South Bronx

NEW YORK -- Seven miles and millions of lives away from the political promises of midtown Manhattan are the streets of the South Bronx, boulevards of legendary destitution and more recently, of new hope.Presidential candidates once journeyed to the South Bronx to be photographed amid the urban decay. But this year -- just as the most depressed area of the Bronx is experiencing something of a rebound with pockets of new housing free from graffiti, drugs and squalor -- the Democrats are ignoring the neighborhood.

NEW YORK -- El Nuevo San Juan Health Center sits in a bathtub of vehicle exhaust, its South Bronx neighborhood boxed in by expressways and choked with traffic. Despite all the tailpipes, asthma hospitalization rates among children here have fallen by two-thirds over the past decade. Dr. Samuel De Leon, the clinic's medical director, says one reason is the drop in ozone air pollution since New York adopted California's tough vehicle emission standards. "The South Bronx is ground zero for asthma, with all of our trucks and traffic," said De Leon, a pulmonologist.

NEW YORK -- When Sister Lucila Perez learned that she would be leaving her convent in Mexico to serve in a South Bronx church, her neighbors rushed to warn her that her very life would be at risk. "I expected to see dead bodies everywhere and drug dealers on every corner," said Sister Lucila, 36, one of four Roman Catholic nuns who came to New York last year. "They told me the South Bronx was the worst of society." Not so bad But things have not been so bad. Occasional gunfire, yes, and even a gang rumble.

NEW YORK -- In New York City, air pollution levels have typically been monitored by inanimate objects, at more than a dozen locations around town. But in the South Bronx, from 2002 to 2005, air pollution monitors went mobile. They went to the playground, to the gritty sidewalks, even to the movies. A group of schoolchildren carried the monitors everywhere they went. The instruments, attached to the backpacks of children with asthma, enabled researchers at New York University to measure the pollution the children were exposed to, morning to night.

An article in yesterday's editions of The Sun misstated the background of Dave Johnson, an IBM field engineer. Johnson said that, as a teen-ager in the South Bronx, he was a runner for a criminal organization, but he said he never sold drugs.The Sun regrets the error.Pub Date: 8/12/98

NEW YORK -- The state of New Jersey, already home to what used to be New York's two professional football teams, has drawn up a proposal to build a 50,000-seat baseball stadium in the Meadowlands sports complex for the Yankees, state officials have reported.One official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, but who is familiar with the plans of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, said that the authority was "definitely interested" in having the Yankees in New Jersey.

NEW YORK -- For nearly 30 years, drivers on the Bronx side of the Triborough Bridge have gazed at the monuments of Manhattan, their view unimpeded by the abandoned rail yard on either side of them.But smack in the middle of that rail yard, the southernmost point of the South Bronx, construction is scheduled to begin this year on an audacious, first-of-its-kind building that promises to be a New York landmark.This new monument is a paper-recycling mill unlike any other.The lead developer is one of the nation's best known environmental-advocacy groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council.

NEW YORK -- In New York City, air pollution levels have typically been monitored by inanimate objects, at more than a dozen locations around town. But in the South Bronx, from 2002 to 2005, air pollution monitors went mobile. They went to the playground, to the gritty sidewalks, even to the movies. A group of schoolchildren carried the monitors everywhere they went. The instruments, attached to the backpacks of children with asthma, enabled researchers at New York University to measure the pollution the children were exposed to, morning to night.

IGNORE Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio. The contest that matters to New Yorkers is between the National League and the American, the Bronx and Queens, the accustomed winners and the upstart challengers, the Yankees and the Mets. There was a time when New York was the cultural, commercial and communications capital of the country. A Subway World Series was as predictable an October event as Halloween. But that's history. The nation is now decentralized in art, broadcasting, publishing, financial services and sport.

For decades, America watched its cities empty out. Some became eerily reminiscent of wartime ruins, with street after street of vacant, bombed-out apartment buildings, terrifying testimony to a rampant, incurable urban cancer. The ultimate, world-famous example of American urban abandonment was Charlotte Street in New York City's South Bronx. The chaos -- of dysfunctional inner-city poverty-fragile families, drugs, gangs and horrific crime -- spun out of control in the 1970s. For a decade, the arson fires burned, decimating 20 square miles of Bronx neighborhoods.

For decades, America watched its cities empty out. Some became eerily reminiscent of wartime ruins, with street after street of vacant, bombed-out apartment buildings, terrifying testimony to a rampant, incurable urban cancer. The ultimate, world-famous example of American urban abandonment was Charlotte Street in New York City's South Bronx. The chaos -- of dysfunctional inner-city poverty-fragile families, drugs, gangs and horrific crime -- spun out of control in the 1970s. For a decade, the arson fires burned, decimating 20 square miles of Bronx neighborhoods.

NEW YORK -- When Sister Lucila Perez learned that she would be leaving her convent in Mexico to serve in a South Bronx church, her neighbors rushed to warn her that her very life would be at risk. "I expected to see dead bodies everywhere and drug dealers on every corner," said Sister Lucila, 36, one of four Roman Catholic nuns who came to New York last year. "They told me the South Bronx was the worst of society." Not so bad But things have not been so bad. Occasional gunfire, yes, and even a gang rumble.

IGNORE Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio. The contest that matters to New Yorkers is between the National League and the American, the Bronx and Queens, the accustomed winners and the upstart challengers, the Yankees and the Mets. There was a time when New York was the cultural, commercial and communications capital of the country. A Subway World Series was as predictable an October event as Halloween. But that's history. The nation is now decentralized in art, broadcasting, publishing, financial services and sport.

On a recent visit to the Brooklyn Museum of Art's new show "Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes & Rage," I missed my subway stop and inadvertently ended up in the place where hip-hop was born. It was an honest mistake. Lulled by misplaced faith in the directions offered by a token-booth clerk, I clung to my strap as the train sped right past Brooklyn's leafy Prospect Park, where the museum is located, and clattered on into the vast, impoverished urban wilderness known as East New York. When I finally emerged, I was in a trash-strewn wasteland of dilapidated houses and sullen storefronts so unremittingly bleak, and so geographically and psychically remote from Manhattan's sophisticated glitter, as to seem almost on another planet.

Morris High School opened in 1902 as a neo-Gothic cathedral of learning. But when Carmen V. Russo arrived for her first day as principal, she found a run-down fortress, a school surrounded by blight whose students were considered too poor, too South Bronx to perform Shakespeare. Graffiti marred the streets in the school's neighborhood, where the Latin Kings, the Zulus and the Dominican Power gangs guarded their turf. Garbage was strewn behind Morris. Broken bottles littered its playground.

An article in yesterday's editions of The Sun misstated the background of Dave Johnson, an IBM field engineer. Johnson said that, as a teen-ager in the South Bronx, he was a runner for a criminal organization, but he said he never sold drugs.The Sun regrets the error.Pub Date: 8/12/98

New York -- IT'S EASY for politicians to vilify Richard Kraft, the Yankees' former director of community reelations, who compared South Bronx children to "monkeys." It will be harder to solve the complicated problems between the team and the neighborhood, Mr. Kraft's resignation on Saturday not withstanding.Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president, took advantage of Mr. Kraft's insensitive statement (which I reported recently in New York magazine) to give a boost to his political profile and mayoral aspirations.

A Jesuit priest who took the place of one of the six Jesuits assassinated in El Salvador finds more hope in that country than he did in his previous work as a community organizer in the South Bronx.In El Salvador, where 75,000 people died in a 12-year civil war that recently ended, says the Rev. Dean Brackley, a traditional society of extended family has sustained people, even in the midst of poverty and war."They have no access to health care in El Salvador but they have land and they have the extended family," Father Brackley said.

NEW YORK -- For nearly 30 years, drivers on the Bronx side of the Triborough Bridge have gazed at the monuments of Manhattan, their view unimpeded by the abandoned rail yard on either side of them.But smack in the middle of that rail yard, the southernmost point of the South Bronx, construction is scheduled to begin this year on an audacious, first-of-its-kind building that promises to be a New York landmark.This new monument is a paper-recycling mill unlike any other.The lead developer is one of the nation's best known environmental-advocacy groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council.

On Vyse Avenue in the South Bronx, a woman enters an abandoned building to go to a crack house in the basement. The entrance is surmounted by stone decoration -- attached columns, a shield, scrolls -- that will never be equaled on buildings constructed today.In Newark, a boy climbs an apartment building stairway that looks like a dungeon -- no windows, no visible source of outside light. In Chicago, another boy looks through an iron grate outside a 16th-floor apartment of a housing project.