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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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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.

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."

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.

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.