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Rivera Must Clarify

By Editorial

In this issue we report on a confusing arrangement among Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera, community leader Sallie Caldwell and Community Board 7.

What troubles us is not that Rivera wants to serve the Norwood and Bedford Park sections of her district. We’ve long encouraged politicians based to the east and west of our communities to open satellite offices here.

It’s that the arrangement is not transparent. Everyone involved seems to have a different explanation for what Caldwell’s role is. She is either doing constituent work in the office or not doing any at all, depending on who you talk to. If she is doing constituent work, then Rivera needs to tell her constituents that and advertise a schedule. If she’s not doing constituent work at CB7 — and is just helping out with community board business — then Rivera should just say so. The arrangement, whatever it is, may be perfectly appropriate. But those involved aren’t acting like it.

There also needs to be greater clarity brought to the issue of whether an elected official can use space at a community board office and under what circumstances. For instance, can every elected official use space in the CB7 office if they so desired? Do they need to pay rent?

We weren’t able to get any answers to these questions. The city’s Community Assistance Unit punted to the borough president and the borough president referred us to the City Charter. But surely Board 7 and Rivera can seek guidance from city officials who oversee community boards.

CB7’s chairman, Greg Faulkner, said these issues would be raised at the next executive committee meeting. That’s a good first step.

 

Think Local, Shop Local

As usual around this time of year, we urge our readers to shop locally for holiday gifts wherever possible.

In the special holiday advertising section in this issue, we offer some creative gift ideas, brought to you by local nonprofits. By purchasing from these organizations you’re also supporting their larger missions.

There are also terrific opportunities to find that special something at stores along the numerous shopping districts in the area.

Sure, we have a selfish interest in thriving local business districts; this newspaper wouldn’t exist without them. But we all should care about keeping our commercial areas healthy. When they are, it’s a good sign that our neighborhoods are in good shape, too.

Even if you might save a couple of bucks on a video game or a piece of jewelry at a mall in Westchester or Manhattan — and in most cases you’ll get a better buy in your own backyard — spending money here is an investment in your community.

We ask you to pay particular attention to the advertisers in this newspaper who are themselves investing in better neighborhoods by supporting our work.

Healthy communities require a healthy local economy.

This holiday season, please try to do your part.

Old Win Streaks, New Faces, College Basketball Begins in the Bronx

By Alex Kratz

As we approach December, the squeak of new sneakers on freshly polished hardwood floors begins to pierce your ear. A whistle blows. A ball is tipped. Ah, the dank smell of a sweaty practice jersey. It can only mean one thing: another college basketball season is shifting into high gear.

Most teams have already completed a tournament or two by now, but December is when the real season starts. It’s when most teams start their conference schedules and begin playing their local rivals. It’s when coaches preach fundamentals. It’s when young teams find their character and young players grow into their roles, as superstars or super-subs.

The following is a brief preview of four of our local college squads, the men’s and women’s teams from Lehman and Monroe College. Let the games begin.

Monroe Women

Although last year’s team went a perfect 36-0 and won the Junior College Division III championship, coach Seth Goodman believes this team might be better in several ways.

“We’re very defense oriented, more athletic and much deeper,” Goodman says.

However, they don’t have Fantasia Goodwin, one of the best women’s junior college players of all time and a dominating force inside the paint. She moved on to Division I powerhouse Syracuse after last season.

This year’s team will rely more on speed and defense, Goodman says. “There’s different ways to win games,” he says. “This year we play better defense, but we’re scoring six or seven less points a game.”

And sparking that defense is 5-foot-8 sophomore dynamo Angela Pace, the team’s point guard who earned first-team all-region honors as a freshman last year. She was 20th in the nation in assists (4.3 per game) and eighth in steals (5 per game).

Right now, Goodman is still trying to figure out his starting lineup and rotation with all the talent he has at his disposal. Last year, the Mustangs started the same five players in every game except for injury substitutions. This year, he’s already started four different lineups in five games (all of which Monroe won).

And what about that streak? Isn’t it daunting? “The funny thing is that you think things carry over from year to year,” Goodman said. “But honestly, they don’t really think about it.”

Monroe Men

While the women’s team won the national title, the male Mustangs came tantalizingly close, winning 33 games (a school record) and finishing eighth in the national tournament. With a healthy crew of returning veterans, this year’s team is thirsty for more.

Like the Lady Mustangs, the men lost three big men to NCAA Division I programs and will rely on their talented guard play this year.

Rich Jackson, a second year player from St. Raymond’s in the Bronx, is the team’s leading returning scorer and will be relied on heavily to produce offensively. “He’s the focal point of our team,” says coach Jeff Burstad.

Jackson will be joined in the backcourt by DaShaun Williams, a versatile 6-foot-3 combo guard (he can play either guard position) from Chicago, and Jonas Ghebremeskel, a lithe 5-foot-11 sharpshooter from Sweden (the team also has players from Guinea and Senegal). Both guards will have to play bigger roles this year if Monroe wants to get back the national tournament.

Lehman College Women

Despite three losses to open the season, Lehman’s women’s basketball coach Eric Harrison believes this team is much better than last year’s team, which struggled with injuries to a 12-14 record.

“It’s the most talented team I’ve had in my nine years here,” said Harrison, the coach with the best winning percentage in school history and the longest-tenured collegiate coach in the Bronx.

With all five starters returning, Harrison says the biggest challenge will be to keep his players focused and ready to play. “You gotta keep players motivated,” he said.

The Lightning will be led up front by bruiser Sally Nnamani and in the backcourt by Kelly Santiago, who was the first female player to record a quadruple double (double-digits in points, rebounds, assists and steals) back in 2001. Santiago took a few years off, but is now back, at the age of 24, and ready to make up for lost time.

Lehman College Men

Last year’s Lehman’s men’s team finished 15-11 and reached the NCAA Division III regional tournament riding the back of dominant big man Sekani Francis, who graduated last year.

Post-Francis, this year’s team must find its own identity, says seventh year coach Steve Schulman. But he’s excited about the change in personality.

“This year’s team, we’re going to be tenacious defensively,” Schulman says, adding that he plans to play more man-to-man pressure defense after sitting back in a zone most of last season. “I prefer quickness over size.”

The Lightning will rely mostly on two talented guards, senior Rafael Bueno and sophomore sensation Duane Rhoden, a product of DeWitt Clinton. Jason Marchena will be thrust into the starting lineup, replacing last year’s point guard Willy Vargas.

Community Leader’s Political Role Raises Questions

By Alex Kratz

For as long as anyone can remember, Sallie Caldwell has been active in the local community, serving on various committees and looking out for her neighbors at Tracey Towers.

Caldwell is currently vice-chair of Community Board 7 (CB7) and the corresponding secretary of the 52nd Precinct Community Council (her daughter, Brenda, became president of the Council during the summer).

A year ago, Caldwell added a new hat to her civic wardrobe. She became a representative of Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera, who was just completing her first year in Albany.

In an interview with the Norwood News last year, soon after she began working for Rivera, Caldwell said she helped mobilize Tracey’s residents for Rivera during her successful campaign for Assembly in the fall of 2004.

“She needed someone who knew the history of Tracey Towers,” said Caldwell at the time.

Rivera said Caldwell would be providing constituent services for Norwood and Bedford Park residents, including those at Tracey. Community Board 7 District Manager Rita Kessler allowed her to use a corner of the board office and one of its phone lines on Mondays and Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“It’s just a temporary thing,” Kessler said a year ago. “We’re just doing a favor for an elected official.”

Now, more than a year later, Caldwell still comes into the community board office, usually on Mondays and Tuesdays, one CB7 staffer said. But it’s unclear whether she is working for the board, or for Rivera, while she’s there.

Kessler says Caldwell does not perform any constituent services for Rivera using any board equipment.

“Sallie is wonderful,” Kessler said in a phone interview last week. “She helps with community board stuff when she’s here.”

Kessler added that if phone calls are directed to Caldwell and they concern Rivera, Caldwell always uses her own personal cell phone to respond.

But Lilithe Lozano, a staffer at Rivera’s office, said that Caldwell is employed by the assemblywoman and provides constituent services out of the CB7 office to better serve the elderly and infirm in the area. However, no one in Rivera’s office would say what hours Caldwell is available or provide information about how to reach her.

At the 52nd Precinct Community Council’s recent annual meeting, Caldwell presented Rivera with an award for her service to the community.

After the ceremony, the Norwood News asked Caldwell if she is still providing constituent services out of the CB7 office on 204th Street. She said she wouldn’t discuss the matter unless Rivera was present. When Rivera walked over, she dismissed Caldwell to talk one-on-one, but then would only say that Caldwell is her “eyes and ears in the community” but provides the same services for “everyone,” hinting that Caldwell isn’t doing anything special for her.

While briskly walking out to her SUV, Rivera said Caldwell does receive a small stipend, but wouldn’t say exactly how much it is for. “It’s so small, it’s a joke,” Rivera said, changing the topic and then jumping into the driver’s seat.

Rivera did not respond to several phone messages and a faxed list of questions requesting more details about what Caldwell does for her, and whether she provides constituent services out of the Community Board 7 office.

No local politicians have full-time offices in the Community Board 7 area.

Council Member Oliver Koppell and Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who are based in Riverdale and Kingsbridge respectively, both employ staff to represent them at a satellite office at the Mosholu Montefiore Community Center. Those staffers provide constituent services during a regular part-time schedule, which both politicians regularly advertise. Though the situation is different, since the Center is a private nonprofit organization that the political staffers have no relationship with, Dinowitz said he saw no real problem with using community board space to provide constituent services.

The office of Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, which oversees community boards, would not comment on whether Caldwell’s situation was unusual or improper. Spokesperson Ronnie Sykes said all questions regarding community boards can be answered in the City Charter. The City Charter says only 25 percent of community board members can be city employees but does not prohibit the staff of elected officials from serving on community boards. Nothing else in the Charter pertains to this situation.

Community Board 7 chair Greg Faulkner said the Caldwell situation fell “off my radar” after Kessler and Caldwell assured him the Rivera relationship was only temporary and other business took precedent. “My impression was that it was over,” Faulkner said, adding that whenever he sees her at board office she is doing “community board stuff.”

Faulkner said the Board’s Executive Committee would discuss the issue at its next meeting.

Remembering a ‘Connector’

By Alex Kratz

Toward the end of her extraordinarily active and devout life, Sister Annunciata Bethell played a role in a modern miracle.

Every day of the week, throughout the summer of 2004, Patricia Burlace, Sr. Annunciata’s assistant and protégée at her beloved senior center, would drive the elderly advocate to the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center to visit conjoined, and then separated, twins Carl and Clarence Aguirre and their mother, Arlene.

The Aguirre’s story received attention from both local and international media because it marked the first time twins conjoined at the head had been successfully separated. But Sr. Annunciata wasn’t there trying to bask in the spotlight, she was simply there to provide support and guidance to a family going through a difficult time.

“She was so touched and honored to be part of their success,” Burlace said.

At that point in her life, Sr. Annunciata was dealing with her own physical ailments, Burlace said, but up until the very end she dedicated herself to others.

“She lived a lifetime with a commitment to helping others,” Burlace said.

Sr. Annunciata died on Nov. 12 at the age of 90 at Montefiore.

Born in the northwest Bronx on April 4, 1916 — in the middle of World War I — young Annunciata Bethell decided to dedicate her life to religion and community service at an early age. She entered the Ursuline Bedford Park Convent after graduating from the Academy of Mt. St. Ursula at the age of 16 and became a nun in 1935. She celebrated her 70th anniversary as a nun last fall.

Sister Annunciata, or just “Sister” as friends and colleagues called her, believed strongly in education. She was well educated herself, earning a B.A. in Education and an M.S. in Religious Education from Fordham University as well as a master’s in Social Work from Hunter College.

Throughout and after gaining her own education, Sr. Annunciata worked to mold young minds in the Bronx, teaching at several Catholic elementary schools in the borough, including St. Jerome’s Parochial, St. Angela’s, Our Lady of Mercy, St. Philip Neri and the Ursuline School.

While she spent much of her career educating youth, Sr. Annunciata began shifting her focus to the other end of the age spectrum as she grew older herself. In 1972, she transformed the St. Philip Neri Leisure Time Club into the Bedford Park Multi-Service Center for Seniors. The Center survived a ghastly fire that gutted St. Philip Neri Church in 1997 (only closing for a single day as Sr. Annunciata scraped and scrounged to keep providing services for her seniors at various locations), relocating to a brand new building on East 204th Street, which was renamed the Sister Annunciata Bethell Senior Center in 2002 in her honor.

“Indeed, over these many years, I and the staff have endeavored to be the “missing link” in the lives of our elderly friends of the northwest Bronx!” Sr. Annunciata wrote in 2002.

Her office, in the basement of the new facility, is filled with scrapbook pictures and remains exactly the way she left it after falling ill in 2005. Burlace says the Center is filled with so many awards and proclamations for Sister that she can’t find enough wall space to hang them.

Sr. Annunciata, who was often referred to as “The Big A” (not for her stature, mind you – she stood barely 5 feet tall in heels – but because of “the enormity of what she did,” Burlace says), made a name for herself not only as an educator and a provider for seniors, but also because of her strong presence in community affairs.

In his homily, Father Arthur Mastrolia remembers Sr. Annunciata “moving deftly through the maze of social services,” adding later that “I called her a connector. We relied on The Big A to connect us.”

In addition to her duties at the senior center, Sr. Annunciata fought for others in other capacities, as a member of several committees and boards, including the Quality Care Committee at Montefiore, the board of directors at the Mosholu Preservation Corporation (which publishes this newspaper), the Bronx Community Home Advisory Board, the Montefiore Advisory Board, and the Montefiore Board of Trustees, among others.

Maureen Milton, who served as assistant director next to Sr. Annunciata at the senior center for more than 20 years, spoke about her good friend at the legendary nun’s Mass two weeks ago.

“All of us are better for knowing her,” she said, fighting back tears and summing up the sentiments of many. “We’re all glad you spent your life in our little corner of the Bronx.”

New Enforcement Program Aimed at City’s Worst Buildings

By Alex Kratz

In the summer of 2005, New York City unleashed a new proactive campaign against the city’s most notorious landlords, including Moshe Piller, who owns several health and safety violation-ravaged buildings on Valentine Avenue in North Fordham. As a result, Piller and other landlords are being taken to task for their neglect and indifference to tenant complaints, but other serious offenders continue to slip through the cracks, city officials say.

The new aggressive approach has not consistently targeted the city’s worst buildings and there are several logistical kinks that need working out, according to a recently released one-year report on the Targeted Cyclical Enforcement Program (T-CEP) by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).

But on the whole, the city and housing advocates are calling T-CEP a success, as valuable relationships have been forged between city agencies and community housing organizations, and many landlords have reacted promptly to make repairs.

The T-CEP program, implemented through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the City Council and the mayor, is a collaboration between HPD, the City Council and non-profit housing advocates.

Breaking the Mold

This proactive concept is the brainchild of HPD and the Association of Neighborhood Housing Development (ANHD), an umbrella group comprised of dozens of community housing organizations scattered throughout the five boroughs, including local stalwarts like the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC). Aggressive and packaged with the threat of legal recourse, T-CEP was designed to break the ineffective HPD mold of reactive inspections and toothless penalties.

“Most of our work here is reactive because we get such a high volume of complaints; responding to those [tenant] complaints takes up the majority of our time,” said HPD spokesman Neill Coleman. “This allows us to do more proactive work.”

The idea behind T-CEP is simple: target the most neglected buildings in each Council district and do periodic roof-to-cellar inspections on them, in the process identifying all building code violations, both new and outstanding. HPD then takes steps to force the landlords to fix the violations.

Once inspections are completed, HPD creates a violation summary and consults with Council members and housing groups to decide what action to take. As a group, they decide on enforcement tactics based on a landlord’s past history with HPD and its Division of Anti-Abandonment, which tracks the worst of them.

HPD wants landlords to do their own repairs, says Coleman. If the violations are less severe, HPD will work with landlords to remove the violations through a self-certification program, which Coleman admits is not always foolproof. “But I would stress that if we find that [landlords] have falsely certified repairs, they will be referred to housing court,” Coleman said.

In more drastic cases, buildings with serious safety and health violations, landlords must enter into a Voluntary Repair Agreement (VRA), promising to fix their most egregious, class “C,” violations – leaky roofs, blown boilers, or dead refrigerators – by a determined deadline or face litigation.

Finally, the most aggressive tactic in the T-CEP arsenal takes a habitually offending owner, such as Moshe Piller, straight to HPD’s litigation arm.

Conclusions and Recommendations

In the first year, HPD completed inspections of 270 buildings and 4,697 apartments in 12 out of the city’s 51 Council districts. About 400 units per district are targeted. In total, 14,634 new violations have been identified and 7,612 violations were removed.

Of course, numbers can hardly quantify how effective the program has been, considering there are more than 2.7 million outstanding code violations in New York City, according to HPD.

“Overall, we would certainly say that it’s been successful, especially in getting more up-to-date information on the violations of these buildings,” Coleman said.

Dave Hanzel, the policy director for ANHD, agrees. “The program theory has proven correct,” he said. “If you have the threat of follow-up and comprehensive inspections, then landlords will respond.”

Perhaps the most intriguing by-product of T-CEP is the fact that Hanzel and Coleman agree on anything. HPD and the city’s housing and tenant advocates don’t often see eye-to-eye.

“Initially, HPD was resistant and community organizations thought HPD was a huge bureaucracy that wasn’t going to do anything, but now I think they both realize that we have the same goals,” Hanzel said, which are to improve living conditions throughout the city.

Both sides say scheduling has been a problem. Decisions in the program are based on meetings between HPD, housing groups, and Council members. If there are scheduling conflicts, the entire process is delayed. Oftentimes, HPD and ANHD say, Council members are slow to commit and come ill-prepared for meetings.

To solve this problem, Hanzel wants to provide more training to Council members, whose districts are only up for inspection every three years at this point, and “making them better prepared to sit down,” he said. “They have a huge agenda and we know there are competing issues. But the window of opportunity is narrow on this.”

Because of T-CEP’s limited cope and periodic nature, HPD wants to do a better job of identifying the most neglected buildings, saying the majority of violations it discovered through the program were class “A” violations, or those considered the least serious. Thus far, HPD has allowed Council members and housing groups to choose all 400 units, but is now planning to pick half the units itself. “It will better enable us to inspect the worst of the worst,” Coleman said.

Both ANHD and HPD would like to expand the program to do more districts, more often. NWBCCC organizers say they would like each council district to be inspected once a year, which would mean three times the manpower. In total, HPD uses about 10 of its 416 inspectors for T-CEP.

Locks Still Not Fixed

Meanwhile, tenants like Xiomara Mejias, 34, her husband and three young children still don’t have locks on their building’s entrance at 2654 Valentine Ave. The building’s owner, Moshe Piller, was named the second worst slumlord in the city in 2005 by the non-profit tenant umbrella group, Housing Here and Now.

Mejias’ building, which showcases both the success and most difficult challenges of T-CEP, boasts a well-documented history of neglect. It had been referred to HPD’s litigation department even before T-CEP started. Then, last summer, after roof-to-cellar T-CEP inspections, HPD piled on more violations, many of them class “C” (the worst) infractions. (On the morning of the inspections, Piller had workers frantically painting and cleaning to make the place halfway presentable. Inspectors uncovered rusted, deteriorated pipes due to be replaced, that were instead wrapped in plastic bags and “sealed” with duct tape, Mejias said.)

On Sept. 11 of this year, Piller finally settled with HPD in housing court, agreeing to pay a $30,000 fine, make all repairs within 45 days, and depositing $50,000 in an escrow account to ensure that all the repairs would be made. Just last week, HPD did a follow-up inspection to find that 81 percent of the violations had been repaired and levied another $5,000 fine (it also issued 21 new violations). And still, the locks haven’t been fixed, allowing drug addicts and vagrants to enter the building at will, Mejias said.

“Any way you want to put it, things aren’t being done,” Mejias said. “You could walk into my building right now.”

After Stroke, Principal Returns to New School, and Controversy

By Alex Kratz

Just four months ago, Paul Smith woke up and found himself in the middle of a nightmare.

It was Sunday, July 16, a day Smith will remember for the rest of his life. The principal of the Bronx New School in Bedford Park had just finished service at Foster Memorial A.M.E. in Westchester, where Smith is also a pastor. It happened during an after church reception. Smith was talking to members of his congregation, when he began to feel lightheaded. Then everything went black.

Next thing Smith knew, he was strapped to a hospital bed while a team of doctors hovered over him, conducting tests. He tried to move, but found himself paralyzed on his entire left side. Relatively young at the age of 48, the active educator and minister had suffered a severe stroke.

“It was very frightening,” said Smith.

The Rehab

The large man with the shaved head couldn’t feel the left side of his body for a good month.

Though doctors told Smith that he recovered quickly because of his youth – most strokes don’t hit people until their 60s – and good health, the principal found rehab “difficult” and “frustrating” at times.

Eventually, Smith graduated from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane and soon was able to move without support. At Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in Westchester, Smith learned to walk again.

Smith credits his faith and an incredibly supportive network of family, friends and church members for his steady recovery. He finished up at Burke at the end of October and returned to school on Nov. 1. He says he pushed himself to get back because “I love my work at school and I love my kids at school.”

The Comeback

Smith says he’s easing his way back into the position of running an elementary school with the help of a very supportive staff. He feels better every day, but multi-tasking isn’t as easy as it once was. He’s adjusting by writing things down more and “pulling back” when he finds himself feeling stressed.

With only a week under his belt, Smith says he’s still “playing catch-up.”

This has all the makings of a heartwarming comeback story, but it’s not that simple. In fact, some parents at the school don’t want him to come back at all.

Now “90 percent” recovered from his stroke, Smith, who called the Norwood News with a request to be interviewed, is back at the New School, where his landing may not be so cushy. His six-year tenure has been plagued by controversy and turmoil, according to parents and teachers.

Meanwhile, parents say although they are happy he has made a recovery, his absence reminded them of what the school was like before Smith took the helm.

Falling From ‘Heaven’

The Bronx New School was created by a group of parents and teachers 20 years ago. Designed to be a progressive public elementary school with alternative education philosophies, including multi-age classrooms and heavy parent and teacher involvement, parents say the school has been drifting away from its original model over the past six years.

Smith’s top-down approach to school management is the primary culprit, parents interviewed for this story say. He phased out multi-age classrooms, one of the school’s prized institutions, because he said it was adversely affecting test scores. But more importantly, parents say, he often makes sweeping changes without consulting the school community.

“When I came here to visit three years ago, I thought I’d fallen into heaven,” said one parent who requested anonymity because her child still attends the school. “Now, I’ve seen those ideals gradually whittled away by the administration.”

Former New School parent Patrick Wynne had enough of Smith’s style after just two years. Earlier this year, he pulled out his 6-year-old daughter, Shiori, and put her in the new AMPARK elementary school in Van Cortlandt Village – the only “progressive” education possibility around now, Wynne said.

As a member of the School Leadership Team (SLT) – a group of parents, teachers and administrators, including Smith – Wynne says he butted heads with the principal on many occasions. He felt Smith rarely heeded the advice of parents and teachers, who were used to having more input, and openly chastised them when he felt challenged.

“He showed disdain for progressive education,” Wynne said. “Part of it was that he was really focused on testing. He thought if he could keep up the test scores he would be free from criticism.”

Wynne and other parents said SLT meetings would often deteriorate into shouting matches and that Smith showed little interest in hearing opposing viewpoints.

Visibility and approachability were also a big issue with parents, who wondered where his priorities were, Wynne said.

“I think he was there just picking up a paycheck,” Wynne said.

Smith was rarely seen during lunch period or after school and spent school time working on church-related activities, Wynne said, adding that he had heard from reliable sources that Smith had hired three staff people who were members of his congregation at Foster’s.

‘One Driver’

But Smith said he has never used school time to perform any church-related activities or hired anyone from Foster’s.

He said he believes the school is still “progressive” in the sense that children still have the opportunity to create their own learning environment.

Though it was hard because he had high hopes for the New School, Wynne finally decided to take Shiori out of Smith’s learning environment after an encounter his wife had with the principal last year.

According to Wynne, when his wife, Siobhan O’Neil, approached Smith about holding Shiori (who was young for her grade) back a year to work on the shy girl’s social and emotional development, the principal shut her down in front of his staff in the main office, saying there was no such thing as social and emotional development and, therefore, they didn’t need to talk about it.

Four teachers left the New School, including superstar Martha Andrews (who has a course designed on her work at Columbia Teachers College) after last year. It marked the first time in school history, a parent said, that one teacher, let alone four, had left for another school in New York City.

“These were some of the best teachers in the city,” said the parent who requested anonymity. “They were so creative and so experienced. I think he’s creating a little fiefdom there.”

Smith couldn’t say why those teachers left, but said he wished them well and hoped they wished him the same.

He admits that he has clashed with parents and teachers in the past, but says he’s excited to make a fresh start. “We’ve traveled through some dark waters,” he said. “It was a very difficult time.”

Although he’s not preaching at Foster’s now, he intends to in the future and says his ministry only makes him a “richer, fuller” educator.

As for his top-down management style, Smith says, “People here need to realize that collaboration works both ways. You have to understand your roles as teachers and parents and understand that it’s for the betterment of the school.”

Smith has a favorite saying that he says best illustrates his point. “All of us are on the same bus,” he says, “but there can only be one driver.”

‘Management Issues’

Local Instructional Superintendent Keith Oswald, Smith’s direct supervisor, said that Smith’s doctor cleared him for full-time duty and that while they would be keeping an eye on him, he wouldn’t require any further assistance from the city.

Oswald wouldn’t comment on any in-house turmoil at the New School, except to say that “those are management issues. All schools have those kinds of issues.”

Coming off a stroke, Oswald said, Smith may need to re-evaluate how much he’s extending himself. “He’s got to think about how he needs to keep all these things on his plate and still be effective.”

Democracy Without Choices

By Editorial

We spent some time talking to voters at polling stations in the area on Election Day. Just seeing people from every ethnicity imaginable taking time out of their busy days, sometimes with two or more children in tow, to exercise democracy’s most precious right, is affirming and uplifting.

But there is also something disconcerting just below the surface. Choice is the fuel of democracy, but on Nov. 7, voters had very little, if any, choice. They could vote for incumbent Democrats or, if they had any choice at all, invisible third party candidates. One cynical, yet duty-bound voter, put it succinctly as he told us on his way from the PS 46 polling station to the subway, “If I don’t vote for them [the incumbent Democrats], it’s like a wasted vote.”

The fact that Republicans fare so poorly in most of the Bronx goes only so far as an explanation. On primary day in September, where most city election battles are fought, only one Democratic incumbent faced opposition.

The exception was East Bronx activist Joseph Thompson, who scored an impressive 34 percent of the vote in his bid to unseat first-term assemblywoman Naomi Rivera. Thompson, a retired police officer, hardly had a penny to his name, but he is known for community involvement and his neighbors who knew his work rallied to his side.

There is a strong tendency to merely blame the system, which favors incumbents, and political clubs, which muster the money and troops to deter challengers.

Well, welcome to politics in America — and reality. Political power has its advantages.

That doesn’t mean that challengers can’t win. Just take a look at the new Democratic Congress.

So where are the Joseph Thompsons of Norwood, Bedford Park, North Fordham and University Heights? Where are the community leaders interested in representing their neighbors in government?

None of this is to say we prefer challengers to incumbents. (The Norwood News does not make political endorsements.) What it does say is that we prefer contested elections, where spirited challengers force incumbents to defend their records and make their case to voters for why they should be rehired for another two years.

Part of the problem, of course, is that so few people even know they are represented by two elected representatives in the state legislature (a state senator and a member of the Assembly), much less their names. When we asked voters who they planned to vote for in the state Senate race, they said Hillary Clinton.

So, what’s to be done?

We don’t have all the answers but here are a couple of suggestions:

Learn who represents you in government and tell everyone you know. If you have access to the Internet, go to www.nypirg.org, click on the “Who Represents Me?” button and plug in your address. You’ll instantly get a list of everyone who represents you at all levels of government, along with their phone numbers and addresses. If you don’t have Internet access, we’d be happy to get the information for you. Just send us your address. Once you have the contact information, call your elected officials, ask them questions, and tell them what your community needs.

If you know all this already, and are active in your community, consider running for office. We’re serious.

And if you’re a teacher, teach your students how city and state governments work. Better yet, get them involved in a project they care about. There are good local examples to follow. Laura Spalter at MS 80 formed the Norwood Action Club with her students, who then went about meeting with officials to improve Oval Park and install a stop light at a dangerous intersection. Sasha Wilson at the Bronx New School worked with his kids to get the MTA to improve lighting in a subway underpass.

If we don’t build a farm team of active, engaged, young people, who may one day be capable of running for office themselves, they, too, will face phantom choices in the polling booth.

Democracy requires choices. Let’s go about creating some.

Local Voters Like Hillary and Other Lessons from Election Day

By Alex Kratz

Armed with Dunkin’ Donuts and chocolate covered cherries, volunteers at a University Heights voting site readied themselves for a long day of helping voters.

Most of them dutifully showed up last Tuesday at IS 15 on Andrews Avenue before sunrise, a good half hour before polls opened in New York City at 6 a.m. And most of them, some in their golden years, others barely out of their teens, would stay until polls closed at 9 p.m.

“Nobody’s going anywhere,” said bubbly polling coordinator Donna Benjamin, a Belmont librarian whose kids attend IS 15, about her dedicated pool of poll workers.

By 9:30 a.m., the crew had helped some 100 voters cast their ballots at IS 15. It was a mature and diverse crowd. Elderly black and Hispanic women, some pushing walkers, others holding onto the arms of grandsons, made their choices for state and national positions.

Benjamin said the morning rush would be comprised of mostly seniors, while during the evening they would see more young adults and middle-aged voters.

“The seniors are out here doing it,” Benjamin said. “Those are the most reliable voters.”

While the rest of the nation waged a bitter partisan battle for both houses of Congress, voters in the northwest Bronx, a Democratic stronghold, seemed to agree on at least one choice.

“Hillary,” said one older Hispanic woman after casting her vote. “I voted for Hillary Clinton.”

Why? “I like Hillary.”

“She does good things for people,” echoed Maria Cabrera as she shuffled out of IS 15 holding onto her adult grandson.

Even when asked who they voted for in the state Senate race, which pitted indicted incumbent Democrat Efrain Gonzalez against unknown Conservative candidate Ernest Kebreau, people didn’t differentiate the contest from the U.S. Senate campaign and said they liked “Hillary.” In fact, most voters couldn’t name any of their state legislators. They voted Democrat regardless of who was running.

At around 10:30 a.m., the IS 15 site hit its first snag. Otis S. Thomas, a 36-year-old city worker, couldn’t understand why he wasn’t listed as a registered area voter.

In June, Thomas alerted the election board that he had moved to University Heights, but hadn’t heard a peep from the board since. Naturally, Thomas explained, he assumed the Board’s silence meant he would have to vote in his former Parkchester district. But when he went to his old polling site, they told him he wasn’t listed and that he should go vote in his new district. But he wasn’t listed there either.

“This is just like 2004, when my vote didn’t count,” Thomas said, throwing up his hands.

Benjamin quickly moved to avert the crisis. “Give him an affidavit,” she said.

Eventually, Thomas begrudgingly filled out an affidavit ballot. Later, outside of the school, Thomas vented about the how the Electoral College system is a joke and how Republicans are ruining the country.

“The Republicans are getting too happy. Getting real stupid. Give [Democrats] a chance again,” he said.

Even if the Democrats win, Thomas said, he might not be able to take it anymore. “If this country gets real stupid, I’m moving to Canada.”

Elsewhere on election morning, in North Fordham at the PS 46 polling station, youth volunteers from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition were collecting voters’ opinions on various issues in the organization’s first ever voter survey.

Carlos Cardenas, a voter who works in advertising and had lived in the area 20 years, said he voted straight down the Democratic line, but was pessimistic about politicians in general. He said politicians were mostly “concerned with being on TV. Once they achieve their goal of [getting elected] they go back to sleep.”

Why did he vote for all the Democrats then?

“If I don’t vote for them, it’s like a wasted vote,” he said.

Union Says Bronx Loses in Mail Consolidation

By Laura Sayer

While the United States Postal Service has not officially announced the consolidation that would take mail processing from the Bronx to lower Manhattan, the local union and the larger Bronx community, including Congressman Eliot Engel, have already united against its consequences.

In the consolidation, which the USPS says is not imminent but definitely being discussed, mail normally processed at the General Post Office, at 149th Street and the Grand Concourse, also known as the Detached Mail Unit and Hail New York Truck Transfer Center, will now be trucked to the Morgan Processing and Distribution Center, at 29th Street and 9th Avenue.

The General Post Office building in the Bronx would remain open for window service, but the entire borough’s mail would be processed downtown, adding truck traffic to an already congested area, said Chuck Zlatkin, vice president of the New York Metro Area Postal Workers Union.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Engel told postal workers at a rally against the consolidation recently.

“My office already receives complaints of poor mail service,” Engel added later in a statement. “Moving mail processing out of the Bronx will only make it worse.”

Since the union was notified on Dec. 20, 2005, the “study,” as it is referred to by the USPS, has grown from 40 communities to 139 facing similar cutbacks, Zlatkin said.

Pat McGovern, a USPS spokesperson, said the study is now under review in Washington, and is still far from becoming a reality.

“But, the Morgan facility has already set aside space for the machines,” Zlatkin said.

As a result of the relocation of these processes, “the entire borough’s mail will be delayed,” Zlatkin said.

The USPS, however, does not expect delays, McGovern said. “The distance between the two facilities is approximately 10 miles,” she said. “There are rumors of mail being delayed something like two days. It’s unreasonable for them to speculate that because the distance is so small.”

The Union claims that 450 Bronx postal workers will lose their jobs, because “the machines will move to Morgan, but the people won’t,” Zlatkin said.

McGovern countered that no postal workers would lose their jobs, and the relocation process would occur under the national protocol already agreed upon by the USPS and the union.

“The operation has fewer than 500,” McGovern said, “but as to how – if this even happens – they’d be redistributed, I couldn’t begin to speculate.”

Although the potential move is unpopular with the union, McGovern said it is nothing new, or different, as far as USPS operations are concerned.

“When I was transferred from Queens, I wasn’t happy about it at first,” McGovern said, recalling how she was relocated to Manhattan in 1992. “I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m going to have to pay for the train.’ But it’s not so bad now.”

The consolidation is part of the USPS’s response to the changing ways people communicate, she said. Now it’s more through the Internet and via e-mail.
“The type of mail we process has changed,” she said. “We’re really just going along with the changes that the public is putting upon us.”

First class mail is being replaced more and more by what Zlatkin calls “magazines and such that most people call ‘junk mail.’”

“They call it a cost saving measure,” Zlatkin said. But rates will go up in 2007 for the general public – with stamps up 3 cents a piece – while subsidies will go to big corporate mailers facing fewer drop-off points. He said he wonders who is really “saving” in the relocation.

“A lot of people depend on that mail – older people, who can’t get out as much like to be able to order from catalogs and things, handicapped people, and people who just don’t have the time,” McGovern said in defense of junk mail.

Increasing technology used in mail processing also contributes to the consolidation, McGovern said. “No one sits and looks at each individual piece of mail, and the ‘read rate’ of the machines has improved significantly over the years, which leads to more facilities with excess time,” she explained. “Rather than having two locations with excess time, it makes more economic sense to combine operations.”

In any case, McGovern said, postal patrons will be given an opportunity to voice their concerns before anything is finalized.

Meanwhile, the Bronx Coalition to Save Our Post Office, made up of the New York Metro Area Postal Workers Union and other community organizations, is holding its own community forum on Saturday, Nov.18 at noon, in the Lincoln Hospital Auditorium, 234 E. 149th St.

Possible AIDS Exposure Puts 4 Cops on Leave

By Alex Kratz

In the past two months, Deputy Inspector Joseph Hoch, the commanding officer of the 52nd Precinct, has lost four cops temporarily to the threat of AIDS.

Each of the four officers, including the precinct’s Special Operations Lieutenant Jerry O’Sullivan, was deemed by the Police Departmentat to be at risk of contracting the immune-system-destroying virus after being assaulted on the job. They were either punctured by a hypodermic needle or shared open wounds during the course of fights with suspects. They have been placed on medical leave and given anti-viral drugs.

“It’s a precautionary measure,” Hoch said. “They are immediately put on that stuff.”

That “stuff” is the AIDS cocktail, a potent and nauseating combination of three AIDS drugs. It’s the same cocktail that doctors give patients who have already contracted the virus.

It’s an interesting and terrifying by-product of Operation Impact, which flooded the Five-Two with 100 new officers over the summer. With an increased police presence on the street, there are more possibilities for confrontation and violence against officers, said Hoch.

While crime in the Five-Two is down overall, assaults are up, mostly due to domestic violence and attacks on police officers, Hoch said.

Dr. Barry Zingman, medical director of the AIDS Center at Montefiore Medical Center and has been working in the AIDS field since it became a field in the early 1980s, said the precautionary administering of the AIDS cocktail is also common practice at hospitals, where the risk of exposure to the virus is high as well.

Rarely, Zingman said, do these exposures result in positive tests. But taking the AIDS cocktail helps people psychologically more than anything else.

“They are often scared and upset,” Zingman said about those exposed to a possibility of contracting the virus. “It introduces a tremendous amount of unknown into their lives.”

Medically speaking, Zingman said, taking the cocktail early after an exposure has proven to be 80 percent effective, but that it’s probably much higher.

According to Zingman, only 2 percent of Bronxites are infected with the HIV virus, which means that most of the time a random exposure to a used hypodermic needle or the mixing of blood with another person would not result in transmission of the virus.

But cops are often dealing with criminals and known drug abusers, which puts police officers at a higher risk when they’re exposed on the streets.

Hoch said he doesn’t know of any officers who have ever actually contracted the virus from contact in the field, and Zingman maintains that it’s an extremely remote possibility. The NYPD press office didn’t respond to a Norwood News query asking if any officer in the city had ever contracted the virus from contact in the field.

Hoch feels for his cops and laments the fact that he’s losing officers, who are out at least a month after exposure. After a month on the cocktail, officers are tested for the virus again. Six months later, they are tested again,

He said these exposures were not the result of bad training or tactics; they simply happened during the course of being a cop.

“This, unfortunately, goes with the territory of what we do,” said Hoch.

Fatal Crossing

By Alex Kratz

When Ellen McHugh, 66, died shortly after being struck by a city bus last Thursday morning, it marked the third time in 10 months a pedestrian had been killed at the intersection of Bainbridge Avenue and Gun Hill Road.

Less than six weeks ago, on Sept. 30, Kenneth Filacchione, a 62-year-old Manhattan College security guard, was killed at the very same intersection following a late evening hit-and-run. And last February, 82-year-old Eva Schweitzer was also killed by a city bus in the early morning hours.

Now, after the most recent death at the busy intersection, which is at the center of several Montefiore Medical Center buildings, community leaders see a pattern.

Members of Community Board 7 have taken notice, says District Manager Rita Kessler, who called for urgent action in a letter she wrote on behalf of the Board to the Department of Transportation (DOT).

“Pedestrians are at risk each and every time they cross the street at that location,” Kessler wrote.

Deputy Inspector Joseph Hoch, commander of the 52nd Precinct, said police are investigating the situation and will make recommendations to the DOT if they discover a solution.

Two of the accidents happened early in the morning when victims were struck by buses. One was making a left hand turn onto Gun Hill, while the other was traveling west on Gun Hill. The other happened at 9:42 p.m. and the victim was hit by two different cars going eastbound. Neither of the cars stopped to help.

The police could place a cop at the intersection to direct traffic, Hoch said, but that would only be a temporary solution.

A spokesman for the MTA, which operates the buses that were responsible for two of the deaths, said the MTA tests drivers for drugs and competency after they are involved in these kinds of accidents, but that ultimately the investigation is up to the Police Department.

The driver of the bus that killed Ellen McHugh received a traffic violation for failure to yield to a pedestrian, but has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing.

At a recent district service cabinet meeting at the Community Board 7 office, a DOT representative told Kessler to write a letter to the DOT outlining her concerns, and that the agency would look into it in the meantime.

Kessler wants more.

“We ask that you not take the time to “study” the area but get out there now and do something fast,” Kessler wrote.

Honor a Bronx Treasure

By Editorial

The 92nd Street Y in Manhattan honored a Bronx — and Norwood — treasure last Thursday evening. As part of a series, “Music and Dance of Jewish Traditions,” Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, a songwriter, singer and poet, was celebrated as the equivalent of a rock star in Yiddish culture.

It was a delightful evening. Well-known Yiddish singers from two younger generations sat around a dinner table on stage before a packed auditorium singing Schaechter-Gottesman’s beautiful songs while the English translations appeared on a screen above. After intermission, various singers and musicians interpreted her work in their own styles.

Schaechter-Gottesman, who was born in Austria in 1920 and moved to the Bronx in 1951, is not just special because of her incredible creativity, but also because of her sense of community. She still lives on Bainbridge Avenue. A half-dozen Yiddish-speaking families moved into the row of attractive brick homes leading up to Montefiore in the 1940s and ‘50s and formed a remarkable Yiddish cultural community. Working together they rejuvenated the Sholem Aleichem Folkshul, which still exists on the corner of Bainbridge and East 208th Street, sending their children to school there. Schaechter-Gottesman’s son, Itzik is a Yiddish scholar and editor at The Forward.

We’ve made this case before and we’ll make it again: Schaechter-Gottesman, who has now been honored in Manhattan and in Washington, D.C. where she received a National Heritage Fellowship last year, deserves to be honored right here in the Bronx.

In June 2007, we hope to watch as the sign with her name on it is hoisted above the borough’s most famous boulevard next to the likes of E.L. Doctorow, Stanley Kubrick, Johnny Pacheco, Grand Master Flash, Hal Linden, Danny Aiello and Yomo Torro.

Here are a few excerpts from the translated lyrics of one of our favorite Schaechter-Gottesman songs entitled “New York, New York”:

From Brighton Beach to Baindbridgeivke
Upon your homey streets
There still can be heard
A tasty Yiddish word
Among the giant masses …

You might ask, what’s the use?
You’re crazy, I tell you, just crazy
Why torment yourself
Argue and shriek
And still strive toward your Yiddishist goals?

I know that life here isn’t easy
But as long as I still have
a tongue in my mouth
I’ll gather my strength
and I sing
My dear, sweet,
beautiful, pure…

Oh, New York, New York ..
You are truly one of a kind.

Evander Makes the Big Dance

By Alex Kratz

Evander Childs’ do-everything Jamaican superstar, Mario Rainey, danced through the last 10 minutes of the Bronx Championship last Tuesday at his home field, a game the Tigers won 2-0 over cross-borough rival Truman.

First, Rainey danced through Truman’s usually stout defense, absolutely abusing two overmatched defenders with a killer step-over move and unleashing a game-clinching shot that the forward buried into the lower right-hand netting.

Up 2-0 and with the game firmly in hand, Rainey, 18, then spent the final minutes joking with teammates and just plain dancing.

The 18-year-old striker had earned the right to celebrate after leading the league in scoring during the season and almost single-handedly putting the Tigers in position to gain a number one seed and a first-round bye in the city playoffs.

It was sweet redemption for the Tigers who lost to Truman (one of only two defeats for Evander) earlier in the season, 3-0, in Co-op City. Evander finished the regular season 12-2.

Coach Toma Gojcevic, who returned to coaching Evander this year after a two-year hiatus, said his team is loaded with talent, but lacked chemistry and fought amongst each other at times during the season.

After last Tuesday’s performance against Truman, Gojcevic’s international crew, which includes players from Jamaica, Ecuador, Columbia and Africa, may be peaking at just the right time. After losing to Truman on Sept. 29, the Tigers have reeled off seven straight wins, including Tuesday’s victory and a hard-fought win over Lehman (the only other team Evander has lost to).

The Tigers are set to play Lab Museum United, a lower Manhattan school, on Thursday, Nov. 2, the day this paper comes out.

In the stands last Tuesday, Evander fans stood on their feet, pressing themselves against the front row railing for the entire action-packed second half.

The Tigers had taken a 1-0 lead on a header by Rainey in the first half, but found themselves on the defensive to begin the second.

Truman relentlessly pressured the Evander defense, which was content to stay back and protect its slim lead. Rainey even moved back from his forward spot and positioned himself behind the midfield. The result was a barrage of Truman shots, two of which bounced of the goal posts, causing gasps from the crowd.

But it was Truman’s all-out attack that would be its undoing. Rainey received the ball on a quick counter attack, started hearing the music and the rest is history.

After the game, Evander players exploded with excitement in the tiny locker room just off the playing field – hugging, screaming, dancing, laughing in celebration.

Gojcevic interrupted the celebration to say, “I take back every bad thing I said about you ugly mugs!” And then the celebration continued.

The soccer regular season wrapped up last week. Here’s a quick wrap-up of area teams.

Competing in the tough Bronx “A” division with powerhouses Evander, Lehman and Truman, Walton ended the season with two ties and finished with respectable a 5-7-2 record.

Also in the “A” division, DeWitt Clinton upset top division foe Truman on Oct. 20, but then lost its final two contests and fell to 4-9-1.

Playing in the smaller Bronx “B” division, John F. Kennedy was a juggernaut this year, finishing 11-1. The JFK Knights were a number two seed in the city playoffs, where they faced Manhattan-based Bayard Rustin at home in the first round on Wednesday, Nov. 1.

A Look at How Filtration $ Is Reshaping Local Parks

By Shazelle Goulet

The more than $200 million in Bronx parks funding promised by city officials in exchange for siting a controversial water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park, has begun to change the local landscape. Fences and bulldozers can be found in most local parks and more are on the way.

Following is a rundown of where the various park projects in Community District 7 and the Norwood News readership area stand:

Van Cortlandt Park

Van Cortlandt Park’s Saturn Playground — to be renamed Sachkerah Woods Playground — was one of the first to undergo renovations. It lies just to the south of the filtration plant construction site. The result of a community design process several years ago, the project will include a comfort station, dog walk and a new playground and picnic area. The Parks Department is pushing for completion by the end of the year. Just north of the plant site, the Allen Shandler Recreation Area, not yet under construction, will have its comfort station renovated as well as new landscaping and reconstruction of the picnic area. Work on this project will begin in summer 2008.

St. James Park

At St. James Park, construction began in the fall of 2005, with new stone steps, cast iron fencing and new central staircases. The Parks Department is pushing for completion of this phase by spring 2007.

Phases II and III at St. James, now in the design phase, will include reconstruction of the recreation building, pathways, benches, a new playground and newly manicured lawns. Construction on these phases should begin in spring 2007. (The reconstruction of the St. James park house, a project unrelated to the Croton funds, appears to be back on schedule after a long delay caused by contractor defaults. It should be completed by winter’s end, the Parks Department said.)

Williamsbridge Oval

The Williamsbridge Oval Master Plan was presented on Oct. 25 to Community Board 7’s Parks Committee. Since a Dec. 1 scoping meeting last year, Board members and the city’s Art Commission have been reviewing the master plan to see what work is feasible under the existing budget of $13.6 million. Community members had originally hoped to restore the perimeter walls with new fencing and gates, stabilize slopes, resurface the track and field, renovate playgrounds 1 and 3, reconstruct the senior seating area and restore the recreation center.

The Parks Department had originally divided the projects into seven phases, but after budgets cuts, there is only enough money for the completion of three. All Croton funded park projects were cut across the board by 9.5 percent due to underestimated budgets. According to a Parks Department spokesman, “Cutting the budgets assures that some portion of work will be completed at all Croton funded parks and that all parks get a fair deal.”

Community members and residents are pushing for the restoration of the track and field, renovations to the park house, reconstruction of playgrounds 1 and 3, and the re-asphalting of the concrete play area on the east side, which will include construction of a skate park. The track and field, which will become Phase I of construction, is set to begin in spring 2007. Restoration of perimeter walls including fencing and gates and slope stabilization is now on hold for the foreseeable future, thanks to the budget cuts.

Harris Field

The Parks Department is actively reviewing the scope for Harris Field. Community members would like to see the park split in two, one half containing a football/soccer field with synthetic turf. The other side will contain four separate baseball fields made of natural grass. The fields will be fenced off with two entrances for better security. A construction date has yet to be scheduled.

Devoe Park

At Devoe Park, the first of two construction phases is under way. A brand new playground is currently under construction on the west side and reconstruction of the playground on the east side should be completed by June 2007. The second phase will consist of renovations to the Parks building, set to start in summer 2007.

Other Projects

Improvements to Aqueduct Walk and a recreational pathway around the Jerome Park Reservoir are slated for construction to begin in summer 2008.

Sizing Up Competition at the Armory

By Alex Kratz

The race to redevelop the Kingsbridge Armory is officially on.

Close to a hundred people showed up to an informational meeting put on by the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) on Thursday, Oct. 19 at the Armory. The morning meeting included an overview of the request for proposals (RFP), an extended tour through the Armory’s labyrinth of rooms and tunnels, and ended with a brief question-and-answer session.

In addition to a handful of big-name developers – each of whom brought a posse of staffers, architects, environmental experts and traffic engineers – there were a few smaller groups hoping to carve out some space for their operations.

Benyamin Bridges is looking for a permanent home for his nomadic School for Entrepreneurial Skills. Dr. Fernando Cabrera, the senior pastor of the New Life Outreach International Church, located just north of the Armory, said he’s looking to place some of his programs in the massive building.

“Everyone’s looking,” explained a smartly dressed woman, who works for a developer but declined to say which one.

On the tour, men and women, some in sharp Italian suits with tennis shoes, others in jeans and boots, took pictures with digital cameras, marveled at the sheer amount of space and raved about the elaborate hallways and staircases.

Dean Vanderwarker of the Related Companies, which is redeveloping the Bronx Terminal Market, another EDC project, said he was “very serious” about competing for the Armory project.

“This is a unique building,” Vanderwarker said while checking out one of the Armory’s underground shooting ranges. “It’s something entirely different than what we typically do.”

Vanderwarker said he wasn’t really surprised by anything in the RFP. “The city always asks for a lot in an RFP and this was no different,” he said.

Evan Blem, who works for an historic preservation company called Demolition Depot, says he would love to take over the project, but doesn’t see it happening.

“I don’t wear a suit like most of these guys,” Blem said, dressed in khakis and a loose-fitting yellow shirt. “But I can connect to the community better than they can.”

Though he was attending the meeting, Blem was very pessimistic about the RFP selection process, saying the EDC had probably already chosen a developer and was just going through the motions because the agency has to make it look good.

Janel Patterson, the EDC spokesperson, adamantly denied that the EDC has already chosen a developer.

“We’re very committed to the RFP process,” Patterson said. “We put a lot of effort into crafting the RFP with input from the community and look forward to a competitive process.”

(Would-be developers must submit their proposals to the EDC by Dec. 14.)

While climbing up some stairs into a darkened room, another woman, who also wouldn’t give her name, talked about how the competition for the Armory project would be intense given the limited space for development opportunities in the Bronx. “The Bronx is hot,” she said.

During the question-and-answer period, there was mostly silence. Someone from the Atlantic Group, which presented an Armory vision to the community in May in an attempt to avoid an RFP, asked if the two schools (which will replace the Armory annex buildings) could be constructed somewhere besides the Armory’s northern side. The short answer was “no,” but the long answer was that the EDC would defer to the School Construction Authority for all school building-related questions.

That was about the extent of the excitement for the day, which ended with the various factions breaking away to discuss strategy and timetables.

Outside the Armory, Peter Fine of the Atlantic Group, and his cohorts, were approached by a reporter who asked him what he thought about the RFP and the selection process. “I’m more interested in what you think,” Fine said.

One of his staffers, Michael Grasso, seemed to think the whole RFP process would be a long, drawn out affair.

“By the time this thing gets done, you’ll be a senior writer for the New York Times,” he told the community reporter as he climbed into the back seat of a black SUV.

Norwood Native’s Second Act

By Alex Kratz

Five years ago, at the age of 45, Norwood native Valerie Killigrew made the risky decision to dramatically change the course of her life. She became a writer.

And now, after a half decade of plugging away at her chosen craft, countless hours agonizing over every word in every sentence and suffering at least a hundred rejection letters, Killigrew is finally seeing the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

Starting on Nov. 2, two of her one-act plays, “Interview” and “Behind the Invisible Enemy” will be performed at the 13th Street Repertory Company, a nonprofit with that is “part of the heart of off-Broadway,” says Sandra Nordgren, the company’s general manager and literary director.

Killigrew is billing her plays as “two plays as absurd as the world that inspired them.” The first half of the doubleheader, “Interview,” is about Ilias Tride, the richest man in the world, who is forced to come to grips with his unethical lifestyle and addiction to unhappiness through an encounter with a prospective protégé. “Behind the Enemy Lines” is about a totalitarian dystopia where everyone’s thoughts are controlled by one man named They. Fortunately, a handful of free-thinkers, “retro-revolutionaries,” exist. Their belief in the past is the only hope for the future.

“This is my first big break,” Killigrew said during an interview at her pristine apartment overlooking Williamsbridge Oval Park.

Nordgren, who has been pushing to get Killigrew’s plays produced for the last three years, says she was “blown away” during a reading of the “Interview” script in 2003.

“I found her work really clever,” Nordgren says. “It really made me question what’s going on the world. I was really surprised that she was such a new playwright.”

Rock and Roll

For the majority of her adult life, Killigrew worked in the music industry for big-time recording labels like Capital, Arista and Polygram.

All week long, Killigrew would listen to demo tapes, looking to discover the next big thing. At night, she worked the big rock clubs, rubbing elbows with wild-haired stars. The walls of her apartment are lined with records, CDs and music videos.

But the industry proved fickle and she was constantly moving from company to company, boss to boss. “That’s how the music business happened, sometimes we were going in, sometimes we were going out,” she said.

Finally, she went out for the last time five years ago when she was fired at a job working at Arista for rock ’n’ roll hall-of-famer Clive Davis.

The night she was fired, she made the fateful decision — Killigrew believes it was her destiny — to dedicate herself to writing.

A Bronx Education

Killigrew has always written. As a child, teachers admonished her for writing stories when she should have been listening to a lesson. At the age of 12, Killigrew, who says she’s “always written about insanity,” wrote a story about incest before she even knew what the word meant.

Following a classic Catholic school education, first at St. Brendan’s in Norwood and then at the all-girls Academy of Mt. St. Ursula in Bedford Park, Killigrew did not attend college or directly pursue her interest in writing. She did what she was supposed to do. She got a job.

Though she worked in the frantic world of downtown Manhattan, Killigrew returned each day to the northwest Bronx, where the pace slowed and the volume decreased.

She maintained employment and married a Bronx boy. But stories and ideas were constantly popping into her head – on the subway, in the supermarket – and she continued to write during her spare time, dabbling in fairy tales, short fiction and “the most awful poetry in the whole world.”

Heartache and Happiness

Now, Killigrew is single, unemployed and writes every day from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. She’s a morning person, she says. Sometimes she keeps writing all day until her brain eventually fizzles out.

Though she says she’s never been happier, life is harder these days. The theatre is giving her exposure, but not a check. She’s living off credit cards and the charity of friends and family. “These creditors keep ringing on the phone,” she says, exasperated.

She’s sacrificed a lot, Killigrew says, choking back tears. In addition to financial security, Killigrew says she’s lost friends over her decision to become a writer. And some in her family are just now starting to believe that Killigrew isn’t just “twiddling her thumbs” at home all day.

“All the worrying, all the heartache, it’s all worth it because I believe in what I’m doing,” Killigrew says.

To get away from it all, Killigrew often takes long walks through Woodlawn Cemetery, just blocks from her apartment, and thinks about death and how peaceful it must be. “I love death,” she says. “Life is so hard. I imagine I’d just be hanging out with God – and John Lennon.” (Kiligrew is a huge Lennon fan.)

Whenever Killigrew receives another rejection letter or another call from a creditor, she tries to brush it aside and focus on her work, often invoking her favorite Sylvia Plath line. “The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt,” she tells herself and starts working on her next perfect sentence.

Her ex-husband, Brian Killigrew (the two are neighbors and still close friends), says her carefully wrought sentences come alive when spoken on stage. He saw the same reading in 2003 that Nordgren raved about and he was equally blown away.

“There’s a lot of ideas packed between those words,” says Brian, a photographer and artist in his own right. “It’s great to see anyone creative get some recognition, a lot of artists have work that’s in their closets.”

Killigrew is so busy working on the production of “Interview” and “Behind the Invisible Enemy” that she hasn’t had time for much new writing, but she always has several projects going at once. She’s working on a couple of children’s books, a screenplay and a book of wisdom-packed one-liners (“wisdom never goes out of style,” she says) that were cut from stories, but too good to abandon. She likes writing plays because “I’ve always been good at dialogue,” she says.

Making a living as a playwright in New York City is extremely difficult, Nordgren says. She’s “inundated” with scripts every day. It’s rare, she says, that she picks up page-turners like the two plays she’s received from Killigrew.

The most important thing for an aspiring playwright, Nordgren says, is to receive recognition. If this is true, Killigrew is on her way. “Interview” won third place in the 2003 13th Street Repertory Company’s New Works of Merit Competition and “Behind the Invisible Enemy” won two awards last year, including a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Award for playwriting.

“I’ve always wanted to write so my work will last for a hundred years,” Killigrew says.

“I don’t think I’m there yet, but I’m on my way.”

Water Pressure

By Alex Kratz

In 2003, when the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was calculating the cost of building the controversial Croton Water Filtration Plant at Van Cortlandt Park, it vastly underestimated the project’s final price tag which now stands at more than $2 billion.

In the final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the plant, the DEP estimated the total construction cost for the project, which is slated for completion in 2011, would be $992 million. Now, according to contract data disseminated by the DEP at a recent public meeting, it appears the cost has doubled, which means a higher burden for taxpayers, renters and homeowners.

The cost of DEP capital projects is one of the key factors in determining water rates, which have been rising more than 9 percent a year for the past three years, according to Jim Buckley of the University Neighborhood Housing Program (UNHP).

Buckley is one of the few activists who attend the Water Board’s annual rate increase meeting every May because it affects rents and the UNHP is primarily concerned with affordable housing issues.

The Water Board determines its rate increases based on a recommendation by the DEP, which factors in several variables. The two most important factors in determining that recommendation, according to Buckley, are consumption (which is down) and the cost of capital projects like the filtration plant.

“As it is [before the Croton cost increase], the city has been saying for years that the rate increases are due to the capital costs,” Buckley said. “We’re very nervous about the impact on housing affordability.”

“It concerns me,” said Greg Faulkner, chair of the Croton Filtration Monitoring Committee, a group of community leaders that serves as the project’s official watchdog. “If it is what it appears to be, then it’s not good and this is something that needs to be explained.”

Faulkner and the Monitoring Committee have been pressuring the DEP to find more jobs for local residents – something the community was promised during the siting of the plant in 2003. The DEP, the city agency in charge of water quality, also promised that the Van Cortlandt Park site would be the cheapest and most fiscally responsible place to build.

While it’s unclear whether it would have been cheaper to build the plant at another location, such as the industrial Eastview site in Westchester, it’s apparent that building the plant in the northwest Bronx is costing the city much more than the DEP originally thought.

Exactly how much more, however, is also unclear.

The DEP admits that the cost of the Croton project, estimated at $992 million in 2003, is now up to $1.46 billion. But that doesn’t include the money spent on the site preparation work, design work, construction management or the $243 million the DEP is earmarking for Bronx parks projects. According to calculations by the Norwood News, based on numbers given out by Bernard Daly, the Croton project manager, at the last public monitoring meeting, those omissions bring the cost of the project to more than $2 billion dollars.

Despite repeated requests for harder numbers from the DEP – including an itemized list of how the agency tabulated its 2003 estimate and a new list of contracts handed out by the DEP over the past two years – the city agency would not provide them.

Steve Lawitts, the DEP’s second deputy commissioner in charge of capital projects, did however answer some questions in a phone interview.

Lawitts said that there were three reasons why the cost has risen since the original EIS estimate.

The first, Lawitts said, is that the original estimate was a “conceptual estimate” that called for the building of a “generic” filtration plant. The conceptual estimate didn’t take into account many of the site specific elements that engineers, upon further inspection, deemed necessary. This may have been why the estimate didn’t include site preparation, which was basically the digging of a giant $127 million hole that the plant would be built inside of.

“It’s the nature of building a very large technological site that you are going to see changes from the original design elements,” Lawitts said.

Another reason, Lawitts continued, was that in 2003, when the EIS was written, the DEP estimated that construction costs – including steel, concrete, electric, labor, etc. – would rise at less than 3 percent per year. Mostly due to a housing boom, however, that number jumped to 8 percent a year, which is the number contractors are now using to bid on the Croton construction projects.

Lawitts said there was no way for the DEP to anticipate that kind of drastic rise in construction costs.

Finally, Lawitts said because of the design changes after the original EIS, the DEP had to adjust its timeline. Instead of the job taking four years, it is now taking five years, which means the DEP is now paying for an extra year of labor and materials.

Meanwhile, the bottom line continues to rise. And while reluctant to say how significantly, Lawitts admitted that the rising cost of the project “could” affect water rates in the coming years.

Chris Jones, of the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, said that the general “rule of thumb” is that large public projects end up costing more than they’re estimated at. But how much more? “It all depends on how they did their original calculations,” Jones said.

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