Bronx officials and kids wasted no time making use of the new amenities at Devoe Park. City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe was fast on his feet during an inaugural game of hoops at Devoe Park’s renovated basketball courts, though local teens gave him a run for his money.

Scores of Bronx tenants lost their rights over the last year and they probably didn’t even know it. That’s because a Bronx Supreme Court judge, Sallie Manzanet, prevented community organizers from entering five neglected buildings, negotiating with banks to enforce the good repair clause of mortgage contracts, or even discussing the problem buildings with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).

Once home to quiet prayer and meditation, the second floor of the convent at St. Brendan’s Church now resonates with the tickling of piano keys and strumming of guitars. The Norwood institution realized a long-held dream last month when its music school opened in the school’s former convent.

Together Patty Doyle and Lisa Concelacion have decades of nursing experience. Still, neither had seen anything like the Aguirre brothers, the world-famous conjoined twins who were successfully separated after four surgeries in 2003 and 2004 at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore.

Mosholu Preservation Corporation, the nonprofit that publishes the Norwood News, works to make our neighborhoods nicer places to live and work. We were founded to make the area nicer for Montefiore, but we also make it nicer for everyone. We work alongside numerous organizations to improve things in as many ways as we can.

Council Member Oliver Koppell, a Democratic favorite son in Riverdale politics for decades, will face a primary challenge next September from someone he has appointed to important community positions.

Though four lawsuits have now been filed in an attempt to stop the construction of a filtration plant at Mosholu Golf Course in Van Cortlandt Park, the city has already begun preliminary work at the site.

Nearly 200 soldiers from the 145th Maintenance Company of the Army National Guard, based out of the Kingsbridge Armory, said their goodbyes on Nov. 19, and will shortly be headed for an unknown destination in Iraq.

If there is a certain measure that Mayor Bloomberg is out of touch on a particular issue, it is when all 51 members of the City Council vote for something that he opposes.