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.

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.

Park users relax at Brook Park.Photo by Joe Hirsch

City officials insist community gardens have nothing to fear

Eight years ago, the city, the state and the creators of 500 community gardens on city-owned land reached an agreement that ended a long battle that began when the Giuliani administration sought to auction the garden lots to developers.

Now, that agreement is set to expire, alarming gardeners in Mott Haven and Melrose who fear that new rules drafted by the Parks Department threaten their green mini-utopias.

The community gardens they created by cleaning up vacant lots offer respite from wilting summer heat and a harvest that is tastier and more nutritious than the produce in local markets, they say, but they fear that real estate will trump their efforts to provide life’s basics for locals who live with less.

City officials contend residents have nothing to worry about. They say whatever new agreement gets hammered out to replace the pact that expires in September will be an improvement on the present arrangement, and that they have made every effort to take residents’ concerns into account.

Harry Bubbins, director of the area’s largest community garden, Brook Park, is among the skeptics. “They want to put up condominiums, big boxes, you know the deal,” Bubbins warned a crowd of about a hundred at a festival honoring immigrants at the park in July.

Bubbins, whose gruff demeanor more closely resembles that of an embattled rural homesteader than a crass New Yorker, recalled the state of the park, which occupies the better part of a square block on Brook Avenue between 140th and 141st streets. “We cut the locks to get in here. It was an abandoned lot.”

Community gardeners want the city to sign an agreement that would grant the gardens permanent status and protect them from future development, a demand the city says is impossible to meet, and unnecessary.

“There is no legal mechanism that guarantees permanency,” said Jack Linn, assistant commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Linn says his agency is sensitive to the nervousness garden users are feeling in the face of the expiring agreement, but that their fears are unfounded.

“I certainly understand their anxiety when there’s change, but their concern is not rooted in history,” he said.

Separately, the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development is set to implement new rules for community gardens on its land that license existing gardens but also provide for the possibility that in the future they could be evicted. The new rules emphasize that the gardens are not parks, that the city retains title to the land and that the gardeners gain no right to it through their work.

Aresh Javadi, a former Melrose resident who counsels kids during the summer at the Padre Plaza Success Garden on St. Ann’s Avenue and runs the moregardens.org website thinks the city is being disingenuous by extolling the virtues of gardens on one hand, but refusing to make them untouchable to developers.

“We find it a little frustrating that they won’t write it down,” Javadi said of the city’s assurances.

“We ask that they state specifically that all gardens in good standing stay in parks,” he added.

City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito who represents a small section of Mott Haven and also chairs the Council’s Parks and Recreation Committee, says she agrees about the need to protect gardens, saying “I believe there has to be some measure of permanency written in.” But Mark-Viverito was less than hopeful about prospects for the gardeners getting what they’re asking for.

“We’ve taken it as far as we can because the Mayoral administration has said ‘this is as far as we’re going to go,’” she said, but added “we still have a ways to go,” in negotiations with the Mayor.

But Jack Linn of the Parks Dept insists the Bloomberg administration’s policies have been favorable to community gardens.

“No group of gardeners has been evicted” in the eight years in which the current agreement has been in place, Linn said, and added that “not one garden has been lost.”

Longtime Mott Haven resident and park user Flora Garcia Cruz, who moved to Mott Haven from Mexico decades ago, has been persuaded that the danger to Brook Park is worth worrying about.

“If they try to take it, I’ll chain myself to a tree,” she said in Spanish, in the company of several Mexican friends relaxing on benches under shady trees at the park. “We’ll all chain ourselves to trees to keep this garden for our children.”

Harry Bubbins thinks there is cause for alarm, and that gardeners have been “lulled into complacency” during the eight years of the existing agreement.

“Nothing is protected forever unless we make it so,” he said.

A version of this story appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

One hundred trees along the Grand Concourse are part of the Tree Museum, a summer-long public art project to celebrate the street's 100th anniversary. Bronx student James Kane of All Hallows High School narrates for this amur corktree in Joyce Kilmer Park.

The Grand Concourse, the iconic boulevard that stretches along four miles of the Bronx, has 100 years of stories to tell. This summer and fall, Bronx residents are lending their voices to share those stories—through the trees that line the street’s parks and sidewalks.

The Tree Museum is the creation of Irish artist Katie Holten, who was commissioned to create a work of public art to celebrate this year’s 100^th anniversary of the Grand Concourse.

From 138th street to Mosholu Parkway, 100 trees tell their stories. Green discs on the sidewalk bearing the Tree Museum logo identify the trees and offer a phone number that visitors can call, either from home or from their mobile phones, to hear a short audio clip about the Bronx narrated by people who live and work in the community.

“It’s kind of like an Easter egg hunt,” Holten said of the markers scattered along the Concourse.

Call tree number 6, a honey locust in front of the post office at 588 Grand Concourse, and you’ll hear community activist Majora Carter talk about growing up in the Bronx. Harry Bubbins, director of the local environmental group Friends of Brook Park, narrates for tree number 13, an American elm at the entrance to Franz Siegel Park.

Call this tree outside the post office at 588 Grand Concourse to hear Majora Carter, the founder of Sustainable South Bronx, talk about growing up in the South Bronx.

Bronx Borough Historian Lloyd Ultan, who participated in the project, said he thinks using trees is an appropriate way to celebrate the street’s centennial.

“The Grand Concourse is noted for the fact that it’s tree-lined,” he said. “That’s one of the things that makes the Grand Concourse outstanding, so it made a great deal of sense.”

Ultan made recordings for seven different trees along the Concourse, offering historical facts and anecdotes about the street.

Opened to traffic in November of 1909, the Concourse was modeled after the Champs Elysees in Paris, and soon came to mark achievement in the borough, Ultan said.

“The Grand Concourse in the Bronx was the equivalent of 5th Avenue and Park Avenue in Manhattan,” he explained. “It was a symbol that you had made it.”

Holten said she knew very little about the area when she launched the project in 2007.

“I spent about two months researching and spending as much time as possible on the Concourse,” she said.  “I kind of fell in love with it.”

Organized by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Wave Hill and the Department of Parks and Recreation, The Tree Museum debuted on June 21st and will run until Oct. 12th.

The audio guide is available by calling (718) 408-2501 and entering the extension for any tree, numbered 1 to 100. More information, including a map of the project, can be found at www.treemuseum.org.