Food delivery giant FreshDirect has announced it will expand service into the Bronx, beginning this week. In addition, the company says it has received government approval to launch a pilot program that for the first time would allow food stamp recipients to use their benefits to order food from online vendors.

Opponents of the deal to move FreshDirect from Queens to the Harlem River Yards in Port Morris have pointed out that while the grocer will bring 2,000 additional truck trips per day to the South Bronx, it did not serve its residents. Only the Northwest Bronx has been included in FreshDirect’s service area until now.

The critics say the added traffic would worsen existing air pollution problems without providing any benefits to residents. FreshDirect is set to receive $130 million in subsidies from the city to move.

In an effort to quiet criticism, in February the company signed a non-binding agreement with the office of Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., promising, among other things, to begin delivering to the Bronx.

Diaz hailed the announcement that the company would begin to serve the entire borough.

“Today’s announcement shows that FreshDirect is ready to live up to those commitments ahead of schedule, years before making the Bronx their official home,” he said. “Ultimately, this move will offer residents increased healthy grocery options.”

FreshDirect officials added they will offer 50 percent discounts on certain popular items and discounts of $25 for new customers, to celebrate their service expansion to the borough. Details for implementation of the food stamps pilot project are still being worked out, but the company says they will be finalized in the coming weeks.

Middle school students learn ins and outs of the business world

Brittni Ortiz, 12, arranged fliers neatly on the table as her business partner, Brittany Tirado, 13, pulled out a chocolate frosted cupcake and set it by a poster board.

“Brittany, this is it,” Ortiz said.

After weeks of preparation, students at M.S. 223 in Mott Haven pitched more than 20 different business ideas to their peers, teachers and business people, who acted as judges. The one-day competition gauged which start-ups had the best chance of succeeding. Since the beginning of the school year, all the seventh-graders have been learning about different career options, what their interests are and how to start their own businesses.

“This is Charmed Bake Shoppe and we decided to create this idea because we were upset there’s no Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts or anything like that really close to the school,” Ortiz told a group of students who had crowded around their poster board.

Tirado explained how their bake shop would sell everything from coffee to cupcakes and offer Wi-fi Internet and a quiet place for students to study.

“Is that a real cupcake?” one student asked. “Can I have it?”

Quickly realizing the marketing opportunity, the girls wrote numbers on pieces of paper and handed them out to students so the cupcake could be raffled off later.

M.S. 223 has partnered with the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, a national program that teaches young people from low-income communities the necessary steps to becoming an entrepreneur. Only one other school in the Bronx uses the curriculum to teach students how to pitch their own business ideas.

“I think our country is founded on entrepreneurship,” said Ramón Gonzalez, principal of M.S. 223. “We want these kids to have experiences where they are not only talking about creating companies, but actually doing it.”

The  ideas students pitched in this year’s competition included removable and machine-washable hat inserts to keep baseball caps clean, waterproof sneakers, a pen mp3 player that plays music while it writes and a mobile app that charges phones and saves battery life.

Business professionals from across the city served as judges, grading each business’s pitch based on the quality and creativity of the pitches.

After hearing Charmed Bake Shoppe’s presentation, two judges grilled the girls on whether they had considered creating a mobile business to avoid the expense of a storefront. They also wanted to know if the café would only serve children, or if adults would be welcome too.

“We want our customers to feel like they’re at home, so no matter what age you are, you can go and you can buy whatever you want because we’re there for you, to please you,” Ortiz said.

Afterward, the judges said they were impressed.

“They’re, what, 12 or 13?” said Mark Stein, who works with Meringoff Properties in Manhattan. “They’re extremely poised and very well-spoken. We asked questions and they responded seamlessly.”

Dennis Miller, an engineer, said, “Now, this is the kind of thing that is probably a lot more useful for the real world than some of the other stuff you get out of textbooks.”

Nicole Lentino, a technology teacher, has run the entrepreneurship program at M.S. 223 for the past two years. She uses the curriculum to teach four different classes of seventh graders.

“Students don’t necessarily see themselves as capable of doing that,” Lentino said of students’ self-perception as business entrepreneurs. “You know, just, environmental factors, home life, whatever the reason may be, they just don’t believe they’re capable of this type of success.”

When the competition was completed at the end of the afternoon, four winning groups from each class were announced. Charmed Bake Shoppe was one of them.

The winning entrepreneurs will apply to compete in a regional competition in June, where they will face other fledgling student businesses from across the city.

“I was so excited,” Tirado said. “I thought it was going to be a close tie between us and the mp3 pen. But I think what put us over the top was the real cupcake.”

This Francisco Reyes ll photo of a man washing his dog is one of hundreds that will be displayed in a photo exhibition by the collective Seis del Sur this spring.

Photo exhibit will feature insiders’ view of ’70s and ’80s South Bronx

A chance meeting at a photo exhibit at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies in 2010 led six South Bronx photographers who have shared a common vision of life in the neighborhood for over thirty years to join forces for the first time.

David Gonzalez, Angel Franco, Ricky Flores, Edwin Pagan, Francisco Reyes II, and Joseph Conzo Jr., whose black and white photos were featured at the Hunter exhibit, had spent the 1970s and 1980s documenting the area and its people. But although they had crossed paths while living in and photographing the South Bronx over the years, they had not had the chance to work together.

But when they met at Conzo’s exhibit, they realized they had been photographing some of the same places all along, just from different perspectives.

Flores noticed that one of Conzo’s photos featured a bodega he had photographed extensively during the ’80s.

Gonzalez, an award-winning writer for The New York Times, posted a photo on Facebook he had taken of a window in his childhood home on Beck Street. Flores responded by posting a photo he had taken of the same window, from a different angle.

Flores posted a photo of the building at 800 Fox Street in Longwood burning down. Coincidentally, it had been one of Conzo’s favorite hangouts.

Realizing the commonalities in their work, the men decided to pool their visions as photographers, and called their collective Seis del Sur, or Six From the South.

The name,” says Flores, “is a reference to the 6 train that runs through the community, and the fact we are six Boricua men from the South Bronx.”

Each brings his own distinct vision of the neighborhood to the group. Franco, the oldest of the six, spent his time off from work as a photojournalist in the ’70s following officers from the 46th Precinct, whose violent reputation led it to be labeled “The Alamo.” Today, with a police scanner in his car, Franco continues the work he began in the Fordham section of the borough, as a photographer for the Times.

In Angel Franco's photo, a boy sits in wait at the precinct.

Pagan, a filmmaker and cinematographer, and Flores, a photojournalist for The Journal News in Westchester, first met as teenagers, documenting one of the most turbulent periods in the borough’s history through their photos. Mostly self-taught, they each focused on documenting their surroundings, friends and family.

Pagan recalls sharing his prints with his mother while growing up.

My mom would ask ‘who’s that?’ and I would respond, ‘I don’t know,’” says Pagan, who was accustomed to taking his camera everywhere, though at the time he did not consider what he was doing an art form.

I was just excited and passionate about taking photos,” he explains.

Reyes, who lived in the South Bronx during the early ’70s while working there as a street photographer, taught photography at United Bronx Parents, the organization Conzo’s grandmother, community activist Evelina Antonetty, helped establish. Growing up, Conzo looked up to Reyes as a mentor. After 35 years of friendship, the men still take photographs together.

Conzo was a chubby kid with an Angela Davis afro who picked up his first camera at the age of nine. Early on in his career, he trained his lens on Latin music stars like Tito Puente and Charlie Palmieri, and later documented the birth of Hip Hop, taking the genre’s “baby pictures,” as Gonzalez dubbed them in a 2005 Times article he wrote about Conzo.

Like the rest of the Seis, Conzo took photos of his friends, family and surroundings, during a time when many photographers from elsewhere were sent to cover the South Bronx on assignment. For him, “the group’s pictures represent what they saw and felt, going beyond the urban blight that others tended to focus on.”

The group’s first show is slated for early summer, and has been two years in the making. One of the primary objectives, says Gonzalez, will be to try to dispel the negative light the South Bronx has been cast in over the years.

These pictures are our story, told from inside the neighborhood and our hearts,” says Gonzalez.

When Gonzalez returned to Longwood in 1979 after four years studying at Yale, he discovered that the landscape of his youth had been obliterated. To cope with the shock, he turned to his camera, to try to make sense of the changes.

Ultimately, I chose to take photos of life and people,” he said. “What distinguishes our work from that of so-called ‘parachute photographers,’ was that we focused on signs of life, as opposed to the rubble.”

The show will be held at the recently founded Bronx Documentary Center in Melrose and will feature a multimedia component, as well as a curriculum to engage young people from local schools. Michael Kamber, founder of the center and a colleague of Gonzalez’ at the Times, views the show as a homecoming and a chance to share the borough’s past with younger audiences.

City Councilwomen Maria del Carmen Arroyo and Melissa Mark-Viverito say 2000 FreshDirect truck trips per day would add to Mott Haven's existing environmental woes.

Mark-Viverito, Arroyo demand an audit on Harlem River Yards

Two members of the New York City Council want the State Department of Transportation to reconsider the lease of the land where FreshDirect is planning to build its new headquarters.

Melissa Mark-Viverito and Maria del Carmen Arroyo, who represent Mott Haven, have called for a moratorium on all new development in the Harlem River Yards until an audit is conducted on the impact of heavy industrial use of the land on the surrounding neighborhood.

Mark-Viverito and Arroyo sent a letter to DOT commissioner Joan McDonald on May 3, urging the agency to take into account the harmful impact FreshDirect’s 2,000 truck trips per day would have on a neighborhood already heavily burdened with polluting industries. 

The letter asks for the agency to re-examine the lease of the state-owned property to the Galesi Group, a real estate firm doing business locally as Harlem River Yard Ventures Inc. Mark-Viverito and Arroyo say the firm has violated the spirit of the lease by renting parcels to “an array of manufacturing and waste processing facilities that place a disproportionate impact of diesel truck traffic running in and through the South Bronx.”

There are four waste transfer stations on the narrow waterfront strip, which contribute to the area’s sky-high asthma rates, leading the council members to conclude “the tenant is using the property in a manner that is inconsistent with the terms of the lease.”

Since the Galesi Group signed the 99-year lease with the city in 1991, the area adjacent to the Harlem River Yards has been rezoned to allow for increased residential use, and to help bolster local businesses, the council members say.

“Adding insult to injury,” the letter says, “Harlem River Yard Ventures collects approximately $500,000 per month in rent from its subleases while paying only $43,000 per month in rent to DOT for the entire 94 acres.”

Mark-Viverito and Arroyo concluded by suggesting the DOT declare a default on the property and collaborate with state authorities to consider , “taking full account of the socio-economic makeup of the neighborhood and the disproportionate impact” on area residents.

Opponents of the FreshDirect deal, in which the city and state have authorized $130 million in subsidies to help the online grocer move from Queens to Port Morris, hailed the effort. Mott Haven community leader Mychal Johnson echoed the letter, saying, “This is a budding residential area with new developments and loft conversions; it is not an industrial wasteland.” He added, “We need open space and waterfront access and real economic development.”

South Bronx Unite, the umbrella organization that is coordinating opposition to the FreshDirect deal, also applauded the council members’ effort. The organization, which has been holding demonstrations in Manhattan calling for a boycott of FreshDirect (which does not serve most of the Bronx), is also seeking to show that local residents want access to the South Bronx waterfront. It is asking residents to fill out this survey.

Residents learn about recycling, conservation at annual festival

For the fifth straight year, Bronxites gathered at St. Mary’s Park to celebrate Earth Fest, sharing ideas for innovative ways to green the planet.

Representatives from businesses, community organizations, and city agencies combined on April 21st to promote environmental initiatives, through information kiosks, activities for kids and assorted giveaways at Mott Haven’s biggest park.

Julia Wilson, 6, circled a flagpole several times while trying to decide where to tie a bright orange ribbon, to give flight to a sail made of recycled materials. She settled on a spot she could reach at the bottom of the pole.

“Recycling means cleaning the earth and not leaving garbage around,” she said, standing back to admire the plastic bags and ribbons tethered to it that blew in the wind.

“There’s a lot to learn here,” said Levell Peterkin, 40, who was visiting family in the area. “I was over there and talked to Con Ed, who told me you can change all the light bulbs in your house to these things,” he said, holding up a compact fluorescent light bulb. “I could cut my electricity bill by 40 percent.”

With bright green papers in hand, festival-goers like Peterkin strolled from one table to another listening to vendors peddle their wares. The product vendors stamped the papers, allowing participants to collect prizes based on the number of stamps they’d accumulated.

“It’s fun and free, but you have to work to get the free stuff,” said Rachel Amar, the event’s founder. “It’s a way to incentivize green behavior.”

A crowd swarmed the table that was covered with prizes for most of the afternoon. One volunteer yelled, “Hardcover books, three points. Softcover books, two points. All brand new books, come and get them.” Other prizes included t-shirts, healthy snacks and bottles of lotion.

Nearby, a group of kids played a round of Recycling Olympics, the newest addition to Earth Fest. They competed in a recycling toss, where they had to decide whether an item of garbage went in a blue plastics bin, a green paper pin or a black trash bin.

After playing the game, Natasha Perez, 8, reflected on what she learned.

“Plastic should not go in the paper, because later you can’t recycle,” she said.Across from the games, Jayla Garris, 11, stood on stage singing her rendition of Adele’s “Someone Like You,” as part of the youth talent show that featured spoken-word and musical and dance performances. She said it was her first time at Earth Fest.

“It’s nice of people to throw an event because people don’t usually celebrate the Earth,” she said.

Anna Vincenty, a long-time neighborhood activist who worked for many years for housing advocacy group Nos Quedamos and now works as Congressman Jose E. Serrano’s community liaison, was honored with a 2012 GetGreen Environmental Leadership award.

“There is nothing more important than making sure that today you take advantage of everything that you’re learning,” said Vincenty. “We’ve got to make sure we leave our children and our grandchildren a better place than what we found.”

Superhero Global Man Eco-Avenger also accepted an award for promoting green education to children.

“One of the things I want everybody in this community to understand is we believe in you,” he said. “We are committed to making sure the Bronx gets cleaner and cleaner.”

Sin City on Park Ave. in Mott Haven has been the site of violence and car break-ins, police say.

Strip club violence
Police from the 40th Precinct are keeping close watch on Sin City. The strip club on Park Ave., tucked between a taxi garage on one side and Metro North tracks and a sprawling community garden on the other, has been the site of multiple incidents of violence and theft in recent months.

There have been 14 reported incidents since Jan. 1st directly related to the club, and numerous overnight car break-ins in the vicinity police suspect may also be the handiwork of club patrons. Of those arrested, many have had prior convictions for drug dealing and other felonies, police say.

“The clientele that’s coming to the location is the worst of the worst,” said Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack, commanding officer of the 4oth Precinct, who says he deploys officers needed in other parts of Mott Haven and Melrose to patrol Park Ave. late nights to contend with the problems brought on by Sin City’s customers.

On Feb. 28th, a man left the club after a dispute with management, retrieved a 9 mm handgun from his car and returned to the bar to settle the score. Although no shots were fired, the suspect and another man took off running before police caught and arrested both men.

On March 23rd, Lincoln Hospital staff notified police a patient was being treated for a gunshot wound. Police later found he and another hospital patient receiving treatment had both been shot while clubbing at Sin City that night.

“Mott Haven does not need this,” said McCormack.

Two homicides
On April 15 at 5:15 a.m., Terrence Martin, 26, was found dead in front of 285 E. 156th St. with a bullet wound to the back of the head. No arrests have been made.

On April 16, a 16 year-old boy was beaten to death in front of 700 Morris Ave. and later pronounced dead from multiple injuries. There have been no arrests made in the case.

Cell phone snatchings
On April 18th and 19th, three cellphone thefts were reported on the corner of Lincoln Ave. and 138th St. A young man in his late teens grabbed the devices out of victim’s hands in all three incidences, one on a bus, another at the bus stop and one on the street corner.

Crime by numbers
Of the seven major categories police use to gauge crime in the city, robberies and grand larcenies have shot up over the first four months of 2012 compared with the same period last year. Robberies have increased by roughly 23 percent, from 88 to 108, while grand larcenies have risen from 60 last year to 74 this year.

However, rapes, burglaries and car theft are way down over the same period. There were 58 burglaries reported over the first four months of 2011, compared with 40 over the same period this year, while car thefts tumbled from 34 this time last year to just 20 so far this year.

SoBRO’s financial education coordinator Stephane Hyacinthe will present ways to best utilize tax refunds, save for retirement, establish good credit, develop a solid budget, and to get ahead of the debt collectors.

The session will take place at SoBRO’s main office at 555 Bergen Ave. near the Hub. To RSVP, call 718-732-7544 or email vseltzer@sobro.org.

Opponents of company’s move to Mott Haven seek broad support for boycott

Over a dozen South Bronx activists took their protest against FreshDirect to the Upper West Side on March 21st, urging Manhattanites to join them in a citywide boycott of the online grocer. 

The activists, representing a group called South Bronx Unite, gathered at Verdi Square on W. 72nd St. to rally support. They argue the food delivery company’s planned move to Mott Haven will add extensive truck traffic to a neighborhood whose residents are already among the city’s most asthma-plagued.

FreshDirect announced in February it will move from its Queens facility to the South Bronx, after the city offered it $130 million in loans and incentives to keep it from moving to New Jersey.

“We want everyone in the city to know that this is a very serious issue that doesn’t just impact the South Bronx,”said Harry Bubbins, director of the Mott Haven group Friends of Brook Park.

“FreshDirect customers are around here, and their customer base needs to be aware of the impact that they are having on us,”said Daniel Wallace, a Mott Haven resident.

Asthma hospitalization rates are higher in the South Bronx than anywhere else in the city, according to a 2008 study conducted by the city’s Department of Health, but Community Board 1 member Mychal Johnson said the tony Upper West Side is equally affected by noise and pollution from Fresh Direct’s vehicles.

“We just want to let Manhattan residents know it’s not just a Bronx issue,” he said.

Ivelyse Andino, who has lived in Mott Haven her whole life, said she suffers from asthma and is worried about pollution from the trucks.

“I’m tired of seeing the city polluting our neighborhoods, doing back-room deals with public money and not considering the community,” she said.

Brian Chidester, who recently moved to Port Morris from Virginia, said he had open-heart surgery in October.

“I don’t want to be breathing the kind of toxins that are going to be coming out of the trucks coming through our area every single day,” he said.

Members of South Bronx Unite protested FreshDirect's move to Mott Haven on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Photo by Alex Robinson

FreshDirect officials have said the company will transition gradually to a fleet of electric trucks, including ten when it opens. In addition, they vow to create up to 1,000 jobs over five years.

Protesters said they are skeptical the company will keep its word. They alluded to an audit released by City Comptroller John Liu’s office on March 19th, which revealed that over 300 companies that received similar tax breaks in 2009 failed to create or retain the jobs they had promised to.

“This is a company that wants to move to our neighborhood without offering any benefit.  We’re going to bear only costs and people elsewhere are going to get all the benefits,” Wallace said.

Opponents argue that adding insult to injury, FreshDirect does not deliver to the South Bronx, but the company has promised that will change.

A representative for FreshDirect handed out promotional flyers for the company at the protest, but he declined to comment.

“Today’s rally against FreshDirect’s decision to expand in New York ignores the positive impact of our public-private partnership with the city,”the flyer read.

Audio slideshow produced by Tom DiChristopher and Alex Robinson

Harry Bubbins, from Friends of Brook Park, joined others from Mott Haven in protesting the city's accord with FreshDirect on Feb. 14 in Manhattan.

Critics cite environmental harm, denounce backdoor deal

The city’s Industrial Development Agency voted overwhelmingly on Feb. 14 in favor of subsidies that will bring the food delivery company FreshDirect to Port Morris, as about a dozen South Bronx residents sat and fumed that the agreement was rammed through without sufficient public discussion.

The agency ignored a letter from Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito asking it to postpone the vote because there “appears to be the lack of transparency and public input.”

Instead the agency confirmed the $130 million in subsidies that city and state officials announced a week ago to sway FreshDirect, which has outgrown its current home in Queens, to remain in the city rather than move to New Jersey.

“I cannot sit quietly through the lies that I’m listening to,” Harry Bubbins, director of the Mott Haven group Friends of Brook Park told the board before walking out of the agency’s conference room shortly after the meeting began.

Bubbins and other local advocates had denounced the deal as one that would further foul the air by bringing more trucks through Mott Haven and closing off access to the waterfront.

Board members’ assurances that the project will create jobs for Bronxites without worsening local air pollution were interspersed with angry interruptions from the protesters, who were repeatedly warned to pipe down by board members and security personnel.

Michael Toth, vice president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, characterized FreshDirect’s potential move across the Hudson as a “credible threat” the city needed to counter to keep over 2,000 jobs from leaving town. Toth added that the food company would earn back $255 million in revenue for the city over the next 25 years, triple the amount in sales and property tax exemptions they will receive over that span as part of the deal.

“This in no way impedes development of the greenway,” he added, responding to one of the protester’s concerns that the project will prevent completion of the South Bronx Greenway, including the planned link to Randall’s Island.

The protesters were critical of Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. for not making the terms of an agreement with the food company designed to answer criticism public before the meeting. The borough president released the text of the memorandum of understanding just as the breakfast-hour meeting was drawing to a close.

“It’s ridiculously insulting to our intelligence they won’t even show it,” said Reverend Ruben Austria of the Bronx organization Community Connections for Youth.

Mott Haven resident Corrine Kohut said she doubted the 15 board members had paid serious attention to residents’ environmental concerns.

“I doubt they even looked at it,” she said, stressing that the company’s 130-truck fleet will make frequent trips to and from Port Morris.

Comptroller’s John Liu’s representative Carol Kostik cast the only No vote, calling the process “flawed” and saying the price tag was too high.

“Today’s $100 million subsidy to Fresh Direct was already a done deal from the moment it was announced last week and the reality is that my vote today does not change the outcome,” said Liu in a statement. “Nonetheless, I cannot vote for this subsidy in good conscience.”

While opponents vowed to continue to fight, a spokeswoman for the borough president said of the vote, “This means the deal is done,” and added on behalf of Diaz that it was “a victory for the Bronx,” that would assure the company’s “commitment to the Bronx for decades to come.”

FreshDirect has ordered 10 all-electric trucks like this one used by Down East Seafood at the Hunts Point Market and says it will be "100 percent green" in five years.

Agreement with borough president seeks to answer critics

Responding to intense criticism from South Bronx residents and organizations over the deal to subsidize a new facility in Port Morris for FreshDirect, the online grocer has promised to seek out Bronx residents for new jobs, to expand its service to the Bronx and to build a non-polluting fleet of delivery trucks.

Announced the day before critics were to rally in a downtown protest, the company  signed an agreement with the Bronx borough president’s office and the Bronx Overall Economic Deveolpment Corporation that includes a promises to intensify efforts to train and hire Bronx residents for the 620 new jobs the company says it will be filling over the next eight years. It sets a target of 30 percent of non-union hires for Bronx residents.

In answer to concerns about air pollution from increased truck traffic to and from the FreshDirect facility, to be constructed on a 16-acre site in the Harlem River Rail Yard, the company promises to have a 100 percent “green fleet” within five years.

By June, the company will meet with the borough president to discuss plans for expanding its delivery service in the Bronx, where it currently serves only Riverdale and Woodlawn. The agreement promises that the South Bronx will be included in the expansion plan.

While the agreement sets targets for employment and milestones for fulfilling its promises, it does not set aside jobs for local residents. FreshDirect agrees to seek out “qualified unemployed persons in the Bronx.” The economic development corporation, in turn, will hold training programs and job fairs to prepare and recruit workers.

“These are all just promises,” said Bettina Damiani of the watchdog organization GoodJobsNY. “The lack of accountability is extraordinary.”

Under the terms of the agreement, FreshDirect promises to report annually to the borough president and the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation on its progress.

To enforce the agreement, the memorandum says that if FreshDirect fails to live up to its terms, Bronx officials may withdraw their financial support for the move to Port Morris. The borough president and economic development corporation have pledged $1.5 million in grants and a $3 million loan.

The $123.3 million package of grants, loans and tax credits pledged by the city and state to induce the company to remain in New York City rather than move to New Jersey are not affected by the agreement.

The memorandum of understanding does not address concerns that the lease of the parcel in the rail yard to Fresh Direct will interfere with plans to connect the South Bronx Greenway to Randall’s Island. Construction of the pedestrian bridge had been scheduled to begin at the end of this year.

Calling FreshDirect’s decision to remain in New York “a win-win for everyone,” Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. said “we have come to an agreement with the company that will ensure their commitment to the Bronx for decades to come.”