Bronx Quotes

Everyone at school seems to go by a nickname. Kat, Frosty, Bronx, Boo Bear, Jelly Bean, Freckles.

The saddest thing in life is wasted talent, and the choices that you make will shape your life forever.

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.

The Bronx? No Thonx!

...the Beatles were hard men too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia--a hard, sea-farin' town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from the Dingle, which is like the f***ing Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys--they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles--not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always s**t on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.

Justin took off in a run. Frosty and Bronx, too. It wasn’t long before Frosty was carrying Kat, Bronx was carrying Reeve and Justin was carrying Jaclyn. I think every one of them was crying. I forced myself to stand, to inch forward, toward the slayers.

Choose whatever box you like, Mike. Just don't put me in one, son. Believe me, I won't fit.

You get what you give," we will tell his sorry, selfish ass." The Betty Lady has spoken. I detect a Bronx accent. "But," I demur, "it will make the other woman say, ´See? She IS a jealous and paranoid and pushy wife.´" The Betty Lady rips open a cell phone statement with a nail file and, without looking up at me, says, "Let me tell you something, honey. In my experience? The only thing they care about is what they see in the mirror each morning and WINNING...or their perception of winning.

At the edge of heartbreak, we both take a leap into the unknown...That's when we see it, a buoy callled friendship.

As someone who grew up in the Bronx, I certainly learned my share of four-letter words, but none are more powerful than nice.

I like the idea of different theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass, a Bronx where people talk like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow kind, perhaps in the nook of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed anyone.

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.

Art is only important to the extent that it aids in the liberation of our people.

I'm sorry, I can't see that you truly love me

I wanted to tell all my people, my Bronx people, “You gotta come see this! These woods are ours too. These woods are everybody’s.

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.

It wasn't as if crack was getting great press in the South Bronx in 1999, but it took a particular kind of idiot to wake up one day and say, 'Angel dust is a product I've heard nothing but good about, and it's about time I was involved.

You have to take people one at a time, check out what's in their head and heart before you judge.

so darlin' close your eyes, 'cause you're about to miss everything

Only the wind shatters the silence. I have been here before choking in solitude.

I tried to drown my demons with whiskey, but I found out real devils can swim.

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this is exactly what's happening, it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics of mournful Whistlers, the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge. I like the idea of different theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass, a Bronx where people talk like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow kind, perhaps in the nook of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed anyone. Here I have two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back to rest my cheek against, your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish. My hands are webbed like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed something in the womb but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds or a life I felt passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly she had to scream out. Here, when I say I never want to be without you, somewhere else I am saying I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you in each of the places we meet, in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying and resurrected. When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life, in each place and forever.

...I found myself surrounded by people--starting with my mom, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, and leading to a string of wonderful role models and mentors--who kept pushing me to see more than what was directly in front of me, to see the boundless possibilities of the wider world and the unexplored possibilities within myself. People who taught me that no accident of birth--not being black or relatively poor, being from Baltimore or the Bronx or fatherless--would ever define or limit me.

She wasn’t listening to him. He recalled how she and Peter had insisted on English, his new name, the right education. How better and more hinged on their ideas of success, their plans. Mama, Chinese, the Bronx, Deming: they had never been enough. He shivered, and for a brief, horrible moment, he could see himself the way he realized they saw him—as someone who needed to be saved.

She was a freaking princess. And he was a poor Vamp from the Bronx. If he laid a finger on her, she’d probably bite it off. Hell, she’d chew all ten of his digits down to mere stubs, and then her father would sic a pack of werewolves on him to rip apart the rest of this body.

The Choices you make today affect you for the rest of your life.

They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? "Mary got a quarter," Friedman says. "There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket." ... and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professionals.

Go to any police-and-community meeting in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Harlem, and you will hear pleas such as the following: Teens are congregating on my stoop; can you please arrest them? SUVs are driving down the street at night with their stereos blaring; can’t you do something? People have been barbecuing on the pedestrian islands of Broadway; that’s illegal! The targets of these complaints may be black and Hispanic, but the people making the complaints, themselves black and Hispanic, don’t care. They just want orderly streets.

Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx.

You laugh, rap my woody shell with wicked whispers shaped like knuckles, then toss me aside. Lucky for me, I don't bruise easily. Besides, you loss is someone else's gain for I am coconut, and the heart of me is sweeter than you know.

South Wind had been, in Marjorie’s visions, a new clear world, a world where a grimy Bronx childhood and a fumbling Hunter adolescence were forgotten dreams, a world where she could at last find herself and be herself—clean, fresh, alone, untrammelled by parents. In a word, it had been the world of Marjorie Morningstar.

Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City and Brooklyn and the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven Seconds.

She taps the Bronx. "This part of the city gets hit the hardest by everything. Gangs, real estate scams, whatever. Hard people, too, if they came through any of that . . . so in a lot of ways, this is the heart of New York. The part of itself that held on to all the attitude and creativity and toughness everybody thinks is the whole city.

If a dream is in your heart, you never lose it.

I called the Ops Room, hoping to get Luc, and possibly Ethan, on the phone. “Jimmy’s House of Vampires,” Luc answered, in a really poor Bronx accent.

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

It was a chorus! A rain of garbage! A Rigoletto from the sewer, from the rancid gullet of the Bronx!

Love is not me being who you want. Your definition is a whirlpool trying to suck me in and I'm drowning. Don't you see?...It's time...Time you stop telling me who to be, how to live. This is my portrait. You chose your canvas. Let me choose mine.

Few aspects of my work in the DA’s Office were more rewarding than to see what I had learned in childhood among the Latinos of the Bronx prove to be as relevant to my success as Ivy League schooling was.

Around $50 million had collected in one checking account in the Bronx…. Those of us who worked in the office regularly understood that we were not to speak about our work. The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives or on the lives of the poor we were trying to help.

The fact is that you are more comfortable with myth than man.

So don't tell me that I can't fit in. My heart beats like a talking drum.

Forget who I really am, who I really want to be.

Jealousy is a waste of energy...focus on what I have, not what I don't.

Do something about it, or shut up.

I'd pretend their words were water and let them roll off my back. Now, I'm nobody's duck, and their words stung a whole lot more than water.

The day she clips her way out of her cocoon, the only sound she plans to hear is a deafening cheer.

A core principle for me is that life is hard, so you need to find strength and determination within yourself to move forward and succeed.

A fog of despair so pervaded the ghetto that the smallest gesture of rebellion could seem like a bold, piercing light. Bad, said with a fond expression, was almost always a compliment.

In the old country someone would have opened a window to let the man’s spirit fly out, but any souls let loose here in the South Bronx would be free only so far as they could bat around four walls until, exhausted, they wilted in the heat and were forgotten.

My father exerted an emotional monopoly. His happiness tolerated no dissent. When he was in a good mood, everyone was supposed to be delighted to hear his long stories, laugh at his jokes and cheerfully partake in whatever project he had in mind—calamitous home renovations, around-the-clock printing jobs, excursions to the Bronx in search of an Italian butcher someone had mentioned. But whenever he was low or had been wronged, he made everyone pay for it. I have yet to see a face as determined as his was in anger. It was, sadly, a determination that was fixed only on itself—determined to be determined. Once he got into that state, I think he viewed any kind of compromise as self-betrayal, as if his whole being could be eroded and wiped away by the admission of a fault. I lived with my father for over twenty years, and we stayed close after I moved out. Not once, in all those decades, did he apologize to me for anything.

It’s Curt Schilling and his bloody sock staring down the Yankees in the Bronx. It’s Derek Lowe taking the mound the very next night to complete the most improbable comeback in baseball history—and then seven days later clinching the World Series. It’s Pedro Martinez and his six hitless innings of postseason relief against the Indians. Yes, it is also Cy Young and Roger Clemens, and the 192 wins in a Red Sox uniform that they share—the perfect game for Young, the 20 strikeout games for Clemens—but it is also Bill Dinneen clinching the 1903 World Series with a busted, bloody hand, and Jose Santiago shutting down Minnesota with two games left in the season to keep the 1967 Impossible Dream alive, and Jim Lonborg clinching the Impossible Dream the very next day, and Jim Lonborg again, tossing a one-hitter and a three-hitter in the 1967 World Series, and Luis Tiant in the 1975 postseason, shutting out Oakland and Cincinnati in back-to-back starts. They are all winners.

These people who judge us should take a city bus or a cab through the South Bronx, the Central Ward of Newark, North Philadelphia, the Northwest section of the District of Columbia or any Third World reservation, and see if they can note a robbery in progress. See if they recognize the murder of innocent people. This is the issue, the myth that the Imperialists should not be confronted and cannot be beaten is eroding fast and we stand here ready to do whatever to make the myth erode even faster, and to say for the record that not only will the Imperialist U.S. lose, but that it should lose.

He had in his Bronx apartment a lodger less learned than himself, and much fiercer in piety. One day when we were studying the laws of repentance together, the lodger burst from his room. "What!" he said. "The atheists guzzles his whiskey and eats pork and wallows with women all his life long, and then repents the day before he dies and stands guiltless? While I spend a lifetime trying to please God?" My grandfather pointed to the book. "So it is written," he said gently.—"Written!" the lodger roared. "There are books and there are books." And he slammed back into his room. The lodger's outrage seemed highly logical. My grandfather pointed out afterward that cancelling the past does not turn it into a record of achievement. It leaves it blank, a waste of spilled years. A man had better return, he said, while time remains to write a life worth scanning. And since no man knows his death day, the time to get a grip on his life is the first hour when the impulse strikes him.

THE AMERICAN League Championship was so hotly contentious that year, I could barely stand to watch the games. The tension of being a Red Sox fan as they battled back from 0–3 made my stomach hurt, and my surroundings didn’t make it any easier. The running joke in the Camp was that half the population of the Bronx was residing in Danbury, and of course they were all ferocious Yankees fans. But the Red Sox had plenty of partisans too; a significant percentage of the white women were from Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and the always-suspect border state of Connecticut. Daily life was usually racially peaceful in the Camp, but the very obvious racial divide between Yankees and Sox fans made me nervous. I remembered the riot at UMass in 1986 after the Mets defeated the Sox in the World Series, when black Mets fans were horribly beaten.

He'll never do it again,' she swears, but he will because she'll let him. Now me? I've got no use for imitation love that packs a punch.

The crashing sound of years lost shattered in her ears, and new fears emerged from the looking glass. Sometimes I wonder if she'll ever sing again.

I'm an artist...The difference is that I don't tell anybody. I refuse to give them new reasons to laugh at me.

The longer the wars, the younger the men who must finish them.

In Nam, the jungle's heat was heavy, and like a spoiled overweight child, it insisted on being carried everywhere.

I skipped two short steps and walloped the back of his head with an energy-charged swing of the pipe. The street collided with his jaw.

Spring came slowly to the Bronx with a lot of rain & soft water-color tree blossoms.

love New York City from the Battery to the Bronx, but

…but because they felt the neighborhood was safer than the one around Columbia, the medical campus of which was so far north that it was practically an annex of the Bronx

Maureen was a buxom, smiling redhead who had grown up something of a roughneck in an Irish-Slavic family in the Bronx and had a blunt way of talking that was

But of course, Bronca herself is the Bronx, and the Bronx don’t trust nobody but the Bronx, so maybe her distaste for everyone else is just as inexorable as Manhattan’s charm.

Look around. Take the tour. Fear hangs on the wall and shame sometimes. Emotional dislocation too. But I am brave in my admission. Are you? When no one is looking, I check to see if anyone seems as scared as me, or lonely, or shy, or insecure. Is it just me? I'm not so sure. Is your heart an onion too? Show me yours, I'll show you mine we used to say. Your turn. Peel away.

She’d rented the hottest nightclub in the Bronx for her fiftieth birthday. Her English was more proficient than all her siblings’, and she made use of it in her approximation of a Dominican-York socialite.

said one Bronx rabbi. “Einstein would have done better had he not proclaimed his nonbelief in a God who is concerned with fates and actions of individuals. Both have handed down dicta outside their jurisdiction.

In a lot of ways it is easier to do things on a large scale. It is easier to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than it is to buy a bungalow in the Bronx. For one thing, it takes just as much time to close a big deal as it does to close a small deal. You will endure as much stress and aggravation; you will have all the same headaches and problems. It is easier to finance a big deal. Bankers would much rather lend money for a big project than for a small one. They are more comfortable investing money in a big prestigious building than they are a rundown house in a bad section of town. If you succeed with the big project, you stand to gain a lot more money.

Also (and most painfully) the loss of a pet is one of the worst feelings you’ll ever have and it never goes away, so you’ll have to get used to not crying in public when you see another dog take a shit the way your pooch used to.

Cooperative Care in Wisconsin, which provides care to the elderly, was able to give its 81 members in 2004 relatively high pay, workers’ compensation, ten days’ paid vacation, and 50 to 75 percent health insurance coverage, all only three years after beginning operations.79 Similarly, Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, New York, founded in 1985, offers its 1700 members “significantly better pay and working conditions than most home health aides.”80

Mike puts us into trance, pours language - definitions, idioms, concepts - into us for moments that feel like hours... then we dictate at once what he has poured into us, while it's still fresh. But it can't be just anybody. It requires a sharp accent and the ability to join trance rapport and then spill out the results. Sam, for example, has everything but the accent - he manages, God knows how, to speak Martian with a Bronx accent. Can't use him, it would cause endless errata.

Earthquake insurance, gosh they need it dont they? Do you know how long God took to destroy the tower of Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? Seven minutes. There’s more wickedness in one block in New York City than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how long do you think the Lord God of Sabboath will take to destroy New York City an Brooklyn an the Bronx? Seven seconds. Seven seconds. . . . Saykiddo what’s your name?

Now the evening's at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there's a lull-like the calm in the eye of a hurricane - before the reverse tide starts to set in. The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny's and Lindy's - yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go - and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from - and that's home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: 'New York, New York, it's a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground. Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it's a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson's face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There's a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again. Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It's an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it's ever going to get. This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys' nerves get tauter and women's fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the 'Late Show' title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There's a life that's happening here. ("New York Blues")

public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School. The fourth partner was George Katz. He was born in 1931. He grew up in a one-bedroom first-floor apartment in the Bronx. His parents were

The flood of donations was considered to be a sign of God’s approval of Mother Teresa’s congregation. We were told that we received more gifts than other religious congregations because God was pleased with Mother, and because the Missionaries of Charity were the sisters who were faithful to the true spirit of religious life. Our bank account was already the size of a great fortune and increased with every postal service delivery. Around $50 million had collected in one checking account in the Bronx. . . . Those of us who worked in the office regularly understood that we were not to speak about our work. The donations rolled in and were deposited in the bank, but they had no effect on our ascetic lives or on the lives of the poor we were trying to help.

His world shrank so those lips were the world. That rosebud. That heart. He swooped in, but stopped just short of her mouth, so the steam from his breath joined with hers. Waited. Because although he had come, rather rapidly, to his "fuck it" revelation, that didn't mean she had. He hoped she had. Please let her have. There were only a few millimeters between them. She closed the gap. It was different this time. This was premeditated, and they were in her secret place in the middle of the goddamn Alps.

New York is full of water, and neither looks it nor acts it. Of the five boroughs of the city, only one—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and yet you can spend months in New York without seeing any water except what comes out of the faucet.

Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow.

."...and look down the glowing store front of a 24 hr bodega. I am not overly concerned about going in there with one bare foot and a considerable amount of dried blood on my clothing. This is the Bronx after all. But best to minimize the visual impact I might make.

I woke up this morning exhausted from hiding the me of me. So I stand here confiding there's more to Devon than jump shot and rim. I'm more than tall and lengthy of limb. I dare you to peep behind these eyes, discover the poet in tough-guy disguise. Don't call me Jump Shot. My name is surprise.

A date was soon set for the wedding. He and Marie were married on Saturday, August 31, 1940, at the Church of Our Lady of Refuge on East 196th Street in the Bronx. The nuptial mass was performed by the Reverend Jeremiah F. Nemecek, a Fordham football fan who idolized the Seven Blocks of Granite

December is one of my favorite months for cycling in New York because all the fair-weather cyclists have gone into hibernation, we aren’t in nor’easter season yet, and the cold is bracing without being debilitating. I bike up to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx one day, down to Coney Island the next.

But there was a more recent author and public figure whose work spoke to the core of a new set of issues I was struggling with: the Bronx's own Colin Powell. His book, My American Journey, helped me harmonize my understanding of America's history and my aspiration to serve her in uniform. In his autobiography he talked about going to the Woolworth's in Columbus, Georgia, and being able to shop but not eat there. He talked about how black GIs during World War II had more freedoms when stationed in Germany than back in the country they fought for. But he embraced the progress this nation made and the military's role in helping that change to come about. Colin Powell could have been justifiably angry, but he wasn't. He was thankful. I read and reread one section in particular: The Army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America. Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts more than in any Southern city hall or Northern corporation. The Army, therefore, made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all of my heart." -The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (p. 131)

So I joined the robotics team, which was the only team that accepted members regardless of their level of skill. Though I knew nothing about electronics or the construction of robots, the community was welcoming. It was full of charming misfits and geeks, an acceptable and even cool thing to be at the Bronx High School of Science.

Almost certainly I had ruined the life of some deserving brainiac out in the Bronx—some poor clarinet-playing loser in the projects who was still getting beaten up for his algebra homework, who was going to end up punching tickets in a tollbooth instead of teaching fluid mechanics at Cal Tech because I’d taken his or her rightful place.

In the Bronx, plans were being made to establish a new home for the poor. Many of the homeless were sick and needed more permanent accommodation than that offered by our night shelter. We had bought a large abandoned building from the city for one dollar. A co-worker offered to be the contractor and arranged for an architect to draw up plans for the renovations. Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After all the negotiations and plans, the project for the poor was abandoned because an elevator for the handicapped was unacceptable.

Now touch it just there.... See how it pulses. And now I am going to conceive The Great Work," he says, shitting on the laboratory floor. "I have created life!!" he screams, pointing to a roundworm undulating up out of the shit, give a Bronx cheer, grow to a great serpent with lamprey mouth and chase the "scientist" through his Yokohama appliances.

[Howard's] eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were--illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive, and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end... 'Can you hear me?' I asked him. 'I know you can see me.' Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, 'So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.

The silence became palpable and merciless in its depths. The only sound came from my car’s radio. The Temptations towed me to tears.

The guys I owed were serious people. I was so busy raising cash; I barely had time to ignore my creditors.

My old man left Ireland's stone, green fields to migrate to the glass, concrete canyons of New York in 1950.

I crashed the pipe murderously down onto his mouth and heard his upper teeth shatter at the gums.

Then the cop said, “Now, you guys could just start over. At least you’re not going to jail tonight.

If Denise doesn’t have her money by Friday, you won’t even see it coming. You’ll just wake up in the hospital. Now, try me bitch.

The rabbi glanced over glumly from behind the jail bars. 'My faith in God is fine,' he said. 'It's people I'm not so sure about.

Stengel admitted. “I’m not going to make any decision until I have to give the umpire my batting order. Then you’ll know as well as I.” The next afternoon, Casey resisted

My life's choices would never tell the whole story because there has always been a different ending.

A lifetime assault of contradictory messages–to be sexy, to respect, that all men were dogs but without them women were nothing–reinforced her sense of powerlessness and futility.

EVERYTHING ROUND AIN'T A BALL

Listen to me, kid. Nobody cares. You worry about yourself...your family...the people who are important to you.

I grew up in the South Bronx in the ’80s, and in the mid-’90s was plucked from there and escorted to boarding school in pastoral Connecticut (Choate Rosemary Hall, Pomfret). In my years at school, and subsequently at college (Trinity, in Hartford), I never once heard the term “hipster.” Looking back, I think hipsters, yuppies, and preppies were the same thing

The current catchwords—diversity, compassion, empowerment, entitlement—express the wistful hope that deep divisions in American society can be bridged by goodwill and sanitized speech. We are called on to recognize that all minorities are entitled to respect not by virtue of their achievements but by virtue of their sufferings in the past. Compassionate attention, we are told, will somehow raise their opinion of themselves; banning racial epithets and other forms of hateful speech will do wonders for their morale. In our preoccupation with words, we have lost sight of the tough realities that cannot be softened simply by flattering people's self-image. What does it profit the residents of the South Bronx to enforce speech codes at elite universities?

Few aspects of my work in the DA’s Office were more rewarding than to see what I had learned in childhood among the Latinos of the Bronx prove to be as relevant to my success as Ivy League schooling was. It was in effect to see that mastery of the law’s cold abstractions, which had taken such effort, was actually incomplete without an understanding of how they affected individual lives.

Another social problem is the high cost of housing and the destruction of housing. The North Bronx looks like the pictures recently coming from Yugoslavia of areas that have been shelled. There is no doubt what the cause is: rent control in the city of New York, both directly and via the government taking over many dwelling units because rent control prevented owners from keeping them up.

Unfortunately, many give lip service to the concepts of diversity and inclusion but confuse the two and fail to implement them effectively. These are two different but related ideas. Diversity is the recognition that we are unique in our combination of physical attributes and our life experiences. Each of these differences matters because they help provide unique perspectives for problem-solving. Diverse perspectives, versus a homogeneous group, will bring forward a broader range of potential solutions and more “out of the box” thinking. Inclusion is proactively bringing a diverse population together—whether a community or business organization—and enabling these differences to coalesce in a positive way. Making a diverse group feel welcome and valued is the essence of inclusion.

It is successful charter schools that are the real threat to the traditional unionized public schools. No charter school network examined here has been more successful educationally than the Success Academy charter schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Bronx and other low-income minority neighborhoods in New York City—and none has been more often or more bitterly attacked in words and deeds.

I know how easy it is to sound like a corny version of Noam Chomsky when talking about something like this, but in a country where millions of dollars are spent on nuclear weapons, corporate welfare, and many ridiculous things, doesn't it just make sense to take care of people first? As soon as we can make the South Bronx, Compton, Taos, and Astoria look like Beverly Hills I'll have no problem watching a guy orbit Mars.

It was 1977. Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero. In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

For several months they'd been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can't afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs. [10] It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teenage gangs and racial tensions. The Hell's Angels' massive publicity -- coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley -- was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal for a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels' aggressive, antisocial stance -- their alienation, as it were -- had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell's Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully bucking authority, and to the frustrated student radical this was a powerful image indeed. The Angels didn't masturbate, they raped. They didn't come on with theories and songs and quotations, but with noise and muscle and sheer balls.

add that technically it was medicine. It was just that people like him had ruined a useful tool for people in pain. I said, “You know anything that could help me find this Tight?” Flash shook his head. We stood in an awkward silence until he said, “Ain’t you goin’ to ask me about the kid you shot? Ronald Timmons Junior?” “Nope. Separate investigation. I’m just a subject in that one.” “The Reverend Caldwell sees it different. He’s got everyone in the Bronx

Ready or not, I peer into your soul and dive deep... Your eyes don't like what I see. You don't want to be me. So you curse and smash the mirror which gets you what? A bit of blood , a handful of glass splinters, another source of pain.

My grandparents were Italian immigrants. My father’s father, Joseph Massimino, was from Linguaglossa, near Mount Etna in Sicily, and he came over in 1902 to New York City and ended up buying a farm upstate in a town called Warwick, which is where my father, Mario Massimino, grew up. When my dad left the farm he moved back to the city, to the Bronx, where he met my mom, Vincenza Gianferrara. Her family was from Palermo, also in Sicily, and they lived in Carroll Gardens, an

But if you’re two guys like us, riding the Bronx tracks, you better make sure you hide any sign of affection if you want to fly under the radar. I’ve known this for the longest—I just hoped it wouldn’t matter. Someone whistles at us and I instantly knew I was wrong. These two guys who were competing in a pull-up contest a few minutes ago walk up to us. The taller one with his jeans leg rolled up asks, “Yo. You two homos faggots?” We both tell him no. His friend, who smells like straight-up armpits, presses his middle finger between Collin’s eyes. He sucks his teeth. “They lying. I bet their little dicks are getting hard right now.” Collin smacks the dude’s hand, which is just as big a mistake as my mom trying to save me from being thrown out the house last night. “Fuck you.” Nightmare after nightmare. One slams my head into the railing, and the other hammers Collin with punches. I try punching the first guy in his nose, but I’m too dizzy and miss. I have no idea how many times he punches me or at what point I end up on the sticky floor with Collin trying to shield me before he’s kicked to the side. Collin turns to me, crying these involuntary tears from shock and pain. His kind brown eyes roll back when he’s kicked in the head. I cry out for help but no one fucking breaks up the fight. No one fucking does the right thing. The train stops and the doors open but there’s no chance for escape. For us, at least.

she began quoting some poet whose name I didn’t catch, a line about open doors and a single beam of sunlight that struck right to the center of the floor. Her Bronx accent threw the poem around until it seemed to fall at her feet. She looked down sadly at it, its failure, but then she said that Corrigan was full of open doors, and he and Jazzlyn would have a heck of a time of it wherever they happened to be; every single door would be open, especially the one to that castle.

He had been the one to set the course of their lives by migrating to New York before they were born. The parts of the city that black migrants could afford—Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Bronx—had been hard and forbidding places to raise children, especially for some of the trusting and untutored people from the small-town South. The migrants had been so relieved to have escaped Jim Crow that many underestimated or dared not think about the dangers in the big cities they were running to—the gangs, the guns, the drugs, the prostitution. They could not have fully anticipated the effects of all these things on children left unsupervised, parents off at work, no village of extended family to watch over them as might have been the case back in the South. Many migrants did not recognize the signs of trouble when they surfaced and so could not inoculate their children against them or intercede effectively when the outside world seeped into their lives.

Do those of you in like Chicago or NYC ever notice how commuters on the train tend to get all quiet and intense when South Side or South Bronx starts to flow past? If you look closely at the faces, you see it’s not depression, not even discomfort; it’s a kind of rigid fascination with the beauty of ruins in which people live but look or love nothing like you, a horizonful of numbly complex vistas in slab-gray and spraypaint-red. Hieroglyphs on walls, people on stoops, hoops w/o nets. White people have always loved to gaze at the ‘real black world,’ preferably at a distance and while moving briskly through, toward business. A view from this remove yields easy abstractions about rap in its role as just the latest ‘black’ music. Like: the less real power a people have, the more they’ll assert hegemony in areas that don’t much matter in any grand scheme. A way to rule in hell: their own vocabulary, syntax, gestures, music, dance; own food; religious rhetoric; social and party customs; that…well-known athletic superiority—the foot-speed, vertical leap—we like them in fields, cotton- or ball-. It’s a Hell we like to look at because it has so clearly been made someone else’s very own….And the exported popular arts! The singing and dancing!…each innovation, new Scene, and genius born of a ‘suffering’ we somehow long to imagine, even as we co-opt, overpay, homogenize, make the best of that suffering song go to stud for our own pale performers.

Reports of New York's death are not greatly exaggerated, though some would argue otherwise, insisting that the city's undomesticated heart still beats in far-off corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx, that you'll find a faint pulse in whitewashed Manhattan if you look hard enough. These insistent optimists, deep in denial, point to any trace of the old town and say, "There is New York." Yes, there it is. But it's only a remnant, a lone survivor from an endangered species rapidly vanishing.

17.2 One evening I was to meet Marilyn up at her mother's apartment for our ritual Friday night dinner. On my way up to the Bronx, when I got off at the 175th Street station, I decided to stop in and see what sort of sexual activity was going on in the subway john there. I'd never gone into that one before, perhaps because I usually came there with Marilyn. I pushed into the yellow-tiled space, with its dim, caged light-bulbs. There was only one guy at the urinal, a tall workman in greens and scuffed orange construction boots-- which had, only in the last year or so, become standard wear for the nation's laborers. I stood a stall away from him, and we glanced at each other. When I smiled, he turned toward me. I reached for his penis. Holding it, I realized something was wrong with it, but, for the moment, couldn't quite figure what. For its thickness and harness it was too short. It ended in a kind of flat stump, like a sawed-off dowel, without the collar or taper of glans, making me think he was uncircumcised. Only there was no cuff of skin. That's when he said, a little hoarsely, "That's what there is. If you want it, it's yours. But that's it." And I realized that, either from medical procedure or something else, the first inch or so had been amputated. He came very fast. I wanted to talk with him afterward, but he zipped up once we were finished and hurried away. I never saw him again, though I looked for him. But the image stayed, unsettlingly, for a while.

Again on Rose Hill with all the familiar sounds, sights and smells, dank gymnasium office, trainer Jake’s old barber chair, the Keating Hall clock tower, Jesuits in cassocks clucking along, lunches of linguine and calamari on Arthur Avenue, leaves and mud on the practice field, thud and smack of leather upon leather as dusk enveloped the Bronx, maroon and gold, we do or die notes drifting over from band rehearsal—Lombardi was in his element, restored. Football as religion. The T a catechism from which he preached. And God was in the details.

As some tone-deaf person began to tell the story of Lazarus, the World Series was playing on a TV upstairs. A ball disappeared into the Bronx and a dead man came forth, and the story always ends there, optimistically , in the middle, with a miracle so high profile it becomes the catalyst for the Crucifixion, which is technically a fair exchange, man for man , though three days before his death Jesus visited Lazarus again and you have to wander what he said, if he looked at what Lazarus had done in the meantime and began to question what he was dying for.

He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's.

Welcome to part one of my author’s note: the inspiration behind this book. Just a few years ago, the wildest thing ever happened to me. During my senior year, Tom Holland secretly enrolled in my high school, the Bronx High School of Science, as an undercover student to learn more about American high schools for his upcoming role as Spider-Man. I was lucky enough to meet and talk to him during his time there (literally still reeling in shock if we’re being honest because w h a t), and I’ve always treasured that experience. Since then, an idea has lingered in the back of my head—wouldn’t this be such an incredible concept for a book?

On the second to last day, Lt. Russo, who ran the program, announced, "Unless you were at dinner last night and had the opportunity to say 'Howard, pass the salt,' you are going to Brooklyn North and Manhattan North. That's where they need people, and that's where you're going." "Howard" referred to to the Commissioner Safir, and when they read the list of assignments the next afternoon-- "Alvarez... Brooklyn North..." "Baker... Brooklyn North..." "Buono... Manhattan North..." "Calderon... Brooklyn North..." "Conlon... South Bronx Initiative..." --more than a few people turned around to look. Howard, pass the salt. I was a little surprised myself.

It is not, as somebody once wrote, the smell of corn bread that calls us back from death; it is the lights and signs of love and friendship. Gil Bucknam called me the next day and said that the old man was dying and would I come back to work? I went to see him, and he explained that it was the old man who was after my skin, and, of course, I was glad to come home to parablendeum. What I did not understand, as I walked down Fifth Avenue that afternoon, was how a world that had seemed so dark could, in a few minutes, become so sweet. The sidewalks seemed to shine, and, going home on the train, I beamed at those foolish girls who advertise girdles on the signboards in the Bronx.

The lack of goodness in the young gun's heart was oxygen to the fire, and so he burned for a good long while before I woke. The dream stoked my faith in the judgment and justice that will come someday or this afternoon soon. I turn up the collar of my white robe, relieved to know that God's got me covered 'cause I'm good, but not that good.

Well, that was certainly a disgusting display worthy of your father's family." "Shut up, Ma," Lisa Livia said, her hands on her hips. "Like you weren't born in the Bronx, and the Fortunatos weren't a big step up for you. Now you listen to me. You try to move this wedding away from Two Rivers again, I'm gonna clean every skeleton out of every closet you got and make them dance, you hear me? I'll dig up everything you ever buried, including my daddy, and then I'll sink that beat-up rowboat you're living on so you'll be out in the street with nothing. Do not fuck with my kid and do not fuck with my friend, they are all the family I got, and they are off-limits to you. Understand?

At last a cab driver who was helpful. An experience like this might put him in a good mood. Perhaps he should write a letter to the Yellow Cab Company. ‘Dear sir,’ murmured Patrick under his breath, ‘I wish to commend in the highest possible terms the initiative and courtesy of your splendid young driver, Jefferson E. Parker. After a fruitless and, to be perfectly frank, infuriating expedition to Alphabet City, this knight errant, this, if I may put it thus, Jefferson Nightingale, rescued me from a very tiresome predicament, and took me to score in the South Bronx. If only more of your drivers displayed the same old-fashioned desire to serve. Yours, et cetera, Colonel Melrose.

Growing up black or Latino in Hunts Point, East New York, or the Bronx; or Buffalo’s East Side; or Milwaukee’s North Side; or Selma, Alabama, means being confined. It means being forced to live in a certain neighborhood, one with fewer legal opportunities—fewer jobs, fewer schools, less money, less everything. It can be isolating and depressing. It isn’t just about money. These entire communities are stigmatized socially and culturally. The feeling of being excluded, of being different, is more than about what things you own; it is also about what you know, what you learn, how you approach issues. The tools you have available to solve those issues are all different, and they can be isolating.

Gotta remember that in the Dark Ages, people were getting married at age 7 and had to farm turnips or dig coal or kill dragons or something along those lines. Fast-forward to the industrial revolution and you had 14-year-old coal miners working a full shift and getting black lung. Yet my generation thinks we’re tougher because we rode bikes without helmets. FOH.

On April 14 in Boston, Elston’s name went down in Yankee history. He got into his first game when Irv Noren was ejected over a call at home plate. According to the Black Associated Press, Elston made his Yankee debut at 4:32 p.m. “Howard’s appearance at-bat signaled the fall of a dynasty that had been assailed on all sides as being anti-Negro. The fans gave Howard a well-deserved round of applause, making his debut on the heretofore lily-white Bronx Bombers.” Elston played three innings that day. He singled and drove in a run in an 8–4 loss to the Red Sox. Finally, the Yankees had become the thirteenth club in the major leagues to field a black player. The only holdouts were the Philadelphia Phillies, Detroit Tigers, and Boston Red Sox.

She was familiar with a certain type of American crazy. Gun crazy was normal to her, shooting-kids-at-school or putting-on-a-Joker-mask-and-mowing-people-down-in-a-mall or just plain murdering-your-mom-at-breakfast crazy, Second Amendment crazy, that was just the everyday crazy that kept going down and there was nothing you could do about it if you loved freedom; and she understood knife crazy from her younger days in the Bronx, and the knockout-game type of crazy that persuaded young black kids it was cool to punch Jews in the face. She could comprehend drug crazy and politician crazy and Westboro Baptist Church crazy and Trump crazy because those things, they were the American way, but this new crazy was different. It felt 9/11 crazy: foreign, evil.

Jessica lived on Tremont Avenue, on one of the poorer blocks in a very poor section of the Bronx. She dressed even to go to the store. Chance was opportunity in the ghetto, and you had to be prepared for anything. She didn’t have much of a wardrobe, but she was resourceful with what she had—her sister’s Lee jeans, her best friend’s earrings, her mother’s T-shirts and perfume. Her appearance on the streets in her neighborhood usually caused a stir. A sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl with bright hazel eyes, a huge, inviting smile, and a voluptuous shape, she radiated intimacy wherever she went. You could be talking to her in the middle of the bustle of Tremont and feel as if lovers’ confidences were being exchanged beneath a tent of sheets. Guys in cars offered rides. Grown men got stupid. Women pursed their lips. Boys made promises they could not keep.

He was fat. He was not very good looking. He didn’t play up to the press. But he tried. Boy did he try. I could still see him stretching from first to third on a single to center and belly-whopping into the bag, invariably safe. I related to Thurman. I had been a catcher in Little League, I was chunky, I played tough, and I too was pretty ugly. I always took Thurm’s side in arguments, and somehow I could feel what he was going through in that Yankee dugout, sensing his fear and dislike for Reggie (Jackson). I understood Thurman Munson’s terribly private ordeal, trying to simply play ball without wanting to be on the cover of a magazine, avoiding the fanfare in a town that breathes glamour and ignores dedication. His death signifies to me how difficult life really is, how hard it is to do what you want, to love and maintain your family and still do your job. The American dream drags onward….

I really should simplify my existence. How much trouble is a person required to have? I mean, is it an assignment I have to carry out? It can’t be, because the only good I ever knew of was done by people when they were happy. But to tell you the truth, Kayo, since you are the kind of guy who will understand it, my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself, and that’s the worst of being helpless. Oh, I don’t mean like the swimmer on the sea or the child on the grass, which is the innocent being in the great hand of Creation, but you can’t lie down so innocent on objects made by man,” I said to him. “In the world of nature you can trust, but in the world of artifacts you must beware. There you must know, and you can’t keep so many things on your mind and be happy. ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair!’ Well, never mind about Ozymandias now being just trunkless legs; in his day the humble had to live in his shadow, and so do we live under shadow, with acts of faith in functioning of inventions, as up in the stratosphere, down in the subway, crossing bridges, going through tunnels, rising and falling in elevators where our safety is given in keeping. Things done by man which overshadow us. And this is true also of meat on the table, heat in the pipes, print on the paper, sounds in the air, so that all matters are alike, of the same weight, of the same rank, the caldron of God’s wrath on page one and Wieboldt’s sale on page two. It is all external and the same. Well, then what makes your existence necessary, as it should be? These technical achievements which try to make you exist in their way?” Kayo said, not much surprised by this, “What you are talking about is moha—a Navajo word, and also Sanskrit, meaning opposition of the finite. It is the Bronx cheer of the conditioning forces. Love is the only answer to moha, being infinite. I mean all the forms of love, eros, agape, libido, philia, and ecstasy. They are always the same but sometimes one quality dominates and sometimes another.

Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.” Einstein used only about half his allotted number of words. It became the most famous version of an answer he gave often: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”9 Einstein’s response was not comforting to everyone. Some religious Jews, for example, noted that Spinoza had been excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for holding these beliefs, and he had also been condemned by the Catholic Church for good measure. “Cardinal O’Connell would have done well had he not attacked the Einstein theory,” said one Bronx rabbi. “Einstein would have done better had he not proclaimed his nonbelief in a God who is concerned with fates and actions of individuals. Both have handed down dicta outside their jurisdiction.”10 Nevertheless, most people were satisfied, whether they fully agreed or not, because they could appreciate what he was saying. The idea of an impersonal God, whose hand is reflected in the glory of creation but who does not meddle in daily existence, is part of a respectable tradition in both Europe and America. It is to be found in some of Einstein’s favorite philosophers, and it generally accords with the religious beliefs of many of America’s founders, such as Jefferson and Franklin.

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that "Quiet City" made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasure: the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art - Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise - yourself a strong defense. There were times you were worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in a t a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How luck we are, when we've spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!

Hardy reinforces his narrative with stories of heroes who didn’t have the right education, the right connections, and who could have been counted out early as not having the DNA for success: “Richard Branson has dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student. Steve Jobs was born to two college students who didn’t want to raise him and gave him up for adoption. Mark Cuban was born to an automobile upholsterer. He started as a bartender, then got a job in software sales from which he was fired.”8 The list goes on. Hardy reminds his readers that “Suze Orman’s dad was a chicken farmer. Retired General Colin Powell was a solid C student. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, was born in a housing authority in the Bronx … Barbara Corcoran started as a waitress and admits to being fired from more jobs than most people hold in a lifetime. Pete Cashmore, the CEO of Mashable, was sickly as a child and finished high school two years late due to medical complications. He never went to college.” What do each of these inspiring leaders and storytellers have in common? They rewrote their own internal narratives and found great success. “The biographies of all heroes contain common elements. Becoming one is the most important,”9 writes Chris Matthews in Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero. Matthews reminds his readers that young John F. Kennedy was a sickly child and bedridden for much of his youth. And what did he do while setting school records for being in the infirmary? He read voraciously. He read the stories of heroes in the pages of books by Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. He read, and dreamed of playing the hero in the story of his life. When the time came to take the stage, Jack was ready.

Ravitch had no interest in restarting the Second Avenue subway, and the project was a low priority for many of the communities it would serve. During the 1970s, East Harlem lost more than 22 percent of its population, and one-quarter of those who remained were on welfare. In seven Bronx census tracts, more than 97 percent of the buildings were either burned down or abandoned, leaving block after block of rubble. On the Lower East Side, where the number of apartments fell by 7.5 percent, a nonprofit environmental group known as the Green Guerillas took over vacant lots and turned them into community gardens.

Many East Siders pushed the MTA to add a station at 96th Street. Metropolitan Hospital, a city-owned facility located at 97th Street, sent about one hundred doctors, nurses, and other employees to the hearing. One of its directors charged the MTA with “brutal insensitivity toward the sick poor” and said it was not a coincidence that Rockefeller University and New York Hospital, where the governor was a major benefactor, would have much more convenient access. After the hearing, which lasted four hours and fifteen minutes, the MTA board subsequently voted to add a new station at 96th Street. The Bronx did not have as much political clout as the Upper East Side.

Speaking of wild conspiracy theories, did you know that all animals in zoos belong there because they’re political prisoners and we humans worked out a treaty to keep them in exchange the other wild animals don’t take over? Heard this in my barbershop so I know it’s true.

People still tell stories of how terrible the Bronx is. At the same time, somewhere, some realtor is talking up how amazing it is, so that people with money will come and buy up everything. At the same time there are the folks who live here, for whom it’s neither terrible nor amazing; it just is. All of these things are true, and that’s just within our own reality. It’s not just decisions, is what I’m trying to say. It’s… Every legend of this city, every lie, those become new worlds, too. All of them add to the mass that is New York, until finally all of it collapses under its own weight… and becomes something new. Something alive.

Just two days before, big white film-production trailers took over her entire block. That happens all the bloody time these days, because movie people invariably seem to want multicultural working-class New York as backdrop for their all-white upper-class dramedies—which means Queens, since East New York is still too Black for their tastes and the Bronx has a “reputation

in Bronx,

Because why not? A cabdriver from the Bronx didn’t have that many opportunities to spend the evening with a princess, and when he did—especially if she was a sad princess—he should probably seize the chance to kiss her hand.

Well. “I hope it was worth it.” He was kidding. There was no way the Bronx Technology Charter School production of The Wizard of Oz was worth the wrath of a king. When she didn’t laugh at his little joke, he glanced over at her. “It was.” She smiled at him. “It was worth it.

Experts believe that the children of affluent suffer twice as much depression as the kids in the South Bronx or East New York. The findings are robust.These affluent kids are like hothouse flowers, who are propped up by their parents and support staff but who know that they can't measure up.

What was essential to them was that same dusk of winter, that late afternoon of cold hard air and leaves spinning down from the plane trees of the Bronx streets, produced by the clouds of World War Two.

You learn to assess the big picture and what you are trying to accomplish. You learn to be persuasive. You learn to look for data or external examples to support your proposals. You anticipate questions and have answers ready. You create a detailed action plan to implement your proposal.

Among his peers, Pablo Guzmán had a unique upbringing. He graduated from one of New York’s premier academic high schools, Bronx Science, where students were engaged with the political debates of the day, from the Vietnam War to the meaning of black power, thanks to the influence of a history teacher. Guzmán had also been politicized by his Puerto Rican father and maternal grandfather, who was Cuban. Both saw themselves as members of the black diaspora in the Americas. The job discrimination and racist indignities they endured in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and in New York turned them into race men committed to the politics of black pride and racial uplift. When Guzmán was a teenager, his father took him to Harlem to hear Malcolm X speak.188 He also remembers that his Afro-Cuban grandfather, Mario Paulino, regularly convened meetings at his home to discuss world politics with a circle of friends, many of whom were likely connected through their experience at the Tuskegee Institute, the historic black American school of industrial training, to which Paulino had applied from Cuba and at which he enrolled in the early 1920s.189 Perhaps because of the strong black politics of his household, Guzmán identified strongly with the black American community, considered joining the BPP, and called himself “Paul.” His “field studies” in Cuernavaca, Mexico, during his freshman year at SUNY Old Westbury, however, awakened him to the significance of his Latin American roots.

The Bronx.

But to me, what the Greeks knew and what these other ancient authors, I think, tapped into is something we’re only now finding words to articulate again, which is that betrayal is the wound that cuts the deepest. You can call it whatever you want, moral distress, moral injury, but really, it’s betrayal — feeling abandoned or betrayed, or betraying oneself and one’s sense of what’s right. And so we had respiratory therapists in some of our early performances during the pandemic, who were saying, “I have 20 patients on respirators in the public hospital in the Bronx, and there’s only me, and I’m left with the guilt of not being able to attend to them all.” That’s an impossible situation. So you call that person a hero, when they’re wrestling with their own sense of betraying their own standards of care and being betrayed by the system that put them in that position, and it could actually hurt them.

Would it be possible to use a courtroom to get everyone involved in a case - the accused, judges, lawyer's, clerks, social workers, community members, to help improve behavior instead of merely punish it? We take a problem solving approach to the cases that come before us, said Amanda Berman, the Justice Center's project director and a former public defender in the Bronx. When we're presented with a case... the question we are asking at the endo f the day is, what is the problem and how can we come together to come to a solution. This new purpose required the design of a new kind of courtroom.

Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution. I spent nearly every waking moment around Nikki, and I loved her dearly. But sibling relationships are often fraught with petty tortures. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. But I had. At the time, I couldn’t understand my mother’s anger. I mean this wasn’t really a woman I was punching. This was Nikki. She could take it. Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past. My mother came to the United States at the age of three. She was born in Lowe River in the tiny parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, hours away from the tourist traps that line the coast. Its swaths of deep brush and arable land made it great for farming but less appealing for honeymoons and hedonism. Lowe River was quiet, and remote, and it was home for my mother, her older brother Ralph, and my grandparents. My maternal great-grandfather Mas Fred, as he was known, would plant a coconut tree at his home in Mount Horeb, a neighboring area, for each of his kids and grandkids when they were born. My mom always bragged that hers was the tallest and strongest of the bunch. The land that Mas Fred and his wife, Miss Ros, tended had been cared for by our ancestors for generations. And it was home for my mom until her parents earned enough money to bring the family to the States to fulfill my grandfather’s dream of a theology degree from an American university. When my mom first landed in the Bronx, she was just a small child, but she was a survivor and learned quickly. She studied the other kids at school like an anthropologist, trying desperately to fit in. She started with the way she spoke. She diligently listened to the radio from the time she was old enough to turn it on and mimicked what she heard. She’d always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style. Words like irie became cool. Constable became policeman. Easy-nuh became chill out. The melodic, swooping movement of her Jamaican patois was quickly replaced by the more stable cadences of American English. She jumped into the melting pot with both feet. Joy Thomas entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, a year when she and her adopted homeland were both experiencing

Based in Queens, NY, K. L. Sanchez Law Office P.C. is a top-rated construction accident lawyer, car accident lawyer, immigration lawyer, workers compensation lawyer, and a criminal defense attorney. Spanish-speaking lawyers are available for a free consultation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you've been injured on a construction site in Queens, the Bronx or anywhere else in New York City, we may be able to help.

With all her talk about saving the planet, AOC has put a new spin on the phrase “limousine liberal.” According to a story in the New York Post, she runs up Uber tabs like crazy. It wouldn’t be so bad if she had no other way to get around. But her congressional district, which includes parts of Queens and the Bronx, has about five or six subway lines. She responded to the article in typical sanctimonious fashion: “Living in the world as it is isn’t an argument against working towards a better future.” Hey, listen, girlfriend, you want to get driven around by Uber, go for it. But if you’re going to keep telling people the apocalypse is upon us, you might want to think about carrying a MetroCard.

1973 was the year when the United Kingdom entered the European Economic Union, the year when Watergate helped us with a name for all future scandals, Carly Simon began the year at number one with ‘You’re So Vain’, John Tavener premiered his Variations on ‘Three Blind Mice’ for orchestra, the year when The Godfather won Best Picture Oscar, when the Bond film was Live and Let Die, when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, opened, when Sofia Gubaidulina’s Roses for piano and soprano premiered in Moscow, when David Bowie was Aladdin Sane, Lou Reed walked on the wild side and made up a ‘Berlin’, Slade were feeling the noize, Dobie Gray was drifting away, Bruce Springsteen was ‘Blinded by the Light’, Tom Waits was calling ‘Closing Time’, Bob Dylan was ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, Sly and the Family Stone were ‘Fresh’, Queen recorded their first radio session for John Peel, when Marvin Gaye sang ‘What’s Going On’ and Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, when Morton Feldman’s Voices and Instruments II for three female voices, flute, two cellos and bass, Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style for violin and piano and Iannis Xenakis’s Eridanos for brass and strings premiered, when Ian Carr’s Nucleus released two albums refining their tangy English survey of the current jazz-rock mind of Miles Davis, when Ornette Coleman started recording again after a five-year pause, making a field recording in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, when Stevie Wonder reached No. 1 with ‘Superstition’ and ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, when Free, Family and the Byrds played their last show, 10cc played their first, the Everly Brothers split up, Gram Parsons died, and DJ Kool Herc DJed his first block party for his sister’s birthday in the Bronx, New York, where he mixed instrumental sections of two copies of the same record using two turntables.

Which brings me to a question I ask myself every day: What kind of a father have I been? Have I been good? Have I helped more than I have hurt? Have I given as much as I have taken? In truth, my children have, at times, had trouble. With depression, with drugs, with all those exotic things that befall kids nowadays. Though I do not like all the things they have done, I am here for them when they are in jeopardy and I do whatever I can when they need help. I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem is in our very circumstances, if the life we have given our children—the money and the cars and the vacations and the private planes—has spoiled the everyday world for them. Can the child of a rich man have the same ambition as a kid from the Bronx? One evening, one of my daughters, having just flown on a commercial plane for the first time in her life, called me in a panic. “My God,” she said, “the way they jam you in, and make you sit there, in one seat, it’s like a prison!” In the end, though, I think your outlook has less to do with money than with the values your parents exhibit and your own nature. In this, I’ve been neither perfect nor blameless. I love my children and I think I have been a good father, but there were times when I chose my career over the life of the house. Was I there for every recital, or play, or concert? No, I was working. It’s nearly impossible to succeed in the world and also succeed in the house, which means, at some level, even if you do not realize it, you make a choice. This is a regret. I wish I had been there more, had done better, had given my children as much as my parents gave me. I did not. I was always divided, being pulled away, on the phone, and so forth. But maybe you do best by

Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light." - George Washington

I’ve started the water boiling for my oil/butter-free egg when the doorbell rings. I hurry over to the front door and fling it open without checking who is out there, because that’s the sort of neighborhood I live in now. Back when we lived in the Bronx, I never opened the front door without checking who was waiting on the other side. If it was someone I didn’t recognize, I demanded ID to be held up to the peephole. But this neighborhood is so safe. I don’t have to worry about anything anymore.

Blacks did not arrive in New York in large numbers until after World War I, and, following the lead of the foreign immigrants, they moved to Harlem. Most were from the rural South, and most were poor. As the blacks moved in, the Jews moved out—north into the Bronx or, if they could afford it, to the South Shore of Queens and Long Island.

Dad’s out and Chico’s in, I’m like, fuck this. And she’s like watch your mouth and show adults respect. I pay the rent here. So I start staying out with my friends and skipping school just ’cause I feel like it and my teachers say, oh yeah, well here’s to your grades plummeting, and then I’m like, so what, and then they say one more semester and it’s over, you’re so out of here, and I’m like shit, no, they’ll send me to school with remedial kids. My little brother Peanut is gloating cause he’s at Bronx Science and thinks he’s the next Steve Jobs. That’s when I hit the books and school again. I cannot, will not, be showed up by Peanut. And that’s when I see the poster about the playwriting contest and Professor Bass, who is too old to be teaching high school but the damn union can’t fire him, says, you could probably write something decent if you weren’t so arrogant. He says half the students in the school don’t deserve to be here. And I roll my eyes and say well what, if you were

His was a true American experience. He was originally born in the Bronx and then became a returning Volksdeutscher in the Second World War, a German refugee living amid the rubble of the Third Reich under Soviet occupation, a

Horse was a new thing, not only in our neighborhood but in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and everyplace I went, uptown and downtown. It was like horse had just taken over. Everybody was talking about it. All the hip people were using it and snorting it and getting this new high.

In the most notorious case of humans in zoos, a Mbuti man named Ota Benga who was kidnapped from his home in the Congo Basin and sold into slavery was exhibited in the Bronx Zoo's Monkey House in 1906. He was freed after public outcry and moved to Virginia, where he worked in a tobacco factory and hunted alone in the woods. But he struggled with the intense trauma he had endured and in 1916 shot himself in the heart.

There's too much seaweed in the Bronx.

Still, the tentacle must be pretty big for her to be able to discern that it's a tentacle at all. That's not real, she thinks, with the instant scorn of any true New Yorker. Just two days before, big white film-production trailers took over her entire block. That happens all the bloody time these days, because movie people invariably seem to want multicultural working-class New York as a backdrop for their all-white upper-class dramedies—which means Queens, since East New York is still too Black for their tastes and the Bronx has a "reputation".

Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was only a six-hour drive to here when she had moved. Becca had taken I-95 after skirting around the Bronx and cutting across the Hudson River.

all Bronx

In 1828 Broadway, the city’s spinal thoroughfare, ended at Tenth Street, according to the grid plan for the city streets. Forty years later Broadway extended northward to 155th Street and beyond that into the Bronx. Only the three rivers that enclosed Manhattan could limit its horizontal growth.

Another young actor in Charlie’s class with me was a guy by the name of Martin Sheen. In one session Marty did a monologue from The Iceman Cometh, and he blew the roof off—I said, this is it, this is a great actor we are witnessing. He was the next James Dean as far as I was concerned. I got to be friends with Marty Sheen, and one day he said to me, “You know what my real name is, don’t you? Estevez.” He was half Spanish and he came from Ohio, out there in the Midwest, where he had a tough upbringing. He was one of ten kids in a working-class family that was always struggling for money. He had tenacity and grit and I could tell he was one of the best people I’d ever know, all grace and humility. I loved him. I still do. Marty Sheen moved in with me in the South Bronx so we could split the rent. We worked together at the Living Theatre in Greenwich Village, where we cleaned toilets and laid down rugs for the sets of the plays they put on.

And then, one night, onstage, just like that, it happened. The power of expression was revealed to me, in a way it never had before. I wasn’t even searching for it. That’s the beauty of these things. You’re not looking for it. I’m opening my mouth and I’m understanding somehow that I can speak. Words are coming out, and they’re the words of Strindberg, but I’m saying them as though they’re mine. The world is mine, and my feelings are mine, and they’re going beyond the South Bronx. I left the familiar. I became a part of something larger. I found that there was more to me, a feeling that I belonged to a whole world and not just to one place. I’m thinking to myself, What is this? It feels as though I’m lifting off the ground. I thought, Yes, this is it. It’s right there and I can reach out and touch it. This is out there, and this is what I know now is possible. All of a sudden, in that moment, I was universal. I knew I didn’t have a worry after that. I eat, I don’t eat. I make money, I don’t make money. I’m famous, I’m not famous. It didn’t mean anything anymore. And that’s lucky, in this business, when you don’t care about that. A door was opening, not to a career, not to success or fortune, but to the living spirit of energy. I had been given this insight into myself, and there was nothing else I could do but say: I want to do this forever.

Everything about realty nyc for you In case real estate nyc is what you are searching for, then Bogatov Luxury Real estate is for you. You could wish to purchase a home or offer it off, but it constantly helps to have professionals do it for you. If it is luxury condominiums you are searching for in Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx or Manchester, then these are the people you have to go to. Simply select the city that you want and the Bogatov team will assist you get the condominium you are searching for. All this ends up being possible as the group at Bogatov are concentrated on comprehending the customer's requirements and making all efforts to meet them. This is professionalism at its finest and it leads to customers returning once more and again. Not only this, it results in exemplary referrals and that has actually caused the development and nourishment of their business. Purchasing real estate nyc is not simply about getting any home. It is all a reflection of your way of life. This is why the Bogatov team makes a lot effort in understanding your desires in order to purchase that perfect home for you. When you utilize their services, you would continuously be returning for more. Even they think in long term relationships with their clients. In case you are attempting to sell your home, then Bogatov group will do so in just the type of luxury that it deserves. In order to get access to the various homes in estate new york provided on their site, you would have to register with them. Just inspect them out to know the most current properties, their floor plans, amenities, costs and anything else that you would want to understand about them. As soon as you are with Bogatov Luxury Real estate, you would understand that they keep you updated with the latest in real estate information too. So you would understand all about the most recent State paws on home, any brand-new developments in realty. With Bogatov Luxury Real estate, inspect out the very best places to stay in, the home mortgage rates in various areas, the way the need and supply chart is moving and so on. Thus being with the Bogatov group serves more functions than one as you get a lot more than exactly what you planned on. Simply pick out the city that you desire and the Bogatov team will assist you get the condo you are looking for. All this becomes possible as the group at Bogatov are concentrated on comprehending the client's requirements and making all efforts to fulfill them. Purchasing actual estate nyc is not just about getting any property. This is why the Bogatov group makes so much effort in understanding your desires in order to purchase that best home for you. http://bogatovrealty.com/new-york/real

The saddest thing in life is wasted talent, and the choices that you make will shape your life forever.

The long-dead curator from the Bronx Zoo now had me in his unwavering grip. Close by, the bushmaster too lay in wait.

He changed his final wad up at the train station. Which was a sad place now. There were homeless people and disturbed people hanging around. There were furtive men with swivel eyes, their hands thrust deep in capacious pockets. There was spray-can graffiti on the walls. Nothing compared to the South Bronx or inner-city Detroit or South-Central LA. But unusual for Germany. Reunification had been a strain. Economically, and socially. And mentally. He had watched it. Like living a comfortable life in a nice little house with your family. And then a whole bunch of relatives moves in. From someplace where they don’t really know how to use a knife and fork. Ignorant and stunted people. But German like you. As if a brother had been taken away at birth and locked in a closet. Then in his mid-forties he comes stumbling out again, pale and hunched and blinking. A tough situation to manage. He

Since hip hop emerged from the South Bronx in the 1970s, it has become an international, multi-billion-dollar phenomenon. It has grown to encompass more than just rap music. Hip hop has created a culture that incorporates ethnicity, art, politics, fashion, technology and urban life.” This debunks the widely accepted argument that the genre is inherently divisive. With so many factors converging to create such an intricate, informative and multi-faceted genre, whose history and impact have bridged barriers between artist and society, it is not too complicated an endeavor to understand that its relevance repudiates its notorious reputation.

He changed his final wad up at the train station. Which was a sad place now. There were homeless people and disturbed people hanging around. There were furtive men with swivel eyes, their hands thrust deep in capacious pockets. There was spray-can graffiti on the walls. Nothing compared to the South Bronx or inner-city Detroit or South-Central LA. But unusual for Germany. Reunification had been a strain. Economically, and socially. And mentally. He had watched it. Like living a comfortable life in a nice little house with your family. And then a whole bunch of relatives moves in. From someplace where they don’t really know how to use a knife and fork. Ignorant and stunted people. But German like you. As if a brother had been taken away at birth and locked in a closet. Then in his mid-forties he comes stumbling out again, pale and hunched and blinking. A tough situation to manage.

Servco Industries Bronx was one of the first Office Cleaning Service companies, over 20 years ago to introduce high speed floor care services to retail giants like Sears Holding Corp, Kmart, Sports Authority, Waldbaums Supermarkets, Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company and FAO Schwartz. Prior to using this equipment, it took four times the labor to clean stores than it does today. With new floor finishes that promote high speed burnishing, you get brilliant longer lasting great looking floors. These companies represent just a few of the corporations that Servco Industries works with today to solve their Janitorial Cleaning and commercial floor cleaning services.

The kids from Stuyvesant and Bronx Science formed their own pale New York clique that people seemed to leave alone,

At first, Third Avenue El passengers bound for the Bronx could only transfer—for a separate fare—to the socalled Huckleberry Line, a horsecar that meandered along the Annexed District’s Third Avenue so slowly that passengers could hop off, pick huckleberries in the fields, and reboard the same car.

In 1991, while talking with writer Ed Gross, Fred Freiberger summed up his agony over Star Trek with a joke, saying, “I thought the worst experience of my life was when I was shot down over Nazi Germany. A Jewish boy from the Bronx parachuted in to the middle of 80 million Nazis. Then I joined Star Trek. I was only in a prison camp for two years, but my travail with Star Trek has lasted 25 years ... and still counting.

If there were a multitude of schools almost as good as these in every city, so that applicants for high school could select from dozens of good options—so that even parents who did not have the sophistication or connections to assist their children in obtaining entrance to selective schools would not see their kids attending truly bad schools, since there would be none—then it would do little harm if certain of these schools were even better than the rest. In such a situation, kids who couldn’t be admitted to a famous school such as Bronx Science might be jealous of the ones who did get in, but would not, for this reason, be condemned to third-rate education and would not be written off by the society.

When a school board hires just one woman to retrieve 400 missing children from the streets of the North Bronx, we may reasonably conclude that it does not particularly desire to find them. If 100 of these children startled us by showing up at school, moreover, there would be no room for them in P.S. 94. The building couldn’t hold them.

You know, we got a saying back in the Bronx. Why smash each others' heads when you smash someone else's?

By 1640, the Dutch had spread out from Manhattan and established new settlements on Staten Island, Long Island, and in the Bronx, which was named for Jonas Bronck after he settled there in 1639. They also settled in what is now Westchester County

Back in Washington Frasureˇs delicate diplomacy was supported by his direct superior flamboyant Assistant Secretary of State R.H. To Vice-President Al Gore, Secretary of State Christopher, Ambassador Albright and Leon Fuerth, Gores representative on the National Security Council, any lifting of sanctions against the Serbs would be anathema. They still believed that Serbs had to be punished not wooed. ......Frasure gave this account of talks with Milošević: ...look at him like this....he is a Mafia boss who has gotten tired of doing drugs in South Bronx and so he is planning on moving to Palm Beach and getting into junk bonds. ....... Milošević was not prepared to see the Bosnian Serbs getting defeated militarily, he was very keen on preventing Karadžić from becoming "King of all Serbs"........The moment in which the parties would substitute politics with force was approaching fast.

Guy, go get me a switch. This muthafucker done pissed the bed again.

We were always driven by a gray-haired man in the foster-care agency car. I remember leaving that abusive home, pulling out of the driveway, and seeing sumo Mr. Sanchez’s ice cream truck. He would take us with him when he worked but never gave us any ice cream. Oh, the cruelty! I would have taken real a beating for some ice cream.

stranded. New Yorkers have learned to cope with life’s worst vicissitudes, and this nil admirari attitude, they say, is one reason why New York considers itself a city of survivors. Only the fittest make it here. The unfit, having tried and failed, go home to Peoria, where they do just fine. The notion that New York is a community of success is perhaps the greatest source of the New Yorker’s immense self-pride. We are not talking here of Harlem, or of the Bronx, or Queens, or Brooklyn or Staten Island. These remain, Rand-McNally notwithstanding, foreign places. New York—the New York that counts—consists only of the lower two thirds of Manhattan Island, and some might limit the New York territory to an even smaller strip

Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. They used to draw crowds. Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, even though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today. A New York Times account of community resistance to the eviction of three Bronx families in February 1932 observed, “Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only 1,000.”1 Sometimes neighbors confronted the marshals directly, sitting on the evicted family’s furniture to prevent its removal or moving the family back in despite the judge’s orders. The marshals themselves were ambivalent about carrying out evictions. It wasn’t why they carried a badge and a gun.

For example, a program that ran from 2005 to 2008 in the South Bronx provided more than 1,300 families with legal assistance and prevented eviction in 86 percent of cases. It cost around $450,000, but saved New York City more than $700,000 in estimated shelter costs alone.37

Guys, I hate to sound insensitive, especially considering what just happened, but we really have to leave here, now. We are extremely pressed for time, if we plan on escaping Manhattan and the Bronx, before nightfall. And make no mistake that is the plan.

You guys think you can survive out there on your own? What makes you think this shit won’t come up here into Yonkers? It already started. They’ll be lucky if they can hold it back as long as the Bronx did. There are no rivers dividing Yonkers from the Bronx. It’s going to keep on spreading, until we’re overrun. That’s our future, plain and simple. Personally, I think we should go on a hunt and kill them all, but that’s my opinion and everyone knows opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one and no one cares.

On the whole, I found great sympathy for the plight of the undocumented among people from every walk of life and irrespective of whether they lived in neighborhoods where illegals resided or in other communities. District managers of community boards were basically of one mind, best expressed by a Hispanic manager in the Bronx: “I have no problem with them, because they’re willing to work. Shame on employers for not paying them a decent wage. They’re not working for themselves; they’re working for their children. This country’s been founded on illegal activity. End of story.

I’d get him out, get him home to Manhattan, and come back to my world in the Bronx. No lingering. No cuddly heart-to-hearts while he caressed me and stared into my eyes. No more joining the ranks of people who were infatuated with Ashton Townsend. Or, more accurately, not allowing him to find out I was already in those ranks. It

Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ' Holy shit!' It was like being on a commuter train through the Bronx and seeing among the piles of crushed cars a pasture with a lone white horse.

When we’re sitting in the Bronx somewhere nice and dry, you’re going to thank me for this educational adventure.

I ran back into the emergency room crying, yelling, and screaming, “Somebody please help my mother. He is going to kill her!