MovieChat Forums > Fort Apache the Bronx (1981) Discussion > how the four one precinct got its name

how the four one precinct got its name

posted 17 years ago by jaykaybuck
3 replies | jump to latest

Fans from the hinterlands might be interested in how the four one got its name. The house came under siege from angry denizens of the area so many times that a regular procedure nwas adapted to repel the attacks:Steel shutters would enclose the windows to protect the officers and civilian employees from flying glass, and handpicked officers would man the front steps with baseball bats, which commanded more respect than ordinary truncheons, robably due to the proximity of Yankee Stadium. During one of these raids, a desk officer was on the horn to One Police Plaza requesting reinforcements. The bureaucrat on the other end of the line stated in awe: "that place is just like Fort Apache in the movies, The officer said, "THAT'S IT--Fort Apache!", and a legend was born. Hollywood heard about it and the rest is history

[–] donfemia 17 years ago

I understand that the local citizens so burned out the neighborhood that
now that station is called "The Little House on the Prarie." In the
ghetto areas New York City would not rebuild burned out buildings.

[–] GunHillTrain 10 years ago

It was nicknamed Little House on the Prairie by the late 1980s but there's been so much redevelopment around it that the name has disappeared. Since the late '90s there has been a steady stream of new buildings going up in that area.

New York cop lingo has named other neighborhoods. Police slang was allegedly the origin of the famous Hell's Kitchen name which has endured since the 19th Century. The police also named the now-gone Tenderloin district in mid-Manhattan. That was the city's 1890s red-light district and "tenderloin" referred to the high "quality" of the graft and corruption available to officers assigned there. San Francisco's Tenderloin was named after the New York version and that name survived.

For a while the 44th Precinct in the West Bronx was known as Jungle Habitat, after the now-defunct "safari park" in New Jersey. I think the term was used by the police and the press, but rarely if ever by the residents. That name has also vanished since the '80s; I suspect few Bronxites remember it now.

[–] mobocracy (846) 2 years ago

Can you imagine the shitstorm in the media these days if there was smartphone footage of a bunch of cops beating back angry people with baseball bats?