Long-time allies in the effort to clean up pollution in Hunts Point have fallen out over the fate of the 28-acre corner of the Oak Point rail yard where the city wants to build a jail.

Congressman Jose Serrano has denounced Sustainable South Bronx’s longstanding plan to create an industrial park devoted to remanufacturing discarded construction material there.

In an open letter to the Hunts Point community, Serrano contends the proposal would merely add another dumping ground to a neighborhood already overburdened with waste.

“We’ve had enough,” said the Democrat, who represents New York’s 16th Congressional District in the South Bronx. “I can’t support the idea we’ll be putting a lot of fanfare behind a project where some people will be sorting other people’s garbage.”
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Barbara Darby stopped her shopping cart and stared at the price for a gallon of milk.

$4.79

“Milk is almost $5?” Ms. Darby, a senior citizen from Riverdale, asked incredulously.

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In January 2007, the city reopened the waiting list for Section 8 rental subsidy vouchers for the first time in 13 years, giving many low-income New Yorkers new hopes of finding a place of their own. But, some prospective tenants are finding that having a Section 8 voucher is no guarantee of getting an apartment.

Hunts Point Riverside Park is a pristine patch of green surrounded by rusting metal: train tracks line one side of the park, and mountains of scrap metal another. But the salvage yard where the Sims Metal recycling company collects discarded metal will soon include its own patch of green: a wall covered in moss and ferns, and a wet meadow with native plants.

The plants are part of a $2-3 million water treatment system aimed at keeping pollutants out of the Bronx River by imitating natural wetlands.

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There’s lots to do on Jerome Avenue between East 174th Street and the on-ramp to the Cross Bronx Expressway. You can get your car windows tinted. You can purchase a used police cruiser. You can pimp out your rims. You can have a chicken, rabbit or rooster slaughtered, plucked, skinned and trussed. You can time how frequently the No. 4 train roars by on the tracks above. But if you’re worn out after all that activity, there’s no place to rest your head.

Prakashkumar Patel wants to change that. “They need a good hotel in the Bronx,” said Patel, who owns Marriotts, Hampton Inns and other chain hotels in Albany, on Long Island and near LaGuardia Airport. He purchased and demolished a car repair shop – one of many on the strip – at number 1665. And he plans to build a brick and granite Comfort Inn, complete with breakfast and meeting rooms and a parking lot in the rear. “It will bring up the value of the whole area,” he said.

Local leaders disagree.

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When P.S. 209 principal Jacquelyn Cannon died in May, parents, teachers, and community residents realized they wanted to make sure the school retained the spirit of its much-loved leader.

Now, they’re hoping to go one step further – in renaming the school and a portion of 183rd Street on which the school sits in her honor.

“She was the mother of the school,” said Niya Mitchell, whose third-grade daughter, Ny’Rayah Mitchell, attended the school and whose first-grade son, Charles Fields, is in his second year there.

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Saving a few hundred dollars on heating oil is no small thing for a single mother of three scraping by on a social worker’s salary. Thanks to a Citgo Corporation heating oil discount program, Camille Pow has stashed away some much-needed cash the last two winters.

“I got a deduction of $26 to $30 every month last year, which means $300 more you can look for in your pocket,” said Pow, 45, who rents one of the 1,250 apartments owned by Mount Hope Housing Company, which receives a 40 percent discount on oil from Citgo, then passes the savings on to tenants through rent breaks.

Now the two-year-old program could potentially benefit Pow and other low and moderate-income residents of the 32-building complex in ways they never expected.

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Buoyed by a commitment to ensure that a redeveloped Kingsbridge Armory will anchor the community, hundreds of local residents crowded into the Fordham Manor Reform Church Oct. 27 before marching around the landmark fortress in a cold, driving rain.

The rally could be described as a warning shot across the bow for the developer, which the city should choose in the coming weeks.

A banner on the side of a truck expressed the rally participants’ objective in stark terms: “Developer: Negotiate with KARA.”

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The mall and recreation complex coming to the Kingsbridge Armory will undoubtedly host well-known retail stores and provide more goods to local shoppers, but it is unclear if this kind of new business will provide good jobs for Bronx workers.

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Lourdes Hernández Cordero works just blocks from Highbridge Park in Washington Heights, but never noticed the long-shuttered elegant 19th-century pedestrian bridge that gave the park its name.

When the Columbia University researcher first stumbled onto the High Bridge - which starts in the park and spans the Harlem River, connecting Washington Heights to the Bronx’s Highbridge neighborhood - she was stunned.

“It was like bumping into a treasure hidden in a big chest and dusting it off and saying, ‘Oh my God. I have to put this in a place of honor,’” she said.
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