Looking for something the entire family can do together or just with your friends? Then look no further!
Nicole Perrino aka BronxMama first learned about rock hunting from a family member down in Georgia who had posted about the activity. Perrino quickly realized this would be a great idea to bring to The Bronx.
Folks get together and paint rocks with whatever their hearts desire and on the bottom they add the hashtag #TheBronxRocks. Once they’re done, they hide them throughout their neighborhoods across The Bronx for people to find, enjoy, take a picture and tag them on social media to show folks that they found a particular rock.
People are asked to re-hide the rock for others to find and join in the fun.
Bronxite and owner of Confetti Kids in Pelham Bay Lourdes Melendez-Gamez painted these beautites
“I thought it would be a great idea to spread to the Bronx. The borough is no stranger to art, and I imagined all types of people getting in on the fun. Families, artists, local businesses.” said Perrino to Welcome2TheBronx.
She added, ” It looked like such a fun activity to bring communities together and have fun as a family”.
And indeed it has already been a hit with Bronxites across our borough immediately taking to the activity.
When Nicole set up #TheBronxRocks Facebook group a month ago, Bronxites jumped in on the fun and began painting rocks and offering up clues to where they’re hidden.
Oh where can this heart rock painted by Debby of The Bronx be? If you find it, you know what to do!
Hopefully you can come out to Virginia Park, bring your friends, family, kids, or just come solo and join in on the fun.
Someone’s excited to have found a painted rock! Briana, Perrino’s daughter is pictured here with her find.
“Not only is it exciting to see families spending quality time together, but it’s a fun way to get people out exploring the borough and meeting neighbors.” Nicole Perrino said.
As for the goal for the program? She said, “…to bring the Bronx community together and have beautiful rocks all over the borough!”
This Sunday July 2nd from Noon to 5PM at The Third Avenue Business Improvement District in The Hub at Melrose, the 1 Bronx Festival will kick off a festival celebrating the beautiful diversity of The Bronx along with Bronx LGBTQ Pride and simply fun for the entire family regardless of your walk of life!
The event will feature performances by Grammy nominated Bronx native Latin Jazz superstar Bobby Sanabria, dancers from ‘We’re Muslim, Don’t Panic’, singing sensation Jeannie Sol, It’s Showtime NYC! street performers, Bronx born and raised singer, actor Christopher Estrada and many more!
There will also be over 150 vendors and organizations throughout the 4 blocks of the festival on Third Avenue from 149th Street to 153rd complimenting the stores in the shopping district with the performance stage on Westchester Avenue (150th Street) between Third and Bergen Avenues.
Gothamist just reported that thousands of rent stabilized apartments in New York City―the overwhelming majority which are in The Bronx―are in danger of being deregulated as NYC continues to phase out the notorious cluster site homeless shelter program that enticed landlords with on average double the average rents in order to house homeless families.
The average price per unit that the city was paying? $2,451 a month and yes, these were rents being paid in The Bronx too well above what the rent regulated rents were for these units.
At the peak of the program in January 2016, the city had 3,658 cluster units spread across 314 buildings throughout the city and of those, a whopping 2,877 units in 268 buildings were located in The Bronx representing 79% of such sites which turned these residential buildings where multi-generational families lived into living nightmares as landlords greedy with the promise of doubling their rent rolls began pushing those long time tenants away.
Whether it was done through neglect of the properties or the overall lack of safety that existing families felt, the results were the same: Entire buildings were turned into shelters.
I have friends in Hunts Point in one particular building who went through living hell as his landlord tried every means to evict him from his apartment as the building was slowly being turned into a full cluster site. Ultimately my friend won and stayed but at a great emotional toll and a significant drop in quality of life as conditions in his building continued to deteriorate and the landlord’s pockets got fatter.
Things began to change this year after a scathing report from the Department of Investigation in 2015 called, “…clusters the worst-maintained, least-monitored type of shelters, the city was paying landlords and nonprofits $2,451 a month on average per unit. Because cluster site shelters are overwhelmingly in poor and working-class neighborhoods, that figure was more than double the average rent the apartments would have fetched on the market,” according to Gothamist.
By last month, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Dr Hermina Palacio and Department of Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks announced that the use 842 cluster units at 83 buildings had ended of which 474 units in 48 buildings were located in The Bronx.
But Gothamist points out a big problem:
“Early last year, Mayor de Blasio announced he was going to phase out the cluster site scheme by 2018. He has since extended the deadline to 2021, but in May the mayor touted the removal of more than 800 apartments from the program, saying, “Our homeless families deserve better and we will continue to take aggressive action in closing down the remaining sites and replacing them with better, safer shelters to help them get back on their feet and into permanent housing.”
There’s a wrinkle, though. Data obtained by Gothamist shows that of 3,300 cluster apartments in use at one point in fiscal year 2016, 3,167 were in rent-stabilized buildings. A combination of lax state oversight and landlord-friendly carveouts in the rent laws could make such apartments ripe for deregulation as the city pulls out. And responses to public records requests by the relevant city and state agencies suggest that despite the mayor’s plan to create and preserve 200,000 below-market apartments by 2024, little has been done so far to prevent this.”
Gothamist also points out a story out of many of what Bronxites have gone through:
“It’s too late for Shanae Yates and her onetime neighbors on Vyse Avenue. A Virginia native, Yates has lived in the Bronx since she was a young girl, and has spent most of the past 20 years on the same block near East 174th Street. When she first looked at apartments in the big brick building in 2000, it was fully rent-stabilized, and she was pregnant with her second daughter. The landlord at the time was Wolf Posalski—everybody knew him as Willie—and tenants remember him as exceedingly accommodating. For Yates, he arranged to speed up renovations on a first-floor one-bedroom, so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs.
The building “was always clean,” Yates said. “All of the issues were addressed immediately. They didn’t prolong things.” She recalled that once, when her refrigerator stopped working, she called Posalski at home and, “He said, ‘Don’t worry. Go buy some new bags of ice and we’ll have a new fridge in the morning.'”
Her starting rent was $585, and “when it came time to renew your lease, [Willie] would always work with you.” Sometimes, Posalski didn’t raise the rent at all. “He’d say, ‘I’d rather have people I know living here,'” Yates recalled.
Posalski died in 2007, and his daughter Rochelle took over, making his monthly Sunday rounds, collecting rent personally from each tenant. Within a few years, Posalski’s business partners gained control, and according to public records and seven former tenants, that’s when everything started to change.
The repairs got sloppier, managers began offering buyouts, and bills and legal threats started appearing in the mail, demanding late rent. This occurred even, tenants said, when they had paid on time. Around this time, in the early 2010s, then live-in handyman David Forbes recalls that David Green of the new owner RRW Realty told him, “I could make this a homeless shelter and get $97,000 a month.”
Green is one of 13 cluster site owners on Public Advocate Letitia James’s 100 Worst Landlords list for 2016. Together, the 13 men owned 76 of 300 buildings in the program at one point in fiscal year 2016. City records obtained by Gothamist indicate that a cluster shelter building on Intervale Avenue that is 15 units smaller brings in about $83,000 in rental income a month.
As longtime tenants moved out, shelter residents moved in, and the building deteriorated. There were mice and roach infestations. The building lacked security, according to Yates, and some of the shelter people came with their own problems. Tenants recalled stepping out to find people sleeping on the roof and under the stairs, people drinking, and smoking cigarettes, marijuana, and crack in the hallways.
“You’ve got to watch your kids a lot closer,” former tenant Alicia Galasso said of that time. Prior to that, she trusted her neighbors so much she didn’t lock her door. That changed. “You don’t know people now,” she remembered. “You don’t trust people.”
Tenants say building managers warned them that they couldn’t guarantee their safety if they stayed. In February 2013, the building’s renters received a letter that read, “Please be aware that the landlord is not renewing any leases in the building, at the present time. If you would like to terminate your lease, you will not be penalized.” It was signed, “The Management.” Outside of a handful of heavily regulated processes and taking over apartments for one’s family, landlords are legally barred from withholding renewal leases from rent-stabilized tenants.
Nevertheless, the tenants on Vyse got the message.
“Towards the end people had started just leaving quickly,” Galasso recalled. “They were evicting people, saying people owed rent that they didn’t owe, late fees built up on what they were claiming.”
Faced with the constant pressure and growing chaos, as well as a family illness, Galasso moved out of state, no buyout necessary.
The story doesn’t get any better but this is excellent reporting from Gothamist highlighting one of the many problems with the housing crisis we’re facing.”
Artist Dominque Paul wears a dress the measures air pollution. Nexus Media
She looks like a club kid walking through the streets of the South Bronx but she’s not going dancing.
Dominique Paul is on a mission to use her art, a light-up dress, just how dirty the air is thanks to pollution from traffic and other sources and what better place to show it off and help educate folks than the South Bronx neighborhood of Mott Haven which has one of the worst air qualities in New York City.
Collectively, the South Bronx has some of the highest rates of asthma in the nation at nine times the national average.
According to Popular Science:
“Paul debuted the dress as part of a residency funded by IDEAS xLAB, a nonprofit that uses art to raise awareness of public health issues. She has taken the dress out for walks in the South Bronx, which has some of the poorest air quality in New York City. Her goal is to spark conversations about air pollution.
Paul recently joined a walk organized by South Bronx Unite. The group’s president, Mychal Johnson, led a crowd through Mott Haven and Port Morris, neighborhoods in the South Bronx. They stopped every few blocks to talk about economic and environmental issues facing residents. Paul explained how the air monitor attached to her handbag measures fine particulate matter, microscopic bits of dirt and soot floating through the air. Vehicle exhaust is one source of particulates, which are small enough to enter the bloodstream and have been linked to lung and heart disease.
As she walked, Paul explained the Air Quality Index to those assembled. “Green is good,” she said. Yellow is worse. Orange means children and the elderly are at risk, and red means everyone may experience health effects. When it’s red, Paul said, “you might want to consider wearing a mask.” She raised her makeshift breathing mask like a flight attendant miming a safety demonstration.
“Right now, it’s fairly good,” Paul said, pointing to the lights on her dress, which oscillated between green and yellow. It was a weekend morning, she pointed out, with no rush-hour traffic, and the wind was blowing.
But, as the crowd paused on a walkway over the Major Deegan Expressway, Paul’s dress started to flicker between yellow and orange. The South Bronx is surrounded by freeways and overrun with diesel-powered garbage trucks. The asthma hospitalization rate among children living in Mott Haven and Port Morris is around three times the city average.”
Watch the video below and then read the rest of the article over at Popular Science!
We have received a bit of exciting news: Welcome2TheBronx has been selected by Columbia University Libraries for their Web Resources Collection Program, “…for inclusion in its Avery Library Historic Preservation and Urban Planning web archive to ensure its continuing availability to researchers.”
Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University is the world’s largest architectural library and we are honored that one of the most prestigious universities in the world has found our writings worthy of preservation for current and future scholars.
The following is an excerpt from the email we received:
“Dear Mr. García Conde,
The Columbia University Libraries Web Resources Collection Program has selected your website, http://www.welcome2thebronx.com, for inclusion in its Avery Library Historic Preservation and Urban Planning web archive to ensure its continuing availability to researchers. The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library collects books and periodicals in architecture, historic preservation, art history, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, city planning, real estate, and archaeology–and now makes archival copies of important web resources for preservation and access purposes.
Columbia University Libraries plans to collect your website at regular intervals using a web crawler (requiring no effort on your part) and to provide public online access to the archived version(s) of your website to ensure its availability to researchers. Please note that the web crawler will not affect the performance or accessibility of your website. We will also create a cataloging record for your website in the international online library catalog Worldcat and the Columbia University online library catalog, increasing the visibility of your website to the scholarly community.
When I started writing almost 8 years ago, never did it ever cross my mind that I would be creating a repository of Bronx history, current events, and information that would lead Welcome2TheBronx to be quoted and cited in the media over 400 times (and counting) or that we’d receive Historic District Council’s Friend in Media Award in 2015 and let alone be acknowledged by New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito last year for Pride Month and receive a proclamation citing, among many accomplishments, Welcome2TheBronx.
But the last thing this kid from The Bronx ever thought was that his writings and passion would be selected for archival purposes at Columbia University and it’s a validation of how important our stories are and by OUR stories I don’t mean my writings but the narratives of the borough we love and the people who live here.
This journey has been an exciting one where I have learned so much about The Bronx I love, its people. I’ve gotten to meet so many amazing Bronxites from all walks of life, from all religions and lands spanning the globe in all their technicolor glory.
None of this would have happened without all our readers support, the media who turn to us for quotes as a reliable source of information.
Most of all, this wouldn’t have happened without the never-ending support and love from my parents who put up with this crazy idea I had to start writing about our neighborhood and eventually our borough.
Thank you all and thank you Columbia University Libraries for this honor.
Bronxite Giacomo Francia has a documentary project called ‘Who Makes The Bronx’ and recently had a beautiful segment published in The New York Times which you can watch right here.
The series takes a look particularly of workers along Jerome Avenue, an area of our borough that is threatened by displacement as a major rezoning looms over the area.
Giacomo’s work is critical in not only examining the local cultures and people who are threatened by New York City’s poor judgement in destroying our neighborhood but sadly as a way to preserve the histories when the city eventually gets its way.
We’ve seen this grotesque piece of “architecture” going up at the far end of Morris Park just below Pelham Parkway and next to the Hutch and for many of us Star Trek fans, we can’t help but see a giant Borg cube ship instead of the life-saving building that it is.
Borg Cube added for reference
Now, we get to see a little more inside (but not completely due to the sensitive nature of the facility) this 450,000 square foot 24 story monstrosity so out of character with the neighborhood.
The $800 million (yes, you read that correctly, almost $1 billion…) building is finally complete after being under construction since 2010 and test calls are being routed but it won’t be officially operational until some time later this year.
Driving along the Pelham Parkway or Hutchinson River Parkway in Pelham Bay you might notice a silvery, somewhat monolithic structure along the road. That recently completed structure is New York City’s Public Safety Awareness Center II (PSAC II) otherwise known as the center where 911 calls are answered by emergency response workers from three different agencies: the police department, the fire department, and emergency medical services.
The 450,000-square-foot building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) as a perfect cube. To avoid that monolithic feel to a structure that is supposed to prioritize safety and privacy above all else, the architects on the project developed a serrated facade for this building with aluminum panels.
The few windows that do exist are mostly centered around “the 50,000-square-foot, L-shaped call room, which has 30-foot ceilings,” the New York Times described, when it stopped by at the building last year.
The New York Times just published a scathing article on the New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Fund which was founded to make peace with a furious community at the taking over of 25 acres of beloved parkland to create the new Yankee Stadium.
But are we surprised on the findings that this community, which not only endured the nightmare construction of the new stadium and the demolition of the old but also the traffic and pedestrian nightmares that come to the area with home games, has been neglected by the charity?
The purpose of the charity is to provide a benefit to that very community which Yankee Stadium disturbs but as The New York Times shows, only 30% of $6.8 million disbursed between 2008 and 2015 have gone to community organizations in the immediate surrounding zip codes that border the stadium.
70% of the monies have gone to places like Riverdale and The New York Botanical Gardens which are no where near the stadium.
$40 million, 600,000 tickets, and sports equipment were allotted to the fund to distribute over the course of 40 years to the borough but the areas that need it the most and are impacted the most by Yankee Stadium are being shafted.
The New York Times reports:
“The Funding and Energy Only Goes to a Select Few”
“All the other nonprofits that I know of who have grants for community organizations are very proactive in terms of alerting the community,” said Joyce Hogi, who is on the board of the Bronx Museum and has been involved in local nonprofits for decades. The Yankee Stadium fund, she said, is “like a deep, dark secret.”
Agnes Johnson, a member of the South Bronx Community Congress, a group of neighborhood activists who have tried to monitor the Yankee Stadium fund, said that “the funding and energy only goes to a select few.”
Miya Chen, a staff lawyer at the Partnership for Working Families Community Benefits Law Center, a network of advocacy groups that assists communities in negotiating agreements with city governments and developers, called the Yankees C.B.A. “a behind-the-scenes deal, something to tokenize the community, to say on paper they were going to give the community something when in practice it’s been really hard to hold the parties accountable.”
Over the years, at least $300,000 in grants has flowed to organizations that have shared common board members with the Yankee Stadium fund.
Fund Money Flows Far From Yankee Stadium
To be sure, many Bronx organizations have benefited from the $6.8 million that has been distributed. SCAN New York, a youth and family services organization, has received the most money over all, netting $120,000 in donations over the years. The Bronx Children’s Museum has received $45,000, the most of any organization in the Yankee Stadium ZIP code. But often the money goes to communities far from the South Bronx.
In 2014, the fund sent $8,500 to the New York City Cat Coalition, a group of women helping feral cats in Eastchester, seven miles from the stadium. It has also donated at least $18,000 to two private high schools in Throgs Neck, an affluent neighborhood nine miles from the stadium.
The Edgewater Athletic Association, a recreation center in a gated community in Throgs Neck, has received $29,000.
RIVERDALE―The Whitehall Co-op on Henry Hudson Parkway and W 232nd Street unveiled a massive 30,000 square foot green roof designed by the same landscape designers as Manhattan’s High Line, Genie Masucci.
Costing $6.5 million, the improvement includes a sundeck, children’s playground, walking paths, native trees, grass, shrubs, a fire pit, and gazebos and is being touted by co-op as a, “first-of-its-kind” amenity in The Bronx and one of the largest in New York City.
The Whitehall was built in 1970 and at 23 stories houses over 400 apartments and this luxury development was even the home of Ed Sullivan as well as accomplished actress Yvonne De Carlo (aka Lily Munster of ‘The Munsters’).
Bronx B-Boy Chief69 aka Nelson Seda, performs during Loving The Bronx’s ‘The Get Down Tour’ this past April
Whatever you call it, b-boying, breaking, breakdancing there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind who knows anything about Hip Hop and its origins that this urban dance form was born here in The Bronx influenced by the predominantly Puerto Rican dancers who created this style of dancing which became one of the 5 pillars of Hip Hop.
Are you surprised that The Bronx creates so much and exports it to the world? The Bronx isn’t just a borough or a county or a geographic place, it’s a way of life, a culture, a living breathing art exhibition in perpetual motion in a flurry of dazzling colors representing all the ethnic groups that make up The Bronx past, present, and future.
Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Italians, Irish, Garifuna, German, Black, Jewish, Russian, Albanian, Mexican, Bengali, West African, Jamaicans, you name it we are ALL of it!
Watch Gabe Pressman’s last piece he did on The Bronx below
Bronx born and raised Gabe Pressman, a legend in broadcast journalism who graced our television screens for over 60 years passed away today at the age of 93 literally working until the day he died.
Pressman was considered by many to be New York City’s first local TV reporters and he told the New York Times in 1998, “All I know, I was alone out there…I was the only one holding the mike.”
“Gabriel Pressman was born in the Bronx on Feb. 14, 1924, the son of Dr. Benjamin and Lena Rifkin Pressman. His father, a dentist, bought him a hectograph, an early duplicating device, to produce a family newspaper, and he wrote pieces about his grandmother’s sponge cake and a cousin’s first tooth. He started a newspaper at P.S. 35 in the Bronx, and at Morris High School was editor of the student newspaper and class president.
He attended New York University, majoring in history, and in the summers of 1941 and 1942 was a reporter for The Peekskill Evening Star. He enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and was a communications officer in the South Pacific. Back at N.Y.U., he earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in 1946 before receiving a master’s degree in 1947 from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Gabe Pressman’s style of journalism was like no other. He was someone who didn’t just report the news but asked the complex questions and probed deeper underneath the surface of the story to get to the ever important WHY something happened.
Today is a dark day in journalism as we have lost one of the greatest ever.
Thanks for making The Bronx proud and never forgetting your roots.
Watch Gabe Pressman’s last piece on The Bronx which aired exactly two years ago (click arrow to watch full screen)
The man who has become one of the most recognizable memes in the world was born and raised in The Bronx!
When we saw the headline above from The Schmooze, it immediately caught our attention because we already know who ‘The Most Interesting Man in The world’ is (great job marketing department at Dos Equis for drilling that into our subconsciousness).
Jonathan Goldsmith famous for his line in the commercials, “I don’t always drink beer. But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.” told The Schmooze that he hails from our awesome borough.
According to the article:
Goldsmith, who was replaced by younger actor Augustin Legrand in 2016, is meeting with me to discuss his new memoir “Stay Interesting: I Don’t Always Tell Stories About My Life, but When I Do They’re True and Amazing” (Dutton), published on June 13th. The book is filled with interesting anecdotes from Goldsmith’s life but the actor doesn’t have much in common with the Latino debonaire he plays in the campaign that made him in a star. In fact, Goldsmith isn’t Latino at all. He’s a Jew from the Bronx.
That plan was dashed when he got a call one day from his agent, who said she knew of a role for which he would be perfect. It was this call that would change his life forever.
Goldsmith had nothing to lose. He said yes to the audition, packed a bag, and drove his old pick-up truck out to Los Angeles. Within the year, his very Yiddishe punim had become synonymous with one of the most famous commercial campaigns of the new millennium.
“There was a line of 500 men and they all looked like Juan Valdez, the coffee merchant,” said Goldsmith of the fateful audition. “I said, I’m all wrong for this.”
The producers of the commercial were looking for an actor with an improvisational background, which Goldsmith had. But his confidence wasn’t at an all-time high.
“I didn’t know if I still had it in me, if I could still make them laugh,” he says. “They asked me to tell them a story – any story – but it had to end with ‘and that’s how I arm-wrestled Fidel Castro.’”
Goldsmith concocted a wild tale about meeting Fidel Castro through a romantic tryst with Che Guevara’s sister. The bit was a roiling success.
“I had them laughing more and more,” says Goldsmith. “And in the end, they chose a Jew from The Bronx.”
