Students from International High School learned about compost by doing at Brook Park. File photo by Urban Transformers

Friends of Brook Park is assembling a South Bronx Green Team Collaborative to build a new compost system in Brook Park on East 141st Street and Brook Avenue.

Students between 13 and 19 years old who live or go to school in the 10454 or 10455 zip codes are eligible for the summer jobs, which pay $8 an hour.

Applicants must have good communications skills and be punctual. Each intern will be responsible for sharing his or her experience as a members of the South Bronx Green Team Collaborative with at least one classroom in the South Bronx.

Participants must be available on six consecutive weekends for four hours a day beginning in mid-May.

An application form, due by May 10, can be obtained by sending an email to urbantransformers [at] gmail [dot] com, or an application may be mailed to Friends of Brook Park, PO Box 801 Bronx NY 10454, and should include contact information. Applicants should include a two-paragraph statement about why they are interested in participating in this project.

The parent or guardian of those selected for an interview will have to sign a permission and waiver form.

A project of Friends of Brook Park and the Urban Transformers, the collaborative is financed by grants from Citizens Committee for New York and Department of Youth and Community Development, thanks to funds from City Council members Maria del Carmen Arroyo and Melissa Mark Viverito.

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

The Port Morris gantries. Photo by Alexandra Corrazzo

New use sought for rusting Port Morris towers

The word “gantry” doesn’t mean anything to longtime bakery owner Errol Bier, but when he sees a photo of the rusted, towering structures that stand next to his Port Morris shop, he nods.

“That’s where I used to ride the ferry,” said Bier, who owns Miss Grimble on 135th and Locust Ave. 

Bier, who has been coming to the neighborhood since he was a child, recalled a time when the gantries were filled with passengers going to visit family members interned at Rikers Island. Today, the massive structures stand desolate in a fenced-in field of weeds, surrounded by construction cranes and “No Trespassing” signs.

But the local community group Friends of Brook Park has big plans for the site. Its members want to turn it into a waterfront recreational area in a neighborhood starved for open space.

Earlier this month, the Historic Districts Council, an advocacy group that fights to preserve New York City neighborhoods, put the site on its highly selective annual list of historic sites in need of protection. The council says it will collaborate with the Brook Park group to try to get the gantry site on the National Register of Historic Places.

“We don’t often visit places like this that are so visually striking and make you feel as though you’re experiencing a different time in history,” said Simeon Bankoff, the preservation group’s executive director. “It really brings us back to our foundation and reminds us that New York is a city about water. It’s a really evocative space to think about new opportunities for the community.”

The two structures were built a century ago to load cargo and passengers onto ferries that sailed to Queens and back.

Randall Comfort, in his 1906 book “History of the Bronx Borough, City of New York,” described the opening of the ferry station. “The beautiful, tastefully, and practically arranged ferry house became the talk of the whole Borough of the Bronx, and now especially on a fine summer day, it is a great sight to see the throngs go over the ferry to North Beach,” he wrote.

After the private company that owned the gantries and ferries dissolved in 1918, the city cut service, opting to run ferries only to Rikers for inmates and their families, and to North Brother Island for patients at the sanatorium.

The ferries continued to operate until the mid-1960s when the Francis Buono Bridge, better known as the Rikers Island Bridge, was built and the North Brother hospital was mothballed, making ferry service to the islands unnecessary. North Brother is now a protected bird sanctuary owned by the Parks Department, which has worked with teens at The Point Community Development Corp. to restore native plants.

Harry Bubbins, director of Friends of Brook Park, has been working with architects from City College’s School of Architecture to attain historic preservation status for the site, and envisions turning it into an educational hub that would combine art and ecology lessons for the public, similar to a site in Queens that turned its rusted gantries into a public education space. Bubbins sees the Historic Council’s ’s selection of the site as a first step.

“There’s six miles of shore where there’s no waterfront access,” said Bubbins. “It’s an absolute tragedy.”

The project has received support from Congressman Jose Serrano, who in a June 2010 letter to the state’s Office of Historic Preservation said, “The Morris Gantries are the last historic vestige of the South Bronx’s once thriving industrial waterfront. The gantries have been in existence for many decades and remain a striking visual reminder of a time when our waterways were utilized by substantial numbers of New Yorkers.”

Bubbins says local residents should be encouraged to visit the gantries, but some Port Morris residents don’t agree. John Lekas, who lives in the neighborhood and owns the Locust Restaurant, is skeptical a recreational space in this isolated industrial neighborhood can succeed.

“This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where people come and sit outside with a magazine,” said Lekas. “People come here to work, or for temporary residence.”

Errol Bier, whose bakery has existed for almost as long as the gantries, thinks a park would be uplifting, and would be good for businesses like his and Lekas’s.

“It would beautify the neighborhood,” said Bier. “And maybe then people will stop building recycling plants here.”

Members of Friends of Brook Park canoe on the Harlem River, but it's not easy to get to the shore. That may change.

The Harlem River was once one of the city’s great playgrounds: colorful boathouses dotted its banks; riders on horseback promenaded and raced along the Manhattan shore; the bluffs above the river were home to an amusement park, as well as the Polo Grounds, which later became the home of the New York Giants, and, of course, to Yankee Stadium.

As the river was industrialized, though New Yorkers turned their backs on the Harlem.  Now, with much of the industry gone, Bronxites hope to reclaim the river.

For years, organizations like Friends of Brook Park and the Bronx Council on Environmental Quality have looked at the Harlem and seen a necklace of green the length of the borough. A greenway would connect existing parks, like Mill Pond and Roberto Clemente, along with new parks built on unused land.  Some of them would include fishing piers, places to launch kayaks and canoes, eco-classrooms and gardens.

Pie in the sky? Not really. To see the future, just look at the Bronx River. Not so long ago, it was an open sewer and garbage dump. Today, thanks to the hard work of volunteers whose efforts led to the formation of the Bronx River Alliance and the investment of millions of federal dollars, wildlife has returned, fish thrive, ospreys soar and egrets nest. People play in new parks, stroll and bicycle on the shore and canoe in the water.

Five years ago, Harry Bubbins of Friends of Brook Park urged the formation of a Harlem River Alliance, drawing on the experience of the Bronx River Alliance. Now the federal government has given advocates’ efforts a boost.

Last month, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar visited Roberto Clemente State Park to announce that the Harlem River would be one of a hundred projects nationwide aimed at restoring neglected rivers to the people who live near them. Rep. Jose Serrano, the chief benefactor of the Bronx River, who accompanied the secretary, pointed to the lessons of the Bronx River.

There are plenty of obstacles. Ways have to be found for a greenway to wind through or around a maze of industrial facilities. The city or state will have to seize junk yards. Thusfar, the state has not even been persuaded to designate the Harlem a sensitive area protected for recreation, turning down a request to do so from the Bronx Council on Environmental Quality in a blizzard of bureaucratic initials.

The city’s 2009 Lower Concourse rezoning, which envisions riverside promenades, has yet to attract the development that would yield them, and the boundaries of the newly-zoned area left out the southern end of Park Avenue, where Friends of Brook Park hopes to see a boat launch built.

But the pledge of federal assistance is a game-changer. The Bronx Council on Environmental Quality, which completed a comprehensive plan for a Harlem River Greenway from Highbridge to Spuyten Duyvil four years ago, has also formed a Harlem River Working Group, which has enlisted community organizations and parks groups the length of the river. Energized by Salazar’s visit, it envisions the Harlem Greenway joining the South Bronx Greenway at the bridge to Randalls Island, says its coordinator, Chauncy Young.

The effort to revive the Harlem River can bring jobs and economic development opportunities to the area, give Mott Haven residents a larger role in deciding how waterfront development will proceed once the economy improves and, above all, offer parks-starved Bronx communities a place where they can find beauty and ease at their doorstep.

Photo by Lily Kesselman Mott Haven's newest resident gets a big hello.

Kids enjoying the greenery at Brook Park

Restoring a stream would bring environmental benefits

Brook Park takes its name from Mill Brook, whose waters once burbled through today’s Webster and Brook Avenues.  Now the environmental organization that helps oversee the park wants to bring the brook back.

“What we are trying to do here is make a green park, and a blue park,” says Aaron Petersohn, manager of the Friends of Brook Park’s Brook Daylighting Restorations Project.

Petersohn is heading an effort to bring the buried stream that once ran through Mott Haven back to the park at Brook Avenue and East 141^st Street.  If the plan succeeds, visitors will hear the sound of water trickling into a pond that attracts dragonflies, frogs and migrating birds.

The South Bronx has been shortchanged on green space, said Harry Bubbins, director of Friends of Brook Park. It “needs greater access to nature and restoration of our natural environment.”

Not only will the water make the park more inviting; it will make the neighborhood healthier, Petersohn says.

Wetland plants will perform their function as nature’s filtration system, capturing and cleaning storm water before it reaches the sewers, where it would carry motor oil, antifreeze, litter and other pollutants into the Harlem River.

For most of the 19^th century, the Mill Brook River flowed through the South Bronx, following the course of today’s Brook Avenue, before emptying into the Bronx Kill, the narrow stretch of water between the Bronx and Randall’s Island.

When the sewer pipes were laid in the 1890s, the river was diverted into them.

“We want to bring back an old river that disappeared,” said Petersohn. Friends of Brook Park has a $45,000 federal grant to design the project and is hoping to raise $300,000 more to unearth the portion of the historic Bronx waterway beneath the park’s soil. The process of bringing that groundwater to the surface is called “daylighting.”

The Friends group partnered with the environmental engineers at the Bronx-based Gaia Institute to locate a source of water for the pond and surrounding wetlands. They found it at the nearby Nehemiah Homes on 140^th Street.

Plans call for diverting to Brook Park the 800,000 gallons of water that now flow into the sewers from the roofs, sidewalks and streets of the housing development. Another 700,000 gallons will be collected from the rainwater and snow that falls on the park itself.

Removing 1.5 million gallons from the sewer system will help clean up the city’s waterways, and will ultimately save money, Petersohn said. When storm water goes into the sewers, New Yorkers pay twice. “As taxpayers we are paying to have rainwater cleaned up when it’s already clean,” said Peterhsohn.

What’s worse, even a short storm can overwhelm the city’s wastewater treatment plants, forcing them to dump untreated waste flushed from toilets into the rivers and bays.

One of the Bloomberg administration’s goals is to improve the quality of the water in New York harbor by capturing and retaining storm water runoff before it enters the sewer system, said Mercedes Padilla, a spokeswoman for the city Department of Environmental Protection.

The Brook Park plan has won applause from elected officials and park users. A spokesman for Rep. Jose Serrano, who secured the federal funds for the project’s design, echoed Bubbins, saying the congressman “wants more green and natural space and places for folks to have room to the outdoors, and not just see concrete.”

“We have actually been vindicated with the fact that there is water found here,” said City Council member Melissa Mark Viverito, who has advocated for the restoration of the brook since she took office in 2005. “That reality is going to be integrated with the design of this park. It reflects and acknowledges the history and reality of this community, that there’s a stream that runs under here.”

“It will be fun for the kids, and something different that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the neighborhood,” said Margarita Herrera, who was strolling in the park with her one year old daughter and two little girls of her friend’s on a recent Sunday.

A version of this story appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

Is a large, suburban-style supermarket in Mott Haven’s future? The city Economic Development Corp. has just issued a call for developers to build at the Hub–on two lots between East 149th Street, Brook Avenue, Westchester Avenue, and Bergen Avenue–and it’s offering incentives for building a supermarket on one of them. Under the city’s FRESH program, enacted to bring more and better food options to under-served neighborhoods, the 58,000 square foot lot is eligible for zoning breaks and financial incentives if it’s developed as a supermarket.

A 26-year-old man was shot dead in the elevator of a building on 149th Street.

Police arrested an aide to Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo, Wilfredo Nazario, and charged him with impersonating an officer and stealing $4,000 by flashing a badge and a gun to get into a Bronx apartment. The Assemblywoman defended Nazario, saying it was all a mistake.

The Bronx Community Pride Center at 448 East 149th Street is looking for volunteers to help it serve the area’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents. People who know bookkeeping and accounting are especially needed.

SummerStage Dance 2010, will be in St. Mary’ Park this weekend. Rennie Harris RHAW and Le Soul Afrique with Special Guest Akim Funk Buddha will perform on Friday, June 25, at 7 p.m. Abakua Afro-Latin Dance Company and Areytos Performance Works will be on stage on Saturday at 7.

One of the culprits in a scandal that has cast a shadow on Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo and City Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo is headed to a federal pen for the next 10 months. Margarita Villegas pleaded guilty to embezzling $50,000 from a non-profit housing corporation that manages low income apartments. Next up, Richard Izqierdo Arroyo, who admitted stealing $115,000, some of which prosecutors say went to the assemblywoman and councilwoman, his grandmother and aunt, respectively.

Friends of Brook Park has a plan to create oyster and mussel beds in the Bronx Kill, which separates Mott Haven from Randall’s Island. The organization is awaiting word from the feds about a $50,000 grant for its proposal to clean up the polluted water nature’s way.

Assemblyman Michael Benjamin won’t challenge Congressman Jose Serrano this year, but won’t rule out a run in 2012, when new district lines are drawn. Benjamin is giving up his seat in the State Legislature.

A refugee from Sierra Leone, who attended International Community High School in Mott Haven was stabbed to death in Washington Heights Sunday. Police said 18-year-old Mohamed Jalloh, who lived in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, was seen arguing with a group of men in a McDonald’s.

Mott Haven has a new landmark, the seven-story Haffen building in the Hub. The Landmarks Preservation Commission also began considering creating a Grand Concourse Historic District stretching from 153rd to 167th Street.

Thirty-three-year-old Tamar Brown was killed on Courtlandt Avenue near the Melrose Jackson Houses Sunday. Police said he had been shot several times.

A soldier who grew up in Mott Haven was murdered on an Army base in Georgia. Master Sgt. Pedro Mercado, 47, a father of three was shot several times. Police have not identified the shooter, who turned himself in and is in custody.

Thieves broke in to St. Rita’s Shrine Church in Mott Haven and stole chalices and communion plates, some jewel-encrusted.

Children gather around a newly-planted cherry tree.Photo courtesy of Friends of Brook Park

Hip-hop and Afro-Latin dance are on the agenda of St. Mary’s Park, with performances on June 25 and 26 at 7 p.m. and a family day celebration at noon on June 27.

A Mott Haven company, Bronx County Recycling, LLC “dumped dangerous construction debris” in an illegal landfill upstate, charged Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who announced a criminal indictment against the company and its owner Salvatore Cascino.

A dog run is under construction in St. Mary’s Park, at the corner of St. Mary’s Street and Cypress Avenue, thanks to the efforts of the South Bronx Dog Owner’s Group.

As Sustainable South Bronx prepares to open the farmers market at Padre Plaza Success Garden, the organization’s Greenway Stewards have worked with trainees enrolled in the Bronx Justice Corps program to replace the gazebo roof, as part of a 10-week partnership with the Justice Corps.

Pablo Rivera reaches down to check on vegetables in the Bronx Community and Cultural Garden (Click on image to see more)

Urban farmers won’t rest when the last crop is picked

On a warm weekday morning in September, Valeria Cantero arrives at Brook Park, on Brook Avenue between 140th and 141st streets. She opens the gate with a key and locks up behind herself. After leaving her things in the center of the garden, Cantero ducks into the back of the lot, emerging with an armful of sticks to light a cooking fire.

One of 20 people who maintain plots of vegetables in Brook Park, Cantero grows tomatoes, beans, peppers and cilantro for her family. She is in the park almost daily, often working alongside her daughter Esperanza, who tends to her own neighboring plot.

Even as the last vegetables are harvested in Mott Haven’s gardens, the work won’t stop. For Cantero and the others who maintain the gardens and the organizations that support them, the colder months are a time to build, plan and finish projects so that next summer’s crop will be even more bountiful than this year’s.

If the off-season, Raymond Figueroa, the Youth Farm Coordinator of Brook Park, who organizes programs and partnerships for young people, will continue to work with students from the International Community High School on Brook Avenue.

This summer they dug up an area of asphalt right in the center of the garden. This fall a hoop house–a simple greenhouse that uses the sun to heat a protected room–will go up, making it possible to grow early vegetables as well as delicate seedlings that will be planted in the spring and become part of next year’s crop.

Another project in the works for next season will be the expansion of the park’s composting system. Composting is a way to treat waste from the kitchen so that when it decays it enriches the soil. Brook Park currently composts its own waste and accepts food waste (but no meat) from homes in the neighborhood. With more space to treat compost the operation will grow, helping the park’s urban farmers to produce higher quality food.

Encouraging this cycle of planting, growing, eating and composting is all a way for the Mott Haven community to become healthier in the long run, according to Figueroa. “I’m looking at this from a real community development vantage point,” he says. “You have to engage young people.”

Mott Haven and Hunts Point have New York City’s highest adult rates of diabetes, a disease that is linked to obesity and a lack of available healthy food choices. Residents can’t count on finding affordable, fresh foods nearby, Figueroa points out. That is why, he says, it is so important that local gardens teach young people to farm, and why the Brook Park garden donates much of the food it produces to local churches and soup kitchens.

A few blocks away in the Bronx Community and Cultural Garden, at 143rd Street and Willis Avenue, there is an entirely different “to-do” list. For starters, says Liz Gonzales, an active gardener there, “Animals have to eat!” She points to the chicken coop where a number of shiny brown hens are marching around, and to the cage that houses a few floppy-eared rabbits.

Under plenty of flapping Puerto Rican flags, the Community and Cultural Garden produces peppers, squash, tomatoes, eggplant, corn, tomatillos, basil, cilantro, pumpkins, cabbage, and even a small patch of aloe.

After the harvest, a crop of winter rye will be planted to enrich next year’s soil, says Simon Skinner of the New York Restoration Project, the group that owns the land and supports the garden’s programs. Grass will be reseeded where dancing has flattened it over the summer, and members are looking into building a raised deck next to their covered stage.

Major mulching and tree-trimming projects will also happen over the winter in “one of the few gardens where,” Skinner says, “people will sit outside all year.”

In the Community and Cultural Garden, as in Brook Park, schoolteachers are meeting with gardeners about working together this fall to use the garden as a teaching tool for the neighborhood’s children.

Back in Brook Park, Cantero has started a small fire underneath a huge black pot filled with water and ears of corn from the local bodega. She makes a lid out of a large checkered cloth and stands watch over her cooking under an old Willow tree.

Another woman strolls in and asks if she can pick a few sunflowers. Meanwhile, a fourth-grade class from PS 369 has entered the park. They gather in the corner with Figueroa to check out the student farm.

Over in the tool-shed last year’s garlic is hanging to dry. This year’s crop of garlic won’t be planted until after the first frost, sometime in November–one of the many tasks still to come in Brook Park.

The gardeners won’t just be planting the ingredients of future meals, Figueroa says. They’ll be “planting social responsibility while planting seeds.”

A version of this article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.