In Popular Culture
- Novelist E. L. Doctorow has featured the Grand Concourse in much of his writing. Short fiction writer Jacob Appel's story, "The Grand Concourse" (2007), a woman who grew up in the Lewis Morris Building returns to the Morrisania neighborhood with her adult daughter to discover the boulevard is far from how she remembers it.
- The Grand Concourse figures prominently in Tom Wolfe's novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987), where its evolution from "the summit of the Jewish dream" and the "new Canaan" to a rundown, unsafe thoroughfare is seen through the eyes of frustrated Assistant District Attorney Larry Kramer.
- In the television series Rhoda, Rhoda Morgenstern's parents Ida and Martin live in an apartment on the Grand Concourse.
- Grand Concourse Avenue is referenced in Act One, scene one of Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, where Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz describes it as a first generation immigrant settlement.
Read more about this topic: Grand Concourse (Bronx)
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)