The first inhabitants of the area were the Siwanoy, Native Americans, of the Wappinger Federation. The Algonquin-speaking Siwanoy had several villages along the Bronx River including a relatively large settlement called Snakipins (“ground nuts” in the Siwanoy language), situated near the intersection of Leland Avenue and Soundview Avenue. Archeologists believe the settlement had about 70 lodge sites.
The Dutch began “acquiring” large tracts of land from the Native Americans in 1639, including the area that was to become the Bronx. Clashes between the Europeans and various tribes marked the next few decades. As part of a three-year series of reciprocal raids known as the “Pig Wars”, Wampage, a Siwanoy leader led an attack on Bronx families including the Cornell family who had built the first farmhouse in what would become the Harding Park neighborhood. Family members who managed to escape did so only because an English ship was fortuitously passing by. A year later, Thomas Cornell and his remaining family returned, and the area came to be known as Cornell’s Neck. Cornell Avenue also bears his name.
Within 50 years, wealthy New Yorkers were “purchasing” land in the countryside for summer residences and estates. In 1720, Isaac Clason, a successful Scottish merchant and ship owner, “bought” 1,000 acres in the eastern half of Cornell’s Neck. The land was further subdivided in the following years and families such as the Lynches, Ludlows, Schieffelins, and Lelands all built farmhouses in the area renamed Clason Point.
By the early 20th century Clason Point was a mix of estates, farmland, and plenty of undeveloped swampland. Several landowners commercially developed their properties as picnic areas, beaches, dance halls, and amusement parks. Ferries between Clason Point and College Point, Queens ensured a steady stream of visitors, and became the destination point for daylong excursions. The area soon grew into a seasonal resort.
In the 1920s Thomas Higgs, who owned of about 100 acres of beachfront property, began leasing tents to visitors. Eventually Higgs’s Beach and the adjoining Killian’s Grove merged, incorporated, and then subdivided into small lots for a summer bungalow colony. The colony was named for Warren G. Harding (1865-1923), the US president at the time. After World War II, a severe housing shortage inspired many Harding Park tenants to convert their bungalows into permanent homes. The community soon grew to about 250 families – mostly Irish, Scandinavian, German, and Italian – many making their living from the sea.
For the next 70 years the tenants overcame a series of threats to their homes. In 1957, they survived Robert Moses’s (1881 – 1981), Urban Planner, attempt to raze what he called the “Soundview Slums.” Robert Moses was responsible for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of disproportionately affected minority communities throughout New York. In 1962 they countered eviction notices and rent increases and convinced the state legislature to pass a bill giving them the same rent-control protections as longtime tenants in pre-war apartment buildings. In 1979 the last private owner, Federated Homes, defaulted on outstanding tax bills and Harding Park became City property. Longtime residents and newer tenants banded together for their last challenge: convincing the City that they should own not only their homes, but also the property underneath.
In 1982 the Harding Park residents in the southeast Bronx became members of the Harding Park Homeowners Association, the first cooperatively owned low and moderate-income community in New York City. The successful attempt was the result of a decades-long struggle for ownership in an area that originated over 300 years earlier in a conflict over land.
The residents came together with the help of then Mayor Ed Koch, and formed Harding Park Homeowners Association, Inc., and purchased 18.7 acres of land. Including common areas, gardens, 22 easement accesses (called Private Ways) and a dilapidated community center that housed a volunteer fire department, run by the same homeowners of Harding Park as there parents and grandparents did when they first founded the Volunteer Fire Department many years earlier. In the summer of 2002, the firehouse was demolished and replaced with a Community Center.
Harding Park residents have always been a united group of resilient people. We are the first and ONLY Homeowners Association governed by predominately Latino homeowners. We currently represent, many places like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, countries within Africa, Europe and the Middle East, India, Bangladesh, and many other places.