Talk Bronx New York

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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Carter is founder of Sustainable South Bronx

 Majora Carter

“If power plants, waste handling, chemical plants and transport systems were located in wealthy areas as quickly and easily as in poor areas, we would have had a clean, green economy decades ago.” — Majora Carter, Powershift 2007

Majora Carter grew up in the South Bronx at a time when America’s cities were emptying into the suburbs. Many of the buildings in her neighborhood were abandoned by the time she was ten years old.

Landlords were burning their buildings to collect the insurance; light manufacturing industries were moving out of the Bronx; and waste facilities were moving in to take their place. As pollution rose, asthma rates, poor health and unemployment soared. To outsiders, those who were left were branded with the stamp of the ghetto: as Carter says, “If you lived here you were no doubt a pimp, a pusher, or a prostitute.”

As a child, Carter spent much of her time planning her escape. “Education was my way out,” she reveals.

She studied cinema studies and film production at Wesley University then signed up for graduate school at New York University. To save money, she moved home to her parents.

Of that time, she says, “It felt like a defeat but it was also the best thing in the world to happen to me because I got reacquainted with my community.”

Carter saw that her neighborhood — under-served, ignored and literally dumped on — needed to fight a positive campaign to assert itself as a vibrant community.

“People wanted things like clean air, they wanted safe places for their kids to play where they wouldn’t get hit by a truck,” she tells CNN. “They wanted living wage jobs that didn’t degrade the environment or kill them.”

She fought a vociferous campaign against a planned waste facility that would have seen 40 percent of New York’s municipal waste coming to the South Bronx. “We were already handling 40 percent of the city’s commercial waste here,” she says.

In 2001, after the defeat of the scheme, Carter founded the non-profit environmental justice solutions corporation, Sustainable South Bronx. Its central tenet is that people shouldn’t have to move out of their neighborhoods to live in a better one.

While walking her dog one day, Carter stumbled upon a disused stretch of waterfront. That inspired her to write a tenacious $1.25 million Federal Transportation planning grant for the South Bronx Greenway. The 11-mile-long stretch is the first new South Bronx waterfront park in over 60 years and provides alternative transport, recreational space, jobs and environmental enhancements to the local community.

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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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Bronx Pride Still Strong - Even In Iraq

Efrem Williams, a civilian contractor and proud former Bronx resident, keeps up with goings-on in the borough from base in Iraq.

You can take the boy out of the Bronx but you can’t take the Bronx out of the boy - even if he’s in Iraq, by way of Hawaii, Japan and Australia.

Efrem Williams is a civilian contractor in the war-torn country, in the city of Mosul. He went to work there for ITT Global Communications Systems a year ago this week.

He grew up in Soundview, went to Adlai E. Stevenson High School and City Community College, and graduated from New York University in 1981. He has been living all over the globe since. From halfway around the world, on a military base in the restive area about 200 miles north of Baghdad, he keeps up with his beloved Bronx.

“I periodically browse the Daily News, keeping updated on the goings-on,” he e-mailed me recently.

He enjoyed a story in this space about Nisa Rodriguez, a teen and fellow South Bronx resident who is fighting in the Golden Gloves finals this week.

“I came across your article about the female boxer going for sports fame at the Golden Gloves and gold medal aspirations,” Williams wrote.

“It does my heart good to read a story with a positive theme, and a progressive direction.”

We began a correspondence by e-mail.

The Bronx Boro News is available in this borough only. But it’s on the Daily News’ Web site, so this column regularly hears from people who left the borough for upstate, or Florida, or California.

These expatriates just love to read about old friends, or the old neighborhood, and share memories. They also revel in the changes and successes of the present.

But Williams’ missives, coming from a place so distant, truly show a love of his childhood home and a longing for particularly New York things.

“I miss the Bronx, Yankees, pizza, calzone, New York television programming, all the nuances of the city,” he wrote.

“And most of all the hard working/law abiding/salt of the earth New Yorkers. Good people are hard to find, which I suppose is a good thing in a way. Because of the rarity, I appreciate them more.”

Williams joined the U.S. Navy out of college, and during his 24 years, he said, he circumnavigated the globe three times. He has always worked in the communications field.

He lived on military installations in the Philippines, Japan, Middle East and Australia.

He retired from the Navy in 2005 and resides in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Now he’s in Iraq, a far cry from the placid environments and lush scenery he’s lived in, but just as fascinating.

“Mosul is a very interesting and historical place in history … in fact, this area was originally called Nineveh, the cradle of civilization, and the birthplace of Abraham the prophet,” he wrote. “My scope on life has been and continues to be broadened immensely, and my humble beginnings remain a special chapter in my heart,” he wrote.

When asked about the volatile situation over there, he answered, “I tend to take a little of my ‘Bronx instincts’ with me as they come in handy when conditions warrant survival mode to be engaged.” The forward operating base he lives on, outside Mosul, has seen its share of danger.

Insurgents have fired shells over the base perimeter. They’ve planted improvised explosive devices (IEDs) along the nearby roads. Read more..

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