Talk Bronx New York

WHEN John Patrick Shanley steps into a Midtown Manhattan hangout known for its theater clientele, few would guess how much he belonged.

There is little about his sure gait, workingman hands or no-nonsense affect that flicks at the artist within, let alone a playwright, often the more delicately wrought of the species. Only the eyes, weakened by glaucoma but working, suggest anything other than a tough guy from the Bronx. And in that gaze he is constantly calibrating everything around him, seeing a great deal and concluding not much.

“It’s an important part of my personality that I continually adjudicate, but I never reach a verdict,” he explains.

If Mr. Shanley, 58, more resembles a craftsman — the wizened, handsome contractor — it only makes sense. He builds stuff, including “Doubt,” a cultural artifact so sturdy that it not only became a Broadway achiever, winning a Tony for best play, but a film staring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman that is among the mentioned in this year’s Oscar race. By the way, he already has one of those for writing the 1987 film “Moonstruck.” He’s been building and telling stories for a while. Read more..

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 “I didn’t think that they will let me pray in here,” Dinar Puspita, a 17-year-old Muslim, said of a local rabbi’s offer to let her worship in his synagogue in Riverdale.

BACK home in the Indonesian city of Semarang, Dinar Puspita, a slight and cheerful 17-year-old, says her afternoon prayers with friends at the mosque in her school. In Riverdale in the Bronx, Dinar is now a high school exchange student in an increasingly Orthodox neighborhood where synagogues are prevalent.

Among them is the Riverdale Jewish Center, which sits conveniently across the street from Dinar’s public school on Independence Avenue at West 237th Street. Because Dinar cannot pray in the school, the Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy, her host Naomi Erickson e-mailed the synagogue’s rabbi to see if the girl could pray there instead.

“I was very pleasantly surprised at how gracious the rabbi was,” said Ms. Erickson, a retired accountant.

Dinar echoed Ms. Erickson’s feelings.

“I didn’t think that they will let me pray in here,” she said the other day, seated on a green cushioned bench in the synagogue after finishing her prayers. “I mean, it’s not my religion.”

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Sitting like islands in a warm pool in the Haupt Conservatory’s central palm gallery at the New York Botanical Garden are two landmarks that welcomed early-20th-century immigrants to Manhattan: the main building of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. They seem appropriate here in the Bronx too, at the entrance to the annual Holiday Train Show, because this exhilarating exhibition makes you feel a little like an alien visitor just coming ashore; everything familiar is skewed and strange in the fragrant, humid air.

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 NEW YORK — A Bronx jury has ordered Eliot Spitzer’s father to pay more than $1.3 million in an employment discrimination case. Read more..

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They say that in Albany, everything is decided by “three men in a room” - the governor, the State Assembly speaker and the State Senate majority leader.

But Pedro Espada Jr., who is slated to become the senate majority leader, and the state’s most prominent Hispanic official, insists those days are over.

“Well, I am going to be in the room,” said Espada in his Soundview, Bronx office.

Espada is on his way to becoming the number two leader in the State Senate. He’s a member of the so-called “Gang of Three,” three Democrats who at first refused to back Democratic Senate leader Malcolm Smith and tip control towards the Republicans.

A deal brokered with Governor David Paterson and Smith now means the Democrats are taking over.

The lack of Hispanics in positions of power had been one of the chief complaints of the “Gang of Three.” Read more..

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