Maxi Phalone (right) reacts after her sister was pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in Port-au-Prince on Monday, January 18. Bronx residents have responded to Haiti’s earthquake with donations but more help is needed. Photo by Julie Jacobson

In two decades as a clergyman, Rev. Nathanael Saint-Pierre has never worked so many hours, consoled so many congregants, seen so many tears. Saint-Pierre heads the Haitian Congregation of the Good Samaritan Episcopal Church on E. 219th Street in the Bronx and has led the borough’s response to the earthquake that devastated Haiti on Tuesday, January 12.

“We Haitians in New York City are sad and frustrated,” he said. “I have never had to face such hard issues.”

Saint-Pierre was fortunate not to lose any family members in the disaster but many of his congregants did. More have struggled to contact family members and friends in hastily constructed shelters amid the ruble. Good Samaritan has gathered food and donations for those trapped on the impoverished Caribbean island and Haitians trapped here in New York City as well.

“One of my [congregant’s] families lost six people,” Saint-Pierre said. “One man who lost his sister was unable to find a funeral home in Port-au-Prince and there are no commercial flights to Haiti. He had to have someone there transfer the body to the Dominican Republic [to be cremated]. When commercial flights start again he’ll get the ashes. He needs to grieve but to grieve is not easy.”

The daughter of one congregant brought her daughter to the United States for Christmas. Her home in Haiti has been destroyed and she has no way to return but no job or legal status here. Saint-Pierre hopes to raise money and help the woman gain legal status.

“Unfortunately, we cannot only focus on those in Haiti,” Saint-Pierre said. “There are also crises here.”

Although the Bronx boasts hundreds of thousands of Caribbean immigrants, many from the Dominican Republic, which borders Haiti, the borough is home to only 4,196 people of Haitian heritage and 2,455 Haitian immigrants, census records reveal. In comparison, the Bronx is home to some 143,000 Dominicans and nearly 49,000 Jamaicans. Read more..

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  By the rivers of Babylon

There we sat down and wept

When we remembered Zion.

Psalm 137

THE afternoon sun dipped low over the empty lots around Charlotte Street. There in the long shadows stood three boys against a backdrop of smashed bricks, crumpled beer cans and a busted bike wheel. Behind them, past the tall weeds of this urban prairie, loomed decrepit apartment buildings.

Yet the trio were grinning, their faces friendly, even goofy. Look closer at the picture and you can see why they smile:

A scrawny mutt’s snout peeks out from their huddle.

Thirty years ago this summer, I returned to the South Bronx, where I grew up, with a Yale diploma in one hand and a beat-up Pentax camera in the other. Raised to get a good education, become a doctor and escape, I had instead come right back to teach photography — on Charlotte Street, no less, the world’s most famous slum.

In the four years I had been away, the South Bronx had gone from anonymous to notorious, a brand name for urban decay and despair. The landscape of my childhood had vanished, its buildings abandoned, stripped and incinerated.

Private tragedies became public humiliation in 1977. Howard Cosell damned the place, declaring, “The Bronx is burning,” as the cameras showed fires flickering beyond Yankee Stadium. Looters picked clean Tremont Avenue’s stores during that summer’s blackout. President Jimmy Carter made an obligatory pilgrimage — as Ronald Reagan would during his campaign in 1980 — for a photo-op amid the rubble.

The only way I could even try to confront this confusion was to slice it up into snapshots, each frame giving the illusion of a neat answer to inexplicable questions. For five years, I wandered from Fordham Road to Mott Haven, taking thousands of pictures in parks, street fairs, stores and even empty lots.

The negatives ended up stuffed in a closet. And the South Bronx was quietly transformed in the late 1980s by community campaigns that created new homes, community gardens and smaller schools. I became a journalist and traveled to Latin America, where I confronted poverty that made New York’s worst look tame.

But I always came back to the Bronx. I have spent much of my professional life chronicling the same streets I photographed as a young man. Six years ago, I moved back for good, with my wife and son. Some people thought I was crazy; cynics swore it hadn’t changed much from the Bad Old Days of 1979.

This year, I dug out the old pictures. The images may be black and white, but to look back upon them now is to discover that their secrets are revealed in shades of gray. In a landscape that was written off as uninhabitable — if not unsalvageable — you can see creativity, faith and even a kind of innocence.

Click. In the middle of a Mott Haven street, a lone couple hugs tightly and twirls to the music of an unseen orchestra. Squeegee boys dart out among the land yachts rolling off the Deegan to cadge a quick quarter.

Click. A couple with faces etched by lines depicting a tough journey rest for a moment, she with her groceries and he with a beer. An artist fills an abandoned building with lithe torsos made from the charred wood that had choked its apartments. A blind guitarist sings boleros from a faraway island. Read more..

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 Bronxite John Melton checks out audio equipment at Bronx Speakers Store on Boston Road and says he likes to blast car stereo, to the chagrin of many.

 You wouldn’t know it from all the noise, but the Bronx has gotten quieter this year.

Bronxites logged almost 8% fewer noise complaints to the city’s 311 hotline during the first six months of this year than they did over the same period last year.

There were 28,915 noise complaints from Jan. 1 to the end of June, compared with 31,411 last year.

“I have to give some credit to the weather,” said Councilman James Vacca (D-East Bronx). “We’ve had a mild summer so far and a lot of rain and those are both circumstances that are detriments to noise. That’s got to be a contributing factor.”

“I’m not surprised. It seems to be less noisy,” said George Dallas, 72, of Morris Park. “It’s just people blowing their horns. But that’s New York drivers. You have to live with it.”

For the second year in a row, Community Board 7, which includes Norwood, University Heights, Jerome Park, Bedford Park, Fordham and Kingsbridge Heights topped the list with the most noise complaints in the borough.

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Nogotaly Meite, 32, was mauled by a pit bull that showed no signs of belonging to anyone. The dog was shot dead, but the search for an owner continues.

 The husband of a pregnant woman viciously mauled by a pit bull in the Bronx begged cops yesterday to find the dog’s owner so his family can stop living in fear.

“I want to find the owner of the dog,” said Madous Meite, whose wife, Nogotaly Meite, was attacked Monday as she hawked newspapers in front of the East Tremont Ave. subway stop. “He has to account for his dog. We are hurt. We don’t know what to do now.”

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Todd Heisler/The New York Times

CONVERGENCE Shoppers navigate the intersection of Southern Boulevard, Boston Road and 174th Street, a business hub in Crotona Park East. New construction has replaced blight in many parts of the neighborhood.

After being eviscerated by highway projects, poverty, public health crises and crime, this square-mile South Bronx neighborhood took its final blow in the form of arson, both by tenants and landlords, which helped to reduce rows of tenements to rubble.

The ruined streets conjured fear when used as film locations, whether for horror movies (“Wolfen”) or police dramas (“Fort Apache the Bronx”). They also served as a different type of media backdrop when, 31 years ago this month, President Jimmy Carter  paid a visit, describing the area as America’s “worst slum.”

In the intervening decades, much has changed. Once-desolate lots now have housing, whether rebuilt two-families or luxury condominiums.

One lot that Mr. Carter visited is now the site of Interval Green and Louis Nine House, a $46 million complex with 173 moderately priced apartments, built with planted roofs and leafy courtyards by the nonprofit Women Housing and Economic Development Corporation. It is to open to renters next month.

Some new homes in the area make use of materials that are sensitive to Crotona high asthma rates. In fact, 28 new brick-and-stone two- and three-families with nontoxic rugs and paints built by the Blue Sea Development Company, won a city environmental award in September.

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