This Thursday, March 22nd, RuPaul’s Drag Race will premier its 10th season and will feature Bronx-based drag queen Monét X Change.
Born in Brooklyn, Miss X Change now resides in our borough and we’ll be rooting for her!
Watch her video below:
Future Ferry Expansions Should Include City Island, Throggs Neck, & Other Bronx Neighborhoods
This summer The Bronx is finally getting a ferry service in Soundview but we can’t help think that other Bronx neighborhoods can benefit.
The first one that comes to mind (and is a no-brainer) is City Island, I mean why wouldn’t NYC’s premier nautical community NOT be part of the city’s ferry network?
Residents on the island already have to endure exiting the island and bottleneck traffic, why not make it easier for them?
After City Island the ferry could then head across over to Country Club, yet another waterfront community.
And how about Throggs Neck? Although serviced by express and regular bus service this is yet another community that could benefit from such a service.
It can go to perhaps at Ferry Point Park or just south of the golf course which shall not be named and then trek on over to Soundview before departing for Manhattan.
While we’re at it, why not have trips from The Bronx to Queens and Brooklyn and simply bypassing Manhattan altogether? This would create an excellent alternative to traveling between the outerboroughs until we get our Triboro RX subway line (hey, we might as well dream big, no?).
We are a City of Water and our public transportation network should reflect this.
The Bronx can have a ferry network with stops even up on Riverdale that can zoom down the Hudson or head down the Harlem River and stop along perhaps University Heights, Morris Heights, Highbridge, and even Yankee Stadium where there is existing service already for game days.
Considering that our subway system is collapsing and thousands of more people are moving into The Bronx as neighborhood after neighborhood gets rezoned, we need alternatives and fast.
What are your thoughts on this? No plans have been announced for future expansions nor are their any plans for it but this is something to get us to think beyond just our crippled transit system.
6 Months After Hurricane Maria, Photographer Shows Puerto Rico is Still ‘Preciosa’
In a few days it will be exactly 6 months that Hurricane Maria landed in Puerto Rico leaving behind an unimaginable devastation which triggered yet another massive migration from the island towards the mainland, including our borough of The Bronx.
With one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans on the mainland, the event, although thousands of miles away, triggered a torrent of emotions on the diaspora here as families waited days, weeks and even months before hearing word from their loved ones on the island.
What followed was also one of the worst humanitarian crisis in US history as the callousness of the Trump administration, coupled with the ineptitude and cowardice of the Puerto Rican government’s unwilling to stand up for the 3.5 million US citizens that inhabit the island crippled any meaningful rescue and aid attempts.
But Puerto Ricans are survivors. Our island has been through a lot since being colonized over 500 years ago first by the Spanish and later on by the United States.
6 months later, Puerto Rico is still struggling to pick up the pieces but our island still remains beautiful in our hearts.
Photographer Omar Z Robles recently captured hauntingly beautiful images of Puerto Rico with his signature juxtaposition of dancers in various settings and landscapes throughout the island.
Robles, who’s works has been published in Harper’s Bazaar and the Huffington Post and has over 300,000 followers on Instagram writes in his own blog on his last trip to Puerto Rico:
“I remembered all those things that make my Puerto Rico so special, beautiful and precious to me. Even if my island’s current appearance is a little roughed up, she is still the same Preciosa that held me in her arms as a child. In all the stories I heard, there was one constant phrase from everyone, like a mantra “pero al menos estamos vivos y eso es lo importante” (at least we are alive, which is what really matters). Even Don Moncho, who lost every single one of his belongings joined the chorus of voices singing that refrain… “estamos vivos”…Puerto Rico you are still here, you are still mine, and that matters.”
There is a beauty in these photographs that leaves you breathless yet filled with hope for the future of Puerto Rico for even in devastation there is beauty to be found.
Make sure to read the full account of his journey home and take a look at the entire collection on his website. Follow him on Instagram too and never miss his amazing images.
Thank you so much to Omar Z Robles for sharing his images with us and his beautiful account.
WATCH: An Beal Bocht Hosts World’s Shortest St Patrick’s Day Parade to Help Feed the Homeless
The popular Irish pub in Riverdale, An Beal Bocht, hosted the world’s smallest St Patrick’s Day parade to help feed the homeless.
According to PIX11 news, the parade route is all of 47 steps from one door to the other at the Bocht.
Watch the clip below:
17 Images of Our Beautiful Bronx
Each week we’re aiming to highlight different aspects of our beautiful Bronx through our extensive archives of pictures.
We hope you enjoy these images and keep coming back for more. Oh, and please let us know if there’s something you’d specifically like to see.
We’ll make sure to accommodate your requests because The Bronx is Beautiful!
Boogie on The Boulevard
The Bronx is Music
A Bronx Woman
The Bronx River at Concrete Plant Park
West Farms
Freeman Street station on the 2 and 5 train
Sunset on City Island over frozen waters
The Bronx River runs past the Snuff Mill in the Botanical Gardens
Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at NYBG
A building on Walton
Southern Boulevard meets Westchester Avenue
City Island
Little Italy
The “Fish” Building on the Grand Concourse
B-Boy dancing
Bomba dancer in The Bronx
Bronx County Courthouse Steps and Statues
Underground Fight Club Thrives in The Bronx
There’s an underground fight club in The Bronx (hey, we weren’t the first ones to break the first rule so we’re good) that’s helping squash beef between individuals before things get deadly with guns.
While we don’t condone violence at all whatsoever, we’d rather see two people duke it out in a ring than end up dead on the streets. Heck, maybe it’s because of clubs like this that murders are down? Who knows?
David “Dee” Delgado writes for The Undefeated and says:
“Killa Mike is proud of an early match that involved an ex-husband and the new boyfriend. The two men’s problems had escalated to the point of death threats toward each other on social media. The two men walked out of the ring with a mutual respect, he says, and the threats and bickering have ceased.”
But it’s not just those in the ring taking their frustrations out. Spectators aren’t safe if another spectator calls them out to settle a score as seen in the video clip below.
Delgado takes us into the dark underground world of Rumble in The Bronx, the latest fight club to spring up in our borough and his tale and images are a must see so head over and read the full account and take a look at his amazing images.
Header Image caption via The Undefeated: “Lulu (left) takes a punch to the face from Ashley during a fight that wasn’t on the card but was the result of a callout by Ashley. This fight was to settle some differences between the two onetime friends over Ashley’s ex.”
Two Women Bring The Bronx to New Zealand
Although negative stereotypes of The Bronx still persist around the world and even right here in our own country and city, in recent years more and more of the plethora of positive aspects of our culture is gaining worldwide recognition.
To see this blossoming on a global scale, for us, is an amazing phenomenon considering we were the first platform designed and created to combat negative stereotypes of The Bronx.
Now, two women from New Zealand, Lisa Romana aka Miss Illz a visual artist and Cass Koutsimanis aka Cass K a female rapper are utilizing their love of the Bronx-born genre of Hip-Hop to take their art and passion to the next level.
The article in Stuff reports:
In an urban jungle, the Bronx, entrenched in poverty, a musical style was created by a group of innovators who couldn’t afford to buy musical instruments.
Throw a couple of turntables, a microphone, and some borrowed and bartered speakers from around the neighbourhood together, plug into the national grid and you have yourself a block party.
But out of the economic and social ills of that New York borough, made up of mainly African American and Hispanic families during the 1970s, came a sound and culture that would change the world forever.
Still, you can’t go anywhere without spotting its influence. It’s sprinkled in our language, clothing, automobiles; from popular culture to commerce.
And for many, hip hop might seem like a male-dominated art form (you’ve seen the overtly sexualised videos and heard the not-so-subtle innuendos towards women in the lyrics).
But two women are bringing the Bronx to Blenheim.
One a visual artist, the other a musician. For them, hip hop was a way of life growing up. And, also, a way to find themselves in boy’s world.
Both women describe how Hip-Hop has helped them fit into the world. Now Illz wants to open up a retail space to showcase some of her artwork and fashion while Cass K is focusing on her music and taking it to the next level by writing scripts for her videos.
Whether you like Hip-Hop or not, you can’t deny that the Bronx has left a mark across the world. It is a genre that has surpassed something as classic as Rock and Roll and perhaps even more American than apple pie at this point.
Watch: Take a Ride Along The 3rd Avenue El
One of the worst things to happen to transportation in The Bronx was the removal of the 3rd Avenue El running from the North Bronx down to Chatham Square in Downtown Manhattan.
First, The Bronx’s portion of the 3rd Avenue El was severed from Manhattan on May 12, 1955 when the entire Manhattan portion of the route was shut down up to 149th Street/3rd Avenue at The Hub.
For the next 18 years, the El operated between 149th and 3rd Avenue up to the last stop at Gun Hill Road until that also eventually was discontinued on April 29th, 1973 and demolished in 1977.
This left a huge transit vacuum in Morrisania and the central Bronx leading to further urban decay but we’ll leave that for another day.
Take a look at these videos along the 3rd Ave El:
You can watch the full video below:
Bronx Investment Sales Rise as They Tumble Across the Other Four Boroughs
Investment sales in New York City continue to drop across all boroughs except The Bronx where the borough was the only one to show an increase in the second half of 2017 which was up by 3% the previous year from $1.45 billion to $1.49 billion.
Manhattan, meanwhile, saw a 41% drop form $17 billion to $10 billion during the same time period and Queens saw a decline of 46% from $3.5 billion in 2016 to $1.9 billion.
Brooklyn, dropped the least which went down by 26% but Staten Island saw the biggest drop by 59% from $492 million to $203 million.
According to Real Estate Weekly, The Bronx’s push up in sales was helped by the $115 million sale of 260 E 161st Street in Melrose to the owners of Manhattan’s Chelsea Market in what is to date the borough’s most expensive sale ever.
“The current demand and value of Bronx properties, as seen in our most recent New York City Residential Sales Report, carried over to investment property trades in the second half of 2017,” REBNY president John H. Banks said. “While the pace of completed transactions lagged citywide in 2017, investors continue to show interest in income-producing properties across the five boroughs.”
It will be interesting to see if this upwards trend continues for The Bronx as gentrification continues to rear its ugly head.
Protected Bike Lanes Coming to Broadway Along Van Cortlandt Park
Despite opposition from Bronx Community Board 8, New York City Department of Transportation is ignoring the board and will proceed with a redesign of Broadway from 242nd Street to the city limits at the Westchester County border and will include two-way protected bike lanes.
Currently, pedestrians have to cross a 70 foot wide Broadway making it a dangerous trek to get to and from Van Cortlandt Park across a road where many drive above the speed limit.
The new redesign will reduce the crossing to 50 feet by adding a north/south protected bike lane hugging the park along the current parking spaces which will then be shifted west to separate the lanes from traffic.
There will be no reduction of traffic lane which will remain a 4 lane roadway with two lanes of traffic going north or south.
Even if we weren’t biking all the time, we still cannot fathom why a community board would be against shortening the distance pedestrians have to cross in order to make a more safer thoroughfare.
According to Streetsblog:
In a letter sent last week, DOT Bronx Borough Commissioner Nivardo Lopez informed CB 8 Chair Rosemary Ginty that the danger of Broadway’s current wide, high-speed layout makes the redesign imperative [PDF].
“After full consideration of your resolution, feedback received through our outreach process, and our engineering analysis, we have determined that the proposed safety improvement project is the best way to address all the safety issues along the corridor,” Lopez wrote.
Broadway north of 242nd Street feels like a highway, and people have to cross it to get to the park, which is one of the city’s largest. DOT clocked about 80 percent of drivers exceeding the speed limit on this part of Broadway. Lives are at stake: From 2010 to 2014, 12 people — including 10 pedestrians — were killed or severely injured in crashes on Broadway between 242nd Street and the Westchester County border.
There’s no arguing that this is a good thing for everyone. We must share our roads and make our city a safer one for all.
South Bronx Unite to de Blasio and City—No New Prisons: Not in the South Bronx, Not Anywhere
We unequivocally reject the city’s plan to site a new jail at 320 Concord Avenue in our South Bronx neighborhood, and we oppose the construction of any new jails in New York City. The decision to construct a new jail in the South Bronx, made without any input from the local community, is a slap in the face of South Bronx residents who have suffered from top-down city planning decrees that put the interests of the powerful above the needs of the people in the nation’s poorest Congressional District. From the planning of the Cross Bronx Expressway to the relocation of Fresh Direct to our community’s waterfront, decisions are made for our community with complete disregard for the people who live here. Our vision for the health and wellbeing of our people is constantly eclipsed by the wants of those outside our community.
The siting of a new jail at 320 Concord Avenue is in direct conflict with locally-driven, grassroots neighborhood efforts to develop our community in a way that respects the long history of organizing by Bronxites who struggled through years of abandonment and neglect. Building on a twenty-two year struggle to stabilize the Diego Beekman housing complex and the surrounding community, local residents have worked to develop the Diego Beekman Neighborhood Plan, with the lot at 320 Concord Avenue established as a neighborhood Hub for housing, commerce, and community space. (see Diego Beekman Open Letter to Mayor de Blasio and NYC Council Speaker Johnson in Opposition to A New South Bronx Jail, which we support).
The South Bronx already carries a disproportionate burden of New York City’s failure to invest in sustainable ways to address its social and environmental problems. The city’s failure to provide genuinely affordable housing results in a concentration of homeless shelters in the South Bronx. The failure to meaningfully address heroin addiction in our community (before the opioid crisis became mainstream) results in similar concentration of methadone clinics in our neighborhood. The excess consumption of New Yorkers hits us in the form of 5,000 tons of trash processed daily in the South Bronx waste transfer station. And the desire of wealthier New Yorkers for gourmet food delivered to their doorstep will soon bring an additional 1,000 diesel truck trips per day through our neighborhood that has the highest asthma rate in the nation.
In the same way, New York City’s failure to invest more aggressively in alternatives to incarceration and more restorative ways to deal with crime now results in the plan for a new jail in the South Bronx. Our opposition to the new jail is in no way a rejection of the people caught up in the criminal justice system. A disproportionate number of the city’s prisoners are from the South Bronx and they too are members of our community. We desire fairer, swifter, and more humane forms of justice for our brothers and sisters in the justice system, and for that reason we applaud the city’s plan to close Rikers Island.
Our opposition to the construction of a new jail goes beyond “Not In My Back Yard” to a broader concern about how the city’s resources are allocated to deal with people in conflict with the law. We are not just against the siting of a new jail in our neighborhood – we don’t want a new jail built period. Over the last 25 years, the city’s jail population has fallen from a high of 21,674 in 1991 to under 9,000 earlier this year, accomplished through a combination of falling crime rates and criminal justice reforms. The plan to replace Rikers assumes a need for 5,000 jail beds in ten year as reforms continue. We challenge the city to come up with a more aggressive plan to further reduce the number of people in jail, thus making the need to construct a new facility unnecessary. Through a combination of bail reform, decriminalization of minor offenses, and investment in alternatives to incarceration, we believe this is more than possible.
It is not lost on us that in New York City’s plan to replace Riker with smaller facilities, the Bronx is the only borough where a new facility is planned for construction. In Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, the plan is to repurpose existing jail complexes, thus not expanding the footprint of the criminal justice system in these boroughs. But in the Bronx, the borough that has suffered the most disinvestment, we see once again the pattern of spending millions on an ever-expanding criminal justice infrastructure. The new Bronx County Criminal Court that opened in 2007 cost $352 million dollars to construct. The new 40th Police Precinct is expected to cost $51 million to build. The plan to renovate the Horizon Juvenile Detention Center to accommodate adolescents from Rikers is expected to cost $170 million. The construction of a new jail to replace Rikers (when we already have the Vernon C. Bain Detention Center in Hunts Point) will likely cost more than all the aforementioned developments. And yet when our community asks for the renovation of community centers, the creation of green spaces, living wage jobs, truly affordable housing, and other investments in positive supports that would alleviate the conditions that push so many into the criminal justice system, we are told that the resources don’t exist.
We will not accept more spending on infrastructure that coerces and controls when our neighborhood is in desperate need of community-driven development. We will not accept the construction of a new jail, in the South Bronx, or anywhere. We will not accept a vision for our community that relies on caging people instead of investing in the resources they need to thrive.
For these reasons, we categorically reject the building of a new jail in the South Bronx, and call on the city to invest its economic resources in people, not prisons.
South Bronx Unite
Governor Cuomo to Declare NYCHA State of Emergency
After visiting Andrew Jackson Houses in Melrose, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said has no problem with declaring a state of emergency for NYCHA after witnessing first hand the deplorable conditions for himself as he toured the projects.
Cuomo saw apartments that were infested with roaches and vermin, peeling paint that could possibly be contaminated with lead and called the conditions “intolerable” and “disgusting”.
But missing from many narratives in the media is the fact that three years ago, the same Governor Cuomo who’s calling for a state of emergency for the country’s largest public housing system housing over 400,000 people, he pulled $100 million in funding that was marked for repairs that were desperately needed.
Curbed made mention of this via a tweet as seen below
Throwback to some past @RitchieTorres comments: “The governor has politicized the use of the $100 million and does nothing to address the needs of tenants.”https://t.co/KTBPNTHHN9
— Wiley Norvell (@WileyNorvell) March 12, 2018
Where has Cuomo been all these years? Has he not been the governor of New York since 2001? New York City Housing Authority’s problems and deplorable conditions predate his tenure in office so as several people have mentioned, is this an issue because it’s an election year?
Some of the city’s most vulnerable residents live in NYCHA and all of the 400,000+ residents shouldn’t be an afterthought or a campaign season political football.
Let’s hope they actually fix things now and not stop after the election year is up