South Bronx

PRESIDENT CARTER came to the South Bronx in 1977, posed among the ruins and said that now that he was president something would be done. In 1980, Candidate Reagan came to the South Bronx, posed among the ruins and said if he were president something would be done. Can anyone imagine Candidates Clinton or Dole doing something similar this year?The "urban crisis," which played so large a role in domestic politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, will not, we can be confident, be an issue this election.

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.

ON THE ROAD TO PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The journey begins in Cap-Haitien at a last-chance, makeshift gas station where pigs chew scraps of garbage and barefoot women pour seven two-gallon jugs of watered-down fuel into a beat-up 1981 Datsun station wagon with 54,960 miles on the odometer and no back seat.It weaves through three mountain ranges and a desertlike area, dips along a bay so beautiful that the sun shimmers like fire off the blue water, passes marketplaces with more flies than people and towns where fear hangs heavy in the humid air, and ends, two flat tires, one blown clutch, one snapped accelerator cable, eight hours and 180 miles later in a place that looks a chunk of the South Bronx -- with an ocean view.

Rivalries. Perhaps even more so than records or individual performances, they are the engine room of sports, the things that keep us coming back, clamoring for more.Sure, Jack Dempsey was a fearsome and charismatic fighter, but where would he be without Jack Tunney and the famed 14-second non-knockout?One too many times, the great John L. Sullivan bragged "I can lick any man in the house," for in the crowd that evening was a fancy-dan named James J. Corbett.'Tis said that even before Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees by a New York carpetbagger and Red Sox owner Harry Frazee that the people in Boston would just as soon beat the Pinstripes as go to heaven.

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.

NEW YORK -- Walking home from the store on a sunny day last weekend, Michelle Knight could hardly believe her eyes: Amid the straggly grass and weeds of her South Bronx neighborhood park was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican candidate for mayor, raking up smashed bottles."

New York. -- 'Tenant Meeting -- Reunion de Inquilinos -- Monday -- Lunes -- 7:30 p.m. -- Community Room. Now that the plumbing is fixed, what about the antennas? What about sanitation issues?''Posted in the lobby of one of the many buildings owned and managed by the Mount Hope Housing Corporation, the hand- lettered notice is suggestive of what's happening in the South Bronx today.Twenty years ago as landlords abandoned block after block and vandals stripped buildings and torched them, the flames of destruction were reminiscent of Dresden in 1945.

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.

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.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- Ninety days to go . . .Armando Cintron of the South Bronx and Puerto Rico is dressed in boots, jeans and an overcoat, preparing to ride his second-hand luge down a sheet of ice carved into the side of the mountain."