2010 Year in Review: Muller the New Armory?

The Muller Army Reserve Center in Wakefield is fast becoming the new Kingsbridge Armory. As of press time, the mayor’s office and Bronx officials (and activists) are in complete disagreement on how to best fill the vacant Muller Center, which the Department of Defense handed over to the city late last year as part of its BRAC program.

2010 Year in Review: Missing a Bronx Hero

Megan Charlop cared. Everyone who knew her knows that. But her death last March at the age of 57 in a bicycling accident focused the broad community of family, friends, and colleagues she knitted together over 30 years — as a Bronx mom, advocate and activist — on just how much she cared and accomplished in her too-short life.

2010 Year in Review: The Curious Case of Billy “Peanut” Murphy

Mourning friends created a makeshift memorial for Billy Murphy that included his favorite drink, Cobra malt liquor. (Photo by Adi Talwar)
The year’s most mysterious and potentially disturbing death came on a Sunday morning in August. At St. Barnabas Hospital, Billy “Peanut” Murphy, a heavy drinking, big hearted, homeless man who often took refuge in Epiphany Lutheran Church on East 206th Street, succumbed to severe injuries suffered days earlier. Epiphany Lutheran Vicar Bob Rainis, a former NYPD homicide detective, read Murphy his last rites and came away convinced “Peanut” had been the victim of a savage beating that led to his death. But police continue to say Murphy’s death was not a homicide.

2010 Year in Review: Up-and-Coming Gustavo Rivera Defeats Espada

Gustavo Rivera, an adjunct politics professor and former political aide, took the Bronx political scene by storm this year when he defeated State Sen. Pedro Espada, Jr., for his seat in the 33rd District in the northwest Bronx. Rivera, a 34-year-old Kingsbridge Heights resident and former aide to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, beat out a number of other primary contenders in what quickly became one of the most watched and dramatic races in the state.

2010 Year in Review: Harris Cleanup Costing Other Parks

There’s a new twist to the saga that has become the remaking of Harris Field in Bedford Park. Last year, the Norwood News uncovered the Parks Department’s finding of heavy lead contamination underneath the soil at Harris, which caused delays and cost the city $5.2 million to mitigate. Those clean-up costs are now eating into other Bronx parks projects.

2010 Year in Review: Filter Plant Contractor Busted

In what has become our annual recap of what’s gone wrong with the enormous filtration plant being built in Van Cortlandt Park, federal authorities announced this fall that one of the plant’s primary contractors committed fraud in its reported hiring of minority and women-owned businesses.

2010 Year in Review: Racism Charges Ignored, Cemetery Workers Say

The most controversial local labor story of the year came out of 147-year-old Woodlawn Cemetery. For the past couple of years, minority workers at Woodlawn tried unsuccessfully to address what they said were acts of overt racism by supervisors. Their appeals to Woodlawn administrators fell on deaf ears, they said.

2010 Year in Review: Ex-Pol Gonzalez Gets Jail Time

State Sen. Pedro Espada, Jr. wasn’t the first representative in the 33rd District to run into legal trouble. His predecessor, Efrain Gonzalez, Jr., was sentenced to seven years in prison this May for similar federal charges.