January
As most years do, 2023 began with reflection. But in the Bronx it was a somber one, as residents commemorated the first anniversary of the Twin Parks North West fire in Fordham Heights.
The Bronx Times covered the blaze extensively — not just when it first happened on Jan. 9, 2022 — but also through the displacement, funerals and lawsuits that ensued in its wake. And as the Bronx mourned the first anniversary of the 17 lives lost (eight of them children) in the fire, so did the paper. It was, after all, New York City’s deadliest fire since 1990.
Bronx Times journalists went back to the Twin Parks building to speak to people in the area about that fateful morning a year prior, and found that the Fordham Heights community was still searching for normalcy after the trauma.
Elizabeth Fermin, a business owner along 181st Street right across from the Twin Parks apartments, told the Bronx Times about some of the building’s tenants who were regulars at her shop. Virgen Peralta, a resident of the building when the fire broke out, recalled the smell of smoke that Sunday morning.
“I called and called and called my family,” Peralta told Bronx Times reporters in Spanish. “I called everyone to get me out because I was suffocating.”
David Cadogen, a Station 27 paramedic who responded the morning of the blaze, described the scene as “going from drops of a faucet to an all-out waterfall. There was just an avalanche of patients.”
Nearly one-third of the building was still vacant by Jan. 5, almost a full calendar year after the blaze, including 14 units on the third floor where the fire originated. Before renovations were complete, the third floor was gutted and still being rebuilt: construction material occupied units, and temporary industrial lighting hung in exposed hallways. But even so, families — most of them immigrant families — continued to move into Twin Parks North West in search of a new beginning.
A lot of attention was also on Montefiore and Mount Sinai nurses in the New York State Nurses Association union in early January, who went on strike after administrators’ last-minute offer for higher pay and new positions didn’t cut it.
The Bronx’s Montefiore hospitals really started to feel the strain of being short 3,500 nurses at their three locations after the third day on the picket line. Patients like Donell Jones told the Bronx Times during the strike that a “simple” 10- to 15-minute appointment turned into an “hour-long mess” that ended in cancellation as workers scrambled to accommodate patients. Others, in need of biopsies and other life-altering surgeries, had procedures pushed off.
The strike ended on Jan. 12, and Montefiore and Mount Sinai nurses ratified a new contract — which stipulated a 19% pay hike over three years and outlined the establishments’ plans to hire more personnel — less than two weeks later.
The week the nurses union announced its new agreed upon contracts, tragedy struck in Longwood after 15-year-old Josue Lopez-Ortega was killed outside of the Police Athletic League (PAL) New South Bronx Center at the end of January when a man opened fire on a group of people leaving the center. Another 16-year-old, whose identity was withheld, was shot in the leg but survived. In July cops arrested Jamir Scarboro for the killing of Lopez-Ortega, charging him with murder, attempted murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon. So far this year, there have been at least five reported homicides of children in the Bronx.
“It’s heartbreaking, tragic, and just infuriating quite honestly,” Assemblymember Kenny Burgos, who represents Longwood in District 85, told the Bronx Times after the shooting. “We see these continuous accounts of gun violence happening, not just in my district, but throughout the whole city.”
February
February in the Bronx began with a near tragedy in the Bronx’s 47th Precinct, where a 22-year-old rookie police officer attempted suicide inside a station house locker. The officer was expected to survive his injuries, but the attempt highlighted a disturbing trend in law enforcement.
According to the National Library of Medicine, the suicide rate among police officers is surpassing the rate at which they die in the line of duty. Before the 22-year-old’s attempt early this year, two NYPD officers — a reassigned cop who jumped to his death in Elmhurst on Jan. 10 and a cop who died due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a car in Queens on Jan. 20 — had already died by suicide.
The epidemic runs deep. There were 28 cop suicides from 1993 to 1995 — which sparked the Police Organization Providing Peer Assistance (POPPA) program — and an annual average of seven the decade of 1986-1995. The average of NYPD suicides, according to POPPA, had dropped to five per year by 2021.
That same month, cold spell also left some Bronx residents looking to the city for help getting heat — pleas they said had largely gone unanswered.
A two-day spell of single-digit temperatures in February tested the limits of the city’s aging public housing infrastructure, including the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) Fort Independence Houses in Kingsbridge Heights.
After temperatures reached as low as 4 degrees one weekend, 19-year-old Emily Ayala and her younger sister had to evacuate their apartment in the middle of a leak after a leak caused by a boiler — that was flagged as defective by the NYC Department of Buildings on Jan. 29 — emitted a flood of water and heat vapor into her third-floor unit.
When asked by the Bronx Times about the defective boiler, NYCHA officials pointed to aging infrastructure and federal disinvestment in public housing. According to a NYCHA fact sheet, 175 out of NYCHA’s 302 developments were 50 years or older earlier this year, including 36 developments that are 70 years or older.
“In the winters, it’s kind of weird sometimes. We get heat and sometimes we don’t, and usually when we don’t get heat, it is freezing in here. probably colder in here than outside,” Ayala told the Bronx Times after the boiler leak. “I’ve lived here since I was nine. I still have most of my ceiling missing so if it’s not one thing that needs a repair, it’s another thing.”
March
In one of the oddest stories to come out of the city this year, Bronx Zoo officials were trying to nurse a visitor back to health in March. But it wasn’t just any old zoo animal — it was a 5-foot-long alligator.
Found in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake a few weeks prior, Godzilla the female gator was recovering in the Bronx from the cold, from being underweight — she weighed 15 pounds when she should have weighed in between 30 and 35 — and from complications after swallowing a bathtub stopper.
Officials from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, which oversaw the rescue from Prospect Park Lake and subsequent transport to the Bronx Zoo for treatment, said Godzilla was likely a pet who had been illegally dumped by her owner. The gator died after two months of “extensive” care at the Bronx Zoo.
It was clear that Bronxites cared about Godzilla’s fate, but what wasn’t clear later in March was whether or not Bronxites cared about cinema in their home borough.
A Bronx Times report on the amount of movie theaters shocked readers: How could it be that the Bronx only has two commercial theaters?
The report found that the AMC Bay Plaza Theater 13 and the Concourse Plaza Multiplex Cinemas on 161st Street were the lone commercial theaters in the Bronx. That came after the Whitestone Multiplex Cinemas at 2505 Bruckner Blvd. closed in 2013, as well as the American Theater at 1450 East Ave. Another cinema house, the former Garden Theater on Webster Avenue, still has its awning despite being closed as a movie house since 1926.
But it turns out there are Bronxites who care about the fate of film in their neighborhoods. The nonprofit Bronx Independent Cinema Center announced its intention to reopen the landmark Loew’s Paradise Theatre at 2417 Grand Concourse shortly after the Bronx Times reported on the lack, and an independent theater called Cinema on the Sound had a similar mission in City Island.
“That’s something that’s missing here in the Bronx,” Cinema on the Sound owner Peter Gennari told the Bronx Times. “There’s so many creators here, so many filmmakers, so many people that want to present, so many stories to tell and I thought, ‘well, let’s create a place where we can tell those stories.’”
April
The legal cannabis industry was a hot topic in early April, as the Bronx remained without a dispensary storefront a solid five months after the state announced its first round of conditional adult-use retail dispensary (CAURD) licenses.
License holders told the Bronx Times that the road to securing a physical retail location had its roadblocks, such as examining vacant commercial spaces to operate, and ensuring that their business aligns with that area’s zoning requirements. Bronx advocates and license holders felt spurned by the state’s cannabis market rollout and the promise of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA) — which was signed into law in 2021 legalizing the recreational market — to prioritize communities most impacted by cannabis prohibition and enforcement.
Since then, two dispensaries have opened in the Bronx — the first, Statis Cannabis Co., in Crotona in July, and Hush in Allerton this month — and more are in the works.
The month of April concluded with a lot of chatter about an issue many Bronxites have been well aware of.
Marcel Moran, a PhD candidate at the University of California’s Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, spent a month last year visiting every police precinct in the city to see whether vehicles — both personal and NYPD-labeled — were parked on sidewalks and/or in crosswalks.
And in the Bronx? He found NYPD cars parked on sidewalks at each and every precinct.
“There did not seem to be an increase or decrease in this behavior between 2007 and now,” Moran told the Bronx Times after the report dropped.
Moran, whose research interests are pedestrian, transit and bike issues in cities, published his findings in a peer-reviewed academic article called “Authorized Vehicles Only: Police, parking, and pedestrian access in New York City” in the academic journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
– Robbie Sequeira, Aliya Schneider, ET Rodriguez, Kirstyn Brendlen, and Ashley Steinberg contributed to this report
Reach Camille Botello at cbotello@schnepsmedia.com. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
