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A Onetime ‘Jungle’ Feels the Winds of the Past

THE crime occurred early on the morning of Wednesday, May 21. Mike Young, a handyman who is president of Padre Plaza community garden, arrived to find his saws, power drills, clippers and shovels — 24 items worth a total of $1,352, according to the list he keeps in his wallet — had been stolen.

Mr. Young discovered the theft when he was walking by the garden on his way to pick up his tools en route to a client’s house. A member of the garden called out to ask if he had left the shed open. Mr. Young said no but thought the question was odd. When he went to check, he saw to his dismay that the shed was empty.

Mr. Young is a stocky 46-year-old with a thin mustache and matching goatee who wears his work boots even on Sundays and spends much of his time maintaining the garden, a third of an acre at St. Ann’s Avenue and 139th Street in Mott Haven in the South Bronx.

During the night, someone had apparently broken into the garden’s aluminum shed, which was locked, and taken nearly everything inside.

“I sat down,” Mr. Young said the other day, ensconced beneath a canopy of redwoods, “and tears came to my eyes.”

The theft was an unsettling echo of the garden’s troubled past. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the surrounding area was plagued by problems, Padre Plaza was infested with drugs.

“It wasn’t a garden; it looked more like a jungle,” Mr. Young said. “There was one guy working in here, and his nickname was Flex. He had no ladders, no tools. He had a pair of scissors.”

One day last spring, Mr. Young offered to bring over his tools, and the two started working nights, cutting branches from overgrown plane trees, pruning unruly shrubs, trimming bamboo and pulling weeds, their work accompanied by the music of Marvin Gaye and KC and the Sunshine Band. Members of local nonprofit groups, along with residents and passers-by, started asking if they could help.

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Gay Pride Week: Bronx LGBT Community Is Increasing, More Accepted

Parkchester in the Bronx is one of the largest condominium developments in the world, and is now host to a growing population of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender residents.

Salvador Cordero and Romeo Romero, party promoters in the area, say that Parkchester and the surrounding neighborhoods of Castle Hill and Soundview have plenty of proud gays who are not hiding any more.

“I guess on a good note, the Parkchester area is really safe,” said Cordero. “Going back a couple years, it was not easy to come out without getting beat up in the Bronx or anywhere in the city. This area has calmed down and become more gay-friendly.”

At Parkchester’s Mi Gente Café, there has been an LGBT-themed party every Tuesday night for the last three years.

“Anybody who comes, whether they come dressed up in drag, as a transgender person, as a lesbian, as a bi-sexual, we have such a mixed crowd here. I have never had a problem with the community,” said Romero.

The Mott Haven area has become extremely attractive to the LGBT community as well. A few art galleries have opened here, including one inside the Bruckner Bar and Grill, which owner Alex Abeles says attracts a mixed crowd that includes gays.

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Bronx Policeman Helps Family Bury Their Child

A Bronx policeman rallied a neighborhood to help a family lay a two-year-old son to rest.

Police say Officer Dimas Cortez aided the family of Josian Garcia Camacho, who died last Tuesday in Mott Haven after sticking a key in an electrical outlet.

Police say when Cortez asked what he could do for the family, they handed him a funeral estimate of $4,700, which they could not afford.

Cortez then got the La Paz Funeral home to provide a free coffin and funeral services.

Cortez said he had to step up and help the family however he could.

“It’s our next door neighbor,” said Cortez. “If you look right behind me, the first house that’s connected to the precinct is the house that the child lived in. So we kind of took it a little more personal than that as our neighbor. Not only a child, but as our neighbor.”

Cortez also got fellow officers and firefighters to chip in $2,500 so Camacho could be buried in Mexico, where the family is originally from.

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A Bronx Tree Honors a Slain Journalist

The untimely death of the journalist Tim Russert has been the subject of much commentary and reflections, especially on television in the past week. The unsolved murder of another journalist, Bradley Will, nearly two years ago never received such saturation coverage.

A recently planted apple tree in a South Bronx park is perhaps the only memorial in the city to Mr. Will, a video journalist based in New York, who was shot dead in Mexico in October, 2006, while covering anti-government protests. His killers, who may have been captured on his tape, have not yet been brought to justice.

This is not new in Mexico, which has earned the distinction of being among the 10 worst countries when it comes to impunity for the murders of journalists, according to a recent survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists. In fact, narco-fueled violence has made that country among the world’s most dangerous for journalists, who often resort to self censorship, rather than run the risk of being deleted by drug gangs.

Friends of Mr. Will were very much thinking of this – and of him – in recent days, when some television channels were devoting hours of coverage to the death of Mr. Russert, a beloved media figure.

“It really does highlight the disconnect or distance between hard-hitting investigative journalists who are out there working and the risks they take versus the boys club in D.C.,” said Mark Read, who teaches media studies at New York University. “There is a self-importance there, and rarely do they try to leverage their celebrity to speak out and help protect those who are doing risky, dangerous work.”

Mr. Read had befriended Mr. Will in New York in the late 1990s, when they both were active in the city’s community gardens, which were under threat from officials and developers. Both of them had also come to know Harry Bubbins, an environmental activist in the South Bronx.

“We met while doing environmental organizing,” said Mr. Bubbins. “During the Giuliani administration we were arrested at City Hall for protesting the auction of community gardens.”

Mr. Bubbins said that Mr. Will eventually moved toward independent reporting work, traveling to Latin America often. He went from being part of the story to covering it. Ultimately, his killing became the story one last time.

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Erotic artwork bares ‘SoBro’ culture clash

“Hyde Park ” (2008) by South Bronx artist Emily Stedman. Ms. Stedman’s paintings were exhibited at Bruckner Bar and Grilll in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx. The paintings were subsequently removed following local opposition to their erotic nature.

Some creative types streaming across the Harlem River in search of the city’s “next” neighborhood are starting to find their new home to still be more South Bronx than “SoBro.”

At least that’s artist Emily Stedman’s conclusion after her show, “Erotic Watercolors,” was pulled off a neighborhood gallery’s walls when patrons at adjacent restaurant deemed it offensive.

“I expected it to be an anything goes, sky’s-the-limit, open kind of place,” said Stedman, 59, who left her loft in TriBeCa for Mott Haven in December after tiring of hearing people at gallery openings talk more about real estate prices than art on the walls.

“I’ve been in New York a long time and there’s always a neighborhood where people move to — a Williamsburg or a Long Island City, and it seemed like Mott Haven was going to be the next place. I don’t know if that is still going to happen.”

Her show features soft watercolors of couples or threesomes in various states of embrace. The opening earlier this month at the Bruckner Gallery attracted dozens of art patrons.

But the owner of the Bruckner Bar and Grill, a hip new dining spot which owns the gallery, ordered the show to come down after some of the neighborhood old guard — who rented out the space for golden wedding anniversaries and the like — considered the paintings pornographic.

“A lot of young people have moved here, but you still have a lot of old timers coming in for parties or what not,” said Alex Abeles, the bar’s owner. “We didn’t want to take it down but you could see that it collided with the ideas of people.”

Stedman, who has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and at galleries in Chelsea, said she was shocked that the show was closed, and added that it was hard to imagine something like it happening in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

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