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Bronx Neighborhood Shocked By Graffiti On 9/11 Mural 

Two women walk past defaced memorial mural to Firefighter Peter Bielfeld.

Over several nights this month, a graffiti vandal stared into the face of Firefighter Peter Bielfeld, who lost his life rushing into the World Trade Center - and coldly spray-painted right over it.

Now the Olinville community where Bielfeld lived, the South Bronx community where he worked and Bielfeld’s family are raging, and out to punish whoever defaced the memorial wall mural of Bielfeld.

“It’s ridiculous. It is very personal,” said Bielfeld’s father, Ernest, 73, who held memorial services at the mural in memory of his son on Olinville Ave., before his son’s remains were found. “It’s such an emotional thing for us. Angry? I’m pissed off.”

The defaced mural is at Thwaites Place, down the street from where the 44-year-old Bielfeld lived on Barker Ave., on the wall of a bodega where he regularly bought cigars.

Bielfeld’s face and much of the rest of the mural was obliterated by the bubble-letter tag - “SIPS.”

“How could you do something like that? 9/11 has touched everyone,” said Victor DiPierro, community affairs officer for the 49th Precinct, who has added his own $250 to the NYPD’s $500 reward to catch the defacer. “It’s just so disrespectful. It’s blatant.”

DiPierro calls graffiti his “forever arch nemesis.” He goes out on the street weekly, cleaning graffiti off walls. But, graffiti on a memorial mural? DiPierro compared it to defacing a tombstone.

He warned “SIPS” that he will most likely have the same fate as a similar defacer whose tag was “SNEZ.”

DiPierro spent a year hunting for SNEZ, who defaced a 9/11 mural in Morris Park. When he found the 14-year-old at the end of the spray can, he was punished by the law and his parents. DiPierro said he will similarly canvas the area’s schools to find SIPS.

DiPierro is also working with Eddie Rodriguez, who painted Bielfeld’s mural, and who has agreed to restore the image, which has a twin near Ladder 42, Engine 73, where Bielfeld worked. The firehouse, the 49th Precinct Community Council and DiPierro plan on splitting the cost of the restoration.

Ernest Bielfeld hopes the mural will be a permanent record of the story of his son, who had been injured the weekend before Sept. 11 and was visiting the fire department’s medical office when the planes hit.

He rushed downtown, borrowed equipment from a different firehouse and left behind a note for his family expressing his love in case he did not make it back.

“It tells a story of a good guy who did above and beyond the call of duty,” Bielfeld said. “When one of your kids goes, it’s indescribable. But it is not in memory of just Peter, but the 343 firemen who were murdered.”

SOURCE: NYDailyNews.com

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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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Pope concludes US trip with Mass at Yankee Stadium in Bronx

Pope Benedict XVI arrived in storied Yankee Stadium on Sunday for his final Mass in America, cheered by a joyous crowd after making a solemn stop at the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Tens of thousands of Roman Catholics filled the stadium, chanting, clapping and waving white and yellow handkerchiefs in the Vatican’s colors as the white popemobile pulled in.

Outside the stadium, two yellow dump trucks filled with sand blockaded 161st Street before the Mass, an extra level of security along with the heavy police presence. Pilgrims without tickets pushed up against metal police barricades, hoping to get a glimpse of the arriving pope.

Inside the stadium, ad-splashed outfield walls were draped in white with purple and yellow bunting. A white altar perched over second base, and the papal seal covered the pitcher’s mound, suspended by white and yellow ribbons.

“I have never seen Yankee Stadium so beautiful, and I have season’s tickets,” said Philip Giordano, 49, a tax attorney from Greenwich, Conn., who won seats in the loge section behind home plate through a parish lottery. “It sure beats sitting in my local church.”

Added his wife, Suzanne: “I’m hoping to feel something from (Benedict). Everyone who has seen him says they crumple, their knees buckle. You come away just feeling different.”

The New Orleans crooner Harry Connick Jr., on the pre-Mass concert program, remarked that he is often asked if he’s a practicing Catholic.

“Practicing?” he said. “I’m playing for the pope today.”

Earlier, on a chilly, gray morning, the pope blessed the site of the terror attacks and pleaded with God to bring “peace to our violent world.”

The visit by Benedict to ground zero was a poignant moment in a trip marked by unexpectedly festive crowds anxious to see the former academic who for three years has led the world’s Catholics.

Benedict was driven in the popemobile part-way down a ramp now used mostly by construction trucks to a spot by the north tower’s footprint. He walked the final steps, knelt in silent prayer, then rose to light a memorial candle.

Addressing a group that included survivors, clergy and public officials, he acknowledged the many faiths of the victims at the “scene of incredible violence and pain.”

The pope also prayed for “those who suffered death, injury and loss” in the attacks at the Pentagon and in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa. More than 2,900 people were killed in the four crashes of the airliners hijacked by al-Qaida.

“God of peace, bring your peace to our violent world,” the pope prayed. “Turn to your way of love those whose hearts and minds are consumed with hatred.”

Benedict invited 24 people with ties to ground zero to join him: survivors, relatives of victims and four rescue workers. He greeted each member of the group individually as a string quartet played in the background.

In his prayer, he also remembered those who, “because of their presence here that day, suffer from injuries and illness.”

New York deputy fire chief James Riches, father of a fallen Sept. 11 firefighter, said the pope’s visit gave him consolation.

“We said ‘Where was God?’ on 9/11, but he’s come back here today and they’ve restored our faith,” Riches said.

The site where the World Trade Center was destroyed is normally filled with hundreds of workers building a 102-story skyscraper, a memorial and transit hub. It bears little resemblance to the debris-filled pit where crews toiled to remove twisted steel and victims’ remains.

The remains of more than 1,100 people have never been identified.

Benedict was joined by New York Cardinal Edward Egan, along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York Gov. David Paterson and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine. The land is owned and managed by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.

Benedict has addressed terrorism several times during his six-day visit.

In a private meeting with President Bush, the two leaders “touched on the need to confront terrorism with appropriate means that respect the human person and his or her rights,” according to a joint U.S.-Holy See statement.

Benedict has been critical of harsh interrogation methods, telling a meeting of the Vatican’s office for social justice last September that, while a country has an obligation to keep its citizens safe, prisoners must never be demeaned or tortured. Read more..

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9/11 Bronx Paramedic Remembered & Honored With Plaque

A paramedic who worked at a morgue in the toxic dust of ground zero is being honored two years after she died of lung cancer.

A plaque is expected to be unveiled in memory of New York Fire Department paramedic Deborah Reeve at a ceremony Tuesday at Station 20 in the Morris Park section of the Bronx.

Reeve died on March 16, 2006, of mesothelioma, a lung cancer associated with exposure to asbestos. The 41-year-old developed a cough in late 2003 and retired about a year later, too ill to work.

Her death has not been officially linked to exposure from the 9/11 attacks, though her family and doctors say her cancer was caused by her work at the World Trade Center.

SOURCE: NewsDay.com

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Secret Service To Protect The Pope During NYC Visit

November 14, 2007

The Secret Service has offered its protection to Pope Benedict XVI for his April visit to New York City and Washington.

The agency says it is standard practice for heads of state.

The pope will be in the city on April 18th and is planning to hold a public mass at Yankee Stadium on April 20th.

According to published reports, tickets will be distributed through local parishes and will be free of charge. The archdiocese is trying to prevent people from profiting off the event.

While in town, the pontiff will also visit the World Trade Center site and deliver a speech at the United Nations

Source: NY1 / Bronx

We felt it was necessary to publish this to you all as some of you may wish to visit him while he’s in town. Check with your local Parish for tickets!

TalkBX Team!

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