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A Friendly Bustle, With Oases Nearby

IT was either the Bronx or Queens.

Jason Velez, 32, a financial adviser, and his girlfriend, RoseAnn Monterroso, 28, a consignment shop manager, had decided to move in together. He owned a one-bedroom in Bedford Park and worked nearby in Belmont. She owned a one-bedroom in Jackson Heights and commuted to Midtown.

They looked in Queens but decided they would get more for their money in Bedford Park — whose proximity to public transportation and major highways provides easy commuting to both Manhattan and Westchester.

“There’s the Bronx stigma,” said Mr. Velez, who grew up in Parkchester. “I thought it would be hard to convince her, but the more she saw, she started liking it.”

She sold her place, he sold his, and they bought a two-bedroom in his co-op on East 201st Street for $178,000. They plan to redo the bath and closets with a custom job, not prefab units.

“We’ll take the extra money,” Mr. Velez said, “and instead of buying something we don’t like, we’ll create something we do like.”

But Bedford Park is about more than affordability to Mr. Velez. It’s about friendliness. For instance three weeks ago his broker, David Abreu, who lives next door, visited a Manhattan comedy club to witness what Mr. Velez had billed as his first foray into stand-up. (In fact, Mr. Velez is no comedian: halfway through his “set,” he pulled Ms. Monterroso onstage, dropped to one knee and proposed. She said yes.)

Once heavily Irish and Jewish, Bedford Park in the 2000 census was 58 percent Hispanic, 17 percent white, 13 percent black and 7 percent Asian. There is a large mix of new arrivals, among them Guyanese, Albanian and Vietnamese. A Korean commercial strip occupies a block of East 204th Street.

John Dhauraj, a Guyanese immigrant who has owned a three-bedroom house on East 203rd Street for 19 years, was chatting one recent afternoon with a neighbor, Cholelle Miranda, who grew up locally and rents a place in a six-story brick apartment house two doors down. Their block is typical: tree-lined and backing up to the woodsy Mosholu Parkway, with early 20th-century single-family and multifamily houses sandwiched in among apartment buildings.

“This block is still a community,” Ms. Miranda said, and Mr. Dhauraj added, “We look out for each other.”

Like many in this middle-class area, both feel pinched by the economy.

“Let me put it to you this way,” said Mr. Dhauraj, 63, who used to work in building maintenance. “Since I retired, I got to look at the pennies. When I was working, I never looked at pennies.”

Fortunately, Mr. Dhauraj bought before the wave of subprime lending. The Bronx is the seventh-ranked county in the nation for foreclosure-related decreases in home values, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.

But several factors insulate Bedford Park. Rental apartment buildings, which constitute a majority of housing here, are mostly immune. Typical homeowners have lived in their homes for a long time, so are less susceptible to the recent proliferation of risky loans.

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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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Mayor Bloomberg lays out multi-agency economic plan for South Bronx

Mayor Bloomberg came uptown Tuesday to tout his South Bronx Initiative, a multi-agency effort to knit various private projects and city improvements into comprehensive economic development.

But one major player - the borough president - was notably absent.

“The South Bronx - long known nationally as the area Howard Cosell was talking about when he said, ‘The Bronx is burning’ and once known locally as an area of underinvestment and decay - is undergoing an extraordinary transformation,” said Bloomberg.

In recent years, nearly $3 billion in public and private investment has poured into the borough, Bloomberg said, including the $300 million Gateway Center Mall, almost $300 million for local schools, more than $900 million for transportation improvements, as well as the new Yankee stadium.

While the mayor credited Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión and his office for major input into the initiative, Carrión was a no-show at the event on the steps of the Bronx County Building.

Sources in the borough president’s office said Carrion was annoyed at “the last-minute notice - not the first time - from City Hall for the event.”

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Hearings Planned To Tackle Yankees Financing Plea

An assemblyman, a frequent critic of New York’s public authorities, said yesterday that he plans hearings on the Yankees’ request for additional public financing to complete the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

Assemb. Richard Brodsky (D-Hartsdale) said that hearings could be held within “a couple of weeks.”

Brodsky is chairman of the Standing Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions, which oversees the state’s public authorities. Last year, he co-sponsored legislation that would require the state’s authorities to submit contracts for review to the comptroller, limit borrowing and seek legislative approval before creating subsidiaries.

“What’s at stake here is a much bigger issue than whether you like or dislike the Yankee Stadium deal,” Brodsky said. “Stadiums [are] soaking a lot of the tax-exempt financing, and we can’t fund the capital plan of the MTA and we’re short capital money on schools and hospitals.”

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The Bronx Is More Than Just Yankee Stadium

THIS season is your last chance to catch a game in the old Yankee Stadium, before the House That Ruth Built is replaced by its modern cousin across 161st Street, the House That Steinbrenner and Taxpayer Subsidies Built.

That means a lot of first-timers will be heading into town and up to the South Bronx, and they might have no idea what else there is to see and do around the stadium. They shouldn’t feel bad: most lifelong Yankees fans who have been up there hundreds of times don’t know, either.

That’s in part because the area still suffers the hangover of decades of bad press. But Howard Cosell is dead, the Bronx isn’t burning, and sticking around after the game does not have to mean crowding into beer-soaked bars across the street from the stadium.

You don’t even have to go very far; you’re only three blocks away from the Grand Concourse, the once-stately, still-impressive thoroughfare that in its day was a most desirable address. It’s working-class these days, but you can still sense the grandeur in the sheer width of the 11-lane road and the architecture that lines it.

Not far from the stadium, at the intersection of 161st and the Concourse, are the Bronx County Courthouse (a handsome but imposing fortress), Joyce Kilmer Park (a spot to picnic on jerk chicken from the nearby Feeding Tree restaurant or a bresaola panini from the Press Cafe) and the former Concourse Plaza Hotel (once full of Yankees and politicians).

But the Concourse is best known architecturally for what is often called the biggest concentration of Art Deco buildings outside Miami. Walking north from 161st Street you’ll find at least one gem every few blocks, but be sure you walk at least the half-dozen blocks to 1150 Grand Concourse, the apartments known as the Fish Building for its aquarium mosaic. It’s enough to make you think (for a moment, anyway) that you’re in South Beach, not the South Bronx.

Ambitious Art Deco buffs could keep going for miles (on foot or by bus), all the way to Fordham Road past the old Loew’s Paradise, and cut east to eat in the Bronx’s Little Italy. Or keep going to the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, the slightly relocatedoriginal house where the poet retreated in what was, in the mid 19th century, bucolic hinterlands.

Your other option is to head south from the stadium down to Mott Haven, home to an ever-growing artists’ colony. (The closest train from Manhattan is the 6 train to 138th Street, but from the stadium take the 4 to 138th and walk east to Alexander Avenue.) The area has long been known for its antiques shops, which attract visitors from Westchester County and beyond, but now there are also arts spaces to check out, places to eat and even a new place to party.

Art makes its way into weird places in Mott Haven. Haven Arts recently moved into a 2,500-square-foot space in a former linoleum store (check out the freight scale built into the floor) and is currently showing “NY Press,” an exhibition of New York photojournalists from The New York Times, The Daily News and other publications. It also holds free painting classes from 5 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays, usually with a nude model.

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