Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. announced on Monday that the city had started talking with Sanford Golf Design to design and build a championship-caliber golf course over a former garbage dump at Ferry Point Park in the Bronx, potentially giving new life to a project that has been dogged by years of delay and problems. The project’s price tag has nearly quadrupled since it was proposed in 1998, to well over $80 million, by one estimate.
The proposed 18-hole, links-style Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course would be built using city capital funds, with an estimated completion by the fall of 2010. A public hearing on the proposal has been scheduled for 10 a.m. on June 26, 22 Reade Street in Manhattan. After construction has begun, the city plans to seek proposals from businesses to operate the golf course and make additional improvements, including a clubhouse and restaurant.
However, New York City Park Advocates, a community group that has often been critical of the Parks Department, quickly issued a statement criticizing the proposed deal. The group said that the city had not completed a study of the project’s environmental impact, noting that the site included a former landfill.
The project has a long and troubled history.
In 1998, during the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Parks Department announced plans to have a developer, Ferry Point Partners, build a golf course. It would have received a 35-year lease in exchange for financing the $22 million project, which was to be completed by 2001. The 222-acre site called for a driving range, a clubhouse, two playgrounds, a banquet hall and a restaurant overlooking the East River, as well as a waterfront esplanade.
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.
It’s midnight on a Monday night, and the walls of Fratelli’s Pizza Café are thumping with the music from the Hunts Point Triangle strip club next door. John Fratelli is kneading dough for pepperoni rolls and leafing through Forbes between fielding orders from the wholesale market workers.
(”Hey, John! Send over a pie at 1:30, willya?”) Sometimes, John says, strippers from next-door come by for whole lasagnas. “I don’t know how they do it!” he says. “They eat a whole lasagna and then dance all night!” He clutches his stomach and laughs.
Restaurants in Hunts Point cater to the people who work hard slinging fish and breaking down sides of meat (and stripping). Manhattan might be the restaurant capital of the world, but it’s actually this South Bronx neighborhood that is essential to the way we eat. Whether you’re picking up broccoli at D’Agostinos, or enjoying a porterhouse at Peter Luger, much of the fresh food you buy has passed through the wholesale markets in Hunts Point.
The Hunts Point food-distribution center is the largest wholesale food market in the world. It’s made up of three entities—meat, fish, and produce markets—that supply restaurants and supermarkets throughout the country. Thousands of employees at the market work through the night to ship food to the sleeping city.
The market sits on a desolate South Bronx peninsula jutting into the East River. Planes from LaGuardia take off directly across the water and roar low overhead. The neighborhood feels remote from Manhattan, but it’s vital to the city.
Although the market is large, it’s often startlingly old-fashioned; many of the companies at Hunts Point are small and family-owned. And although the neighborhood looks gritty, it often feels like a small town. Guys just off work wave out their car windows to each other, and when they stop by a nearby restaurant, the person behind the counter already knows what they want.
“It’s a blue-collar job engine,” says produce market co-president Matthew D’Arrigo, of D’Arrigo Bros. Co. “Thousands of guys come through—customers, drivers and workers . . . you’ve got a real hardworking-man kind of mentality.”
That intricate infrastructure of moving food in and out, 24 hours a day, makes for a lot of hungry people. So where are the best places to eat in the neighborhood that feeds the city?
Fratelli’s Pizza Café is justifiably famous for its broccoli-rabe hero. The sautéed broccoli rabe has a sheen of olive oil and comes on a soft roll, studded with golden-brown cloves of garlic. John, Joey, and Mario, the three Fratelli brothers, learned to cook from their immigrant parents. Fratelli’s hours are the same as the wholesale market’s: open continuously from midnight on Sunday until midnight on Friday; closed on weekends.
According to Mario, who works midnight to noon, there are a number of advantages to this arrangement. For one thing, he’s able to make long-simmered stocks and tomato sauces, because there’s always someone there to tend it. And being so enmeshed with his suppliers is also a good thing:
“We get everything from the market,” he says, “and the workers there order from us, so they make sure I get the best product at a good cost.”
D’Arrigo, who supplies Fratelli’s with its broccoli rabe, and who eats there often, says:
“It doesn’t hurt, that’s for sure, being right across the street.”
Hunts Point used to have a reputation as one of the most dangerous places in the city. But this area, like the rest of the city, has gotten considerably tamer over the years.
Nick Papamichael, the owner of Sugar Ray’s Café, a 24-hour greasy spoon and doughnut shop next to Fratelli’s, has plenty to say about the neighborhood.
“They’ve really clamped down on the hookers,” he says. “If you see a good-looking hooker, just say ‘Officer, I’m lost!’ And if they have teeth? Then you know they’re undercovers.”
South Brother Island, seven acres of dense forest, bittersweet vines, flocks of wild birds and little else, is a speck in the East River ? and a glimpse of what the rest of the city might have looked like thousands of years ago.
Historically overlooked and unwanted, it changed hands for $10 in 1975, despite being located in the middle of New York City.
But South Brother, the last East River island of any significant size to remain in private hands, will finally get its due today when it is formally transferred to the city as part of a complex $2 million deal brokered by the Trust for Public Land and financed with federal money secured by United States Representative Jos? E. Serrano.
?The idea of buying an island ? I mean, how many people get to buy an island?? said Mr. Serrano, whose district includes South Brother.
South Brother, situated between the Bronx and Queens and within sight of the Rikers Island guard towers, will most likely be left as it is, officials said, preserved as a nature sanctuary and administered by the city?s Department of Parks and Recreation.
The island ? the smaller sibling of the better known North Brother Island, which is 500 feet to the north and once the quarantine home of Typhoid Mary ? suddenly became a desirable property precisely because it had been unwanted for so long.
Neighboring islands, including North Brother, became sites for hospitals that treated infectious diseases like typhus and tuberculosis and for mental hospitals, power plants, jails, homeless shelters and cemeteries for the indigent. But South Brother, neglected by humans, turned into a prime nesting spot for birds and a migration stopping point for such New York City exotica as the great blue heron.
?It is a natural jewel,? said Clark Wallace, project manager for the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group.
In addition to several types of herons, the island?s bird population includes ibises, oyster catchers, cormorants and egrets. In its forest are locust, white mulberry and black cherry trees, covered by thick tangles of oriental bittersweet vines that cover trees and ground alike. Because there are no predators on the island, many birds build their nests on the ground.
K. Jacob Ruppert, whose great-great-uncle Jacob Ruppert Jr. owned the island and was a co-owner of the New York Yankees in the early 1900s, said South Brother was a bird paradise when he paid his only visit in 2004.
?There?s no beautiful lagoon,? he said. ?It?s a mound of bird poop. But there are beautiful birds. I never thought I could walk up to a swan on her nest. The ground is nothing but bird droppings and broken egg shells.?
But humans, even if few have ever set foot on the island, have had an impact.
During New York City Audubon?s annual surveys of the island, volunteers have found dead birds entangled in fishing lines and other debris. Adult birds have been found dead on or near nests that contained unhatched eggs, and Mr. Ruppert said he spotted a television set that had washed ashore.
Maria Torres, president and chief operating officer of the Point, a nonprofit group that is working to revitalize the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, and Mr. Serrano said they had been interested in buying South Brother for the public since 1997. But the owner, Hampton Scows, a Long Island sand and gravel company, had not been interested in selling until recently.
Official with Hampton Scows declined to comment, as did the company?s lawyer, Michael McMahon.
But once Hampton Scows signaled its willingness to sell, the Point and the Bronx-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which had received federal money through Mr. Serrano?s efforts to buy private land along the Bronx and East Rivers for public use, agreed to pool their money to come up with the $2 million asking price.
Unlike better-known East River islands like Randalls, Roosevelt and Rikers, South Brother?s past is murky.
Both North and South Brother Islands were claimed by the Dutch West India Company in 1614, according to ?The Other Islands of New York,? a book by Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller, and both were originally named ?De Gesellen.? (The term was translated as ?the companions.?)
The islands soon passed into the hands of the English, but remained undeveloped for almost two centuries because of the treacherous currents surrounding them, according to the book.
South Brother may have been a base for Union soldiers during the Civil War, and in about 1894, it was purchased by Jacob Ruppert Jr., a brewing magnate who bought the Yankees with Col. Tillinghast L?Hommedieu Huston in 1915. (Mr. Ruppert?s tenure in baseball included the purchase of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox, the opening of Yankee Stadium and eight World Series titles.) Mr. Ruppert built a yacht house on South Brother, and amateur baseball games were held on an adjacent field. Legend has it that Ruth would occasionally show up to practice his swing, swatting balls far into the East River.
After Mr. Ruppert?s summer home burned down in 1909, South Brother went through another long fallow period. The island changed hands several more times until 1975, when Hampton Scows bought it for $10.
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