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Irish artist Katie Holten seemed an unlikely candidate to make a piece of public art celebrating 100 years of the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. But her ‘museum without walls’, telling the area’s story, has proved a winner

TWO YEARS AGO, in the middle of winter, Dublin-born artist Katie Holten spent weeks wandering along the four and a half miles of the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, looking for a way to make it speak. The Concourse, built in 1909 as a speedway out of Manhattan (and modelled on the Champs Élysées, no less), was approaching its centenary, and Holten, along with two other artists, was in the running for a commission to commemorate it through a public artwork. “I really didn’t think I had much chance of winning,” says Holten, “because the other two artists had really strong connections with the Bronx, and I’d been to the Bronx once, to a Yankees game.”