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Fordham University and New York Botanical Garden Form Acadmic Deal 

Hey, waitaminute!

Was that Fordham University and the New York Botanical Garden holding a love fest this week?

After all those years of bitter feuding over a gangly Erector set-like campus radio station transmission tower looming over the garden, a whole new period of peace and love seems to have sprouted.

In the latest embrace, officials from the two Bronx institutions signed an agreement Wednesday to cross-pollinate academic programs.

A joint graduate program will permit students to receive a master’s degree or doctorate from Fordham, “drawing upon the intellectual and physical resources of both the university and NYBG,” they said in a statement.

Garden President and CEO Gregory Long, who pointed out the two institutions have been “next door neighbors” for 115 years, joined Fordham President, the Rev. Joseph McShane, to officially ink the deal.

“There has never been a moment in American history when education, and research and concern for the biodiversity of the world, have been more important,” said Long.

McShane called it “a momentous occasion that links us, two institutions that reach across Southern Boulevard, to work together for the common good.”

Things were not always so rosy between the two neighbors.

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New South Bronx Apartments Named For Local Nun

A once-empty lot in the South Bronx is now the site of new apartments.

The Sister Thomas Apartments at 870 Southern Boulevard in Hunts Point was officially named Thursday.

The abandoned city-owned lot, once a reminder of the crime that plagued the neighborhood in the 1970s, was developed by the South East Bronx Community Organization into 103 units of affordable housing.

“When I came up today in my car and I went through the area, and it was extraordinary,” said former Mayor Ed Koch, who attended the dedication. “It was alive. And I remember when I went through this area when I became mayor and it was dead or dying.”

“And Lord make this home a happy place and bless it from above. So that’s how my new family knows how much I love them,” said Sister Thomas of the Sisters of Charity, whose name graces the apartments.

Sister Thomas was one of those who led the push to clean up the neighborhood and bring housing back to the borough.

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Greening the Bronx, One Castoff at a Time

 

Omar Freilla, center, started a cooperative to recycle building supplies with, from left, Julie Falu Garcia, Yasin York, Gloria Walker and Carlos Angel.

 Carlos Angel, left, of ReBuilders Source solicits construction materials at an Upper West Side building under renovation.

No one would mistake Timpson Place in the South Bronx for the cradle of a new environmental movement. This short street wedged between Bruckner and Southern Boulevards and East 149th Street is lined with small homes and a couple of brick warehouses. The largest tree — or, more accurately, what remains of it — is a Beetle-size hunk of roots and trunk that was yanked out of a construction site and dumped onto the sidewalk.

Give Omar Freilla a chance, and he might find a use for that trunk. Inside a green-and-white warehouse on Timpson Place, he has been helping a small crew of urban recyclers arrange rows of doors, stacks of tiles, pallets of gravel and gallons of paint as they prepare for Monday’s official opening of ReBuilders Source, where used and overstocked building supplies will be sold at deep discounts. He believes it is the nation’s first worker-owned cooperative for reused building materials.

“The stuff you see here, if you look at it for what it is, is a toilet or a cabinet, it’s not garbage,” he said. “If you put it in a Dumpster, then it becomes waste. Context is everything. All we’re doing is changing the context.”

He intends to do the same for his neighborhood, Hunts Point, which for decades has held the dubious honor of being the city’s dumping ground. Wastewater treatment plants, smelly sludge processing facilities and riverside scrap yards outnumber parks. Mr. Freilla figured that if he could get people to see the value in things others tossed away, he might also change how they look at the out-of-the-way neighborhood, too. Read more..

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George Washington From The Bronx? 

I GREW up in the rough-and-tumble Morrisania section of the East Bronx. I’m not sure when Morrisania’s gangs began, but they were already there during the Revolutionary War.

It wasn’t patriots and Tories who battled it out in Morrisania during the British occupation of Manhattan, a period that lasted from 1776 to 1783, but their surrogates, called Skinners and Cowboys, who scalped men, molested women and murdered children of both sides.

The gangs of Boston Road and Southern Boulevard circa 1950 weren’t as mean and malicious, but I lived in a whirlwind of chaos nevertheless, where I was my own urban guerrilla who had to battle his way to school block by block.

There were terrible racial and religious divides in Morrisania. I belonged to the little enclave of poor Polish and Russian Jews that collected at the borders of Crotona Park.

There might have been physicists living in the Byzantine palaces of Crotona Park East, but they were failed physicists, men inhabiting some mysterious cocoon that no one could explain, least of all themselves.

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Bronx Man Suffers Jolt After Walking On Manhole

A Bronx man suffered a shocking jolt when he stepped on a manhole while crossing the street and was overcome by a rush of electricity.

Stray voltage investigators for Consolidated Edison were at Southern Boulevard and Leggett Avenue where the victim, 34-year-old Jermaine Bedell, told police he was jolted and burned around 9:30 in front of the Giant Launder Center. Bedell said it happened the moment he stepped off the sidewalk and onto a metal cover on the street.

Bedell’s girlfriend Yvette Reyes says he called her in agony.

“All I understood was the left side of his body [was hurt, he was saying] ‘I’m in excruciating pain in the ambulance,” Reyes told CBS 2.

Police and EMS confirmed Bedell was brought to Lincoln Hospital where officers said they noticed a smell of something burning on him.

“Do we pay to get excruciating pain in the streets?” said Reyes. “You don’t know what you’re going to step into.”

In the past year, Con Ed received 115 reports of stray voltage. About 40 of those cases involved Con Ed equipment..

A company spokesperson said Con Ed is proactive about the problem, with a fleet of trucks dedicated to stray voltage-related repairs. CBS 2 was told such incidents are down dramatically since the death of 30-year-old Jodie Lane, a Columbia University graduate student, in 2004. She was killed stepping on a metal plate.

Some residents now simply try and avoid walking on the covers at all costs. “Just stay away from these metal grates, that’s about it,” advises city resident Lou Kizner, who admits he doesn’t always follow that rule himself.

Bedell, a former school custodian, will remain hospitalized overnight. The extent of his injuries is being kept under wraps by his doctors.

In investigating Bedell’s incident, Con Ed says there was no stray voltage found and no malfunction in the larger service area that would explain Bedell’s claim that a simple walk down the street turned dangerously electrifying.

SOURCE: WCBSTV

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