Don’t Dump On The Bronx!

Come celebrate Bronx Week:

In a population contest among the boroughs, the Bronx would rank second to last. John F. Kennedy once lived in the Bronx, but so did Lee Harvey Oswald. Until 2000, Amorphophallus titanum, otherwise known as the corpse flower because it gives off an odor similar to rotting flesh, had the distinction of being the borough’s official flower.

But every year the Bronx finds something worth celebrating.

Itself.

[Saturday was] the start of Bronx Week, an annual festival of civic pride organized by the Bronx Tourism Council and the borough president’s office. There are plans for Latin music concerts, health fairs and a black-tie ball at Orchard Beach. The celebration culminates next Saturday with a parade on Mosholu Parkway. Details for the event can be found, naturally, on ilovethebronx.com.

The borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., said he was proud that his borough of 1.3 million residents has begun to shed its image as a violent, burned-out urban nightmare, but he was the first to admit that it needed more than a week of self-promotion. “We need a month, a year,” Mr. Carrión said. “Or a decade.”

Civic boasting, it turns out, is not new to the borough. Bronx Week is the longest-running event of its kind in the five boroughs. It started out small, in the early 1900’s, as a day. Borough Day parades used to attract tens of thousands to the Grand Concourse. On June 14, 1924, schoolchildren, National Guardsmen and women’s clubs marched before an estimated crowd of 200,000.

The parade no longer draws 200,000, and fostering a spirit of togetherness has not always been easy. At the 1971 parade, the first borough-pride march in decades after the tradition waned, someone mounted a placard on a fire escape that read, “Da Bronx Stinx.”

These days, people in the Bronx are quick to say that their borough does not, literally or figuratively, stink.