Talk Bronx New York

New York promotes the Bronx’s parks and gardens

Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is blooming!

Despite its urban image, the Bronx has 7,000 acres of park land, about 25% of its total area. In addition to Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo, the borough’s green spaces include the New York Botanical Garden; a 19th century garden overlooking the Hudson River called Wave Hill; and Van Cortlandt and Pelham Bay parks, where you can bird-watch, play golf and ride horses.

New York City is touting the Bronx’s green attractions in a new promotion. “Most people don’t think of the Bronx like that. We want to open their eyes to the actual physical beauty of the Bronx,” said George Fertitta, CEO of NYC & Company, the city’s marketing and tourism organization.

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It’s quite a turnaround for a place that once symbolized urban decay. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning,” sportscaster Howard Cosell famously said during a 1977 Yankees game, as footage aired of a building in flames near the stadium. An epidemic of arson plagued the city at the time.

New York is a different place now, billed as America’s safest big city and attracting a record 46 million tourists last year. Many of those tourists are repeat visitors, and “their appetite for something other than Times Square and the Statue of Liberty is enormous,” said Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion Jr., who got an enthusiastic reception talking up the Bronx at a recent tourism conference in Berlin.

Green spaces only comprise part of the Bronx’s attractions. There is also Italian food on Arthur Avenue, a hip-hop music tour, a bed-and-breakfast called Le Refuge Inn, and saltwater swimming at Orchard Beach. For more information, visit the Bronx Tourism Council website at www.ilovethebronx.com or NYC & Company at www.nycvisit.com/bronx. Meanwhile, here are some highlights.

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Gay Pride Week: Bronx LGBT Community Is Increasing, More Accepted

Parkchester in the Bronx is one of the largest condominium developments in the world, and is now host to a growing population of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender residents.

Salvador Cordero and Romeo Romero, party promoters in the area, say that Parkchester and the surrounding neighborhoods of Castle Hill and Soundview have plenty of proud gays who are not hiding any more.

“I guess on a good note, the Parkchester area is really safe,” said Cordero. “Going back a couple years, it was not easy to come out without getting beat up in the Bronx or anywhere in the city. This area has calmed down and become more gay-friendly.”

At Parkchester’s Mi Gente Café, there has been an LGBT-themed party every Tuesday night for the last three years.

“Anybody who comes, whether they come dressed up in drag, as a transgender person, as a lesbian, as a bi-sexual, we have such a mixed crowd here. I have never had a problem with the community,” said Romero.

The Mott Haven area has become extremely attractive to the LGBT community as well. A few art galleries have opened here, including one inside the Bruckner Bar and Grill, which owner Alex Abeles says attracts a mixed crowd that includes gays.

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Push in Bronx for H.I.V. Test for All

Dr. Donna Futterman, left, with Rosita Gonzalez and colleagues at Montefiore Medical Center, helped the city shape the plan.

The New York City health department plans to announce on Thursday an ambitious three-year effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx, which has a far higher death rate from AIDS than any other borough. The campaign will begin with a push to make the voluntary testing routine in emergency rooms and storefront clinics, where city officials say that cumbersome consent procedures required by state law have deterred doctors from offering the tests.

“Routine would mean if you came into the emergency room for asthma or a broken leg, we test everyone for H.I.V., if they’re willing,” the health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said in an interview on Wednesday.

While Manhattan has long been the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in New York, with the highest incidence of both AIDS and H.I.V., the virus that causes it, the Bronx, with its poorer population, has far more deaths from the disease. Public health officials attribute this to people not getting tested until it is too late to treat the virus effectively, thus turning a disease that can now be managed with medication into a death sentence.

Several AIDS experts said on Wednesday that the Bronx campaign was the most aggressive testing effort they could recall in the nation. Two years ago, Washington, D.C., made a high-profile push to test 450,000 residents, enlisting celebrity endorsements and distributing 80,000 free testing kits, but the campaign resulted in only about 45,000 people being tested.

“What’s new here is that we are implementing it on this large a level,” said Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who helped New York develop the new program. “The Bronx has 1.3 million people. It’s bigger than most cities, bigger than Boston, bigger than Washington. We’re talking about a significant urban population.”

City officials estimate that 40 percent of the 830,000 people ages 18 to 64 in the Bronx have been tested for H.I.V. in the past year. Half of the remainder, about 250,000 people, have never been tested, and the goal is to test them first. Tests would be given at 40 designated sites, including clinics, community centers, churches and emergency rooms. Dr. Monica Sweeney, an assistant health commissioner for H.I.V. prevention, said the city had not set aside money specifically for the program, but would absorb the $12 cost of each test.

In organizing the campaign, which formally begins on Friday, Dr. Frieden has enlisted support from elected officials, health care providers and clergy members in the Bronx. But the proposal is raising some concerns.

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South Bronx: Graffiti, Underground and Above

BEGINNING in the 1970s, city kids swept up in the new trend of scribbling graffiti on the outside of subway cars gathered on a bench in the 149th Street-Grand Concourse station in the Bronx to appraise each other’s work as trains rumbled by on the tracks. The site became known as the 149th Street Writers Bench, and it is legendary in graffiti lore.

“You would sit there watching for new talent,” recalled Freddy Miteff, 48, a former Bronx graffiti writer. “If you saw something real exciting, you’d chase the train to see who it was.”

Mr. Miteff was among the many young people who were arrested for defacing subway cars, and the spray painting of trains largely ended by the late ’80s. But two decades later, there is a continuing dispute over graffiti — and its center is at Hostos Community College, directly upstairs from the fabled 149th Street station.

The setting is a fall seminar on graffiti taught by James Cade, a graffiti writer who himself came of age spray-painting subways in the ’70s.

On Tuesday evening in the college’s white-walled art gallery, Mr. Cade explained the importance of teaching graffiti to today’s students.

“A lot of students are young and didn’t see the trains back in the day,” said Mr. Cade, now a graying man in his 40s. “This gives them a chance to learn about the first element of hip-hop, which is graffiti.”

Mr. Cade stopped spray-painting illegally in the ’80s. He has since been a tireless booster of graffiti as a legitimate art form, even urging that the subway bench be declared a landmark.

But in the eyes of some, like City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., who has criticized Hostos for offering the course, graffiti is part of a ragged image that the borough is trying to shed.

Others say graffiti deserves attention — especially in the neighborhood that some consider its birthplace.

“It’s an important part of this area’s cultural history,” said Wally Edgecombe, director of the Hostos arts center. “Graffiti style has been appropriated by Madison Avenue. It’s in museums around the world.”

SOURCE: NYTimes.com

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