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.

CITY GUIDE: Where to sleep, eat and shop in New York

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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Rumblings of a Bronx Comeback From Espada

He has been out of the political spotlight for a few years. But Pedro Espada Jr. is clearly thinking serious of re-emerging into the raucous Bronx electoral life.

Mr. Espada, a former Democratic state senator and one-time candidate for Bronx borough president, is strongly considering running again for the State Senate. However, Mr. Espada, who represented the Hunts Point and Bronx River sections (the 32nd Senate District), is now looking instead at running in the adjacent 33rd Senate District, which stretches from Kingsbridge to East Tremont. He would be challenging the incumbent, Efrain González Jr.

Mr. Espada has long been a colorful political figure and, for a long time, the most prominent enemy of the Bronx Democratic Party organization. He has also been a lightning rod, of sorts, in the heavily Democratic Bronx because of his announcement in 2002 that he would switch parties and become a Republican.

In the end, however, he never officially changed his registration, although he began to sit with the members of the Republican majority to participate in that party’s conferences.

“My wife and I moved to the Mosholu Parkway area and people started asking me to get more involved in community activities, from visiting schools to participating in Little League activities,” Mr. Espada said. “And most of all, these people kept telling me that there should be an alternative to the present incumbent, Senator González.”

As a result, he said, those residents who urged him to run for the Senate, began circulating petitions to collect signatures to qualify Mr. Espada to get a spot on the ballot for the Sept. 9 Democratic primary.

“As of this moment, I have not announced my candidacy,” Mr. Espada said. “And I won’t until I’m convinced that the residents truly want a change.”

But then, Mr. Espada began sounding very much like a candidate ready for political battle.” There is a huge vacuum of leadership in this area and there is no time to lose,” he said. “And I’m positioned to offer them the leadership that this area deserves.”

Mr. González, the former senator said, is a virtual absentee official. “People have simply not heard from the incumbent,” he added. “And that’s not just in the last two years, but in the last 20 years.”

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Public Housing Residents Face Loss of Their Community Centers

Ishmael Sylle, 12, focusing on a chess game at Parkside Houses’ community center in the Bronx. After-school programs are popular.

 Marc Anthony Reyes, 10, left, and Andre Delgado, 9, worked on a computer.

 Children made Father’s Day cards.

An average of 200 people of all ages use the center daily at Parkside Houses, where girls recently walked an imaginary fashion runway.

The community center at Parkside Houses, a public housing complex in the Bronx, has one floor, four rooms and many uses.

Adults work on their résumés on one of 10 computers or play Scrabble on Friday nights. Teenagers congregate around the pool tables in the game room or train for competition as part of the Parkside Knights track and field team. But the center, on the ground floor of a red-brick building across from a wooded stretch of the Bronx River Parkway, is really a children’s place.

After school on Thursday, about a dozen children sat in the multipurpose room making Father’s Day cards out of construction paper and buttons while several boys and girls played chess and video games down the hall. They ate turkey and cheese sandwiches. They got help with their homework.

Andre and Giovani Delgado spend their afternoons at the center, waiting for their mother, Ruth Delgado, to pick them up at about 5:30 p.m. Ms. Delgado, a building custodian and single mother, said she trusted the staff and liked the price: $80 a year to enroll Andre, 9, and Giovani, 11, in the center’s after-school program.

But Ms. Delgado and other parents are worried about the fate of the center. The city’s public housing agency, the New York City Housing Authority, announced last month that budget problems could force it to close Parkside and hundreds of other community centers, senior centers and recreational, job-training and educational programs throughout the five boroughs.

Ms. Delgado said that she made $11.10 an hour and could not afford to hire a baby sitter. She would be left with one option if the center closed: “I’m going to have to get my oldest one a key so they can be home by themselves,” she said, shaking her head.

The proposed cuts would affect hundreds of thousands of children, adults and older people who live in the city’s 343 public housing complexes, as well as thousands of others who are not residents but regularly use the centers. The plan has outraged tenants, public housing advocates and City Council members, focusing renewed attention on the New York City Housing Authority’s budget shortfall and its financial dealings with the city.

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New York Real Estate: Morris Park, Bronx

MAP/BOUNDARIES

Morris Park is defined by Pelham Parkway to the north, the Amtrak/Metro-North tracks to the east and south and Muliner Avenue and Bronxdale Avenue to the west.

INTRO

Morris Park’s thriving Italian community is often compared to the better-known Little Italy centered on Arthur Avenue, but that doesn’t mean the locals are any less proud of their neighborhood.

The number of pasticcerie, salumerias, and pizzerias crammed into the area is spellbinding, Italian is spoken in the shops, and even the parking meters are striped with the colors of the motherland’s flag.

But at the turn of the century, Morris Park was famous for something else: its racetrack, which was built by John Albert Morris.

Local development picked up in 1910 when a streetcar line was installed on Morris Park Avenue, and construction of new roads and housing continuing well past World War II. Soon, droves of Italian immigrants began settling in the area.

Though the area’s Italian qualities are prominent, some locals claim there’s more to Morris Park than the Italian community.

“It’s always been a family area, and that’s stayed the same, but now all types of people live here,” said Angela DaBenigno, who moved to Morris Park in 1992. “People move in, people move out, but the area constantly adapts to the changes.”

The neighborhood is now home to significant populations of Albanians, Latinos and Chinese.

“There are a lot of different ethnic varieties, different colors,” said DaBenigno. “Years ago it was much more Italian, but times change.”

Though Morris Park’s population has become more diverse in recent years, residents still have certain things in common.

“It’ll always be a good, regular crowd–down-to-earth, working class people,” said DaBenigno. “No matter how much it changes, it’s still a gem in the Bronx.”

TO EAT & DRINK

Morris Park’s restaurant scene is comprised largely of Italian eateries, with the pizza places considered among the best in the Bronx. Try Emilio’s (1051 Morris Park Ave.); Luciano’s Pizza (1005 Morris Park Ave.); Pasta Pasta (2023 Williamsbridge Rd.); and Federici Ristorante (980 Morris Park Ave.).

• Patricia’s

This extraordinarily popular brick pizza restaurant gets so packed during peak hours that squeezing through to your table can be quite trying indeed. The atmosphere’s unbeatable, and so is the food: sandwiches made with slices of rich and oily focaccia, breadbaskets accompanied by garlicky dips and arguably some of the best pizza in the Bronx (some even say the city).

1080 Morris Park Ave. 718-409-9069

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A Community Plan for the ‘Highway to Nowhere’

North of Westchester Avenue, where the Sheridan now runs on grade, the Community Plan would create 1,200 new homes with retail and community space below. Open space would enable residents of Longwood and West Farms to easily reach the Bronx River and the new and redeveloped parkland of the Bronx River Greenway.

Sheridan ramp traffic menaces pedestrians and subway riders and interrupts the Westchester Avenue commercial strip

Removing the Sheridan would allow development of a retail and community hub at the intersection of Whitlock and Westchester Avenues, linking the Number 6 train stop with the station designed by Cass Gilbert for the New York and New Haven Railroad.

For 10 years, South Bronx residents have been fighting to get the state to tear down an old expressway so that a greener and more sustainable mixed-use neighborhood can take its place. The community’s vision fits nicely with the goals of the city’s long-term sustainability plan, PlaNYC2030. But will the city embrace this precocious community-based effort?

The Highway to Nowhere

South Bronx residents have fought for a decade to cast off the shadow of Robert Moses’ Sheridan expressway — a 1.25-mile, little-used stretch of highway locally known as “the highway to nowhere.” In its place they aim to build more than 1,000 sustainable and affordable apartments, greenways, parks, resident services and progressive businesses that will offer living-wage, long-term jobs to Bronx residents in the city’s burgeoning “green industry” to Bronx residents.

One of Moses’ few projects that never reached full fruition, the Sheridan Expressway carries an average of 37,000 cars a day (to compare, on any given day, approximately five times as many cars traverse the nearby Cross Bronx Expressway). Construction on the Sheridan began in 1958, and Moses named the road for his good friend, the Bronx commissioner of public works, Arthur V. Sheridan, who died in a car accident in 1952.

Determined to provide yet another option for drivers traveling between New York City and New England, Moses originally envisioned the Sheridan to continue four miles north from the Cross Bronx Expressway through the New York Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo, to the New England Thruway. In one of the first of several defeats that eventually ended Moses’ reign, advocates for the gardens and the zoo blocked his plan. This was good news for the city, but the South Bronx was left with the redundant stub of an expressway that connects the Cross Bronx to the Bruckner — a purpose already served by parallel stretches of the Major Deegan Expressway and the Bronx River Parkways.

Stunted or not, South Bronx residents say that the road does its share of damage. Not only does it cut them off from access to the Bronx River, but the Sheridan also separates Bronx Community Districts 2, 3 and 9 from one another. Home mostly to African American and Latino families with significantly lower than average household incomes, these districts also suffer from some of the highest asthma rates in the entire state.

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