A weird one

This one seems comical, yet it certainly has an eerie feel.

In Riverdale, New Anxieties, and a Resolve to Carry On

The scene on Thursday along 232nd Street in Riverdale. Jewish residents have been drawn to the neighborhood for decades.

In Bronx Bomb Case, Steps and Missteps, on Tape (May 22, 2009)

Suspects in Terror Bombing Plot: Drug Arrests and Prison Conversions (May 22, 2009)

N.Y. Bomb Plot Suspects Acted Alone, Police Say (May 22, 2009)

NYC: Interfaith Understanding Wins Out, and a Plot Loses (May 22, 2009)

Happy 70th

The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge under construction in the 1930s. It opened to traffic on April 29, 1939.

I've been crossing this bridge regularly since 1986, driving up to Chichester. Crossed it before then to get to the Bronx Zoo.

After just 22 months of construction, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge opened to traffic 70 years ago today, rushed into completion for the start of the New York World’s Fair a day later. Previewing the opening ceremony — which included Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia; Robert Moses, the region’s master builder; and Othmar H. Ammann, the bridge’s engineer — The Times reported on Thursday, April 27, 1939:

The bridge, an important link in the city’s coordinated interborough highway and bridge plan, was constructed within two years, after its schedule had been shortened to assure completion before the opening of the Fair on Sunday. Costing about $18,000,000, it is exceeded in length only by three other suspension bridges, the George Washington Bridge and the two over San Francisco Bay.

It has been worked on for more than two years to paint, resurface, and who knows what else.

The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge today, at age 70.

The bridge is used by about 120,000 drivers each day.

Some summer Friday night it seems as if half of those drivers are on the bridge at once.

In Bronx, Little Houses That Evoke Puerto Rico

A casita in the United We Stand community garden. The clubhouses offer a rural Puerto Rican tradition.
Playing congas inside Rincon Criollo in Melrose, the Bronx.
February 23, 2009
In Bronx, Little Houses That Evoke Puerto Rico
By C. J. HUGHES

Cabbage boiled on a makeshift grill. Wine pressed from grapes grown on a chain-link fence surrounding the property sloshed into cups. Under paintings on a wall showing women in pastel dresses, and a brightly colored machete sitting on a ledge, men played their congas, making a rhythmic thumping.

Though the cracked sidewalks outside were frosty, inside the Rincon Criollo, a lime-hued wooden clubhouse in a community garden at East 157th Street and Brook Avenue in Melrose, in the South Bronx, a summertime vibe ruled.

The 16-by-16-foot clubhouse, where a dozen men gathered on Friday, is one of many scattered throughout the Bronx that are meant to evoke the Puerto Rican countryside, where low-roofed buildings surrounded by gardens, known as casitas, “little houses,” are a common sight.

“This is an important place for the community because it helps it to remember its roots,” said Carmelo Diaz, 55, as he sat inside the Rincon Criollo and began, in song, to beg forgiveness of a long-lost love.

Bronx leaders seem to agree. Adolfo Carrión Jr., the Bronx borough president, who last week was appointed to a position in the Obama administration, has urged the New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in a report issued last month to declare Rincon Criollo, along with other casitas, as city landmarks.

Many of the sites proposed in the report, which is the culmination of a nine-month block-by-block survey, are in line with other city landmarks and bear notable architecture, like corbeled brick cornices and Art Deco courtyards.

But breaking with tradition, the list also features more basic modern-day structures, like the beige raised ranches along Charlotte Street, along a stretch ravaged by arson fires, and a highway-side brick apartment tower at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, which many believe to be the birthplace of hip-hop.

Emphasizing sites that have cultural significance, like the casitas, “is very, very different from how we normally have done things, but it is important to broaden the definition,” said Bernd Zimmermann, a former planner in the Bronx borough office who headed the task force that created the list.

“Puerto Ricans wanted to recreate their villages to stabilize themselves while adjusting to society and they were doing it in a place that was an absolute wasteland” because of crime, abandonment and decay, he added.

Rincon Criollo, which translates roughly to down-home corner, has occupied its current 3,000-square-foot corner lot, which also includes an open-air stage, some grills and a shrine to the Virgin Mary, since 2007, after relocating there from a site one block north.

That earlier site, which the city owns and seeks to develop, was a junk-strewn lot in 1974 when Jose Soto, who is known as Chema, led the effort to construct a casita.

Rincon Criollo may be the oldest casita in the South Bronx, residents say, though many have sprung up since. Indeed, a dozen examples are scattered around Melrose Avenue. Although few casitas are open regularly when it is cold because of their thin walls, passers-by can still savor their designs and occasionally sylvan settings from the street.

The yellow-trimmed version on East 157th Street, between Melrose and Elton Avenues, for example, with a symmetrical four-columned porch, is notable among its older brick neighbors. And the clear glass walls that enclose the thickly timbered casita on East 158th Street, between Melrose and Courtlandt Avenues, give it the offbeat feel of a fishbowl.

Tony Incle, 52, a retired electrician, showed a visitor the chandelier he installed at his own creation that went up in 1994 in an abandoned lot on East 157th Street, near Melrose Avenue, which anchors the ceiling of a blue faceted roof.

“And we used to have another casita next door, too, but then they built those homes,” Mr. Incle said.

At most casitas, men seem to dominate among the regulars who show up, and many of them are retired.

An exception to both rules, though, is found at the United We Stand Garden on East 137th Street, near Cypress Avenue, where the group of five men at a square table on a recent afternoon included Pedro Cintron, 33, an ironworker who lives nearby.

“In Puerto Rico, you would be playing outside, but we have to adjust a bit,” said Mr. Cintron, whose bushy ponytail lay against a puffy jacket. “But I still roll in here every day.”

Meanwhile, a few steps away, past plots for tomato plants, now desolate, and two wandering roosters, stood a second casita, built in 1992, where four women played dominoes in studious silence.

“We could meet in our apartments, but you wouldn’t have these views,” said Aida Rosa, gesturing toward a pair of pine trees. “And we need room for spectators.”

Whether the landmarks commission agrees to protect Rincon Criollo is unclear; it typically frowns upon buildings whose exteriors have been significantly renovated. And the only pieces to survive its move two years ago were roof beams, says Yolanda Gonzalez, executive director of Nos Quedamos, a 17-year-old community group that helped the club buy its lot and provided $15,000 for the move.

No matter what happens, though, the attention will benefit casitas in general, even if it’s as simple as educating a broader audience that they exist.

“It brings a light to what culture is to a community, why people came together and why they stayed where they were,” Ms. Gonzalez said. “This is history that is not taught in textbooks.”

That’s What You Call Investing for the Long Term

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Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian, examined an old municipal bond. More Photos »

February 13, 2009
That’s What You Call Investing for the Long Term
By JO CRAVEN McGINTY

Anyone who has failed to keep track of a winning lottery ticket for all of 12 months may want to consider the efforts of 39 bondholders who have been safekeeping valuable, tissue-thin, New York City securities since shortly after the Civil War.

Next month, one of the bonds, issued in 1868 and thought to be one of the oldest active municipal bonds in the country, will come due. And the city stands ready to retire the debt incurred when Winston Churchill’s grandfather came up with the idea of building a road to one of the nation’s first racetracks, which he had opened in what is now the Bronx.

For 135 years, New York City has been dutifully paying 7 percent annual interest on the bonds, which financed construction of the road. On March 1, the owner of one of them is entitled to come forward and collect its face value: $1,000.

The 38 other bondholders have notes that will mature sometime between now and 2147, a mere 138 years away.

“It’s not the best example of municipal debt management,” said Jim Lebenthal, a bond specialist. “But 135 years of payment without missing a beat does underscore the safety record of municipal bonds.”

Although the interest rate on the notes has remained constant, other things have changed. The road, called Central Avenue when it was built, is now known as Jerome Avenue after Churchill’s grandfather, Leonard W. Jerome.

The site of the racetrack, known as Jerome Park and in its day a magnet for all manner of society swells, is now a reservoir.

And the two towns that originally issued the bonds, Morrisania and West Farms, then incorporated villages outside the city limits, no longer exist, which is how New York City ended up holding the bag of debt after annexation.

As generation followed generation, the 100 or so outstanding notes with a combined face value of $66,000 have all but been forgotten, aside from an occasional newspaper account. But the Bank of New York Mellon, which administers the bonds for the city, has a record of the 39 bondholders who own them and has been mailing them interest checks twice a year.

Two of the active bonds are in the Museum of the City of New York, which has held them since 2001. They were a gift from Mr. Lebenthal, who had held them for 30 years after buying them through a broker from the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery. The cemetery had gotten them from Martha B. Jones in 1914. She took possession of them in 1881.

City officials declined to identify the other bondholders, citing privacy concerns, so it is hard to say how they have kept track of a flimsy piece of paper that would not pay off for several lifetimes.

But the difficulty of the task can be seen in the fact that city officials can no longer locate the heavy bound ledger in which, in neat Victorian script, their predecessors kept track of the bonds by serial number and purchaser name.

The ledger, which the city displayed as recently as 1980, became superfluous when record keeping for the bonds was transferred to computers.

Not all the ledgers are missing: “We do have some dating back to the early 1900s,” Regina Fleszar, the director of investor relations for the city comptroller, wrote in an e-mail message. “But at the moment cannot find the one containing the 1868 bonds.”

What is known about the bonds is that they were the handiwork of a wily 19th-century financier and a couple of cash-strapped towns that schemed to implement a public work at the expense of their wealthy, gleaming neighbor.

The financier, Mr. Jerome, was a successful Wall Street stock speculator and a pioneer of American thoroughbred racing at a time when harness racing was more popular. To cultivate his hobby, he built the track. To ensure its success, he concocted a plan to lure upper-crust New Yorkers to what was then the suburbs by naming races after them, including the banker and socialite August Belmont (yes, the Belmont Stakes was first run in the Bronx).

“Jerome wanted to bring horse racing back as the sport of kings,” said Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian. “To do that, he knew he had to attract his wealthy friends to the racetrack. And to do that, he needed a road from the upper part of settled New York — what is now Midtown Manhattan — to where the racetrack was.”

There was a catch: West Farms, where the track was, and Morrisania, which would share the road, could not afford the improvement. So the towns issued bonds, backed by Mr. Jerome, with unusually long maturities, gambling that their rapidly expanding neighbor would soon absorb them, and their debt.

“Everybody knew because of the shift of population northward, it was only a matter of time before the City of New York was going to annex the territory,” Mr. Ultan said. “So they issued these bonds with the date of redemption so far in the future because they figured that once the City of New York annexed their town, then the City of New York would assume the payment of the bonds — which is exactly what happened.”

At its peak, Jerome Park attracted thousands of spectators who traveled by horseback, four-in-hand coach or train to fill the park’s clubhouse, grandstands and the surrounding knolls and bluffs to watch horses pound around the kidney-shaped track. The city condemned the park in 1890 to make room for the Jerome Park Reservoir.

In addition to his fame as financier, sportsman and bon vivant — at one point, he was listed as a “considerable owner” of The New York Times, according to his obituary — Mr. Jerome was known for his three daughters, and particularly for his middle daughter, Jennie.

“She was known as an international beauty, and she did what the daughters of wealthier Americans did in those days,” Mr. Ultan said, marrying the son of an impoverished European aristocrat. “Her son was Winston Churchill.”

Since 2000, the Bank of New York Mellon has administered the bonds for the city. This decade, four of the bonds have matured — one every other March beginning in 2001 — but no one stepped forward to claim the money.

“Our concern when we took over the business was seeing the age of some of the securities,” said Michael Hieb, a vice president of the bank. “We were scratching our heads.”

The typical municipal bond sold currently matures in 30 years.

Today, the city pays the interest on the outstanding bonds for the Bronx road twice a year, on March 1 and Sept. 1, in increments of $35 or $17.50, depending on the denomination of the bonds, which have a face value of $1,000 or $500. The total cost is $4,620 each year.

The city comptroller is not certain how much debt was originally issued through the bonds, but a previous estimate put the figure at $278,000, reflecting the fact that hundreds of bonds were probably sold originally, some of them with shorter maturities. Today, nearly 100 of the bonds, with a face value of $66,000, have yet to mature. By the time they do, the city will have paid out nearly $1 million in interest.

That debt is not large by modern standards, when the city currently borrows about $7 billion a year and has an annual debt service of about $3.7 billion.

But in the early years after the Civil War, when money stretched further, $70 a year in interest was a substantial sum, enough for a down payment on a middle-class house of good construction, which cost about $300.

“People who bought the bonds might say: ‘This is really cool; generations of my family will benefit from this,’ ” said Richard Sylla, a financial historian and a trustee for the Museum of American Finance. “For the issuer, if you don’t have to pay back the principal for 100 or 200 years, that’s an advantage, too.”

Ex-Yanks star, broadcaster Bobby Murcer dies at 62

Dang! I remember Bobby Murcer coming up to Yankee Stadium as a peach-fuzzed, fair-faced youngster, slated (unfairly and impossibly) as Mantle's successor. Now he's gone.

I also remember he was Munson's great friend, and delivered an eulogy after Munson dies in a plane accident. That happened in 1979 -- dang! I thought it'd happened whilst I was in college. but, no, I was already working at Hess.

With Expanding Library’s Promise, Concern About Its Purpose

A busy day for libraries in the media. This piece actually appeared in the NYTimes yesterday. Still, libraries aren't in the media that often, so all exposure is welcome by us in the field. This piece is interesting in debating the role and purpose of libraries: should it be "an institution that is exceptional in its presence and posture," or should "populist virtue" be claimed by "having its demographics mirror" those of its community.

Mr. Rothstein visited the Bronx Library Center, and found that despite things he didn't approve of (all that evidence of “democratization”), the Bronx Library Center "is also too vital, too well stocked with possibilities for all ages, too inviting to browsers, readers and workers, to be characterized as a countermove in the evolution of public libraries. It offers an alluring mix of entertainment and enlightenment."

After adding such bon mots as "Before the 19th century many books were simply too expensive for widespread public handling," and "Beginning with New York in 1835, state laws allowed the establishment of free libraries supported by taxes and associated with school districts," he discusses Carnegie, and winds up optimistic: "It is an example of the library’s contemporary temptation: to serve by deferring to the public rather than inspiring it. But the Bronx example offers reassurance and hope that the library will not fully yield, cultivating in itself the tensions of its origins."