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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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Who Says: We should have known this was coming. Just wait until the start tearing down the old stadium and find that the land is contaminated from an oil leak from the stadiums oil tanks..

Time and Cost Rise for Yankee Stadium Parks

 Anthony Santiago, left, and his twin brother, Christopher, playing in a temporary park at Jerome Avenue and East 161st Street.

 Cost estimates for eight small parks around the new Yankee Stadium have almost doubled.

The cost of replacing two popular parks where the new Yankee Stadium is being built has nearly doubled. At the same time, several of the eight new parks, which were supposed to be completed before the new stadium opens next spring, have been delayed by as much as two years, according to city documents.

The price of the new small parks — which are to replace tennis and basketball courts, a running track and baseball and soccer fields eliminated to make way for the new stadium — is now projected to be $174 million, almost one-seventh the cost of the $1.3 billion stadium itself. The original estimate had been $95.5 million. The increase comes amid skyrocketing costs for construction projects, both public and private, around the city.

The stadium is being financed by the Yankees with city subsidies, while the eight new parks for the South Bronx, which range in size from 0.24 acre to 8.9 acres, are being paid for by the city.

None of the replacement parks have been completed, and construction on several has not yet started; however, the parks department has built a temporary replacement park on a parking lot in the area, opened a ball field this spring at a school almost a mile to the east, and is building a sports field at a recreation center about a mile to the north.

The city was required to build the new parks after it selected the 28.4-acre Macombs Dam Park and a portion of the 18.5-acre John Mullaly Park as the site of the new stadium in 2005. State and federal law dictated that a similar amount of parkland nearby of equal or greater fair market value be built to replace the parks that would be lost.

Some residents have been critical of the trade-off. While Macombs Dam and Mullaly Parks were almost contiguous stretches of grass and trees amid the concrete topography of the South Bronx, the replacement parks are small parcels scattered around the area. The sites include sports fields atop a planned stadium parking garage and a park along the Harlem River, which is on the opposite side of the Major Deegan Expressway.

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Traveling Roadshow of Justice at the Bronx’s Shiny New Courthouse

On a typical day, dozens of trials, hearings, arraignments and other legal procedures take place in the Bronx court system, and often there is not a single spectator.

But on Thursday, the hottest ticket in the Bronx — aside from the Yankees-Red Sox game being played a few blocks down 161st Street — may have been the scramble to get a decent seat in the Bronx Hall of Justice.

The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, had come down from Albany to hear oral arguments in a few selected cases at the Bronx’s new glass-walled courthouse, and the public was invited.

More than 450 people — most of them blue-suited lawyers — stood and sat rapt, listening as intently as one might at a classical music concert to cases that were in many ways less compelling than the usual fare heard in the Bronx criminal court system.

The five cases selected by the court did, however, offer a representation of the hazards of life in New York City, circa 2008: murder, gender discrimination, terrorism, illegal eviction and a trip-and-fall episode.

It all took place in the building’s new, ornate and extremely large central jury room, with seven black-robed judges at the front and tight security all around.

“We wanted to celebrate the new courthouse and to bring the court to the community,” the state’s chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, said after two and a half hours of oral arguments ended. Judge Kaye also made an admission: that in Albany, the court’s average crowd is about 30.

“Not so many people come out, which is one of the reasons it’s good to be here,” she said.

First up was the case of Santos Suarez. Mr. Suarez was convicted of fatally stabbing his girlfriend in the Bronx apartment they shared in 2000. A jury acquitted Mr. Suarez of one second-degree murder charge, that he killed his girlfriend intentionally, but convicted him of another, killing her with depraved indifference. The jury failed to decide on a manslaughter charge in the case.

That became a crucial element of the case when the Court of Appeals concluded that the jury had erred, and that Mr. Suarez had indeed committed the murder intentionally. It overturned the conviction.

So with one murder charge thrown out and an acquittal on the second, all that stood in the way of freedom for Mr. Suarez, who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison, was the manslaughter count.

Mark W. Zeno, Mr. Suarez’s lawyer, told the judges on Thursday that trying his client on the manslaughter charge would be akin to double jeopardy. “An acquittal is an acquittal, no matter what errors go into that acquittal,” Mr. Zeno said.

Around the grand room, lawyers — many of them prosecutors from the Bronx district attorney’s office — shifted uncomfortably.

One of them looked up at the ceiling in disbelief, tapped her neighbor and nodded toward a Martin Luther King Jr. quote on a piece of sculpture that is the room’s centerpiece: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It was now time for Peter D. Coddington, chief appellate attorney for the Bronx district attorney’s office, to make his case. The jury, he said, had not had a “fair opportunity” to consider the manslaughter charge, and he said a trial on that charge would not be double jeopardy, but a “continued prosecution.” A pair of defense lawyers nudged one another in disbelief.

Mr. Zeno summed up his position, saying, “It’s an unpleasant result in some respects, but now the prosecutor has to live with that decision.” Read more..

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Completed in 1914, the Bronx Borough Courthouse on 161st Street and Third Avenue has served as home to the borough government and a courthouse. The Beaux Arts-style building features a granite exterior, marble interiors, and a statue of Justice above the south entrance. The building was abandoned in 1978, but later designated as a historic landmark by the city. It has been refurbished and was home to various community groups, but today it sits empty. Without an owner or use, preservation groups worry that the building is again falling into neglect and disrepair. Source..

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New Bronx Academy Gets Promise From Department of Education

The Department of Education has approved plans for a new charter school to be placed inside the landmark courthouse on Third Avenue and 161st Street.

“That charter school process is not easy,” said Reverend Wendy Calderon-Payne of the Urban Youth Alliance. “They make you prove that you have the ability to run a charter school.”

For three years, religious leaders in the South Bronx worked and prayed to bring a charter school to the courthouse, which has been closed since 1978. The Virginia-based organization Imagine Schools was granted the charter, but the facility will be run by the Bronx organization Urban Youth Alliance and will be called the Bronx Academy of Promise.

The theme of the school will be career education. Along with learning the core subjects, students will be taught what jobs are associated with those subjects and how to get into the various fields.

“We are promising the young people here something very, very special,” said Reverend Timothy Birkett of the Church Alive community church. “We are going to give them an opportunity to look forward to their future, and we are promising things are going to be better than they are today.”

For 30 years, various groups have been unsuccessful in developing the property. Although the charter has been granted, there are still millions of dollars in construction that needs to be done.

While construction is going on, community leaders are going to have to pay close attention to security at the site. Over the years, there have been a number of break-ins, where fixtures and electrical wiring have been stolen.

Leaders say new copper pipes already been put in for heating have been stolen. The building was also steam cleaned, but someone tagged it with graffiti.

“We are asking the community to support us; don’t tear us down,” said Calderon-Payne. “Let the building go up so that our children, their children, their nieces and nephews can come and get a great education.”

Currently Boriqua College is building a campus next to the courthouse. The charter school will go from kindergarten to the eighth grade.

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Jury Duty Not ‘Hard Time’ To Serve In New Courthouse 

By ROBERT HILFERTY
February 26, 2008

For the first time in my life, I could imagine actually looking forward to jury duty. Unlike those ponderous fortresses that typically shroud one’s civic obligation in gloom and doom, architect Rafael Viñoly’s Bronx County Hall of Justice, which opened its doors last month, epitomizes the notion of “innocent until proven guilty” — and doesn’t condemn the rest of us who must pass judgment. It is, perhaps, the least Kafkaesque courthouse in the city — a welcoming, translucent nine-story structure on 161st Street with a long, elegant façade of corrugated, green-tinted glass resembling Astor Piazzolla’s bandonéon.

Its project director, Fred Wilmers, called the courthouse “a metaphor for the transparency of the judicial system, the openness of government.” It is an apt description of this structure, with its street-level entrance and its exhilarating, light-filled lobby that’s not the least bit oppressive.

It’s an architectural (and a metaphorical) antidote to the concrete, bunker-style Bronx Family/Criminal Courthouse across the street, and it’s less intimidating than the Bronx County Courthouse a few blocks west, near Yankee Stadium. The new $421 million building, impressive but not imposing, takes on some of the criminal functions of its overextended neighbors.

You still have to pass through metal detectors and X-ray machines before gaining entry, but Mr. Viñoly’s idea of respect for the public above authority is delightfully successful. The centerpiece of the L-shaped configuration is the jury assembly room, a rotunda-like space that could hold 570 people in the center of the lobby. Skylights allow daylight to flood the space, which symbolically puts the juror at the center of the judicial process with dignity. What an idea.

After you are assigned a case, you can take an elevator to one of the four court-dedicated floors. Or you can stroll up the ramp that spirals around the rotunda to the second floor, offering a continuous view of the tree- and bench-dotted courtyard outside. It’s the designer’s stated hope that once this public plaza is opened later this year, the staff and local residents take their lunch breaks out there; a greenmarket has even been invited to camp out in this neighborhood-integrating social space, graced by a site-specific granite sculpture of interlocking cubes by Cai Guo-Qiang, who currently has a show at the Guggenheim.

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