Talk Bronx New York

Obama Cites Case of Bronx Nursing Aide 

Senator Barack Obama was giving an address by satellite to the Service Employees International Union convention on Wednesday, when he unexpectedly began talking about a nursing home worker from New York City who died last month.

The worker, Audrey Smith-Campbell, died on May 13 after she had an asthma attack. Her family said the attack was caused by her employer cutting off the workers’ health insurance and the resulting inability to afford her asthma medication.

Ms. Smith-Campbell and 220 other workers at the Kingsbridge Heights Rehabilitation Care Center in the Bronx went on strike on Feb. 20 to protest the nursing home’s decision to stop paying for their health insurance. The strike continues after more than three months.

Ms. Smith-Campbell, who had worked at the home for 29 years as a certified nursing assistant, was known as one of the most dedicated strikers, picketing day after day. Describing her as a “66-year-old grandmother,” Mr. Obama said, “For 82 straight days she kept marching, she kept standing strong, right up to the day that an asthma attack took her life.”

Her daughter, Yvonne Young, said she had an asthma attack on Mother’s Day, shortly after she picketed that day. She died the next day. Ms. Young said her mother simply could not afford the $600 a month for asthma medication once the health insurance was cut off.

“We cannot accept this kind of injustice in the United States of America,” Mr. Obama told the 2,000 delegates at the S.E.I.U. convention in Puerto Rico. “We cannot tolerate this outrage of workers having to go on strike to get the benefits they promised.”

The nursing home’s owner, Helen Sieger, accused the union — 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare Workers East — of “using this woman’s death to gain support.”

“This shameless act screams of desperation and guilt,” she said.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama, now the presumptive Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, who has the union’s endorsement, said, “Audrey is no longer with us, but her spirit is with us.”

He added, “It’s driving me on this campaign.”

Mrs. Sieger sought to hold the union responsible for the termination of health benefits, saying that she had offered 1199 an interim agreement that would have offered health insurance.

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CHANGING NYC: Bronx is changing, with artists leading way 

For decades, the Bronx had a bad reputation.

Howard Cosell intoned, “Ladies and gentleman, the Bronx is burning,” in 1977. Ten years later, Tom Wolfe picked the borough as the site of the hit-and-run accident that led to the downfall of rich, white bond trader Sherman McCoy in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Over the years redevelopment has proceeded in fits and starts, with the Bronx often hailed as the next hot area.

It hasn’t quite happened yet _ the Bronx still has too many vacant lots and auto-body shops to be a yuppie paradise _ but many Bronx neighborhoods are undergoing a significant transformation.

Chains like Starbucks and the New York Sports Club are setting up shop, and underused industrial buildings are being redeveloped as shopping malls.

As in other places that have gone from gritty to trendy _ like Manhattan’s SoHo or the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn _ artists are in the vanguard.

Sculptor Linda Cunningham moved to the Bronx in 2000 and bought a five-story industrial building with two partners. She has redeveloped it into condos, part of a trend toward market-rate housing in areas where there had been nothing but government-subsidized rental units.

“I got in here because I was urgent to find a studio,” said Cunningham. “I was driven out by escalating rents everywhere.”

Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion said more than $925 million in public and private money was invested in housing in the borough in 2007 _ up from about $237 million in 2002.

And while the nationwide economic downturn has slowed housing growth in 2008, U.S. Census figures show that the Bronx is less affected than the city as a whole.

The number of building permits filed in the city for individual apartments and for entire buildings in the first quarter of 2008 was about half of what it was in the same period last year.

In the Bronx, the figure was down just 17 percent from the prior year, from 1,037 to 862. By comparison, the number in Manhattan was down 69 percent.

And Bronx growth is not restricted to housing. The New York Yankees, who once threatened to leave for greener pastures, are instead building a new $1.3 billion stadium next to their old one, and they have pledged $800,000 a year to Bronx community groups.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced last month that the city has chosen a developer for the Kingsbridge Armory, a nine-story red-brick castle in the West Bronx that will become a mall called the Shops at the Armory.

Then there’s the fortress-like brick complex called the American Bank Note Building in the Hunt’s Point section, a landmark 1909 structure where bank notes were once printed.

Developers bought it for $32 million and plan to renovate it into offices for arts organizations, design firms and nonprofit groups, along with a retail food market.

Eight years after Cunningham and her partners bought their building in Mott Haven _ just 20 minutes by subway from midtown Manhattan _ the condo conversion has been completed and all but one of the 13 units have been sold.

Prices range from $395,000 to $795,000 _ still a bargain compared to Manhattan, where the average sale price for a co-op or condo was $1.6 million for the first quarter of 2008.

One lingering question is whether gritty Bronx neighborhoods can be fixed up without existing residents, businesses and nonprofit groups being forced out.

Of New York’s 8 million people, 1.3 million live in the Bronx. The borough’s population is largely black and Hispanic, and the poverty rate remains high.

According to Census figures, 28.9 of Bronx households were below the poverty line in 2005. The median household income was $29,331.

“We are experiencing a certain amount of gentrification,” said Carol Zakaluk, a lifelong Bronx resident who is a grant writer for a gallery. But Zakaluk said there are 11 housing projects in the area where she lives “and they’re not going anywhere.”

She envisions a future where people of all classes live side by side. “It’s got to be a little bit of each,” she said. “That’s my hope anyway.”

Whether that can happen remains to be seen.

The developers of the American Bank Note Building, henceforth to be called the BankNote, have said they expect the renovated project to rent for at least $20 per square foot. In Manhattan the average is $65 per square foot.

“We believe that if we create the right product and bring the right people there, it will help transform the area,” said Charles Bendit, co-chief executive of Taconic Investment Partners, which is developing the property with Denham Wolf Real Estate Services.

But the building’s current tenants will see their rents double, and some have left. A homeless drop-in center called the Living Room will soon be homeless itself.

“They’re saying they want us to leave in August,” said Carolyn McLaughlin, whose organization runs the Living Room.

A choreographer who goes by the single name Pepper is also shopping for a new home.

Pepper said her $450 monthly rent at the BankNote was slated to go up to $2,000 within 18 months. She is using temporary office space elsewhere and has put her costumes in storage.

Pepper is not happy about being displaced after she helped to build the Bronx arts scene that the BankNote developers are investing in.

“Who created that buzz?” she said. “The artists did it, not the landlords.”

SOURCE: NewsDay.com

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Bronx’s last independent bookstore to close

Paperbacks Plus owner Fern Jaffe will close her bookstore at the end of the month after nearly four decades in business.

After nearly four decades, a literary giant is entering its final chapter.

Paperbacks Plus, a Bronx community bookstore on Riverdale Ave., is set to close its doors at the end of this month.

“It’s been 38 years, time to let someone else take over,” said owner Fern Jaffe, with a good-natured laugh.

Jaffe and a friend opened the shop in 1970, seeing it grow into a neighborhood fixture that is touted as the Bronx’s only independent bookstore.

Over the years, Paperbacks Plus has hosted numerous book parties, drawing such big-name authors as Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, Ed Koch, Pete Hamill, Frank and Malachy McCourt, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Roger Kahn, Carol Higgins and Mary Higgins Clark.

And it became a vehicle for Jaffe’s activist streak.

“We were a real community bookstore. If there were issues in the community, we took a stand on them,” she said. “We put ourselves out there politically.”

When “The Pentagon Papers” were published, Jaffe sent 100% of the book’s sales to the Friends of Daniel Ellsberg, a group formed to support the U.S. State Department officer who leaked the secret government reports on the Vietnam War.

When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah against author Salman Rushdie and anyone who sold his book “The Satanic Verses,” Jaffe kept the book on her shelves.

Recently, Jaffe fought against a Patriot Act provision that would have required her to hand over lists of customers’ purchases at the government’s request.

“I used to say I should have been a lawyer because of all my activism,” she said. “But I channeled that energy into putting the right books into people’s hands instead. Books can change people’s lives.”

It wasn’t all heavy political statements though. There were more light-hearted times, too.

For instance, every Yankee baseball player-cum-author has held a book signing at Paperbacks Plus, including Yogi Berra, Paul O’Neill and Derek Jeter.

“Every Yankee player who’s ever come through here has been super nice to everyone, especially the kids,” Jaffe recalled. “They made you proud.”

A true Bronxite, Jaffe grew up in Mount Eden, went to Public School 70 and graduated from Taft High School. She moved to Riverdale in 1966 with her husband, Martin Jaffe, and their two children.

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