The name sounds fancy, and the thing is fancy. The Grand Boulevard and Concourse, as it was originally called, opened in 1909 between 161st Street and Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx. In 1927, the Concourse grew to incorporate Mott Avenue south from 161st to 138th. The Concourse became the elegant spine of the most solidly middle-class of the boroughs.

A Lorraine-born and -trained engineer, Louis Risse, conceived of the boulevard, and designed it with separate lanes for carriages, pedestrians, and bicycles, and innovative grade separations. At first, everyone presumed that private mansions would line the Concourse. Instead, as it took shape, apartment buildings dominated, relieved here and there by institutional buildings.

To taste the Concourse, go to 161st Street. Just to the west stands Yankee Stadium, built in 1922 and rebuilt in 1976, at River Avenue. At the southwest corner of the Concourse is the monumental Bronx County Building, a handsome “stripped classical” design by Joseph Freedlander and Max Hausle from the 1930s.

Across 161st is Joyce Kilmer Park, a lovely patch of green named for the New Brunswick, N.J.-born, Columbia educated poet (“Trees”) who died in World War I. The park features the Lorelei Fountain in honor of the great German poet Heinrich Heine. Dusseldorf turned down Ernst Herter’s sculpture, presumably because of Heine’s Jewishness. The Bronx welcomed the fountain with open arms.

On the northeast corner stands the Concourse Plaza Hotel from 1922, which as the scene of wedding receptions, bar mitzvahs, and dances looms large in many a Bronxite’s memories. Many players on the Yankees and opposing teams spent game nights at the hotel, its entrances stalked by neighborhood children seeking autographs.

A sure sign that the Concourse’s glory days had ended came in 1968, when new management transformed the fabled Concourse Plaza into a welfare hotel. The 1970s, when much of the South Bronx burned, witnessed a precipitous decline on the Concourse. The old families moved away, to the suburbs or Co-op City. The transformsation astounded those who grew up regarding the Concourse as the symbol of success.

Walk up to 165th for two signs of something equally astounding: the renaissance of the Concourse.

At the northeast corner, the Bronx Museum of the Arts occupies an abandoned synagogue. The museum, in the midst of an impressive expansion, offers wonderful exhibitions, including ones on Bronx life and history.

Across 165th stands an enormous apartment building, Executive Towers, from 1963. Most of the Concourse’s grand apartment buildings date from the 1920s and 1930s, and many of those are Art Deco. Executive Towers is an Upper East Side-style glazed white brick job, not an architectural gem like Horace Ginsbern’s 1150 Grand Concourse (1936) a block to the north at McClellan Street.

Executive Towers was the last of the Concourse’s confident bourgeois apartment blocks. No sooner had it opened than the boulevard lost its luster. Now refurbished, the 24-story, 455-unit doorman building radiates co-op luxuriousness – a sure sign that the Grand Concourse stands poised for grandeur once again.