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A Friendly Bustle, With Oases Nearby

IT was either the Bronx or Queens.

Jason Velez, 32, a financial adviser, and his girlfriend, RoseAnn Monterroso, 28, a consignment shop manager, had decided to move in together. He owned a one-bedroom in Bedford Park and worked nearby in Belmont. She owned a one-bedroom in Jackson Heights and commuted to Midtown.

They looked in Queens but decided they would get more for their money in Bedford Park — whose proximity to public transportation and major highways provides easy commuting to both Manhattan and Westchester.

“There’s the Bronx stigma,” said Mr. Velez, who grew up in Parkchester. “I thought it would be hard to convince her, but the more she saw, she started liking it.”

She sold her place, he sold his, and they bought a two-bedroom in his co-op on East 201st Street for $178,000. They plan to redo the bath and closets with a custom job, not prefab units.

“We’ll take the extra money,” Mr. Velez said, “and instead of buying something we don’t like, we’ll create something we do like.”

But Bedford Park is about more than affordability to Mr. Velez. It’s about friendliness. For instance three weeks ago his broker, David Abreu, who lives next door, visited a Manhattan comedy club to witness what Mr. Velez had billed as his first foray into stand-up. (In fact, Mr. Velez is no comedian: halfway through his “set,” he pulled Ms. Monterroso onstage, dropped to one knee and proposed. She said yes.)

Once heavily Irish and Jewish, Bedford Park in the 2000 census was 58 percent Hispanic, 17 percent white, 13 percent black and 7 percent Asian. There is a large mix of new arrivals, among them Guyanese, Albanian and Vietnamese. A Korean commercial strip occupies a block of East 204th Street.

John Dhauraj, a Guyanese immigrant who has owned a three-bedroom house on East 203rd Street for 19 years, was chatting one recent afternoon with a neighbor, Cholelle Miranda, who grew up locally and rents a place in a six-story brick apartment house two doors down. Their block is typical: tree-lined and backing up to the woodsy Mosholu Parkway, with early 20th-century single-family and multifamily houses sandwiched in among apartment buildings.

“This block is still a community,” Ms. Miranda said, and Mr. Dhauraj added, “We look out for each other.”

Like many in this middle-class area, both feel pinched by the economy.

“Let me put it to you this way,” said Mr. Dhauraj, 63, who used to work in building maintenance. “Since I retired, I got to look at the pennies. When I was working, I never looked at pennies.”

Fortunately, Mr. Dhauraj bought before the wave of subprime lending. The Bronx is the seventh-ranked county in the nation for foreclosure-related decreases in home values, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.

But several factors insulate Bedford Park. Rental apartment buildings, which constitute a majority of housing here, are mostly immune. Typical homeowners have lived in their homes for a long time, so are less susceptible to the recent proliferation of risky loans.

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They’re Drawn Back, Once Again, by Stickball

 Eric Mortensen swinging for the fences at P.S. 95 at the 31st Annual Stickball Reunion and his class’s 50th reunion.

 Alan Frishman showed Sunny Dolney Moles a photograph of her that was taken on graduation day in 1958.

Yiggy showed up early, carrying the mop and broom handles he keeps in his closet back home. Barry Heyman, 63, arrived soon afterward, bearing a large black and white photograph of the eighth-grade class of 1958. David Sternthal, 63, the blurry one in the photo because he jerked when the boy next to him pinched him in the behind, brought his video camera.

Eric Mortensen, 66 — a retired teacher who carries his stickball gear in his minivan because, he explained, “You never know” — held out the hard rubber Spaldeen ball in his hand. “This stupid little ball, for a working-class neighborhood, provided us with all the entertainment we needed, until we got old enough to chase after girls,” he said.

They met Saturday morning on the blacktop of a schoolyard in the northern Bronx. They played in this yard when they were children and teenagers, and decades later, they still play in this yard, even if it is only once a year.

For 31 years, on the second Saturday in June, dozens of men and women who lived in the Van Cortlandt Village section of the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s play stickball at their old school, P.S. 95. They called it Stickball Days at first, and this time they called it the 31st Annual Stickball Reunion.

Ed Yaker, 63, a retired math teacher who lives near the school and who everyone calls Yiggy, started the tradition in 1977. That first year, about 10 or 12 people came, said Mr. Yaker, an easygoing sort whose business card lists some of his activities as “beach” and “golf.” After a while, more than 100 attended annually, and they started making commemorative T-shirts and handing out an award called the Novi, in honor of a classmate who died years ago, Alan Novikoff.

Mr. Yaker has since been inducted into the city’s Stickball Hall of Fame, affiliated with the Museum of the City of New York.

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