Mott Haven Herald

Mott Haven firm pioneers green moving

Posted on 09. Aug, 2010 by Juan DeJesus.

A new patch of green is growing in Mott Haven–but it isn’t grass.  In the shadow of the Bruckner Expressway, a company called iMovegreen, is trying to transform the moving business.

What makes a mover green? Instead of Styrofoam peanuts, the company offers its clients shredded office documents and other biodegradable packing material. In lieu of throwaway boxes, it provides sturdy reusable plastic boxes. It uses soy ink to print its documents on recycled paper. (more…)

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Community gardens brace for new rules

Posted on 04. Aug, 2010 by Joe Hirsch.

Mott Haven and Melrose are home to about two-dozen community gardens, lovingly tended green spaces tended by residents, who plant and harvest food and flowers, play music, exercise or simply kick back under stately shade trees.

With names like United We Stand, La Finca del Sur and La Casa de Chema, some recall the Puerto Rican countryside with their casitas, miniature wooden huts where friends gather for conversation.

Most are on land owned by the city, and were left to gather trash and breed vermin before they were reclaimed by residents. Now, local gardeners and their counterparts citywide fear the city wants them back for development. (more…)

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In the news, June 21-28

Posted on 21. Jun, 2010 by editor.

A Book Fair on the sidewalk in front of the Bronx Museum on the Grand Concourse at 165th Street this weekend has been organized to call attention to the absence of bookstores in the Bronx. The fair, on Sunday, June 27, from noon-5 p.m., will feature books, magazines and comics, along with authors and artists.

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.

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Green jobs, green city: a special report

Posted on 06. Jun, 2010 by Bernard L. Stein.

The economy may be recovering, but you wouldn’t know it in Mott Haven, Melrose and Port Morris, where, officially, one of every five adults is unemployed, a number that overlooks many undocumented immigrants and ignores those who have given up on looking for work or taken part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time employment.

But the neighborhoods of the South Bronx have an edge: experienced community-based organizations devoted to an idea whose time may have come—green-collar jobs building a more energy-efficient, less polluting economy.

Green jobs have become a buzz word, embraced by the Obama administration as a way out of the economic downturn. It has provided $4 million to a union-backed education organization, which will parcel it out to local organizations.

In this special report, the Herald examines how much of that money will be spent, analyzing what it may mean for residents and for the Bronx and taking readers to the workplaces and classrooms that will share the $4 million to teach new skills. We visit:

• The Osborne Association, which helps people who’ve done time in jail or prison to become gainfully employed.

• Project H.I.R.E. at Bronx Community College, where trainees learn construction practices

• And an after-school program run by SoBRO, where young people get an early start at thinking green.

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

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Workers learn by doing in Project H.I.R.E.

Posted on 04. Jun, 2010 by Carla Candia.

A brand-new duplex apartment in the University Heights section of the Bronx is ready for inspection. Equipped with bamboo floors, a ceramic kitchen and a spacious bedroom closet that would make more than one New Yorker jealous, it would rent for at least $2,000.

Instead it will be demolished. And the construction workers who built the apartment won’t mind seeing it go. (more…)

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SoBro gets students ready for green economy

Posted on 04. Jun, 2010 by Alex Green IV.

The adage “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is being given new meaning by a group of high school seniors working with SoBRO, the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation.

The students are starting a fashion business that will recycle hand-me-down clothing and plastic soda containers to make handbags, pencil holders and change purses.

The project, called Green Goes Greener 2010, is an add-on to SoBro’s In-School Youth program—a year-round after-school program that provides career planning and work-readiness training to low-income students. (more…)

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Mott Haven co-op preaches gospel of reuse

Posted on 04. Jun, 2010 by Vishal Persaud.

Sounds of power sanders filled the warehouse of ReBuilder’s Source on Timpson Place on a recent afternoon. They didn’t buzz, they boomed. Six people were at work, two or three times the usual staff at the worker-owned cooperative.

ReBuilder’s Source didn’t hire more workers. It was hosting a weeklong training program in cooperation with the Osborne Association – a non-profit that provides job training for people who were once in prison. (more…)

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Earth Fest reaches out with music and games

Posted on 12. May, 2010 by Nick Loomis.

Legendary emcee Grandmaster Caz has been packing parties in the South Bronx since 1974, but none quite like the one at St. Mary’s Park in Mott Haven for this year’s Earth Day on April 24. .
 

Soundslide by Nick Loomis

By noon on the beautiful spring day, the crowd was already dancing to the Staple Singers’ “I’ll take you there”–courtesy of DJ Jazzy Jay on the wheels of steel.
 
“Aw yeah, that’s what we’re gonna do,” boomed Caz’s amplified voice. “We’re gonna take you to a greener planet!”
 
One of the founding fathers of hip-hop, Caz said he was honored to be the emcee for the third annual GetGreen South Bronx Earth Fest in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.
 
On the first Earth Day in 1970, few would have imagined that the South Bronx would not only celebrate environmentalism, but, in many ways be taking a leading role in the green revolution.

Among the organizations represented at the Earth Fest, were Melrose-based Nos Quedamos, which has led the way for Melrose Commons to become the first neighborhood in New York State to be honored by the U.S. Green Building Council for its environmentally-sensitive business practices.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has just honored another participant, the Hunts Point-based Sustainable South Bronx, which pioneered the creation of the South Bronx Greenway. When it is completed, it will be a recreational trail dotted with new parks extending from the Bronx River to the Port Morris waterfront and a bridge to Randall’s Island.

More than 40 other local organizations and businesses set up tables at the event. To encourage children to visit and learn, each child who came by got a stamp that could be cashed for prizes like reusable water bottles, pens and plants for community gardens.

Four live birds attracted crowds throughout the day to the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy table. The birds, all found near the city’s waterways, drew flocks off children.

“The idea here is to try to inspire kids to think about nature a little bit,” said Ludger Balan, the conservancy’s executive environmental program director. “There’s nature in our urban environment, and we’re teaching them a way to appreciate it, learn about it, and hopefully inspire them to become some of the future stewards of this environment.”

“We think that children are at the prime age to absorb this information and teach their parents,” said Andrea Schaffer principal of CityMatters LLC and the event’s chief organizer. “But you have to start young so that it becomes ingrained, second nature to recycle and reuse materials instead of consuming and throwing out.”

Jehlani Bowers, 6, of Mott Haven got the message. She attended GetGreen for the second year in a row with her mother, Nedra Bowers. Jehlani bounced from activity to activity with a painted face, accumulating enough stamps for a plant for their community garden.

“It’s actually helping her out in school because they’re going through, with Earth Day, how we recycle and how we save and how we reuse. So she’s making that connection with being here today,” her mother said.

Participants in a SoBRO after-school program climbed on stage to compete in a “Music Gets Me Green” contest, performing a song they wrote accompanied by a music video. “I like music and I found the opportunity,” said Lenny Nivar, 14, who is in the 10th grade at Green Dot New York Charter School. Along with Ricardo Korsah, 16, Nivar, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was 9, performed a rap song with some verses in English and others in Spanish.

SoBRO provided the prizes, as well—four cardboard trophies in the shape of trees. It took 30 students in its Education for Life program two weeks to make the trees, said Evalina Ruiz, a 22-year old who is working toward her GED at the community organization. “You have to cut, you have to paste, you have to just really be dedicated to it,” she said.

As the Bronx Borough President’s Office and the city’s Office of Recycling Outreach and Education teamed up to hold a recycling drive to collect old cell phones, computers, printers, TVs, used clothing and sneakers, the music continue on stage.

One group in the music competition ended its performance with a variation of a chant as old as hip-hop itself, and almost as old as Earth Day.

“When I say ‘get,’ ya’ll say ‘Green.’”

“Get.”

“Green.”

“Get.”

“Green.”

Alex Green IV contributed reporting to this story.

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Housing rises on reclaimed land in Melrose

Posted on 08. Apr, 2010 by Alex Green IV.

An eight-story apartment building rising on the Northeast corner of East 158^th Street and Third Avenue will complete the transformation of the intersection.

Dubbed La Terraza, the building will join two more apartment buildings developed by the Melrose-based non-profit Nos Quedamos in the last decade.

Offering 107 apartments for middle, moderate, and low-income families, along with new stores, La Terraza will occupy one of the last vacant lots in the Melrose Commons urban renewal area. Spills of chemicals from a drycleaner that once occupied part of the site had to be cleaned up before construction could begin.

Two more buildings are rising on another formerly contaminated site, on Courtlandt Avenue between East 160^th and 161^st streets. There, a gas station had polluted the ground.

Called “brownfields,” underutilized and often contaminated sites like these are found throughout urban areas, but are especially numerous in neighborhoods like Mott Haven, Melrose and Hunts Point where crime, poverty and a changing economy have led many businesses to close and many building owners to abandon their property. (more…)

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Grant promises unemployed 300 ‘green jobs’

Posted on 29. Jan, 2010 by Bernard L. Stein.

The recipient of a $4 million federal grant is promising that 300 unemployed residents of Hunts Point, Longwood, Mott Haven, Melrose and Port Morris will find jobs under a new training program for “green” jobs.

The Consortium for Worker Education will use the money to establish a Center for Environmental Workforce Training to teach both job skills and offer general education.

The organization will partner with several non-profit organizations, including Mott Haven-based SoBro and Greenworker Cooperatives to train residents to build or retrofit energy-efficient buildings.

Most of the participants will “learn how to work with their hands—being able to fix things,” said Rebecca Lurie, director of development at the consortium.

Jobs will include window installation and building repair, installing insulation and repairing or installing boilers, she said Some participants in the program will also learn to conduct energy audits and market energy upgrades to building owners,

Lurie said the consortium hoped to launch the program, which will last for two years, within a month.

Sustainable South Bronx and The Point CDCthe Osborne Association, the Association for Energy Affordability, the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp. and Bronx Community College’s Project Hire will also serve as partners in the program, which was hailed by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. as “a big step toward becoming the ‘greenest’ borough in New York City.”

All told, the program, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, aims to provide training and education services for 425 participants, while placing 297 of those who receive a degree or certificate in jobs.

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