The winning bidders were Diana and Steven Gonzalez, who paid $185,000 to have everything they have been deprived of in their South Bronx apartments: their own roomy home on a safe, quiet street. Living in Charlotte Gardens, they said, they can raise their three daughters comfortably and be close to relatives.
“It’s a whole new community,” Diana Gonzalez said. “I won’t be worried about my girls. They’ll be protected there, definitely. They’re not going to be South Bronx kids—they’re going to be Charlotte Gardens kids.”
A Neighborhood in Waiting
By JAKE MOONEY | August 12, 2007
Arthur Avenue, probably the most famous dining street in the Bronx, is located in the Fordham neighborhood.
ELVIA NUÑEZ FIRST ARRIVED IN THE BRONX at age 11, when her family moved to the Fordham neighborhood from Mexico. They settled on Lorillard Place, just below Fordham Road. There, they found an ethnically diverse neighborhood with a growing Latin American population.
Ms. Nuñez, now 30 and a math teacher in a local middle school, says she sees signs that the familiar Fordham neighborhood she grew up in is showing new energy. There is construction all around, she said, including a row of new houses by Jerome Avenue where there used to be a parking lot.
Ms. Nuñez and her husband, Juan, who moved to New York from the Dominican Republic when he was a teenager, hoped to take advantage of that new liveliness when they began looking for more space. They focused on Fordham, mainly because her in-laws are nearby and can help with baby-sitting for their three young children.
She had also come to appreciate the area’s casual friendliness. “You see people sitting outside their houses, and they say hi to you,” Ms. Nuñez said. “You see the kids playing street basketball, sitting outside in the neighborhood.”
Fordham has long been a place for working-class people who want to live within a short train ride of Manhattan, and near the busy Fordham Road commercial strip. The area avoided the urban blight that struck the southern parts of the Bronx in the 1970’s and 80’s, but there were doldrums, local officials said. Now, with Upper Manhattan an established spot for real estate investment, they hope more people will make the jump across the Harlem River.
Of course, the absence of gentrification has its advantages, said Obi Ugbomah, a musician and real estate agent who moved from Brooklyn to buy a three-story house near Lorillard Place and Third Avenue in 2005. “When I first came here, I discovered that I could have a bottle of beer and a plate of food for under $10,” he said. “I was like, ‘What?’ Now you know Park Slope is not like that.”
STATEN ISLAND
Staten Island’s Worst Problem? New Jersey
By ALAN RICHMAN | March 9, 1979
CORNELIUS VANDERBILT WAS BORN ON Staten Island. His first home appears to have been a Stapleton farmhouse later torn down to make way for the Paramount Theater. Now boarded up, the theater is showing only graffiti from the street artists of the projects nearby.
Matthew Brady, the photographer, lived on Staten Island. While there, he is not known to have taken any pictures.
Col. Ichabod Crane, immortalized by Washington Irving, is buried in Asbury Memorial Cemetery. His grave has been desecrated.
Many Staten Islanders care little for what has gone before them, unless it’s the 8:30 ferry that pulled out as they were sprinting to the terminal gate. Their own ancestors are forgotten, even if they care a great deal about the ancestry of the family that moves in next door.
Each borough of New York, except Manhattan, occasionally proclaims itself the forgotten one, and none has been more deserving of the title than Staten Island.
Lacking accessibility, industry and voters, Staten Island was always the one borough every politician could live without. If it is not yet the boom borough, the predicted onslaught of post-Verrazano-Narrows Bridge humanity having been slowed by inadequate transportation and city services, it is still a potential promised land. Staten Island has the look of paradise to New Yorkers dreaming of a single-family detached life.
Across the Arthur Kill is the natural wonder of New Jersey, stretching in panorama to the west and, in some places, less than half a mile away. On a clear day, from New Brighton to Tottenville, you can see New Jersey. On a polluted day, you can smell it. Fumes from Garden State industries, which almost always waft over Staten Island, are blamed for the respiratory-cancer death rate, the highest in the city.
State Senator John J. Marchi, a Republican who represents Staten Island, predicts that the 1980 census will show it has a larger population than Buffalo. In fact, the borough president, Anthony R. Gaeta, stands proudly in his fading reception room and says there is only one real obstacle impeding the future.
“New Jersey,” he says, his tone that of a Balkan prince censuring a neighboring state, “New Jersey is the worst problem we have.”
Where Isolation Is Both Curse and Charm
By SARAH LYALL | July 24, 1989
STATEN ISLANDERS HAVE BEEN TALKING about breaking away from the city and governing themselves for a long time. When the United States Supreme Court ruled this spring that the city’s system of government was unconstitutional, a decision that would weaken the borough presidents’ power, Staten Islanders began to fear that their voice in city affairs would be all but silenced. Talk of secession and self-determination began in earnest.
The State Legislature passed a bill that would allow residents of Staten Island to vote on whether to secede. While many of the island’s residents say they want to look more closely at the question before they take such a dramatic step, the issue is causing them to examine what makes them Staten Islanders and what, if anything, makes them New Yorkers.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t like the city that much,” said Anthony DiStefano, a 23-year-old part-time plumber, as he strolled down his road in Tottenville. “There’s too much traffic and too many people,” he said. “Here, you go to the beach, take a walk, play football in the streets, go swimming in your pool. I feel like Staten Island is its own little place.”
Its own little isolated place. Janet Barker said she spends an hour and 45 minutes commuting to work at a bank in Manhattan’s financial district. “It takes so long to get home, I feel like it’s altogether a different state,” she said. “Any farther, and you might as well be in Pennsylvania.”
But while many Staten Islanders say they moved there seeking a quiet suburban life away from the city, they complain endlessly about the lack of services, like transportation and road repair, and about the Fresh Kills Landfill, the world’s largest garbage dump. Staten Islanders grimly refer to it as Mount Trashmore, and as much as anything, it has united them against the rest of the city—and added to the feeling that they might do better on their own.
About an Island That’s Worth Remembering
By CLAIRE WILSON | August 17, 2001
WHENEVER I TELL ANYONE I WAS BORN AND raised in the city’s so-called forgotten borough, the reaction is always the same: disbelief, sometimes disdain. “Staten Island? You must be kidding.” As if the only thing out there was the Fresh Kills Landfill and now that it has closed, the borough has nothing left to redeem it.
Which couldn’t be more wrong. Staten Island, a terrific place to grow up, is a wonderful place to explore—and to some of us, it’s so “out” it’s “in.” There are great little museums, three centuries of American architecture, extensive gardens, 7,500 acres of lush protected parkland, miles of uncrowded beaches, and wetlands that are ripe for canoeing and communing with herons and cormorants.
The borough’s newest landmark, the Richmond County Bank Ballpark, is headquarters of the Staten Island Yankees minor league baseball team. The Baby Bombers draw huge crowds as much for the sport—and the rivalry with the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ minor league team—as for the stadium’s sweeping views of New York Harbor.
Another new landmark for St. George is the National Lighthouse Museum. Housed in what was most recently a Coast Guard base adjacent to the ferry termin
al, it will explore the science and lore of lighthouses. In the late 19th century, when shipping was a vital local industry, it was the United States Lighthouse Depot, the country’s main center for technological development and the manufacture of lighthouses.
The borough’s best known art and performance site, the 83-acre Snug Harbor Cultural Center, is about 15 minutes away. It was opened 200 years ago as a haven “for aged, decrepit and worn-out sailors”—or Snugs, as the retired seamen were called. Its 28 buildings include a music hall that is one year younger than Carnegie Hall.
On Lighthouse Hill, the Crimson Beech, a 1950’s prefab house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is regarded as a piece of important mid-20th century culture.
The same can be said for Mandolin Brothers, a bustling little shop-cum-museum close to the zoo. The shop has been responsible for bringing some unlikely tourists to Staten Island: Joni Mitchell, for one, who immortalized the shop in a song, and George Harrison, who popped in one day unannounced and went on a 40-minute shopping spree. The owner, Stan Jay, doesn’t mind visitors’ picking up the priceless Fender Stratocasters and giving themselves an Eric Clapton moment.
THE NEW YORK TIMES is regarded as the world’s preeminent newspaper. Its news coverage is known for its exceptional depth and breadth, with reporting bureaus throughout the United States and abroad. The Times has the largest circulation of any seven-day newspaper in the U.S. It has been awarded many journalism awards over the years, including a total of 101 Pulitzer Prizes and citations, which is far more than any other newspaper.
JAMES BARRON is a reporter on the metropolitan staff of The Times and has been a newspaperman in New York for the last 30 years. He wrote the minute-by-minute stories on the 9/11 attacks on The Times website and the front-page lead story on the 2003 blackout. He started the Public Lives column (later called the Boldface Names column) and writes a podcast for The Times’s website summarizing the next morning’s front page.
MITCHEL LEVITAS launched The New York Times book development program, where he is now executive associate. In more than 40 years at The Times, he has been the metropolitan editor, editor of the Week in Review, editor of the Sunday Book Review and editor of the Op-Ed page. A former Nieman fellow, he was also a reporter at the New York Post, where he won a George Polk Award for investigative reporting. He has also taught seminars in critical writing at Princeton University as a Ferris professor and at Hunter College in New York City.
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced—mechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopying—without written permission of the publisher.
Published by:
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Cover design by Liz Driesbach
Cover Image: © CORBIS, Photographer Samuel Gottscho
ISBN-13: 978-1-60376-369-1
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