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New ‘Friends’ Leader Stakes Out Vision for VC Park

By Kathryn Molinaro

Since joining the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park in 2000, Christina Taylor has seen a lot of changes. Involvement in the Friends’ environmental internships has increased, areas of the park are being reforested and, of course, in 2004, the city chose Van Cortlandt Park as the site for a controversial new water filtration plant.

Now, as the new executive director of the non-profit organization, Taylor is ready to preside over more changes to improve the park, the city’s third largest, and those who use it.

“I have a vision for the Friends,” Taylor said.

Taylor, 30, previously served as the education coordinator for the Friends. She became interim executive director in November, when Paul Sawyer stepped down from the position, and she became the official director at the Friends’ March 8 meeting.

A Rochester native, Taylor is most excited about the Croton extension trail. The Friends have re-created the path, which runs along the Croton Aqueduct from the corner of West Gun Hill Road and Mosholu Parkway to the Allen Shandler Recreation Area within the southeastern section of the park. The Friends are also working on improving the condition of the trees and plants in that part of the park, which experts called the unhealthiest part of the Van Cortlandt Park forest.

“I’m really dedicated to changing that,” Taylor said of the forest’s diagnosis. “This project is very dear to me.”

Her vision also includes securing capital money to make restoring trails and plant life easier. In the past, interns and volunteers have worked on improvements, but Taylor wants professional help for some of the bigger tasks of reforestation.

Taylor, the only full-time staffer of the Friends, also wants to hire a new education coordinator and a development person to focus on fund-raising, a constant challenge for the group.

“I know if I want to raise capital funding it will take up a huge chunk of my time,” Taylor said.

She is looking forward to the opening of the Sachkerah Woods playground at the corner of West Gun Hill Road and Jerome Avenue, especially because so many children live near that part of the park, even though it came as the result of a political deal brokered to site the filtration plant, a project the Friends fought in court.

“I’m just excited there’s going to be a new space for them,” Taylor said.

A graduate of SUNY School of Environmental Science and Forestry, Taylor originally wanted to be a field biologist. She had several jobs after college before coming to the Friends, a position she heard about from a co-worker when she was an urban forest ranger.

“I knew I would always work outdoors,” Taylor said.

But many outdoor jobs are temporary and require a lot of moving, which makes her new stable gig that much more appealing.

“I like being settled and having a home,” Taylor said.

In that home in Dobbs Ferry, Taylor lives with her husband of one and a half years, Stan, their cat Molly, and a turtle named Murph.

Stan works for the Department of Environmental Protection, the organization the Friends sued in 2004 in an effort to keep the water filtration plant out of the park. But Taylor said there was no tension in the relationship during that period because Stan works out of White Plains.

“He’s not at the level that makes decisions about that,” she said.

As Taylor and the Friends prepare for a busy spring full of programs and fund-raising, Taylor has a spot chosen in the park where she can get away from it all. With the exception of a few golf carts, Taylor likes the seclusion and quiet of the bridge on the John Kieran Nature Trail.

“You actually forget that you’re in the city,” she said.

Ed. note: For more information on the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, or to volunteer, call (718) 601-1460 or visit www.vancortlandt.org

Veteran Coach Sees Life Lessons on Softball Diamond

By Cassandra Lizaire

Lifelong baseball fan and girls little league softball coach, John O’Neil can honestly say that his favorite team is the Mets – as in the group of 16 young ladies he trains every spring. No offense to the New York Mets, but the choice between the hardened major league team and his budding talents is a virtual no-brainer.

When you’ve spent as many weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings calling plays and building team spirit as Coach O’Neil, there is no question where your loyalties lie. A head coach in Mosholu Montefiore Community Center’s (MMCC) girls’ softball division, O’Neil, 62, has happily reported for duty for the past 15 years.

“I prefer to coach the girls softball division,” admits O’Neil, who first trained his son’s baseball team before making the gender switch 14 years ago at his daughter’s insistence. He’s been a softball mainstay ever since.

With his adult children long-since graduated from the MMCC league, O’Neil stays on, driven by his passion for baseball and a genuine commitment to girls’ softball.

“Sometimes [girls] don’t start playing as early as the boys do, but they catch up,” says O’Neil, who takes pride in the softball prodigies he has coached over the years – many of whom go on to play for junior high and high school teams.

A recycling office employee in the city’s Department of Sanitation, O’Neil lives in the northwest Bronx’s Amalgamated Houses with his wife of 34 years, Janitzia.

Though he could not think of one downside to coaching, at times, the coach said, it was difficult to practice after work. He looks forward to retirement next year when he will have more time for baseball.

“I think this is a great way to get people to become fans of baseball, especially those who have never played before,” says O’Neil, who values MMCC’s emphasis on team participation over cutthroat competition.

In this baseball league, unlike other more competitive ones like the national Little League program, “everybody has to play and everybody has to bat,” the coach says. This nurturing and supportive environment makes O’Neil’s role in teaching players the fundamentals even more satisfying.

Typically the three girls’ softball teams – the Mets, the Yankees, and the A’s (short for the Athletics) – have afternoon practices at least once a week for two hours. Over the ten-game, two playoff season, girls between the ages of 9 and 15 learn to work and play together as a team.

Beyond field technique, O’Neil teaches a culture of respect, good sportsmanship and self-assuredness.

“If they have confidence in baseball, which they’ve never played before, then they’ll have confidence in their school and home lives,” O’Neil says.

On Saturday, April 7, he marched with the Mets at the head of MMCC’s annual baseball league parade down Jerome Avenue to Harris Field. O’Neil said he enjoyed the day, taking in the festivities and excitement of young players in pristine uniforms yet unsoiled by dust and slides into home plate.

“He’s a good coach and runs the Mets perfectly,” said Maritza Martinez during the parade. Her daughter, Sepulveda, 11, will be starting her third season on the Mets.

The fanfare also heightened the Mets’ morale going into their first game this season after winning the championship a year ago. They defeated the A’s, 10-5, at Shandler field last weekend.

For Coach O’Neil, baseball has been one of life’s constants, and a great vehicle for youth development. Plus, he says, to aspiring coaches out there, “It’s just a lot of fun. If you’re a baseball fan, you can give it a try.”

David Greene contributed to this article.
Ed. note: MMCC Coach John O’Neil encourages more families to consider enrolling more students for the next season’s girls softball teams. For more information, call Chris Pinto at (718) 882-4000.

German View of the Bronx

By Alex Kratz

Thanks to YouTube, the Bronx and the world were made aware this weekend of a German military training exercise where soldiers were told to imagine African-Americans in the Bronx exiting a van before firing off their machine guns.

But anyone who has a Google News Alert set for Bronx will learn relatively quickly that our borough is frequently used for target practice by clueless people trying to make a point in violent contexts. In fact, the Norwood News ran an editorial about exactly this last July. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Michael Hart, the Liberal Party candidate for state parliament in Burleigh, Australia, “has rejected suggestions that Burleigh is becoming the ‘Bronx’ of the city,” according to a local paper there.

“We are certainly having some trouble with out-of-control youth gatherings, but I don’t think we have reached that stage yet,” he told the paper…

A year ago, a Swiss paper ran an article about training sessions for people concerned about rising crime in Swiss cities. The headline was, “Safety lessons in a virtual Bronx.”

By the way, we posted an entry about this on our blog — westbronxnews.blogspot.com — and it has sparked an interesting exchange. Said one reader: “The image of the Bronx in non-US countries is indeed one of decay, lawlessness, violence, and…gangs. And you know why? Because it was portrayed exactly like this by American pop culture for decades. And since ordinary Europeans derive alot of their ‘knowledge’ about America from American TV series, movies, etc., which are flooding European households, this picture is ingrained into the population. So, if you want to assign blame, start at home and chide Hollywood for the horrible PR job it is giving the Bronx.”

And in response: “I’m from Germany living in New Jersey for a couple of years and even though I spend almost every weekend in New York City, I never went to the Bronx. I don’t know this area and I’m too afraid ending up in a dangerous situation. That might sound funny to some people, but as Tobias [prior writer] said, that’s the image the media made out of it.”

Feel free to add to the conversation. Just go to this particular blog entry (it was posted on April 15) and click on the comment button at the end.

What Political Clubs Mean

Next year, if there’s any particular political or community issue that’s been nagging at you and you want to buttonhole some of the city’s most powerful Democratic officials all in one place, you might consider plunking down $75 to attend the annual dinner of the Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club.

If you went last week, you wouldn’t have even entered the ground floor ballroom before you tripped over State Senators Jeffrey Klein, Eric Schneiderman and Efrain Gonzalez, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, and Councilmembers Eric Gioia and Oliver Koppell, all in full handshaking mode. Inside the ballroom were over 200 more local movers and shakers.

It’s the kind of local political show of force that Norwood’s Decatur Democratic Club probably last exhibited in the 1980s.

It may seem like inside baseball to many, but this type of healthy political activity means a lot to a community. Citywide candidates campaign in Riverdale, where they seek the club’s endorsement and make promises on issues important to them. Active community residents see their officials on a regular basis. The more of them that are involved, the more the officials feel like they need to produce.

Norwood is still part of the Ben Franklin Club’s constituency (it considers its boundaries the 81st Assembly District). Maybe the Ben Franklin Club might consider expanding its membership meeting by having a few meetings in Norwood, or maybe even its annual dinner! Certainly, other leaders would become aware of the club and maybe even participate at a greater level.

The same goes for the rival North Bronx Democratic Alliance, which launched as an alternative to Ben Franklin. When it started, NBDA talked about reaching out to less politically involved parts of the district. We’re still waiting.

Planning a River’s Renaissance

By James Fergusson

For decades, community leaders and environmentalists have dreamed of cleaning up the Harlem River, and renovating its underutilized eastern shoreline. It’s quite a dream.

The eight-mile waterway is polluted; its shoreline, on which factories and power plants once stood, is presumed to be one large brownfield (land whose redevelopment is complicated by environmental hazards).

But in recent years there have been pockets of progress along the water’s edge. River Plaza Shopping Center, with its Target and Starbucks, opened on a former industrial site in Marble Hill in 2004. In Morris Heights, Roberto Clemente State Park is on the cusp of a $20 million rehab.

And then there’s the work being done by the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality (BCEQ), and partners, who are looking at the possibility of renovating 162 acres of brownfield land between the river and the Major Deegan Expressway.

Earlier this year, BCEQ submitted a lengthy description of the area to their backers – the State’s Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) Program. Now, the BOA Program says they’ll fund a further study which will investigate the exact condition of the land and the feasibility of reclaiming it for public and private use.

Ultimately, the BOA Program aims to provide expertise, help attract investors, and build community consensus over what to, and how to develop, particular sites.

Hilary Kitasei, the Harlem River BOA’s project manager, says they’ve “yet to receive a dime” from the BOA Program. Still, the project is slowly moving forward, she says, as they build on “three generations worth of planning.”

BCEQ, with input from the community and various community groups, would like to see waterfront parks and an accessible shoreline so local residents and tourists can enjoy boating, fishing, and even swimming. This fits in nicely with the Parks Department’s hopes for a Harlem River Greenway, a continuous sliver of green along the river’s edge. “Our hope is this [BCEQ’s studies] helps them carry out the Greenway plan,” said Kitasei.

To some extent, these visions have been taken from the past. For in the late 19th century, the Harlem River was a hive of activity, a waterway teeming with yachts and sculls.

The river would have been thick with life – bass, oysters, and clams. In the 1890s, a man by the name of John Burns ran “Cedar Jack’s Last Stand Clam Bar,” on a site close to Yankee Stadium, according to Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian. It sounds like City Island. (“Try and find a fish now!” said Ultan.)

Meanwhile, beautiful parks lined the shorelines and cliff tops on both sides of the river. Tourists and local residents alike would stroll across the pedestrian only High Bridge, the city oldest bridge, to take in the magnificent views.

When industry arrived, and the borough’s population swelled, this picture postcard scenery began to fade. Access to the waterfront from upland neighborhoods was becoming more difficult, too. Already, local residents had to negotiate steep cliffs and the railroad (today run by Metro North). From 1956 onwards, they faced another barrier in the newly built Deegan.

The cliffs, highway, and rail companies, continue to present problems. So does landownership: over 50 percent of the total acreage is owned by the rail companies. How willing these railroads are to give up their yards and maintenance facilities, could affect what redevelopment is possible. Moreover, said Kitasei, waterfront access is all well and good, but if the water’s filthy, no one will go near, let alone take a dip.

Stopping sewage from entering the waterway is thus vital. (The city’s sewer system is old and inadequate and overflows with every heavy storm, pouring some 27 billion gallons a year of mixed sewage and storm water into city waterways. Organizations such as S.W.I.M (Storm Water Infrastructure Matters), hope to change this by capturing rain water on rooftops and sidewalk gardens.)

Overall, Kitasei remains hopeful. “You can’t look at this river and not be moved by its potential,” she said.

Hearing Airs Details of Borough’s Digital Divide

By Alex Kratz

Affordable, and sometimes free, high-speed Internet access is coming to the Bronx – one restaurant, building and neighborhood at a time.

The virtual reality is that there’s a digital divide between those who have high-speed Internet access and those who don’t. That gap is widest in working-class, low-income communities like much of the Bronx.

“Go down to St. Ann’s Avenue and you might as well be in Mogadishu,” said John McMullen, a technology professor at Monroe College, “but up in Riverdale, it’s terrific. The wealthy neighborhoods find ways.”

In 2006, only 21 percent of households with an annual income of $30,000 or less had a broadband, or high-speed, Internet connection at home, according to a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. At the same time, 68 percent of households earning more than $75,000 had broadband.

Starting with a hearing at Bronx Community College on March 30, the city jump-started a public discussion on how to bridge the divide.

Interest in the subject is strong, judging by the hundreds of attendees and hours of testimony at the hearing, which was the first of five (one in each borough) that the City Council’s Broadband Advisory Committee will host.

Already a handful of groups are working to bring affordable (or free) Internet access to some neighborhoods, but the committee is looking to create a comprehensive plan that will benefit all New Yorkers from every economic strata.

“We’re dovetailing with the mayor and the EDC (Economic Development Corporation) to find out what people really want,” said Council Member Gale Brewer, the Upper West Sider who heads the Council’s Technology Committee and created the advisory committee two years ago.

After all the hearings, an EDC-hired consultant will advise the mayor on how the city should move forward.

Students and seniors

From the testimony, Brewer said it became apparent that both students and seniors, particularly those who are low income, are underserved.

“The Internet can be a veritable lifeline for homebound elderly,” said Tom Kamber of Older Adults Technology Services, at the hearing. “Not only can seniors access invaluable health and medical information, but they can communicate with family members and friends.”

For students, consistent Internet access is increasingly about being competitive academically.

While some students have high-speed access at home, most are at the mercy of school and public library computers, where access is free, but limited. Even among public schools, there are glaring disparities between schools. Some kids said they accessed the Internet three hours a day, while others said they were lucky to be on-line, three hours a week.

Andrew Gallagher, a teacher at The Bronx Writing Academy, a school where 80 percent of the students are eligible for free and reduced lunch, testified that his school has enjoyed success trying to integrate technology tools into most subject areas, but inconsistent Internet connectivity is impeding that effort.

“Why should these kids be less educated and effectively relegated to second class citizens?” said Dana Spiegel, the executive director of New York City Wireless, a non-profit that has helped set up dozens of wireless “hotspots” throughout the city, including at parks and apartment buildings.

Spiegel’s group has teamed up with Monroe, through McMullen’s Wireless Technology class, to set up access in public places, including a Subway restaurant on Fordham Road, The City Line Diner in Woodlawn and three city parks.

Progress in Mt. Hope

There are other encouraging signs of Internet life in the Bronx. Shaun Belle is the president and CEO of Mt. Hope Housing Company, which has wired 1,200 of its affordable housing units for high-speed access. The group partnered with Verizon to do the installation and negotiated a deal allowing them to offer broadband access to all of its residents for $12 a month, a fraction of the normal cost.

Belle’s company also partnered with Per Scholas, a Bronx non-profit offering low-cost technology to underserved communities, to provide Mt. Hope with 200 used computers. Also, the housing company provides its tenants with free computer training so they can maximize their usage.

“The key is not just to provide the skeleton of the hardware and the Internet, but to train families on how to use it to their advantage,” Belle said.

As a member of the Broadband Advisory Committee, Belle recently took a tour of Japan, China and Taiwan to get a sense of how those countries are setting up Internet access.

Belle found that Asia is far ahead of the United States in terms of providing access, but how they are accomplishing it is not much different than how he does it in the Bronx: by cutting deals with private providers. The difference is Asian governments are taking a more active role by negotiating with providers on a larger scale – one city at a time.

Unlike Mayor Bloomberg’s business-first approach to the Internet, Belle says the city should start with underserved communities, where a lot of bright young minds and talent is being wasted.

Groups like Belle’s are at the forefront, but they can’t cover the map on their own. “The government has to step up to the plate,” he says.

The ‘wave of the future’

Still, no one knows exactly how the city should solve the digital divide, hence the hearings. Other U.S. cities are trying different combinations of public and private efforts, but no one has a magic potion, Spiegel said.

For now, Spiegel said, it’s up to smaller groups to wire the city, one public space at a time.

Roberto Garcia, the director of the Jerome-Gun Hill Business Improvement District (BID), is working with both Spiegel and Monroe to bring wireless technology to Norwood.

“It’s the wave of the future,” Garcia said. Ultimately, Garcia wants all the stores and apartment buildings in his BID to have high-speed wireless Internet access, as well as Williamsbridge Oval Park, the neighborhood’s recreational hub.

“This will help bridge the digital divide,” Garcia said. “The kids are already getting into it at school, but they can’t do anything once they get home if their parents don’t have access. This will allow families to be more informed and make better decisions.”

The biggest problem is the monthly fee, which can run up to $60 a month.

“The monthly cost could be the difference between a MetroCard for work or a pair of sneakers for your kids,” said Garcia, who also works for Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a partner in the BID’s efforts.

In the future, Garcia imagines local residents shopping digitally and parents looking on-line for better jobs while watching their kids play soccer in the park.

He’s starting by installing wireless technology from Verizon at the VIP Café, one of the most successful restaurants in the BID and a popular haunt for Montefiore Medical Center staffers.

There’s a lot at stake in all these local efforts, and for the city’s as-yet-undetermined role.

“In order for us to be competitive with rest of the world, we need to be connected,” Belle says.

Muslim Community Wants Schools to Recognize Holidays

By James Fergusson

On Christmas Day, public schools across the city shut down. They close on several Jewish holidays, too. But Muslim holidays aren’t recognized in the same way by New York City’s Department of Education (DOE), leaving some parents with a dilemma: keep the kids at home so the family can celebrate together, or whisk them off to school so they don’t miss their classes.

The issue came to a head in January 2006 when a statewide test was scheduled on Eid-Ul-Adha, one of the holiest days in the Muslim calendar. Many Muslims were furious, and on the coattails of this uproar, a new law was passed to prevent mandatory state testing from occurring on all future religious holidays.

Now, the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays, an amalgamation of 50-plus mosques and community groups, is trying to take things a step further by asking the DOE to close schools on both Eid-Ul-Adha (which celebrates the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca) and Eid-Ul-Fitr (the day that marks the end of the Ramadan, the holy month of fasting).

“As a parent I would like my children to have the same rights as children from other religions,” said Bakary Camara, of the Bronx-based Gambian Society, one of the organizations behind the Coalition.

While students of any faith are able to take days off on their religious holidays (providing the school receives a prior letter from a parent), Camara is worried that those absent on the “Eids” are falling behind their peers and blemishing their attendance records. A poor attendance, says Camara, can hurt a student’s chances of getting a “scholarship to a better performing school.”

The Coalition’s campaign is gathering steam. In mid-March, they published a report titled “Acceptance, Not Exclusion: A Case for Muslim Holidays in New York City Public Schools.” Then, on March 31, they held a forum in the south Bronx to educate the community and drum up support. Organizers say 400 people showed up.

So far, the DOE isn’t playing ball. “We’re very respectful of different populations [and] religions,” said Dina Paul, a spokesperson. “But we haven’t added any new holidays to the calendar in half a century… and we won’t be adding any now.”

The matter could soon be out of the DOE’s hands. John Sabini, a Queens state senator, and Assemblyman Ruben Diaz, Jr. (D-Bronx) have recently introduced bills in the Senate and Assembly respectively, which, if passed, would smother the city’s opposition, and force schools to close on both days, as they already do in several New Jersey cities.

“I’m optimistic [this will become law],” Diaz said. “It’s about time we recognized this growing population.”

And growing it is. Just look at the number of mosques. Before 1970, there were fewer than 10 citywide, according to a 2001 study by the Muslim Communities in New York City Project. Today, says Camara, there are close to 30 in the Bronx alone. (In the west Bronx, they’re particularly prevalent in Mount Hope, Morris Heights and Highbridge, neighborhoods with blossoming Ghanaian, Gambian, and Malian communities.)

Exactly how many Muslims call the city home, however, isn’t known – details of religious affiliation aren’t collected in the Census. But the Coalition says there are 100,000 Muslim students in the public school system (that’s 12 percent of the student body) and they’re working on collecting the signatures of 100,000 supporters in recognition of this figure.

Assemblyman Michael Benjamin (D-Bronx) is supporting Diaz’s bill. Making the “Eids” official school holidays would create “mutual respect,” said Benjamin, because non-Muslim students would be curious to learn why there was no school on a certain day.

Sadiq Abdul Malik, who worships at the Masjid-Hefaz mosque in Bedford Park, agrees. “It would help build bridges of understanding,” he said. “Ignorance makes us come to the wrong conclusions about people.”

“[Incorporating these holidays] would go a long way to show Muslims that we believe they’re also a part of our big New York family,” Diaz added. “It’s a small step, but I think it’s a significant one.”

No Takers

By Alex Kratz

Major construction on the controversial water filtration plant being built in Van Cortlandt Park, already two months behind schedule, ran into another major obstacle when the contractor for the project withdrew its $1.127 billion bid.

This means the $2 billion Croton Water Filtration Plant will definitely cost another $200 million, and maybe more, depending on how much longer this new twist delays the project.

The original contractor, a consortium of three large contracting firms, Pirini, Tutor-Siliba and O & G, dropped its bid last week, saying it couldn’t build the plant at the price it initially offered, which was the lowest of two bids.

In turn, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) offered the job to another consortium trio, Slattery-Skanska, Gottlieb-Skanska and Tully, which originally bid $1.3277 billion for the filtration plant project.

The second consortium is now deciding whether it can build the plant at the cost it initially bid for it, said DEP spokesman Ian Michaels. He added that the DEP has not set a deadline for the consortium to make a decision.

If the consortium decides it can’t build the plant for $1.3277 billion, then the DEP will be forced to re-open the bidding process, Michaels said. Since the process has already been done once, he said, the agency should be able to “expedite” the process this time around.

In general, Michaels said, construction prices have been on the rise for the past couple of years, which means that if the project is re-bid, the cost of the project will most likely go up.

In 2003, the DEP estimated the total cost of the plant would be $992 million. Then, last November, the Norwood News reported, and the DEP acknowledged, that the cost of the project had doubled to around $2 billion due to skyrocketing construction costs and design modifications, which caused the completion date to be moved back another year, to 2011. The $1.3277 billion bid for major construction doesn’t include the cost of site preparation, design work, construction management or the $243 million that the DEP is earmarking for Bronx park projects (to offset the loss of park space in Van Cortlandt).

Now, the 2011 completion date appears in jeopardy, though Michaels said the DEP doesn’t anticipate moving the date back any further.

“What it obviously means is more delays and more money,” said Anne Marie Garti, a local activist who has watched in dismay as the plant’s pricetag continues to rise. “There’s just a huge number of questions. Nobody seems to be looking at [the practical elements of the project], they just seem to be stumbling along. Who’s idea was it to build this filtration plant in a giant rock hole anyway?”

Water Rate Hearing

One of the unfortunate by-products of the rise in the DEP’s capital costs, such as the building of the Croton Water Filtration Plant, is its affect on city water rates, which is significant. This year, the New York City Water Board is considering a proposal to raise rates for water by 11.5 percent starting on July 1, 2007. The increase is the largest increase in 15 years and follows an increase of 9.4 percent last year. The Board is projecting annual increases of more than 11 percent for each of the next three years. The rate hike will directly affect homeowners and building owners, and will likely affect renters as well, as increases in operating costs get passed down to tenants in the form of larger annual rent hikes approved by the Rent Guidelines Board. Over the next few weeks, the Water Board will hold public hearings in each of the boroughs to decide whether to approve the proposed rate hike. The Bronx hearing will be on Wednesday, April 25 at 9:30 a.m. at Lehman College (Carmen Hall, b-34). Call Kevin Kunkle at (718) 595-3601 to register for the hearing.

An Irish Recipe Binds Diverse Congregation

By Annie Shreffler

Reverend Francis P. Scanlon, the relatively new pastor of the Shrine Church of St. Ann on Bainbridge Avenue, surprised his congregation recently by announcing the church’s very first Irish soda bread baking contest.

Almost 90 percent of St. Ann’s congregation is of Hispanic descent and most had never even heard of the staple Irish bread leavened with baking soda. The competition began Sunday afternoon, March 11. The three judges – Father Scanlon, William Curran of McKeon Funeral Home, and parishioner Myra Smith – are Irish.

“I’m going to go back to my neighborhood and ask for a rice and beans contest and see how they do,” he said. Smith said three or four entries were authentic, but all were delicious. First place winner for Best Taste, Devina Torro, of Santo Domingo, cooks a little of everything, but this was her first soda bread attempt.

Hector Martinez, of Filipino descent, church organist and music teacher, enjoys cooking and makes “a mean Calabasa soup,” but had also never made soda bread. He took away third place for Best Taste.

Ashley Caraballo, 12, an altar server and sixth grader in St. Ann’s school, didn’t know what soda bread was, but won first place for Most Unique. 

“I gave [the recipe] a twist. I added cinnamon,” she said, holding up her prize, a ceramic figurine of the Lady of Knock.

Sister Gladys organized the event and explained that it was part of a new effort at St. Ann’s to build community. Father Scanlon agreed.

“It’s a way to be together, eat together, celebrate together,” he said.

At the end of the contest, the priest’s voice boomed over the din of children’s voices as he thanked all the participants twice: in English and Spanish. He invited guests to come try the entries. And of course, butter was provided.

Ed. note: The winners of the contest in first to third place order in each category were Best Taste: Devina Torro, Phyllis Meegan and Hector Martinez; Best Appearance: Adele Campos, Sister Gladys and Maria Cabrera; Most Unique: Ashley Caraballo and Cecelia MacDonald.

Missing Florence Bock

By Alex Kratz

No one seemed to know Florence Bock very well.

But that doesn’t mean that no one cared about her.

Neighbors would bring her groceries. When the mail started piling up at her house on Perry Avenue in 2005, her mailman—whose route includes our offices — came to us and told us about it.

At least two other neighbors called the police.

So, the story here is not how a woman apparently died in her own home and lay there for two years without being noticed. Many did notice, were worried and took action.

The story is how, despite that concern and the involvement of several city agencies, that Ms. Bock could have been dead for two years in her own home without any of the authorities discovering her.

Ms. Bock’s pension checks were cut and mailed with regularity for two years after her presumed death and returned to the city by the Post Office. By several accounts, the police entered the home twice and came out having found nothing. The public administrator for Bronx County also sent an investigator to the house to no avail.

After our story in 2005, the Buildings Department sent out an inspector who saw nothing remarkable when everyone else in the neighborhood saw signs that something was wrong — a door ajar, broken windows, piled up mail. “No action necessary based upon physical observation,” was the report the inspector filed, according to the city’s on-line buildings database. 

Maybe Ms. Bock’s body was hidden by the papers and other refuse that many have reported was in the home. But couldn’t some city official have taken responsibility for removing some of it to do a more thorough search?

The mailman and the residents of Perry Avenue continued to wonder about the situation, but having exhausted every option open to them, what else could they do?

If there is any silver lining to this tragedy, it is that people who barely knew Florence Bock cared about her just because she was their neighbor.

But the multiple representatives of the city whose duties intersected with the mystery of 3280 Perry Ave. need to figure out what went wrong and how they can do a better job if, God forbid, something like this ever happens again.  

Irish Go, Spirit Stays
In the early 1990s there were 18 Irish bars on Bainbridge Avenue and East 204th Street.  There was also an Irish gift shop and bakery and newsstands that sold county newspapers like the Anglo Celt and the Connacht Tribune alongside the Post and the Daily News. There still are a few Irish pubs in Norwood and Bedford Park, and a few Irish papers scattered around, but the area’s days as an Irish stomping ground are clearly behind us. The commercial landscape is now populated by businesses representing a panoply of ethnicities – there’s an Albanian bakery and specialty food store, several Mexican restaurants, a Mexican record store and a Bangladeshi grocery store. Local houses of worship reflect the influences of new groups – the packed Spanish Masses at local Catholic churches, a new Mass for Filipino parishioners of St. Ann’s, mosques well attended by Bangladeshis.

Meanwhile, Irish culture thrives just to our north in Woodlawn and, as Alex Kratz reports in this issue, people still flock back to some of the remaining pubs to reunite with old friends and family on St. Patrick’s Day.

The story of Norwood and the waves of Irish-Americans who once made it home is the story of many of the city’s neighborhoods. People come from far away in search of opportunity and a better life, and then, often, they go, for a variety of reasons.

But, like a layered sedimentary stone, all those who have stayed for a while leave their mark on a community’s identity. The never-ending story of Norwood, Bedford Park and the rest of the northwest Bronx continues to be written.

Fordham Place Construction Begins at Sears Building

By Cassandra Lizaire

Beneath its dark netting and scaffold-covered exterior, the historic Sears building at 400 E. Fordham Rd. is undergoing drastic restructuring. The shopping center will re-emerge in the next 16 to 18 months as Fordham Place, the Bronx’s first mixed-use development in more than 15 years.

Last Thursday, real estate developers Acadia Realty Trust and P/A Associates joined with Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, Jr. and City Council Majority Leader Joel Rivera for the Fordham Place groundbreaking ceremony.

In the barren, cement-floored lobby, an array of black curtains concealed evidence of what P/A Associates co-founder Aaron Malinsky assured guests was “the middle of a construction demolition site.” Malinsky then introduced his partner and CEO of Acadia Realty, Kenneth F. Bernstein, who beamed, saying, “This has been several years of hard work and we’re very excited to get to this point.”

Since announcing renovation plans at the Bronx Chamber of Commerce’s business banquet last November, Fordham Place developers say they have set the bar for future Bronx investors by stimulating an influx of commerce and jobs. In appreciation of their progress and vision for Fordham Road, Chamber CEO Lenny Caro presented the developers with a ceremonial plaque and vowed to encourage local businesses to relocate to the new facility.

Lured by the modern architecture, high-tech amenities, and sprawling office spaces of the new 14-story building, tenants have already signed on for leases. The nearly 285,000- square-foot Fordham Road anchor will also afford tenants “design and cost-effective floor layouts with an unsurpassed location in terms of its incredible accessibility, high levels of foot traffic and excellent work force,” Bernstein said.

Potential occupants represent “the healthcare, non-profit and education sectors,” said Harry Blair, senior managing director of exclusive leasing agent GVA Williams. Rivera, a fervent project supporter, said he would have liked to move his office to the building were it not for its 2008 completion date. “To my successor: have fun in this building,” Rivera joked, alluding to term limits, which will force him from office in 2009.

Developers worked closely with local Bronx politicians, including Rivera and Carrión, as well as with the Fordham Road BID and the community board, Malinsky said. These partnerships have facilitated the “first brand new office building of a Class A standard to be built in the heart of the Bronx” with access to spectacular views from the intersection of Webster and Fordham Road,” the third largest retail corridor in New York City, he added.

In the past five years, the borough president said, the Bronx has seen upward trends in employment and private sector job creation. So, “Fordham Place makes sense as an investment… and allows for future development down 3rd Avenue,” he said.

The new mixed-use building will add 150,000 square feet to the old Sears building, with plans for three full stories of retail space and a full-floor health club. Once completed, Fordham Place will welcome back Sears in the basement level, and will include Walgreen’s and other national retail chains.

New Jerome Park Reservoir Path in Works

By Kathryn Molinaro

As a meeting scheduled for later this week about a new recreational path around the Jerome Park Reservoir approaches, the city and some community members are clearly not on the same track.

The reservoir, which is bordered by Goulden, Sedgwick and Reservoir avenues, is receiving $5 million worth of improvements. The money, earmarked for a path of some kind around the reservoir is part of the parcel of $200 million in park projects that Bronx politicians received in return for supporting the construction of the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park.

Residents, who have begun to mobilize on the issue, want decorative landscaping, benches and more lighting around the Jerome Park Reservoir. 

Those will likely end up being in the final plan, but other ideas are hitting choppier waters. Anne Marie Garti, president of the Jerome Park Conservancy and a leader of the successful fight in the 1990s to keep the filtration plant out of the reservoir, wants a jogging and walking path along the water’s edge.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), however, says that’s a non-starter.

Public access so close to a source of drinking water poses a security threat, the DEP says, and the path should be built outside of the 8-foot security fence that separates the reservoir area from the city sidewalk. There is a second fence that runs along the edge of the water.

“The recreational path belongs along the water and that’s what the community decided with lots of time and meetings,” Garti said.

She added that the DEP’s plan does not take into consideration the Lehman College parking lot on the east side of the reservoir or how, in some places, the grass outside of the security fence is only a few feet wide.

“Instead of gaining access to the reservoir, we’re being asked to give up our sidewalks,” Garti said.

"Residents, Garti says, are willing to make sacrifices in order to have a path close to the water. People could have access only during certain hours of the day, for example, and at only one entry point with passes given out by security guards and a no-bag policy.

“We’re bending over backwards,” Garti said. “We’ll let ourselves be searched even.”

Garti also thinks the city is breaking its promise to residents after Chris Ward, former DEP commissioner, told an audience at Bronx High School of Science in April 2004 that a track would be installed at the reservoir.

Ian Michaels, spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, has heard this accusation before.

“There’s no one here at the agency that knows anything about a promise to put the running track inside the fence,” Michaels said.

Sonya Lappin, a member of the Jerome Park Conservancy, said the DEP’s decision to keep the path outside of the park is a double standard.

“They’re not giving us the consideration that they would give Central Park people,” Lappin said.

But Michaels said that Central Park has not been used for drinking water since 1993 and therefore does not require the same level of security.

Garti points to upstate reservoir areas like the Kensico located 15 miles north of New York City, where area residents are allowed to boat and fish.

“We’re just trying to get what everybody else has,” Garti said. “People can get to those reservoirs with vehicles. We’re talking about people running around it or walking around it.”

Michaels said the upstate reservoirs were built on the condition that they would have recreation access. Officers protect upstate reservoirs and the water in all in-use reservoirs is tested daily.

“We’re concerned about security everywhere,” Michaels said.

The distance the water must travel from the upstate reservoirs to those who use the water is also a method of protection, as is the size of the reservoirs upstate. Jerome Park Reservoir holds less than 800 million gallons, whereas the Pepacton Reservoir in the Hudson Valley holds 140 billion gallons.

“Having more water is definitely a defense,” Michaels said.

He also added that the filtration plant, being built in Van Cortlandt Park, is not a guaranteed protection from all contaminants put into the Jerome Park Reservoir.

Lappin, who is on the board of directors at Scott Tower in Bedford Park, said she worries that the disagreement over the path will mean nothing gets done.

“If [the path] is the sole issue that keeps them from doing any work, let’s have some alternatives,” Lappin said. “I don’t want them to have an excuse to do nothing.”

According to Cristina Deluca, a Parks Department spokesperson, design work on the path, wherever it ends up, will begin in May and last until March 2008. Construction will begin in December 2008 and end a year later.

Ed. note: A Parks Department scoping meeting to discuss design ideas for the path around the reservoir is scheduled for this Friday, March 23 at 1 p.m. People will meet at the corner of Goulden Avenue and East 205th Street.

Remembering When the Irish Painted the Town Green

By Alex Kratz

In the 1980s, 204th Street and Bainbridge Avenue – two Norwood streets that form a slightly bent elbow of a commercial district – was a hotbed of New York City Irish culture known as either “Bainbridge” or “Little Belfast.”

During its apex, a thirsty resident or visitor could walk down that crooked corridor and pick and choose from any one of the 18 different Irish pubs (one from each Irish county, people used to joke).

Along with the saturation of watering holes, there was an immigration support office, a handful of Irish delis and a Celtic gift shop that sold county newspapers from back home.

While “Bainbridge” was the commercial district, Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans populated a majority of Bedford Park as well.

Richard Smith, a retired Irish-American banker who has lived in the area for 27 years with his wife Carmen, estimates that the neighborhood was “90 percent Irish.” He moved to Norwood from the Grand Concourse because of that fact. “I felt like I was back in the homeland,” he says.

Today, only remnants from that era remain. The Irish have been replaced by Mexicans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Albanians and Bangladeshis. A couple of newsstands and bodegas, mostly operated by men of Middle Eastern descent, carry some of the Irish weeklies. A sprinkling of gritty Irish pubs refuse to close their doors. And some of the old-timers, like Smith and his wife, still call the area home and eat breakfast at the McDonald’s on 204th Street.

Irish in America
The Irish have been living in the Bronx since colonial times, says Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian. The first Irish to migrate were mostly Protestants with means. “They could afford to make the swim across the Atlantic,” Ultan says.

Irish signed the Declaration of Independence and fought in the Revolutionary War. American war hero Richard Montgomery (who has several counties, towns and cities named after him) was an Irishman who lived in the Bronx.

It wasn’t until the Great Famine in Ireland that the native Irish, the Catholic Irish, began moving to the States in droves. Thomas Ihde, a professor at Lehman College’s Institute for Irish American Studies, says during that bleak period (about 1845-1849), a million Irish died and a million immigrated, many to the United States.

In the land of opportunity, the Irish, who worked hard and cheap, found employment in New York City’s thriving construction industry. As the subway lines moved into the Bronx, so did the Irish. Many of them settled in Bedford Park and Norwood because they were working on projects at the New York Botanical Garden, Ultan says. By the 1970s, living among pockets of the area’s waning Jewish population (which had dominated the community for decades), the Irish were well established in the northwest Bronx.

Irish Hotbed
Mickey Burke, who grew up in Williamsbridge, just east of Norwood, began exploring his Celtic roots at Hunter College in Manhattan, where he created a pan-Celtic club (the first in the country, he says). In 1977, he fulfilled a lifelong dream by opening up Keltic Connections, a Celtic gift shop that not only carried all the Irish newspapers and a host of gifts and crafts, but also what he says was the largest selection of St. Patrick’s Day cards on the planet. Burke carried five full racks and many of his cards were written in Irish (otherwise known as Gaelic).

During the 1970s and into the ‘80s, illegal Irish immigrants began flooding into Norwood and Bedford Park to either find work in the Bronx’s booming construction industry or to escape the political violence in Northern Ireland, commonly known as “the Troubles.”

“The Irish would come straight from the airports and onto the subways,” Burke says. “They would take the D line all the way to the end,” where they would stop in Norwood.

Sometimes tension arose between the new Irish, the “Greenhorns,” and the old Irish, the “Narrow Backs,” Burke says, but mostly everyone got along.

“You felt so proud to be Irish then,” especially on St. Patrick’s Day, Smith remembers.

It was during the late ‘80s and into the early to mid-‘90s that Little Belfast received its nickname as a breeding ground for Irish politics and socializing. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams (1995) and former Irish President Mary Robinson (1993) visited the strip’s Tir Na Nog Young Irish Center. Politically raucous Irish rock band Black 47 (the name is an ode to the worst year of the Irish famine, 1847) played various “Bainbridge” pubs and refers to the area in a couple of its songs. Thomas Maguire, the owner of The Phoenix, a bar on 204th Street and Decatur Avenue, was charged with smuggling bomb detonators from the United States to Ireland in 1994 (a jury found him not guilty).

By then, most of the Irish were either on their way back to Ireland to take advantage of the resurgent Irish economy, known as the “Celtic Tiger,” or had moved just north to Woodlawn or Yonkers. Many of the illegal Irish found it increasingly difficult to make a living without proper documents, Ihde reasoned. Others moved to find cheaper rent and more space in the suburbs, Burke says.

The Irish exodus from the area began in 1990, Burke says, and within a few short years their presence had all but disappeared. “It dropped off radically,” he says. Burke finally closed his shop in 1995.

“There’s so few [Irish] left,” Burke says. “The Irish population is almost gone.”

St. Patrick’s Day
Last Saturday, on the great Irish holiday, St. Patrick’s Day, a black man wearing a green plastic necklace with a four-leaf clover around his neck, smokes a cigarette outside of Madden’s Irish pub on Bedford Park Boulevard. Neil Young blares from the speakers. (Up until a few years ago, out in front of the Madden’s, the Bedford Park Shamrock Club would paint a giant shamrock in the middle of Bedford Park Boulevard.) Inside, 80-year-old Irish-American Patricia Dugard, wearing a long green T-shirt, cleans up around steaming pans of corned beef, cabbage and Irish shepherd’s pie – a gift from the bar’s owner.

Dugard, a Bedford Park resident for the past 24 years, points to a wall of pictures that look semi-recent. “They’re all gone,” she says, her eyes drifting to the other dozen or so folks in the bar. “I don’t know any of these people,” she says. But her daughter, Kathy Maloney is there, along with bar regular Trisha Karney and her own daughter Bernadette Lynch, who just returned from the St. Patrick’s Day parade downtown. “We all get along here,” says Karney. The rest of the bar clientele is made up of Latinos, black transit workers and an old Finnish American guy named Donald Anderson.

Around the corner on Jerome Avenue, at Shea’s, which has been owned by the O’Shea family since 1954, the scene is livelier. The place is packed. Irish visiting from the home country and Irish-Americans mingle in the crowded, skinny bar. Kids wearing floppy Irish hats scurried beneath armpits and through legs. The owner, Tim O’Shea, grew up here, literally, in the apartment upstairs. Like most of his customers that day, O’Shea has since moved to Yonkers. Former neighborhood residents, some still loyal customers, have returned to bask in nostalgia and catch up with old friends. On the stereo, traditional Irish music mixes with pop and country hits from the ‘80s.

“It’s a nice family place,” says Mike Utke, who made the trip here from Queens. “Everybody knows everybody.”

An Irishman who moved to Bedford Park 15 years ago, but now lives in Yonkers, is at the bar with his wife (an Irish woman he met at Shea’s) and a small army of red-headed children. With a smile, he declines to give his name. “I’m on the run,” he says. “The whole lot of us.”

Finding Florence Bock

By Jordan Moss

In August 2005, Wakefield attorney and insurance agent Maxwell Pfeifer didn’t receive an annual home insurance premium check from Florence Bock. So, he decided to send a man from his office to check on her house at 3280 Perry Ave. There was no answer when he knocked on the door and her neighbors didn’t know where she was.

Because Ms. Bock and her late sister, Frieda, had been good clients and timely payers for over 20 years, Pfeifer knew something was wrong. So, he decided to refer the matter to the Bronx’s public administrator, a city agency responsible for protecting the assets of deceased or missing individuals with no apparent heirs.

Pfeifer wasn’t the only one curious and worried about Bock’s whereabouts.

Several months earlier, in May 2005, mailman Brian McDonough told the Norwood News, whose offices are also on his route, that he thought something must have happened to Ms. Bock. Her mail had been piling up since Christmas and the front door was ajar. In a conversation last week, McDonough clearly recalled several policemen entering the house on two separate occasions after being called by neighbors, but they left having found nothing.

Michael Lippman, an attorney and 37-year veteran of the public administrator’s office, said his agency had difficulty getting the police to open a missing person’s case.

“Our office took the bull by the horns,” Lippman said. “Our job is to preserve assets, not to find missing people. We do everything we can to try to light a fire under the police.”

 Nevertheless, the public administrator’s office sent out its own investigator who also entered the house and found no sign of Ms. Bock.

Because the insurance policy on the house expired, the public administrator acted to “preserve the asset,” Lippman said. The agency successfully sought permission in Bronx Surrogate Court to auction the home. Churchill Homes LLC bought the single-family house for $410,000 in 2006.

Just two weeks ago, police were called to the home when workers clearing out the house uncovered human bones, presumably Ms. Bock’s, although the city medical examiner’s office has not yet identified the body or determined the cause of death. Lippman said he heard the bones were found lying “deep under debris” next to a cane.

He described the house as a “Collyer house,” referring to the famous brothers who were both discovered dead among the 100 tons of their obsessively collected belongings in 1947 in upper Manhattan. McDonough also said he noticed stacks of papers and magazines when he peered in the windows.

In addition to the insurance agent, the public administrator and the police, others also visited the house.

Just after the Norwood News published a story on the house in September 2005, the Buildings Department sent out an inspector. Despite the unlocked, open door, he reported: “No action necessary based upon physical observation.” Buildings Department spokeswoman Kate Lindquist said, “The complaint was unsubstantiated as the building’s windows and doors were intact.”

McDonough also says Ms. Bock was getting city pension checks as recently as a couple of weeks ago. For two years, he’s been sending them back to the city coffers, as procedure requires.

Eventually, the public administrator’s office discovered Ms. Bock had a will. Lippman said the lawyer felt it was just as well that the house had been sold, so that the asset could be preserved. If there were a fire, for example, in the uninsured home, the equity would have vanished.

(The attorney for Ms. Bock’s estate, Sandy Glatzer, did not return a call by press time.)

In the two weeks since the discovery of Ms. Bock’s apparent remains was reported in newspapers all over the country, the Norwood News has been able to add many more details. In addition to learning of the plethora of people and city agencies that came into contact with the house without knowing she had been inside all along, there are these facts:

Ms. Bock had been a city schoolteacher. She lived with her sister, Frieda, who died before her. And she was born in 1922 and would have turned 85 this year.

But there are still many more questions left to be answered.

On March 13, the day after the bones were discovered, someone paid all $6,340 of her back property taxes. Who paid them? And how did the city sell the house in 2006 without that lien being settled? 

Did Ms. Bock die of natural causes? If she did, why was she covered in debris in her own home? (The 52nd Precinct’s detective bureau is investigating the matter, but the Norwood News couldn’t reach the bureau’s commander by press time.)

Did she have any relatives? Did they try to contact her during the two years she was missing?

Stay tuned.

Students Find Home at Discovery High School

By Alex Kratz

Despite all of his best efforts, Discovery High School Principal Scott Goldner can’t stop his students from calling him by his first name.

“He tried,” says Ashley Cameron, a senior who lives just a couple of blocks away from the small school located inside the Walton HS campus near Kingsbridge Road. “But it just didn’t work. He’s Scott.”

That may be the only thing not working for Goldner as his burgeoning institution heads toward the end of its fourth year, which will culminate in June with Discovery’s first graduation ceremony.

Judging by the results of its first-ever School Quality Review (the SQR, as it’s referred to, is an all-encompassing review that the city’s new Empowerment schools must undergo each year) in late February and a recent visit to the school a few weeks ago, Goldner’s Discovery is not simply working, it’s thriving.

“The SQR was a great affirmation of our growth, our success and our goal of continuous improvement,” Goldner said in an e-mail last week.

Even the principal’s failure to make his students address him formally speaks to the familial and community atmosphere that Goldner’s administration and faculty have fostered at Discovery.

“Everybody knows everybody,” says Nigel Shoulders, a charismatic senior who, like many Discovery students, doesn’t so much speak about the school but gushes about it. “Everybody’s got everybody’s back,” he says.

And it’s not just the students doing all the gushing. The man who conducted the SQR, an independent reviewer hired by the Department of Education (DOE), had nothing but good things to say about Discovery based on a Power Point presentation he created after his review, which included a two-day visit.

“The school provides a warm, pleasant and safe environment which is highly conducive to learning,” the reviewer wrote in his presentation. “Teachers know, understand and respond extremely positively to being accountable for the effectiveness of students’ learning.”

The high praise led Joel T. DiBartolomeo, Discovery’s Network Leader, to rank the school in the DOE’s top 20 percent. “Such a statement is easily verifiable, particularly when one reads the entire Discovery report and could arguably be much higher when one is on the ground making direct judgments as I do,” DiBartolomeo said in a letter to Goldner after the review.

Goldner first “proposed” Discovery – “Teaching and Learning Through Creative Discovery” is the school’s tagline and mantra – to the DOE in 2001. It was approved in 2002 and opened on the Walton campus in 2003.

Even before it officially opened its doors to students, Discovery was on the road to success.

Cameron remembers meeting Goldner at a high school fair when she was an eighth grader. The next time she saw him, Goldner not only remembered her first and last name, but also her mother’s first and last name, which is different than Cameron’s.

“I already felt comfortable at a school that didn’t even exist,” Cameron says now, four years later.

Discovery has since grown from a transient handful of classrooms inside Walton to a full-fledged high school with a permanent home that now encompasses the building’s entire second floor.

Senior Erick Melo attended the brand new school during his (and the school’s) freshman year. He then moved to Georgia for his sophomore and junior years before returning to the Bronx and Discovery this year.

Not only were there more students and teachers as well as improved classrooms and facilities, but “everybody was coordinating together,” Melo says. “It was more like an actual school.”

And not just any actual school. As a small Empowerment school, Goldner and new Assistant Principal Rolando Rivera (“Rivera” to all the kids) say they have the autonomy and flexibility to tailor programs and curriculum to the needs of their students. A “voracious” reader, Rivera has a small library full of education material in his office. He conducts all of the faculty’s professional development training by himself so he can make sure the administration and teachers are all on the same page when it comes to assessing student performance and progress and then implementing changes.

Another key component to Discovery’s success is the school’s various partnerships with outside organizations, such as MMC Theatre in Manhattan and the Lehman College Art Gallery, which allows students to get invaluable experience outside of the classroom.

David Laster, a 20-year-old senior who will be graduating in four years, called his Lehman Art Gallery internship, pure “awesomeness.”

Goldner and Rivera are already passing out save-the-date cards for Discovery’s graduation ceremony in June.

For many of the seniors, the day will be bittersweet. Many of them are going on to college reluctantly. Senior Cynia Barwell, a 16-year-old Bronx beauty queen will be going to Colby College on a full scholarship. Shoulders is heading to Bennington College to study Japanese and culinary arts. Laster will be attending Monroe College at its New Rochelle campus. And Cameron is going on to Albright College in Pennsylvania.

“As seniors, we’ve gone from the ground to the sky and the sky’s the limit,” Cameron says.

Reservoir as Flashpoint

By None

When community activists successfully defeated the city’s plan to build the filtration plant in the Jerome Park Reservoir in the mid-1990s, some also took the time to imagine how the reservoir could be reintegrated with the community.

The streetscape surrounding the reservoir, particularly in Van Cortlandt Village, was designed by Frederic Law Olmstead, the famous landscape architect who designed Central Park.

The reservoir itself is now sequestered from the public by two fences. But Olmstead intended for the area’s winding streets to complement the bends of the reservoir, according to historian Robert Kornfeld, who issued a study of Olmstead’s influence on the area in 1998. Olmstead saw them as a unit, not for one to be barricaded from the other.

With this information informing their work, the Jerome Park Conservancy drafted a plan to establish a park surrounding the reservoir.

Now that the reservoir is safe from construction, and the city has $5 million from the filtration plant agreement to spend on creating a path around it, plans for improving the area around the reservoir have resurfaced.

The main feature of the Conservancy Plan, a pathway inside the reservoir fence next to the water, appears to raise the city’s blood pressure to unsafe levels. “If you’re only at this scoping meeting to say you want the track inside the fence then we can end this right now,” said Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) legal counsel Richard Friedman. Some community activists distinctly remember former DEP chief Chris Ward promising the community a path, but the DEP denies that.

Regardless of who said what when about the path, this disagreement points to residents’ profound distrust of the DEP, which has misled the community on more than one occasion.

They promised that many Bronx residents would be employed at the Van Cortlandt Park site, where the plant is under construction. They now concede they are having difficulty hiring Bronxites for skilled jobs at the site.

The city vowed on more than one occasion to build an Urban Ecology Lab at the reservoir, promises that were documented in this newspaper, The Riverdale Press, and The New York Times. The city hasn’t even demolished the demonstration filtration plant to make way for the lab, even though it said many times over the last several years that it would.

So, it was no wonder that advocates who met with the DEP and the Parks Department recently to discuss proposals for improving reservoir landscapes and pathways were exasperated. Not only were they rebuffed on the Ecology Lab and silenced on the inside-the-fence proposal, but the agencies didn’t seem to take the previous proposals of the Conservancy and others seriously. “Send it to us again,” they essentially said.

Residents at the meeting suggested that the land around the reservoir be ceded to the Parks Department, since that agency is more suited to cleaning and maintaining recreational space.

A Parks Department representative responded that it didn’t matter which agency owned the land because they were both city agencies. Every resident in the room who just last month trudged through unplowed snow on the sidewalks along the reservoir knew that wasn’t true.

Leaders in the battle over the reservoir dedicated years of their lives to saving their neighborhood. They’ve accumulated a great deal of knowledge in the process, including lessons these agencies can learn from. The community deserves respect, attention, hard work and just plain honesty from their city government in return.

News Scores Top Prize

By Norwood News

The Norwood News took home a first place award for Heather Haddon’s investigation of the Pinnacle Group at the New York Press Association’s annual convention in upstate Saratoga last weekend.

Haddon, who was a reporter for this paper from 2002 to 2006, first learned about the large landlord when a tenant called to suggest that the paper take a picture of her building’s new flowerbeds.

When Haddon returned to the office, she looked the property up on the city’s on-line housing database. She discovered that the new landlord had recently purchased hundreds of properties in the Bronx and throughout the city. She kept digging, talking to tenants, building staff and former Pinnacle employees, and poring through court records at Bronx Housing Court.

Over the ensuing weeks and months, Haddon documented Pinnacle’s efforts to force out tenants through fabricated major capital improvement increases and by taking hundreds of them to court. Following Haddon’s first article on Pinnacle in October 2005, no other media followed suit until May 2006, when the Daily News ran a story on the Housing Court actions, and called it an “exclusive.”

Haddon now works for the Herald News, a daily in Paterson, New Jersey.

The NYPA, the state’s association of weekly newspapers, gives out annual awards in its Better Newspaper contest. This year, 227 newspapers competed in a wide variety of categories. The News’ first place award was in the “in-depth reporting” category.

The judges, who were from the Oklahoma and New Jersey Press associations this year, said of Haddon’s work:

“This is NOT in-depth reporting — this is investigative journalism at its finest. Powerfully written, Haddon never has to add chrome to this — the plain facts catch the eye, the mind and the heart. Clearly the best in a field of excellent competitors.”

Haddon’s work was judged in a division with the state’s highest circulation community newspapers. (Despite its small staff, the Norwood News’ circulation of 15,000 is similar to newspapers that employ many more reporters. 

“We are extremely proud of Heather and this award,” said Norwood News editor Jordan Moss. “We already knew she had done an incredible job researching and reporting this important story. But we couldn’t be more honored by this vote of confidence from our journalistic peers.”

Ed. note: Links to some of Heather Haddon’s articles on the Pinnacle Group can be found on the West Bronx News Network’s blog at http://westbronxnews.blogspot.com/

City To Help With CB7 Zoning Study

By Annie Shreffler

In an ongoing effort to improve living conditions in this growing part of the northwest Bronx, Community Board 7 decided at its February meeting to authorize the city’s Department of Planning to work with them on the rezoning process referred to as 197C in the city’s Charter.

Now, members of the Long Term Planning and Land Use committees are looking at problem spots in the district and are considering new development proposals.

With the help of City Planning, individual areas can be addressed with rezoning, usually within a year. The 197C process eliminates the daunting costs of development consultants and the delays caused by long reviews of the entire district, according to Rita Kessler, CB7’s district manager.

One of the areas to examine will be the district’s eastern riverfront. The Long Term Planning Committee reported at the March community board meeting that it hopes to work cooperatively with Community Boards 4 and 5, as well as a Harlem River task force, to develop the waterfront. Members of the community are already involved in a river cleanup effort and would like to see the area rezoned for more public access and green space.

Board member Paul Foster said another area under review is a residential section near Montefiore Medical Center. Because the large institution has converted so many private homes to office space, residents feel the neighborhood is left vulnerable and unoccupied after business hours, creating a kind of dead zone.

As a creative way to prevent dead zones or unwanted commercial changes from occurring on Mosholu Parkway, the community board is also considering one resident’s suggestion to apply for the parkway’s designation as a Community Preservation Area. This change would protect current building facades, beautify the parkway and help some older buildings obtain landmark status.

With the ability to make zoning changes using the 197C process, the community board can also prevent unwanted development. Rezoning may be able to stop the construction of larger buildings, curbing the rise in population density and strains on already busy transportation and sanitation systems.

One new development under consideration is an application for a variance by the Doe Fund to build two eight-story, single-room occupancy buildings on Webster Avenue. The Land Use Committee debated the pros and cons of supporting the application at their last meeting.

While no one relished the idea of building 84 units to house men just released from prison, committee members recognized the importance of the reintegration process run by the reputable Doe Fund. The committee decided to invite Doe Fund representatives back (only their attorney came to the initial meeting), and ask them to compromise by creating two-bedroom housing units as well, which would allow people rebuilding their lives to establish roots, raise families and truly live in the community.

CB7 Chairperson Gregory Faulkner feels positive about working with City Planning, saying this partnership in the 197C process will accomplish many of the same changes as a larger redevelopment plan would, but sooner.

“The planning office gives tremendous support, doing a lot of the legwork [on re-zoning initiatives] and walking us through the technical aspects of each project,” he said. “We’re not restricted to one area, but Webster Avenue is a priority.”

Bronx’s Jenny Back on the Block

By Alex Kratz

Never underestimate the power of J-Lo.

Need evidence? Take the hundreds of screaming, starry-eyed fans who lined up last week for a chance to meet the multi-talented Bronx-bred performer, otherwise known as Jennifer Lopez, at an autograph session inside F.Y.E. music store on Jerome Avenue near Gun hill Road.

 

That’s right, if you missed it, Jenny was definitely back on the block. Not exactly her block (that would be in the east Bronx), but a block in the Bronx with a heavy Hispanic population nonetheless.

Lopez was there with husband Marc Anthony promoting her new album, Como Ama Una Mujer, the Bronxite’s first all-Spanish language effort. Anthony, a veteran singer with several Spanish language albums on his resume, produced the record, which critics are calling a big risk.

When Anthony and Lopez emerged from a black SUV, the crowd went nuts, wildly waving marketing posters and homemade collages as Lopez smiled and waved back.

Outside the store, there was a bullpen for all the television cameras. All the major New York networks and news stations were there, as well as several radio stations, MTV and Univision. Small local print outlets were told they would have to be snuck in because the place was overrun with big-name media brands.

Surrounded by a hefty group of handlers and police officers, J-Lo went inside and took a seat behind a long table, a large sultry picture of herself forming a background. Television cameramen and photographers jockeyed for position on a platform facing the mega-star. Anthony drifted off to a corner and tried to be inconspicuous, while Lopez signed copies of her new CD for giddy fans who filed in one by one.

“I told her she’s beautiful and that I love her,” said Evelyn Gonzalez, a University Heights resident who showed up at F.Y.E. at 7 a.m. the previous morning, two hours before the store opened, to buy a copy of the album and get a wrist band (the first 300 people to buy Lopez’s new CD received a yellow wristband that granted them autograph access).

Others were equally gushing with praise for J-Lo. “Oh my God! She’s so beautiful and she’s from the Bronx” was a popular refrain from people in the crowd, which ran the gamut from first grade girls and teenage boys to grandmothers and aspiring rappers.

Crystal Rosa, 13, who lives just a couple of blocks away on Knox Place, was on her cell phone trying to find a way to see J-Lo even without a wristband. Her mother was sick, so she had to visit her in the hospital rather than buy Lopez’s new CD.

“I love the way she sings,” Crystal said. “I want to be just like her.”

Crystal frowned when she turned and saw a friend waving her wristband around like it was a magic wand.

Others were there to catch a glimpse of the hyphenated one. “I just came to see if she was pregnant,” said one fan, who remarked on Lopez’s baggy, belly-hiding shirt.

Standing on the fringes of the crowd, sporting a mustache and a look that can only be described as glowing, was a middle-aged white man from Long Island named Greg Packer. He found out about J-Lo’s Bronx appearance from the F.Y.E. Myspace page (who knew?) and made the trek to the northwest Bronx the day before to buy the album and get a wristband. He returned the next morning at 7 a.m. and proudly became the first person to receive Lopez’s autograph.

“I’m a big J-Lo fan,” Packer said. “She’s from the city and she knows how to represent and put out a sweet, beautiful album.”

 Case closed.

Residents Press City

By Kathryn Molinaro

More than 30 people gathered in the rain two weeks ago to tell the Parks Department and the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) how they think $4.5 million the city has set aside for Jerome Park Reservoir can best be used.

The money, originally allocated for a path of some kind around the reservoir, is part of the parcel of $200 million in park projects that Bronx politicians received in return for supporting the construction of the filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park.

The debate over whether the city would build the recreational path along the water’s edge or outside the security fence has gone on for years, but Richard Friedman, DEP special counsel, did his best to put an end to the argument.

“If you’re only at this scoping meeting to say you want the track inside the fence, then we can end this right now,” Friedman said.

But some of the reservoir’s neighbors aren’t giving up on the recreational path they have planned and designed since 1994. Still, Anne Marie Garti, president of the Jerome Park Conservancy, knows she will have to be patient.

“Don’t focus so much on the running track until it can go where it belongs,” Garti said after the meeting on March 23. “The path is going to go inside the fence, it’s just a matter of when.”

Discussion shifted to ways the $4.5 million could make the area outside of the 8-foot security fence more park-like without the addition of a recreational path. A new path would not circle the entire reservoir fence because of the Lehman College parking lot on Goulden Avenue and because the already existing sidewalk along Reservoir Avenue leaves no room between the street, the historic pin oaks and the fence to create another path.

Many people at the meeting wanted flowers and other decorative landscaping, new lighting, more benches and someone to maintain the new additions.

The meeting also doubled as a grievance session. Neighbors took turns complaining of the DEP’s neglect of the land around the reservoir. Complaints included snow-covered sidewalks during the winter, graffiti on the low stone wall along Reservoir and Sedgwick avenues, and trash, including a pig’s head in a bag a few weeks ago.

“Nobody is taking care of things,” Karen Argenti, a longtime reservoir advocate, said.

Margaret Groarke (disclosure: Groarke is married to Norwood News editor Jordan Moss) compared the maintenance of Fort Independence Park, which is cared for by the Parks Department, with the upkeep of the land in the DEP’s jurisdiction.

“You want to plan something that’s sustainable,” Groarke said. “The DEP is not in the business of maintaining parkland.”

When Groarke and others suggested the Parks Department acquire the reservoir land at least for cleaning responsibilities, Hector Aponte, the Parks Department’s Bronx commissioner, laughed and said that would require more funding for his agency.

Residents are particularly exasperated with the DEP’s failure to make good on its promise to demolish a filtration demonstration plant in order to build an urban ecology lab at the reservoir, a project championed by the Conservancy.

According to an April 29, 2004 article in The Riverdale Press, the DEP commissioner at the time, Christopher Ward, said the demonstration plant, built more than 20 years ago, would be demolished within 12 to 18 months to make room for an urban ecology lab, a project championed by the Jerome Park Conservancy.

Almost 36 months later, the demonstration plant still stands, and plans for the ecology lab have reached a standstill. Friedman told the group at the scoping meeting that the DEP would begin demolition on the demonstration water treatment plant on Goulden Avenue this summer, completing the task in the first half of 2008.

A 1997 New York Times article said the Parks Department and the DEP expected to finish planning the ecology lab, which would be used by area schools, in the next month.

In May 2000, the Norwood News reported that the Jerome Park Conservancy’s plans for the ecology lab were approved and the lab would be completed in the spring of 2001.

A 2004 Riverdale Press article reported that Ward “promised” an urban ecology lab would be built on the site of the demonstration plant.

Resident Leonard Stoller isn’t expecting swift action from the DEP.

“They’ve made a lot of promises,” Stoller said. “I don’t trust them.”

Norwood Soldier and New Family Man Returns To Iraq for 2nd Tour

By David Greene

Leaving his new family behind and putting his life in potential danger, Staff Sergeant Christopher Perkins of Norwood is on his way back to Iraq for a second tour of duty.

Perkins spent his first 15-month tour in southern Iraq with his fellow soldiers from the 245th Maintenance Company of the National Guard, a unit based in the Kingsbridge Armory.

Upon his return, Perkins wasted no time readjusting to civilian life. He not only returned to his job at the Institute for Literacy Studies at Lehman College, but also met and fell in love with a woman named Sonia. The couple recently celebrated the birth of their first baby, Christopher Anthony, Jr., born Nov. 21.

Perkins spent the rest of his time back catching up with family and friends, making new friends at the local AMVETS Post and visiting his favorite comic book store on Bainbridge Avenue.

Taking into consideration his new family and the worsening situation in Iraq, Perkins is pragmatic about his decision to head back into a war zone.

“I’m sure I could have fought harder to get out of it, but I know they need medics,” Perkins said, adding, “I’d rather get this out of the way while the baby’s young.” Asked where he will be deployed for the next 10 months, Perkins replied with a laugh, “I have an idea, but I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“The orders were cut for 310 days,” he said, referring to the amount of time stipulated in his tour of duty orders.

While he doesn’t know where he will be, he does know he will have a new job when he gets there. “When I joined the military, I was an optician [an eye care specialist]; that was my first job. But then they retrained me to become a combat medic.”

For this tour, Perkins will be joining the 466th Medical Company based out of Glenn Falls, NY.

The former air conditioner and automobile repairman said of his upcoming duty, “This time I’ll be working in the air conditioning instead of on the air conditioning.”

There is one thing Perkins appreciated most upon his return and will miss during his upcoming tour. “The showers,” he said with a laugh. “The showers over there just didn’t seem to get you clean. I guess it was the treated water.”

After a week in Texas, Perkins boarded a plane on Friday, March 2 and after an 18-hour flight, arrived in Kuwait. By now, Perkins is most likely already in Iraq.

Ed. note: The Norwood News covered Sgt. Perkins’ emotional return visit to his colleagues at the Lehman College Literacy Institute in October 2005.

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