Talk Bronx New York

Ministries for Peach and Justice

When Alexie Torres-Fleming, the director of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, was growing up in the 1960s, she would sit at the window of her ninth-floor housing project and watch the South Bronx burn.

“There was a period where I was really ashamed of my community,” said Torres-Fleming, 43, who was raised with her three siblings by Catholic Puerto Rican immigrants in public housing during the epidemic of drug abuse and gang violence.

“If you’re black or brown and you grow up poor the way we did, the message you get is that you’re only going to be successful when you can get out of the ghetto.”

After fleeing the Bronx in her 20s to live and work in Manhattan, Torres-Fleming met human rights icon Luis Garden Acosta, who mentored her at his Williamsburg activist group, El Puente. Inspired by the power of grassroots community organizations, she returned to the South Bronx to ignite local activism.

She joined a community action group at Holy Cross parish. In 1992, after the church led a march against crack houses in the area, drug dealers set the church ablaze in retaliation.

But Torres-Fleming was more devastated over the drug epidemic in her neighborhood. Read more..

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New life for Bronx rail station?

Can the Cass Gilbert-designed Westchester Avenue Railroad Station ? abandoned since 1937 ? be transformed into a grand entrance to the Bronx River and its new greenway?

That?s the hope of local group Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice ? one that?s complicated and costly.

?It could be a beautiful gateway from Westchester Avenue to the new park,? said Tawkiyah Jordan, senior director for community programs at Youth Ministries.

The boarded-up station that belongs to Amtrak overlooks the new Concrete Plant Park, which is expected to open in summer 2008. After months of pestering Amtrak, Youth Ministries was able to bring in architects to look at the space.

?It?s a building that would break your heart to lose,? said Joan Byron, of the Pratt Center for Community Development. ?But it?s about as challenging a site as they come.?

It?s ?fragile,? with an exposed steel lattice work embedded with terra cotta, Byron said. ?The steel is expanding and exfoliating, like little potato chips flaking off, and that?s damaging the terra cotta.?

It would cost millions to renovate the roughly 2,700 square foot building above rail tracks. ?It?s like the size of a ranch house,? Byron said, ?and that?s one of the challenges because it can?t generate revenue that would pay for its development debt.?

Residents have pitched turning it into a Bronx River ecology center or a place for renting fishing gear and canoes. Some envision a holistic heath care and reproductive rights clinic there or a food pantry or restaurant.

Linda Cox, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, the public-private partnership overseeing the Bronx River Greenway, said any project would be ?a daunting? undertaking.

?We need a closer look at the costs, the benefits and if it?s even feasible for the building to be made available,? she said.

Adam Liebowitz, of community group the Point, said some locals want a hip-hop museum.

?The South Bronx was the birthplace of hip-hop and to have this place all graffitied up in the heart of the neighborhood could be great,? Liebowitz said. If not, ?I think Youth Ministries would make sure it?s something the whole community has a stake in.?

SOURCE: NYMetro.us

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