Mott Haven, Bronx, New York - Definition and Overview

Mott Haven is the southernmost neighborhood in the South Bronx. It refers to the area below 152nd Street, though relatively few locals actually refer to the neighborhood by its name, often preferring to identify Mott Haven by streets or refer to it simply as the "South Bronx".

Mott Haven was the first neighborhood to give rise to the term "South Bronx". In the 1940s when the Bronx was usually divided into the East Bronx and West Bronx, a group of social workers identified a pocket of poverty in Mott Haven and called it the South Bronx. This pocket of poverty greatly expanded northward, reaching a peak in the 1970s when the North Bronx-South Bronx boundary reached Fordham Road. Today the North Bronx-South Bronx distinction remains more common than the traditional and perhaps more useful East Bronx-West Bronx distinction, and many still regard Fordham Road as the boundary. However, residents along Fordham Road imagine the South Bronx as some place further south.

In November 1999, Scientific American noted: "The Mott Haven section of New York City's South Bronx has long been one of the poorest neighborhoods in the nation. The median household income of its residents, most of whom are African-American or Hispanic, is less than one third of the U.S. median."

[1] (http://www.sciam.com/1999/1199issue/1199infocus.html)