Classic New York school buildings have a family resemblance for a reason: they were designed by the same man– C.B.J. Snyder. The Bronx has preserved a much higher percentage of its Snyder schools than Manhattan, and on Sept. 4, the Bronx Historical Society will conduct a tour of eight of them, built from 1897 to 1922, ending with Snyder’s 1904 masterpiece, Morris High School. The tour will meet at 11 a.m. at the Brook Avenue stop of the #6 train, on the northwest corner of East 138th and Brook Avenue (in front of a discount beauty supply store). The fee is $10 for members of the Society, $15 for non-members. Call 718-881-8900 to RSVP.

Hunts Point Riverside Park will host the Bronx River Alliance’s annual fundraiser, the Upstream Soirée will be on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. Longwood resident Roberto Garcia, the outgoing chair of Community Board 2, and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe will be honored. Tickets are $100, or $200 for a patron ticket that includes a listing in the program. Tickets may be purchased online at www.bronxriver.org or reserved by calling 718-430-4665.

SoBRO’s South Bronx Leadership Forum will introduce local business to the services of the Small Business Administration at a breakfast at 9 a.m. Sept. 14 at Betances Community Center, 465 St. Ann’s Avenue. Pravina Raghavan, who heads the New York office will be the speaker. A $5 donation is requested. Reserve by contacting Linda Yantz, 718-732-7522 or lyantz@sobro.org.

The bloodbath continues. A 21-year-old man was shot and killed at 4 a.m. Friday in front of 285 East 156th Street, near the Andrew Jackson Houses. The victim, Delquan Alston, had two gunshots wounds to the head and two gun shot wounds to his body. According to the Daily News police say Alston was a drug dealer, and may have been murdered in a dispute over territory.

A devastating fire took the life of a young man when it raged through his apartment in the early morning of Aug. 23. It took 65 firefighters to extinguish the blaze on 149th Street, the Daily News reported.

A new charter school will open in Mott Haven on Wednesday. Bronx Success Academy 1, which will share quarters with PS 30 at 510 E. 141st Street, will start with a Kindergarten and first grade and add a grade each year. It will feature a longer school day, starting at 7:30 a.m. and ending at 4:30 p.m. The school is part of the Success Charter Network founded by a politician, former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

The Department of Sanitation has changed the recycling day for parts of Mott Haven and Melrose to Tuesday. Recyclables will be picked up then between St. Ann’s and Prospect avenues from 149th to 161st streets. Here’s a map.

At the second annual Festival of Immigrants in the South Bronx’s biggest community garden between 140th and 141st Streets on Brook Avenue, over a hundred came to feast on quesadillas, see and hear Latin American music and dance, and to share their opposition to the Arizona law.

The new law would require law enforcement officers in that border state to order people they question for any reason to show proof of immigration status, a measure immigrant advocates see as racially motivated and unconstitutional. In late July a federal judge temporarily halted enforcement of the law in response to a lawsuit by the Obama administration.

Victor Toro, one of a long roster of speakers rallying opposition to the Arizona initiative, has had his own well publicized run-ins with federal immigration officials. The 68-year-old Chilean national, who has lived in Mott Haven since 1983, was pulled off a train in Buffalo by Homeland Security officials, and now faces the threat of deportation.

Toro was a union leader in rural Chile before being forced to leave his country during the dictatorship of US-backed strongman Augusto Pinochet. After enduring torture in Chilean detention centers for three years for his outspoken opposition to the regime, Toro was granted political asylum in Mexico, but says he left Mexico for the US when he found three years later that Chilean secret service agents in Mexico planned to assassinate him for his continued criticism of Pinochet’s rule.

Toro has lived in the South Bronx and traveled the US speaking out for immigrant and labor rights ever since.

“People ask me why I decided to settle in the Bronx,” reflected the silver-maned, ponytailed Toro in Spanish, sitting between the raised plant beds in the baking afternoon sun. “I always tell them it’s because it most closely resembles the Latin American third world where I’m from.”

Wearing a t-shirt saying “No human being is illegal,” Toro said he has traveled across the US on speaking engagements, but has never considered living in any other part of the country. The pastor at St. Ann’s Church on St. Ann’s Avenue allowed him to use the church basement to play music, make art and discuss politics with fellow immigrants in the 1980s, Toro says, and the neighborhood has been his home since then.

Though he has lived in the US for 27 years, Toro says it is unclear if he will be granted political asylum here because the Nixon administration helped put Pinochet in power in Chile in 1973.

“This time is killing me,” Toro said of the anxiety of waiting while the government decides what to do with him, but he added that his present efforts to advocate on behalf of other undocumented Latin Americans in the US is more important.

“I’m not doing this for myself,” he said. “There are 20 million with problems worse than mine.”

Many others at the festival faced odds as daunting as Victor Toro’s, though with less cloak-and-dagger intrigue in their stories of survival.

“I’m afraid,” said Alejandro Castillo, 35, who came to the US 14 years ago from central Mexico and now works in a restaurant to support himself, his wife and three children.

“We do the hardest work in the fields, in restaurants, in kitchens,” Castillo said, his voice rising with anger. “We come here to do the work others don’t want to do. We don’t take work away from anyone like they say.”

A Mexican dance troupe wearing indigenous costumes performed an elaborate dance routine, and Castillo stopped to marvel at them.

“I’m Mexican, but this is the first time I’ve seen this kind of dance from up close,” Castillo said, smiling.

Later, as the crowd chanted “Todos somos Arizona,” (We are all Arizona), Castillo added, “We Latinos have come to work with dignity like everyone else.”

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

The meeting, the first with stakeholders in a year, showed that reaching a consensus on whether the state’s most controversial highway should be retained or demolished remains elusive.

The split between the proprietors of businesses in the Hunts Point food distribution center and the Southern Bronx Watershed Alliance, the collation seeking to tear down the highway, is as wide as ever.

And Mott Haven-based For a Better Bronx weighed-in with the charge that Hunts Point’s gain would be their community’s loss, if trucks that now use the Sheridan were rerouted onto the Deegan instead.

“We’re disappointed that land use and economic analysis is not going to be factored in,” said Veronica Vanterpool of the Watershed Alliance, which includes several South Bronx community groups, including Sustainable South Bronx, The Point CDC and Mothers on the Move.

But truckers and the businesses they serve in the market want to see the Sheridan remain. Demolishing the route so many delivery trucks take from the George Washington Bridge to the market would hurt and cost South Bronx residents jobs, they contend.

“I find the whole thing to be about a land use and park choice, not traffic,” said Matthew D’Arrigo, president of the Hunts Point Produce Market. He charged that the groups advocating removal of the Sheridan “don’t represent the neighborhoods; they represent themselves.”

Those who want the highway to remain found an ally in Jaime Rivera of For a Better Bronx. While the Watershed Alliance planners say trucks should reach the Hunts Point markets by turning south from the George Washington Bridge and taking the Major Deegan to the Bruckner, Rivera said increased traffic on the Deegan would make asthma problems worse for residents.

“We can’t support something that takes from one neighborhood to serve another,” he said. “The Sheridan is key.” Rivera added that his own father has worked as a trucker his entire life, including a stint at the Hunts Point market. He said, though, he would be supportive as long as truckers’ livelihoods are taken into consideration, “in a plan that’s not going to decrease their income.”

Hunts Point homeowner Jose Ortiz complained about the constant pollution from the traffic, and emphatically called for a park to be built where the highway now stands. Before the Sheridan was built in the early 1960s, “there was a park there and they took it off. The kids used to play there,” he said.

And those who want the Sheridan torn down said the DOT was exaggerating the impact of life without the highway.

“Looking at the modeling, we think they’ve overstated the numbers quite a bit,” said Kyle Wiswall, general counsel for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. “The model is not exactly representative of what would happen.”

New ramps planned for the Bruckner and a new intersection at Oak Point Avenue, would help traffic flow, he argued. Coupled with the fact that most traffic to the Hunts Point market happens in the wee hours of morning, the Deegan would not see significant traffic spikes during peak travel hours, he said.

The DOT officials insisted that the state was committed to gathering as much community input as possible before making a decision in 2012.

More workshops and public sessions are in store, the DOT brass assured people, via community board meetings.

Artist Virginia Ayress invited residents and members of the congregation to pick up paint brushes and help create a work she hoped would start conversations about immigrants at a time of heated debate about the nation’s policies toward those who arrive from other countries.

In an interview, Ayress said she wanted to educate the public about the history of immigration, including the violence that accompanied the settling of the nation. “Native Americans were the first ones here, were killed and then other groups came,” she said.

The mural “has a little bit of everyone’s history,” said Judy Williams, a Mott Haven resident who worked on it with her three children.

In the top left corner, four Native Americans look down on a panorama of American history. Below the faces of the Native Americans, an eagle wing and a dream catcher embrace a sailing ship that brought over enslaved Africans. “The eagle wing not only represents all races, but also is protecting people,” explained Juan Kortright, 72, a parishioner in the church.

Ines Contreras, 53, who helps run the church’s social program, offers another interpretation. The wing, she says, “represents the dreams they come with”—dreams that get “trapped here, shown by the dream catcher.” Immigrants, she said, came “here looking for that dream, but exploitation leaves them with nothing in their hand when they go home.”

The mural includes a steamship that carried later generations from Europe to the New World, and a skyline of apartment buildings like those near the church. It shows European immigrants arriving from Ellis Island surrounded by women on a dock where a giant sewing machine symbolizes the work they will do in the city’s garment factories. Men tote heavy loads over large boulders. Gears symbolize the machinery of the modern factory. Railroad tracks, laid by Chinese workers, cross farmland.

African slaves mirror the Native Americans in the top right of the mural. They look down on scenes of struggle—on the broken chains of slavery and on Latino workers demonstrating for immigration reform. The mouths of the slaves and the young workers on the picket line are open, speaking up for their demands.

In the center of the mural, farm workers plant and harvest the bounty of the land. Next to their crop is a beating heart.

Desiree Lugo, 23, who has attended the church all her life, is uneasy about the mural’s political message. She would have preferred something more spiritual, she said, but, nevertheless, she calls the painting “a way to beautify the space” and said the artist tried to give immigrants a voice they haven’t had.

While Lugo wonders whether the mural belongs at the church, 11-year-old Caroline Callo says it shows “how great church and the Lord is.” Caroline was one of a group of young women who said the mural, which was commissioned by the church’s food program, the called “Give Them to Eat Ministries,” offered something meaningful for church-goers to discuss.

The mural was created to show change, agreed Tiana Rodriguez, 13, Katelyn Peralta, 10, Alisa Rodriguez, 11, and Caroline and her 13-year-old sister Annabel. But Tiana, who has been attending services at the church since she was 4, and who was one of the artists who helped paint the wall, took a pessimistic view.

“The only thing that has changed is slavery. Immigration is still the same,” she said.

Still, she and her friends agreed that one of the best things about the mural was that it portrayed so many young people. It shows that “kids have a big voice, speak out, and say what they mean,” declared Katelyn.

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

If you ask those who live in the area about him, many will just say “Who?” But everyone will recognize his constant companion, a five-year-old golden yellow Labrador named Proof.

“I have strangers who come up and greet Proof by name, and I have no idea who they are,” says Mann.

Proof plays an important role in Mann’s ministry. Her calm and friendly presence makes her a great recruiter.

What’s more important, though, is her relationship with children.

Proof serves as an incentive to get kids to read, as a mediator who cools hot tempers and as a source of unconditional love for the children in the ministry’s after-school program.

“For kids who struggle to read, it’s good for them to read out loud,” explains Mann. So he sometimes has students read to Proof because they gain a level of comfort that reading aloud to an adult could never offer.

“Proof doesn’t judge. She doesn’t know the mistakes they are making while reading, and kids like that,” says Mann.

Mann also uses Proof’s presence as a way to comfort students who are angry or distraught. He often lets those students take care of the yellow Labrador.

“She has a very calming effect,” says Ashley Emmert, a native of San Antonio who works with the ministry. “It’s almost magical.”

Proof’s journey to Mott Haven is as long as her owner’s.  Mann moved to New York to attend New York University as a music major. While honing his skills he worked with the East Seventh Baptist Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

There he met pastor Taylor Field, who headed the Graffiti Community Ministries. Field’s mentoring led Mann to change paths and study to become a minister. When he returned to New York from Wheaton College in Chicago, Field tapped Mann to start the next branch of the church’s Graffiti ministry program in Mott Haven.

“He caught me off guard,” says Mann.  “I came up here one day and did a walk and prayed for the neighborhood. It was hot, all the fire hydrants were open and kids were playing in the spraying water.”

The large number of children in Mott Haven offered the possibility of developing a young strong ministry, Mann said. He organized a weeklong basketball camp, then formed an after-school program.

Proof’s role began as the brainchild of Mann’s sister, a school counselor in Missouri, who was considering bringing a therapy dog into her school. When Mann heard her idea he asked himself, “If they can have them in school, why not in an after-school program?”

He found a Kansas company called Cares Incorporated that trains service dogs with the help of inmates in a Colorado prison. It put him on a waiting list. Finally, in 2006 Mann flew to Kansas to take part in a weeklong training course to help the owner with his new dog.

When he describes his first meeting with Proof, Mann chokes up slightly. “I remember waiting and seeing the dogs come out one by one,” he said.  “I would look and hope to see if the next dog was mine. Then when she came out–I know this is clichéd–but I knew it, I knew she was mine.”

Proof and the rest of her litter had been named using newspaper terms. Her siblings include “Ink” and “Lead,” Mann said.

She quickly proved her worth. Both Mann and Emmert describe Proof’s ability to evaluate a problem and find a solution.

“One time a child was screaming at the top of his lungs, interrupting the rest of the program and making it difficult for the other kids,” says Mann.

“With no cue from me, Proof got up and walked toward us. She walked right up to the kid and started licking his hands. Like a light switch being flipped off, he stopped screaming and started petting Proof. He was calm the rest of the day.”

“We call her the first missionary dog,” said Mann, smiling proudly, “For the kids, there’s few better examples in our natural world of God’s unconditional love than what comes through the presence of Proof.”

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

She remembers being fearful and embarrassed when she went to job interviews. She didn’t know how to turn on a computer, let alone use one.

Then, one day when she dropped her children off at St. Pius V School on East 144th Street, Rios found a flyer advertising the services of Mercy Center, which was headquartered at the school at the time.

At Mercy Center, she learned parenting skills, graduated from a computer class and earned her GED. In gratitude, she worked at the center as a volunteer. Her commitment paid off when the center offered her a job.

Fifteen years have passed, and the confidence she gained shows as Rios greets visitors attending classes at Mercy Center, which is now located in its own building on East 145th Street and Willis Avenue. Her five children continue to attend after-school programs and girl talk workshops and perform community service.

Twenty years ago, Sister Mary Ann Dirr, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, arrived in Mott Haven. She found a neighborhood suffering from crack, crime and poverty. City agencies abandoned the South Bronx; the Catholic Church stayed.

Working with two volunteers from the neighborhood, Sister Dirr established a counseling center in a single classroom at St. Pius V.

Now, Mercy Center has grown to employ 20 bilingual staff members and 200 professional volunteers. Last year it served more than 2,000 clients from some 700 families.

Its focus remains women and families. It helps women learn parenting and family life skills, and prepares them to start their own businesses or work in the job market. Other programs include alternatives to violence classes, immigration services, youth services, after-school programs, yoga and spirituality groups and English as a Second Language.

From its beginning, Mercy Center’s programs have been geared toward women. “Women in poor or any community, from rural to urban, hold up the family. They keep it together, and need more help in sustaining family,” explained Blanca Ramirez, the center’s coordinator of direct social services, who has been at Mercy Center for three years.
The center’s English classes have proved to be among its most popular programs.

If people “can’t communicate with people important in their lives, such as teachers or doctors, it’s a problem,” says Ramirez. That’s why Mercy started teaching English as a second language.

America Reyes agrees. She can “socialize with people now,” she said, adding that she “was timid before, but is empowered through English.”

Areida Beltran a 50-year-old immigrant from Central America, has lost her fear of speaking English. Now when she goes to the hospital, she can speak for herself and ask for what she needs.
Margarita Navarro, can now speak English at her children’s school. She said she can read her children’s report cards and understand their needs.

The language classes, Ramirez says, do more than just teach English; they bring people together from all over the world to support one another.

Ramirez, who describes herself as an “old time organizer,” said the “spirit of hospitality is what makes Mercy Center different” from other social service organization that cater to women. Other places make you wait in line or take a number, she says. At Mercy, visitors are directed to a comfortable lounge to wait for help from a staff member.
The person who greets them warmly in either Spanish or English and escorts them to the lounge is Heidy Rios.

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

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.

In addition, iMovegreen’s trucks and cars are washed with water captured during rain storms and with environmentally-safe detergents and solvents.

The company gets all of its electricity from an Ohio-based company that supplies wind power to Con Edison’s grid, making iMovegreen the only mover in the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership program, which recognizes businesses that get at least 10 percent of their energy from renewable sources.

“Reduce, reuse and recycle and now relocate,” quipped Jeffrey Sitt, the company’s CEO, who started out in Brooklyn running another green endeavor called iStoregreen. When that company proved viable, he purchased an aging Bronx moving company called Meyer’s Van Lines in late 2009. He retooled and rebranded the company to work in accordance with the model established by his storage company.

The change has been an adjustment for the workers. Surveyors who traditionally showed up in a Ford F350 now drive hybrid Toyota Priuses. More important, trucks no longer go out half-full. To reduce the number of trips made, save fuel and cut down on exhaust emissions, the workers play a game of Tetris with furniture and boxes in order to fill as much space as possible before departing the warehouse.

The change has had an impact on Pablo Morales, a gruff-voiced foreman who has been working at the company since before the green revamp.

Morales participates in the employee information program the company runs, which provides recycling tips and offers wholesale prices on compact fluorescent light bulbs and other green products. It has led him to urge his family to do the little things that save energy and materials. He says these lessons often lead to shouting matches with family members and have earned him the moniker of “the recycle Nazi.”

As part of its marketing strategy, the company sees to it that every move adds a little bit of green to the planet. As they say good bye, the crew presents each client with a reusable tote. Inside is a pamphlet filled with tips on saving energy in the home, two reusable coffee mugs, a customer satisfaction survey, and a housewarming plant grown in a small nursery on the premises.

In addition, in a partnership with the Nature Conservancy, the company donates a percentage of the proceeds to plant trees in the Brazilian rainforest. If the client returns the customer satisfaction survey, iMovegreen pays to plant an extra dozen. One out of every four clients returns the survey, a figure, Sitt says, that far outstrips the industry average.

John Meo, a resident of Long Island recently needed a moving service to relocate a hot tub and large wooden gazebo. He inquired at six different moving companies before coming across the iMovegreen. Its green business philosophy is what attracted him, he said.

Competitors are taking notice. Moishe’s Moving Systems, a mainstay of the trade, has revamped its operations to keep pace. The company has formed a partnership with the Trees for the Future program, which plants beneficial trees around the world. It has also converted its fleet to bio-fuels, created a program to allow customers to exchange reusable boxes and begun using biodegradable pellets made from recycled diapers instead of packing peanuts.

Sitt says his next program will be aimed at community groups. This new initiative would allow Mott Haven residents to store unwanted furniture that is in good condition with iMovegreen until it is offered for donation or sale at a church or community flea market.

Although he says he’s  a strong believer in the environmental movement, Sitt is careful to point out that he still runs a moving company. “We aren’t perfect. We use trucks,” he notes.

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

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.