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.

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.

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.

City and local Bronx officials continue to butt heads over a controversial confidentiality agreement that is threatening to delay, or even derail, the long-anticipated redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory. The Armory Task Force, an advisory group created by the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and made up of local elected officials and community leaders, was supposed to review and discuss the three Armory redevelopment proposals at a Bronx meeting on March 1.

Despite a reputation for secrecy and abuse, it appears most member item allocations – grants handed out by state lawmakers for projects and organizations in their districts – actually do find their way back into local neighborhoods, funding vital art, social and economic development programs.

On Friday, Feb. 23, Pilgrim-Hunter was among four New York City leaders honored by Congressman José E. Serrano and State Senator José M. Serrano during a ceremony commemorating Black History Month. Each received a State Senate proclamation and a statement to be placed in the U.S. Congressional Record.