Pianos in the Park

Children take advantage of "Play Me, I'm Yours" and the shade at Sackerah Woods Playground

Shaded under the open-aired municipal facilities at Sackerah Woods Playground, in Van Cortlandt Park's southeastern corner, sits a curiously inviting blue and green piano.

The piano's creative aesthetic is accompanied by an open invitation: "Play Me, I'm Yours," written just above the keys. The piano is part of a citywide public art project that temporarily placed 60 pianos in parks, playgrounds and gardens. The Sackerah Woods piano is one of four in the Bronx.

The art project is run by the New York-based charity, Sing For Hope, which imported the concept from a similar project in Britain where they envisioned the pianos as "a catalyst for conversation."

At Sackerah Woods on Monday afternoon, the piano was dominated by adolescents investigating the instrument's capabilities while, at the same time, escaping the sun from beneath near-by the monkey bars.

The "Play Me, I'm Yours" project will continue to provide the pianos until July 5 and can also be enjoyed in the Bronx at Fordham Plaza, Grand Concourse and Joyce Kilmer Park.

David Gonzalez recently wrote about the pianos on the New York Times' City Room blog.

Bronx News Roundup, March 22

Here's some Bronx news for you on this rainy Monday:

Making history yet again, President Obama's health care reform bill gets passed with a 219-212 vote. Here's the NY Times breakdown of the bill.

Yesterday, a 23 year-old Bronx man was arrested and charged with murdering his girlfriend's 22 month-old daughter in a Soundview apartment. According to a spokeswoman for the city's medical examiner, the baby suffered blunt impact wounds and cuts of the liver and other organs.

A Bronx father of two, Orlando Salgado, was stabbed to death Friday night near E. 197th Street and Webster Avenue after trying to defend a teenager who was involved in a dispute earlier that day. The teenager was able to get away unharmed.

Montefiore Medical Center has opened the only pancreas transplant program in the Bronx and Westchester. It will treat people with severe, end stage diabetes.

Anti-abortion protesters stake out at Mott- Haven abortion clinic in national 40 Days for Life Campaign.

A Malian Cultural Center opens here in the Norwood section of the Bronx. It is the first of its kind in the United States. It is dedicated to the people from West Africa's Republic of Mali.

On Friday night, police shot a 30 year-old man armed with knives, who was threatening to kill somebody inside an apartment in a Mott Haven building. Officers demanded he dropped the weapons, he ignored the demands while approaching the officers. He was shot twice.

A Bronx man was shot to death after asking a neighbor to quiet down so his children could get some sleep, Sunday night. He was shot in the chest by the neighbor, who fled the scene but returned to turn himself in.

The MTA revises its plans to cut transit services.

Homeless Shelters in Bronx Apartment Buildings: The Story Behind the Story

Henry Perry, a 68-year-old substitute teacher and Mosholu Parkway resident, is a star today. Not only did he appear in the first paragraph of a NY Times front page story, but also in the first paragraph of the Norwood News' top story on its Web site. (It will appear as a front page story in the Norwood News print addition, which will hit streets tomorrow morning.) Here's our editorial on the situation with Perry's building and others like it.

The Times story and the Norwood News story have some similarities, but also many differences, which I'll get to in a minute, but first let's rewind to see how this story unfolded.

In mid-January, I learned that a homeless shelter had quietly moved into a notorious and poorly-managed Bedford Park apartment building, 3001 Briggs Ave., which happened to be directly across the street from a school, PS 8. Teachers at the school were irate. They contacted the community board, 311 and the Norwood News. On Jan. 22, Community Board 7 invited an increasingly angry neighborhood to weigh in and, wow, did they. On this blog the next day I reported about the meeting and some of the other things I had found out. In the next issue of the paper, I wrote up a more in-depth story about it that focused on how upset residents were and how previous tenants may have been harassed to make way for the shelter.

Soon after that story appeared on Feb. 5, Perry called us to say he too was living in a building, 15-19 Mosholu Parkway, with a homeless shelter and said he would be attending the next Community Board meeting to discuss his situation and express his opposition to it. The Bronx Times published a story about Perry's building and the Bedford Park building on Feb. 27.

Regardless of how it started, we now have a better picture of what the city is doing with its homeless population and how it's affecting tenants.

The NY Times story focuses on the city's new policy of creating so-called "cluster-site" homeless shelters, which are similar to the controversial "scatter-site" policy, which was denounced in the early 2000's as an "expensive failure." It includes some good details and stats like the fact these cluster sites are growing exponentially and mostly in the Bronx.

The Norwood News story focuses more on the events leading up to Perry's building becoming half a homeless shelter -- mass evictions and landlord intimidation, no tenant notification, 3 suspicious fires -- and how it mirrored what happened at 3001 Briggs. We also report that the outcry over this is forcing the city's Department of Homeless Services to rethink its policies.

Combined, they make an even more complete story. And that's our goal as reporters and journalists.

Note: One of our ideas to open up dialogue on this blog is to give some of the back story behind what you see in print or on our Web site and this our first attempt to do that. Let us know what you think. Is it interesting? Does it help you understand the story better? Is it pointless? Whatever the case, we want to know what you think.