J-Lo aka Jenny from The Block is giving a bit more back to The Bronx along with her beau, former New York Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez aka A-Rod, by way of a program aimed at equipping local kids with financial literacy in real estate.
The program, known as Project Destined, was launched by Cedric Bobo with a few students in Detroit who later on met Alex Rodriguez who now heads up A-Rod Corp, a real estate and development firm who convinced Bobo to bring the program into The Bronx.
JLo and A-Rod have also become one of the program’s biggest backers.
Project Destined in The Bronx started with 50 students from 3 local high schools who all learned about the world of real estate including financing.
CNBC Reports:
“I learned about cap rates, which I didn’t know what it was before I came here. I also learned about due diligence,” said Zainabou Darboe, a high school senior. “We had to talk to a lawyer, a banker and a broker.”
The program culminated in a Saturday ‘boot camp’ in the Viacom building in Times Square. Students were divided into six teams, each with a mentor student from Harvard Business School.
“I wanted to bridge two worlds,” said Bobo, himself a graduate of Harvard Business School.
They developed presentations for two Bronx apartment buildings, writing offer letters, and explaining their strategies to finance the properties.
Norwood Gardens, at 400 E 203rd Street and Webster Avenue is now accepting applications for 117 “affordable” housing units.
The 11 story building has rents ranging from $865/month for studios to $2,302/month for three-bedroom units depending on income ranges of $31,989 for a family of 1 to $143,910 for a family of 6 which represents 30% to 130% of the Area Median Income (aka the misleading AMI).
Norwood Gardens features a recreation room as well as a fitness room and is located just a few short blocks to the D train at 205 Street and Metro North’s Botanical Garden Station.
50% of units will be set aside for qualifying residents of Community Board 7. Key word is “qualifying” and once the city exhausts applications from CB7 and if it can’t fill the 50% quota then the building is opened up to other residents which is why you rarely if ever get 50% residents from the actual neighborhood.
The following is a guest post by Gregory Jost, a Bronx-based researcher, organizer, and writer. This is a series on New York City Mayor de Blasio’s controversial plan to build a prison in the South Bronx neighborhood of Mott Haven without consulting residents and local leaders. Read the open letter from Diego-Beekman to the Mayor and NYC Speaker Johnson.
Thousands of Black Nurses, the Young Lords and the Relocation of Riker’s:
Why the history of a block matters
In 1895, the Society for the Relief of Worthy Aged Indigent Colored Persons purchased a block in Mott Haven to build a permanent facility. After moving around Manhattan for decades, the new permanent facility opened in the Bronx in 1898 with beds for over 200 patients. That same year, The School for Colored Females in Nursing Arts also opened on site, training Black women to care for the growing number of patients. Six women comprised the first graduating class in 1900, and by 1902 the larger facility was renamed Lincoln Hospital and Home. For decades, Black women came from around the nation, the Caribbean, and as far as Africa to study at the prestigious Lincoln School for Nurses. Nearly 2,000 nurses graduated from the school before it closed for good in 1961.
By the late 1960s, the increasingly dilapidated Lincoln Hospital gained the moniker, “The Butcher Shop,” with days-long wait times and numerous instances of lead-poisoning and medical malpractice. In July 1970, the Young Lords carefully executed the takeover of Lincoln, putting their lives on the line and drafting the very first Patients’ Bill of Rights. In November they occupied the old Nurse’s residence to launch the People’s Drug Program along with the Black Panthers. From this base, they started an acupuncture treatment program, and staged rallies in support of the Attica Prison Uprising in 1971 and the American Indian Movement’s Battle at Wounded Knee in 1973. Their detox operation lasted until the police shut it down in 1979. By then, thanks in part to their efforts, the old Lincoln Hospital site at the corner of Concord Ave and East 141st Street had closed and moved to its new facility on 149th Street, in 1976. The old hospital and school for nurses was demolished soon after and turned into an NYPD Tow Pound, which you may be familiar with if you’ve ever had your car towed in the Bronx.
Just last month Mayor de Blasio announced that his administration has identified this exact same site as the future home of one of the jails that will replace Riker’s Island. While he states there will be ‘community input’, none of the Bronx elected officials even knew about this choice before the announcement, let alone neighborhood residents including those living in homes across the street.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Group portrait of Lincoln School nurses.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1912.
When we consider the significance of what has happened on this site, from training scores of black nurses to the launch of a patients’ bill of rights and a revolutionary people’s detox program, what can we imagine as a new use for this space? Would we be willing to put ourselves on the line in the same ways those who have come before us have to make sure our ‘input’ isn’t just heard, but leads the way for the future of this historic site?
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UPDATE 5:53PM: 5 Service has resumed normal service.
With winds up to 70mph and flooding from the Nor’easter battering The Bronx and the region, transportation is down all across the area.
The 5 train service between E 180th Street and Dyre Avenue remains suspended after a tree fell across the tracks this morning.
A similar situation caused an outage along Amtrak between DC and Boston, subway lines are a mess and the flights are grounded at area airports.
Video below by the Breen Brothers shows a downed tree on Shore Road in Pelham Bay Park just south of 15 Shore Road
Meanwhile, thousands are without power in the borough mostly in the East Bronx neighborhoods of Throggs Neck, Country Club, City Island and a few outages in Morris Park, Wakefield and other Northeast Bronx areas according to Con Ed’s outage map.
How are things looking in your neighborhood? Be safe!
Last week, three manhole explosions occurred on Davidson Avenue near W 183rd Street setting two cars on fire.
Now, last night around 12:45AM, a build-up of carbon monoxide due to a manhole explosion caused another explosion and ripped apart the stoop of a building at 4683 Park Avenue.
Luckily, no one was hurt as residents had been evacuated earlier due to the extreme build up of carbon monoxide in the cellar of the building.
From fires to manhole explosions and a broken down subway system, our city’s infrastructure seems to be collapsing before our eyes.
Every other day it’s something else. When will the city realize it needs to invest in our infrastructure?
Plans have been filed for a six-story, 130 room hotel at Bay Plaza including a swimming pool according to records at Department of Buildings.
The area has seen major commercial development in recent years with the addition of The Mall at Bay Plaza which was the first indoor mall in NYC in 40 years when it opened in four years ago.
This development is yet another hotel coming to The Bronx adding to the existing portfolio of ever-expanding lodging options in a borough where there were none for decades save a few rinky dink, hot sheet motels or bed and breakfast spots.
The location of this planned hotel is perfect for those traveling along I-95 needing a stop to rest before continuing on their trips or lodging for relatives visiting loved ones right here in The Bronx.
We’re still waiting for renderings from Prestige Properties and Development who owns the properties and once we get that we’ll share them with you.
That being said, we’d still like to hear from area residents and their thoughts of another hotel coming to the Co-op City / Baychester area.
Are you one of the hundreds of thousands of New York State residents and Bronxites owed money in unclaimed funds?
All you have to do is head over to this website and check out and see if you are one of these individuals or organizations owed money.
This is free with zero cost to you to claim your money according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office.
According to WABC, almost 200,000 residents in NYS Senate district 36, which covers Mount Vernon in Westchester and several northern Bronx neighborhoods like Wakefield, Williamsbridge, Baychester, Norwood, and Co-op City, are owed $112 million.
So don’t delay and get your money ASAP of you’re owed!
Bronx chocolate lovers get ready. Sol Cacao in Port Morris is opening a chocolate tasting room later this month.
Located in Port Morris on E 133rd Street next to Port Morris Distillery, Sol Cacao is dedicated to providing the purest of chocolates using literally only two ingredients: Cacao beans, and raw cane sugar.
All their cacao beans are fair trade and organic and currently offer Ecuador, Peru, and Madagascar dark chocolates.
The company was founded by the Maloney brothers, Dominic, Nicholas, and Daniel of Harlem by way of Trinidad and Tobago.
ed in America, they realized that finding the rich chocolate they grew up on was rather difficult to get here in the states so they decided to take matters into their own hands and start their own company.
Stay tuned with us and we’ll keep you posted on the opening of that tasting room.
Hey, at least chocolate is good for you and what they produce is far better than the chemical loaded crap that is passed as “chocolate”.
Also, if you eat too much of it, you can just take a run over the Randalls Island Connector and just burn those calories.
Featured here are several restaurants in the area dominated by the Grand Concourse which are described as must eats and serve a wide range of dishes and cuisines due to the fact that there aren’t many to begin with.
From a pizza shop that sells more Mexican dishes as well as Italian food than it does pizza to Dominican restaurants serving dishes other than, well Dominican food, it seems these shops in Mount Hope are doing the most (in a good way) to serve their communities.
Featured are:
Tigres Pizza which opened 35 years ago on E 174th Street and serves everything but pizza. Well they serve pizza but their Mexican and Italian dishes are more popular it seems.
Aurora Fish Grill, a relative new-comer with just 3 years on the scene where you can get tropical juices, ensalada de pulp (octopus salad), ensalada de aguacate (avocado salad), Venezuelan cachapas or patacón the latter of which is a sandwich with tostones for bread.
Pollo Sabroso Lechonera Dominicana is where you can get the traditional Puerto Rican pastelón which is our version of lasagna except instead of pasta we use…tostones (can you tell we love all things fried even if we’re on a #not62 campaign to always eat as healthy as possible?).
Ugh and there you have it, more reasons to enjoy our neighborhoods. Some people would describe these joints as hole in the walls but hey, they keep folks employed and are small businesses which are the lifeblood of our borough.
And we know that these types of places across NYC tend to offer some of the best eats even if it isn’t fancy schmancy.
BTW, what are YOUR favorite places to eat around the 174-175th Street Station on the B line?
This summer, residents of transit-starved Soundview and other East Bronx neighborhoods will have a new option to get to Manhattan and points south: By ferry.
Last year New York City’s ferry system, priced the same as a $2.75 subway ride, has been hugely successful and meeting expectations years ahead of schedule in terms of ridership.
Now four new docks are currently under construction, including the Clason Point dock in Soundview as the city prepares to expand service.
Demand is so huge that the city is also adding six boats with higher capacities to handle this surge of residents flocking to this new form of transportation within our metropolis.
Travel in the comfort of these modern ferries from Soundview to Wall Street
When the ferry system was announced in 2016, Welcome2TheBronx was the ONLY media outlet who noticed a glaring mistake on the design of the routes: The Soundview ferry would NOT stop at 34th Street, a major hub, and would have gone from E 62nd Street straight to Wall Street.
The ferry will operate out of Clason Point:
We argued that this would, once again, shortchange the people of The Bronx by not stopping at 34th Street where thousands of people could get off and either head to work or continue their commute by other means.
The ride from Soundview to Wall Street is estimated to take 58 minutes according to NYC Ferry’s website and will stop at E 90th Street as well as 34th Street along the way and serve an estimated 400,000 residents.
Residents of the immediate area currently endure commutes of almost 90 minutes by bus and subway to get there.
At any rate, we’re glad that The Bronx will finally get this much needed ferry service but if only we could expand it to other communities and areas like Yankee Stadium for West Bronx residents?
A ferry already stops there to drop off fans for games, why not allow a ferry to stop there to help the actual residents who LIVE in the neighborhood?
That’s probably too much to ask from a city that always thinks about The Bronx as an afterthought though.
New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development has officially launched its new homeownership program aimed at first-time home buyers, called Open Door, with construction on a new affordable cooperative development in Williamsbridge.
Called Sidney House and located at 839-841 Tilden Street, the $29 million, 57 unit building will have one bedroom units starting at $188,823 to three bedroom units at $326,000 once completed according to Curbed.
Curbed reports: “Homeownership is a dream for so many working families, and Open Door is staying true to its name and making that dream a reality by breaking down many of the barriers to entry many New Yorkers face,” said HPD Commissioner Maria Torres-Springer, in a statement.
Just like NYC’s “affordable” housing units, these will also be sold via a lottery to income-qualifying residents (income guidelines have yet to be formally released) and will remain affordable for up to 40 years.
We’ve been saying for years that in order to address gentrification and the affordability crisis, every single affordable development should have some homeownership component to it like Via Verde in Melrose which mixes rental tenants and cooperative homeowners together in one development.
We can’t combat displacement without providing opportunities for people to own property in their neighborhoods and while we applaud this new development, we’d be remiss to not say that this must be done in all developments.
Why not create this opportunity even in existing ones? What are the hurdles that are preventing us from doing so?
Just off the shores of City Island and Orchard Beach is Hart Island, the world’s largest publicly funded cemetery and the final resting place for the poorest of the poor or simply, the forgotten and unclaimed.
It is perhaps the darkest and most depressing place in all of New York City with over 1 million such people interred here without even the dignity of a solitary grave but stacked upon each other in unmarked pits except numbers to identify who “might” be buried there.
Now, CBS News reports that according to The Hart Island Project, human bones are washing up on City Island and Orchard Beach due to the lack of upkeep on the island particularly after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012 exposing bodies and damaging the sea wall.
Even after receiving a grant of $13 million in 2013 from FEMA, there are no plans to even begin repair work until 2020 says TimeOut New York and this is absolutely appalling that it would take this long to give some dignity to the dearly departed.
We really need to do better, people.
Meanwhile, bathers in Orchard Beach might be sharing the water with the dead and not even knowing it.
