Elected officials and more than 150 community members gathered at Lehman College Saturday afternoon to rally for Operation Restoration, a fundraiser to help rebuild the Love Gospel Assembly and restore the services it provided.

On July 25, the Grand Concourse church was gutted by a four-alarm fire, leaving thousands of the hungry people who were fed every month through its Love Kitchen to seek food elsewhere.  “It’s so important that we get back up and running, because there’s a whole community of people that depend on us,” said Love Gospel Assembly Bishop Ronald Bailey. “We’re feeding 300 to 400 people every day, somewhere between 8,000 to 10,000 people a month. Those people need these services that we provide, so we’re trying to move quickly.”

During the two-hour event, the college’s Center for the Performing Arts was filled with song, prayer and testimonials about the church’s importance in the Fordham community.

Brian Draper, 53, told audience members that he has been a born-again Christian for about 15 years since finding the church. ”When I first was going, I was only going for the physical food,” Draper said. “It was a way of physically staying fed because of my addiction. But God has such a sense of humor, you know, I’m thinking I’m just physically getting fed, but every time you get fed physically, there always always a word said, a prayer said or someone encouraging you. So then eventually, it was like a seed being watered…and eventually that seed grew into what I am today.”

The largest contribution came from State Senate Majority Leader Pedro Espada  Jr. and Senate Democratic Conference Leader John Sampson, who presented a check of $100,000 from the state senate to a roaring crowd.  “An institution such as this provides so much to our communities, but more so plays a vital role in the economic crisis we are experiencing here,” Sampson said. “And the only way we are going to rise from that is through our faith, through institutions, churches like this, who extend beyond the four corners of those institutions.”

“We all know government and the faith have to work together,” Espada added. “God is everywhere.”

Bronx Borough President Rueben Diaz Jr. also spoke and contributed $1,000 to the cause.

Bailey said he believes the turnout from elected officials is evidence that the community cares about the work of the church.  “It’s good to get recognition, because it’s not about us, it’s about the work that we’re doing,” Bailey said. “So we thank them, we take the pat on the back and keep going.”

Love Gospel Assembly Deacon Tasha Andrews said the fire resulted in $150,000 worth of equipment damage alone. The church will continue to accept donations through its website: www.lgabronx.com.

Andrews said the cause of the fire is still under investigation.

Highbridge apartment goes up in flames on a hot Friday afternoon

HIGHBRIDGE — A three-alarm fire tore through the top three floors of a six-story apartment building in the southeast Bronx on Friday afternoon. Four firefighters and two bystanders sustained minor injuries, but all the tenants were safely evacuated.

The fire quickly escalated from a two to three-alarm blaze due to the 90-degree heat and need for relief.

“It was hot,” said one firefighter who was in the building and declined to be named. “By the time we got here, it was roaring.”

Deputy Chief James J. Nichols said the cause of the fire is officially under investigation. “We think it’s accidental,” he said. “We think it’s electrical.”

The fire began on the fifth floor at approximately 3:30 p.m. at 1504 Sheridan Ave., a large grey-brick residential complex across the street from William Taft High School. FDNY Ladder Company 44 was the first to respond, followed by Ladder Company 49.

Because the building is large and the main entrance was far from the site of the fire, firefighters had to thread their hoses both through the lower levels of three adjacent buildings and also across the roof. The flames were extinguished in about 45 minutes.

Jason Monegro, 20, was the first to call 911 after he saw flames leaping from an electrical outlet near the television in his aunt’s fifth-floor apartment. He was doing laundry in the kitchen when his Yorkshire terrier, Bam-Bam, began barking and running back and forth.

“I saw smoke coming out of my cousin’s bedroom,” Monegro said. “And then I saw the crib catch on fire.”

Monegro said he poured a bucket of water on the fire, but when that had no effect he called 911.

“Everybody got out, thank god,” Monegro said.

The manager of Juhysa Beauty Salon on the building’s ground floor also called 911 when he noticed flames coming out of the windows on the fifth floor.

“I ran along the street and yelled up to the windows, ‘Fire! Fire!’” said Areliz Rodriguez.

Outside, throngs of bystanders crowded around the building, even as pieces of charred debris fell onto the street. Monegro, who was shirtless and barefoot, fielded questions from police, reporters and then dumbfounded family members as they slowly arrived on the scene. Monegro said glumly that his family had lived in the building for over 50 years.

“I don’t know,” Monegro said, when asked what he plans to do now. “I guess we’ll stay with relatives and see what the damage is.”

The building’s new superintendent, Juan Rosa, said he was working on the fourth floor when he heard the smoke alarms and saw the whole fifth floor filled with smoke.

“I was knocking and banging on the doors trying to get everyone out,” Rosa said when reached by telephone. “Now we’re picking up the mess.”

The entire length of the first floor was soaked with water from the firefighters’ hoses. From the ground, onlookers could see blue sky through the windows of some burnt-out sixth-floor apartments — an indication that the roof had collapsed.

Pamela Wright, a resident on the third floor, was not in her apartment at the time of the fire but arrived shortly thereafter. She was relieved to find out her apartment was not damaged.

“My granddaughter came and told me about it,” Wright said. “I was worried about my cat and my other stuff. It hasn’t really set in yet.”

Travis Antonio Luciano sits at a café table  near the entrance to the Bronx Zoo. He is about 5 feet, 6 inches tall, skinny and has a wispy mustache on his otherwise baby face. On his back rests a drawstring knapsack and in his lap sits a two-year-old toddler, TJ, who has a head full of curly brown hair, dark black eyes, a button nose and small pearly teeth that sparkle when he smiles.

“I often get asked if he’s my baby brother,” Luciano says. “And I tell them he’s my son.”

Luciano lives with his mother and younger sister in a cramped two-bedroom apartment and loves to play football with his friends in the small patch of green across from his house in Morrisania. He works five days a week at a café in the Bronx Zoo. He recently got his GED which he wants to turn into a job as an electrical technician.

Yet Luciano also has to take care of his two-year old son, for whom he is the sole custodian. At 19, Luciano is a single dad.

Travis Luciano and his two-year-old son TJ spend the day at the Bronx Zoo. Luciano became a father at 17. (Mamta Badkar/The Bronx Ink)

Two years ago, his ex girlfriend, a 15-year-old high school student at the time, became pregnant. “Travis grew up in a church and a lot of spiritual things took place,” said his mother Elizabeth Porter, “Abortion wasn’t an option for him.”

TJ’s now 17-year-old mother, who moved to Philadelphia, visits him twice a month in New York City, said Porter. Luciano thinks the time apart affects TJ badly.

At the zoo TJ squirms in Luciano’s lap, whimpers and frequently cries for “mommy.”  It is a stubborn cry that Luciano is used to.

“When she’s leaving, he has this face where he knows that she’s not gonna come back for a while, and that hurts a lot,” he said.

“A lot of times, he calls people ‘mom,’ that bothers me a lot,” Luciano said. “I don’t like women getting too close to him, because then he’s calling this girl mom, and this girl disappears and then where did mom go? Another mom has disappeared.”

Luciano and TJ’s mother stayed together for about two months after TJ was born. “I went to school, then I went to work at McDonald’s and I used to get home around 11 o’clock at night,” he said. “It was really hard and stressful.” When Luciano’s hectic schedule exacerbated the problems in their relationship, he said, the couple threw in the towel.

“It kinda hurt cause I wanted my son to have a family,” Luciano said.

Becoming a single dad has changed his life drastically. “Having my son forced me to grow up really fast,” he said. He couldn’t afford to spend the time he needed to finish his high school degree and had to transfer into a GED program. To pay the bills, he took a  $7.25-an-hour job at the Bronx Zoo.

Luciano shakes his head at the thought of his friends complaining about school and their hurry to grow up. “When you get older you have children you have to worry about, you have work you have to worry about, you have bills you have to worry about, and that is nothing compared to high school drama at all,” he said.

“I miss high school,” he said. “I miss being a kid again.”

Teenage pregnancies are not a rarity in the Bronx. The South Bronx has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in New York City, according to the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the borough’s rate is double the national average. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 445,045 live births among mothers aged 15 to 19 years in 2007, citing a birth rate of 42.5 per 1000 teenage girls in 2007 . Yet, most of these pregnancies end with the mother taking care of the child, and the father paying child support.

Among single parents living with their children, only 18 percent are men. Though there are no official numbers on teenage single dads, Luciano knows his situation is rare.

“At the moment I don’t know any single fathers,” he said. “You just hate being the only one sometimes.”

His god brother, he explained, recently had a child, but is still with his girlfriend.

“I feel like I don’t really want to talk to him about certain things, like ‘Oh god, I had to stay up all night,’ and this and that because he doesn’t do the same things,’’ Luciano said. “He works, she watches the babies.”

“When you see stuff like that, you wish it was you, you wish that I was still with my son’s mother,” he said. “but then you know things wouldn’t work out the same.”

Being a single dad means Luciano can no longer go to movies because he knows the $10 he would spend on the ticket might come in handy when TJ needs another box of diapers in the middle of the week. In between work and caring for TJ, he can rarely make time for a game of football with his friends. Going out at night has all but disappeared from his life, he said.

“Sometimes I get home from work and I’m extra tired because there were a million guests at the zoo one day, and I just wanna go to sleep and I get home and he’s still up, and he still wants to play, and he hasn’t seen daddy since this morning and he’s running to me and I can’t.” he said. “I’m sorta used to it by now but there’s just those days when you just need an Excedrin for your headache cause you’re doing this by yourself.”

TJ sketches on a wall at his father's house. Luciano hopes to save enough money to move into an apartment of his own. (Mamta Badkar/The Bronx Ink)

The job at the zoo helps Luciano pay for part of TJ’s expenses, though it gets nowhere close to making ends meet. Luciano’s mother, Elizabeth Porter, 43, who works as an administrator for a union representing teaching and research assistants at Columbia University, is the backbone of the family, emotionally and financially.  Porter is divorced from Luciano’s father.

Porter explained that she often helps her son out with the baby’s expenses. “Financially I still take home all the bills, buy all the Pampers, wipes and bottles and clothes,” she said. And her support doesn’t stop there.

She had to miss work last week because TJ was rushed to Montefiore Medical Center after a bad asthma attack. She stayed with him overnight.

Porter knows the travails of teenage parenthood . She was in her last term in high school when she got pregnant with her first son. As the first in her family to finish high school, she had dreams for her future. “I wanted to be a gymnast and do all the exciting things out there, and unfortunately I got pregnant,” she said.

“I was going to be a single parent; there was no father figure in the picture,” Porter said adding that her mother was a believer in “if you’re going to have a child, you’re going to do everything yourself.”

“So most of the responsibilities were mine outside of mom babysitting when I went to school. I didn’t go out, didn’t go to parties … didn’t go to the movies.”

Having her own childhood cut short, she works hard to give Luciano the opportunity to still be a child. She babysits TJ, helps out financially so her son, “can go out and do teenage things.”

It is apparent that TJ is close to his grandmother or “mima” as he calls her. While Luciano is at work, Porter gets ready for work and then sits TJ down for his dose of asthma medication. When she puts the face mask on his mouth TJ flails his arms shouting for air. Then she sits and watches cartoons with him while waiting for her sister, TJ’s grand aunt, to arrive and babysit so she can leave for work.

The sister, hard-pressed for a smile, arrives late and with a plastic takeout container in her hand positions herself on the couch to watch television. Luciano’s friend helps Porter carry out four immense bags of laundry. TJ who had been watching cartoons, chases her out the door in his onesie crying for her to stay, until she carries him back into the apartment and the arms of her sister.

“I am now a mom raising a child all over again,” she said. “The freedom I used to have, I no longer have because I have a little one to take care of.”

Besides work and taking care of her two children Luciano and his sister Victoria, and her grandson TJ, Porter is studying for an associates degree in business administration.

“I go to school now to show him — ‘if I can do this at this age you can do more,’ ” she said of Luciano. “He can’t have a GED and that’s where life ends. He does have a job at the Bronx Zoo but that’s the beginning, not the end.”

Porter explained that her oldest son had his first child when he was 19, and that  she forced him to finish school.

Luciano agrees with his mother’s focus on education. He plans to take classes so he can be an electrician like his brother, but his longterm goal is to get an apartment for him and TJ, enroll in an online college and one day become an elementary or middle school teacher.  “I just wanted to be one of those cool teachers that make you wanna come to school,” he said. “I love children, so that was my dream job kinda thing.”

Victoria, Luciano’s 11-year-old sister was surprised when she found out her older brother was going to be a father. “Travis was the smarty,’’ she said. “He loved school, and he claimed he wasn’t gonna have kids. He ended up having TJ.”

Now, Victoria is helping to take care of TJ as well. She feeds him, changes his diapers, reads him stories and puts him to sleep when everyone else is busy. “I’m like his auntie,” she said.

Luciano's 11-year-old sister Victoria often helps take care of TJ. Here she babysits him while Luciano prepares to play football with his friends. (Mamta Badkar/The Bronx Ink).

Though she has a strong bond with TJ, Victoria said she doesn’t want to have a child before she is done with school.

“My mom said for me to live my childhood, take it slowly, for me not to rush my childhood because I’ll regret it,” she said. Then, she added gingerly, “I won’t regret it. But I will feel a little bit mad if I had a child at a young age.”

It isn’t so easy for Luciano to admit that he would do things differently. “He’s already here, so I already know him, I already love him, I can’t just say I’d go back,” he said, and added, “I would have made it so I’d have him later… Mostly because I wanted to be ready, and I’m definitely not ready right now.”

After 18 months of rehabilitation for a broken hip, all that Eta Eckstein wanted was to go back home to her Brooklyn apartment. The 92-year-old Holocaust survivor had lived at 8750 Bay Parkway for 40 years, but when her son visited her apartment while she was still at the Shore View Rehabilitation Center, he found a red eviction notice on the door.

Her son, Zvi Eckstein, continued to pay her monthly rent, but the landlord, Moshe Piller, evicted the long-time resident, claiming she had vacated the apartment. The building superintendent had told the neighbors she was dead. But according to her son’s affidavit, his mother could instead not move back in because the apartment was in such disrepair.

With the help of her family, Eckstein fought the eviction all the way to Housing Court. Piller settled the case after Judge Candy Gonzales warned him: “You’re playing with fire.”

Along with the right to live in her apartment, Eta Eckstein won the right to reclaim belongings that had been stored in an unlocked basement or scattered on the building’s landing. But she also won the right to live with faulty wiring in the living room, a collapsed ceiling in the bathroom, and clogged plumbing, according to her son’s affidavit. Victory for Eta Eckstein meant being allowed back into a building that currently has 99 open violations with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD.

Why would anyone fight so hard to get back into 8750 Bay Parkway? Since Piller took over the building in 2005, tenants say that conditions have deteriorated. But five years of decline do not matter as much to a 92-year-old woman as a lifetime of familiarity. “It’s been her home for over 40 years,” said her grandson, Idan Eckstein.

Like Eta Eckstein, tenants all around the Bronx and Brooklyn live in buildings that have rodents, collapsing ceilings, no heat in the winter and windows that don’t open in the summer, and unlocked security doors that allow people in to urinate and do drugs in the stairs. The system makes it almost impossible to demand better.

They are afraid to make trouble because they lack the language skills to make sense of the complaint process or because their work schedule makes it impossible to go to housing court during the day. The city’s housing bureaucracy struggles with a system that makes aggressive enforcement difficult. And landlords learn how to fly under the radar, paying fines or making minor repairs rather than making expensive improvements.

Eckstein is hardly an isolated victim, and her landlord, Moshe Piller, is not unique. In fact, there are far worse landlords: Piller does not appear on the Village Voice’s list of “10 Worst Landlords,” nor do any of his holdings appear on the HPD’s list of the 200 worst buildings in New York City. Piller, who occupied a berth on the HPD’s 2003 “Major Problem Landlords List,” with 7,313 open violations at 29 buildings, now escapes the agency’s sanction, and his current violations are down to over 1,700.

In an effort to understand how landlords like Piller work the New York housing system, The Brooklyn Ink and The Bronx Ink spent several months following the same process that many tenants do. Like them, reporters from the two websites talked to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Buildings and the district attorney’s office. They all provided different versions of the same answer: He hasn’t broken the law; there’s not much we can do about the condition of housing for many tenants.

Also like many tenants, we went to Piller’s office to talk to the landlord himself. We made several trips and finally spoke with his property manager, Mike Ross. Ross said they constantly making improvements to the properties, including beginning renovations in three apartments at 119 East 19th Street in the last month since we began investigating the building for this story.

“We’re trying our best,” said Ross. “There’s always more, more and more work.”

***

When a faucet is leaking or the oven is broken, the first step for tenants is to phone the landlord or superintendent and ask him to come fix it. But if residents wait and remind him and nothing is done, the next step is to complain to the HPD.

Under New York law, a landlord is not fined—even if a violation isn’t fixed—unless a tenant or the HPD takes the landlord to housing court. But often tenants cannot take time off work to go to court, according to Legal Aid chief litigator Judith Goldiner, who represents tenants in housing cases. Legal aid can only represent about one in eight tenants who come to complain, due to a lack of resources. For those who go to court unrepresented, the success rate is low.

Numbers don’t tell the whole story of what it means to live in a Piller building, but they do tell a compelling part of it. The Piller apartment buildings we identified in Brooklyn have 829 open HPD violations . Of those, 219 are Class C violations, which include lead paint and a lack of child safety bars. The buildings in the Bronx have 995 violations, with 297 Class C violations, the most serious violations.

(To see the violations by building, click here)

Piller’s tenants have taken him to court more than 95 times in Brooklyn and the Bronx since 1989. Many of these cases settled, with the landlord agreeing to perform repairs.

Still, the extent of the landlord’s holdings, and therefore the number of violations in his buildings, is impossible to determine, even for city officials. New York City keeps records of all the buildings in the city, but not of the individuals who own them. One of the problems that organizations like HPD face in regulating a landlord like Piller is that he registers his holdings under a corporation, not individual, name. He registers most of his holdings under separate corporations. Eckstein’s building, 8750 Bay Parkway, for example, is registered as “8750 Bay Parkway L.L.C.,” which we confirmed by checking the sign in the lobby.

The Brooklyn Ink identified 14 buildings that Piller owns in Brooklyn and seven in the Bronx. The buildings that are listed under his name were purchased in the early 90s. Most of them are small two- or three-story brick homes in the Borough Park area. They have no violations, and tenants we spoke to generally said he’s a good landlord.

But after the early 2000s, Piller stopped registering buildings under his own name. We searched the names of Piller’s family and his employees, but nothing came up. The only way to know for sure is to visit the buildings themselves, where the registration on the wall says the name of his company, “MP Management,” and his name, Moshe Piller.

After hours of searching city records, old news clippings, and reports by city agencies we found as much as we could about the buildings he might own. Then we went to the boroughs to confirm which buildings are still his, and to find out what it’s like for the people who live there.

Life at 119 East 19th from Brooklyn Ink on Vimeo.

From the outside, nothing seems amiss at 119 East 19th Street, in Prospect Park South, Brooklyn. The railing protecting the flowerbeds outside is freshly painted and the building’s light brown facade has been redone recently, according to the building’s manager, Mike Ross.

Inside the lobby, on white paper with black marker is noted the name of the landlord for the building: “Moshe Piller.”

In the stairwell, the smell of urine is overpowering and at the bottom of the stairs, there’s a rat hole, just one variety of the vermin—such as bedbugs, cockroaches and mice—that crawl throughout 119 East 19th.

The elevator had been out of order for a month when we visited—not for the first time, according to residents. When we came back two weeks later it was still not working.

The building on 19th Street has 152 open violations as of this week, according to HPD. Of those, 52 are Class C, the most serious violations. This is more than twice the number of violations in any other building in the neighborhood, and three times the majority of buildings in general.

Piller purchased the building for $218,000 in 1995. He currently has over $9,000 in Department of Buildings’ fines, mostly for the broken elevator. He charges most tenants between $900 to $1,200 in rent. He pays some of his fines, enough to stay out of trouble with the department.

The first thing that’s noticeable when entering Desmond Fontenelle’s small one-bedroom apartment 6J is a chair placed awkwardly in the middle of the room, which conceals a gaping hole big enough for a person’s foot. “I don’t wanna break my neck walking to the bathroom at night,” said Fontenelle, a gregarious man in his early 40s, with pale brown eyes and a St. Lucian accent.

In the bathroom, a broken faucet has been dripping water into a bucket for years. The floor is soaked and a towel has been placed over the wet patch where the bath leaks. When Fontenelle showers, it floods the apartment of the neighbor below him, so he tries to bathe as little as possible.

The bedroom windows are barred with a locked metal gate and the smoke detector does not have a battery. The stove has also been out of order for years. “I eat mostly at mother’s place these days,” said Fontenelle.

But for other problems, such as the disarray in the apartment and rotting food in the refrigerator, Fontenelle also bears responsibility.

Fontenelle has been living at 119 East 19th for 20 years, before Moshe Piller purchased it 15 years ago. He said he has confronted the landlord numerous times about the repairs. In the last week, men have brought paint buckets up to his apartment and the building manager, Ross, has arranged for someone to come fix the broken oven door.

Fontenelle has tried withholding his $900 rent to pressure Piller to fix the apartment, but this has led to numerous court cases and eviction notices in the mail. Piller has taken him to court 16 times in 15 years for late rent payments – although Ross said they only do this once the rent is at least three months overdue. Fontenelle always agrees to pay, but also uses the opportunity to complain to the judge about the lack of repairs in his apartment, according to court documents we read.

Finally, at the beginning of this year he contacted HPD, which gave Piller a month to do some of the repairs. More than a month later, nothing had changed, so Fontenelle took the landlord to housing court.

“He’s gonna keep taking you to court until you move out,” said Fontenelle. “Then he’ll fix up the place a little bit for the next people and jack up the rent.

“I mean the man deserves his money, but he’s got to give me some services.”

In a phone interview, Ross said that keeping on top of all the repairs in a building with 50 units is a challenge, but that they are constantly working to make conditions better for their tenants. Since we began working on this story, management has renovated two of the units. They’ve arranged for workers to come and paint Fontenelle’s unit and fix the broken stove door.

But the need for repairs is ongoing. Since these problems were fixed, the number of HPD violations in the building went from 148 to 152 this week.

The building has 50 units. Three complaints per unit is standard for buildings around the city, said Ross. But of the buildings in the neighborhood of similar size, most we found had around one-third of the violations in Piller’s buildings.

***

Life at 2860 Grand Concourse from Bronx Ink on Vimeo.

At 2654 Valentine Ave. in the Bronx, men loiter in front of the grilled gate that closes off the front courtyard. The front door of the building gapes open, as if by a strong wind.

Many windows in its upper floor windows are broken and what glass remains is covered with blue-ink graffiti. Rodent feces are visible on the ground floor. On a recent Saturday, a woman sat on the steps leading up to the fourth floor with a syringe beside her, bobbing her head and mumbling, too lost to notice the disdainful look a tenant shot at her as he climbed down the stairs.

Inside the apartments, tenants complain of mold, caving ceilings, crumbling walls, mildew and sinking floors. The building has 164 open HPD violations, of which 44 are hazardous Class C violations. These include rodents, lead wall paint, cascading water from a seventh floor bathroom leak, and lack of heating, among others.

Piller owns 2654 Valentine Ave. and the adjacent 237 E 194th St., registered under Valentine Apartments L.L.C. He owns more buildings under different company names—2860 Grand Concourse and 2874 Grand Concourse, five blocks away, and 2501 Davidson Ave., on the other side of the Grand Concourse. But of all the buildings Piller owns in North Fordham, Valentine Apartments is the most visibly distressed.

William Plasenia and his wife have lived in apartment 4D for the past 13 years. A corner of the ceiling in one bedroom has burst open. The adjacent wall bulges with the weight of water pushing down. The kitchen floor slopes towards toward the center, like an upturned roof pitch. Plasenia says it is sinking. The bathroom ceiling sags and its peeled plaster flails mid air.

Plasenia, who hails from Cuba, speaks little English. He gestured to say that he fears the bathroom ceiling will collapse on his head soon. None of the violations in his apartment, however, show up in HPD files because he doesn’t know enough English to understand the system so said he does not file complaints.

At the buildings we visited, many tenants were non-English speakers who were unwilling to open their doors to strangers. In other cases, tenants were confused about the process for filing violations. Many said they simply call 311, which does not keep track of the number of complaints.

***

How can landlords get away with scores of violations? from Brooklyn Ink on Vimeo.

Even if tenants complain to HPD—Piller’s tenants have made thousands of complaints—there is nothing the HPD can do to bar a landlord from owning or renting property out to tenants.

Under HPD’s Alternative Enforcement Program, introduced in 2007, the HPD can enforce repairs on buildings it deems “distressed” or “hazardous.” Failure to comply could result in a lien being placed against the building. Of the 200 buildings on the most recent list, published on Feb. 15 of this year, none were Piller’s.

HPD can also refer buildings on this list to the district attorney for prosecution. The Kings County DA’s office could find no record of Moshe Piller in their referral files. The HPD declined to comment on whether they had referred Piller to the prosecutor.

In the meantime, the city continues to send some tenants to buildings we identified as Piller’s as part of its housing program for the homeless.

“You know, it’s very bittersweet sometimes as we send people into these buildings,” said Juanita Fernandez, a housing specialist at The Concourse House Shelter, who sent tenants to 2860 Grand Concourse, a Piller building, as recently as four months ago.

“We have no choice but to move people out after six months,” she said. “But yes, some of the places we send them to. I wouldn’t want to live there.”

***

In the absence of a clear enforcement mechanism, some tenants have organized to put pressure on Piller to fix the buildings.

In 2006, tenants drove two school buses to Piller’s home in Brooklyn and picketed there for a day, according to Xiamara Mejias, 40, who lives in apartment 3B at 2654 Valentine with her husband and three daughters. She’s the tenant organizer for the building and has been fighting the landlord for the past 10 years, relaying tenants’ grievances to authorities and the mortgage holder.

When they went to Piller’s house, his neighbors poked out of their homes to ask what was going on. “We told them your neighbor is a slumlord,” Mejias said. “And they started throwing eggs on us. Eggs!”

Since tenants took their paperwork and pictures to the building’s mortgage holder, the New York Community Bank, Piller has gotten better at repairing violations, according to Mejias. The open violations listed at the HPD today are half what they were in 2006.

Mejias said her bathroom still leaks and the hair salon beneath her apartment has complained. “This has been broken for a year,” she said pointing to her front door, which looks like someone had broken in. What is worse, the front door still doesn’t lock.

But Mejias also sometimes makes it impossible for repairs to get done. The piping in her bathroom is so old and rotten that it needs to be replaced. But when the super agreed to repair it, she told him, “I got three daughters who need to bathe every day. You can come in this morning … you can dig whatever, but when I come back home. I have to find a bathroom in there.’”

The hair salon eventually installed a ceiling to remedy the problem, but full repairs were never done.

Other tenants also get in the way of keeping the building in good repair. A week ago, all the hallway walls were painted a fresh round layer of brown yellow but someone has already sprayed graffiti on the fourth floor walls.

“It is like [the tenants] see this disrepair and they add on it,” said Mejias.

***

Moshe Piller was once one of the city’s most notorious landlords and has now become one of dozens that the city’s agencies just don’t have the time or resources to deal with. But though he may have receded from the public gaze in the last few years, for his tenants the problems in his buildings are real and unlikely to go away any time soon.

More shocking is that these problems are common in far too many buildings in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Like Eta Eckstein, many of the city’s residents have decided that for reasons of financial necessity and fear they’d rather make due than make trouble. Thanks to the weaknesses in a system that was meant to protect them, a place doesn’t have to be comfortable, clean or even safe to call it home.

The Yankees may get the attention, but softball fields like this one in Pelham Bay Park are where the real Bronx legends are made. (Ryan Tracy/The Bronx Ink)

As many older observers tell it, softball in the Bronx was most popular in the mid-1980s, when games could attract crowds of hundreds of people and wagers on various teams ranged up to $10,000 on a single contest.

One softball team had a particular penchant for taking that cash in those years: an aptly-named crew known as The Bandits. As their veteran players tell it, their team was so unstoppable that it had to travel to Brooklyn, Connecticut, or New Jersey to find a game. They once changed their team name to be admitted to a league that wouldn’t have accepted them otherwise, for fear they would trounce the competition.

Today most of the original Bandits are in their 50s. One is 65. But the guys can’t stay away from the diamond. The team reunited last year and is now in the midst of its second season this century, playing games every Saturday in the Bronx Stars league at Pelham Bay Park. The Bandits today are a combination of veterans from the squads of the 1980s and a handful of 20-something sluggers. While the younger guys man the outfield to do most of the legwork, the older players yell the loudest and seem to collectively hang on every pitch. For them, donning the grey-and-black jerseys on Saturdays is about a break from wives and girlfriends in favor of time with sons and old friends. It’s about taking pleasure in those non-stop insults and chuckling over a beer after the game ends on a sunny afternoon. And if they finish ahead of the 23 other teams in the league, so be it. They were division winners last year and lost in the playoffs to the eventual champions.

Yankee Stadium may get the most attention, but for many Bronxites the real baseball happens on fields like the ones where The Bandits play. Here are the characters that bring those fields alive.

The Survivor

Cheo Romero woke up with a hole in his throat, unable to breathe or talk, with surgical wounds on his neck and leg, scared, depressed, suicidal, a feeding tube poking out of his abdomen and an IV needle in his arm. That was February 2009, days after doctors had discovered a bulging tumor in Romero’s jaw. That was the beginning of the battle.

Cancer Survivor Cheo Romero has returned to the softball field, hoping to add another framed championship jersey to his collection. (Ryan Tracy/The Bronx Ink)

Next came several months of an experimental treatment that combined radiation and chemotherapy. The former bodyguard and Bandits centerfielder spent drugged-up day after drugged-up day in the hospital, unable to go home because he couldn’t bear the pain.

Romero’s people were fixtures in the hospital room during those hard months: his ex-fiance and mother-in-law – both still close to him when the cancer was diagnosed – his son Rolando, and his softball teammates. Manager Edgar Aviles came to see him several times a week.

“Sometimes I’d go to sleep and I’d wake up and he’d be in the chair,” Romero remembered. “He used to tell guys, ‘I don’t think Cheo’s going to make it.’”

Making it wasn’t a sure thing. Doctors had warned Romero that the even if the emergency surgery needed to remove the tumor was effective, it could leave him eating out of a straw or through a feeding tube for the rest of his life. Few imagined he would play softball again.

But Romero had other ideas. He would surprise his nurses by disconnecting his own IV and feeding tube to walk around the hospital for exercise. He did pull-ups on the chain above his bed, startling other patients.

Romero, who is 51, hasn’t returned to work, but he lives for Saturdays. Now he not only chews some of his meals, but wraps up that feeding tube so it doesn’t impede his ability to pitch. He stays away from playing the outfield or running the bases, but he can still swing the bat. Best of all Romero’s cancer is in remission.

“I used to look out my window and cry,” Romero said. “Now I’m playing every game.”

The Manager

The Bandits's dugout is a rowdy place, but there's no question manager Edgar Aviles is the man in charge. (Ryan Tracy/The Bronx Ink)

When Edgar Aviles broke his ankle sliding into third base, his teammates thought of one thing: revenge.

The Bandits’ dugout was a dangerous place to be in the 1980s. The team, energized for softball games that, at that time, they played throughout the week, thrived on more than just verbal jibes. The guys were fans of the World Wrestling Federation and wouldn’t be shy to throw an elbow and catch a teammate off-guard.

As Bandits member Frankie Rodriguez remembers it, Edgar Aviles was among the most formidable wrestling opponents. But this time, as Aviles lay prone waiting for an ambulance, he couldn’t fight back. And with the rest of his body intact, it was open season for the rest of the Bandits.

“While he was laying on the floor, everybody was doing elbow drops on him, eye gouges, whatever it took just to get back at him,” Rodriguez recalled. As the ambulance pulled away, the team flagged it down. The paramedics stopped, “thinking they were going to give him something. The guy opens the door, and (a Bandits player) came and eye gouged him again. He left (for) the hospital in pain, but he was laughing, he was laughing the whole way.

“I mean it’s amazing, how you going to be there with a broken ankle and be able to laugh at things like that? That will tell you the kind of guy he is,” Rodriguez said.

It’s Aviles who keeps order amidst the trash-talking personalities in the dugout. After decades of strict managing (he once walked off with the player’s cash after it took a threat of forfeiting the game to get them to pay an umpire’s fee), he has earned their loyalty. The men on the team may call the shots at their day jobs, but everyone knows who sets the lineup on Saturday.

Edgar Aviles memorialized The Bandits on his left arm. (Ryan Tracy/The Bronx Ink)

“Today I showed up late,” said Gilbert Rivera, 55, on a recent morning in Pelham Bay Park. “He’s not going to start me.”

Aviles, whose son Mike is an infielder for the Kansas City Royals, says he’s more relaxed than in the Bandits’ earlier days. At 50, he’s stopped working as a customer service representative at a bank due to a heart condition. He looks forward to the games at the park to keep him occupied.

Today, “we come out to enjoy ourselves, goof around, talk about the old times,” Aviles said. “It’s not big deal if we win or not.”

Yet when Aviles talks about how the Bandits finished second-place in their division last year against a field of younger teams, it’s hard to miss a sense of satisfaction.

The Mummy

During the week, Milton Pacheco is, in his own words, “The Broker” of real estate in the Bronx. On Saturdays, he’s something else.

“They call me ‘The Mummy’ because it takes me about 45 minutes to get wrapped up. I gotta wrap up my ankles, wrap up my knees, wrap up my back,” Pacheco said while preparing to pitch on a recent Sunday. “Bunch of assholes, anyways,” he added with a smile.

Milton Pacheco, 65, is the oldest Bandits player. Teammates call him 'The Mummy.' (Ryan Tracy/The Bronx Ink)

Pacheco, who is 65, is regarded as the senior member of the Bandits squad. He remembers how the team used to have to travel outside the Bronx to find opponents. Once, the Bandits changed their team name so that they could be admitted to a league that wouldn’t have accepted them for fear that they would trounce the competition.

“We had a reputation, nobody wanted to play us,” he said. “Now we’re old and everybody wants to play us, but we’re still pretty good.”

The team’s competitive fire hasn’t subsided with age. Pacheco was tossed from a game in April after arguing balls and strikes from the pitcher’s mound. His replacement, Joe Capello, got berated for giving up too many walks. Said teammate Gilbert Rivera after the game: “he led their team in RBIs.”

Indeed, after the game is when the real fun starts. The guys sit on benches in the shade, sipping beer and hurling insults. They dissect the most recent game, pointing out that as older guys, they can’t make unforced mistakes. They discuss a team trip to Florida. Everyone is home. What’s better than sitting in the park talking baseball?

“Sometimes we don’t see each other for six, seven months. You’ll meet up again in April, hang out, have a little brew after the game, you know what I mean?” Pacheco said. “We spend the whole day here. You look forward to it.”

Said Rodriguez: “I do anything I can to be part of the team. I keep score, I coach the bases, just to be here. And there’s a lot of guys like that … It’s in your blood.

“They’re gonna bury me in the mound when I die,” he added, laughing. “That’s the way it is.”

Carlos Ramos (Photo courtesy of Carlos Ramos)

“My journey was not an easy one,” said Ramos, 40, during a telephone interview Friday. As a teenager, he was sentenced to a short time in prison for a drug-related offense. “Eventually I did some soul-searching and I realized there was more to life,” he said.

Since that realization, Ramos said he has been dedicated to helping others in his community through his involvement in public service initiatives and grassroots organizations. He first became involved with a local Hispanic Democrats club in Westchester in 1998 and has since worked for national campaigns in Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania before  returning to the Bronx to work for  William C. Thompson Jr., the former New York City comptroller.

It was during the 2009 Thompson campaign for mayor that Ramos said he found the inspiration to step forward as a candidate for the Senate. “There was a guy there helping us every day,” Ramos said. “I was sharing my idea with him that I was thinking about running, and he told me ‘If you run against Ruben Diaz, I promise to give you my last $20.’ ” Ramos said the volunteer was HIV-positive, living in a homeless shelter, surviving off government benefits and hurting because of a lack of political leadership. “The only way you’re going to get some leadership in there is to run,” he said.

Ramos thinks there is currently a lack of political leadership in the Bronx because elected officials have been pushed into office without obtaining the proper skills to lead. He attributes this to weaknesses in the current education system in public schools — one of the top priorities that he proposes to tackle if elected to the state Senate.

“We need to be prepared for all these new people that are moving in and have the proper school system for them,” he said. “And we need to better prepare the next generation of Bronx leaders.”

Job creation and affordable housing are the other big issues for Ramos. Too many residential buildings, he said, are owned by conglomerates who are dealing with the fallout of the recession. “What happens is their problems trickle down to the tenants,” he said. “Sometimes their services are not being met, their apartments are not being painted, or there’s no repairs being done. Many times the tenants don’t even know how to address these problems.”

Ramos says there is a “stark contrast” between himself and Diaz, both in their political ideologies and in their campaign methods. Social media plays an important part in getting his messages across and he thinks that the use of digital technology gives him an edge in fundraising. Diaz could not be reached for comment on the coming election.

Ramos said he received about 4,000 messages, mostly supportive, on the day his campaign went live, and that he has attracted campaign donations from across the United States.

“When we run the campaign, we’re going to have the latest technology to be able to micro-target voters,” Ramos said. “Diaz doesn’t have that advantage. They run campaigns the old-fashioned way.”

In an age where indiscretions by public figures are also amplified by social media and the Internet, Ramos believes that the mistakes of his past will not become an issue. “Many people in my community can identify with some of my challenges, so I’m not even worried about it,” he said. “When I talk to people, I’m very frank about it. It’s not something that I’m hiding. They’re actually glad that I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Last month’s  unusually high temperatures  had New Yorkers taking shade in parks and even taking an early trek to the beaches of the still- chilly Atlantic.  The preview of sizzling heat anticipated for this summer was a rude awakening to what some say is a stark reality:  There isn’t enough green space to keep the city’s residents cool.

The Bronx Initiative for Energy and Environment is hoping to change that. The group is a non-profit established by the  Bronx borough president and the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp. Borough President Ruben Diaz has been involved in efforts to reduce pollution in the Bronx, going so far as to require  designs that are certified as sustainable for any housing development receiving capital financing.  On May 17, as part of Bronx Week, New Yorkers can tour five of 13 grant-sponsored “green rooftops” in the Bronx.

“We’re open every day from April through October, and anyone who wants to come see a green rooftop can just call me up and I’d be happy to give them a tour,” said Kate Shackford, executive vice president of the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp.

Shackford says that when she was first shown the plans for the green rooftops, it was love at first sight. “Holistic environmental technology that addresses water and air pollution, doesn’t get any better than that,” Shackford said.  The earliest installations are from 2006 and are modeled after German guidelines and initial technology for rooftop gardens.  “Their guidelines, work and weather patterns are similar enough to the northeast that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel too much, though in Germany the cost is about one tenth of what it costs here,” Shackford said.

The U.S. Green Building Council  developed the “green” building certification system known as LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.   “Green buildings save energy, reduce CO2 emissions, conserve water, improve the health of their occupants, increase productivity, cost less to operate and maintain and increasingly cost no more to build than conventional structures,” said Ashkley Katz, communications manager at the council.

Since 2001, LEED has become a nationally accepted benchmark, providing building owners and operators with what Katz called an “objective, verifiable definition of green,” along with the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable  impact on their buildings’ performance.  LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability, which has become highly popular in the past decade for saving water, materials and energy.

Rooftop gardens reduce a ” heat island” effect by roofs that absorb heat and radiate it into the air.

“On a hot summer day the black membrane on a rooftop will be at 170 degrees,” Shackford said, “but with the garden, the roof is cooled down to almost 98 degrees lowering ambient temperature, while reducing pollution.”

By pollution, Shackford is referring to the thick black smoke dumped into the Bronx air from buildings all around.  Particularly important was the need to see a reduction in high rates of asthma in Bronx County, which also has the highest levels of air pollution.

In a January article in the Daily News, Kevin Cromar, a public health fellow at the New York University Law School’s Institute for Public Integrity, said that lowering the pollutants released into the air by heating fuels could lower health risks for everyone.  “Every time we cover an acre of land or vacant lot with a building we are destroying the ability for land to filter water and air; that is unless we put green resources around it that can restore natural ability to clean up pollutants,” Shackford said.

A city contract only adds to the sustainability of the entire project, Shackford said.  Sustainable South Bronx’s Smart Roof Project  has been training staff in the  hope of  launching a business that would employ local residents to install and maintain the smart roofing technologies.  For at least the first four years, some gardens must be constantly irrigated and weeded if not planted as early as April.

One of the green roofs to be toured is an intensive green roof complex for low-income grandparents raising grandchildren.  Located on 851 Prospect Ave., the 8,000-square-foot space serves as a getaway for the elderly residents, while the children in their charge are at school.  “It’s an oasis for them,” Shackford said.

Bronx Walk of Fame signs on Grand Concourse (Photo by Ian Thomson/Bronx Ink)

While Hollywood’s Walk of Fame is known around the world, few people have heard of the Bronx counterpart, which stretches south along the Grand Concourse from 161^st Street to 140^th Street. Even many Bronxites, it seems, are unaware of the tourist attraction hovering from the street lights above their heads.

“I’ve never heard of it, and I pass here a lot,” said Louis Gonzalez, a resident of nearby High Bridge, as he waited for a bus outside the Bronx County Building — the very spot where the walk begins.

On May 23, the borough hosts its 14^th annual induction ceremony where four Bronx-born public figures will see their names go up on signs as they join 82 existing inductees recognized for their lifetime achievements. Singer Jerry Vale, flautist Joanie Madden, former Congressman Herman Badillo and magazine founder Edward Lewis will be honored at the event, after which the quartet will serve as grand marshals for a parade along Mosholu Parkway to mark the end of Bronx Week 2010.

Doris Quinones, executive director of the Bronx Tourism Council, describes the ceremony as a “great Bronx Week tradition” that bestows the borough’s highest honor upon the inductees. Ruben Diaz Jr., the borough president, will unveil four signs to be placed on street lights at the intersection of Grand Concourse and 161^st Street for one year before they are moved to a permanent place along the walk’s lengthening route.

This year’s additions will join a list including high-profile names like boxer Jake LaMotta, the subject of the Robert De Niro film “Raging Bull,” singer Luther Vandross, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

According to Quinones, of the Bronx Tourism Council, the president had pushed for changes to this year’s Bronx Week to increase the involvement of the local community. The May date, one month earlier than in previous years, allows children from more than 80 local schools to take part in the final day’s parade and help to raise awareness of an event that aims to celebrate the borough’s multicultural identity.

“The four inductees are such a beautiful reflection of the diversity of the Bronx,” Quinones said. “We place the signs high up for everyone to see and look up to.”

Still, it appears that many locals have yet to notice. Monique Clarke, a nurse at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, said she had never heard of the Bronx Walk of Fame despite living in the borough for her entire life. She laughed when the signs above her were brought to her attention.

“I didn’t even look up,” said Clarke, before offering her advice on how the walk could generate greater interest. “Al Pacino’s from the Bronx. They need to put him in there.” Pacino spent part of his childhood in the South Bronx.

The walk and other Bronx attractions are beginning to gather more attention, Quinones said.  “Writers are making reference to it,” she said. “They’re telling travelers to leave Manhattan otherwise you miss out on what the real New York is about. There are a growing number of people coming up to the Bronx.”

Out in the plaza on East 161^st Street opposite Quinones’ office window, Dutch tourists Ilse Van Der Lei and Maike Kroese were reading their New York City guidebook and contemplating their next move. The two girls, visiting the city on vacation from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said they wanted to escape from Manhattan to see New York’s other neighborhoods, but they too were unaware that the Walk of Fame started a few yards away from where they sat.

“It sounds like a good idea,” Van Der Lei said. “They should put it in Lonely Planet.”

Bronx residents know these churches by the loud singing and yelling heard on the sidewalk on Sundays.  Watch this video to see what it’s like inside the three-hour-long service of Henry’s Pentecostal church.

Gladys Wright was lying in her bed on Sunday morning and could not fall asleep because she was waiting for her great-granddaughter, Quanisha, 16, to come home. Instead she got a phone call from Quanisha’s friend who told her that she had been shot at a birthday party in an apartment on Weeks Avenue, four blocks away from her apartment.

“I’m always praying. When you’re out there on the street, you never know if you’re gonna make it back home,” Wright, 86, said on Monday as she ate deli sandwiches for lunch with Quanisha’s brothers, Hassan, 13 and Trayquan, 14. Next to her sat Quanisha’s empty chair as a subtle painful sign of her loss.

Gladys Wright, 86, the great-grandmother of Quanisha Wright who was killed on Sunday morning at a birthday party sits in her apartment in mourning on Monday. (Delphine Reuter/ The Bronx Ink)

Quanisha who had just celebrated her 16^th birthday on Friday joined her friend Marvin Wiggins, 15, Saturday evening to celebrate his godson’s first birthday. They stayed after the party ended around 9 p.m. to help clean up then started an after-party with their friends.

“They wanted to have a little time” for themselves, said Eva Reed, the baby’s grandmother, who lives in the building where the party took place.

Around 1:15 a.m., said people who were present, two drunken men arrived at the party and opened fire. They were allegedly upset about a disagreement that took place earlier in the evening and were seeking revenge. Wiggins was shot when he threw himself between the shooters and Doreen Eleazer, Reed’s neighbor.

As panicked party-goers fled the scene, Reed said, Quanisha was shot in the stomach and ran toward the backdoor where she crouched down next to her friend Shonta Crosby. Both men ran out.

According to police,two men, Dexter “Lil Dex” Green, 20, and Robert “Jacob” Mitchell, 24, were arrested Monday and charged with murder in the shootings.

“They took something precious from me. She was my treasure,” Wright, who was Quanisha’s guardian, said of the shooters. “I want them to be punished.”

Monday morning, Hassan Wright, was sitting on his sister’s bed, reading the news of her death in the paper. He was at his aunt’s house when his sister was shot. He described her as “unique, smart and beautiful,” and said that he misses her.

Hassan Wright, 13, lays on his sister, Quanisha's bed the day after she was killed during a birthday party. (Dunia Kamal/The Bronx Ink)

Quanisha loved dancing and planned on improving her step-dancing skills with friends over next summer. “She was always there for everybody,” said Wright’s friend, Delores Shazeia Pinkston, 16.

Pinkston also knew Marvin Wiggins. She left a potato chip bag for him by the candle memorial set up at his building’s entrance. Friends and family hung a white T-shirt in the building’s entrance, on which they wrote condolences. Marvin and Quanisha went to the same school from sixth to eight grade, said Marvin’s mother, Andrea Wiggins.

On Monday afternoon, Wiggins’ apartment was filled with family and friends in mourning. They watched the news on television hoping they could learn more about the crime.

“Marvin was a loving child. He didn’t want anybody being hurt and now he’s gone,” she said before shouting and wailing in anguish.

When Andrea called the police, to ask about the suspects, she was pleased to hear that an arrest was made. The memory of her son dying in her husband’s arms makes her very angry at the neighborhood’s rampant crime.

“All I want is to stop violence and get guns off the streets,” she said.

Delores Shazeia Pinkston, 16, a friend of Marvin Wiggins who was shot and killed on Sunday morning writes on a memorial in the hallway of his apartment building. (Delphine Reuter/ The Bronx Ink)

“You have put our backs to the wall,” said Ethel Walsh. “We are living on fixed incomes that don’t go up.” Walsh has been retired for nearly 12 years. Reliant on Social Security benefits, she says the increase will take even more money out of her purse. Housing expenses increase by an average of 3 percent every year. The proposed increase in water rates would add much more to that rate.

With nothing but glasses of cool clear New York City drinking water as a distraction, Mehul Patel and Alan Moss listened intently and took notes. Both were appointed as voting members of the Water Board, and along with four other members, they will decide whether the increase will be implemented by the Department of Environmental Protection. The Water Board sets the water and sewer rates for the city.

Walsh says her bill has gone up every year, so much so that she doesn’t even look at it anymore. Her husband, James, refused to attend Thursday night. “He says this is a done deal,” Walsh said. Walsh thinks her testimony won’t really change the panelists minds, still she wanted to make sure the Water Board understood her anger. “Shame on you, shame on, shame on you,” Walsh shouted, jabbing her pointed finger at the panel.

Voting members of the water board, Mehul Patel and Alan Moss listen to residents complaints against the proposed water rate increase(Lynsey Chutel/The Bronx Ink)

“You are the group of guys who do the voting,” Tony Cannata said. “I’m asking you to really listen, to consider what people said.” As president of the Waterbury-La Sale Community Association, Cannata attended an earlier hearing in April and was skeptical that the voting members would pay attention to community needs.

Michael Vivian waved his bill at the panel. He received it on the same day he received the notice of the public hearing. With a water bill of $80.86 for his 47.32 cubic-foot water consumption, the increase will make his bill just under $90 a month in 2011.

Water rates are already high in the Bronx because homes are larger in the borough, according to the University Neighborhood Housing Program, a non-profit affiliated with Fordham University. The group surveyed 919 housing units in the mainland borough and found that the average water bill was $934.20 per unit per year. The average water bill in the city was just over $700 annually.

Johanna Kletter, financial director of the housing program, reminded the panelists that she had submitted alternative strategies to the DEP, with little feedback. “Two years ago we released a study calling for reform and asking the important question: Can NYC achieve affordable water rates, promote conservation and control capital costs” Kletter said at the hearing. “No, no, no has been the answer to this question for far too long.”

In a press release the Department of Environmental Protection said that the 12.9 percent increase was an improvement on the 14.3 percent increase that was projected in 2009. “Clearly it is hard on customers to pay more, especially during tough economic times,”  Cas Holloway, commissioner of environmental protection, said in the press release that first announced the proposed increase. “Still, we must continue to fund critical projects that protect our drinking water and effectively treat the 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater that New Yorkers produce every day. New York City’s water is safe, healthy and high in quality. Keeping it that way requires substantial investments.”

The DEP intends to complete three plants by 2011. The Croton Filtration Plant will cost households $33 a year, the Ultraviolet Disinfection Plant $18 a year and the Newtown Creek Treatment Plant $48 a year. As of 2011, these plants and other federally mandated investments, will account for $177 of the household water bill every year.

But many in the audience felt that the DEP was using the rate increases to raise its revenue. “Bluntly, water rates are now just one more revenue stream for the city’s general budget,” Frank Vernuccio Jr. said. “The board itself admits to a $194 million straight transfer of funds to the general city budget.”

Vernuccio argued that New York City had seen harsher economic climates and that a water rate increase was unnecessary because residents had already tightened their belts to save money. New Yorkers had decreased their daily water consumption from 200 gallons per capita in the 1990s to 155 gallons in 2001, Vernuccio said. Currently, he said, New Yorkers consume four gallons less than the national average. “New Yorkers have done all that was asked of them,” Vernuccio said amid applause from the audience.

This story was corrected to address the following errors and clarifications:
Cas Calloway is the commissioner of environmental protection, not the executive director. A water bill of  $80.86 would be about $90 with a 12.9 percent increase;  and the Water Board sets the water and sewer rates for the city.

The trio of lion cubs born in January has made their much-anticipated debut at the Bronx Zoo.

The cubs, two females and one male remain nameless and the zoo is calling on the general public to submit their suggestions for names by tomorrow.

You can stop by the zoo to check out these cubs between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. The hours will be extended as the cubs acclimate to their new outdoor home.

The final list of names will be revealed on Sunday, May 16.

Click HERE to submit your suggestions.

End of semester examinations and summer vacation aren’t the only things on teachers’ and parents’ minds at P.S. 86 Kingsbridge Heights School in the Northwest Bronx. Prompted by cuts to the state budget leaving the city $5 billion short, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today plans to further trim the public school system budget.

While schools are not the only institutions affected by the cuts, they are among those that will be hit the hardest, as some 6,700 educators’ jobs will be lost when the measures come into force in September. This number includes 300 teacher’s aides.

On Thursday, teachers and parents enjoying ice cream outside school were just learning about the latest cuts, but the news hardly surprised them.

“The first thing they do is cut services for children and the elderly, it’s very archaic the way they always attack the weakest members of society,” said T. Pannell, who teaches kindergarten through third grade and whose daughter is also in kindergarten at the school. Pannell added she is not worried about her own job and praised the principal of Kingsbridge Heights for his management of the school’s budget, but she said she is more concerned about the broader implications of the trend.

Kingsbridge Heights School is one of the largest public schools in the nation. (Speri/BronxInk)

“It’s not a matter of making cuts but of being more efficient,” she said. “They are all in a ‘this has to go’ mentality, rather than ‘this has to be tightened,’ whether it’s with schools or with public housing.”

Pannell added that concern will grow even further when teachers and parents realize the scale of the cuts.

“Are we going to feel this? For sure,” she said. “But to see how much we are going to feel it we’ll have to wait until September.”

While some cuts seem inevitable, many agree there should be other ways to get around the problem.

“Personally I’d never get into the ‘the sky is falling and we’ll have to have layoffs’ mode,” Dee Alpert, publisher of The Special Education Muckraker, wrote in an e-mail. The website is devoted to special- education issues. Alpert suggested instead that little is being done to ensure greater efficiency. “I’d scream like mad about the well-documented fraud, waste and corruption and demand to know exactly what’s being done to end it.”

Being on the receiving end of the bureaucratic knife is not new to New York City’s public schools, and while many acknowledge that times are hard for everyone, they express concern and frustration that children always seem to be the first to pay the price.

“We don’t need any more school cuts, we have too many kids cramped in these classrooms,” said L. Delacruz, a sixth-grade teacher at Bronx Middle School 206, whose son is a third-grader at Kingsbridge Heights. Delacruz said that teachers and staffers alike are already overwhelmed as it is with one teacher often having as many as 30 students in each classroom. “That’s a lot of kids,” she added. “You can’t get them to learn anything.”

Class size has been an increasingly pressing issue in the city’s overcrowded schools.

“Class sizes are growing at an accelerating pace. Now we face the prospect of losing 6,000 teachers, as the student population grows,” said Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, a non-profit dedicated to reducing the number of students per classroom. “Together that is going to mean increases in class sizes to their largest in 20 years.”

Haimson added that the city’s money is wasted on bureaucracy and contradictory measures.

“The Department of Education is spending $5 million on recruiting and training new teachers,” she said. “And at the same time they want to lay off 6,000 teachers.”

Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, agreed.

“These cuts are particularly problematic in the city, which has spent the last three, four years really hiring new high quality teachers,” he said.

Others turn to those city agencies that were saved from the cuts to try to understand why schools are suffering so badly.

While Bloomberg had originally planned to cut 892 officer positions from the already downsized police department, he decided to leave the police untouched.

“Now the police is not getting cut because of all these terrorist threats,” said Delacruz, who admitted she wouldn’t know where to suggest cuts that would minimize damage to New Yorkers. “We shouldn’t see any cuts at all,” she said.

But the decision to cut teachers over police officers may have less to do with terrorism and more to do with financial interest, some suggest.

“This is a fiscal decision, police starting salaries are just much lower than ours,” said Mary Paranac, a fifth-grade teacher who has been working at Kingsbridge Heights for three years.

Mary Paranac with some of her students at Kingsbridge Heights School in the Bronx. (Speri/BronxInk)

Paranac added that she is especially worried about the criteria for these cuts, a concern raised by many. Some have suggested using test scores to determine layoffs, while others recommend the decision is based on seniority, though both methods leave teachers fearing for their jobs.

“I’m concerned about how this is going to happen,” Paranac said, adding that she thinks the cuts are likely to affect new teachers in the Teach for America program or other young teachers who have been on the job for only one or two years. Like other teachers, Paranac praised the Kinsgbridge Heights principal for his devotion to his staff, but said many Bronx schools are not as fortunate. “I have many friends who are scared about the safety of their jobs,” she said.

Laying off teachers based on seniority may affect the quality of the teaching, some fear.

“I think the research suggests that there is no systematic relationship between experience and effectiveness in the classroom,” said Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, who opposed cuts by seniority and also suggested that the correlation between class size and quality of learning is not as strong as many believe. “The problem is that we are going to have a reduction in teachers’ quality,” he said.

While some laid-off teachers may be able to find employment elsewhere, many end up leaving education altogether.

“My sister-in-law was a teacher in the East Bronx but she was laid off with the last cuts,” said Esly Griffin, a young mother of two, at Kingsbridge Heights on her way to pick up her 8-year old son. “Now she works in a hotel. But that’s not her job. She went to college to be a teacher.”

Additional reporting by Sunil Joshi and Shreeya Sinha.

“I cry, I pray, but it’s tough,” Addy said. Along with her business partner, Addy opened the store, less than a block away from the intersection of White Plains Avenue and 233rd Street, almost three years ago. She said her rent began at $2,080 and has increased to $2, 165. Hit hard by the economic recession, her business has suffered, and she has yet to record any gains from the store. In the last few weeks she said she has tried to negotiate, but  her landlord, has taken her to court instead.

“I called him, I pleaded with him to come down a little bit,” Addy said. “I said to him, ‘It’s not your fault nobody knew the economy would be like this.’ ” She said her debt to her landlord has climbed to more than $8,000, including costs of maintenance and taxes, which are divided among the five other store owners in this commercial building.

The landlord, Jeffrey Cohen, declined to comment. “That’s between myself and my tenant,” he said when asked about rent disputes with Addy.

Last week, City Councilman Robert Jackson introduced the Small Business Survival Bill, which if passed, would  give business owners like Addy the right of arbitration to more effectively negotiate their leases.

“Small businesses right now have no say whatsoever in the terms of their lease, so when the lease term comes up, the landlord has total say,” said Robert Bieder, chairperson of the Bronx Merchants Coalition and a member of the Coalition of Small Businesses. “Simply put:  It is the right to arbitration in the commercial lease renewal process,” Bieder said of the bill’s potential power.

Addy said she wished there had been such a program in place when she signed her five-year lease. Instead, she said, she took the word of her landlord, who ran the shop before her, and convinced her that she would be making a profit that would cover her expenses. With four rows of shelves cramped into just about 120 square feet, the narrow store stocks everything  from underwear to detergent and even traditional clothes from Addy’s native Ghana.

Addy said she had taken out more than $50,000 in loans to keep her business afloat. She works night shifts as a hospital nurse technician so that she can pay her debts.  “My pay was five hundred and forty-something dollars, ” she said of her most recent paycheck. “I took $500 to pay for the merchandise. I don’t have money in the bank. It’s about time we were helped, we put money into this economy.”

Cohen also declined to give his opinion on the new bill or what it might mean for his commercial properties.

Local activists are  already trying to mobilize small businesses to gather enough support for the bill. But this is not the first time the bill has been up for debate.  Last year, District 7 Councilman Robert Jackson brought it to the floor. By the end of  the City Council cycle in December, however, the bill had not been voted on and withered away in the political process.

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn argued that she could not support a bill that she felt was fundamentally illegal. Last year, Quinn said that forcing landlords to binding arbitration would encroach on their property rights, according to the Downtown Express. At the Bronx Chamber of Commerce’s monthly luncheon in early April, Quinn’s position had not changed. “I can’t say I’ll pass a bill that so many of our staff and our highest lawyers say cannot be legal,” Quinn said. Instead, Quinn said that the council was looking into alternative legislation to protect small businesses in the city.

Jackson said he believed that opposition from the mayor’s office and pressure from the real estate lobby prevented the bill from being passed last year, even though 34 out of 51 council members  supported the bill. “In the last cycle, when push came to shove, there were not enough votes to move it,” said Jackson. “There [was] a lot of pressures put on a lot of people.” This time Jackson intends to build support “from the ground up.”

Steve Null, a former business owner and activist for the Small Business Survival Bill, said the stalling was political. “Our attorney thinks it’s a red herring,” Null said. “It was a last-second move to stop the bill.”

Null said his attorneys had provided Speaker Quinn’s office with the necessary documentation to prove the legality of the bill. He said his calls for a forum to assess legal issues surrounding the measure were ignored.  “They stopped the bill because she does not want to regulate the landlords,” he said.

Some sources alleged that Speaker Quinn may have rejected the bill because it is in her own political benefit to maintain the real estate lobby of landlords. Speaker Quinn’s office responded to this  by reiterating her December 2009 position. “Council Member Jackson’s legislation before the council, while well intentioned, is not within the council’s power,”  Quinn’s office said in a written statement. The statement suggested alternative legislation that would create a unit within the City’s Small Business Services that would assist in lease negotiation.

In an effort to bring attention to the need for such a bill, the U.S.A Latin Chamber of Commerce surveyed 937 Latino-owned businesses in New York City from November 2008 to January 2009. More than half of all businesses surveyed, both professional services, such as attorney and accounting offices, and smaller “mom and pop stores,”  like corner bodegas and hardware stores, complained that their businesses ran the risk of closing because of high rents and operating costs.

Almost three quarters of the small business owners in the survey said they would have to cut back their workers’ hours because renting their storefronts was too expensive.

“The mom and pop stores are at the heart of those communities; they support your Little Leagues, they support your church groups,” said Bieder, who owns Westchester Plumbing Supply with his two younger brothers. “We need to help them stay in business. There are tenants that have been here for 40 or 50 years,” Bieder said. “Now there is a vacancy problem due to lease negotiations. We’re losing about 8,000 a year.”

For now Addy is determined to keep her store open. “It has become a burden on us, but we are going to pay him for five years,” she said.

Bollella, the owner of Globus Cork, a flooring factory in the South Bronx, is cork’s biggest booster, and quick to recite a litany of its uses, from sandals to the space shuttle – it’s used as a heat shield in the rocket boosters, according to NASA. It’s also found in gaskets, baseball cores, platform shoes, shuttlecocks and bedding for pet lizards.

Seated on a stool, with long black hair, reading glasses, and a long-sleeve T-shirt, the heavyset 58-year-old entrepreneur looks more like an aging drummer than the cork impresario who heads “the premier U.S. manufacturer of colored cork tiles,” as his website proclaims. He sells cork in 38 colors, and judging by the paint cans strewn across his desk, is concocting more.

Bollella laid out his vision while burning through cigarettes wrapped with a cork-colored filter. As Bollella sees it, cork’s time has come.

Fifteen years ago, Ken Bollella wondered, why does cork tiling only come in beige? Bollella, who now heads a cork painting factory, says, "Nobody's ever done what I do." (Sam Fellman/The Bronx Ink)

Cork, in his estimation, may be the perfect material: light, durable, quiet under foot, resistant to insects and fire, good insulation, and easy on the feet. Bollella, who suffers from severe sciatica, said he can stand on it for hours. And it’s environmentally sustainable.

Cork comes from the bark of cork oak trees grown predominantly in Spain and Portugal. Wine corks are punched out of the bark, with the excess processed into cork sheets. Bollella once made a pilgrimage to a Portuguese forest and watched lumberjacks shear off the bark with axes. Afterward, he touched one of the skinned trees.

“It feels like elephant skin – amazing,” he said with a touch of reverence in his thick Bronxese.

Everything can be corked. Take the yoga mat – wouldn’t that be better with cork? Bollella rummaged behind some boxes and pulled out a large spool, spun with thin cork, the raw material for Korq Yoga and Pilates Mats, based in Brooklyn.

Music, not cork, was Bollella’s original muse. After growing up in Washington Heights, Bollella studied liberal arts at Manhattan Community College, but his main focus was rock guitar. When a rock career didn’t pan out after the better part of a decade, he learned carpentry – “Something had to pay the bills; rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t,” he said – and eventually wound up in flooring.

His cork odyssey began in 1995, when he owned a flooring shop in Manhattan, which sold cork tiles – brown, square, straight-edged and to his mind, boring. So he started dabbling with colors and designs in his apartment. By 2001, when he closed his store, he was ready to launch a colored-cork factory.

To drum up business for his launch, he fixed up his Manhattan apartment with a cork floor of brown mahogany (“Scotchwood,” as he named it) tiles in a herringbone layout, and hosted a wine and cheese party.

“I even got dressed in a suit. I hate suits,” Bollella said. Then the guests began to arrive. Many couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

“People would stare at the floor and say, ‘That’s not cork!’” Bollella said. “Trust me, it’s cork,” he would reply.

At first, no one recognized colored cork. Especially not the competition. At that point, big manufacturers like the Portuguese company Amorim still sold cork tiles exclusively au naturel with a wax finish; in appearance, their products seemed unchanged since cork flooring was invented more than a century ago. So when Bollella’s colored tile hit the market in 2001, it baffled his competitors, who either saw him as a Young Turk or a small-time kook. They even mocked the name of his company – Globus, a combination of the words global and U.S., which Bollella dreamed up over a vodka martini.

“Nobody’s ever done what I do,” Bollella mused for a second, while recalling those heady days. “In the beginning, it’s like I’m sitting on top of a goldmine, without a pick or a shovel.”

Globus Cork opened in 2001, when he rented a large basement on East 136th Street in the Bronx, hired a salesperson, and then set to work. Bollella became a one-man cork tile assembly line, placing orders for processed cork from Portugal, then sawing, painting and shipping it to designers and home owners. He remembers working 105-hour weeks. To avoid the trek back to Manhattan on the really late nights, he’d set up an air mattress on the finishing counter – the floor was always off-limits, he explained, because of all the rats.

Those sacrifices are paying off as his company’s sales rise year after year. Even in 2009, amid a deep downturn in new construction and remodeling, Bollella said his sales grew by 12 percent. He sells his tiles for an average of $7.25 per square foot and expects to sell more than 250,000 square feet this year. Sales are on target so far, he said.

Most of his recent business is institutional. The government of Barbados bought 18,000 square feet of mahogany tiles for a courthouse and the housing authority in Little Rock, Arkansas is remodeling the hallways of a 12-story apartment building with tile, courtesy of stimulus money. While he’s processing the Arkansas order, Bollella is trying to win a contract to floor three galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But after each sample he’s sent, the museum has replied they want something “grayer.”

Globus Cork has grown over the past three years to occupy large swaths of three buildings. A recent tour of his mostly subterranean empire began at East 136th Street and ended at the loading dock on East 137th Street, spanning an entire block. His company now has three salespeople – one based in Missouri – and a production team of seven. That frees Bollella for chain-smoking and big thinking.

Haiti is his latest idea. After the devastating earthquake in January, the country needs to rebuild everything from government palaces to countless homes, requiring acres upon acres of new flooring. Bollella is avidly following the reconstruction effort, and pointed out that termites are a huge problem in the Caribbean. Of course, he added, “They don’t eat cork.”

Part of his success comes from seeing every situation or exchange as a possibility to push cork. When firefighters, heavy boots on and all, stepped into his cork-tiled office recently on a fire inspection, he asked them how the floor felt. Good, they replied.

Before the firefighters left, Bollella asked them a question that he’d long wondered about, “What’s the worst type of floor?”

One of the firefighters replied, “‘Vinyl – that stuff is nasty,’” Bollella recalled.

Bollella is now designing a new flooring scheme – red tiles with their ladder number inset in marigold – to retile their burnt kitchen floor.

From his vantage point, Bollella sees a flooring arms race mounting around the world. The latest threat is China, namely its bamboo – another environmentally friendly flooring material. Over the last few years, the bamboo trust has spent so much on advertising that “people know more about bamboo than cork,” Bollella said.

His epiphany came a few years ago, while watching the scene from “The Godfather” when the dons of the five warring families gather to air their grievances and leave resolved to bury the hatchet. That is exactly what the corkmongers need to get past all the “my cork is better than yours” infighting, he realized.

So Bollella founded the North American Cork Association three months ago. Although no other companies have contributed to the non-profit yet, Bollella has big plans: cork kiosks in bus stops, billboards, mention in a TV show like “Flip This House,” and ads “just to get people thinking about cork,” he said.

Already, Bollella has sold cork to clients in Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, the United Kingdom, Romania and Australia, where he hopes to open a factory in a few years – to “feed the Japanese market,” he said. So even with renewed competition and a slow economy, Bollella sees cork’s future as bright.

“It’s a perfect time for me. People are a little choosy and green isn’t going to go away,” he said.

“You can’t get greener than [expletive] cork.”

Thousands of workers and community activists marched to Wall Street on Thursday, bringing Main Street’s anger with bank bailouts to the doorstep of the country’s financial industry.

“We’re hoping to show that Americans are angry at the way the financial industry has abused its power,” said Jordan Estevao, an organizer for the National People’s Action network in an interview after the rally. People who oppose regulation of the banking industry, he said, “are on the wrong side of the fight.”

Estevao estimated they exceeded their goal of 5,000 people for the afternoon’s event. Protestors lined both sides of Broadway and some of the side streets, stretching from Chambers Street to City Hall.

One of the protestors, Eugene Hammond, 65, a resident of the Bronx, said he came out to express disgust after seeing the boarded up stores and scores of people out of work in the neighborhood while big banks got billions in bailout money.

“Working people have been screwed over enormously,” said Hammond, a retired government employee. “People have lost jobs, houses, futures.”

The Showdown on Wall Street was a joint effort of the NPA and union the AFL-CIO. The NPA brings together 25 community organizations from 16 states and has been organizing rallies against banks all over the country, most recently a protest by over 400 people in Kansas City.

On Thursday, many of the protestors came from New York City and upstate New York, and others from surrounding states, such as Connecticut, Massachusetts and Wyoming. A number also came from Brooklyn and the Bronx, linked to organizations such as Brooklyn Congregations United, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and Make the Road, as well as local unions and public schools. Members of the Brooklyn-based mock protests group Billionaires for Wealthcare were also in attendance in fake pearls and suits.

The protestors convened in the late afternoon for speeches by religious leaders, union officials and ordinary people affected by banking practices and foreclosures.

“The poor person is poor because the rich person is rich,” said Rabbi Ellen Lippman, of Cholot Elaiyanu synagogue in Brooklyn. “I see those who have been seeking work for months.”

The loudest cheers were reserved for AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who led the crowd in a chant challenging bankers to “fix the mess that you made.”

After the speeches, and just in time for the five o’clock rush hour in the Financial District, the protestors made their way down Broadway towards Wall Street. They filled the barricaded streets for blocks, issuing calls for “real jobs now.” Workers in suits emerged the Chase Bank building, but brushed past the crowd with eyes averted. Other passersby stopped to give the protestors the thumbs up sign.

“We’re spending billions for nothing,” said another protestor, Justyn Brown, 29, an Iraq war veteran who lives in Brooklyn. “Obama should be spending the money he’s spending on the war on veterans. No one is taking care of their well-being.”

Another veteran agreed, “Bank bailouts are like leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse,” said William J. Gilson, 74, because we’re giving them the money to make the same mistakes again.

Many echoed his calls for more regulation, citing the financial regulation bill currently before Congress.

“We’re sick of greed,” said Buzz Roddy, 50, a resident of the Bronx and member of the Actors’ Equity union. “[Greed] has become institutional in America. It’s time for the government to step up and regulate the way things are.”

The next march will take place in Washington in May.. Estevao calls it the “showdown on K. Street.”

“We want to show it’s about people,” he said, “Not fat cat lobbyists.”