Mirroring the rest of New York City, the 52nd Precinct experienced a significant overall drop in crime this past year. Unlike the city, however, the Five-Two also enjoyed a sharp decline in murders after a homicide-heavy first half of 2006. Crime in the Five-Two, which is contiguous with Community Board 7 and the Norwood News readership area, dropped 8 percent overall, compared to 5 percent citywide.

News of longtime State Senator Efrain Gonzalez’s indictment on mail fraud charges rocked the northwest Bronx at the end of summer. That lone charge proved just the tip of the iceberg when, on Dec. 13, federal prosecutors piled on an additional nine charges alleging that Gonzalez conspired with three other co-defendants to bilk the state for half a million dollars from 1999 to 2005. The previous indictment did not stop local voters from re-electing the Bronx lawmaker. He received nearly 90 percent of the votes in a landslide victory over virtually unknown Conservative party candidate Ernest Kebreau. In an interview two months before the first indictment, the Norwood News pressed Gonzalez to divulge where and how he allocated his member items (discretionary funds that senators and members of the Assembly dole out to local institutions each year). He refused to say where the money was going or which organizations he had given money to in the past.

Not so long ago, when times were good for Alham Mastafa, the Baghdad-turned-Bronx housewife would travel from her apartment in Bedford Park to Jersey City to buy jewelry from an Indian dealer she came to know well. A Sunni Muslim growing up in a wealthy section of Baghdad, she was accustomed to the finer things in life – world travel, fine dining and, of course, jewelry.

At his arraignment in a lower Manhattan federal courthouse on Friday, Dec. 15, State Senator Efrain Gonzalez, who has represented the northwest Bronx in Albany for the past 16 years, looked calm and collected, like he had been there before. It’s probably because the embattled Democratic lawmaker actually had just been there, four months prior, to face mail fraud charges claiming he had swindled $37,412 from a non-profit called the West Bronx Neighborhood Association (WBNA).

Responding to increasing pressure to create more jobs in the northwest Bronx during the construction of the Croton Filtration Plant in Van Cortlandt Park, the head of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said the agency would fulfill promises it made to the community and find ways to place more local residents in construction unions.

Student activists from the northwest Bronx took their fight for more school seats down south – to IS 184 in the south Bronx – where they let Schools Chancellor Joel Klein know exactly how displeased they were with the city’s new Five-Year Capital Plan. "Build more schools! Build more schools!" they chanted loudly during the public speaking portion of the meeting, often drowning out Klein’s efforts to defend the city’s plan.

On the ninth floor of the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in Norwood, Shadhey Camacho, 3, accepted her first gift of the season – a baseball autographed by former Mets superstar, Darryl Strawberry, six days before Christmas. Sitting in a chair wearing fluffy pink slippers, a sparkling plastic tiara perched on her scarred bald head, Shadhey (pronounced shaDAY) smiled when Strawberry, a cancer survivor himself, handed her the ball of stitched rawhide. She gripped it like a pro.

It began as many good and great community things do – from humble beginnings. Barbara Stronczer, one of Bedford Park’s community pillars, remembers working with her neighbors to tie a tree (illegally she admits) to a lamppost in the 1970s. That was a time when the city, unable to ensure the most basic of services like heat and hot water for tenants, was actually considering shuttering the 52nd Precinct. Ceremonial tree lightings, with all the attendant glee and festivity, were, to put it kindly, not on the agenda.

Finally, the 800 kids at PS 246 in North Fordham have a place of their own to run around, shoot hoops and simply play. Originally built as a school for the blind, PS 246, located on the Grand Concourse across from Poe Park, doesn’t have a gym or auditorium, and the only place to play or gather was a cracked asphalt lot in back of the building.