Talk Bronx New York

Mill Pond Park in the Bronx has been named February’s Park of the Month. The ten-acre park opened last October as part of the Yankee Stadium Redevelopment Project, and the upcoming arrival of spring and the warm weather season offers fresh opportunities to discover nature, connect with the community, and have fun outdoors. Hugging the banks of the Harlem River, Mill Pond Park has transformed a formerly run-down industrial section of the south Bronx into a state-of-the-art recreational facility. The park is located along East 149th Street and Exterior Street, across the street from the Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market.

“Mill Pond Park is a creatively designed, exciting new park that brings increased green space and waterfront access to the South Bronx,” said Commissioner Adrian Benepe. “The park’s state of the art tennis courts, esplanade, picnic area, and youth sand play area offer various ways to have fun and connect with nature. Mill Pond Park is a great place to get out, workout, and eat out right on the Harlem River waterfront.”

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Almost five years ago, Transcon International Inc. leased space in a nearly empty former manufacturing building in the Port Morris section of the South Bronx.

The needle trade businesses had for years been leaving the neighborhood, which was a symbol of urban blight in the 1970s and 1980s, and the building, on Rose Feiss Boulevard just east of Bruckner Boulevard, had at one time been scheduled for demolition by New York City.

Now, Transcon, a warehouse and shipping company, occupies four of the building’s six floors — the other tenant is a military uniform manufacturer — and its executives could not be happier with this neighborhood, which seems to have hit its stride.

“This is a phenomenal little peninsula of extraordinary abilities,” said Michael Blodget, the chief executive of Transcon, referring to an area that stretches roughly from 149th Street south to the Harlem and East Rivers and the borough’s southern border.

Covering about 40 square blocks and encompassing Mott Haven, Port Morris, named after a port created along the East River by Gouverneur Morris, one of the writers of the Constitution, is one of the few industrial areas of the city that are flourishing. Read more..

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The Hub — the commercial strip around Third Avenue and 149th Street — is among the parts of the South Bronx that some boosters are trying to rebrand as the “Downtown Bronx.” (Photos: David Gonzalez/The New York Times) City and Bronx officials this week trumpeted a major pedestrians and traffic redesign of the Hub, the commercial strip around Third Avenue and East 149th Street. Perhaps it will be more successful than a previous makeover, which tried to rebrand the area as the “Downtown Bronx.”

Fluttering above the heads of officials — and sometimes above the consciousness of local residents — were banners affixed several years ago to lampposts promoting the “Downtown Bronx Shopping District.” Never mind that the term is nothing less than a geographical impossibility to anyone who actually grew up in the Bronx, where “downtown” pretty much meant any place below 125th Street in Manhattan.

This attempt at rebranding stumps many people who walk past those banners daily (as they go to take the subway downtown, of course). Some thought it meant you could catch Manhattan-bound buses. Others said Downtown Bronx was all the way south, up against the river in Port Morris. Few knew they were smack dab in the thick of it.

Banners in the Hub commercial district in the South Bronx calls the area the “Downtown Bronx.”

Jonathan Sanchez, a security guard on his way to work, had no clue where it was. “This is the South Bronx right here,” he said, oblivious to the banner on a nearby lamppost. “Downtown is more like, Manhattan. The South Bronx is, you know, this area. It seems very good. It’s not like it used to be.” Read more..

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Push in Bronx for H.I.V. Test for All

Dr. Donna Futterman, left, with Rosita Gonzalez and colleagues at Montefiore Medical Center, helped the city shape the plan.

The New York City health department plans to announce on Thursday an ambitious three-year effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx, which has a far higher death rate from AIDS than any other borough. The campaign will begin with a push to make the voluntary testing routine in emergency rooms and storefront clinics, where city officials say that cumbersome consent procedures required by state law have deterred doctors from offering the tests.

“Routine would mean if you came into the emergency room for asthma or a broken leg, we test everyone for H.I.V., if they’re willing,” the health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said in an interview on Wednesday.

While Manhattan has long been the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in New York, with the highest incidence of both AIDS and H.I.V., the virus that causes it, the Bronx, with its poorer population, has far more deaths from the disease. Public health officials attribute this to people not getting tested until it is too late to treat the virus effectively, thus turning a disease that can now be managed with medication into a death sentence.

Several AIDS experts said on Wednesday that the Bronx campaign was the most aggressive testing effort they could recall in the nation. Two years ago, Washington, D.C., made a high-profile push to test 450,000 residents, enlisting celebrity endorsements and distributing 80,000 free testing kits, but the campaign resulted in only about 45,000 people being tested.

“What’s new here is that we are implementing it on this large a level,” said Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who helped New York develop the new program. “The Bronx has 1.3 million people. It’s bigger than most cities, bigger than Boston, bigger than Washington. We’re talking about a significant urban population.”

City officials estimate that 40 percent of the 830,000 people ages 18 to 64 in the Bronx have been tested for H.I.V. in the past year. Half of the remainder, about 250,000 people, have never been tested, and the goal is to test them first. Tests would be given at 40 designated sites, including clinics, community centers, churches and emergency rooms. Dr. Monica Sweeney, an assistant health commissioner for H.I.V. prevention, said the city had not set aside money specifically for the program, but would absorb the $12 cost of each test.

In organizing the campaign, which formally begins on Friday, Dr. Frieden has enlisted support from elected officials, health care providers and clergy members in the Bronx. But the proposal is raising some concerns.

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Greening the Bronx, One Castoff at a Time

 

Omar Freilla, center, started a cooperative to recycle building supplies with, from left, Julie Falu Garcia, Yasin York, Gloria Walker and Carlos Angel.

 Carlos Angel, left, of ReBuilders Source solicits construction materials at an Upper West Side building under renovation.

No one would mistake Timpson Place in the South Bronx for the cradle of a new environmental movement. This short street wedged between Bruckner and Southern Boulevards and East 149th Street is lined with small homes and a couple of brick warehouses. The largest tree — or, more accurately, what remains of it — is a Beetle-size hunk of roots and trunk that was yanked out of a construction site and dumped onto the sidewalk.

Give Omar Freilla a chance, and he might find a use for that trunk. Inside a green-and-white warehouse on Timpson Place, he has been helping a small crew of urban recyclers arrange rows of doors, stacks of tiles, pallets of gravel and gallons of paint as they prepare for Monday’s official opening of ReBuilders Source, where used and overstocked building supplies will be sold at deep discounts. He believes it is the nation’s first worker-owned cooperative for reused building materials.

“The stuff you see here, if you look at it for what it is, is a toilet or a cabinet, it’s not garbage,” he said. “If you put it in a Dumpster, then it becomes waste. Context is everything. All we’re doing is changing the context.”

He intends to do the same for his neighborhood, Hunts Point, which for decades has held the dubious honor of being the city’s dumping ground. Wastewater treatment plants, smelly sludge processing facilities and riverside scrap yards outnumber parks. Mr. Freilla figured that if he could get people to see the value in things others tossed away, he might also change how they look at the out-of-the-way neighborhood, too. Read more..

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