Talk Bronx New York

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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Bronx Hospitality, Unnoticed by the Tourist Guides

The folks who published AAA’s 2008 New York tour book had a hard time recommending any hotels in the Bronx. They could only find one, in fact, a rather bland-looking building a mile north of Yankee Stadium by a service road to the Major Deegan Expressway

Hey, the hotel fared better than restaurants, since the automobile club’s guide does not list a single place to eat in the Bronx. As far as the guide goes, Arthur Avenue, Morris Park Avenue or City Island do not exist.

This 45-room Howard Johnson is the only hotel listed for the Bronx in AAA’s 2008 New York tour book.

It is an odd distinction for that lone hotel, a Howard Johnson of no particular architectural distinction. And given the borough’s long battles against hot sheet motels that rent rooms by the hour, a casual observer might assume this place was no different.

But it is a real hotel catering to real tourists. One day last week, the parking lot was filled with cars from out of state, most belonging to guests who had come to see the Yankees play Cleveland. Retirees from Oklahoma and families from upstate New York eagerly hauled suitcases upstairs as they prepared to change into baseball jerseys and take in a game.

Chadd Morris and Brandon Bebout had driven eight hours from Cleveland to score game tickets. They asked a local police officer for the nearest hotel and were directed to the HoJo.

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Ladies And Gentlemen,The Bronx Is Choking!

One in four children in Hunts Point has asthma—an epidemic GABRIELE STEINHAUSER blames on environmental racism.

At first Tanya Fields thought it was just a regular cold.

For three days in November of 2004, her 5-month-old daughter, Trist-Ann, had been wheezing and coughing. It seemed like she was choking. Eventually the coughing fits became so bad that the little girl was vomiting; she couldn’t hold anything down. When her doctor failed to get Trist-Ann to breathe more easily, he told the young mother to take her to the emergency room. By the time they reached St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, Trist-Ann had fluid in her lungs. The diagnosis: pneumonia.

The doctors told Fields that her daughter could have drowned from the inside. The next four days and five nights, she did not leave her Trist-Ann’s side at the hospital, while her other daughter Taylor, who was two years old at the time, stayed with her parents in Harlem. It was the first of many trips to the emergency room for Fields, a 27-year-old office worker.

A few months later, Trist-Ann was back in the hospital, again with pneumonia.

At the age of 1, she was diagnosed with asthma.

In other parts of New York City, such a diagnosis might have been a surprise, but not where Tanya Fields and her two children live. In their neighborhood of Hunts Point, a small peninsula on the southeastern tip of the Bronx, one in four elementary-school children suffers from asthma.

Three decades after President Jimmy Carter’s famous walk past the abandoned buildings on Charlotte Street, a new epidemic has taken hold of the South Bronx. Public schools have their own asthma clinics, nebulizers ready to help students breathe when they start gasping for air in class. And while urban planners and public health specialists are still struggling to find the cause for the community’s disturbingly high asthma rates, for parents like Tanya Fields there is no question that it’s the air they breathe that makes their children wheeze.

Every week, according to citizens’ groups that monitor the site, up to 60,000 trucks take a turn off Bruckner Expressway and cut through the neighborhood’s small residential section (its current population is 47,000) to reach Hunts Point’s industrial sector, an area that plays a crucial role in New York City’s metabolism. On the peninsula’s 690 acres sit the world’s biggest food market, at least four private waste-transfer stations, a wastewater treatment plant and the New York Organic Fertilizer Company: a plant that turns half of New York City’s sludge (the solid material that is extracted from wastewater before it flows back into the city’s waterways) into fertilizer pellets.

Sometimes, residents say, they can smell the odors emerging from the plant at a distance of almost two miles.
Hunts Point represents an often-ignored dilemma of urban life: Where large numbers of people live together, they produce waste—waste that needs to be collected, transported, reused, recycled or disposed of. All too often that happens in poor communities of color—that is, communities like Hunts Point, where, in 1999, 97 percent of residents were Hispanic or African American and the median household income was $17,612 (less than half that of New York City as a whole). In September 2005, the Associated Press, in an analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency, found that African-Americans were 79 percent more likely to live in a neighborhood where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health risk. In many places, Hispanic and Asian minorities also suffered disproportionate impacts.

For activists around the country, this unequal distribution of waste-processing facilities has a name: environmental racism.

It was to achieve a measure of environmental justice that the New York City Planning Commission passed the so-called Fair Share Criteria in 1991, which stipulated that the benefits and burdens of municipal facilities should be allocated equally across neighborhoods. Three years later, in February 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order demanding that all federal agencies make environmental justice part of their mission.

And yet, 13 years later, at a time celebrities drive hybrid cars and talk of global warming and sustainability has won Oscars and Nobel Prizes, the struggle for environmental justice is far from over. Instead it continues, largely unnoticed, in places like Hunts Point, where the stage is much less glamorous. Here, the scene is set by a city that wastes, a neighborhood where people tend to mind their own business and a system of asymmetric political powers, where the theory of laws and regulations sometimes remains at a great remove from everyday practice.

It was in the summer of 2003, a few months after she had moved into her small, one-bedroom apartment on Fox Street, that Tanya Fields first noticed the smell. Heavy and inescapable, like a mix of chicken manure and rotting meat, it hung in the air, seeping through the cracks between window and air conditioner, forcing her and her little daughter to sit inside on hot summer days.

Her neighbors knew nothing about the odor’s origins. “The community had internalized the smell,” Fields recalled. “When it happened they covered their noses and their mouths and waited for it to pass.” What they did know was that the pungent smells gave them headaches and made them feel nauseous. On particularly bad days, the odor could even trigger asthma attacks.

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Slumming for Landlords: A pair of Bronx pols try to shoot down the latest in tenant protection

When it comes to lopsided battles, it’s hard to top the steady war that’s long raged between New York’s landlords and their tenants.

Any given weekday, just poke your head into a hearing room in the city’s housing courts. There, row upon row of despairing tenants grimly clutch legal papers that demand back rent and/or eviction. Stalking the aisles, briefcases in hand, shouting out the names of their next victims, is a platoon of lawyers, all of them representing building owners willing to spare no legal expense.

As combat, this has all the fairness of a Panzer division rolling up on a fife-and-drum corps.

More than 90 percent of tenants arrive in these corridors without any kind of legal representation; for landlords, the ratio is the exact reverse. And no wonder: At stake here are the enormous profits that New York’s housing market represents, now more than ever.

A hefty lawyer’s retainer? Just a business deduction. An apartment vacated by a tenant paying an affordable, regulated rent? Priceless.

Which is why a group of tenant advocates seized the moment last year and began pressing City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, herself a former housing organizer, to introduce new legislation that would try to balance the scales a little, giving tenants something more of a fighting chance.

Quinn took them up on it. Two disturbing trends, cited to her by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, caught the speaker’s attention: One is the steady slippage of apartments from rent regulation for reasons having nothing to do with reaching the magic deregulation mark of $2,000 a month; the other is the recent flood of private-equity money into buildings occupied by tenants whose current rents are nowhere near high enough to meet the returns that the new investors are likely to demand.

The bill that resulted from those talks would try to keep everyone honest. It would allow tenants subjected to repeated and purposeful abuses—where owners have withheld heat and hot water, constantly failed to make repairs, or dumped garbage in the hallways—to cite landlords for harassment. For the first time, harassment would be covered under the city’s housing-maintenance code, with violators subject to stiff fines and other penalties.

Introduced in October by Quinn and Manhattan council members Daniel Garodnick, who fought to keep apartments at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village affordable, and Melissa Mark-Viverito, whose East Harlem district is rapidly becoming a real estate hunting ground, Intro No. 627 is headed for hearings later this month before the council’s housing and buildings committee.

As is a little look-alike piece of legislation called Intro 638 that was quickly introduced in response by a pair of Bronx legislators happy to oblige the city’s ever-generous real estate lobby. The competing bill mandates that every harassment complaint be screened outside the courts to make sure it’s legitimate. It also contains the novel notion of letting landlords sue tenants for their own harassment. The goal here is to snuff this new tenants’-rights legislation in its cradle by generating much heat and little light about its potential impact.

“We just don’t want to open a Pandora’s box,” said Joel Rivera, the 28-year-old council majority leader, whose father is Bronx Democratic Party boss and State Assemblyman Jose Rivera. “Tenants who have a legitimate case deserve their day in court. But what we’re worried about,” Rivera added as he sat in the gallery in the council chamber last week, “is that there could be a lot of frivolous cases brought under this. We met with the tenant groups, and I said, ‘I hear you, but I have a responsibility to make sure it doesn’t produce frivolous cases.’ ”

Here now is a far-sighted legislator. Every day in housing court, there is a parade of panicked tenants who have received eviction notices claiming they never paid rent. They must comb through bureaus and pocketbooks in desperate search of their receipts. After these crumpled papers are produced, the landlords’ lawyers shrug. “Never mind,” they say. Since the tenants have no lawyers of their own to sputter to the judge about this outrageously frivolous and anxiety-producing waste of everyone’s time, these abuses go unchecked.

It has not previously occurred to anyone that there could be a long line of vengeful tenants bent on payback, scheming about filing their own frivolous lawsuits to burn up the landlords’ profits. “It’s human nature,” shrugged Rivera.

The councilman was asked if he’d had any help crafting his bill. “No, this was a result of a few of us in the council talking it over,” he said.

Had he consulted with landlord advocates, such as the Rent Stabilization Association, the prime lobbying arm for building owners? “Just in passing,” he answered. Rivera couldn’t remember when or where the discussions took place, or who the landlord representatives were. “I can’t remember who it was. But it was just in passing, not a set meeting or anything.”

The landlord reps, whoever they were, said that what Speaker Quinn’s bill needed was “balance,” Rivera recalled.

Rivera is actually not the lead sponsor on the counterproposal. That honor fell to Maria Baez, another Bronx representative and a close ally of the Rivera clan who once served as chief of staff to Rivera’s father. When Baez’s name appeared on the bill, tenant organizers in her district asked to discuss the matter.

“I called her office and asked for a meeting,” said Jackie Del Valle, an organizer for CASA (Community Action for Safe Apartments), which is based on Townsend Avenue in the West Bronx. “They said they’d get back to me. Then we heard nothing for two weeks.”

To get Baez’s attention, Del Valle brought a couple dozen residents last Tuesday to form a picket line in front of Baez’s office at 176th Street and the Grand Concourse. They marched around an immense red dollar sign made of wood chanting about tenant rights.

Among those present was Harold Dell, 65, who lives on nearby Morris Avenue. “Right now the landlord is a bank, and they keep taking us to court,” he said. “We can’t even find a super to call when things break.” Maggie Silva, 72, limped to the rally from her top-floor apartment on the Grand Concourse. Her ceilings have collapsed repeatedly in the past three years. “She has had to go to housing court every time to get repairs,” said Del Valle. “With this bill, she could file for harassment and, hopefully, get some justice.”

Baez wasn’t at her office to meet Silva or hear the chants. At City Hall the next day, the councilwoman was asked why she’d introduced the countermeasure. “For balance,” she said without breaking stride as she walked through the rotunda. Had she met with the RSA, the landlord organization? “No. Never met with them,” she said.

Frank Ricci, the longtime lobbyist for the RSA, remembered the process differently. “We met with her, and with Rivera,” he said in a telephone interview. “Our concern with the Speaker’s bill is that there’s a potential for a lot of frivolous cases and no one to screen them.”

Had he just been passing through when he met with the council members? “No,” he said, “it was a meeting. It was at City Hall. Baez and her staff, and Rivera and his staff, were there.”

Under term limits, both Baez and Rivera are in their final years as council members. Baez’s future plans are unclear, but in the game of musical chairs that term limits creates, Rivera is expected to run for Bronx borough president. Is that true, he was asked? He is an agreeable young man, and his face crinkled into a smile. “That’s something we are looking at,” he replied.

Such a race will cost at least $1 million. So far, Rivera has raised $155,000 toward that goal. Half of it has come from the real estate industry.

SOURCE: Village Voice

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Bronx residents, activists protest new tenant harassment law

Chanting and waving picket signs, two dozen residents and activists converged on Councilwoman Maria Baez’s office in Mount Hope Tuesday to protest a newly proposed tenant harassment law.

Opponents of Bill 638, which the Democratic councilwoman is sponsoring, said it would give landlords too much power to go after tenants, and would make it harder for tenants to fight back.

The language of the bill, being co-sponsored by Bronx Council Majority Leader and potential candidate for Bronx Borough President Joel Rivera, was largely written by the Rent Stabilization Association group, which represents landlords.

“It’s unfair and very imbalanced,” said Jackie del Valle, of Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA). “Tenants in [Baez’s] district are the most vulnerable, so we were shocked to learn that she introduced this bill.”

Protester Glenda Poe, 47, feared even those who made simple complaints would be penalized.

“Under this new bill, you can’t even call 311 because you have no lights or hot water because the landlord can accuse you of harassment, whereas the tenants have to prove the landlord intended to harass them,” Poe said. “It’s not right.”

Protester Enrique Colon, 38, suspected a hidden agenda.

“This just makes it easier for the landlord to kick tenants out. Then they can put the rents up to the market rate,” he said. “It’s making it easier to gentrify the area.”

The group wants Baez to instead throw her support behind Bill 627, a similar proposal sponsored by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and backed by several housing advocates and the rest of the Bronx Council delegation.

In a statement, Baez (D-West Bronx) cautioned that neither bill was a done deal, and said a final version is being negotiated with Quinn and her staff.

“We are having a healthy discussion and debate about both bills,” Baez said in a statement.

Rivera, who also is a Democrat, added that he wanted “all those concerned to understand that we are working hard to ensure that the final draft of this legislation will be fair and balanced to all parties.”

Still, concerns lingered with the protesters.

Local tenant Priscilla Henegan, 64, is expecting the worst, and called the proposed law “no good.”

“The bill Maria Baez signed off can allow landlords to treat us any way they want to treat us,” Henegan said. “It’s not going to protect us at all.”

SOURCE: NY Daily News

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