Bronx Neighborhoods

[Merry]

An Enclave Passed Down to Generations

By JEFF VANDAM




WATER VIEWS Homes along Country Club Road look out at Eastchester Bay.
Properties for sale in this Bronx neighborhood aren’t always advertised, but rather made known quietly among family and friends.



ON certain afternoons in Country Club, a small waterfront neighborhood near the Throgs Neck peninsula in the Northeast Bronx, small groups of men congregate in kitchens for the beloved ritual of the sauce. After the tomatoes and the seasoning are wedded together, the mixture is poured into jars and wrapped in a blanket to cool — an essential step on its way to the top of many a pasta dish.

In this neighborhood, thoughts of Prego or Ragú are akin to heresy. The same groups of guys who make the sauce often head up to nearby Pelham Bay Park for boccie contests. Here, a few empty boxes of grapes on a curb indicate that a neighbor may soon come by to share his latest vintage.

“They say, ‘You’ve got to try this one — this year, it’s a little different,’ ” said Marcia Anne Pavlica, a longtime Country Club resident and president of the local civic association. “It just enforces the community feel,” she added. In the 2000 census, 60.1 percent of residents in the neighborhood and surrounding area reported Italian ancestry.

Country Club is a neighborhood which is often treated to the sight of mounted police officers clip-clopping through en route to their training facility in nearby Pelham Bay Park. Basketball hoops abound, as do jungle gyms and (of late) “Easter Bunny: Stop Here!” decorations. The area is filled with families, many of whom live within baby-sitting range of Grandma and Grandpa.

“We have many parts of Country Club where the mother will live here and the daughter will live six or seven blocks away,” said Councilman James Vacca, who represents the area. “People know each other for years.”
The neighborhood has no subway station, and is more than 10 miles from Midtown Manhattan; remoteness has its charms but also its setbacks.

Sidewalks are often intermittent, and one area still lacks sewers.

Frank Menillo, who has lived in the same house on Rawlins Avenue for more than 50 years, is fed up with the shoddy condition of nearby Lohengrin Place. Until recently, the street was not on city maps. It is in poor shape, with oversized potholes.

“I’ve been after it for about four years, maybe longer,” said Mr. Menillo, whose quest received some attention in the local news media and help from Councilman Vacca last fall. As of now, he said, “They have not paved that street.” But the councilman’s office says paving will start in June.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

A midmorning stroll through Country Club is one of nearly utter quiet, save for chirping birds and the occasional plane on its way to La Guardia Airport.

Decorations and statuary are out in force, from the large lions flanking one door on Baisley Avenue to a plaster likeness of Mike Piazza (in Mets uniform) on Country Club Road. Some streets are winding, others are straight; a few, like Parsifal Place and Valhalla Drive, are hints that the area’s street planner may have been a Wagner enthusiast.

House styles are varied: little Tudoresque cottages; boxy midcentury town houses; larger homes on Stadium Avenue; and a collection of late-20th-century stucco houses called the Estates at Country Club Homeowners Association. There is one co-op, at Stadium and Layton Avenues, though nothing else tall is expected, given local zoning.

“We are not looking for more homes, although the developers would really love it,” Ms. Pavlica said.

According to the 2000 census, the area including Country Club and Spencer Estates has a population of 8,489. Some of those people reside at Providence Rest, a long- and short-term care facility on Waterbury Avenue. Ms. Pavlica gave Country Club’s borders as Interstate 95 to the west; Eastchester Bay to the east; Layton Avenue to the south; and Spencer Drive to the north.

There is a commercial area, consisting of a pizzeria, a small supermarket, a laundromat, a dry cleaner and a chiropractor, all on Layton Avenue. Many locals venture to nearby Spencer Estates, where a small commercial strip is home to Barino’s, a popular Italian market. Otherwise, the stores of Bay Plaza Shopping Center near Co-op City are a short drive away; Westchester County shopping isn’t much farther.

A subject of considerable concern these days is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s recent vote to eliminate the Bx14 bus, which until now has been the only public transportation within Country Club. The M.T.A. voted in late March to cut 34 bus routes, though a compromise was reached to reroute the Bx8 bus through part of the neighborhood, where it will stop on its way to the Pelham Bay Park station on the 6 subway line.

“We got half a loaf,” said Mr. Vacca, who heads the City Council’s transportation committee. “They did consider our geographic isolation to a degree that made the cut a little more livable.”

The sewer issue, too, is on its way toward resolution. The streets in the southwest portion of the neighborhood that still lack them should see the start of work next year, Ms. Pavlica said.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Real estate is taken seriously; brokers are invited to meet with the civic association to discuss their philosophy and marketing plans. When houses come on the market — and there is often a fair number — some do not appear on any real estate Web site. Instead, the word is passed quietly among friends and family.

“There are a lot of people who just want to give it to someone they know who also lives in the area,” said Dorothy De Marco, an independent broker whose company is called Phoenix I.

But prices over all are down 20 percent from the highs of the last few years and show no indications of budging, Ms. De Marco said. Rosanna Robustelli, an agent with Kravitz Ann DeSantis Realtors, put the average for single-family homes in the mid-$400,000s.

If a large house on the waterfront is listed, said Carol Sportello, an agent at Scovotti and Company, a Bronx real estate and insurance agency, it might be priced as high as $1.3 million. But over the last year, she said, houses sold at $400,000 to $700,000, with higher prices being paid for multifamily homes. For example, Ms. De Marco is listing a house on Agar Place with four bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths, on a 55-by-150-foot lot, for $689,000.

As for rentals, there is a range — given the mix of housing styles and the by-owner nature of many leases. One-bedrooms generally start around $1,000, two-bedrooms around $1,300.

WHAT TO DO

The vast open spaces of Pelham Bay Park, New York City’s largest green space at 2,766 acres, begin just a few blocks away. Within the park are playgrounds, tennis courts, a dog run and a nature center. The park is also home to the Pelham Bay and Split Rock Golf Courses, both open to the public.

THE SCHOOLS

Some elementary students are zoned to attend the Senator John Calandra School, Public School 14, on Bruckner Boulevard, where 94.6 percent met standards in math and 79 percent in English in 2009. For middle school, some go to the Urban Institute of Mathematics, a few blocks southwest of the neighborhood on Hollywood Avenue. In 2009, 80.6 percent met standards in math, 76.9 percent in English.

At Herbert H. Lehman High School on East Tremont Avenue, about a mile from Country Club, SAT averages in 2009 were 420 in reading, 439 in math and 411 in writing, versus 480, 500 and 470 statewide.

Country Club is home to Villa Maria Academy, a Catholic school for prekindergarten to Grade 8. The school’s orientation booklet lists annual tuition for a family’s first child in kindergarten through eighth grade as $5,500.

THE COMMUTE

Residents can venture on foot to the Middletown Road or Buhre Avenue station on the 6 subway line, but both are about a mile from certain points in the neighborhood. From there, Midtown is about 40 minutes away. There will soon be the rerouted No. 8 Bronx bus to the Pelham Bay Park station on the 6, the northernmost on the line, where connections to other buses are available. The BxM7A express bus stops along Bruckner Boulevard at Jarvis and Baisley Avenues in the mornings, taking commuters down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The BxM9 express bus stops along Layton Avenue. A one-way fare on either is $5.50; a seven-day unlimited Express Bus Plus MetroCard is $45.

THE HISTORY

Country Club was once, indeed, a country club, or at least part of it was. The Country Club of Westchester occupied part of the area from 1881 until it burned down in 1922, an event during which “fashionable women left dance hall and dining room to form bucket brigades” to help fight the fire, according to an account in The New York Times. Parts of the land were owned by families like Lorillard Spencer’s, whose estate was parceled into 1,200 lots and in 1922 sold at public auction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/re.../04living.html

[NoyokA]

Two pictures I took in the Bronx:


This is in the Morsianna section, one of the few stretches not destroyed by housing projects.


This is right off the Grand Concourse which has without question the best architecture in the Bronx. The building is actually triangular shaped but this perspective makes it look sliver thin.

[Merry]

An Enclave at the Bronx’s Border With Westchester

By JAKE MOONEY




The elevated subway line clatters northward through the Bronx above White Plains Road, coming to an abrupt end in Wakefield.




Carpenter Street




233rd Street

slide show

THE elevated subway line that clatters northward through the Bronx on White Plains Road comes to an unceremonious stop, just before the city line, at 241st Street. After the hulking metal tracks end, there is nothing overhead but sky. Two more blocks up, at 243rd Street, the street signs change from green to blue, and Westchester County begins.

Wakefield, the Bronx neighborhood around the 241st Street stop and one of the northernmost places in the city, shares more than a little suburban character with its neighbor across the border. Residential streets are green, and the physical and psychological distance from Manhattan is marked. Single-family houses predominate; many have driveways and homey touches like wind chimes and flower beds.

It is details like these that have drawn families from denser parts of the city for decades and still do. Debbie Brown, a nurse who grew up in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, recalled spending summers with family in Wakefield as a child. “It was almost like a little vacation for me,” she said.

Now in her 40s, with a 13-year-old son, Ms. Brown recently bought a house on Murdock Avenue, four blocks from the city line. Many of her neighbors are part of the area’s large and well-established West Indian community, like herself, Ms. Brown said, and many have been living in the area for decades. Census data indicate that of the 68,000 people in the 10466 ZIP code, which roughly corresponds with Wakefield, about 72 percent are black, 12 percent white and 20 percent Hispanic of any race.

Nearby, on Seton Avenue, Awilda Ruiz, a public administration student, and her husband, a police officer, are busy renovating a house where they plan to live with their young son and daughter. They now live in Mott Haven, in the South Bronx, and Ms. Ruiz said they had been seeking a safer, more residential neighborhood with good schools. Wakefield fit the bill, and was within the family’s budget: In March, they paid a little over $350,000 for their three-bedroom house.

Nareema Baksh, the broker who sold Ms. Brown and Ms. Ruiz their houses, describes a multicultural mix of people who value a family-friendly ambience.

“You have a lot of career people in this area,” she said. “A lot of nurses — people that are working. Also, I think the area has been well maintained over the years — not a lot of foreclosure. It’s a sense of pride in owning a home.”

The Rev. Richard Gorman, a Catholic priest who is chairman of Community Board 12, which represents the area, described Wakefield as a stable neighborhood with good churches, populated largely by the “homeowning class.”

Though crime has been a concern, especially near the elevated tracks on White Plains Road, he said community and police efforts to stabilize that part of the neighborhood had paid off. As in most of the city, statistics in the 47th Precinct, which covers Wakefield, show a steady decline in most crime over the last two decades.

The area’s charms, Father Gorman said, far outweigh its problems.

“Many of the tree-lined streets,” he said, “people would say: ‘That’s really the Bronx?’ Indeed it is. It’s a very pastoral, peaceful part of the Bronx.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

The hilly northern part of this 1.5-square-mile neighborhood, and the streets west of White Plains Road, on a slope that leads down toward the Bronx River Parkway, are a mix of wood-frame two- and three-story houses, attached brick houses, and small apartment buildings. The area’s leafiest section is east of White Plains Road and south of Nereid Avenue, on a grid of streets tilted 45 degrees on the map from the rest of the neighborhood.

There are places to eat and small businesses on 233rd Street, but the main commercial strip is White Plains Road, a bustling stretch of Caribbean restaurants, pizza places and discount stores under the elevated tracks. Business there has struggled in recent years, Father Gorman said, in part because of competition from big-box retail development nearby in Westchester.

The community board, he said, has been working with civic groups and government agencies to improve the retail corridor. The police have increased patrols; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is painting and refurbishing train stations; and the board has secured city money for new street lamps. In the future, Father Gorman said, there are plans to plant trees and work with the Department of Transportation on improving traffic flow.

An important step, he said, will be persuading the disparate businesses on the strip to work together. There is an emerging merchants’ group, he said, but “the message we’ve got to get out there is that when you help each other, you help yourself. Making a better business district makes a better business.”

Father Gorman said residents were also concerned about several proposed facilities for the homeless and other people with special needs. One, on White Plains Road, would contain about 60 units of housing for homeless people; another, on Bronx Boulevard, would have 100 units of transitional housing.

Father Gorman said the board wanted more say in the process for locating such facilities, and “more equality and fairness” in the way that they are distributed around the city.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Latrisha Asante, an agent at Coldwell Banker, said the recession had not hit the area as hard as some others, though there had been a “little handful” of foreclosures, slightly more to the south.

Ms. Baksh, the owner of Nareema Baksh Real Estate, says one- and two-family houses predominate. For the former, she said, buyers can expect to pay around $350,000, depending on size and condition.

Data provided by Dorothy Namdar, a broker at Better Homes and Gardens Rand Real Estate, did show listings and recent sales in the mid-$300,000s, but there was wide variation, with some houses listed at $250,000 or below and some above $400,000.

Ms. Namdar’s data showed many two-family houses either listed or recently sold for $450,000 to $550,000. An average two-family house, Ms. Baksh said, might sell for $525,000 to $550,000. Brick houses tend to fetch higher prices than wood-frame ones, she said, because of a general preference for them among Caribbean people.

There are few rental units in Wakefield, though apartment buildings do exist, especially along the busier roads, and it is possible to rent all or part of a detached house. In general, one-bedrooms rent for just under $1,000 a month, two-bedrooms for around $1,200. A recent check of Craigslist revealed several three-bedroom house rentals for $1,500 to $2,000.

WHAT TO DO

Just to the east of the neighborhood is Seton Falls Park, a 35-acre former wetland that has walking trails, an artificial waterfall and a playground. The park has had drainage problems, and in the 1970s and ’80s it was used as a dumping ground by car thieves. In recent years there have been public and private restoration efforts — including a $905,000 city improvement bid.

THE SCHOOLS

There are five public elementary schools. To the west, at Public School 16, 70.6 percent met standards last year in English, 88.3 percent in math. At Public School 103, percentages were 56.3 in English and 80.8 in math.

To the east, at Public School 68, 69.1 percent were proficient in English, 86.8 percent in math. At Public School 87, percentages were 71.7 in English and 84.7 in math.
To the south, at Public School 21, 59.2 percent were proficient in English, 75.9 percent in math.

For middle school there is No. 142, to the east, where 46.4 percent demonstrated proficiency in English, 55.9 percent in math. To the west, at the Globe School for Environmental Research, 56.4 percent were proficient in English, 59.7 percent in math.

There are no public high schools, though the all-boys’ Mount St. Michael Academy, on Murdock Avenue — one of several area parochial schools — has more than 1,000 in Grades 6 through 12.

THE COMMUTE

The No. 2 train runs on the elevated tracks along White Plains Road, stopping at 225th Street, 233rd Street, Nereid Avenue and 241st Street. (The 5 also runs, intermittently only.) Local service through the Bronx is slow; the trip to Midtown takes about an hour. To the west, the Metro-North Harlem Line runs along the Bronx River Parkway. The Woodlawn and Wakefield stops are at 233rd and 241st Streets, about 25 minutes from Grand Central Terminal. Bus lines also serve the area.

THE HISTORY

The Encyclopedia of New York City says Wakefield, named for the estate where George Washington was born, was annexed to New York in 1895. It grew in the 1920s when Interborough Rapid Transit built the elevated tracks. Irish, Italian and African-American families bought houses after World War II; people from the Caribbean, mostly Jamaica, began arriving in the 1980s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/re.../16living.html

[Merry]

A Quiet Neighborhood Talks About Policing Itself

By JOSEPH BERGER

The streets of the enclave called Country Club in the northeast Bronx have names plucked from Wagnerian operas —Lohengrin, Parsifal, Siegfried and Valhalla. They enhance the neighborhood’s air of civility, and that aura has been strengthened for many years by a low crime rate. The last murder in the 45th Precinct, which includes Country Club, was in January 2009.

But safety is a slippery and subjective thing to measure, and as residents made clear at a meeting on June 23 with Capt. Dimitrios Roumeliotis of the 45th Precinct, they are angry about crime. They emphasize that there is crime in Country Club — the occasional burglary, a purse snatching, drug deals, teenage rowdiness and worse — and that, low-level as these activities may be, they still produce anxiety.

Resident after resident at the meeting, which was conducted by the Country Club Civic Association, also accused the police of not responding promptly to their complaints, or of ignoring them entirely.

The concern is widespread enough that Mike McNerney, a brawny 32-year-old who is the civic group’s vice president, has proposed the revival of a tool reminiscent of the city’s high-crime era: a civilian crime patrol. What’s more, most residents at the meeting said they welcomed the idea.

Mr. McNerney said the volunteer patrol would use basic observational methods — taking down license plates and car models, for example — to provide “an intelligence force” that the police would get to know and trust.

He also said that the patrol members would carry no weapons more dangerous than cellphones.

“We’re not talking about running around like vigilantes with baseball bats,” he said. “We’re talking about a formidable community presence. At least people will know there’s someone out there watching.”

Mr. McNerney was alluding to the occasional charges of vigilantism against such patrols, like the accusations that followed the arrest in 1996 of some Hasidic patrol members on charges that they had beaten a black man in Crown Heights, a site of disturbances involving blacks and Orthodox Jews in 1991. But Captain Roumeliotis said a civilian patrol, assuming that it behaved properly, could be beneficial, because “it’s a good reason for people to assume responsibility.”

However, the captain also said major crime in the precinct was down 5 percent this year compared with the same period last year, and was down 20 percent since 2001. He acknowledged that burglaries when residents were at work remained a problem, but when a woman complained that squad cars did not patrol regularly, he said the happy reason was the neighborhood’s low crime rates.

“What you’re saying is not false, because officers go where the jobs are,” he said.
Country Club, population 4,000, is set on Long Island Sound midway between the Throgs Neck Bridge and Pelham Bay Park.

Its housing stock is mostly clapboard and brick two-story homes with bedsheet-size front yards. Several grander houses stand along the water, but typical Country Clubbers are barbers and house painters, merchants and civil servants, many of Italian descent. Residents fly American flags year-round from their porches, and grow tomatoes and figs in their backyards.

The neighborhood has a decidedly suburban feel. Some homes still lack sewers, and the police use the area’s quiet streets to train the department’s mounted units. There are a half-dozen stores — a pizza parlor, a small supermarket — and two major institutions, Villa Maria Academy, a Catholic elementary school where the June 23 meeting was held, and the 200-bed Providence Rest geriatric nursing center.

No one seems to know how the Wagnerian street names came about, but the neighborhood itself was named for the Westchester Country Club, whose land was sold to developers after a fire in 1922.

Residents regard the community as so desirable that they quickly tell their children or grandchildren about houses for sale. Marcia Anne Pavlica, the association president, said her next-door neighbor’s four sons all own homes in Country Club.

“It’s an indication of deep feeling,” she said.

But now, these residents say their beloved streets are at risk. Ms. Pavlica, 67, a retired schoolteacher, cautioned that the patrol proposal was at an early stage, yet she recalled that inhabitants also formed a patrol in the 1970s, right after the first Son of Sam killing.

The victim, Donna Lauria, 18, was found dead just blocks away from Country Club, on Buhre Avenue in Pelham Bay.

That patrol functioned for eight years, Ms. Pavlica said. There were about 40 volunteers, and every night four cars equipped with CB radios cruised the streets, on the lookout for trouble. Local politicians pitched in, defraying gasoline and other expenses.

As often as not, Ms. Pavlica said, the patrol had little more to do than escort women coming home late from work.

“If there was anything we observed, we called it in to the 45th Precinct and they took it from there,” Ms. Pavlica said. “We never confronted anybody.”

Robert DeTiberiis, 49, is one of the current residents who favor reviving such patrols. “We need some eyes and ears in the streets,” he said.

Anita Masiello, 64, wants crime addressed, too. At the meeting, she told of finding bags of marijuana outside her house in the morning, and of seeing groups of kids calling drug dealers on cellphones.

“You call up the police and you’re told it’s not an emergency,” she said.

While several residents blamed intruders from across the Bruckner Expressway for the trouble, Captain Roumeliotis cautioned that traveling into Country Club is not a crime.

“It doesn’t matter where they live,” he said. “It’s how they behave.”

After the meeting, Mr. McNerney said he hoped to have a patrol of about 20 people running within a year.

“We’re striving for perfection,” he said. “A low crime rate is good. We want no crime rate.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/ny...l?ref=nyregion

[Merry]

University Heights, the Bronx

By GREGORY BEYER




Davidson Avenue


Bronx Community College




University Woods


Devoe Park


Jerome Avenue


University Avenue


Buchanan Place


Grand Avenue


Fordham Hill Oval

LAST September, when Mary Robison was paying $1,550 for a one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with a view of an alley, she got her introduction to the Bronx. Through a mutual friend she met a man who lived in Fordham Hill Oval, a sprawling gated community of co-ops and rentals in University Heights, a neighborhood overlooking the Harlem River in the northwest Bronx.

They began dating, and Ms. Robison, 45, a librarian and archivist eager to buy her first New York apartment, began viewing units in the complex. In February, she paid $112,500 for a one-bedroom on the 12th floor, from which she can see the Empire State Building, La Guardia Airport and most of her new borough.

Last week she had six friends, five from Manhattan, over for a dinner party.

“I’ve never been able to entertain so many people,” she said the day before. “They’re all coming up from Manhattan with very detailed directions.”

On her friends’ next visit, they might want to consider a look at the neighborhood’s architectural gem, Bronx Community College, with its stately limestone buildings designed by Stanford White. “One should not be in New York without knowing this campus,” said Carolyn G. Williams, who is in her 14th year as college president.

Two who would agree are E. Denise Perry and her husband, Ken. They live on the campus’s south side, in a five-bedroom three-bath home on 180th Street. Mrs. Perry, a dance instructor, was brought up in the house, which her parents bought in the early 1950s because of the relative privacy and quiet the college afforded — since there were no houses across the street.

Her father, Mrs. Perry recalled, saw the college as a safeguard against overdevelopment. As she put it, “He knew the college would never be torn down.”

In 1894, the institution opened as New York University’s uptown campus. For the next eight years, according to the Encyclopedia of New York City, “the university dominated the neighborhood, much of which was covered by the campus and its many residential buildings.” In 1973, N.Y.U. sold the campus to New York State, to be used by Bronx Community College, which had previously been at a nearby location. The college is part of the City University of New York system.

“Our campus is a real oasis,” Dr. Williams said. “We think that’s part of the attraction, the fact that we are a traditional college. And for nontraditional students that’s important.”

By nontraditional, she meant that many of the 11,500 undergraduates have jobs and families, and not all of them traveled a direct route from high school. The average age is 24, and students take four and a half years, on average, to obtain an associate’s degree.

Behind the Hall of Languages, one of Stanford White’s buildings, is the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a colonnaded neo-Classical walkway displaying bronze busts of prominent men and women. Founded in 1900, it is believed to be the first hall of fame in the country, and includes authors, teachers, scientists, soldiers, jurists and statesmen.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

University Heights covers an area less than a square mile; it is bounded to the north by West 190th Street, to the east by Jerome Avenue, to the south by West Burnside Avenue, and to the west by the Harlem River. According to census data, it has more than 41,000 people.

Beyond the college’s limestone and quadrangles, streets are chiefly lined by apartment buildings and multifamily attached houses, with a few single-families. University Avenue, a residential artery, unspools for long stretches uninterrupted by side streets; it is flanked by six-story brick apartments, facades crisscrossed with fire escapes.

A lively street life was evident on a recent sweltering afternoon, with groups of people spread out on folding chairs on the sidewalks, grilling hamburgers and watching as youngsters opened up the fire hydrants and sprayed water on playmates laughing in the streets.

A handwritten sign posted on the door of a bodega read, “Don’t come in if you are wet, thank you.”

“There’s not a lot of gentrification, which adds a lot of diversification to the neighborhood,” said Nathan Herber, an agent with Argo Real Estate. Noting the supply of mom-and-pop stores — many on West Fordham Road and under the elevated tracks along Jerome Avenue — Mr. Herber described his lunchtime ritual: stepping out for a deli sandwich with chips and a soda, for $4.50. “That’s $10 in Manhattan,” he said.

The neighborhood has one of the largest concentrations of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in the five boroughs, according to the Encyclopedia of New York City. On Andrews Avenue North sits a house painted a strikingly bright shade of yellow, wedged conspicuously between modest, plain neighbors. It is the Vietnamese Buddhist Association of New York.

Among other houses of worship in the area is St. Nicholas of Tolentine Roman Catholic Church, at West Fordham Road and Andrews Avenue; it offers Masses in English, Spanish and Vietnamese. In March it was damaged by a fire that investigators called suspicious.

In the northern section, a crop of tall white-brick buildings make up the Fordham Hill Oval, with its co-ops and rentals. Of 1,118 units, most are one- and two-bedrooms, said Lynn Whiting, the vice president of Argo Real Estate.

Affordability and space helped entice Ashley Fernandes to the Oval from Manhattan. She and her boyfriend, Jairo Veras, had been paying $1,250 a month for a studio on the Upper East Side when they saw a listing in the Oval on trulia.com. Now they rent a one-bedroom there for $1,150.

A Toronto-area native, Ms. Fernandes, 25, appreciates the green space around the complex and in Devoe Park nearby.

The move did mean leaving behind Manhattan restaurant options and lengthening her commute to Herald Square, where she works in human resources at Foot Locker’s corporate headquarters. But the benefits more than made up for any inconvenience.

“As far as what you get for your price, it’s so much better,” Ms. Fernandes said. “The actual living room is bigger than my whole studio was.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Mr. Herber of Argo Real Estate said sale prices this year had averaged $340,000 to $360,000, up from $300,000 to $320,000 last year. Rentals account for a lot of the market; one-bedrooms range from $800 to $1,200; two-bedrooms from $1,000 to $1,400, he said.

At Fordham Hill Oval, one-bedrooms sell for an average of $115,000, according to Mr. Herber. The average for two-bedrooms is $165,000.

Latrisha Asante, a broker with Coldwell Banker, said the average length of time on the market was 120 days — slightly longer than last year. A large percentage of people buying in University Heights are former renters familiar with the area, she said.

THE SCHOOLS

Public School 279, Capt. Manuel Rivera on Walton Avenue a block outside neighborhood boundaries, serves kindergarten through Grade 8. In 2009, 45.4 percent of eighth graders met standards in English and 81.3 percent in math, versus 57 and 71.3 citywide.

University Heights High School serves Grades 9 through 12. The SAT averages last year were 411 in reading, 393 in math and 406 in writing, versus 406, 416 and 401 citywide.

For 25 years the high school was housed on the college’s campus, but starting this fall it will move to the South Bronx, at CUNY’s request. Some parents and students are upset. “Our enrollment has grown to a point where we’re just strapped for space,” said Dr. Williams, the college president, citing a rise to 11,500 from 8,400 five years ago. “We’re growing faster than we can get our new buildings.”

Dr. Williams and a city education spokesman said they planned to continue programs to link the college and the high school, like having college faculty members teach advanced high school courses and having high school teachers as college adjuncts.

WHAT TO DO

In addition to its sporting events open to the public, Bronx Community College each May sponsors the Annual Hall of Fame 10K Run and 2 Mile Fitness Walk. The events were started in 1978 by Roscoe C. Brown, a Bronx Community College president. The local branch of the New York Public Library is on University Avenue at 181st Street.

THE COMMUTE

University Heights is adjacent to the Major Deegan Expressway; the elevated 4 subway has three local stops on Jerome Avenue: Burnside Avenue, 183rd Street and Fordham Road. The trip to Midtown takes about half an hour.

Among several buses is the 12, which runs along Fordham Road and across the University Heights Bridge to Inwood, Manhattan, and eastward across the Bronx to Pelham Bay Park.

THE HISTORY

A British fort occupied University Woods, a local park, during the Revolution. The British used it to defend their hold on the city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/re.../18living.html

[Merry]

Morris Heights, the Bronx

By KATHERINE BINDLEY













slide show

MORRIS HEIGHTS was not first, second or even third on the list of neighborhoods where David Klaw and his fiancée, Jill Sunderland, considered buying a house.

This small, hilly community in the West Bronx, with a troubled past and an optimistic future, was actually fourth in line and came into play only after deals fell through in Brooklyn and Queens. The couple considered buying in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick, but Ms. Sunderland, a 29-year-old teacher at Manhattan School for Children, said neither area felt safe enough for the price.

“Brooklyn just wasn’t working out,” she said. “We obviously weren’t looking to buy brownstones in Park Slope.”

The couple’s solution came last month in the form of a three-bedroom attached brick house on Undercliff Avenue in Morris Heights, which they bought for $310,000.

“The block is beautiful,” said Mr. Klaw, 35, an art teacher at the Theatre Arts Production Company School in the Bronx. He was charmed by the architecture, the old church across the street and the views of Manhattan. “You also have views of those giant project towers,” he said, “but you know, that’s O.K.”

The buildings Mr. Klaw mentioned are the River Park Towers, and they are among the area’s many public housing projects. So, would the couple call their new neighborhood up and coming?

“If it is,” Ms. Sunderland said, “it’s right at the beginning.”

The progress of Morris Heights might best be defined not in terms of how far along it is, but how far it has come.

Though in the West Bronx along the Harlem River, it had the same troubles that gave the South Bronx notoriety: crime, drugs and arson.

“It was blight,” said Verona Greenland, the chief executive of the Morris Heights Health Center, which opened on Burnside Avenue in 1981. Ms. Greenland started working in the neighborhood 32 years ago. She remembers often seeing fires, and says the drug of choice back then was heroin. “The ills of poverty permeated every facet of this community,” she said.

Today, Burnside Avenue is a small but lively commercial strip where one recent afternoon Mary Felic sold live stone crabs (4 for $10) from the back of her red pickup truck. The once devastated street has a Chase bank, a Dunkin’ Donuts and several food markets.

Ms. Greenland considers Burnside Avenue a sight to behold. “A lot of people walking through our community can’t see that,” she said. “But if you could step back in time, you can see how transformed the neighborhood is.”

The 2000 census estimated that 38 percent of families in the 10453 ZIP code were living below the poverty level. The 46th Precinct, which includes Morris Heights, has recorded 8 homicides, 17 rapes and 293 robberies this year.

Although poverty and crime undeniably remain a problem, Xavier Rodriguez, the district manager of the local community board, is another who notes significant changes for the better.

“This is a community that is beginning to stabilize,” said Mr. Rodriguez, who cited the $20 million renovations to Roberto Clemente State Park, the new building for Public School 204, and the several improvements to the housing situation, including Washington Bridge View, the neighborhood’s first affordable co-op for income-restricted buyers, which went up this year.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Morris Heights is less than half a square mile in area. Its borders are Burnside Avenue to the north, Jerome Avenue to the east, the Cross Bronx Expressway to the south and the Harlem River to the west.

There are several five- and six-story rental apartment buildings in the neighborhood undergoing renovations. Most require prospective tenants to meet income restrictions.

The co-ops at Washington Bridge View, which has income restrictions of its own, represent the first such housing available for neighborhood buyers. It was built by Mastermind Ltd., and brochures advertise high-end apartments at below-market prices, all within walking distance of Manhattan.

The building has 48 one- and two-bedroom units for low- to moderate-income families; 18 of them were sold through a lottery system. Some have views of the Manhattan skyline. All have dishwashers and wiring for cable and Internet. Indoor parking is available for purchase. Applicants with incomes of $40,000 to $102,000 are eligible.

Among the entities financing the project are the city’s Housing Development Corporation, the New York State Affordable Housing Corporation, Bank of America and the Bronx borough president’s office.

As rents continue to climb on the other side of 181st Street in Manhattan, Radame Perez, Mastermind’s chief operating officer, hopes people will consider living across the bridge.

“We believe that that’s what our building represents,” he said, “an opportunity to capture the audience of homeowners that have been priced out of Washington Heights.”

According to Samantha Magistro, a senior project manager with Bronx Pro Real Estate Management, an affordable-housing developer, migration from Washington Heights has already begun. She is convinced that Morris Heights is well situated to profit.

“I’m hoping those 181st Street artsy types start needing to move across the water,” was how she put it. There is no real “art scene” just yet, she added, but “I think people didn’t ever think they’d go into some parts of Brooklyn they go in now, so you never know.”

As for multifamily homes, many were built or rehabbed in the ’90s, when the Department of Housing Preservation and Development was trying to revamp the Bronx, said Jennie Ng of ERA Champions realty.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Allison Jaffe, an agent with Key Real Estate Services, found that 18 houses sold in Morris Heights this year. Twelve of those were two-family homes, and they ranged from a foreclosure of $215,000 up to $490,000. Two-families usually start in the mid-$300,000s, brokers say.

Nadia Hussey, an agent with Houlihan Lawrence, represented the property that Mr. Klaw and Ms. Sunderland bought. In Morris Heights, she said, blocks of single-family homes are few. These properties start in the high $200,000s and peak in the mid-$300,000s.
According to Ms. Ng, properties are spending nine months to a year on the market, versus six months last year. There are 56 listings in the ZIP code; Ms. Ng estimates that prices have risen about 10 percent since last year.

A recent Craigslist search showed one-bedroom rentals available from $850 to $1,075 a month.

THE SCHOOLS

Area schools include Public School 109 Sedgwick, where, in tests earlier this year, 39.4 percent of students met standards in English, 60.5 percent in math. At Middle School 331, Bronx School of Science Inquiry and Investigation, 19.4 percent met standards in English, 26.9 percent in math. Citywide, percentages were 42.4 and 54.

The schools in Morris Heights have had their share of ups and downs. This school year, Public School 204 Morris Heights moved into a brand-new educational facility with a gym and a library.

But University Heights High School, which had been on the campus of Bronx Community College, relocated farther away, to the South Bronx. Mr. Rodriguez, the district manager, is not pleased. “I want my high school back,” he said recently in a phone interview.
SAT averages at University Heights in 2009 were 411 in reading, 393 in math and 406 in writing, versus 406, 416 and 401 citywide.

WHAT TO DO

Shopping is limited, but there are areas of commercial activity along Burnside, University and Tremont Avenues.

Roberto Clemente State Park, along the Harlem River, is one of the area’s natural amenities. Rachel Gordon, a regional director of New York State Parks, said that in addition to the ball fields, the park offered weekend concerts, summertime movie nights and plenty of space to grill out.

The park was given $20 million from the city’s mitigation fund, as part of the Croton Water Filtration Plant Project. The money went into a gut renovation of its 1973 aquatics center. The Olympic pool was supposed to have been open this summer but was delayed. There are also to be new locker rooms, a dive tank and a children’s spray park.

THE COMMUTE

The No. 4 train runs along the eastern border at Jerome Avenue. The ride to Midtown Manhattan takes 40 to 45 minutes. On the west side, Morris Heights has its own Metro-North Railroad stop, on the Hudson Line.

THE HISTORY

On Sedgwick Avenue, No. 1520 is one of several sites in the New York area that describe themselves as the birthplace of hip-hop. D. J. Kool Herc had parties there in the early 1970s. The area takes its name from an early landowner, Richard Morris, the second chief justice of New York State.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/re...ref=realestate

[Merry]

A Slow Renaissance for a Struggling Neighborhood

By JOHN FREEMAN GILL


















slide show

FOR those who neither live nor work in the South Bronx, its most enduring images are of buildings aflame in the 1970s and the crime-infested, rubble-strewn streetscape of the 1980s, when the area’s infamous 41st Precinct was popularized in a Hollywood movie as “Fort Apache, the Bronx.”

But add to this highlight reel a more hopeful recent image: the day two months ago when contemporary co-op living came to Fort Apache, complete with private terraces and an energy-efficient roof. On Sept. 9, Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, returned to the Longwood neighborhood of his youth to cut the ribbon on a 50-unit government-subsidized affordable co-op building bearing his name.

“I know this section of the Bronx very well,” Mr. Powell told the crowd. “And I have watched with pleasure and admiration as the neighborhood has seen a renaissance.”

For an area whose residents are primarily renters struggling with the city’s highest poverty rate, the General Colin L. Powell Apartments represent a watershed homeownership opportunity. With a target resident pool of middle- and lower-income buyers, most of the units were awarded by lottery; current residents of Longwood and Hunts Point were given preference for half.

One winner was Damian Griffin, the education director for the Bronx River Alliance. He and his wife, Nancy, live with their two children in a walk-up rental in Longwood’s historic district. In their eight years there, Mr. Griffin, who is of Irish descent, and Mrs. Griffin, who is from Honduras, dreamed of putting down deeper roots by buying a home in the area, which is predominantly Hispanic. Apartments in the Powell building, which were offered below market price because of city and state support, were the first that the couple could afford.

Citing “changes for the positive,” Mr. Griffin said, “My work is education, which is informing and hoping to make a place better. That can be in any community, but in this community I feel like I’m part of that.”

When they move into their $160,000 two-bedroom, the Griffins will be able to look out from their terrace and from the plant-covered roof to see some of the changes that have Mr. Griffin feeling so optimistic.

Because his 3-year-old daughter is something of a swing fanatic, the Fox Playground across the street, which reopened last month after a $2.5 million renovation, is a welcome improvement on what Mr. Griffin called the “ugly feel” created by the men who drink in another nearby park. And Barretto Point Park, opened in 2006 on the heavily industrial shoreline of Hunts Point, typifies the improved waterfront access that the community has pushed for.

Such rejuvenation was all but unimaginable in the 1970s, when the area was beset by arson and abandonment and nearly 60,000 residents, roughly two-thirds of the population, either fled or were forced out.

By 1981, Longwood had an almost post-apocalyptic character, according to Orlando Marin, the chairman of Bronx Community Board 2, which covers Hunts Point and Longwood. That year, he recalled, when a young woman asked him to pick her up at her home on Kelly Street, she cautioned that “when you get off the train you have to walk in the middle of the street; there are no lights, no sidewalks, the buildings are abandoned, and someone might drag you into a building and do something to you.” Sure enough, Longwood Avenue was pitch-black; Mr. Marin found the area so frightening and chaotic that he turned tail and left.

He returned in 1992 to buy a multifamily town house in the Longwood Historic District, and in the ensuing years witnessed a slow-motion renaissance.

Debris-littered lots on Longwood’s western edge had already been redeveloped with two-family homes, and by 1994 blighted stretches of Longwood Avenue were handsomely filled in with rows of government-subsidized two-story red-brick dwellings. Crowned with green dentil cornices, today they still look as impregnable as the no-nonsense home built by the third little pig.

Reconstruction has accelerated in the last decade, as the city has sought to restore population by shifting its emphasis from promoting ownership of small houses to subsidizing income-restricted rental apartment buildings. Under its housing plan, 26 new buildings have been financed in the area since 2003.

Although developers say that tight credit has put the brakes on additional co-op construction, and although prostitution is a problem in Hunts Point, the area has nonetheless stabilized.

“This is a growing, vibrant community that is rebuilding itself,” Mr. Marin said. “Yeah, we’re Fort Apache, but Fort Apache is no longer a war zone. It’s a neighborhood where people are proud to live.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Hunts Point and Longwood are joined by a community board but separated by the thundering equator of the Bruckner Expressway. Although not firmly delineated and at times a subject of disagreement, the overall boundaries of the roughly two-square-mile area are: Westchester Avenue on the north; the Bronx River on the east; the East River on the south; and East 149th Street and Prospect Avenue on the west.

The Longwood Historic District, southwest of Longwood Avenue, has a cohesive collection of high-stooped, semidetached two- and three-family neo-Renaissance town houses. Villa Maria, on Longwood’s western fringe, is a pleasant development of two-family homes built around 1990. Elsewhere, rows of tired-looking prewar apartment buildings are interspersed with shinier, government-subsidized rental buildings and row houses. A crowded shopping corridor runs along Southern Boulevard.

The residential district of the Hunts Point peninsula is concentrated to the north. Along the Bronx and East Rivers, the peninsula is dense with commercial and industrial facilities including a 329-acre wholesale food distribution center, a vast wastewater treatment plant, a freight-rail terminal, a gas pipeline and about 18 waste-processing sites. More than 10,000 trucks a day visit the peninsula; the childhood asthma rate has been found to be many times the national average.

The extraordinary environmental challenges heaped on Hunts Point have helped galvanize local groups.

“I do think this is a fiery community with a lot of resilience,” said Kellie Terry-Sepulveda, the executive director of the Point Community Development Corporation. Along with Sustainable South Bronx, the Point has worked with the city’s Economic Development Corporation to plan the South Bronx Greenway, intended to link new and older parks through a “green necklace” of waterfront and street routes. Work has already begun on some proposed improvements, including a landscaped median on Hunts Point Avenue.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Allison Jaffe, the broker-owner of Key Real Estate Services, said that two town houses in the Longwood Historic District had sold this year for around $475,000 each. Over all, the median sale price of two-family homes in the past year was $335,000 in Longwood and $320,000 in Hunts Point. There are 14 homes on the market. Applications are being accepted for income-restricted units in the Prospect Macy Cooperative Apartments, a government-subsidized co-op under construction on Macy Place. The e-mail contact for the Blue Sea Development Company is info@blueseadev.com.

THE SCHOOLS

Area schools include the Vida Bogart School for All Children on Bryant Avenue, which serves kindergarten through eighth grade, and Public School 62 on Fox Street. Each received a B on its most recent city progress report. Among nearby middle schools are the School of Performing Arts on Fox Street, which received an A on its progress report, and the Hunts Point School, which earned a B.

Banana Kelly High School and the Holcombe L. Rucker School of Community Research, also a high school, share a building on Longwood Avenue. SAT averages at Banana Kelly in 2010 were 377 in reading, 382 in math, and 368 in writing. Rucker’s were 374, 362 and 366. Citywide the averages were 439, 462 and 434.

WHAT TO DO

The social outreach program of Cirque du Soleil conducts circus workshops for children at the Point. Rocking the Boat, beside the gorgeous Hunts Point Riverside Park, offers boat-building courses. The BankNote complex, a former currency printing factory, is home to the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. Iridescent’s New York Science Studio provides mentoring to children.

THE COMMUTE

The Nos. 2 and 5 trains run along Westchester Avenue, stopping at Prospect Avenue, Intervale Avenue and Simpson Street. The No. 6 train travels Southern Boulevard, making stops on East 149th Street, and Longwood and Hunts Point Avenues. Midtown Manhattan is roughly 25 minutes away.

THE HISTORY

Hunts Point is named for Thomas Hunt, who in the 17th century built a stone mansion on the grounds of what is now Joseph Rodman Drake Park.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/re...ref=realestate

[Merry]

A Promising Space-to-Price Ratio

By KATHERINE BINDLEY






White Plains Road



slide show

WHEN Xian Edwards began house-hunting over a year ago, he was looking for something not easy to come by in New York City: space, and lots of it.

Mr. Edwards, 32, a program coordinator who moved to New York 10 years ago from Jamaica, bought a two-family home for $430,000. Although it looks small from the front, he says, it has almost 5,000 square feet of space. (Not that he has access to all of it; the renter occupying the other part pays him $1,500 a month.)

In addition to the side yard, where Mr. Edwards grows flowers and vegetables, the four-car garage in the back has a terrace atop it. Last summer the terrace was the site of a party for 100.

“If I could take what I have in the back and put it in upper Westchester,” he said, “it would be the perfect dream house.” Someday he might live in Westchester. But for now, for a single guy working two jobs, Williamsbridge in the Bronx is the answer.

Typing “Williamsbridge” into a Craigslist apartment search yields several results on Williamsbridge Road, but that street doesn’t even go through the neighborhood. The popularity of a similar-sounding part of Brooklyn doesn’t help matters: if you Google “Williamsbridge condos” the search engine might respond by asking if you meant “Williamsburg condos.”

Condominiums are not the dominant form of housing in Williamsbridge, though a few have popped up in recent years. Instead it is mostly single- to three-family homes, few of them more than 50 or 60 years old.

One evident ethnicity is Caribbean. Immigrants from Jamaica and other islands began moving to Williamsbridge in the ’80s, and today their influence is tangible up and down White Plains Road, a commercial strip under elevated train tracks. In addition to Caribbean restaurants, there is a dizzying number of African hair-braiding salons.
Caroline Sinclair has worked at the Kingston Tropical Bakery on White Plains Road for 31 years and can remember a time when there was only one nearby competitor. That is definitely no longer the case.

Shirley Fearon, 65, and a vice president of the Williamsbridge branch of the N.A.A.C.P., describes Williamsbridge as a work in progress. Drugs and crime remain a problem, she said, adding, “We’ve never had a lot of wholesome activities for our young people.”

Ms. Fearon, who lives in a single-family attached brick house for which she paid $26,500 in 1971, is working with local politicians on bringing an intergenerational center to the area, where retirees could mentor youths, and adults could take classes toward the graduate equivalency diploma.

Over the last seven to eight years, said the Rev. Richard Gorman, the chairman of Community Board 12, which covers the area, the 47th Precinct has stepped up safety efforts. Before that, he recalled, “It was getting bad.”

Still, he argued, crime occurs everywhere. “I was mugged once in the Woodlawn area of the community board,” which he described as “basically all Catholic, and I’m a Catholic priest.”

Father Gorman would like to see better lighting on White Plains Road, and zoning to protect architecture. He sees a work in progress: “I think you could have a very vibrant, alive, mixed community that will be a nice place to live.”

One couple who are recent arrivals already seem to see the place that way. Adrian Munroe and his wife, Shelly Bryce-Munroe, who had been renting nearby for 11 years, especially appreciate the shopping and transportation options. They closed last month on a three-family detached house on Willett Avenue, paying $475,000, and have already rented out one of the units. Mr. Munroe, 40, moved to New York 17 years ago from Jamaica; he works as a retail manager in Fairfield, Conn. “Two or three years ago in the housing boom,” he said, “we weren’t able to afford what they were offering. With interest rates as low as they are now, it was time to get into the market.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

A north Bronx neighborhood about a square mile in size, Williamsbridge sits just east of the Woodlawn Cemetery and south of Wakefield. It straddles parts of three ZIP codes; one of them, 10467, has almost 95,000 people, according to a 2009 census estimate.

City boundaries are invariably subject to interpretation, and those of Williamsbridge are no exception. In the words of Father Gorman: “Do I live in Williamsbridge? Or did I sneak into Wakefield? Do I live in Williamsbridge? Or did I sneak into Olinville? People would be fluid about that.”

Bearing that fluidity in mind, Williamsbridge is often described as being bounded by Gun Hill Road to the south; 233rd Street to the north; the Bronx River Parkway to the west; and, to the east, Eastchester and Boston Roads and Laconia Avenue. Some of the area’s single-family detached homes have architectural details like turrets and second-floor outdoor porches. Among other commonly seen properties are attached red-brick multifamilies dating to the 1970s, with monochromatic awnings.

The housing is mostly 35 or older; of the properties for sale, many are advertised as needing “T.L.C.”

But Allison Jaffe, a broker with Key Real Estate Services, describes a building boom of multifamily properties from 2000 to 2008. So much so, in fact, that the community board has asked that zoning be reviewed, to prevent overbuilding, said Karl Stricker, chairman of the land use committee.

“We want to maintain what the community is, one- and two-family houses with setbacks and space between the buildings,” Mr. Stricker said. “We want a suburban-type atmosphere.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Manny Pantiga of the Pantiga Group, says co-ops on the market in the area range from $74,900, for a one-bedroom, to $125,000 for a three-bedroom in an elevator building with a doorman. Single-family homes range from $149,000, for a two-bedroom detached frame house, to $370,000 for a brick four-bedroom.

According to Ms. Jaffe, 67 two-family homes have sold in Williamsbridge since about this time last year, with an average price in the mid-$300,000s.

Dorothy Namdar, an agent with Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty, said that over the last three years, houses in Williamsbridge had taken an average three months to sell.
A recent Craigslist search of rentals in Williamsbridge found a two-bedroom unit off White Plains Road listed at $1,400 a month, and a newly renovated three-bedroom apartment for $1,600.

THE COMMUTE

The neighborhood is almost an hour by subway from Midtown Manhattan on the 2 or 5 train. It is close to thoroughfares, including the Bronx River Parkway, the Hutchinson River Parkway and Interstate 95. It also has a Metro-North Railroad stop.

WHAT TO DO

Between Williamsbridge and the Bronx River is a strip of green known as Shoelace Park. Fifteen years ago the river was in bad shape, and many wouldn’t have considered the area a park at all. “It was a sea of asphalt and some metal guardrails,” said Maggie Greenfield, the deputy director of the Bronx River Alliance, a nonprofit.

Thanks to the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Bronx River Alliance, Shoelace Park now has a new entrance at 219th Street and another in the works at 211th Street.

Goals include linking the 1.5-mile park path more closely to the Bronx River Greenway.

Judy Hutson, a Williamsbridge resident who is an avid runner, remembers feeling solitary 15 years ago in the park. “Now, even in the winter,” she said, “you’ll see the die-hard runners, and we know each other and we say hi.”

Last fall Ms. Hutson helped found Friends of Shoelace Park. The group hopes to draw attention to the area and promote further improvements to it. They are planning their first 10-kilometer run/walk for the end of April.

In 2006, a launch for boaters down by the river was renovated. “It’s really beautiful, even if you don’t canoe, just to sit on that launch and to look down that river,” Ms. Hutson said. “You don’t even think you’re in the city.”

THE SCHOOLS

Primary schools include Public School 21, which got a C on its progress report. Of fourth graders, 29.4 percent met standards in English, 42.8 percent in math, versus 45.6 and 58.4 citywide.

Middle School 113 was closed for poor performance in 2007 and now houses four schools, including the Forward School, which got a B on its progress report. Of eighth graders, 26.7 percent met standards in English, 19 percent in math, versus 37.5 and 46.3 citywide.

Williamsbridge was once served by Evander Childs High School, which had a dangerous reputation. In 2002, its graduation rate was 30.7 percent.

By 2008 the school had been replaced with six smaller ones, among them Bronx Lab School and High School for Contemporary Arts. The average 2009 graduation rate was 80.3 percent.

Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said in an e-mail, “The Evander campus is one of the best examples of our strategy to replace large, failing high schools with rigorous small schools.”

At Cardinal Spellman High School, a private school in nearby Baychester, annual tuition is currently $6,800. Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court was valedictorian of the class of 1972.

THE HISTORY

Williamsbridge is named after a bridge built over the Bronx River in Colonial times by a local farmer named John Williams. In 1841 the area was connected to Manhattan by the New York and Harlem Railroad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/re...ving.html?_r=1

[Merry]

People Care, and It’s Starting to Show

By C. J. HUGHES


Morris Park Avenue, Van Nest's main commercial strip




MANY New York neighborhoods once considered tough have followed a similar script in recent decades: Crime fell. Blocks got cleaner. People moved in instead of out.

By some measures, Van Nest, a middle-class enclave in the eastern Bronx, bucked the trend, with crime dropping more slowly than in the rest of the borough, according to police statistics. And whether one dismisses it as gentrification, or praises it as renewal, the neighborhood didn’t get the gloss of new homes, parks and outdoor cafes that so many other corners of the city did over that span.

Van Nest is not yet completely out of its time warp. Graffiti can be seen in some areas; drugs are a concern. But in the last few years, residents have begun to feel Van Nest, too, should have a shot at rejuvenation — a sentiment that gave rise to the Van Nest Neighborhood Alliance, founded two years ago by residents who had had enough.

Made up mainly of people who have lived in the area for years, the alliance seeks to recapture the spirit of Van Nest’s heyday, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the streets were safe enough for children to play in, members say.

Before the alliance, “it was like nobody cared,” said Camille De Vitto, a member who rhapsodizes about her childhood in the neighborhood.

Some of those fond memories involve Ms. De Vitto’s helping her mother, Theresa, with her business, which was stitching veils for girls receiving their first communion. She recalls being awarded a quarter for every dozen veils she packed in a box.

Today she runs the business, now expanded into rosaries and chalices. It operates out of the ground-floor space in her three-story building, which has a total of five apartments. Ms. De Vitto lives in one of them, a two-bedroom.

The building cost her parents $10,000 in 1959, but was recently appraised at $600,000. That’s an improvement over what it might have been worth a few years ago, she guesses, because stepped-up police patrols have scared away sidewalk drug dealers.

Nor, residents say, are drug users a presence at tiny Van Nest Park, which recently changed its name to the James A. Romito Triangle, for a Port Authority police chief who died on Sept. 11, 2001. On a recent afternoon, children excitedly scrambled up climbing equipment under the watchful eyes of parents.

Those betting on Van Nest’s turnaround aren’t just longtime residents. Sharlene Mendez relocated to the area last year with her husband and four children when they outgrew a two-bedroom rental in Parkchester. And they did so after a drawn-out search. “There is definitely still work to be done,” said Ms. Mendez, a mental-health professional. But it was the tight-knit families — three generations often living under one roof — that won her over. “People have real connections,” she said, “and that’s rare in this day and age.”

And historic houses at discount prices don’t hurt either, added Ms. Mendez, who owns an 1899 row house with original moldings and a fireplace, and soon, she hopes, a backyard full of night-blooming flowers, so as to provide fragrant evening breezes through her kitchen windows.

The house, which cost $408,000, will require work; like many in Van Nest, it was built for one family but later divided for others, so it has bathrooms in odd places. But Ms. Mendez’s taste runs more to antique than contemporary, which is why she declined to buy a newer home in the Eastchester section not far away. “They just don’t give me the same feeling of security,” she said.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

While many agree that Van Nest is staging a comeback, there isn’t all that much agreement on borders. The alliance takes a narrow view, describing the eastern boundary as perpendicular to the end of Van Nest Avenue, and most blocks beyond that point as Morris Park, a more upscale area.

Others say Van Nest is larger, because the whole area was developed in a wave, after the late-1800s opening of the Van Nest station on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, whose track beds are used by Metro-North Railroad today.

Businesses confuse the situation. Morris Park Pizzeria, for instance, is at Unionport Road and Morris Park Avenue, on a block that everybody basically agrees is Van Nest.

That larger Van Nest, with about half a square mile and 15,000 people, is notably Italian, as evidenced by numerous green, white and red striped flags, like the pair flapping about a tile store on Bronxdale Avenue.

From a distance, that flag can resemble Mexico’s, which may be fitting. Recent arrivals from abroad have included many from Spanish-speaking countries like the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Mexico, according to census figures.

Condominiums and co-ops are scarce, as are rental complexes. Houses, attached and standalone, but topping out at three stories, are far more common. Many of these, built at the turn of the 20th century, have slightly bowed facades.

But historical pedigree can be hard to discern, because some of these structures are missing important architectural elements. The cornices have gone missing from four of five adjacent row houses along Holland Avenue, near Rhinelander Avenue, for example, giving their roof lines a bald look.

Modern intrusions include vinyl and other synthetic siding, which can take the form of clapboards, bricks or pebbles, as along Amethyst Street, whose residents have even used siding on their stoops.

Though Van Nest is only a small part of the 49th Precinct, it registers crime statistics. There were 10 murders last year, versus 5 in 2001, though those same numbers indicate this year will probably be less violent than last.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

In mid-April, 25 homes were for sale, at an average of $445,500. They ranged from a 1910 two-family, for $275,000, to a three-family with a garage for $524,999, according to data from the Empire Access Multiple Listing Service provided by Justin Stuckey, a sales agent with the Today Realty Corporation.

Predictably, prices and activity have declined since the boom. In 2010, 19 two-family homes, the most common kind of property, changed hands in Van Nest at an average of $375,000, said Andrew Fernandez, the broker and owner of Re/Max Voyage. That was down from 2007, when 23 two-families sold at an average of $547,000, he said.

There are abandoned homes, as on Van Nest Avenue near Van Buren Street, where an otherwise well-kept Queen Anne sits with plywood in its windows.

Some of these ghostly structures were victims of foreclosures, Mr. Fernandez said. Since last year, short sales and foreclosures have accounted for 15 percent of all sales, which has depressed values, he said. But buyers can benefit, especially if they qualify for a special Federal Housing Administration renovation loan. “They can get very good deals here,” he said.

WHAT TO DO

Cars on Morris Park Avenue, the main commercial strip, honk their greetings as passers-by peruse hardware and furniture stores and supermarkets, as well as Riviera Ravioli, which sells gnocchi and other Italian fare.

The recent bank-branch wave skipped Van Nest, though after 15 years’ complete absence, an outpost of Cross County Federal Savings will open this spring near Barnes Avenue.

THE SCHOOLS

In a blow to many alumni and parents, the Archdiocese of New York recently announced that after 58 years it would close St. Dominic School, which teaches prekindergarten through eighth grade, at the end of this school year.

At Public School 83 on Rhinelander Avenue last year, 63 percent of fourth graders met state standards in math, 43 percent in reading. Averages citywide were 58 percent and 46 percent. At the middle school that shares the address and the number 83, 50 percent of eighth graders met standards in math and 47 percent in reading, versus 46 percent and 38 percent citywide.

Christopher Columbus High School, at 925 Astor Avenue, has an enrollment of 1,100. SAT averages last year were 373 in math, 354 in reading and 350 in writing, versus 502, 485 and 478 statewide.

THE COMMUTE

The Nos. 2 and 5 subway trains stop at East 180th Street station, a former railroad headquarters that has landmark status and is undergoing a major renovation. They deliver riders to Midtown in about 35 minutes.

Bus lines that serve the area include the BxM10 express, though during rush hour it can take an hour to get to Midtown. Tickets are $5.50.

THE HISTORY

If some Van Nest homes look as though they were surrounded by dry moats, it’s because of the rocky soil. The houses were there in 1913, when the city decided to run sewers to the area but found the bedrock too thick to penetrate. Instead, workers raised the streets, using leftover rock from the blasting of the Jerome Park Reservoir, and put the pipes in the new raised-up layer, said Nicholas Di Brino, a historian and former resident.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/re...er=rss&emc=rss

[Merry]

Wearing the Green, in More Ways Than One

By C. J. HUGHES




Martha Avenue at 237th Street, framed in foliage, exudes the calm that typifies Woodlawn.
The area’s Irishness, stronger today than ever, dates to the 1840s, when recent arrivals built the Old Croton Aqueduct.



WOODLAWN’S name is a pretty good example of truth in advertising: forested parks, lots of trees, thickets of greenery around the low stoops of century-old houses. Yet in this quiet corner of the Bronx along the Westchester border, the landscape feature that truly stands out is the bluestone in the sidewalks.

Slightly mottled, like the color of a stormy sky, these slabs are attractive and plentiful. Some line Van Cortlandt Park East, offering a contemplative place to stroll under boughs of London plane trees. Others, fringed with grass, front Kepler Avenue near East 237th Street. And pieces that have buckled because they sit atop ancient roots add charm to busy East 233rd Street (though be careful not to trip).

This “blue gold of the Catskills,” as it used to be called, adorned many New York sidewalks until concrete rendered it obsolete, but Woodlawn may always have had more than most, historians say, because of Woodlawn Cemetery, which opened in 1863 along its southern border.

Bluestone is a significant element of the many artful mausoleums in Woodlawn’s parklike expanse, according to Susan Olsen, the cemetery’s historian, who lives nearby in a one-bedroom apartment. And because so much was stockpiled in local stone yards, along with marble and granite, it was deployed for residential uses. “The supply was right across the street,” she said.

In the early 1840s, Irish immigrants showed up to dig the Old Croton Aqueduct, which sliced beneath what is now Van Cortlandt Park. Twenty years later, Ms. Olsen said, Irish laborers built the roads that wind through the cemetery, establishing a village outside its gates.

Ever since, there has been a substantial Irish presence in the neighborhood; today it is at a peak, with 44 percent of its 7,500 people claiming Irish descent, according to the American Community Survey, conducted by the United States Census Bureau from 2005 to 2009.

The data also reveal that of the area’s foreign-born residents, about half are from Ireland — a trend that has intensified as the collapse of the Irish economy led to a diaspora in search of overseas work, according to the Emerald Isle Immigration Center, an outreach agency. According to its research, the number of Irish immigrants in Woodlawn is up by 25 percent since 2009.

By many measures, thriving Katonah Avenue could also be called “Little Ireland.” Brogues are heard; green trim and shamrock motifs adorn the bars; and jars of pickled beetroot, a staple back home, are found on the shelves of specialty food shops. The avenue is also home to the headquarters of Local 147 of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, a local for miners, many of Irish ancestry, whose work on a decades-long water tunnel replacement project earned them the nickname “sandhogs.”

One sandhog who for years commuted to work 50 stories under Van Cortlandt Park is Chick Donohue, who in 1977 traded a two-bedroom apartment on the Grand Concourse for a three-bedroom rental in a two-family house in Woodlawn. Two years later he bought the whole house, a detached brick Victorian with stone foundations, for $55,000. Real estate deals in Woodlawn, often occurring between family members and without the help of brokers, can seem like a game of musical chairs. Indeed, in 2005, Mr. Donohue sold his property for $400,000 to a daughter, Audra O’Donovan, though she later relocated to a larger property down the block and now rents out the first house.

Today Mr. Donohue, 70, spends most weekends in the Catskills. But during the week, he works on Dyer Avenue in Manhattan running a “hog house,” where miners clean up after their shifts. At night, he stays in Woodlawn, in a bedroom in the basement of his daughter’s home, which helps him stay connected.

“Where else can you go to the corner deli and get a loaf of bread from Dublin?” Mr. Donohue asked. “And I can go into a pub and have rashers,” he said, referring to Irish bacon, “with my Guinness.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Originally named Woodlawn Heights, to differentiate it from the graveyard next door, the neighborhood is squeezed into a quarter of a square mile of land shaped something like a shoe. It has about 3,800 apartments and houses, according to census figures. Most are wood-frame buildings dating from 1900 to 1920, often with a stacked pair of front porches.

Many homes are detached, though often the space between them is barely wide enough to drag trash cans through, which means that private parking is cherished, said Margaret Fogarty, the former president of the Woodlawn Heights Taxpayers and Community Association, a 500-member civic group. But with the community generally sweeping its own streets, she added, drivers are not obliged to observe the city’s alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules. Ms. Fogarty is an Irish émigré whose three-bedroom home with a two-car garage cost about $100,000 in 1984 but — “oh, my gosh,” she said — would be worth about four times that today.

There is also a supply of six-story red-brick apartment buildings, some of them co-ops. A notable high-rise is the hulking 4260 Katonah Avenue, an income-restricted Mitchell-Lama building that originally sought veterans as tenants but that today has a long and varied waiting list. Newer and attached multifamily homes, with simple facades and garages tucked in basements, can be seen on East 233rd Street.

Condominiums, so far, are nonexistent.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

The insider market in the neighborhood can make it appear as if nothing much was selling, brokers say. Indeed, just six houses were on the market in Woodlawn in mid-July, according to the Empire Access Multiple Listing Service, which serves the area, and they were all roughly similar in style, age and price point.

The cheapest, a flat-fronted three-bedroom built in 1901, was listed for $235,000, and the priciest, a detached brick five-bedroom from 1925, for $539,000, according to the listing service.
Among non-insider transactions in 2010, five single-family homes sold, for an average of $388,000, while five two-families sold, for an average of $466,000, according to the listing service. Also, 16 co-ops sold, for an average of $138,000.

In contrast, in 2007, at the market’s peak, 24 single-families sold, for an average of $423,000, and 15 two-families sold, for an average of $517,000. There were 37 co-op sales, averaging $154,000.

The fact that single-family homes were down in value by less than 10 percent, in a city where they might be off by twice that amount in other neighborhoods, does not surprise Elizabeth Brosnan, a sales agent with Century 21 Brand who lives in Woodlawn. “The market is very, very vibrant,” said Ms. Brosnan, adding that one reason was the property taxes, which are low compared with those across the county line in Yonkers.

WHAT TO DO

On a recent weekday afternoon, members of New Horizons, a social club affiliated with St. Barnabas Church, a mainstay, were boarding a bus for the Belmont Park racetrack in Long Island.

In Van Cortlandt Park, a wood-chip-covered trail follows the Old Croton Aqueduct, and a nearby Gaelic football field is a popular spot. Woodlawn Cemetery, whose 400 acres were accorded landmark status in June, stages concerts and readings in locales like the Woolworth Chapel.

THE SCHOOLS

On Katonah Avenue, Public School 19, also known as the Judith K. Weiss School, covers kindergarten through eighth grade. Enrollment last year was 525. On state exams in 2010, 52 percent of fourth graders met standards in math, 41 percent in English. Citywide, those percentages were 34 and 41.

The nearest high school is DeWitt Clinton. SAT averages there were 440 in math, 425 in reading and 417 in writing, versus 516, 501 and 492 statewide.

Parochial schools are well attended. One of them, St. Barnabas, offers prekindergarten through 12th grade for boys and girls, as well as a 230-student girls’ high school.

THE COMMUTE
One way to reach Midtown Manhattan is via Metro-North Railroad, from the Woodlawn stop on the Harlem line. Five trains depart each morning from 6 to 8, arriving at Grand Central Terminal 22 to 33 minutes later. Monthly tickets are $178.

There are 67 parking spaces at the station, 52 of which require permits costing $358.30 a year. The waiting list for a spot has 90 names on it. But the station is about a 10-minute walk from most points in the neighborhood.

THE HISTORY

The cemetery figured in one of the 20th century’s highest-profile crimes, the kidnapping of the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1932.

John Condon, a retired school principal, volunteered to act as a go-between and deliver ransom money to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the man eventually convicted of the kidnapping, who named a meeting spot at the Jerome Avenue gate of the cemetery. However, the actual exchange of money, $50,000, took place a few nights later, at St. Raymond’s Cemetery, in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/re...er=rss&emc=rss

[Merry]

Potential Awaits Its Moment

By JAKE MOONEY









slide show

DECADES have gone by, but all around Mott Haven in the South Bronx, certain physical characteristics provide an echo of the bad years in the 1960s and ’70s. Of the scores of lots emptied by fires and neglect back then, some have been transformed into lush community gardens, and some have been rebuilt into tidy subsidized town houses by nonprofit developers. Others are just empty, with signs on their fences advertising developments that never materialized.

They are as good a symbol as any of the area’s current state, which enthusiasts describe as challenging but filled with potential. Public housing projects, more than a dozen in all, dominate the landscape, but in between are intimate blocks populated by recent immigrants, by adventurous and relatively prosperous newcomers, and by families who have been in the area for generations.

A move to gentrify late in the last decade stalled as the larger economy did, but officials and residents of Mott Haven, which is generally considered to cover about one and a half square miles between the Harlem River and the Bruckner Expressway south of East 149th Street, say the conditions are right for another resurgence.

Housing stock and the income levels of the neighborhood’s 48,000 residents are gradually diversifying, said Cedric Loftin, the district manager of Community Board 1, which represents the area. In particular, he said, the main commercial corridor, East 138th Street, is seeing new life. Also, the city’s rezoning of industrial areas on the neighborhood’s western edge, near the Grand Concourse and the river, represents an effort to promote new housing and to create access to the Harlem River.

Combined with the area’s ample public transportation and proximity to Manhattan, Mr. Loftin said, that is reason for optimism.

“Housing stock is up, it’s not that expensive, and there are a lot of opportunities here,” he said.

Even a few years ago, those assets were in sufficient evidence to attract Yonette Davis, a Brooklyn native who is a geriatrician. Dr. Davis bought her three-story brownstone on East 140th Street for less than $200,000 in 2001, and moved in after a renovation and the birth of her daughter in 2007.

Given the South Bronx’s reputation, her family feared for her safety. The reality, once she settled in, was different. One neighbor sweeps her sidewalk when she is away at work, and there are annual events and plenty of children for her daughter to play with.

“I keep telling people, it’s the first neighborhood that I’ve lived in that feels like a neighborhood,” Dr. Davis said. “The residents seem to be really close to each other.”

One reason for that closeness, she said, may be a history of shared adversity: Almost half of the area’s families, according to census figures, have incomes below the poverty line. And, while crime is far less prevalent these days, Dr. Davis says late nights on area streets can feel unsettling.

Still, she said that she had not felt out of place and that the neighborhood had revealed itself to her gradually, as her bond with her neighbors grew.

Whether she will remain, though, is an open question. She works in Brooklyn, commuting 40 minutes by car, and weighs going back. She says she may not be ready to part with the house, or the area.

“It reminds me of Fort Greene years ago, before Fort Greene became this really expensive place to live,” Dr. Davis said. “It has that feeling of something about to happen to it.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

There are three small historic districts: one, on Alexander Street between East 137th and East 141st, has a row of finely detailed brownstones, two churches, a police station and a library; another, on parts of East 139th and 140th between Willis and Brook Avenues, has 19th-century brownstones; the third, on 136th near Willis, is marked by two rows of yellow-faced brick town houses.

On East 138th and to the south is a fledgling artist community, Mr. Loftin said. Adrian Thompkins, an agent at Halstead Property who has sold in the area, says the scene reminds him of the Lower East Side, when he lived there years ago.

“It’s a very sort of insular community, where a lot of things may not be broadcast to the entire five boroughs,” he said. “But people in Mott Haven know. A lot of painters are there, a lot of photographers — a lot of them are having exhibits out of their own homes.”

To a casual visitor, their presence may not be apparent. Though East 138th Street at times teems with people, the focus of that activity is inexpensive retail and restaurants — some Puerto Rican, Dominican and Mexican. Elsewhere, public housing towers stand on vast blocks; street life is sparse.

Still, Mr. Thompkins said, the newcomers do have their hangouts. Gradually, businesses are opening.

“Everything from florists to pet shops,” he added. “There’s a lot there, and I think that when the market picks back up, this is going to be one of the first places that people look to that’s still a bargain.”

Kouma Kpabla, an associate broker at Re/Max Voyage Homes, sees similar improvement. “The place is quiet now,” Mr. Kpabla said. “Crime is down. Nights, there’s no noise.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Inventory has been low recently, brokers say, as property owners seeking to ride out the slow market hold onto their buildings. Mr. Thompkins says comparable-sales data is scarce, and prices can be hard to predict.

“The prices are a little bit all over the place now,” he said. “A lot of the times they have to do with what a person can afford to sell for, rather than trying to establish a market value.”

That means there are bargains. “I think if you can get a beautiful house that’s in move-in condition and has an income unit, for under $500,000 or $600,000, tops, that’s going to be attractive in any economy,” Mr. Thompkins said, adding, “That would definitely be for a premium, move-in condition home, generally three units.”

Mr. Kpabla puts the average price for a two-family house around $425,000, and Patricia Rodriguez, an associate broker at Exit Realty Success, says prices can be far lower: about $275,000 for a one-family house, $300,000 for a two-family, and $400,000 for a four-family. One- and two-family buildings predominate, she added. Many went up in the late 1980s.

Two-bedroom rentals on Craigslist tend to range from $1,300 to $1,800 a month. One-bedrooms, which vary in size and can include spacious lofts, are in the same range — though there are smaller units, listed for $1,000 or less.

THE COMMUTE

The 6 train runs under East 138th Street, stopping at Third, Brook and Cypress Avenues, and then turns north to East 143rd and 149th Streets. The 4 and 5 stop on the Grand Concourse at East 138th and 149th Streets. The 2 has two area stops.

According to Mr. Loftin of Community Board 1, express service to Midtown takes 10 minutes or less.

Mott Haven is ringed by highways: the Major Deegan Expressway to the west and south, and the Bruckner Expressway to the east. Both connect to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, with easy access to three other boroughs.

WHAT TO DO

Among the hangouts cited by Mr. Thompkins are Alexander’s Café, at the foot of Alexander Avenue near a cluster of antiques stores. The Bruckner Bar and Grill, a popular spot for burgers and beers, is two blocks to the west.

Since 2002, the Bronx Council on the Arts has run a free trolley-style bus through South Bronx neighborhoods including Mott Haven, to promote arts events and organizations along the route. It runs on Wednesdays once a month, and some Saturdays; Mr. Thompkins says at least one of his real estate clients was specifically interested in buying near the trolley route.

St. Mary’s Park, with 35 acres of hills, lawns and athletic facilities, lies to the northeast. Its southern end is rocky and partly wooded, like the north end of Central Park. Farther north, it has an indoor pool and a running track.

THE SCHOOLS

Public elementary schools have struggled. They include No. 154, on East 135th Street, where last year 23.2 percent of tested students met standards in English and 43.5 percent in math, and No. 43, on Brown Place, where 39.7 percent met standards in English and 53.6 percent in math.

A number of charter schools have opened in recent years, including the Bronx Charter School for Children, the Bronx Success Academy, and, for students in the child welfare and foster care system, the Mott Haven Academy.

Among middle schools is No. 203, on Morris Avenue, where 11.4 percent of tested students were proficient in English and 13.6 percent in math.

Public high schools include Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School, where in March students staged a demonstration to lobby for federal “turnaround” financing. SAT averages last year were 370 in reading, 385 in math and 354 in writing, versus 439, 462 and 434 citywide.

THE HISTORY

The neighborhood was named for Jordan Lawrence Mott, the owner of the J. L. Mott Ironworks, established in 1828. German and Irish populations predominated a century ago; these were largely supplanted by Puerto Ricans by midcentury. Many of today’s residents are from Mexico or the Dominican Republic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/re...the-bronx.html

[Merry]

In the City, but Not of It

By JOSEPH PLAMBECK


A pond between Fieldston Road and Waldo Avenue in Fieldston, a privately owned enclave in Riverdale.
Residents pay a homeowners' association for security and street maintenance.



THE grand houses of Fieldston — about 260, all single-family — are mostly generations old, devoid of the uniformity in other parts of the city and in suburban subdivisions. Nearly a century after it was conceived, this flowing suburban community in the northwest corner of the Bronx retains its dash of country, as well as its easy access to city life, having kept faith with its developers’ original vision.

Most of the original homes remain intact. Transportation to Manhattan is simple, and many nearby destinations — parks, restaurants and the subway — are within walking distance.

“It’s the best of all worlds,” said Howie Ravikoff, who arrived in August from the Upper East Side, paying about $1.3 million for a 1928 Tudor with three bedrooms. “It’s suburban, but an urban version of suburbia. It’s very much a walking community. You need a car, but you can do things without.”

And historic designation, granted in 2006, represents an even more formal guarantee against significant change anytime soon.

Bert Trebach, the owner of Trebach Realty, whose home and office are just outside the neighborhood, said he expected the designation to increase Fieldston’s appeal in coming years, although it had not yet had a significant impact.

“It preserves a jewel,” Mr. Trebach said. “Over time, people would have made McMansions and monstrosities.”

Mr. Ravikoff, 39, whose family owns a real estate company that manages properties in Westchester, said he had harbored some concerns about the designation when he moved in, especially about whether making changes to the home would be too cumbersome. But those worries have largely been alleviated. When he and his wife, Randi Maidman, wanted to build a fence, Ms. Maidman downloaded the two-page application from the landmarks commission and filled it out herself. Within two weeks they had approval.
“The experience may vary,” Mr. Ravikoff said, “but our experience was very smooth.”

Fieldston is considered a section of Riverdale, along with North Riverdale, Central Riverdale, South Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil. But there is an important distinction: it is privately owned.
In practice, that means an entity called the Fieldston Property Owners’ Association, rather than the city, maintains streets and sewers. Also, in addition to the city’s 50th Precinct, the area is policed by a private security patrol; it issues passes for parking on the street. These services cost homeowners an annual fee of a few thousand dollars over and above city property taxes (the specific amount is pegged to lot size).

On the edges of the area are three elite private schools: Horace Mann, Ethical Culture Fieldston and Riverdale Country. Manhattan College is also on the border. It is the schools more than anything, Mr. Trebach and other real estate agents say, that draw prospective buyers.

And once they move in, many do not leave for decades. Barbara Muhlfelder moved to Fieldston in 1979, when she and her husband, Tom, paid about $130,000 for a Gothic Revival-style home with three bedrooms and three baths. She estimated that her house was worth about $1 million now.

The area is “as beautiful now as it was 30 years ago,” she said, “and people take pride in it.”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

It feels as if you were a bit off the grid here, and there is a reason for that. The developers, using a layout finalized in 1914, made a point of avoiding straight streets and square blocks. No two angles look the same, because the streets maneuver around hills, large trees and outcroppings.

Over all, Fieldston covers 140 acres, or about a fifth of a square mile. According to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the area is circumscribed by Henry Hudson Parkway to the west, Manhattan College Parkway to the south, Tibbett Avenue to the east and 250th Street to the north.

The homes come in an appealing mix of styles, including Colonial Revivals, Tudors and even formal modernist houses. They are generally large, but lot sizes vary: half an acre is considered large.
The vast majority of residents are white, according to census data. But there are some Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans. Orthodox Jews are represented.

When talking about a house, its residents will often cite its architect. Owning one designed by Dwight James Baum, who built dozens of homes in Fieldston in multiple styles, is a point of pride — as well as a selling point.

Dara Caponigro, the editor of Veranda magazine, was one buyer attracted by the Baum name. When Ms. Caponigro and her husband, David Steinberger, bought their house in early 2010 (for a price she declined to disclose), the inside was a wreck, she recalled. But since Baum was a “master of proportion,” she said, particularly with the dimensions of rooms and windows, it helped make the renovation worthwhile.

After living in Manhattan for 30 years, she thought the move to the quiet and spacious Fieldston might be tough. Not so, she said. “It’s been a shockingly easy adjustment for both of us.”

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

Prices have not escaped the general downturn in real estate. Ellen Feld, an agent for Sotheby’s International Realty, said prices had generally fallen 10 to 20 percent since their peak a few years ago.

Still, buying does not come cheap. Most houses sell for at least $1 million, and some reach or exceed $3 million. According to Ms. Feld, one of the main factors driving prices is the cost to update the house, since many require renovations.

Susan Baldwin, an agent with Robert E. Hill in Riverdale, said that more houses were on the market now than before the downturn, in part because they are staying there longer. It is difficult to know exactly how many listings there are, because owners often list exclusively with a single broker and not on a listing service.

Also, few sellers have qualms about taking a house out of the running. “There’s not a panic in Riverdale for sellers,” Ms. Baldwin said. “If the market is not bringing them the attention they want, they are often even willing to take it off the market.”

Although the vast majority of homes are owner-occupied, there are some available for rent. Mr. Trebach said rental prices usually ranged from $7,000 to $14,000 a month.

WHAT TO DO

Fieldston is purely residential, but shops and restaurants are a short walk away, along Riverdale and Johnson Avenues, just to the south.

Van Cortlandt Park, to the east, has more than 1,100 acres with athletic fields, trails and even a public golf course. To the west is Wave Hill, a 28-acre public garden with views of the Hudson River and the Palisades, on a site once leased by Mark Twain.

THE SCHOOLS

With the private schools a big factor in home purchases, it’s no surprise that many parents in Fieldston send their children to one of them. Even so, the local public schools beat citywide averages. Public School 81, which enrolls over 600 and runs through fifth grade, recently had fourth-grade competency standards of 68 percent in reading and 65 percent in math, versus 51 and 62 citywide.

Middle School/High School 141, also known as the David A. Stein Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy, has over 1,300 students in Grades 6 through 12. On recent state tests, 41 percent of its eighth-graders met standards in reading, 62 percent in math, versus 35 and 53 citywide. SAT averages in 2010 were 475 in reading, 479 in math and 470 in writing, versus 437, 460 and 432 citywide.

Other nearby private schools include Salanter Akiba Riverdale, which offers prekindergarten through Grade 12, and St. Margaret of Cortona School, which runs through Grade 8.

THE COMMUTE

Transportation options are plentiful. Ms. Caponigro, for example, says that when there is no traffic, she can drive to her office at the Hearst Building, in Midtown, in about 15 minutes, thanks to the Henry Hudson Parkway, which passes Fieldston on its western flank.

Some days, though, she says she takes the No. 1 subway; the Van Cortlandt Park-242nd Street stop is about a 10-minute walk from her house. Because it is the northernmost stop for that line, she says, a seat is always available. She reaches Midtown in about 40 minutes if she remains on the local train, and a little less time if she transfers to the express.

Several express buses also stop nearby, making frequent trips to and from Manhattan. Metro-North Railroad trains stop at the Riverdale station on the Hudson Line. The trip to Grand Central takes about 20 minutes.

THE HISTORY

Like the rest of Riverdale, Fieldston has been called home by a variety of prominent people. The singer-songwriter Carly Simon, for example, grew up here; the architect Dwight James Baum lived in a Colonial Revival-style house that he designed; and Fiorello H. La Guardia, the former mayor of New York, lived on the area’s northern edge.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/re...f-it.html?_r=1

[Bingo]

Driving up the Grand Concourse from the Fordham area into Bedford Park, into Norwood and ending in Woodlawn. Same video, different music.

Bugs Bunny Music

Live Grateful Dead

[Merry]

Fluid Reasons for a Constant Allure

By JOSEPH PLAMBECK




Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

More Photos »

THE landscape in Throgs Neck, in the southeastern corner of the Bronx, has been transformed over the last several decades. Before, open fields flanked areas of three-season bungalows overlooking Long Island Sound and other expanses of water. Now the area is mostly bustling and built up — and sewn into the city fabric by expressways.

But when it comes to residents’ reasons for choosing Throgs Neck, they haven’t changed much at all. Largely a working- and middle-class neighborhood, home to many city workers including firefighters and police officers, it is relaxed and friendly — and those qualities have also made it magnetic.

In 1963, John and Theresa Scuoppo moved into a two-family brick home that they bought for $31,500, because they found the area quaint as well as convenient to their jobs in Manhattan. They live in the same home now.

In 1986, Jack and Marie McCarrick moved into an attached single-family home that they bought for $159,000, and knew they were in a family-oriented neighborhood easily accessible to many parts of the region. Mr. McCarrick had spent much of his childhood here, enjoying swimming off the shore. When he married, he said, he had no doubt where to look for a home. And the McCarricks have been in it ever since.

Last year, Felicia and William Frestan moved into a three-bedroom condominium with water views that they bought for about $300,000, thankful to find a friendly and well-situated neighborhood. Ms. Frestan, 54, a former postal worker who moved from just up the road in Baychester, says she plans to stay in her home “till the end of my days.”

“First, I fell in love with the area, then I fell in love with the apartment,” she added. “You feel blessed when everything is at your reach.”

Water is very much within reach — on three sides of the neighborhood. Although the beach-club atmosphere of the summer months dissipates each fall when the summer-only residents depart, brokers say the sea remains a strong pull for many buyers.

The two square miles of Throgs Neck are home to about 30,000 people, according to census data. The area has traditionally been an enclave for Italian-, Irish- and German-Americans, and that still is the case. But these days there are substantial numbers of African- and Asian-Americans, as well as Hispanic-Americans from a variety of countries, distributed throughout.

The area has also become more desirable because of a sharp drop in crime. In the 45th Precinct, which encompasses Throgs Neck, crime has fallen more than 30 percent in the last 10 years and nearly 70 percent since 1993, according to city statistics. “It’s rather idyllic here,” said Mr. Scuoppo, 83. “It’s not a hassle for commuting, shopping or education. That’s what makes it a congenial community.”

Still, communities require involvement. To protect the area’s perceived architectural congeniality during the real estate boom, the Throggs Neck Homeowners Association, which has about 700 members, had its work cut out. Developers were tearing down one-families and building much larger multifamilies on the same lots. As the buildings became bigger, traffic and parking troubles were popping up.

The group pushed for zoning changes to limit the size of future homes, and the city made those changes in 2004.

Residential construction these days is mostly stalled; the biggest development of any kind is on the far west side at Ferry Point Park, a 400-plus-acre former landfill. In January, the city approved a deal to have Donald J. Trump manage a new 18-hole golf course at the park. The course is to open next year, and green fees of up to $125 are planned.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

About the name Throgs Neck: Many residents, and the homeowner association, insist that the correct spelling is with two g’s, even though the city uses only one. But as the area is in fact named after an early settler who spelled his name John Throckmorton — no g’s at all — maybe there simply isn’t a correct spelling.

Shaped kind of like a stingray, with the State University of New York Maritime College as the tail, Throgs Neck has Eastchester Bay and the Long Island Sound on its east side, the East River to the south and Westchester Creek to the west. Layton Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard are generally considered to make up the northern border.

When it comes to the housing, name it and the neighborhood probably has it: single- and multifamily, detached and attached, brick and wood-framed, apartments, condos and bungalows. On the western side, there is also a large public housing complex.

Many of the lots are 25 or 30 by 100 feet, but there are some double lots scattered around. Street parking is plentiful, but it’s often not essential: many homes have driveways, if not garages.

There are also two distinct co-op enclaves near the water — Silver Beach Gardens on the southwestern side and Edgewater Park on the eastern. Each has only one main road leading in and out, and inside are hundreds of single-family homes, about 1,100 in total, mostly winterized bungalows.

Lynn Gerbino, the president of the homeowner association, lives in Silver Beach. “We have a lot of people here who get waterfront property without paying waterfront prices,” she said.

WHAT YOU’LL PAY

The market has picked up in the last year, said Benny Diasparra, the owner/broker of Exit Realty Search. But he also said that it was still a buyers’ market, with prices down about 15 percent from the peak a few years ago.

If priced right, however, homes are moving much faster now. “When a seller is willing to adjust to fit the market,” as Mr. Diasparra put it, “there is a lot of movement.” Many of these realistic sellers, he added, receive multiple offers within a month of posting their listings.

About 45 single-family homes are for sale, according to a recent search. In general, prices range from $350,000 to $500,000. About 30 multifamily homes were for sale, ranging in price from about $450,000 to $700,000.

Homes to the east of East Tremont Avenue are slightly more expensive than those to the west, partly because homes on the eastern side are generally newer.

Mr. Diasparra said his company rented out about 300 units last year, many in two- or three-family homes. There are also some larger rental buildings. One-bedrooms rent for about $1,100, Mr. Diasparra said; two-bedrooms run $1,500 and three-bedrooms up to $2,000.

WHAT TO DO

There’s water here, and lots of it, in practically every direction. That makes boating, fishing and other water activities popular warm-weather pastimes. But there’s plenty to do on dry land, too.
Restaurants and shops line East Tremont Avenue, and the locals gush about dining options. “I could eat a different cuisine every night of the week,” Ms. Frestan said, “and it would all be good.” But often, when prodded, residents give the highest grades to the Italian offerings — particularly the menu at Tosca Café and the pizza at Tommy’s.

There are also ball fields, one at the Bicentennial Veterans Memorial Park.
THE SCHOOLS

Schools include Public Schools 72 and 304, which serve students in prekindergarten through fifth grade. At the former, 37 percent of fourth graders met standards in reading and 49 in math; at the latter, percentages were 64 and 82. Citywide percentages were 51 and 62.

Middle School X101 has about 400 students in Grades 6 through 8. Among eighth graders, 69 percent met standards in reading and 68 in math, versus 35 and 53 percent citywide.

Herbert H. Lehman High School is just to the north of the neighborhood. SAT averages in 2011 were 414 in reading, 442 in math and 395 in writing, versus 436, 460, and 431 citywide. The neighborhood also has several private schools, including St. Frances de Chantal School, The School of St. Benedict and Preston High School.

THE COMMUTE

Practically everyone has a car here, and for good reason. The Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Hutchinson River Parkway and the Throgs Neck Expressway all pass through the area, making relatively short work of driving to Westchester, other parts of the Bronx, Queens and even Manhattan. Driving to Midtown can take 30 minutes or less.

Still, many people use public transportation to commute. An express bus, the BxM9, runs to and from Midtown all day. On trips to Manhattan, the bus picks up passengers in three different spots, and a one-way trip during peak times takes about an hour.

The area is also served by local buses like the Bx8, Bx40 and Bx42. They make their way to the No. 6 train along Westchester Avenue. The ride to Grand Central Terminal takes roughly 40 minutes.

THE HISTORY

Some successful capitalists in the 19th century owned estates in Throgs Neck. One of them, Collis P. Huntington, “owned so many railroads that he could go cross-country without leaving his own property,” according to a text by the Bronx Historical Society. Another, John A. Morris, known as the “Lottery King,” made a fortune running the Louisiana State Lottery.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/re...nt-allure.html

[Merry]

A Fieldston House Sells Once a Generation

By MELANIE LEFKOWITZ

Fieldston, a privately owned enclave in the northern Bronx, was developed as a planned suburban-style community in the early 20th century.

Frederick Law Olmsted and James R. Croe made recommendations for its layout. The noted architect Dwight James Baum, a former resident, designed many of its houses. Those houses, built in a mix of styles including Colonial, Arts and Crafts, Tudor and Mediterranean, were gracefully spaced against a woodsy landscape of tall trees, stone outcroppings and winding streets.

A century later, Fieldston appears nearly intact, a 140-acre time capsule tucked away between the Henry Hudson Parkway and Van Cortlandt Park. Its 258 houses, ranging from "mini-mansions to mansions," according to Herb Hirsch of Fieldston Properties, are a strong draw for young families and professionals seeking stately homes in a bucolic setting—a suburban lifestyle without suburban taxes.


Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
Horace Mann School, in Fieldston in the northern Bronx, above, one of several private schools in the area.

"If you go to Westchester, prices are maybe a little less but taxes are exorbitant," Mr. Hirsch says. "It's a country within the city. During the week you're 30 minutes from 42nd Street."

Prices in Fieldston, where around 15 houses are currently on the market, range roughly between $1 million and $3 million, brokers say, and are often shown by appointment only. The homes tend to change hands only once in a generation, so many of those that do come on the market can be in need of renovation.

People "tend to stay there a long time," says Brad Trebach, associate broker and general counsel of Trebach Realty.



In addition to New York City taxes, Fieldston residents pay annual fees of a few thousand dollars—depending on their house lot size—to the Fieldston Property Owners Association. The fees pay for such services as a private security force and street and sewer maintenance. The community is also patrolled by the New York Police Department's 50th Precinct.

Residents have several options for commuting to Manhattan: express buses; the No. 1 train, which has its first stop at 242nd Street; Metro North Railroad, which travels between Riverdale and Grand Central Terminal in about half an hour; or their own cars. The drive to Manhattan can take as little as 15 minutes without traffic, brokers say.

There is no commercial activity within Fieldston, but the nearby strips of Riverdale and Johnson avenues in Riverdale offer a multitude of shopping and dining options. Many residents are also attracted to the area by the proximity of several well-regarded private schools, including the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Riverdale Country Day School and the Horace Mann School. The playgrounds, ball fields and vast green space of Van Cortlandt Park lie along the area's eastern border.

Fieldston is part of Riverdale's Special Natural Area District, which seeks to preserve the region's natural topography, including its sloping hills and rock formations. The neighborhood was also granted landmark status in 2006 after a contentious debate, in which some homeowners opposed the designation for mostly financial reasons.


Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
A sign at an entry gate

Mr. Trebach, a former member of Community Board 8's land-use committee, says the goal of the landmarking was to prohibit homeowners from destroying distinguished houses and rebuilding larger structures out of context with the area. One house has been built in Fieldston since the landmark rules took effect, Mr. Trebach added.

"There's a distinctive aesthetic character in Fieldston that's worthy of preservation and protection," he says. "There are a lot of period homes located in a leafy and winding enclave, and it makes the area a real gem. You know as soon as you enter Fieldston that you're entering a special place."

Parks: Fieldston borders Van Cortlandt Park, which at 1,146 acres is New York City's fourth-largest and includes playgrounds, ball fields, horseback riding trails, a public golf course, the Van Cortlandt House Museum and a freshwater lake. The tranquil Indian Pond is at Indian and Livingston roads. Wave Hill, a garden and cultural center whose offerings include art workshops and yoga classes, is nearby.

Schools: The neighborhood is part of District 10, and local public schools include P.S. 81, the Robert J. Christen School, an elementary school with about 700 students that received a C grade on its 2010-11 city progress report. Another public school, the Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy, is a combined middle and high school with 1,300 students; the high school received an A from the city last year, and the middle school a C.

Local private schools include the Riverdale campus of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, with about 1,700 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade; and the Horace Mann School, also with about 1,700 students in nursery through 12th grade.

Restaurants: Though there are no shops or restaurants within the boundaries of Fieldston, several eateries are along Johnson and Riverdale avenues, including Yo-Burger, a recently opened yogurt and burger joint; and Palace of Japan, a sushi and Japanese restaurant with a cocktail bar.

Shopping: Everyday shopping is available in Riverdale. Two Fairway Markets are a short distance away, in Harlem and Pelham. Westchester's Ridge Hill, in Yonkers, offers mall shopping, with stores including Whole Foods and Lord & Taylor. There is a Target on West 225th Street.

Entertainment: Wave Hill offers cultural programs. There is a multiplex movie theater at Ridge Hill.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...NewsCollection