Talk Bronx New York

Carter is founder of Sustainable South Bronx

 Majora Carter

“If power plants, waste handling, chemical plants and transport systems were located in wealthy areas as quickly and easily as in poor areas, we would have had a clean, green economy decades ago.” — Majora Carter, Powershift 2007

Majora Carter grew up in the South Bronx at a time when America’s cities were emptying into the suburbs. Many of the buildings in her neighborhood were abandoned by the time she was ten years old.

Landlords were burning their buildings to collect the insurance; light manufacturing industries were moving out of the Bronx; and waste facilities were moving in to take their place. As pollution rose, asthma rates, poor health and unemployment soared. To outsiders, those who were left were branded with the stamp of the ghetto: as Carter says, “If you lived here you were no doubt a pimp, a pusher, or a prostitute.”

As a child, Carter spent much of her time planning her escape. “Education was my way out,” she reveals.

She studied cinema studies and film production at Wesley University then signed up for graduate school at New York University. To save money, she moved home to her parents.

Of that time, she says, “It felt like a defeat but it was also the best thing in the world to happen to me because I got reacquainted with my community.”

Carter saw that her neighborhood — under-served, ignored and literally dumped on — needed to fight a positive campaign to assert itself as a vibrant community.

“People wanted things like clean air, they wanted safe places for their kids to play where they wouldn’t get hit by a truck,” she tells CNN. “They wanted living wage jobs that didn’t degrade the environment or kill them.”

She fought a vociferous campaign against a planned waste facility that would have seen 40 percent of New York’s municipal waste coming to the South Bronx. “We were already handling 40 percent of the city’s commercial waste here,” she says.

In 2001, after the defeat of the scheme, Carter founded the non-profit environmental justice solutions corporation, Sustainable South Bronx. Its central tenet is that people shouldn’t have to move out of their neighborhoods to live in a better one.

While walking her dog one day, Carter stumbled upon a disused stretch of waterfront. That inspired her to write a tenacious $1.25 million Federal Transportation planning grant for the South Bronx Greenway. The 11-mile-long stretch is the first new South Bronx waterfront park in over 60 years and provides alternative transport, recreational space, jobs and environmental enhancements to the local community.

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EPA funding helps clean up Bronx diesel pollution

Some Bronx beer trucks will soon be belching less pollution, thanks to a new federal grant.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Friday it’s funding equipment for 15 Anheuser-Busch delivery trucks. Among other things, the new systems can reduce soot-causing emissions by up to 80 percent.

Anheuser-Busch is also developing an emissions-reducing strategy using biodiesel for its current Hunts Point fleet, and converting older trucks to natural gas.

The EPA says heavy-duty diesel vehicles cause for 15 percent of the nation’s smog, and 22 percent of its soot. In urban areas, diesel pollution can be even greater.

The initiative also involves New York state and a public-private partnership called the Northeast Diesel Collaborative.

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On the Net:

EPA: http://epa.gov/cleandiesel/index.htm#voluntary

Northeast Diesel Collaborative: http://northeastdiesel.org

SOURCE: NewsDay.com

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The Bronx Is More Than Just Yankee Stadium

THIS season is your last chance to catch a game in the old Yankee Stadium, before the House That Ruth Built is replaced by its modern cousin across 161st Street, the House That Steinbrenner and Taxpayer Subsidies Built.

That means a lot of first-timers will be heading into town and up to the South Bronx, and they might have no idea what else there is to see and do around the stadium. They shouldn’t feel bad: most lifelong Yankees fans who have been up there hundreds of times don’t know, either.

That’s in part because the area still suffers the hangover of decades of bad press. But Howard Cosell is dead, the Bronx isn’t burning, and sticking around after the game does not have to mean crowding into beer-soaked bars across the street from the stadium.

You don’t even have to go very far; you’re only three blocks away from the Grand Concourse, the once-stately, still-impressive thoroughfare that in its day was a most desirable address. It’s working-class these days, but you can still sense the grandeur in the sheer width of the 11-lane road and the architecture that lines it.

Not far from the stadium, at the intersection of 161st and the Concourse, are the Bronx County Courthouse (a handsome but imposing fortress), Joyce Kilmer Park (a spot to picnic on jerk chicken from the nearby Feeding Tree restaurant or a bresaola panini from the Press Cafe) and the former Concourse Plaza Hotel (once full of Yankees and politicians).

But the Concourse is best known architecturally for what is often called the biggest concentration of Art Deco buildings outside Miami. Walking north from 161st Street you’ll find at least one gem every few blocks, but be sure you walk at least the half-dozen blocks to 1150 Grand Concourse, the apartments known as the Fish Building for its aquarium mosaic. It’s enough to make you think (for a moment, anyway) that you’re in South Beach, not the South Bronx.

Ambitious Art Deco buffs could keep going for miles (on foot or by bus), all the way to Fordham Road past the old Loew’s Paradise, and cut east to eat in the Bronx’s Little Italy. Or keep going to the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, the slightly relocatedoriginal house where the poet retreated in what was, in the mid 19th century, bucolic hinterlands.

Your other option is to head south from the stadium down to Mott Haven, home to an ever-growing artists’ colony. (The closest train from Manhattan is the 6 train to 138th Street, but from the stadium take the 4 to 138th and walk east to Alexander Avenue.) The area has long been known for its antiques shops, which attract visitors from Westchester County and beyond, but now there are also arts spaces to check out, places to eat and even a new place to party.

Art makes its way into weird places in Mott Haven. Haven Arts recently moved into a 2,500-square-foot space in a former linoleum store (check out the freight scale built into the floor) and is currently showing “NY Press,” an exhibition of New York photojournalists from The New York Times, The Daily News and other publications. It also holds free painting classes from 5 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays, usually with a nude model.

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