Talk Bronx New York

 A Library With a Past Ponders Its Future

TWO years ago, a lanky teenager named Adolfo Abreu who lives in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx got involved in a campaign to turn the shuttered Fordham Library Center into a youth center. Unhappy about the dearth of activities available to him and his friends, he spent months rallying support for the cause, only to learn in late May that the city was eyeing the former library for use as an animal shelter. 

“I felt like, wow, they care more about animals than us?” said Adolfo, a high school freshman who serves as the president of Sistas and Brothas United, the youth branch of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a local organization. “We’ve been fighting for this for years. That part of the Bronx is like a wasteland, and having an animal shelter isn’t going to improve it.”

The former library, a handsome three-story red brick building with arched windows, sits on a downtrodden block of Bainbridge Avenue near Fordham Road’s bustling retail corridor. It has been locked since 2005, shortly before the new $50 million Bronx Library Center opened one block to the west.

Adolfo Abreu isn’t the only one with grand visions for the building. Members of local community groups have envisioned the nearly 30,000-square-foot former library as outfitted with a computer lab, a boxing ring and an art studio, and accommodating activities like after-school tutoring.

The city’s health department is working to open animal shelters in Queens and the Bronx, which currently have only pet receiving centers. The agency has a contract with New York City Animal Care and Control, a nonprofit group, to operate shelters.

Jessica Scaperotti, a department spokeswoman, confirmed that the agency was considering the former Fordham Library as a site for a shelter, but said there was no timetable for the plan. The issue was reported in The Norwood News, a local newspaper.

Despite potential obstacles, leaders of the effort to turn the old library into a youth center said they would soldier ahead. Among them is Fernando Cabrera, the pastor of New Life Outreach International in Kingsbridge Heights.

“There are plenty of other places an animal shelter would be suitable,” Mr. Cabrera said. “The community isn’t going to stand for that here.”

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Court Rejects Suit Against Tenant Organizers

The owners of five buildings in the Bronx have failed to raise a triable issue of fact that tenant organizers interfered with their ability to get mortgages, a state judge has ruled in granting summary judgment dismissing the owners’ case. In New Line Realty V Corp. v. United Committees of University Heights, 1021/04, Supreme Court Justice Sally Manzanet-Daniels of the Bronx found that the owners had failed to submit “any evidence in admissible form” to prove that tenant organizers from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition had taken actions to frustrate their ability to get refinancing for their buildings.

The decision will be published Monday. The owners had claimed that as a result of picketing, circulating fliers and other activities aimed at Washington Mutual Bank, the bank had pulled a letter of intent to refinance a mortgage issued in 2000. The owners claimed damages of $1.8 million.

The organizers denied any intent to interfere with the owners’ prospects for refinancing, and contended that instead they were trying to enforce a provision in the existing mortgage that required the owners to keep the buildings in good repair. The owners’ claim for tortious interference with prospective economic advantage was the sole surviving claim of their lawsuit, filed in 2004, which also raised claims of trespass and libel against the Northwest Bronx group, a 30-year-old, clergy-based community organization.

The owners had withdrawn their trespass claim, and Justice Manzanet-Daniels had dismissed the libel claim in 2006. Under a law adopted in 1992 designed to protect tenants and others who are asserting a First Amendment right to petition government, Justice Manzanet-Daniels wrote, the owners were required to show that their claims against the Northwest Bronx group have “a substantial basis in law and fact.”

The 1992 law (Civil Rights Law §§70-a, 76-a) was designed to curb lawsuits aimed at deterring the exercise of free speech rights by both creating a higher standard to establish a claim’s viability and giving defendants the right to counterclaim for violations of their speech rights. Suits aimed at stifling efforts to petition the government for redress of grievances and to express views at public hearings have been dubbed “Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation,” or SLAPP, suits.

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Report: Bronx Investment Returns Little for Borough’s Poor

A report focusing on the Northwest Bronx has found that as investment in the borough has increased in recent years, the influx of money has had little effect on the area’s poorer residents.

Released today by the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition and the Urban Justice Center, the report “Boom for Whom? How the Resurgence of the Bronx Is Leaving Residents Behind,” found that the area’s residents are stymied in a “a cycle of dead-end, part-time, and low-wage work.”

According to the study, which was based on surveys of 351 residents and Census data, 32% of surveyed adults are currently unemployed. Of those adults who are working and have a high school degree or lower, 55% are making a living wage.

The report also notes that what jobs do exist are mainly in retail, health care, and food services – industries that consist primarily of minimum wage jobs.

It recommends that Bronx neighborhoods undergoing redevelopment negotiate community benefits agreements with developers to create more affordable housing and higher-paying jobs. It also states that the city should build more high schools and create more workforce development programs.

The survey did not employ randomized sampling – for example, it relied heavily on data collected from Bronx high school students because its authors wanted to highlight the trouble teenagers face in finding work.

And while the racial demographics of those surveyed is close to that of census data, there are differences. Census data shows that 13% of the Northwest Bronx is white, but in the report, 4% of those surveyed were white.

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Renaming An Old School Make It A New School? 

School advocates at the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition were thrilled when they read in Mayor Bloomberg’s school construction plan that the city had built a new, 300-student school in their neighborhood.

They thought it might alleviate classroom overcrowding, but there was a problem: It wasn’t true.

According to City Councilman Oliver Koppell, the city had merely just put a new name on an old school.

“We have a number of schools that are substantially overcrowded,” he said. But instead of building new schools, the city is “trying to placate everybody, trying to make it seem like they’re doing more than they’re really doing.”

Middle School 143 in Kingsbridge had been shut down because of poor performance and the New School for Leadership and Journalism, a high school, had opened in its place.

“This was a shock and a half,” said Desiree Pilgrim-Hunter, a member of the coalition board and the mother of a girl who attends an overcrowded high school. “They say they’re building schools, and we’re discovering that they’re just reclaiming seats.”

Bloomberg’s historic $13.1 billion school construction plan calls for 100 new schools for 63,000 children by 2012.

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