Titus Rich (center) at the Institute for Mediation and Conflict Resolution

Eloisa Perez was so worried about her daughter Elisa Vallejo showing up late to class and getting bad grades that she turned to the city’s Administration for Children’s Services for help.

“She wasn’t listening to me,” said Perez. “Young people don’t understand about needing an education.”

The city agency sent the mother and daughter to the Institute for Mediation and Conflict Resolution, a mediation center near the Hub in Mott Haven.

“We promote peaceful relationships,” said Titus Rich, director of the organization’s mediation services.

Rich has been with the institute for 24 years, helping resolve conflicts between parents and children, among students, neighbors, or coworkers. “We provide an opportunity to listen to and understand each other,” he said.

Trained mediators arbitrate disputes of all kinds at no charge, helping defuse tensions over customer dissatisfaction with cars they’ve bought, child visitation issues stemming from court cases, and disagreements between parents of special ed students and school officials. Participation in the program can prevent complainants from having to got to court over their unhappiness.

The conversations can sometimes become heated, but “Noise never killed anyone,” said Rich.

Funded with money from the city and state, the non-profit organization opened in 1972 with a Ford Foundation grant, hoping to demonstrate how techniques used in labor negotiations could also be effective in disarming legal and personal disputes.

The agency,’s seven staff members serve as counselors, and help run training workshops in peer mediation and conflict resolution, including a 40 hour-course that costs $600 for a certificate. Some companies send their employees to the mediation trainings to help resolve workplace issues.

Some clients come in on their own, but others are mandated to go by Adult and Children Services, courts, police, and schools.

“The school was calling every day,” said Perez. But because she works a full time job and takes English as a second language courses at night, “My daughter wasn’t being disciplined,” she added.

At home, her daughter Elisa felt she couldn’t tell her side of the story. “But, I didn’t take school seriously then,” she said.

“The kid has a right to speak their mind too,” said Rich. “And they always tell us ‘this is the first time I’ve got to say anything.’”

After giving both mother and daughter time to speak, the mediator told Elisa the same things her mother was saying.

“That helped,” said Perez. “Just hearing it from someone else.”

“I take my education more seriously now,” said Elisa. “I fixed it.”

“You have to be heard before you listen,” said Rich. “We have clients that come back and tell us how their lives have been impacted.”

Elisa is doing much better in school now. Her mother no longer gets those daily phone calls from the school.

“It’s not my life, but for parents, if it’s good for your kids, it’s good for you,” she said.

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.

Shop owners at the busy Third Avenue Hub are worried over competition from the Gateway

Third Avenue and 149th street would be the heart of many cities’ downtown. Shoppers crowd its sidewalks.

But many storeowners are worried that the Hub—as the neighborhood is known because its four streets intersect to resemble the hub of a wheel—will not remain the retail heart of the South Bronx. They’re afraid a new mall at the Bronx Terminal Market will lure customers away.

“The business community along Third Avenue feels they’re going to lose a significant amount of business,” said Mario Bodden of the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation. “It’s going to be very hard for them to compete.”

Their competition is the Gateway Center, 1.1 million square feet of retail space that opened in September at the Bronx Terminal Market. The mall features a number of brand name retailers and big-box stores like Target, Home Depot, Best Buy and BJ’s Wholesale Club.

“The smaller businesses, they don’t even realize it’s coming,” said Vincent Valentino, executive director of the Third Avenue Business Improvement District (BID), which promotes shopping in the Hub on behalf of storeowners.

“The bigger businesses know it’s going to be quite a change.”

On a Friday afternoon in September, much of Gateway’s six-story parking structure remained vacant. Rosa Pena emerged from Bed Bath & Beyond carrying several shopping bags. She’d taken the subway here, her third trip to the mall since its first stores opened in the spring.

“It’s the best thing they could do for the Bronx,” Pena said. “This is very convenient for me. Everything is kind of here.”

Pena, who lives on E. 198th Street, said she still goes to her local stores for small items, but she likes the option of having the mall nearby. If she needs paper towels, it just makes more sense to go to the new BJ’s and buy them in bulk, she said.

While several of the stores at the Gateway have been operating for months, Valentino believes it’s still too early to tell what the full impact of the new mall will be. But he predicts that many business owners, already reeling from the effects of the recession, might not survive.

A few local shops have already closed their doors this year, and several are asking their landlords to lower their rent.

“You can’t handle both of them at the same time,” Valentino said. “You can handle the recession, but not with a major shopping center opening up.”

Valentino, a retired NYPD officer, recalled working in the neighborhood during the early 1970s when many of the shops along Third Avenue stood vacant. He sees a thriving commercial street as a safeguard against the return of bad times for the entire neighborhood. The absence of a business and retail community makes the neighborhood more vulnerable to crime and drugs, he said.

In an attempt to keep residents shopping locally, the BID is petitioning Community Board 1’s Land Use Committee, asking for its support for a plan to build a parking lot on vacant land between Westchester, Brook and Bergen Avenues. Parking would be free.

Many business owners here think free parking is the key to competing with the Gateway Center, where parking costs $2.40 an hour. They also intend to launch a marketing campaign that emphasizes their low prices and the personalized experience of shopping with community stores.

“We’re proactively trying to go after this,” said Mario DeGiorgio, who runs Young Land Kiddie Shop, a children’s clothing store on Third Avenue. While he’s worried about the impact the Gateway will have, he’s hopeful his customers will remain loyal.

“Businesses like mine have been here for 50 years or better,” he said. “We don’t just have customers—they know us on a first name basis, and we know them.”

But supporters of the Gateway see the shopping center as a means to rejuvenate the borough. Most of the buildings of the Bronx Terminal Market were in a state of disrepair before the Related Companies took over to develop the shopping center.

The rebuilt site will “contribute to the resurgence of the Bronx and the revitalization of the immediate neighborhood,” Gateway’s website boasts.

The Gateway Fast Track Unit, in charge of job referrals, has held a number of job fairs for the new stores. Omarro Benjamin, Business Development Officer at the Bronx Terminal Market, insists that most of those jobs went to local residents.

BJ’s Wholesale Club filled 250 new jobs, 150 of which went to Bronx residents, according to Benjamin. Numbers were similar for Target and Best Buy.

“Residents are eager in getting opportunities for employment,” Benjamin said, adding that the turnout for job fairs was overwhelming.

“That’s great,” Valentino countered. “But what about the people that are losing their jobs here when the stores close?”

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