Courts: City must monitor schools for environmental hazards
Posted on 02. Aug, 2011 by Paul DeBenedetto.
Parents and community leaders have won a victory in a long-running debate over environmental hazards in the Mott Haven school campus at Concourse Village near E. 153 Street. The court ordered the School Construction Authority to conduct a new environmental review of plans to monitor the four new schools in the Mott Haven school campus [...]
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Bronx streetscapes take center stage in new exhibition
Posted on 02. Aug, 2011 by Matthew J. Perlman.
Emilio Sanchez made his first trek down Hunts Point’s Food Center Drive in 1988, when he was 67, to an art gallery in the caverns of the Krasdale Foods complex where his art was being shown. His friend Sig Balka, general attorney for Krasdale and art connoisseur, was showing Sanchez’s work in the gallery [...]
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Mott Haven program specializes in second chances for women
Posted on 02. Aug, 2011 by Kathy Conkwright.
Two weeks before her high school graduation in 1973, Harlem native Yvonne Chestnut was told she was one credit short and could not graduate with her classmates. When she learned she would have to wait until the fall and attend school full-time to receive her diploma, Chestnut gave up. She never returned [...]
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Tenants look to cameras for safety
Posted on 02. Aug, 2011 by Matthew J. Perlman.
Public housing tenants around the city are feeling nervous about their safety, surveys show, and two new initiatives being pioneered in the South Bronx are aimed at helping them feel safer. But while both initiatives call for security cameras inside NYCHA buildings to help protect residents, housing officials support one, while rejecting a method tenant [...]
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Remembering a neighborhood activist
Posted on 02. Aug, 2011 by Paul DeBenedetto.
It was 1974, and a group of South Bronx residents were looking for someone to fill a vacant seat on the state Assembly. The pick from the community was nearly unanimous: It would be Evelina Antonetty, surely. But public office was of no interest to the forty-something activist. Instead, she told her supporters to get [...]
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Serrano votes against debt ceiling deal
Posted on 01. Aug, 2011 by Bernard L. Stein.
Congressman José E. Serrano voted against the legislation raising the nation’s debt ceiling, saying the package urged on Congress by President Barack Obama and the leaders of both parties cut necessary programs and failed to raise taxes on the wealthy.
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Two South Bronx groups win city awards
Posted on 01. Aug, 2011 by Joe Hirsch.
Two stalwarts of the arts in the South Bronx received prestigious Neighborhood Achievement Awards from the mayor’s office in July. The Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education in Hunts Point and Pregones Theater near Mott Haven were among fourteen organizations and individuals citywide to get the 2011 award at a ceremony at Gracie Mansion, [...]
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Mott Haven libraries won’t be cut
Posted on 01. Aug, 2011 by Kathy Conkwright.
When 15-year old Jose “Mickey” Velez learned the place he calls his second home was in jeopardy of getting shut down, he put up a fight—in the democratic way. Though he’s not old enough to vote, Velez made sure elected officials heard his voice. He went door-to-door in Mott Haven, and collected over 100 signatures [...]
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Melrose Post Office on USPS chopping block
Posted on 29. Jul, 2011 by Joe Hirsch.
The Melcourt post office at 754 Melrose Ave is on a hit list, released by the Postal Service on July 26. The local post office is one of 17 Bronx post offices slated for closing, more than in any other borough in the city.
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Engine 60 is saved from the budget axe
Posted on 07. Jul, 2011 by Matthew J. Perlman.
Cowbells rang in the sunlit square in front of the firehouse on 143rd Street and 3rd Avenue on June 29, as chanting residents rejoiced, celebrating the escape of their engine company from fiscal cuts. The city budget had put Bronx fire companies at risk of closure again this year, sparking weeks of protest from worried [...]
