Bronx News Network

100 Hundred Years Young at St. Patrick's

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Local Centennian’s receiving gifts in celebration of their 100 years of life at St. Patrick’s Home on Tuesday.This afternoon, St. Patrick’s Home for the Aged and Infirmed, located right off of Mosholu Parkway, celebrated the lives of 13 residents who either turned triple digits or have surged right past the century mark.The celebration included a review of all of the historic events over the past 100 years, lively Irish step dancing and a presentation of gifts by family members and friends.The residents celebrating over 100 years of age included: Rose Paladino, Anna Benson (103), Anna Roorra (102), Elizabeth Kioski, Josefine Diesto, Louise Erto, Theresa Verna, Mary Leech, Mary Turner (101), Mildred Davis, Nora Roach, John Burns and Bridget McCahill (100).

Bronx News Network

Local Schools Receive Health Awareness Award

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NYC Strategic Alliance for Health (SAH) has awarded P.S. 8 Isaac Varian School, P.S. 51 Bronx New School and P.S. 246 Poe Center for their efforts “to improve the environments, systems, and policies that influence physical activity, nutrition, and tobacco use within schools and the broader community”.The initiative to improve the well-being of students health is in response to reports of a high percentage of the Bronx population who receive limited physical activity, limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables and higher rates of smoking than NYC as a whole.According to the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene 34% of South Bronx residents are obese, compared to a Citywide figure of 22%, 36% of South Bronx residents report having high blood pressure, compared to a Citywide figure of 27% and 20% of South Bronx residents have reported having performed no physical activity in the last week, compared to 16% Citywide.The SAH hopes to continue their initiative throughout the Bronx and Public Schools to keep the Bronx as healthy as possible

Bronx News Network

Pianos in the Park

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Children take advantage of “Play Me, I’m Yours” and the shade at Sackerah Woods PlaygroundShaded under the open-aired municipal facilities at Sackerah Woods Playground, in Van Cortlandt Park’s southeastern corner, sits a curiously inviting blue and green piano.The piano’s creative aesthetic is accompanied by an open invitation: “Play Me, I’m Yours,” written just above the keys. The piano is part of a citywide public art project that temporarily placed 60 pianos in parks, playgrounds and gardens. The Sackerah Woods piano is one of four in the Bronx.The art project is run by the New York-based charity, Sing For Hope, which imported the concept from a similar project in Britain where they envisioned the pianos as “a catalyst for conversation.”At Sackerah Woods on Monday afternoon, the piano was dominated by adolescents investigating the instrument’s capabilities while, at the same time, escaping the sun from beneath near-by the monkey bars.The “Play Me, I’m Yours” project will continue to provide the pianos until July 5 and can also be enjoyed in the Bronx at Fordham Plaza, Grand Concourse and Joyce Kilmer Park.David Gonzalez recently wrote about the pianos on the New York Times’ City Room blog.

Government

Sewage, Cement And Staten Island's Future

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The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant is designed to handle 60 million gallons of sewage per day. Photo by: Marc Fader

Projects to upgrade a sewage plant and construct a cement facility open the next chapter in a complex—and controversial—industrial history. By: Jake Mooney

The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant has stood on Staten Island’s North Shore, purifying the sewage of about half of the island’s residents, for 57 years. Soon it will get a $29 million upgrade, thanks to a citywide infusion of federal stimulus funds. It will also get a new neighbor, a transfer station about a mile down bumpy Richmond Terrace where cement will arrive from South America by boat and head to local construction projects by truck.

ARTS and CULTURE

Tough Love In The Big City

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For young people born without that proverbial silver Spoon in their mouths, New York City has never been An easy place to grow up. It’s a tough love kind of city.For every person who has described a rather idyllic Childhood in old New York, there are many more who Remember a harsher one, going as far back as the days of Jacob Riis, the social activist and photographer who chronicled The lives of poor young people in Lower Manhattan in The late 19th century. What he saw and showed the world influenced attempts at making their tenement lives better. In How the Other Half Lives, he observed:“Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up.”A contemporary of Riis’ in the late days of the 19th century did even more.

Bronx

No Entry: Why Is Teen Unemployment So High?

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The woman sweeping floors at the McDonald’s on 204th Street had gray hair tracing her temples, and her colleague at the register looked to be at least 50. Down at the Micky-Ds on Fordham Road, the woman making french fries could have been a grandmother, and she was not the oldest one behind the counter. At the restaurant on East 170th, the employee on break had a wrinkled face; those on duty were younger, but few could pass for 30. The man taking orders on East 167th Street looked to be pushing 50. On Jerome Avenue, the entire staff—at the registers and the grill—seemed to be beyond their 20s.If there’s a typical teenage job in America, its pushing Happy Meals and Big Macs under the golden arches.

Bronx

Afraid of Crime Now? Join The Kids

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Times Square. In its colorful and danger-filled heyday of the 1970s and ’80s, porn shops, drug pushers, prostitutes and pistol-toting stickup men were the price of admission. But the venue has been a tourist-friendly commercial strip for some 15 years. In early April, for few minutes, that changed.On Easter night, a series of brawls and violent confrontations broke out in Times Square and nearby Herald Square among roaming bands of youths, reportedly resulting in the shooting of three women and one man, whose ages ranged from 18 to 21. A 20-year-old Bronx man was arrested in two of the shootings.