It’s been called a venerable throwback, a hidden gem, a cathedral of college sports. Since its inaugural game in January 1925, ‘Rose Thrill’ has always been much more than a gym.

They don’t make them like they used to, you might say, and you’d be right. Consider Rose Hill Gym’s exterior walls. The builder’s “local gray stone” is likely a mix of Fordham gneiss and Manhattan schist—the ancient, gritty bedrock upon which much of New York City is built. Could there be a more symbolically apt building material for a Fordham icon?

Through the decades, the gym has been the site of countless athletic contests. It’s where students push themselves to excel—amid the roar of the crowd or just the echoey squeak of sneakers on hardwood. And it’s where generations have gathered for momentous events, from Fordham presidents’ welcome addresses (where many students and families first fall in love with the University) to unforgettable concerts, baccalaureate Masses, and award ceremonies.

As the gym turns 100, here’s a look at some of the many moments and people whose energy, camaraderie, grit, and grace have brought the building to life since 1925.

The strength of the Fordham athlete finds root in spirited competition, a strong will to win, forbearance in defeat, and tempered joy in victory.

John Francis “Jack” Coffey

Widely considered the father of Fordham sports, Jack Coffey, a 1910 grad, served as the graduate manager of athletics and baseball coach for nearly 35 years, overseeing the Rams’ rise to national renown, particularly in football.

When Coffey retired in 1958, Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist and fellow Fordham grad Arthur Daley wrote that Coffey always “seemed as much a part of the Fordham landscape as the university’s gymnasium.” He called Coffey “the soul of erudition,” not just a coach and administrator but “a friend, confidant, and advisor of … generations of athletes.”

Test Your Rose Hill Gym IQ

Rose Hill Gym has been the beloved stomping grounds of many a Ram. Do you know it well enough to knock out this quiz as quickly as the Fordham Flash* might have?

Check out the answers at the bottom of this story.

* Who’s the Fordham Flash? None other than Frankie Frisch, Class of 1920. Arguably the Fordham sports GOAT, he excelled in baseball, track, football, and basketball before going on to a Hall of Fame pro baseball career.

1. The gym was considered so big for its time that Rams called it …

• The Meadow
• The Prairie
• The Plains

2. When it opened, the gym boasted …

• Equipment for weightlifting
• Three 400-square-foot boxing rings in the basement
• A swimming pool, with cutting-edge machinery for filtering and purifying water

3. Which Fordham men’s basketball star was the latest to have his number retired and jersey hoisted to the gym’s rafters?

• Ken Charles
• Ed Conlin
• Charlie Yelverton

4. What did Cindy Vojtech do for a Rose Hill Gym encore after her stellar volleyball career?

• Sang the national anthem
• Joined the WFUV broadcast team
• Delivered a valedictory address

5. Which women’s basketball star’s buzzer-beater against Rhode Island inspired a SportsCenter anchor to kick off the night’s highlights from the “Boogie Down Bronx”?

• Anna DeWolfe
• Mobolaji Akiode
• Abigail Corning

Highlights in the History of the Rose Hill Gym

1925 Brought a Flurry to Fordham

Fordham was in the midst of “a million dollar year” when the Rose Hill Gym opened in 1925, declared the Maroon yearbook staff. In addition to the gym, they cited a new campus bookstore and seismic lab along with a new library that was halfway to completion.

But it was the gym that dominated the team’s attention: “The sight of its huge, though artistically proportioned bulk is quite enough to instill in every Fordhamite a full-grown superiority complex.”

Fordham leaders clearly had great confidence in the gym’s architect, Emile G. Perrot, who also designed what would become Duane Library. “Architecture,” Perrot once said, “is the incarnation in stone of the thought and life of the civilization it represents.”

Keepsakes Lie Behind the Cornerstone

When the gym’s cornerstone was laid on a Sunday afternoon in early November 1923, a copper box of treasures from those times was buried alongside it. A list in the Walsh Library archives documents the contents.

Some items speak to Fordham’s Catholic and Jesuit ties, among them a medal of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier. There are U.S. stamps, coins, and a flag bearing 48 stars along with copies of New York newspapers from the day.

There is no mistaking the school pride of the collection’s curators. Included are the Fordham catalog, University seal and colors, a copy of The Fordham Ram, and photos of campus buildings and grounds.

Finally, recognizing the gym’s calling as a home for sports and community, the copper box boasts Fordham athletics schedules, popular University songs, and the athletic association’s constitution.

A treasure trove, indeed—one now more than a century old.

1925: The new gym opens, hosting its first basketball game on January 16. The Rams beat Boston College 46-16 in a contest refereed by former four-sport star Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash, then a second baseman for the New York Giants.

Coach Ed Kelleher’s “Wonder Fives” go on to win 85 games and lose only nine between 1924 and 1929, christening the gym in spectacular fashion.

1927: A record 6,000 fans turn out to see Fordham beat City College of New York on January 22, a crowd well beyond the gym’s current 3,200-seat capacity.

1936: Foul weather forces the football Rams to practice in the gym. The team’s nationally renowned line, the Seven Blocks of Granite, includes Fordham senior and future pro football icon Vince Lombardi.

c. 1940: Trainer Jake Weber operates out of the gym’s basement. A fixture at Fordham for more than three decades until 1942, he also trains U.S. Olympic teams and is known for his “magic elixirs” and “baking machines” used to soothe student-athletes’ sore muscles.

1943: Bob Mullens earns All-America honors and leads the Rams to their first appearance in the National Invitation Tournament. He goes on to play for the New York Knicks in their inaugural season (1946–47), and in 2019, Fordham retires his No. 7.

1953: In his third season as head coach, Johnny Bach, a 1948 grad, leads the Rams to their first NCAA Tournament berth. He goes on to become Fordham’s all-time winningest coach, compiling a 264-192 record in 18 seasons. He departs Fordham in 1968 and later joins the NBA. As an assistant coach, Bach helps lead the Chicago Bulls to three straight titles in the early 1990s and leaves an indelible mark on Michael Jordan, who calls him “truly one of the greatest basketball minds of all time.”

1964: Women’s basketball begins as a club sport after Barbara Hartnett Hall and several of her classmates pitch the idea. “We went to talk to the athletic director … and [he was]surprisingly open to it,” Hall, a four-year captain, later recalls.

1965: The gym is the scene of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s final high school game. Then known as Lew Alcindor, he leads Power Memorial to victory in the New York Catholic High School Athletic Association Championship on March 7.

Video: Watch highlights of the NBA legend’s standout performance in a packed Rose Hill Gym.

1966: The Beach Boys bring their surf rock to the Bronx on March 18, at the height of their popularity. The Lovin’ Spoonful is also on the bill.

On December 3, Simon and Garfunkel perform the first of their two concerts at the Rose Hill Gym, taking the stage for Winter Weekend. The following year, they return on October 13 to play Homecoming.

RELATED STORY: Rockin’ Rose Hill: A Look Back at Campus Concerts Since the ’60s

1967: Men’s basketball beats Iona on February 25 to launch a school-record 25-game winning streak in the gym. The home streak lasts until December 17, 1969.

The Supremes, featuring Diana Ross, perform in the gym on March 11. Future stars Gladys Knight & the Pips open the show.

1970: Women’s basketball debuts as a varsity sport, beating NYU in its first game.

“We started winning games we weren’t supposed to win, and you couldn’t get in the Rose Hill Gym. It was … a real happening. When that team played, it was New York City’s team.”

Frank McLaughlin, FCRH ’69, former longtime athletics director, on the magical 26-3 season of the 1970–1971 men’s basketball team. He was an assistant to head coach Digger Phelps that year, when the Rams rose to No. 9 in the national rankings.

1971: With gritty team play, men’s basketball captures the hearts of New Yorkers, packing the gym and selling out multiple games at Madison Square Garden on the way to a 26-3 record and a top 10 national ranking. The magical season ends with a loss to Villanova in the NCAA Tournament’s East Regional Semifinals.

RELATED STORY: ‘The Darlings of New York’: An Oral History of the 1970–1971 Fordham Men’s Basketball Team

1974: Women’s volleyball posts a 4-3 record in its first season.

1975: Eight years after his last performance in the Rose Hill Gym, singer-songwriter Paul Simon returns to tape a skit for the second-ever episode of Saturday Night Live. In the skit, which airs on October 18, he goes one-on-one with basketball great Connie Hawkins. Despite a 1-foot-4-inch height disadvantage, Simon pulls off the upset—and some deadpan comedy. “First of all, when my outside shot is on, it’s really on,” he says in a mock postgame interview with broadcaster Marv Albert.

1983: Men’s basketball upsets top-seeded Iona to win the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference title.

1984: The Ramones play their hits in the gym on April 27. But basketball is also on the mind of NYC’s seminal punk band, according to concert committee chair Joe Cerra, then a Fordham senior. “[We] had to keep giving Joey Ramone updates on the Knicks game,” he recalled in a 2013 interview with this magazine.

1990: Jean Prioleau hits a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to lead Fordham to a 69-68 win over Seton Hall on November 29, spoiling Fordham grad P.J. Carlesimo’s return to Rose Hill as Seton Hall’s head coach.

Video: “Bang!” Fordham grad and Hall of Fame basketball broadcaster Mike Breen, FCRH ’83, makes the call as Prioleau hits the game-winning shot. Fans rush onto the Rose Hill Gym floor to join the celebration as Prioleau is carried off the court.

1991: Men’s basketball wins the first of two straight Patriot League titles.

1992: Women’s basketball claims its first Patriot League title, a feat the Rams would repeat in 1994.

2000: Volleyball star Cindy Vojtech becomes the first (and, to this date, only) Ram to earn three straight Academic All-America honors, picking up the awards in two sports. Following her senior volleyball season, she joined the women’s crew and helped lead them to a second-place finish at the Dad Vail Regatta in 2000.

She went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics and is currently a principal economist with the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Fordham President’s Council, helping to provide scholarship support to Fordham students.

2001: Fat Joe and Ashanti use the Rose Hill Gym in their “That’s Luv” music video.

2004: Fordham retires the No. 11 jersey of Ed Conlin, a standout player for the Rams who went on to a 10-year NBA career after graduating in 1955. “He played with a passion,” Conlin’s former Fordham coach, Johnny Bach, says at the ceremony. “We need people like Ed Conlin, people who love the game and who love Fordham.” He remains the men’s team’s all-time leading scorer (1,886) and rebounder (1,930).

2010: Fordham retires Anne Gregory O’Connell’s No. 55. A 1980 grad, she led the Rams to four consecutive postseason appearances and remains Fordham’s all-time leading scorer (2,548) and rebounder (1,999).

2012: Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Stephen Colbert meet in the gym on September 14 for “The Cardinal and Colbert: Humor, Joy, and the Spiritual Life.” The discussion, moderated by bestselling author James Martin, S.J., draws a crowd of more than 3,000 “cheering, stomping, chanting students,” The New York Times reports, calling it “the most successful Roman Catholic youth evangelization event since Pope John Paul II last appeared at World Youth Day” in 2000.

2014: Women’s basketball captures its first Atlantic 10 title and holds an NCAA Tournament selection show watch party in the gym. They would go on to win the title again in 2019.

2021: The rapper A$AP Ferg (now known as Ferg) headlines the November 4 “Late Night on the Hill” event that kicks off the 2021–2022 basketball season.

2022: Fordham hosts—and on November 22, the men’s basketball team wins—the first Konchalski Classic, an annual basketball tournament to honor the life and legacy of 1968 Fordham grad Tom Konchalski, one of the most trusted basketball scouts in the country. His four-decade career included assessments of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James as high schoolers.

In February 2021, one day after Konchalski’s death at the age of 74, New York Knicks broadcaster Mike Breen, FCRH ’83, told viewers that while Konchalski “may not have been what’s called a household name, in basketball homes, he was legendary.”

“Tom was the most influential, the most respected, and the most loved high school basketball scout in the country,” Breen said. “He helped thousands of young men, thousands of high school basketball players, achieve their dreams of playing college basketball and beyond. And every single day, he did it with kindness and humility.”

On November 29, the gym floor is designated the Frank McLaughlin Family Court—a tribute to Frank McLaughlin, the 1969 grad and former basketball star who became a devoted coach and longtime athletic director.

2023: After raucous home crowds seem to will the men’s basketball team to a pair of impressive victories in January, head coach Keith Urgo coins a new nickname for the historic gym when he opens a press conference with five words: “How about Rose Thrill, man!”

RELATED STORY: The Rise of ‘Rose Thrill’: Fans Fuel Fordham Basketball Resurgence

2024: In September, the University unveils a new court surface featuring a prominent Fordham script wordmark set over the silhouette of a large Ram head.

Did we miss your favorite Rose Hill Gym moments?

Share your own Rose Hill Gym story on the Fordham athletics website celebrating the gym’s 100th anniversary.

Answers to the ‘Test Your Rose Hill Gym IQ’ Quiz

1. The Prairie 2. A swimming pool 3. Fordham retired Charlie Yelverton’s No. 34 in 2023. 4. Cindy Vojtech was the valedictorian of the Gabelli School of Business Class of 2000. 5. Anna DeWolfe hit the game-winner against Rhode Island on February 22, 2023.

VIDEO: Watch DeWolfe’s game-winning shot.

B.A. Van Sise was driving his young nephew to the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, several years ago when he heard Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on the radio. The Moana actor was reflecting on his Samoan heritage. For years he had a hole in his heart, he said, because he didn’t speak the language of his maternal ancestors.

“I suddenly had this moment of epiphany,” Van Sise recalled.

Since graduating from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2005, Van Sise has worked as a photojournalist, artist, and author, but he studied linguistics at the University, and his degree is in both visual arts and modern languages. He took courses in Italian and Russian, and he also speaks French, German, and Ladino, an endangered language he learned from his mother and maternal grandfather growing up in New York.

“I realized I wanted to explore language in America,” he said. “​​What does American language look like?”

It’s more diverse than you might think.

The Resilience of America’s Endangered Languages

English has been dominant on the North American continent for centuries, subsuming other languages, “turning them upside down and shaking their pockets for loose vocabulary,” Van Sise said. And yet, “against unspeakable odds”—despite colonial forces, disease, cultural displacement, migration, and remixing—hundreds of Indigenous and diasporic languages exist in America.

Much of these languages’ variety and complexity is on brilliant display in Van Sise’s latest book, On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues, and in a solo exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles through March 2.

The book features speakers, learners, and revitalizers of more than 70 languages in the United States. From Afro-Seminole Creole to Zuni, each language featured includes a brief cultural summary. And each portrait is paired with a single, often hard-to-translate word designed to inspire Van Sise’s visual approach and “show off the poetry inherent in each language,” he said. “Fundamentally, it is not an ethnicity project. It’s about the poetry of languages.”

In that sense, it’s a sequel of sorts to Van Sise’s first book, Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry (2019), and it bears a kinship to his portraits and essays about Holocaust survivors in Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust (2023). Like Holocaust survivors he met, endangered language speakers and revitalizers are “obsessed with the future,” Van Sise said, “the future of their stories, their legacies, their own families, and the people who come after them.”

Van Sise initially thought he might photograph “the last speakers” of various languages, “a really colonialist idea that I’m slightly embarrassed of,” he said. But he ultimately focused on the many people and groups working to revitalize—and in some cases resurrect—these languages. He traveled to 48 states with pivotal support from the Philip and Edith Leonian Trust, he said, and worked with dozens of Indigenous and diasporic cultural organizations, Native tribes and nations, and the Tribal Trust Foundation.

And while he photographed a Bukhari speaker and a Judeo-Spanish singer in his hometown of New York City, most locations weren’t so easy to reach. “Endangered languages really do best in places that are remote and where communities can still speak to each other,” he said.

Striving for Balance

Laura Tohe, former poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, met Van Sise near the Superstition Mountains, two hours east of Phoenix. She had a turquoise dress made specifically for the photo session, and “God gave me the sky” to match, Van Sise said. His playful sense of humor is on display in the way he and Tohe depicted hózhó, or striving for balance, “an extremely famous concept in Diné,” the Navajo language, he said.

Whimsy is also evident in Van Sise’s portrait of former Houma chief Kirby Verret in Gibson, Louisiana. Verret and an alligator teamed up to show off the Houma French word onirique, or something that comes from a dream.

Van Sise spent nearly a week with Amish community member Sylvan Esh before Esh agreed to work with Van Sise on the photograph. Part of getting to know Esh included waking up at 4 a.m. several days in a row to milk his cows, Van Sise said. The Pennsylvania Dutch concept he ultimately depicted with Esh, dæafe, or to have permission to do something, is “extremely, unbelievably important in the culture,” Van Sise said.

A Movement to Revive Lost Languages

Amber Hayward, a member of the Puyallup tribe in Tacoma, Washington, chose the Lushootseed word ʔux̌ʷəlč, or the sound of saltwater waves washing onto the beach. Lushootseed once numbered 12,000 speakers along the Puget Sound “before going extinct approximately twenty years ago,” Van Sise writes. As director of the Puyallup language program, Hayward has aided its rebirth. It’s just one of several languages featured in the book that boast healthy revitalization programs.

Another is the Kalispel language, represented by Jessie Isadore. She recommended the word cn̓paʔqcín, or the dawn comes toward me, said Van Sise, who explained that Kalispel is one of several languages historically spoken in what is now Montana and Washington state that make no distinction between nouns and verbs. “The whole thing just becomes one idea,” he said. “There’s something really lovely about that.”

Nahuatl is one of few languages highlighted in the book that is not spoken primarily in the U.S., but Van Sise could not resist the Aztec language’s centuries-old tradition of making as big a poem as possible with a single compound word. He and Los Angeles–based folkloric dancer Citlali Arvizu (pictured at the top of the story) chose tixochicitlalcuecuepocatimani, or, you are bursting into bloom all over with stars like flowers.

Working with people like Arvizu to create “visual poems” in these languages is more than an artful way to document linguistic diversity. For Van Sise, the goal is to raise awareness and inspire further education and preservation.

“I can’t do much to make the Haida language revitalization program more robust,” he said, picking just one example. “But I can provide the sizzle for the steak.”

8 Uncommon Words to Spark Your Interest in Endangered Languages

B.A. Van Sise’s book On the National Language features conceptual portraits of more than 70 speakers, learners, and revitalizers of endangered languages in the U.S. Each image is inspired by a single word in the speaker’s language, one that isn’t always so easy to translate into English. He hopes readers might “find one impossible word, and want to learn another and another.” Here are eight.

tekariho:ken
between two worlds
Mohawk

kapará
worse things have happened
Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino

puppyshow
showing off behavior
Afro-Seminole Creole

amonati
something you hold and keep safe for others
Bukhari

koyaanisqatsi
nature out of balance
Hopi

ma’goddai
feeling when the blood rises that makes you act both violently and lovingly
Chamorro

opyêninetêhi
my heart is taking its time
Sauk

uŋkupelo
we are coming home
Lakota

“It’s been a great season so far,” head coach Brian Bacharach said. “[W]e’ve won several games against top 10 and top 20 opponents that traditionally we’ve had struggles with. We’re in the strongest position we’ve ever been as a program.”

Indeed, after winning their fourth straight Mid-Atlantic Water Polo Conference title, the Rams rose to No. 1 in the nation (in a three-way tie with UCLA and USC)—higher than any Fordham team, in any sport. Now, they’re gearing up the NCAA Championship, which starts on December 6.

Watch to hear what the players had to say about the team’s historic run.

This story was updated on November 29.

That was the call made by Ryan Ruocco as a thrilling, historic WNBA season ended on Sunday night, when the Liberty toppled the Minnesota Lynx in Game 5 of the Finals at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center—the first title for one of the league’s original franchises.

Ruocco, a 2008 Fordham graduate, is a lead play-by-play announcer for WNBA, NBA, and women’s college basketball games on ESPN, and he and color commentator Rebecca Lobo have called all the WNBA Finals games for the network since 2013.

“This was our 12th Finals together,” Ruocco said, “and to get a chance to be the soundtrack of this moment in women’s basketball, it feels like a dream come true.”

The moment he references is one of great growth for the league, with the past season seeing increases in TV ratings and game attendance thanks to veteran stars like Breanna Stewart and A’ja Wilson and rookie phenoms like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. To cap it off, fans were treated to a dramatic Finals series that included an overtime final game and a stunning game-winner from Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu in Game 3—a contest that had Ruocco “practically losing his voice thanks to all the huge shots” but earning praise from fans and critics.

“I was so elated and stunned that this game has given us even more excitement, even more drama,” Ruocco said about calling Ionescu’s game-winner. “Because it felt like the Finals just kept outdoing itself.”

A Legacy of Sports Broadcasting Excellence

Ruocco got his start in broadcasting at WFUV—part of a long list of Fordham alumni who learned the ropes at the University’s public media station and have gone on to great success in the business, from Vin Scully to Mike Breen.

In 2019, Ruocco told Fordham Magazine that working under the mentorship of former WFUV executive sports producer Bob Ahrens made his career possible.

“It’s this simple,” Ruocco said. “If I did not go to Fordham and work at WFUV, I would not be here doing what I’m doing today. Period.”

Looking ahead, he sees only continued growth for the WNBA. And he put in a huge endorsement for checking out a New York Liberty game in person.

“I think the atmosphere at Barclays Center for Liberty games is as good as or better than any atmosphere for basketball in the country,” he said. “There’s a sense of community and jubilation and fun, in addition to the passion. It feels like a party where everybody’s invited and everybody’s welcome.”

Since the 1970s, Fordham students have been studying and contributing to the spirit of innovation and community renewal that has come to define what it means to be a Bronxite.

Fifty years ago, a new art form burst forth on the streets of the Bronx, born from rich musical traditions and a spirit of innovation in neighborhoods of color ravaged by deindustrialization and written off by most of the country. In the ensuing decades, the Fordham community has not only studied and celebrated hip-hop as a revolutionary cultural force but also helped preserve its Bronx legacy—through efforts to recognize the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as the genre’s birthplace, and through oral-history interviews with some of hip-hop’s seminal figures.

“I think the lesson is, let’s explore, interrogate, and embrace the cultural creativity of our surrounding areas because it’s unparalleled,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African and African American studies and founding director of Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project.

Naison teaches a popular class, From Rock and Roll to Hip-Hop, that draws on artists like Cardi B, Nas, and Run-DMC to understand the music and its part in U.S. history—and to explore issues he’s spent his career teaching. “I’m not a hip-hop scholar,” he said. “Rather, I’m someone who works to have community voices heard.”

And just as the music has evolved over the past 50 years, so have efforts to revitalize the borough and tell the stories of its residents.

Challenging ‘Deeply Entrenched Stereotypes’

Amplifying community voices is at the heart of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Fordham launched the project in 2002, at the request of the Bronx County Historical Society, to document and preserve the history of Black people in New York City’s northernmost borough. Naison and his team of Fordham students, faculty, and community historians have spoken with hip-hop pioneers like Pete DJ Jones and Kurtis Blow, but the project is much broader: The archive contains verbatim transcripts of interviews with educators, politicians, social workers, businesspeople, clergy members, athletes, and leaders of community-based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the 1930s. The archive, which also includes scholarly essays about the Bronx, was digitized in 2015, making the interviews fully accessible to the public.

“Starting by interviewing a small number of people I already knew,” Naison wrote in Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s (Fordham University Press, 2016), “I stumbled upon a large, passionate, and knowledgeable group of people who had been waiting for years to tell stories of communities long forgotten, communities whose very history challenged deeply entrenched stereotypes about Black and Latino settlement of the Bronx.”

For Naison, the project highlights how the borough, defying the odds, rebuilt neighborhoods following the arson of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. The neighborhoods, with lower crime rates, saw community life flourish again, and in recent decades, the Bronx became a location of choice for new immigrants to New York. BAAHP research includes interviews with Bronxites from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, among other nations. It gives voice to growing, diverse immigrant communities that have enlivened Bronx neighborhoods where Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican people lived before them. “The Bronx is this site where people mix their cultures and they create something new,” Naison said. “It makes this a lot of fun to study.”

Shaping Global Perceptions

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, helped facilitate at least 50 BAAHP interviews from 2004 to 2010, when he was the project’s research director. He said the archive is useful for anyone studying how cities have changed over the decades.

“I hope people use it to think differently about the Bronx, to include the Bronx more deeply and broadly in urban studies in the United States,” said Purnell, now an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Bowdoin College, where he uses the Fordham archive in his own research and in the classroom with his students. “I hope that it also expands how we think about Black people in New York City and in American cities in general from the mid-20th century onward.”

Since 2015, when the BAAHP archives were made available online, the digital recordings have been accessed by thousands of scholars around the world, from Nairobi to Singapore, Paris to Berlin. Peter Schultz Jørgensen, an urbanist and author in Denmark, has been using information from the digital archive to complete a book titled Our Bronx!

“Portraying and documenting everyday life in the Bronx, as it once was, is essential in protecting the people of the Bronx from misrepresentation, while at the same time providing valuable knowledge that can help shape their future,” he said. “Just as BAAHP gathers the web of memory, my book is about the struggles that people and community organizations have waged and are waging in the Bronx. And more important, and encouraging, it talks about how they are now scaling up via the Bronxwide Coalition and their Bronxwide plan for more economic and democratic control of the borough.”

Championing Bronx Renewal

The movement Jørgensen describes is one in which members of the Fordham community have long played key roles, according to historian and journalist Jill Jonnes, author of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. In the mid-1980s, when she published the first edition of the book, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment and arson that had ravaged the borough.

“Today, we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying these neighborhoods,” Jonnes wrote in a preface to the third edition of South Bronx Rising, published last year by Fordham University Press. “Even as fires relentlessly spread across the borough—as landlords extracted what they could from their properties regardless of the human cost—local activists and the social justice Catholics were mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.”

One of those Catholics was Paul Brant, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic (and later priest) who arrived at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the late 1960s to teach and to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. At the time, faith in the viability of cities was at a low point. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, and two decades of studied underinvestment had taken their predictable toll. The Bronx was experiencing the worst of it, and the people who lived in its neighborhoods were demonized as the cause of the problems.

Brant, who died in May 2023 at the age of 82, wanted to understand what could be done. He earned a spot in New York City’s prestigious Urban Fellows program, meant to harness ideas for a city in crisis. Gregarious and forceful, yet able to work diplomatically, he had the backing of Fordham’s president at the time, James Finlay, S.J., to serve as the University’s liaison to the Bronx. With other young Jesuits, he lived in an apartment south of campus, on 187th Street and Marion Avenue, gaining firsthand insight into the scope of neglect and abandonment afflicting the borough.

“Paul felt, well, look, there’s a lot of people still in these neighborhoods. It’s not inevitable that everything gets worse,” said Roger Hayes, GSAS ’95, one of Brant’s former Jesuit seminary classmates. “What are we going to do?”

Long conversations with Hayes and Jim Mitchell, another seminary friend, convinced Brant that solutions to the Bronx’s problems would come by directing the power of the people themselves. In 1972, they formed a neighborhood association in nearby Morris Heights. They used relationships within the parish to confront negligent landlords. Seeing nascent successes there, they moved to launch a larger group.

In 1974, Brant convinced pastors from 10 Catholic parishes to sponsor an organization to fight for the community, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCC) was born. The group expanded to include Protestant and Jewish clergy—membership was always nonsectarian—and went on to train leaders in hundreds of tenant associations and neighborhood groups, including the University Neighborhood Housing Program, which Fordham helped to establish in the early 1980s to create, preserve, and improve affordable housing in the Bronx, and which has been led for many years by Fordham graduate Jim Buckley, FCRH ’76.

All of these groups were knit together across racial lines and around share interests during the worst years of abandonment and destruction. When they learned that rotten apartments had roots beyond individual slumlords, they picketed banks for redlining, the practice of withholding loans to people in neighborhoods considered a poor economic risk. Before long, Bronx homemakers and blue-collar workers were boarding buses to City Hall, demanding meetings with commissioners and testifying at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

With similar people-power organizations nationwide, they won changes in the nation’s banking laws through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, drove reinvestment to cities, and sprouted a new ecosystem of nonprofit affordable housing.

Preserving Hip-Hop’s Bronx Birthplace

It’s the stuff of legend now: On August 11, 1973, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a 100-plus-unit apartment building just blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

Fast forward to 2008, when 1520 Sedgwick was laden with debt acquired by Wall Street investors who were failing to maintain the building. Organizers from the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, a group focused on preserving affordable housing, hoped that documenting 1520’s history would help save it. They asked Fordham professor Mark Naison, Ph.D., to help. His research—which led to a lecture on C-SPAN and was highlighted in an August 2008 appearance on the PBS show History Detectives—helped convince the city government to intervene, eventually preserving the building as a decent and affordable place to live. In 2021, its standing became official: The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution acknowledging 1520 Sedgwick as the birthplace of hip-hop.

Learning About Bronx Renewal

Each year, Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning shares this view of Bronx (and Fordham) history with incoming students, particularly those who participate in its Urban Plunge program in late August. The pre-orientation program gives new students the chance to explore the city’s neighborhoods and join local efforts to foster community development.

“For 30 years, the Plunge experience has offered our students their first introduction to institutions like Part of the Solution and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, organizations founded by Fordham community members in collaboration with local residents that have built community, advocated for justice, and provided services and resources for the whole person,” said Julie Gafney, Ph.D., Fordham’s assistant vice president for strategic mission initiatives and executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Students learn directly from local residents and policy experts about how they can shape policy decisions and build a better future for Fordham and its neighbors. “We really want to introduce first-year students, along with their upper-class mentors, to what’s driving community work in the Bronx right now,” Gafney said. “It’s an ideal ground for fostering a four-year commitment to community solution-building here in the Bronx.”

Reimagining the Cross Bronx

On August 25, nearly 250 first-year Fordham students fanned out across the Bronx as part of Urban Plunge. They served lunch to those in need at POTS—Part of the Solution, where Fordham graduate Jack Marth, FCRH ’86, is the director of programs; they helped refurbish Poe Park and the community-maintained Drew Gardens, adjacent to the Bronx River; and they visited the NWBCCC, now led by Fordham graduate Sandra Lobo, FCRH ’97, GSS ’04.

Students also learned about the Cross Bronx Expressway, a major highway built in the mid-20th century that has been blamed not only for separating Bronx communities but also for worsening air and noise pollution in the borough, contributing to residents’ high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

Before visiting parts of the expressway, students heard from Nilka Martell, founding director of Loving the Bronx, a nonprofit that has been leading community efforts to cap the Cross Bronx and develop public green spaces above and around it. A few years ago, Martell connected with Fordham graduate Alex Levine, FCRH ’14, who was pursuing the same goal.

At Fordham, Levine majored in economics and Chinese studies and interned at the Department of City Planning in the Bronx. By 2020, he was a third-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he co-founded the Bronx One Policy Group, a student advocacy organization focused on capping an approximately 2.5-mile section of the Cross Bronx that runs below street level. The idea is to cover the road with parks and install vents to remove toxic fumes caused by vehicular traffic. They said the cost of the project, estimated to be about $1 billion, would be offset by higher property values and lower health care costs.

“When you think of preventive medicine, it impacts everyone’s life,” Levine told the Bronx Times in 2021. “If we can get a small portion of this capped, then it might be a catalyst to happen on the rest of the highway. This is a project that can save money and lives.”

Martell said Levine’s group connected her with Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who had published a study on the benefits of capping the Cross Bronx.

“We created this perfect trifecta,” she said. They brought their idea to Rep. Ritchie Torres, and in December 2022, the city received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study how to reimagine the Cross Bronx. Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning later received a $25,000 grant from the New York City Department of Transportation as one of only 10 community partners selected to help the department gather input from residents who live near the expressway.

The feasibility-study funding is just a first step, Martell told students during an Urban Plunge panel discussion that featured a representative of the city planning department’s Bronx office and an asthma program manager from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “This isn’t easy,” Martell said. “If this was easy and there was a point-by-point playbook on how to get it done, all these projects would happen.”

But recent Bronx history gives her ample reason to press on. “You know, 40 years ago, we had the restoration of the Bronx River. Fifty years ago, we had the creation of hip-hop.” When there was little support and “no other outlet,” she said, “Bronxites came together to create an outlet.”

“For me, this is what it’s like to be a Bronxite; this is what it’s like to be in the Bronx—to have this kind of energy and these organizing skills to get things done.”

—Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, teaches journalism at Lehman College and is working on a book about the people’s movement that helped rebuild the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s. Taylor Ha is a senior writer and videographer in the president’s office and the marketing and communications division at Fordham.