The Bronx has no shortage of native sons and daughters who became household names. Billy Joel, Jennifer Lopez, Calvin Klein and Stanley Kubrick, to name just a few.
But the borough has never had a son who was born into celebrity that it could call its own. Until Thursday night, that is, when Bronx Mowgli Wentz was born.
The boy, 7 pounds 11 ounces, is the son of Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, the singer, and her husband, Pete Wentz, the bassist of the rock group Fall Out Boy. The baby received a proud if somewhat perplexed reaction in the borough for which he is named.
Outside the shops at Southern Boulevard and East 163rd Street in the South Bronx, where Phat Gear was having an everything-must-go clothing sale, Joel Santiago, 29, a livery cab driver, took a patriotic approach. “It’s unique,” Mr. Santiago said. “God bless America, in other words. You can name your son whatever you want.”
Evelyn Alvarez and Jamaris Rhodes — students at Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers in the Bronx — were not as impressed. “I guess she wanted to be different, but it’s just weird,” said Ms. Alvarez, 18, who was born and raised in the borough. “It’s like me being named Manhattan.”
It could not be determined what, if any, connection Ms. Simpson-Wentz and Mr. Wentz had to the borough and why they decided on the name. Bronx’s middle name, Mowgli, is the name of the boy character in “The Jungle Book,” the collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling that became a Disney movie.
The borough is a late entrant in the celebrity offspring name game. David Beckham, the soccer star, and his wife, Victoria, have a 9-year-old boy named Brooklyn. Donna Summer’s daughter is Brooklyn Sudano.
Technically speaking, the newborn Bronx is named not for the borough but for the county. “The name of the borough is the Bronx,” said Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian. “The name of the county, the official name of the county, is just plain Bronx, without the ‘the.’ ” Mr. Ultan, the author and co-author of eight books about the borough, said it was understandable that Ms. Simpson-Wentz and Mr. Wentz decided to go without the “the.”
He asked: “How many people have the first name Bronx? How many people have the first name The?”
Little Bronx will have a tough reputation to live up to, or to live down. The Bronx is an unpolished, unpretentious place. It has transformed itself from the urban blight of the 1970s but continues to struggle with high crime, high poverty and high unemployment. It is the birth place of hip-hop and the resting place of Robert Moses. It has more pawn shops than any other borough, and fewer Starbucks than Brooklyn or Queens.
The name has a blunt, gritty ring to it that has intrigued poets and writers over the years. “It’s like three words they’ve crunched together,” one character says to another in Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel “Underworld.”
The Bronx — the borough, not the boy — gets its name from the Bronx River, which runs through the middle of the borough. The river, in turn, was named after Jonas Bronck, a Swedish-born sea captain who was the first European settler in the area in 1639.
Bronx is, indeed, a rare first name, but it is not unprecedented.
Just ask Bronx Barton-Stanfield, a 30-year-old high school English teacher in Montgomery, Ala. She admitted being somewhat sad upon learning on Friday that she was no longer, as far as she had known, the only Bronx in the world. Her father, a long-haul truck driver who traveled to the Bronx before she was born, had wanted to name her something people would not forget after meeting her, and that has been the case, she said.
Her students, for one, love it. “They think it makes me edgier than all the other teachers,” Mrs. Barton-Stanfield said. “They think it’s cool.”
But the borough has never had a son who was born into celebrity that it could call its own. Until Thursday night, that is, when Bronx Mowgli Wentz was born.
The boy, 7 pounds 11 ounces, is the son of Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, the singer, and her husband, Pete Wentz, the bassist of the rock group Fall Out Boy. The baby received a proud if somewhat perplexed reaction in the borough for which he is named.
Outside the shops at Southern Boulevard and East 163rd Street in the South Bronx, where Phat Gear was having an everything-must-go clothing sale, Joel Santiago, 29, a livery cab driver, took a patriotic approach. “It’s unique,” Mr. Santiago said. “God bless America, in other words. You can name your son whatever you want.”
Evelyn Alvarez and Jamaris Rhodes — students at Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers in the Bronx — were not as impressed. “I guess she wanted to be different, but it’s just weird,” said Ms. Alvarez, 18, who was born and raised in the borough. “It’s like me being named Manhattan.”
It could not be determined what, if any, connection Ms. Simpson-Wentz and Mr. Wentz had to the borough and why they decided on the name. Bronx’s middle name, Mowgli, is the name of the boy character in “The Jungle Book,” the collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling that became a Disney movie.
The borough is a late entrant in the celebrity offspring name game. David Beckham, the soccer star, and his wife, Victoria, have a 9-year-old boy named Brooklyn. Donna Summer’s daughter is Brooklyn Sudano.
Technically speaking, the newborn Bronx is named not for the borough but for the county. “The name of the borough is the Bronx,” said Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian. “The name of the county, the official name of the county, is just plain Bronx, without the ‘the.’ ” Mr. Ultan, the author and co-author of eight books about the borough, said it was understandable that Ms. Simpson-Wentz and Mr. Wentz decided to go without the “the.”
He asked: “How many people have the first name Bronx? How many people have the first name The?”
Little Bronx will have a tough reputation to live up to, or to live down. The Bronx is an unpolished, unpretentious place. It has transformed itself from the urban blight of the 1970s but continues to struggle with high crime, high poverty and high unemployment. It is the birth place of hip-hop and the resting place of Robert Moses. It has more pawn shops than any other borough, and fewer Starbucks than Brooklyn or Queens.
The name has a blunt, gritty ring to it that has intrigued poets and writers over the years. “It’s like three words they’ve crunched together,” one character says to another in Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel “Underworld.”
The Bronx — the borough, not the boy — gets its name from the Bronx River, which runs through the middle of the borough. The river, in turn, was named after Jonas Bronck, a Swedish-born sea captain who was the first European settler in the area in 1639.
Bronx is, indeed, a rare first name, but it is not unprecedented.
Just ask Bronx Barton-Stanfield, a 30-year-old high school English teacher in Montgomery, Ala. She admitted being somewhat sad upon learning on Friday that she was no longer, as far as she had known, the only Bronx in the world. Her father, a long-haul truck driver who traveled to the Bronx before she was born, had wanted to name her something people would not forget after meeting her, and that has been the case, she said.
Her students, for one, love it. “They think it makes me edgier than all the other teachers,” Mrs. Barton-Stanfield said. “They think it’s cool.”
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