Talk Bronx New York

Kristy Flores at the premiere of the film ‘Fame’ in Los Angeles

Anthony Carr is featured in new MGM remake of movie ‘Fame.’

Kristy Flores is performing the roll of ‘Rosie Martinez

They’re going to be Fame-ous.

Two Bronx kids who producers have cast in the upcoming MGM remake of the movie “Fame” will get their own hometown screening this Sunday.

Kristy Flores and Anthony Carr will be on hand an hour before the 12:30 p.m. showing at the AMC Theatres Bay Plaza Mall to meet and greet their fans. The movie opened around the country Sept. 25.

“We’re thrilled and ecstatic. They’re our students,” said Lydia Perez, associate director of Bronx Dance Theater, where both learned their trade. Read more..

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The area around Bathgate Avenue and 174th Street is an industrial park, a contradictory term for a place that has more concrete-covered factory floors than grassy fields. Yet the term is quite fitting, actually, in another way: This ordinary corner of Bronx blue-collar life was once home to Studs Terkel, who earned fame by writing about people who were utterly devoid of it.

Mr. Terkel, who died last week in his adopted home, Chicago, was born in the Bronx in 1912 and, according to the 1920 census, lived with his family at 1721 Bathgate Avenue, just south of 174th. He did not mention Bathgate in his last memoir, referring only to Clinton Avenue, a few blocks to the east, in a few pages, before shifting his memories to Chicago.

He once said the best interview question was the gentlest: And then what happened? Read more..

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Cornell staked a claim in hip hop history this weekend, and Kroch library just gained some serious street cred.

On Friday and Saturday Cornell played host to “Born in the Bronx: A Conference Celebrating Hip Hop at Cornell,” as part of the inauguration of a new collection of photographs, posters and recordings documenting the inception of hip hop in the Bronx. In addition to academic sessions and a history of hip hop, the conference also featured a panel of hip hop legends including Afrika Bambaataa and Grandwizzard Theodore, the inventor of turntable scratching.

The enthusiasm and support for hip hop culture shown by the Cornell Library, particularly Kroch Rare and Manuscript librarian Katherine Reagan, is to be applauded. The Library’s efforts the highlight this collection show a foresight and open-mindedness that is sorely needed in Arts and Sciences. With scientific research and technology projects seeming to attract much of the University’s focus and funding, it was refreshing to see the Library assert its own ability to innovate and attract new attention, especially in an area that holds so much promise. Read more..

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Fordham Honors An Artful Dodger Broadcaster

You might say the signature call of baseball’s greatest living radio announcer is the sound of silence.

That ability to let the moment tell the story is one reason why, even though Vin Scully has spent the last half-century living 3,000 miles from his Bronx birthplace, he will be honored tomorrow night by his Bronx alma mater, Fordham University radio station WFUV (90.7 FM).

Scully’s voice, one of the many irreplaceable treasures the Dodgers took with them when they abandoned Brooklyn in 1957, has over 59 years called many of the most indelible plays from America’s best game.

It has not overcalled one of them. When Elston Howard grounded out to Pee Wee Reese on Oct. 4, 1955, giving the Brooklyn Dodgers their only World Championship, Scully said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.”

When Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run in April 1974, Scully reported, “It is gone” and said nothing for 25 seconds, letting the cheers tell the story.

When Mookie Wilson’s ground ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs in 1986, Scully told TV audiences, “The Mets win it!” and then remained silent for more than three minutes as celebration erupted.

In 1988, when a crippled Kirk Gibson hit a two-out, two-strike, two-run ninth inning homer to win a World Series game off baseball’s best reliever, Scully again said, “It is gone” and remained silent for 67 seconds. Read more..

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George Washington From The Bronx? 

I GREW up in the rough-and-tumble Morrisania section of the East Bronx. I’m not sure when Morrisania’s gangs began, but they were already there during the Revolutionary War.

It wasn’t patriots and Tories who battled it out in Morrisania during the British occupation of Manhattan, a period that lasted from 1776 to 1783, but their surrogates, called Skinners and Cowboys, who scalped men, molested women and murdered children of both sides.

The gangs of Boston Road and Southern Boulevard circa 1950 weren’t as mean and malicious, but I lived in a whirlwind of chaos nevertheless, where I was my own urban guerrilla who had to battle his way to school block by block.

There were terrible racial and religious divides in Morrisania. I belonged to the little enclave of poor Polish and Russian Jews that collected at the borders of Crotona Park.

There might have been physicists living in the Byzantine palaces of Crotona Park East, but they were failed physicists, men inhabiting some mysterious cocoon that no one could explain, least of all themselves.

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