Belmont is the real Little Italy — not the Manhattan one that sells the idea to tourists, but the Bronx one that still does the shopping. And it shares a fence with the greenest corner of the borough. Three and a half kilometres from the market to the forest, food first, trees after.
Start in the Arthur Avenue Retail Market, the indoor hall the city built in 1940 to get the pushcarts off the street: cheese, pasta, cured meat, cigars rolled at the back. Out on Arthur Avenue and 187th Street the neighbourhood carries on as it has — the bakery, the pork store, the fishmonger on ice. This is a place that works, not a set. Walk east past the Bronx Zoo gate, then up into the New York Botanical Garden.
The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory is the showpiece, a white iron-and-glass dome from 1902 full of palms. But the quieter wonder is the Thain Family Forest — fifty acres of old-growth woodland, the last uncut piece of the forest that once covered the whole city. End at the garden's own Metro-North stop, twenty minutes back to Grand Central.
