Where bronx history lives.

  • The Bronx County Historical Society (BCHS), founded in 1955, is a non-profit educational and cultural institution chartered by the New York State Board of Regents. BCHS, the historical agency for The Bronx, a county of New York State and a borough of the city of New York, is dedicated to the collection, preservation, documentation, and public interpretation of the history of The Bronx and lower Westchester County from its earliest human habitation by indigenous peoples through the present.

    BCHS disseminates information to the general public, schools, students, historians, community members, activists, urban planners, and staff of other museums and libraries on the historical, social, and economic development of The Bronx. It utilizes its collections in exhibits, both in-house and traveling, historical research, oral history projects, production of publications, and educational and cultural programming. BCHS operates a Research Center with a Research Library and The Bronx County Archives and two national landmark historic house museums, the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage and the Museum of Bronx History at the Valentine-Varian House.

    The common theme in all of these activities is the promotion of pride in The Bronx through recovering and preserving the borough’s place in the history and development of the region and the nation. The buildings maintained by BCHS are major attractions and also serve as anchors around which dynamic communities develop and thrive.

  • Jacqueline Kutner, President
    Anthony Morante, Vice President
    Patrick Logan, Treasurer
    Gil Walton, Secretary
    Steve Baktidy, Trustee
    Robert Esnard, Trustee
    Mei Sei Fong, Trustee
    Dr. G. Hermalyn, Trustee
    Joel Podgor, Trustee
    Lloyd Ultan, Trustee
    Jac Zadrima, Trustee

  • Dr. G. Hermalyn
    CEO

    Dr. Steven Payne
    Director
    718-881-8900 x109
    spayne(at)bronxhistoricalsociety.org

    Teresa Brown
    Chief Administrative Officer

    Pastor Crespo, Jr.
    Research Librarian/Archivist
    718-881-8900 x105
    pcrespo(at)bronxhistoricalsociety.org

    Danise Infante
    Museum Educator

    William “Roger” McCormack
    Director of Education
    718-881-8900 x107
    education(at)bronxhistoricalsociety.org

    Christopher Padilla
    Bookstore Manager

  • The Bronx County Historical Society is supported in part through the funding of the New York City Departments of Cultural Affairs and Parks and Recreation, the Historic House Trust of New York City, New York Community Trust, New York State Council on the Arts, the Office of the President of the Borough of The Bronx, the Bronx delegation of the New York City Council, the Bronx delegations of the New York State Assembly and New York State Senate, the New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Fund, additional public and private entities, members, and individual donors.

  • The Bronx County Historical Society’s Poet-in-Residence, David Mills, holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, a master’s from New York University in creative writing, and a B.A. (cum laude) from Yale University. He has published four poetry collections: The Dream Detective, The Sudden Country, After Mistic, and Boneyarn—the first book of poems about slavery in New York City and winner of the North American Book Award. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Poetry Daily, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Worcester Review, Rattapallax, The Literary Review, and Fence, to name a few.

    He has received fellowships and grants from the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Schomburg Center Library, Flushing Town Hall, the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize, Breadloaf, the Mellon Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Pan-African Literary Forum. He lived in Langston Hughes’s landmark Harlem home for three years (he was also a recipient of the Langston Hughes Society Award) and wrote the audio script for Reflections in Black: 100 Years of Black Photography, a photography exhibition which showed at the Whitney Museum. The Juilliard School commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He has recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records, performed at Central Park’s Summerstage, and has had poems displayed at the Venice Biennale.

    As Poet-in-Residence at The Bronx County Historical Society and recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts FY24 Support for Artists Grant, David Mills is currently working on a collection of poems about the history of slavery in The Bronx.

  • Eileen Markey is an investigative journalist who specializes in urban policy, social movements, memory and the role of religion in the public square. She believes in journalism as a public service and a free press as crucial for democracy.

    Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, The New York Daily News, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast and The New Republic. She has worked as a reporter and editor for WNYC radio and producer for WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, and was a contributing editor for Housing and Homelessness at City Limits.

    Markey is the editor of the first anthology of the work of legendary Village Voice muckraker Wayne Barrett, Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism That First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the American Epidemic of Corruption, Bold Type/Hachette 2020.

    Her book A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura was published by Nation Books in 2016 to wide acclaim and was selected as a New York Times editor’s pick.

    Now an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Markey studied at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and in Fordham University’s Urban Studies Program. But her best education was interning under Wayne Barrett at The Village Voice in the 1990s. She lives in the Bronx with her husband and two sons.

    Her ongoing urban social history research looks at the story of the community movement that fought against the destruction of The Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s. The battle to save and rebuild the borough was waged by multi-racial coalitions of poor and working-class people marshalled through their faith communities. Their battles were of a piece with poor people human rights and anti-imperialist efforts globally and were influenced by ideas of religiously-informed political action originating in the global south. As Wall Street imposed on New York City a racialized austerity regime that threatened the very foundation of the city, these neighbors found communion in standing up together.