A mighty oak tree in The Bronx is no more after succumbing to the winds of last week’s destructive nor’easter was reported by Friends of Pelham Bay Park on Facebook.
The Great Oak of Pelham Bay Park has probably been standing since Jonas Bronck, our borough’s namesake, himself first arrived upon our shores in 1639 becoming the first European colonizer of our borough.
Although an exact age of the tree isn’t possible, estimates were that it was anywhere from 300-400 years old and would have placed it in the realm of even possibly having been around when the Lenape Native Americans still lived in our borough before being driven out by the colonizers.
Top image is by Tom Casey via Friends of Pelham Bay Park
For those who ventured into the forest beyond the Bronx Victory Memorial and traveled through the trails, perhaps you also stopped and stared in awe at this huge monument to nature’s grandeur as I did the first time I stumbled upon it as a teenager.
To think it survived hurricanes, blizzards, superstorm Sandy, and of course, humans, all these centuries but alas, it could go on no more.
It is a sad day in our borough when a tree that so many have loved is now gone but such is the circle of life.
Attention Bronx high school students: If you’re interested in a career in journalism, City Limits is now accepting applications for its CLARIFY (City Limits Accountability Reporting Initiative for Youth) internship program.
The program starts March 24th and meets every Saturday for 10 weeks which includes one weekday in the newsroom as well.
According to City Limits:
This is a 10-week paid introductory internship open to high school students of all learning levels. It will teach them the ins-and-outs of reporting and writing news stories, with an emphasis on learning how to successfully cover public civic meetings. Participants will work on articles throughout the semester and have the opportunity to earn a byline and see their work published in City Limits.
Interns will be expected to work approximately 10 hours per week. This will include meeting at City Limits’ offices in Harlem (8 W. 126th St.) for three hours each week, plus additional assignments to be completed on their own time. They will also be asked to cover at least one public civic meeting during the course of the semester. Interns who perform successfully in the program will be paid a $1,000 stipend, to be distributed in two payments (one midway through the semester and the other at the program’s completion.)
The wildly (pun very much intended) popular Animal Planet series, The Zoo, which follows zookeepers and their charges at our Bronx Zoo is back for a second season and kicks off this Saturday.
The show provides an intimate look into the dedication these people have to the animals at The Bronx Zoo regardless of their size or species.
Before Co-op City, the world’s largest cooperative development that over 50,000 residents call home was built, there was Freedomland.
Built in the marshlands and coastal area along the Hutchinson River, Freedomland was a short lived amusement park with America as its theme.
It billed itself as the world’s largest entertainment center before changing that to world’s largest outdoor family entertainment center but regardless of what it called itself, some say it was doomed from the day it opened its doors on June 19, 1960.
From lawsuits due to accidents and conspiracy theories that it was never meant to last long and just simply serve as a test that the marshlands could sustain large structures that would pave the way for Co-op City’s construction, the park closed its doors in 1964 and demolished.
At any rate, this left us with the gem that is Co-op City home to thousands of families in the largest and truly most affordable housing in NYC especially the middle class.
Tell us what you think about the pictures and your memories of Freedomland. Sadly, I never got to go as a child. I was born over a decade later after it was demolished.
Curbed just published a sobering look at “affordable” housing and how it relates to the local communities where they are constructed in terms of actual affordability.
Their findings are not surprising to us or activists who have for years asked, “Affordable for who?” due to the very fact that these units are rarely affordable to local residents due to the misleading AMI, or Area Median Income used to calculate the median income of an area which is generally considerably higher than what the actual local median income is in these neighborhoods.
Curbed performed an outstanding analysis of the situation by breaking it down from single-person households to five-person households and does it for each affordable housing development that has been preserved or constructed under New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (or 87,557 units if you’re counting).
They did so in response to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s map which shows all those units constructed or preserved thusfar but have left all of us asking and wondering, “Affordable for who?”.
Click the image and head on over to Curbed’s article to explore the map and each individual development.
It should come to no surprise that under each category, the picture painted for The Bronx was quite grim but single person households were the worst off with an overall 62% of units unaffordable to the average city resident.
Things got significantly better as the size of household increases but still leaves out a large segment of the population.
Curbed reports:
Housing activists, however, have criticized the Housing New York plan for not creating enough homes for those who most need it. The Community Service Society released a report last September that says the Housing New York plan may actually be “further entrenching segregation” through its focus on development in low income communities, where locals are at risk of displacement and affordable units are often out of reach.
Despite the city’s focus on low income neighborhoods, only 15 percent of Housing New York units—13,276 units to date—serve the extremely low income band; citywide, 516,000 of those households are rent burdened. And data shows that about 81 percent of Housing New York’s units to date are located in low-income communities, where the median income of one-person households is below 80 percent AMI.
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?
Comments, views, and opinions are that solely of the author and should never be misconstrued as that of Welcome2TheBronx or any other authors of this site. Welcome2TheBronx only edits articles submitted by readers for grammar and spelling leaving fact checking up to the author.
Welcome2TheBronx encourages reader submissions for consideration for publication on our site. It is our mission to be able to provide a platform where Bronx residents can have their voices broadcasted to a wider audience.
To submit an article, email us at submissions@welcome2thebronx.com
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!
