The Friends of Van Cortlandt Park has decided not to appeal a state Supreme Court judge’s Dec. 3 ruling dismissing their lawsuit, which argued that the city failed to rezone the park for industrial use.

Complaints may have tapered off since the Bronx’ Meals on Wheels program was overhauled last October, but John Whyte is still not a fan. "It’s garbage," said Whyte, 75, staring at a plastic tray of reheated meat and limp green beans, as he sat outside his Marion Avenue house.

Conditions at Tracey Towers continue to take small steps forward with elevator work and security staff changes under way. But many worry that some problems are endemic at the building and that Tracey will never run as smoothly as other Mitchell-Lama developments.

After a delay of over a month, nearly 200 footlockers belonging to Bronx soldiers based out of the Kingsbridge Armory arrived at the Tallil Air Base in southern Iraq on May 14.

Sometimes you need to sound the alarm more than once to get attention. In the summer of 2003, University Neighborhood Housing Program (UNHP), an nonprofit advocacy group based on the Grand Concourse, held a forum at Fordham University’s library to warn of a potential real estate bubble inflated by exploding purchase prices for multi-family dwellings. Through its research, the group learned that landlords were paying a great deal more for the buildings than they seemed to be worth. Purchase prices had escalated since 1996, but there was no net increase in building revenue, known as net operating income.

There is some progress to report on efforts to remake two overgrown and neglected public spaces. Officials have recently renewed attempts to make the Risse Street Triangle, an overgrown plot at the top of the Grand Concourse, more usable.

Seven months ago the city debuted Senior Options, the Orwellian name for a program that we now know gives seniors the "option" of eating inedible food or not eating at all. In pushing Senior Options, which drastically transformed the universally popular Meals on Wheels program, the city said seniors would have the choice of getting one weekly shipment of frozen meals that they could reheat themselves or getting daily delivery of hot meals. But when the food is this bad – we tried it ourselves – it doesn’t matter whether the food is frozen or reheated.

The Department of Environmental Protection, which has been doing a better-than-expected job working with the community around the filtration plant, thought it was doing local residents a good turn by providing them with hundreds of garbage cans like the one pictured on the left.

It’s no longer a theory, a plan or a proposal. After more than a dozen years of controversy, with residents repeatedly foiling city officials determined to build a water filtration plant in the Bronx, the city has finally gotten its wish. While three lawsuits are still pending, contractors are well into their work of excavating dirt and rock from the former Mosholu Driving Range in Van Cortlandt Park. The project is expected to take at least seven years. Here are some images from the initials stages of transformation from parkland to filtration plant.