Fox Park

What was here before?
Located on the border of Longwood and Morrisania, this site was home to a series of five-story apartment buildings by the 1940s. The buildings were abandoned and demolished in the following decades, and by the 1970s, the site was a vacant, trash-strewn lot before it became a community garden.

How did this site become a playground?
The property was first vested to the City in 1972, and on July 17, 1979 the Department of General Services granted the land to Parks. The sculpture Puerto Rican Sun, a 25-foot, permanent public sculpture by Rafael Ferrer (b. 1933), was dedicated the same year. Commissioned by the Bronx Venture Corporation, a community development organization dedicated to combating “the symbols of distress” and deterioration of the South Bronx, the colorfully painted Cor-Ten steel artwork depicts arching palm trees embracing the sun on its face, and the moon on its back. In 1987, the park was named Fox Playground.

Well-worn for decades, the site was transformed in 2010. Play equipment was replaced, existing basketball and handball courts were upgraded, and new amenities like a spray shower, small arboretum, and dog runs were added. Puerto Rican Sun, which was formerly outside the park’s chain link fence and had undergone a conservation in 2004, was incorporated as a framing device and entryway arch. A separate artwork on the wall of the building at 737 Southern Boulevard, a series of cast fiberglass sculptures called We Are Family by John Ahearn (b. 1951) & Rigoberto Torres (b. 1960), faces a sitting area in the park.

Who is this playground named for?
This playground honors wealthy 19th-century Bronx resident William F. Fox. Raised as a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), Fox may have been related to George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. In the 1850s, Fox inherited a large estate in the South Bronx.

Fox further increased his wealth when he married the affluent Charlotte Leggett, whose family had settled in the Bronx as early as 1661. The Fox family was also intimately tied with the Tiffany family, who owned a significant amount of land in the Eastern Bronx during the 19th century. William Fox and Charlotte Leggett’s daughter married H.D. Tiffany, whose “Foxhurst” estate was based in Hunts Point. When William Fox died, he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, and his mansion was demolished soon afterward in 1909. Today all three landowning families have streets in the South Bronx named for them.