Talk Bronx New York

CHANGING NYC: Bronx is changing, with artists leading way 

For decades, the Bronx had a bad reputation.

Howard Cosell intoned, “Ladies and gentleman, the Bronx is burning,” in 1977. Ten years later, Tom Wolfe picked the borough as the site of the hit-and-run accident that led to the downfall of rich, white bond trader Sherman McCoy in “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Over the years redevelopment has proceeded in fits and starts, with the Bronx often hailed as the next hot area.

It hasn’t quite happened yet _ the Bronx still has too many vacant lots and auto-body shops to be a yuppie paradise _ but many Bronx neighborhoods are undergoing a significant transformation.

Chains like Starbucks and the New York Sports Club are setting up shop, and underused industrial buildings are being redeveloped as shopping malls.

As in other places that have gone from gritty to trendy _ like Manhattan’s SoHo or the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn _ artists are in the vanguard.

Sculptor Linda Cunningham moved to the Bronx in 2000 and bought a five-story industrial building with two partners. She has redeveloped it into condos, part of a trend toward market-rate housing in areas where there had been nothing but government-subsidized rental units.

“I got in here because I was urgent to find a studio,” said Cunningham. “I was driven out by escalating rents everywhere.”

Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion said more than $925 million in public and private money was invested in housing in the borough in 2007 _ up from about $237 million in 2002.

And while the nationwide economic downturn has slowed housing growth in 2008, U.S. Census figures show that the Bronx is less affected than the city as a whole.

The number of building permits filed in the city for individual apartments and for entire buildings in the first quarter of 2008 was about half of what it was in the same period last year.

In the Bronx, the figure was down just 17 percent from the prior year, from 1,037 to 862. By comparison, the number in Manhattan was down 69 percent.

And Bronx growth is not restricted to housing. The New York Yankees, who once threatened to leave for greener pastures, are instead building a new $1.3 billion stadium next to their old one, and they have pledged $800,000 a year to Bronx community groups.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced last month that the city has chosen a developer for the Kingsbridge Armory, a nine-story red-brick castle in the West Bronx that will become a mall called the Shops at the Armory.

Then there’s the fortress-like brick complex called the American Bank Note Building in the Hunt’s Point section, a landmark 1909 structure where bank notes were once printed.

Developers bought it for $32 million and plan to renovate it into offices for arts organizations, design firms and nonprofit groups, along with a retail food market.

Eight years after Cunningham and her partners bought their building in Mott Haven _ just 20 minutes by subway from midtown Manhattan _ the condo conversion has been completed and all but one of the 13 units have been sold.

Prices range from $395,000 to $795,000 _ still a bargain compared to Manhattan, where the average sale price for a co-op or condo was $1.6 million for the first quarter of 2008.

One lingering question is whether gritty Bronx neighborhoods can be fixed up without existing residents, businesses and nonprofit groups being forced out.

Of New York’s 8 million people, 1.3 million live in the Bronx. The borough’s population is largely black and Hispanic, and the poverty rate remains high.

According to Census figures, 28.9 of Bronx households were below the poverty line in 2005. The median household income was $29,331.

“We are experiencing a certain amount of gentrification,” said Carol Zakaluk, a lifelong Bronx resident who is a grant writer for a gallery. But Zakaluk said there are 11 housing projects in the area where she lives “and they’re not going anywhere.”

She envisions a future where people of all classes live side by side. “It’s got to be a little bit of each,” she said. “That’s my hope anyway.”

Whether that can happen remains to be seen.

The developers of the American Bank Note Building, henceforth to be called the BankNote, have said they expect the renovated project to rent for at least $20 per square foot. In Manhattan the average is $65 per square foot.

“We believe that if we create the right product and bring the right people there, it will help transform the area,” said Charles Bendit, co-chief executive of Taconic Investment Partners, which is developing the property with Denham Wolf Real Estate Services.

But the building’s current tenants will see their rents double, and some have left. A homeless drop-in center called the Living Room will soon be homeless itself.

“They’re saying they want us to leave in August,” said Carolyn McLaughlin, whose organization runs the Living Room.

A choreographer who goes by the single name Pepper is also shopping for a new home.

Pepper said her $450 monthly rent at the BankNote was slated to go up to $2,000 within 18 months. She is using temporary office space elsewhere and has put her costumes in storage.

Pepper is not happy about being displaced after she helped to build the Bronx arts scene that the BankNote developers are investing in.

“Who created that buzz?” she said. “The artists did it, not the landlords.”

SOURCE: NewsDay.com

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City controller’s report blasts Bronx school overcrowding, lack of relief

Bronx schools are bursting at the seams and “flawed” planning is to blame, a new report by the city controller’s office charges.

“There are too many neighborhoods with overcrowded schools, elementary schools in particular, and no relief for years to come,” Controller William Thompson said in releasing the report.

The report compares the new seats provided in the city Department of Education’s 2005-09 Capital Plan with expected neighborhood population growth.

The study highlights several Bronx neighborhoods, including Soundview-Castle Hill, Throgs Neck and Highbridge, where activists have been advocating for a new middle school.

In District 10 in the northwest Bronx, Thompson’s report charges that “schools were over capacity in virtually every CSD 10 neighborhood.”

That finding mirrors the calls of local activists who have been pushing to include two new schools in the Kingsbridge Armory redevelopment project.

The DOE, however, has said it sees no need for new schools in the area.

Its 2005-09 capital plan provides for 36,500 new elementary and middle school seats in new school buildings or additions to relieve overcrowding.

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Lengthy Interview With Councilmember Foster

The Highbridge Horizon has now posted a lengthy interview with Councilmember Helen Diane Foster on our Web site.

On April 11, the Horizon interviewed Foster in her District Office on Jerome Avenue. We published excerpts of this interview in our April issue, but because the Web does not provide the same space constraints as the printed page, we offer a far more expanded version online.

During the interview, Foster was typically candid, as she addressed a wide range of topics during the course of a roughly hour-long conversation. Her words about the killing of Sean Bell, and the trial of the three officers who killed him –words Foster spoke exactly two weeks before the officers were acquitted — have echoed powerfully in recent weeks.

“There is more outrage over the torturing of animals,” Foster said, “than there is over the fact that another Black man is killed at the hands of the police.”

A little later on in the interview, she added: “I think when the verdict comes out, once again like the Diallo case, this city will be looked at and judged on what that outcome is. It appears that we keep going back to Dread Scott, where a Black man has no rights that a white man has to respect, including his own life. And if we see another acquittal in this city, it will be a sad day for all of New York City, and how we are looked at [not only] by ourselves, but by the country. “

Other highlights of the interview:

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In Bleak Days for Builders, Lessons in Saving Your Life

 At a time of high anxiety, a primer on protection.

MANUEL ARRANGO, a construction mechanic, works high above the pavement, toiling over masonry, brickwork, and waterproofing. On Monday night, at a training session for scaffold workers held in a church in Westchester Square in the northeast Bronx, Mr. Arrango also did a turn — literally — as a fashion model.

A burly man who this evening was wearing a denim jacket with a gold chain over his beige T-shirt, he slipped his sneakers through the leg loops of a blue safety harness, then pulled the shoulder straps over his broad shoulders. After a few adjustments were made, he strutted and pivoted in the aisle of the church as though he were on a catwalk in Milan. From the audience came cheers and hoots and — what would you expect from a roomful of construction workers? — a provocative whistle.

Despite the light-heartedness of Mr. Arrango’s performance, the overall mood at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church that evening was not jovial. Monday was the first day of Construction Safety Week, an annual campaign held by the city’s Department of Buildings, and this year’s program came at a grim time for the construction industry.

In recent months, a rash of fatal construction accidents have occurred in the city, including the crane collapse that killed seven people on East 51st Street on March 15. On April 22, Patricia Lancaster resigned as buildings commissioner under a cloud of controversy. Read more..

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Highbridge: Past, Present and Future .. In The Making

THE last time Camille Taylor caught a whiff of fame was more than 60 years ago on the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Back then, Ms. Taylor was a spunky young woman who had moved to New York from Charlotte, N.C., and edged her way onto the black vaudeville circuit. Her stage name was Big Hat Millie, a nod to the wide-brimmed hats she favored.

But after her comedy career sputtered, Ms. Taylor settled into a quiet life in Highbridge in the West Bronx, a neighborhood where she has long been beloved as a foster parent, tutor, baby sitter and mother figure to generations of local children.

“All these people were hollering and cursing at the kids, but not me,” said Ms. Taylor, now 93 with shiny silver hair. “I always had patience. When I go out on the street, they yell: ‘Hi, Nana! Hi, Grandma! Hi, Mother Taylor!’ ”

Recently, however, this neighborhood fixture has gotten a taste of her old stage life. Ms. Taylor is one of 30 current and former Highbridge residents who have been interviewed for a new documentary, “Highbridge: Past, Present and Future.”

The film about this gritty, seldom-celebrated neighborhood, perched on a hill beside Yankee Stadium, is the brainchild of Jose Gonzalez, a 33-year-old video editor who has lived in the area for eight years. He started work on the documentary soon after the fire last March that killed 10 West African immigrants, nine of them children. The fire occurred just three blocks from Mr. Gonzalez’s apartment; his two sons had attended school with some of the children who died.

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