Talk Bronx New York

Eleven schools in Bronx will have new play spaces for September 

When students at 11 Bronx schools return in September, ready to buckle down to work, they’ll also have a place to play for the first time.

The nonprofit Out2Play is building playgrounds this summer at elementary schools that have dilapidated play spaces or lack playgrounds altogether.

Andrea Wenner, the group’s founder and director, said a recess period without a playground can lead to trouble.

“They’re not being physically active,” she said. “They’re getting into fights and not interacting in a constructive way.”

A lack of exercise coupled with overeating is a serious problem in the Bronx, where the obesity rate is 42% - the highest in the city - according to a report by Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión’s office.

The three-year-old organization has already put up 15 city playgrounds, but Wenner said there are still more than 120 elementary schools, including 25 in the Bronx, lacking a place for kids to play.

At Public School 55, a playground has meant fewer fights and falls, fewer scraped knees and fewer bloody noses, said Principal Luis Torres.

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Bronx Students Scramble To Find School 

Parents are stunned to find their children shut out of the Bronx Early College Academy due to building size accommodation.

New York City’s Department of Education said in a letter to parents that it could not find a building big enough to house the increasing number of students. A department representative said that splitting the school in two is one of the proposed solutions.

Parents and teachers have said the academy has been struggling due to a shortage of resources, support and leadership, reported the New York Post.

The academy opened in 2006 for students in grades sixth and seventh and was to expand this year to include grades up to twelfth. Officials expect to reopen the school for its first class of ninth graders in 2009, but parents are doubtful.

In the meantime, the department has recommended that eighth-graders apply to other schools.

A part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Early College Initiative, the Bronx academy was created to prepare middle-school students for college courses by earning course credits through advance placement. The school is supported by the City University of New York and partnered with Lehman College.

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A T-Shirt Brand for Bronx Lovers 

Shorty Hip-Hop, a character created by Anthony Cabezas that he hopes will help launch his T-shirt brand, Beond69.

Shirts made by Anthony “Beond69? Cabezas. He no longer makes shirts with the heart logo.

For a while last year, Anthony Cabezas’s most popular T-shirt design was one that declared “I?BX.” He printed 600 of them in his South Bronx studio and sold them wholesale for $10 apiece. Not long after they hit the stores, he said, thousands of cheaper ones hit the streets.

“I made $1,000 and then it was over,” he said. “Then it just took off over the five boroughs, when the stores on 27th Street and Broadway started making them and flooded the market. Those guys do everything that is popular and they sell them cheap, 3 for $10. I?BK, I?DR, everything.”

He is no longer fretting about losing that market. New York’s State’s tourism board most definitely does not ? BX, BK, DR or anything else that violates the trademark it holds on its iconic logo. The state agency recently announced that it was taking steps to warn violators to stop cranking out unauthorized shirts, bags and anything else with the heart.

“It’s not something I’m making anymore,” said Mr. Cabezas, 39. “I’m not getting emotionally involved with it. It was just something for the street.”

Instead, he is focusing on becoming a brand name. Tags emblazoned with Beond69, his logo, dangle from T-shirts with hip-hop themes and sketches. His brand started out as a different kind of tag, the kind he spray painted on walls as a teenager. Now he makes his living making drawings of fancy awnings for a sign company active in Manhattan’s pricier neighborhoods.

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Bronx Museum Leads Borough’s Renaissance

UPTOWN WORLD Holly Block in front of a mural, ‘Activism is Never Over,’ created for the ‘Making It Together’ exhibition by graffiti writer Lady Pink.

When Holly Block left the downtown arts venue Art in General to run the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2006, many of her friends told her she was crazy. The museum was in serious trouble: It had almost no base of private support, had been running deficits for three years, and was about to open a new building that it didn’t have the funds to operate.

But Ms. Block, who had worked at the museum as a curator in the late 1980s, believed strongly in its mission of collecting Latin-American, Asian-American, African-American, and Bronx-based artists. After 18 years at Art in General, she was ready for a change and believed she could help turn the museum’s fortunes around.

Two years later, she has worked little less than a miracle: The new building, designed by the Miami firm Arquitectonica, is open and running. The museum has more than quadrupled its private fund raising and has run surpluses for two years in a row. This year’s gala, in May, raised $140,000 — an almost 40% increase over last year. The museum’s re-energized board, expanded to 19 members from 14, donated an additional $100,000.

“Holly’s amazing,” the board chairman, Douglass Rice, said. “She’s well-respected; she’s smart; she has incredible contacts. Where she goes, a lot of funders want to follow.”

The road to financial stability wasn’t easy. In her first few months, Ms. Block had to cut the museum’s staff to 22 from 28 and only program in part of the new building.

“That time period was the worst,” Ms. Block said of the fall of 2006.

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