Talk Bronx New York

Mayor Bloomberg outside Thessalonica Christian Church on St. Ann’s Ave. in the Bronx on Sunday. Hizzoner, seeking a third term, spoke from the pulpit in both English and Spanish

  Mayor Bloomberg came to a Queens banquet hall Sunday like a man looking to woo a lover he once spurned, sweet-talking a roomful of Republicans to take him back.

It didn’t work.

While Bloomberg was mobbed by well-wishers, and his 10-minute speech about the state of the city was greeted with warm applause, party leaders at the banquet said it wasn’t enough to win him a spot on the Republican line in the fall election for the third time. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

Synthetic turf can burn your feet - and maybe dim your wits.

The turf covering parts of a shut-down soccer field at Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem was found to contain five times more lead than the Environmental Protection Agency allows in playground soil, according to City Council members Eric Gioia (D-Queens) and Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-Manhattan, Bronx).

Their statistics come from a report on a laboratory analysis done for the city Parks Department prior to the field’s closing in December.

The lead-filled substance in the synthetic turf is crumb rubber, made from old tires.

“You wouldn’t let your children play in a junkyard, but many of the same chemicals are in this material,” Gioia said. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

A decision to move thousands of kindergartners out of city-run day care centers and into public schools could overwhelm classrooms already bursting at the seams.

The vast majority of children who attend the centers are from low-income families where the parents count on day care to enable them to work. “This is very bad for my family,” said Eva Guadulupe, whose child attends Harlem’s Nasry Michelen Day Care Center. “They finish [public] school at 2:30 p.m. and my job finishes at 5.” The Administration for Children’s Services is shuttering the kindergartens to help close a $62million budget hole.

Despite the closing, the city must still pay rent on many of the leased buildings that housed the centers. Families in low-income neighborhood in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens are already forced to place their kids on buses and ship them miles away to schools with space.

“I don’t like my daughter going on the bus - it’s too far,” said Virginia Castillo, standing in front of Public School 56 in the Bronx last week with Fernicy, 5, in the frigid cold, waiting for a bus to take her more than a mile away to PS 54. Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

             No. 1 John F. Kennedy and guard Jeffrey Arzu have won 11 straight entering the Bronx borough playoffs

   You can call this the John F. Kennedy Invitational. The top-seeded Knights are the clear-cut favorite. Of any of the four borough tournaments, them not winning would be the biggest surprise.

That’s not an indictment of the other seven participants; it’s praise for Kennedy.

No. 2 Wings Academy has righted the ship recently, playing better on the defensive end. No. 3 Truman got better as the year went on and No. 4 Lehman has a dynamic inside-out duo in center Armand (Big Baby) Thomas and guard Aaron Barnes. Class A high-scoring entrants South Bronx, Evander Childs and Taft could make trouble for the higher seeds as well.

Favorite: No. 1 John F. Kennedy Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post