Talk Bronx New York

Is Jose the Bronx Beaver Still Around?

Jose, the Bronx River beaver.

Bite marks like these give hope that Jose is still alive.

Fans of Jose, the famous Bronx River beaver, are hoping he isn’t resting in peace.

The bucktoothed, broad-tailed furry symbol of the once badly polluted river’s slow rebirth is hopefully still alive and well, gnawing away on tree branches for his riverbank lodge inside the protective grounds of the New York Botanical Garden.

His fans and river supporters became concerned last month when scuba and harbor unit cops patrolling the East River near the United Nations for the Pope’s visit rescued a beaver floundering in the water there.

Named after Rep. Jose Serrano (D-Bronx), who has pumped federal money into cleaning up the river, Jose had not been spotted for some time, and his fans fear the nocturnal furry guy might have been drawn downriver, attracted by the bright lights of the big city.

Cops said the animal they spotted midday in the East River on April 18 was tilted unnaturally and showed labored breathing.

They lassoed the struggling 40-pound, 4-foot-long male with a safety noose and hauled it aboard the harbor patrol boat.

Unfortunately, the animal later died as it was being transported to an upstate animal clinic.

Stephen Sautner, assistant director of conservation communications at the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, said it has been awhile since anyone has actually seen Jose.

“The last I heard of a confirmed sighting on the Bronx River property was in August last year during some of the herring surveys along the river,” he said. “Someone even clicked a photo. Nothing confirmed since then.”

But Sautner offered some hope Jose is alive and well.

Read more..

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

NYC Store Saves Home Supplies From Trash & Resells Them 

Brand-new porcelain toilets, some still in their boxes, stood on a pallet in the warehouse. Nearby was a pile of unused ceramic tiles. And stacked against the walls of the building were about 200 doors.

This was not the inventory of a Home Depot, a Lowes or some other big home improvement store, but of ReBuilders Source, a building materials re-use store in the Bronx.

The store sells building materials donated by demolition or construction contractors, home renovators and other hardware stores with surplus inventory. The main goal project is to offer an alternative to the landfill for building supplies that normally might get thrown into the trash.

Workers at the store have spent months creating a donor network, making cold calls and researching on the Internet. Once they know that building materials are being tossed out, they will arrange to send a truck to pick them up. Much of what they sell, at discounts between 25 and 50 percent, has never been used.

The store, which celebrates its grand opening on Monday, is the first project of Green Worker Cooperatives, an organization with the goal of creating environmentally friendly jobs and businesses in the poor neighborhood.

“We didn’t want to wait for people outside the community to decide what kind of jobs we would have in the community,” said Omar Freilla, who leads the cooperative and helped launch the store in the Hunts Point section.

The idea of re-use is not new, but it is gaining recognition around the country as people embrace the idea of green building.

There are more than 1,000 building material re-use stores in the country, according to the Pittsburgh-based Building Materials Reuse Association.

An estimate by the BMRA in 2005 found that re-use stores sell an estimated 315,000 to 360,000 tons of building materials each year, a tiny fraction of total waste from building activities.

“There’s an awful lot more room to grow,” said BMRA President Brad Guy.

In New York, thousands of tons of construction and demolition debris are thrown away each year. But there are only a handful of stores that sell salvaged building materials.

Build It Green! NYC, a nonprofit store in Queens, sold about 350 tons of building materials in 2007, according to Justin Green, the program director. It made $900 per ton, he said.

“It’s not a massive takeout,” Green said. “But New York City could support maybe 20 more of these stores because we do create so much waste.”

In the Bronx, waste is an acute community concern: The borough handles more than 8,000 tons of the approximately 45,000 tons of waste generated daily by the city, according to the Department of Sanitation. Much of that is handled in the South Bronx.

Residents in the neighborhood have long been concerned about the effects on air quality and public health of nearly two dozen waste transfer stations in the neighborhood, especially the fume-exhaling trucks that serve them. The neighborhood has one of the highest rates of asthma in the city.

The Department of Sanitation said that the amount of trash being transported for handling in the Bronx has gone down over the past 20 years, because of increased regulation. Most garbage exported to out-of-state landfills is by rail, cutting down on truck traffic, said Thomas Milora, executive assistant to the sanitation commissioner. Read more..

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

Students from the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation hear a talk by zoo employee Linda Corcoran.

Hands on: Students Aber Hajdarmataj (l.), and Yuliana Hernandez take measurements from a miniature ecosystem they created in class.

Wildlife on Top List of Studies For One Bronx School 

At the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation, the zoo is more than a field trip

When Elijah Maderon attended a class at the Bronx Zoo in January, he and his fellow sixth-graders gave presentations on how they might protect peregrine falcons from the pesticide DDT if they were conservationists on a tight budget.

Inspired by the activity, Elijah quickly prepared a proposal afterward. With the silver tongue of an experienced entrepreneur, he described a video game to an intrigued teacher. Called Zoo Tycoon, the game allows players to work within a budget to build and maintain a zoo with the goals of ensuring its animals’ health and happiness while still turning a profit. The game, Elijah maintained, would fit right in with his school’s curriculum.

That kind of thinking is encouraged at the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation (UASWC) in the Bronx, where Elijah and 148 other students represent the inaugural class. This is one of 19 themed-curricula public schools throughout New York City funded partly by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Read more..

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

New life for Bronx rail station?

Can the Cass Gilbert-designed Westchester Avenue Railroad Station ? abandoned since 1937 ? be transformed into a grand entrance to the Bronx River and its new greenway?

That?s the hope of local group Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice ? one that?s complicated and costly.

?It could be a beautiful gateway from Westchester Avenue to the new park,? said Tawkiyah Jordan, senior director for community programs at Youth Ministries.

The boarded-up station that belongs to Amtrak overlooks the new Concrete Plant Park, which is expected to open in summer 2008. After months of pestering Amtrak, Youth Ministries was able to bring in architects to look at the space.

?It?s a building that would break your heart to lose,? said Joan Byron, of the Pratt Center for Community Development. ?But it?s about as challenging a site as they come.?

It?s ?fragile,? with an exposed steel lattice work embedded with terra cotta, Byron said. ?The steel is expanding and exfoliating, like little potato chips flaking off, and that?s damaging the terra cotta.?

It would cost millions to renovate the roughly 2,700 square foot building above rail tracks. ?It?s like the size of a ranch house,? Byron said, ?and that?s one of the challenges because it can?t generate revenue that would pay for its development debt.?

Residents have pitched turning it into a Bronx River ecology center or a place for renting fishing gear and canoes. Some envision a holistic heath care and reproductive rights clinic there or a food pantry or restaurant.

Linda Cox, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, the public-private partnership overseeing the Bronx River Greenway, said any project would be ?a daunting? undertaking.

?We need a closer look at the costs, the benefits and if it?s even feasible for the building to be made available,? she said.

Adam Liebowitz, of community group the Point, said some locals want a hip-hop museum.

?The South Bronx was the birthplace of hip-hop and to have this place all graffitied up in the heart of the neighborhood could be great,? Liebowitz said. If not, ?I think Youth Ministries would make sure it?s something the whole community has a stake in.?

SOURCE: NYMetro.us

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