At least they’re reading at the Bronx Academy of Letters

By Victoria Rossi

While reading experts warn of a drop in child literacy and wonder what affect the web will have on the generation that has grown up with it, librarian Kelly Overton has amassed a room full of enticing reads for young students. Browse the library bookshelves at Bronx Academy of Letters, and you won’t find many classics. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison makes an appearance, as does The Bronx is Burning, a non-fiction classic about 1970s “baseball, politics and the soul of a city.” But most of the nearly 3,000 books in this newly renovated library aren’t exactly high brow. There are plenty of colorfully-covered Goosebumps, Manga Anime, Guinness Books of World Record, and graphic novels, though—books meant to nudge children, one pulp novel at a time, toward a love of reading and eventually, literature. Read the full story

Live theater from a bus window

October 13, 2009

Photo Credit: Foundry Theatre Company

On a bright Sunday afternoon, a bus full of theatergoers slowly made its way down Hunts Point Avenue in the South Bronx. “Stay on it long enough and it becomes a street of razor wire,” said a recorded male voice, talking to the audience through the headphones they all wore. In their 90-minute tour on the bus, they would wind through the neighborhoods Mott Haven and Hunts Point, the live sets on this theatrical tour of the South Bronx. As the 46-seat bus drove on, prison buildings appeared behind fences topped with, yes, razor wire. The voice continued: “And passing you on foot if you arrive at the right moment, there will be somebody walking. There will be the friend or lover or wife or daughter or mother or son who walks this path to Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, named after a warden who died in an accident….” Read the full story

In Mott Haven, not Montana

by Thorsten Schier

Photo Credit: Thorsten Schier

“There are no distractions up here. I do my work and then I leave,” said Elizabeth Levine, a 57-year-old ceramic artist standing in her vast Mott Haven workspace dominated by a large silver oven. For five years she has been renting a loft together with a colleague in an old square building facing the Bruckner Expressway in the South Bronx. The elevator to get to her studio is big enough to fit a car, evidence of the studio’s industrial roots. Artists here rent workspace and do not live on the premises. She says the abundance of space in the Bronx is what made her decide to come here. “Me and my colleague call it Big Sky country,” she said, “because you can actually see the sky here, unlike in Manhattan.” She says initially the move “was a big leap” because of the Bronx’s reputation.

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