On a Saturday afternoon along the Grand Concourse near 167th Street, the soundtrack is Twi. It drifts out of barbershops and cellphone stores, off the speakers in the African groceries stacked with cassava and palm oil, past the men eating jollof rice and red beans at a narrow counter while a woman cooks behind them. Six-story apartment houses that once held Jewish families fleeing Manhattan now hold families from Kumasi and Accra. The boulevard the developers called the Park Avenue of the Bronx has quietly become something its planners never imagined: the capital of Ghanaians in the Bronx, the largest Ghanaian concentration in the United States.
Concourse and University Heights: The Place
The Ghanaian Bronx runs along the spine of the Grand Concourse and spills west toward University Heights and the Harlem River. The corridor stretches roughly from 167th Street north through Mount Hope and Fordham, with satellites in Co-op City and on Mosholu Parkway. It is dense, walkable, and stitched together by the IRT Jerome Avenue Line and the B and D trains. The housing is prewar: courtyard apartment buildings, Art Deco lobbies, and the kind of rent that drew immigrants here in the first place.
How the Bronx Became Little Accra
Before the Ghanaians
The Grand Concourse was conceived in 1890 by Louis Risse, an immigrant engineer from Lorraine who wanted the Bronx to have its own Champs-Elysees. Built between 1894 and 1909, the boulevard became the most sought-after address in the borough. After the Jerome Avenue subway opened in 1917, upwardly mobile Jewish and Italian families poured in from the tenements of Manhattan.
By the 1930s the South Bronx was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the country, with hundreds of synagogues clustered near the Concourse. Then came the long unraveling of the 1960s: disinvestment, redlining, and the lure of newly opened Co-op City. The middle class left, and the population along the boulevard shifted to poorer African American and Puerto Rican residents, with Dominican families arriving close behind.
The Ghanaians Arrive
Ghanaians came in waves, and the first big one had a political engine. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Ghana was governed by the military regime of Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, and a battered economy under structural adjustment pushed teachers, nurses, traders, and students to look abroad. Many landed in the West Bronx because the rent was low and the apartments were big enough for the extended households that Ghanaian life assumes.
The second wave rode the Diversity Visa lottery, created by the Immigration Act of 1990 to favor countries that had sent few recent immigrants. The same lottery reshaped other West African communities, like the Nigerians of Houston, but in New York it funneled Ghanaians straight to the Bronx. Applicants from across Africa won a disproportionate share, and Ghanaians used those green cards to follow relatives already settled along the Concourse. This is the part that matters most: chain migration. One cousin sponsored the next, a churchmate vouched for a newcomer, and a family from a single town in Ashanti could reassemble itself, floor by floor, inside the same Bronx building.
The Bronx at Its Peak
By 2000 the census counted nearly 24,800 people of Ghanaian birth or ancestry in New York City, and by the late 2000s community estimates ran far higher, with the great majority in the Bronx. The enclave around 167th Street picked up a name that appeared in print by 2003: Little Accra. Storefronts filled with the working machinery of an immigrant economy, including import-export houses, textile shops heavy with kente and wax print, hair salons, and groceries.
The economic spine ran through health care. Ghana became one of the top countries of origin for New York’s lower-paid health care workers, and home health aides, certified nursing assistants, and registered nurses anchored thousands of Bronx households. Women often led the way, working overnight shifts in nursing homes and private apartments, then sending money home and saving to bring the next relative over.
The Change
The community did not so much decline as spread out and dig in. Some families moved up to Co-op City and the far northeast Bronx, and a steady stream pushed into the suburbs of Westchester, Maryland, and New Jersey. At the same time the institutions deepened, with churches buying their own buildings and hometown associations formalizing into a parallel civic structure. The southern Concourse began gentrifying in the 2000s, but the Ghanaian presence held, because so much of it is anchored in owned storefronts, leases, and congregations rather than in any single block.
The Landmarks of Little Accra
Papaye (2300 Grand Concourse) is the community’s flagship table, an upscale spot whose owner, Samuel Obeng, set out to draw business diners as well as families. The kitchen turns out jollof, banku with okra stew, light soup, and waakye, the brick-red rice and beans that is Ghana’s great weekend breakfast. It has long been the room where community leaders gather when something needs deciding.
Accra Restaurant (2041 Davidson Avenue) sits up in University Heights and traces its first Bronx location to 1989, making it one of the elders of the scene. Regulars come for soft fufu eaten by hand with egusi soup, plus jollof and waakye served with rich stews. It feeds students from nearby Bronx Community College alongside aunties who have been coming for decades.
Joe Boye Place, near 167th Street, is the kind of landmark a guidebook would miss: a narrow cellphone and convenience store where men sit and eat plates of jollof and red beans cooked by the proprietor’s wife. It captures how the corridor actually works, with food, phone credit, money transfer, and gossip all sold from the same few square feet.
Tracey Towers, the two cylindrical high-rises by Mosholu Parkway that opened in 1974, became such a Ghanaian stronghold that residents nicknamed it Little Ghana. Roughly half the tenants are of Ghanaian descent, recruited so effectively by word of mouth, and even by ads aimed at travelers in Ghanaian airports, that newcomers arrived already knowing which building to ask about. Its Ghanaian Association hosts durbars where chiefs and queen mothers appear in full regalia.
The Asanteman Association of New York, the Bronx-based body for Asante immigrants, was inaugurated in 1981 and swore in Nana Kwadwo Tuffour as its first Asantefuohene, its local chief. It crystallized around a landmark moment: in October 1984, the Asantehene Otumfuo Opoku Ware II came to New York for the exhibition Asante: Kingdom of Gold, processing up Central Park West toward the American Museum of Natural History alongside Mayor Ed Koch. The king’s visit told scattered Asante immigrants they were a people, not just a population.
The Church of Pentecost has its American roots in the Bronx, where the denomination began as a small Ghanaian prayer group and, in 1992, bought its first church building on 216th Street for $710,000. The national office has since moved to New Jersey, but the borough remains thick with Ghanaian congregations: Presbyterian, Methodist, Seventh-day Adventist, and Pentecostal, alongside the Muslim families of Ghana’s north who worship in the same neighborhood.
Where the Bronx Ghanaians Came From
The center of gravity is Ashanti, the inland kingdom whose capital is Kumasi, which is why Twi is the lingua franca of the corridor and why the Asanteman Association looms so large. Akan towns across the Ashanti and Eastern regions are heavily represented, from Kumasi and its surrounding villages to Akuapem and Akyem communities whose churchgoing roots run back to nineteenth-century Presbyterian and Methodist missions.
Coastal Accra and the Ga and Ewe communities are here too, along with Muslim families from the northern regions and the zongo districts. Unlike the single-nation enclaves built by the Senegalese of Little Senegal in Harlem or the Liberians of Park Hill on Staten Island, the Ghanaian Bronx gathers many peoples under one flag. They were drawn by the oldest of forces, which is that someone they knew had already made it work. A nurse on Walton Avenue, a deacon at a Pentecost church, a cousin with a spare room: each became a doorway, and a single hometown could end up with a recognizable address in the Bronx.
The Bronx Today
Walk the Concourse now and the Ghanaian Bronx is neither fading nor frozen. Independence Day on March 6 brings parties and parades, and every summer Ghanafest fills Crotona Park, a festival that has run since 2009 with drumming, hiplife and Afrobeats, jollof, and stalls of wax print. Funerals and outdoorings, the eighth-day naming ceremonies, remain the great occasions of the social calendar, drawing hundreds across the boroughs in matching cloth.
The second generation is coming of age now, raised between Twi at home and English at school, between the Pentecost church on Sunday and an azonto night later in the week. Some are nurses and pharmacists like their parents, and some are lawyers, coders, and city employees who still drive their mothers to the salon on 167th Street. Remittances still flow home by the millions, and a housing development outside Accra was reportedly named for the borough, a quiet sign of which way the influence runs.
The grandest street in the Bronx was built to look like a Parisian boulevard and was sold as the Park Avenue of the borough. A century on, its accent is Akan, its weekends smell of light soup and grilled tilapia, and for tens of thousands of people the Grand Concourse functions as nothing less than Accra’s sixth borough, less a place they ended up than a place they built.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Ghanaians settle in the Bronx?
Ghanaians settled in the West Bronx mainly because the rent was affordable and the prewar apartments were large enough for extended families. Early arrivals in the 1980s and 1990s drew relatives through chain migration, and the cluster of Ghanaians in the Bronx grew into the largest Ghanaian community in the United States.
Is the Bronx still a Ghanaian neighborhood today?
Yes. While some families have moved to Co-op City, Westchester, and other states, the corridor along the Grand Concourse and University Heights remains a stronghold, anchored by restaurants, churches, and hometown associations. Little Accra around 167th Street is still very much alive.
What are the most famous Ghanaian landmarks in the Bronx?
Papaye on the Grand Concourse and Accra Restaurant in University Heights are the best-known eateries, and Tracey Towers by Mosholu Parkway is so Ghanaian it is nicknamed Little Ghana. The Asanteman Association of New York and a dense cluster of Pentecostal, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches form the civic and spiritual landmarks.
Where did the Bronx Ghanaian community come from?
Most of the Ghanaians in the Bronx trace their roots to the Ashanti region and its capital, Kumasi, which is why Twi is the dominant language. There are also significant Ga, Ewe, Akuapem, Akyem, and northern Muslim communities from across Ghana.
When did Ghanaians first arrive in the Bronx?
Ghanaians began arriving in significant numbers in the 1980s, fleeing economic hardship under the Rawlings military government, with a second wave through the Diversity Visa lottery created in 1990. By 2000 the census counted nearly 24,800 Ghanaians in New York City, most of them in the Bronx.
If your family’s story passed through the Grand Concourse or any corner of the Ghanaian Bronx, those years of work, worship, and reunion are worth holding onto.