Talk Bronx New York

At Busy South Bronx Pool, an Unlikely Team Keeps the Peace

Crotona Pool’s manager, Kevin Walker, calls everyone out of the water at the end of the morning session. The Bronx pool has up to 1,400 visitors a day.

James Harrigan, 21, an ex-gang member who is one of a group of young pool volunteers, raised a flag he made.

He is known by the name tattooed on his left arm: Scorpio. He favors diamond earrings and designer sunglasses. He takes pills to control his angry outbursts, and sometimes carries a pistol, a .22 or a .45, depending on his mood.

On this day, on the street outside the Crotona Pool in the Bronx, where hundreds of children wait to get inside, he wears the earrings and sunglasses, but does not have a gun.

“Don’t move!” he shouts when a boy in navy trunks tries to tiptoe to the front of the line of sugar-fueled children, some wrapped in SpongeBob SquarePants towels, others wearing neon flip-flops. The boy gets back in line.

Scorpio, who is known by this name, is Terrance Carpenter, 26. He is one of a dozen or so young men who volunteer unofficially each week at the pool, which sits amid an area long fractured by hostilities among gangs like the Bloods, the Crips and the Latin Kings. Some of the volunteers are gang members, but others have turned their backs on crime.

Crotona Pool was one of several huge public pools to open in 1936 in New York. Built by Robert Moses with financing from the Works Progress Administration, they were heralded as some of the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in the United States.

But the pool, like the park it abuts, went into steep decline starting in the 1960s, as middle-class residents fled the surrounding neighborhoods — Morrisania, Crotona, East Tremont, West Farms — and poverty and violence took hold. Today the area has come far from its worst days, thanks in part to a citywide decline in crime and in part to the efforts of residents. The young volunteers, some of whom have contributed to their neighborhood’s violence, now seek to help keep the peace, at least in the neutral zone of the pool.

The volunteers have no enforcement powers; their duties are not clearly defined. But at the enormous pool full of excited — sometimes overexcited — children and teenagers, they provide extra ears and eyes for the officials charged with maintaining order. When the children violate the no-diving rule, they scold them. When horseplay gets too rowdy, they tone it down. When they see loiterers looking for trouble on the streets outside the pool, they swagger over to ward them off.

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Allerton Ballfield in the Bronx renovated before All-Star Game

Cal Ripken Jr. works with Outsiders’ Edison Montalvo on his swing as Hall of Famer helps over revamped Allerton Ballfields with brother Billy and Bernie Williams

Emmanuel Fabre is a middle infielder from the Bronx, a wiry, 5-7, 140-pound kid who steals bases and hits balls in gaps, and is a key player for a fine youth baseball team called the Outsiders.

He is walking across the freshly renovated infield of the Allerton Ballfield in the Bronx, eyes wide with enthusiasm. The bumps and craters that made every ground ball an adventure have given way to evenly graded clay - the very same dirt used at that field a few miles away, Yankee Stadium. The new pitcher’s mound is pristine, the dugout benches upgraded and painted, the massive poison ivy patch climbing up the first-base fence a withering brown memory.

There may be a gala, and emotionally loaded All-Star Game, being played at the Stadium on Tuesday, but if you ask the Outsiders and the other ballplayers from the neighborhood, this $100,000 slice of urban renewal - courtesy of a public-private partnership between the city parks department and Nike’s Let Me Play initiative - is no small event, either.

“No more bad hops,” Fabre says. “They fixed the field totally.”

John Finck is the president of the Outsiders Baseball Association.

“The infield used to be a lunar landscape,” Finck says. “Now look at it.”

The new field - just off of Webster Ave. by 204th St. - was officially dedicated Saturday, after a whirlwind construction process that began on July 1 and was completed three days ago. Who says things can’t get done quickly in New York City? Of course, it doesn’t hurt when you have Nike capital and clout pushing for completion by All-Star weekend, or to have the services of Eve Burton - she’s VP and general counsel for the Hearst Corp., and John Finck’s spouse - navigating the labyrinth of city bureaucracy.

Bob Buono, whose company, Tri-State Athletic Fields and Services, did the contracting, says that it was one of the worst fields he has ever seen, not a surprise when you consider that the Allerton Ballfields, like most city parks, never get a rest, whether from soccer, baseball or softball.

Still, they got it done, and Nike was happy.

“When you promote sports and physical fitness, you make kids better and you make the world better,” says Nike spokesman Dejuan Wilkins. “That’s the philosophy behind Let Me Play.”

The ceremony Saturday featured Parks commissioner Adrian Benape, Bernie Williams, Cal Ripken Jr. and his brother Billy, and some 150 kids from various baseball clubs, including 40 Outsiders - almost entirely Latino kids from the Bronx between the ages of 16 and 18 who play in the competitive Westchester Baseball Association.

After the talking was done, the Ripken brothers and Williams ran the kids through a clinic. The kids got to work on their swings in prop-up nets, field grounders and shag flies.

“Every swing helps,” center fielder Eury Garcia of the Outsuders said. “Cal Ripken is helping us with bat speed, giving us tips - stay back, no lunging.”

Outsiders such as Emmanuel Fabre reveled in the care that went into the field. Edison Montalvo, the team’s star right fielder and cleanup hitter, imagined himself hitting his ropes and making his throws from right in a big-league field one day.

For now, the Outsiders play their home games at Roberto Clemente State Park. After the way the organization got the new field in, it has been assured of getting priority treatment when the Parks Dept. hands out permits next spring. There is an acute shortage of ballfields in the Bronx, and an even more acute shortage of good fields.

The shortage just got a little better, and you could tell just by seeing Emmanuel Fabre’s face.

“Compared to the way it used to be,” says Tony Reyes, the 33-year-old coach of the Outsiders, “this is like Yankee Stadium now.”

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Edgar Allen Poe’s home in the Bronx to be restored

Poe Cottage, the Bronx home of writer Edgar Allan Poe, will close this winter for restoration

A new, $3.2 million visitor center, seen in an artist’s conception, is slated to open in 2009.

There may not be ravens rapping at the door of Edgar Allan Poe’s final home in the Bronx.

But with a planned $250,000 fix-up and a new visitor center, thousands more tourists are expected to make the pilgrimage to Poe Cottage.

After two moves and years of being shaken by cars on the Grand Concourse and the nearby subway, the house of the famed poet and writer is in bad shape. Paint is peeling, the plaster is cracked and there are cobwebs on the rain-damaged windows.

Once restored, the house will have a fresh coat of paint, new green shutters, a ramp for the handicapped and, ideally, a projected increase of 6,000 tourists a year, said Kathleen McCauley, manager of the cottage in Poe Park, at the Concourse and Kingsbridge Road.

“It’s gone through a lot of transformations,” she said. “Poe would have liked that.”

The design of the new, $3.2 million, 2,000-square-foot visitor center was inspired by Poe’s poem, “The Raven.”

The slate shingles are meant to look like feathers, and the roof sweeps down like bird wings. The bathroom walls will have an abstract picture of Poe’s face.

Repairs and the visitor center are being funded by a combination of federal and city dollars and from donations to the Bronx Historical Society, which operates the facility. The city Parks Department owns it.

The visitor center is due to open in August 2009, while the cottage will be closed for repairs sometime this winter and reopened in 2010.

The cottage, where Poe spent the last years of his life and wrote “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” and “Eldorado,” now sees about 4,000 visitors annually.

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Difficulty of Work Blamed for Delays Replacing Park Space Lost to Yankee Stadium

A parks department official, called before the City Council to explain why an effort to replace recreation space lost to construction of the new Yankee Stadium has been plagued by delays and cost overruns, said on Tuesday that the department’s inexperience with such complex projects was partly to blame.

The city was required to build new parks in the Bronx after Macombs Dam Park and a portion of John Mullaly Park were chosen as the site of the new stadium. State and federal law dictate that a similar amount of parkland of equal or greater fair market value replace the old parks.

The Parks and Recreation Department originally said that seven of the eight replacement parks would be completed by April 2009, in time for opening day at the new stadium. The eighth, Heritage Field, planned for the site of the current stadium, had been scheduled to open in December 2010, after the stadium is demolished, but that date has been pushed back to 2011.

Earlier this year, the agency said the completion of some of the parks would be delayed for as long as two years and cost $174 million, up from an earlier estimate of $95.5 million. The new figures prompted the City Council’s Parks and Recreation Committee to call for a hearing.

On Tuesday, council members asked Liam Kavanagh, the parks department’s first deputy commissioner, a series of pointed questions, including whether the agency had been dishonest about its original cost estimates.

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Talks Focus on Bronx Golf Course

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.

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