The avenue takes its name from Chester A. Arthur, the twenty-first president of the United States, a man most Americans would struggle to identify in a lineup. But the street itself is anything but forgettable. At the heart of the Belmont neighborhood, Arthur Avenue serves as the commercial spine of what New Yorkers recognize as the Bronx's Little Italy. Along with nearby Morris Park, it anchors one of the borough's primary Italian-American communities, part of a constellation that includes the working-class and middle-class neighborhoods of Schuylerville, Country Club, Pelham Bay, and sections of Fordham. In 2016, the American Planning Association named Arthur Avenue one of "America's Greatest Streets," a recognition that surprised nobody who had ever walked it.

Arthur Avenue has appeared in American film and television with a consistency that borders on compulsion. The 1955 film Marty opens here, with its title character working a meat market on the avenue and contemplating buying the business. Robert De Niro set his directorial debut, A Bronx Tale, in the surrounding Belmont neighborhood in 1993, though he filmed most of it in Astoria, Queens. Roy Scheider chased criminals down Arthur Avenue in The Seven-Ups in 1973. Martin Sheen mugged a pedestrian at 183rd Street and Third Avenue in The Incident in 1967. The 1950s doo-wop group Dion and the Belmonts took their name from the neighborhood, and Don DeLillo, who grew up here, set much of his novel Underworld in the surrounding blocks. Even Lady Gaga shot a music video on the avenue in 2008. The street does not audition for these roles. It simply is what directors are looking for.

What makes Arthur Avenue different from Manhattan's Little Italy is continuity. While Mulberry Street became a self-conscious heritage display surrounded by Chinatown and SoHo, Arthur Avenue remained a working neighborhood. The Italian-American community here was not displaced by rising rents or demographic shifts in the way that happened below Houston Street. Butchers, bakers, pasta makers, and cheese shops have operated on and around Arthur Avenue for generations, their storefronts evolving slowly rather than transforming overnight into boutiques. The Arthur Avenue Retail Market, an indoor marketplace, anchors the commercial life of the street. Walking its aisles feels less like visiting a curated food hall and more like stepping into someone's kitchen, where the owner knows what you ordered last week and has opinions about how you should cook it.

The Bronx's Italian-American community has weathered the same pressures that transformed other ethnic enclaves across New York City. Rising property values, changing demographics, the gravitational pull of the suburbs. Yet Arthur Avenue persists. Part of the reason is geographic: Belmont sits between Fordham University and the Bronx Zoo, bordered by institutions that provide stability without displacement. Part of it is cultural stubbornness, the kind of neighborhood loyalty that keeps families returning even after they have moved away. The restaurants fill on weekends with former residents driving in from Westchester and Long Island, picking up bread and sausage from the same shops their grandparents patronized. Arthur Avenue does not trade in nostalgia. It trades in continuity, and that is what makes it irreplaceable.