Talk Bronx New York

Hop Hop Finds Rhymes & Reason To Be Used As Way To Teach Students 

When 13-year-old Steven (King) Ayala strides confidently down the hall at South Bronx Preparatory, students follow.

When he enters Rosaleen Knoepfel’s sixth-grade classroom, people notice.

When he freestyles in her after-school program, his rhymes ring.

“Think twice,” he raps. “Wrong or right, think twice, day and night, think twice, death or life.”

King is one of more than 40 students in the after-school Urban Art Beat program at the middle school at 145th St. and Third Ave. in Mott Haven.

Every Tuesday at 3:30 p.m., kids ages 10 to 14 pile into Knoepfel’s room to write rhymes, make beats, discuss the history of hip hop and learn from visiting underground emcees.

“From the Block! Out the Box!” Knoepfel, known to her students as Ms. K, shouts UAB’s slogan.

Urban Art Beat is an example of a growing trend of using hip hop as a teaching tool, especially in neighborhoods where the music form was born.

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Fordham Road in the Bronx, where many Cambodians who came to New York as children initially settled.

Among The Many, Camodians Find A Home In The Bronx

VIBOL SOK SUNGKRIEM, a 31-year-old aspiring filmmaker, had invited a few friends over for dinner, and his apartment just east of the New York Botanical Garden was flooded with camaraderie and the aroma of spicy Southeast Asian food.

Like Mr. Sungkriem, who wears a whisper of a mustache and favors baggy clothes, most of the half-dozen guests were Cambodians who came to New York as refugees in the 1980s.

Over katiev, a spicy Cambodian noodle soup made with beef, shrimp and fish balls, they told stories about escaping from Khmer Rouge soldiers in Cambodia as they fled to refugee camps in Thailand. They talked about running from thugs on Fordham Road when they were younger, when violence was a fact of everyday life in many Bronx neighborhoods.

As they ate, Mr. Sungkriem opened his laptop and switched on its video instant messaging so that two absent friends could join the party. Within the past few years, both had moved from New York to Cambodian communities elsewhere in the country; one, a police officer, to Los Angeles, for a better job, the other to Stockton, Calif., after a particularly harrowing mugging.

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Fire In Fordham Neighborhood Apartment Kills Elderly Woman 

A 78-year-old woman died Saturday after her clothing caught fire as she stood over the stove in her Bronx apartment, the authorities said. Her 98-year-old mother was burned while trying to put out the flames.

Neighbors and a relative identified the woman who died as Blondell Alston. Ms. Alston and her mother, Dorothy Brown, shared the second-floor apartment, in a building on Morris Avenue in the Fordham neighborhood, for more than 10 years.

Ms. Alston continued to care for her mother despite her own recent problems with disorientation and memory loss, the neighbors said.

Firefighters were called to the six-story brick apartment building at 8:13 a.m. by someone on the top floor who smelled smoke.

Battalion Chief Thomas Riley said the blaze was under control by 8:43 and was confined to the kitchen of the women’s apartment, at the rear of the second floor.

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Hunts Point Subway Station Shutdown Due To Fuel Leak

1/19/2008 

Gasoline leaked into the Hunts Point Avenue station on the No. 6 line.

The source was a storage tank from the BP gas station above the Bronx subway stop.

The station was evacuated and power was shut off.

Trains in both directions bypassed the Hunts Points station.

Brooklyn Bridge-bound trains were running express from the Parkchester Station to the Third Avenue-138th Street station. Trains skipped the following stations: St. Lawrence Avenue, Morrison-Soundview Avenues, Elder Avenue, Whitlock Avenue, Longwood Avenue, E 149th Street, E 143rd Street-St.Marys’s Street, Cypress Avenue and Brook Avenue.

The MTA advised passengers to take the Pelham Bay Park-bound trains to the Parkchester Station and then take a Brooklyn Bridge-bound train.

Hazmat workers were cleaning up the gasoline.

SOURCE: MyFoxNY.com

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The Police Department is asking for the public’s help in finding a missing man from the Bronx.

Juan Forestire, 68, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. He was last seen on Thursday at 630 Jackson Avenue.

He is described as five feet eight inches tall, and police say he weights about 150 pounds. He was last scene wearing a black jacket, blue jeans, a beige sweater and a red and white hat.

Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS.

SOURCE: NY1

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