| The staff writer Ian Frazier shares some of his favorite sights from an oft-overlooked borough, which he writes about in this week’s issue.  Photograph by Angela Weiss / Getty The Bronx, New York City’s best and most inventive borough, is a creature of its singular geography. All the other boroughs are either islands (Manhattan, Staten Island) or are on an island (Brooklyn, Queens), but the Bronx is part of the continent. It’s the main place where the New York City archipelago plugs itself into North America. In the nineteen-sixties, the weightiness of the connection (think Cross Bronx Expressway) trashed the borough, parts of which went up in flames. But it responded with a triumph of rebuilding, and with a leap of creativity that no other borough can claim. In the seventies, during the Bronx’s darkest time, its young people invented hip-hop, an art form that changed American culture and went around the world. To get a sense of the geography, you can go to Split Rock, a timeless natural landmark, and look south across the marshes of the Hutchinson River. Much of the Bronx, before Europeans came, probably looked like that. Or visit Ferry Point Park, at the borough’s southern tip, and see the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge vaulting the East River, and the Throgs Neck Bridge doing the same a mile or so to the east. On the Grand Concourse, in the middle of the Bronx, you can walk the borough’s central ridge and admire the amazing nineteen-thirties-era Art Deco apartment buildings that line that wide thoroughfare. La Morada, one of the best Oaxacan restaurants anywhere, is on Willis Avenue, in the South Bronx. Have lunch there, then take a 3.2-mile walk up to 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a high-rise on the Bronx’s far western edge, just under the Hamilton and Washington bridges, which throb with traffic going to and coming from the Cross Bronx Expressway. Clive Campbell, a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc, along with his friends and family, helped invent hip-hop at a party in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick on August 11, 1973. The Bronx is the place where history, big-time infrastructure, and world-shaking art combine. | 
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