These faceted glass windscreens at the Burke Avenue Station celebrate the borough’s rich literary heritage that encompasses the voices of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Shalom Aleichem, Jack Kerouac, Countee Cullen, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Allen Ginsberg, Chaim Potok, E.L. Doctorow, and many others.

In Bronx Literature, artist Béatrice Coron portrays four great writers' works including Edgar Allan Poe's Ulalume and Other Poems; Sholem Aleichem's Mottel, the Cantor's Son; James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time; and Nicholasa Mohr's El Bronx Remembered. The writers featured on these glassworks tell stories of the borough from colonial times to contemporary community developments. Each writer’s story or poem gives us a window on a particular neighborhood at a particular time.

Images in each of the panels include depictions of people reading—a common activity as the daily commuter travels on trains. Like the commuter who travels through time and space, the works of these four writers help us travel through time, into different social classes and communities.


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