4 10 188 https://melrosestories.org/files/original/4317d7a9b49c1f716572552fffb75280.jpg dad0a1844cb24169b840a788fe012b67 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Family Business and Business Family Subject The topic of the resource Adrienne McAllister Description An account of the resource Objects, places, actions, and spaces that are special to Adrienne's life Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Adrienne McAllister Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource Spring 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Stacie MacDonald Language A language of the resource English Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Meet the Supremes Subject The topic of the resource Adrienne McAllister Description An account of the resource First record released by The Supremes, one of Adrienne's favorite artist groups in 1962 on Motown Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Diane Ross Mary Wilson Florence Ballard Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Adrienne McAllister Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Stacie MacDonald Language A language of the resource English https://melrosestories.org/files/original/e85d27aa68168a3a8b6d8f7ed8b4d6e6.png 7658df386a06df103b6df44af4b6007f https://melrosestories.org/files/original/16ed6b34ca5ef5c95d81b0faad058e8a.docx b5c9603d4d1f22fd49213622543b9895 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Marty Rogers Subject The topic of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource An account of activism in the South Bronx by a lifelong member of the community. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dylan Garcia Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Audio recording Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 5th 2017, April 21st 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Marty Rogers, Dylan Garcia Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Interviewee: Martin Rogers Interviewer: Dylan Garcia Date: April 5th, 2017 Place: Melrose Bronx, New York NY Transcriber: Dylan Garcia DG: I’m here with Marty Rogers and it is April 5th [2017] and this is for Displaced Urban Histories, NYU Gallatin, Spring 2017. I Guess we’ll just start off by you telling me a little about yourself, your history, where you come from, family, geography, culture, things like that. MR: Okay, my name is Marty Rogers, I’ve lived in New York all my life. My family’s been in New York all their life, my family’s been here so long… I think somebody in my mother’s family fought in the civil war, we always said to her which side, thank god she said the North. *laughs* Ethnically my family’s Irish, German, Swiss, and a few others. they’ve been here since the late 1800s, no connection to Europe, New York is our home always was our home, and I grew up in this community, in this neighborhood. My mom’s family moved from 71st and York Avenue on the East side to here in 1927 and we always said, “Mom why didn’t you stay on York and 71st?” and she said, “Well in those days it was so crowded and congested and polluted coming to the Bronx was like coming to the country.” *laughs* More open space. And this historically was farm country, there were breweries around here and we got good water, and we had space, and we had German people and all other people who wanted to drink beer. I have two older brothers and a younger sister, and I live here with my beautiful wife Francine we have three great kids and I grew up in this community and was educated in this community and a member of the Immaculate Conception Church our church is very important its served as an anchor for the community, Ive worked, lived here I’ve worked 38 years with the community resource center which is a local non for profit which ran group home for developmentally disabled people, they still do. Im basically retired now, but I stay busy, because theres so many things to be a part of in the community. So Thats a little bit of my background. DG: So your family has basically your family has lived in New York all there lives, do you know how that happened? Did they come through Ellis Island? MR: I don’t know if they got through Ellis Island they came by boat. They lived down on the 30’s when they first came down…. on Essex Street. Basically were here and we don’t know any body else who’s in our family who is anywhere else like out west or anything like that. So basically blue collar works. The story of my family like so many is education. When we were coming up, my generation was the first generation that was told you’re going to college. Before that it was only “rich people” who could go to college. My father left grammar school in the 7th grade- and but he-you thought you’d be murdered if you didn’t go to college, because education’s very important, same with my mom, my father had a 7th grade education, my mother had two years of high school but again they could read and write and do everything and wonderful people but the stress was you’re going to college. I had too older brothers they went to college I didn't really want to go but I had no choice, later on my mom said, “We never thought you’d go,” I said, “I didn't think I had a choice I thought you guys would kill me if I didn't go to college.” Plus in my time was the Vietnam War, so you went to college because you could get a college deferment to stay out of the Vietnam War. So no disrespect to the veterans but that was a terrible war and my fathers a World War II vet but he used to say to me and my brothers, “you’re not going to that war because that war’s ridiculous okay that not a true war… “ So thats basically it, I went to Colonel hayes High School. I’m Catholic by faith and got a great Catholic school education. Grammar school Colonel Hayes High School is a small catholic boys high school and I went to City College and thank god I was able to go to Hunter for a masters degree. DG: Tell me a little about your childhood, growing up here what was it like in sort of the neighborhood sense. MR: I always say this, it was a great place to grow up we grew up on 151st street almost the whole block is the school and around the block is the church. and in the summer we were a play street, which meant they closed the street, no traffic could go through and there was always some organized, usually though he church and we had games and we owned the street and we played all day long we played stick ball, I love stick ball we still play stick ball one day a year on our block. At night we played games like Ring-a-levio. We played so many street games but that’s how we did it in those days we played other guys on other blocks. There was a sense of ownership that this was our block. It wasn’t like gangs like we’d fight other people who’d come down the block first of all we weren't that tough. We just wanted to play sports, street games. In that sense it was good. Now there was a part of it that was… was there was just this prevailing sense that drugs were coming in strong, drugs create crime, crime makes the streets not safe, the buildings not safe, makes you scared, people break into buildings, they break into schools, churches, they don’t give a damn if they’re using and stores and cars and anything, all bets are off. There was just a sense when we were growing up, people mugged in the streets, snatching pocket books, there was just this sense that things were going awry, but I also thought that that was happening in the entire world, I thought the whole world was experiencing these things, also in the tv you did see, I remember when Dr. King was assassinated and you were like, “Oh my god the tension on thew streets…” Even though this always kind of a.. where I grew it was a racially mixed neighborhood, Black, White, Hispanic, largely Puerto Rican at that time, so it was a mixed community, we had friends of all races, that was a great equalizer, school was a great equalizer, I’m glad I had two older brothers because they were on the good curve of things and educating me on issues of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War they were schooling me which was fabulous. So growing up then there was also this sense that all hell was braking loose okay it was just a ritual that just friends from your class, it almost seemed like it summertime one family just disappeared, like were moving “goodbye” and never came back. And people always said its true the phrase they use is White Flight, but I always say it was across the board flight, stable families, White Black and Puerto Rican it was a certain point in time there would be a straw that broke the camels back, and there would be no drama about it you’d just here so and so’s moving. And it was a sadness because you lost your friends. They were taking up stakes and going…North Bronx, we thought that was far away Fordham Road it’s not that far away, or other places, so that was part of the situation. So in that sense that was a shadow over the childhood but we thought it was normal and I appreciate growing up in this environment because it teaches you there’s evil in the world theres not evil people, drugs are horrible, normal people became addicted and did things they normally would not do like steal beat people up break into apartments terrible stuff. On the other hand I would never trade growing up here for nothing because it taught you so much and it was a great moral lesson, and at the end, grounded me in many ways. DG: Did you had any friend that you grew up with that got caught up by the drugs? MR: What was happening was people… it gets to 8th grade, high school, and then college was different ‘cuz that wasn’t in the neighborhood it wasn’t far but that was a big world going to college even though it’s City College it’s not far. What really happened was which still happens in New York people just disappear, they just kinda’ disappear and then you say, “What happened to so and so” and they would say, “Awe man I heard he’s messed up.” Or the family would move. But you saw, I remember a guy in particular who came back from Vietnam and he was a strapping dude, and then he looked like hell, and he was addicted to heroin and you were like, “What the hell” and the big thing out in my day all in the street was drinking, families almost gave you a medal if you drank beer because you at least weren't smoking pot. We were deathly afraid we would never - I mean I would never… heroin cocaine… the heavy drugs and again I say it’s a lesson because I saw it… I saw people stoned out of their mind, I saw people who looked like walking skeletons and I said, “What could drive you to that situation.” No judgment attached just it scared the shit out of you, so I was never going to go that way. Which was bad too because it made alcohol so acceptable I have a shit-load of friends who are in AA. It was kind of the time too, all bets were off, there was tremendous license. DG: So you had friend maybe that you were growing up with that maybe you were really close with when you were young and maybe they disappeared. MR: Yeah there were guys that just kinda disappeared, now that we had this play street and the school and the church were an anchor, I have friends now that I grew up with and I still go to a baseball game with them I’m… we were a band of brothers… I have childhood friends that come back for stickball or they come back to watch because their legs are shot.*laughs* I have childhood friends that I grew up with and thank god they’re in tact, and we get together and we… support each other and… you know… still know each other. Now there are always those people who… I don’t have any real blood close friends who just kinda’ fell of the… The guys you knew that you would say what ever happened to so and so and they’re like, “Yo I heard he’s screwed up I heard he lives in Florida now I heard he’s using I heard he got arrested” So there were those guys who became lost in the dark side. DG: Were there any places in the neighborhood that you avoided did you know spots that you knew not to go to? MR: Absolutely I mean the word was, our block, you felt safe on our block and the general vicinity, but there was certain sense that if you were going to go, like we have a lot of public housing; 99% of people who live in public housing are hard working, trustworthy, friends of mine, go to the church. 99%. 1 or 2% are knuckleheads, are in my opinion, not a scientific survey, are selling out of the apartments, heroin marijuana all kinds of crazy stuff oxycontin, all kinds of drugs and guns. And those 1 or 2 % are very successful of screwing up the buildings and peeing in the hallway and those of the things which are quality of life issues. So yes when we were growing up we would kinda go around but it was lets go around in a group not that we were in like gangs or crews but just for safety and you shouldn’t go by yourself, go with a few friends but I would say there would be a rubber band of like 6 blocks, stay within the 6 and then once you got beyond the 6 blocks you don't really know anybody. Uou may know 1 or 2 people but you don’t really-and they don’t know you and then you kinda gotta flip thing because I’m white that it easy to pick on the white guy, okay *laughs* and that wasn’t fun. So I always prided myself, I got mugged once or twice but my father taught me to fight, Not fist and cuff but we fought in the street to and you weren't going to let nobody push you around so you were going to fight but then you had to be carful if guys had a knife or something there were no guns in those days I mean you were worried about getting punched, hit with a stick, a chain maybe, maybe a knife but now it’s so bloody dangerous with these crazy knuckleheads with these guns. There was a perimeter. One place that was always safe to go was Yankee Stadium, we’d walk to Yankee Stadium we’d go in groups, we loved the Yankees, and thats our backyard its 12 blocks from us were proud of that too. There were definitely certain places you wouldn't go and there were certain places you would NEVER go at night and there still are. DG: Same sort of Places? Or they’ve moved around a little bit probably? MR: They’ve moved a little bit some have not moved much at all, but I will go there now, I will go there now, Because… why…because my neighbors live there. Now I’m going with young people sometimes from the church the school or the documentary center. So when we go back from the game you don’t say goodbye you say, “Wait were you going” they say, “I’m going home” you say, “no no i’ll walk you.” Especially the young ladies we walked them you walk a person to their door, but thats the New York thing. DG: Tell me a little bit more about how specifically you’re involved in the neighborhood how you got involved in the community with gardening and explained what you do specifically. I’m very pleased to always meet with the young people ‘cuz I admire you and I’m glad that theres an interest in this community. and i was in the community and you saw thing buildings being burnt. destruction and there was always this sense that you should be a good citizen and be involved, and then there was also a sense that the city’s corrupt and the politicians are totally corrupt and just stay away from that. And there was a sense that it was pointless you're hittin’ your head against the wall you cant fight City Hall. We were always somewhat socially conscious, but the tipping point was me and my wife got married and we made a conscious decision to be in this neighborhood and to raise children in this neighborhood and in 1986 and she was teaching in the South Bronx and I could walk to work, but right around the block is the firehouse and believe it or not in 1986 the city of New York said they were going to close our firehouse, and we said wait a minute, did you never here the story about how the South Bronx burned down? and you’re going to close the firehouse? It was the 23rd busiest firehouse in the city of New York engine 41. And the city said they were going to move it but by moving it they were going to close another Engine company. Well make a long story short, and it was a long story, from 1986 to 1990 we fought to have it not moved, public hearings, mobilization, demonstrations in the street. And this was all brought about by a wonderful group called the South Bronx People for change and our church we were the Social Action Committee in our church, and if we knew what we were getting into I don”t think we would’ve done it, but we got into a war with the city of New York. and allied with us in the course of this were elected officials and [we] really had to grab the by the collar sometimes and the fire department union and I met so many incredible people and we fought, fought, fought and we got money in the city budget to keep our fire house, we had a lot of great support by the city council and the mayor was Ed Koch and on May 4th 1990, Ed Koch in spite of all the money that was there, he close the firehouse and that son of a… we… he broke our heart and he closed our firehouse, and some people told us, “you guys fought a great fight you have nothing to be ashamed of but its over.” and now we said, “wait a minute, what more can you do to us? now you close our firehouse,” so we did not stop, we continued to fight and put it in the public eye we had a lawsuit we kept pushing trying to breathe life into that bloody thing and Koch was leaving office and everyone who was running for mayor we brought every single one of them to this block and pointed at that building and said, “yo are you going to open a firehouse?” and they all promised, and David Dinkins became the mayor and David Dinkins reopened our firehouse. But what happened was in 14 months it was closed, 14 people died in this area, and we said that would happen. We were a high fire incident area, arson still not as bad as it was, but that was the tipping point, and we fought and they said “You cant fight City Hall” we said, “yes you can, now you might get your ass kicked but you got to fight.,.” So that was an issue and was all about public safety it was about our buildings and it was also about pride. You come to our block? to close our firehouse when its this busy? are you crazy? you would never have gone to Riverdale, you would never have to the Upper East Side or the West Side in the 80’s and tried to close their fire house you wouldn’t you came to the South Bronx, it was Environmental Racism and it affected the environment, you came down to a community of color which had a horrible voting record, we should be ashamed of ourselves we vote like a bunch of knuckleheads, we don't vote and we had elected officials who were clueless and they've gotten better i’ll say that. This fight galvanized the community on many level. the churches the civic groups, when it reopened hallelujah. The next phase was they were tied to other crazy things and now we had the South Bronx People for Change, whatever are the issues this is how you organize: community based organizing. and we had the tools and we had the structure and we had allies throughout the whole South Bronx and so that was a wonderful thing and then we wanted to get a traffic light, 12 years we fought for a traffic light we finally got a traffic light. Gimme a break it doesn't take 12 years to get a traffic light in Times Square area it Doesnt take 12 years to get a traffic light in Riverdale, it takes 12 years to get a traffic light in the South Bronx. Why? why? okay? It begs the question, “Gimme a break will ya?” And also one or two [hone calls to the elected official he gets on the things and I’m not talking about under the table I’m talking about right on top of the table just get it done okay so people don’t get hit by cars, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand this stuff. So finally something positive in the sense of… there was an abandoned lot on 151st street and one of the brothers in the church said why don’t we make a community garden there, and that was a good sign to me that we were saying were going to be proactive instead of reactive. Fighting the city which we get put in a reactive situation. lets create a garden and it was done in conjunction with my job at that point in time which was group homes for handicapped people and the garden would be something that would be green for the community, grow vegetable plants and all the beautiful things, and also get people who have been isolated because of their physical disability and mental retardation, they lived in institutions back in the day. This is a good place where they could garden and meet people and get involved. And the community garden came out of that and it’s been amazing and it brought together lots of people, we have music in the garden, we grow stuff, we have a barbecue pit, we have celebrations, we celebrate Halloween, Easter we, celebrate lots of things in the garden, and it’s become a community center and the point of all of this… I’m going around the Mulberry Bush - “how’d you get involved.” I did not get involved because i’ll be honest with you because of the importance of greenery, that was part of it, but… it was anger. It was also survival… and it was also like, “Wait a minute other parts of the community have great resources how come we don’t what it wrong with us.” And part of it is you say, “Okay take responsibility” and part of is I don't talk about the man the man dump on us even though I do believe the man does dump on us whoever the man is the establishment we had to get some creditability and we also said to the powers that be, and we had to learn to use the system in the City of New York to say if we want a garden we’ll get a garden you know follow the rules and get a garden. So all the focus was the children. Our kids deserve a nice, green, safe place to plant and learn something and come together. The fight for the firehouse was to save buildings but the most vulnerable people were the seniors the children the people with disabilities, and thats what drove us crazy that these sons of… of… guns would dare to put us in that position. Well, you put us in that position were going to fight. And thats what we did. I would rather spend more time being proactive because we still seem like we’re fighting so many other powers that be. But thanks to the South Bronx People for Change it gave us the tools and mechanisms to see things in our community which need to be improved. And then use the system to get it done. Do your due diligence and do your work and make it happen and thats what we learned to do. It’s and intoxicating feeling. It happens as a group and happens as a community and it’s empowering and it teaches the young people this is how you live your life, wherever you go, you don’t let nobody treat you like a second class citizen and don't let nobody dump on you. But you have to create a group thats going to work together to try to have a good quality of life and you deserve that. It’s not silly. For example the firehouse, the firehouse has been there since 1924 maybe before that, we said and were people of faith, the South Bronx People of Change had Mosques, Catholic churches Lutheran churches Episcopal churches, we didn’t have a synagogue but if there was one they would’ve been on board we would’ve tried to bring in our Hebrew brothers. we said this, god almighty but our firehouse up there because it was to save peoples lives. Ed Koch has got it all wrong. Because he thinks he has the power to come down here. Now he had the power and he exerted that power and he did it and what did it get him, 14 people died, he didn’t even save money for the city, knucklehead. There was a play on broadway once, “Your arm’s to short to box with god.” God put it there and we kept saying, “God, put it back” and he did put it back, now we organized and we pushed on the ground, and in the courts, with the elected officials and it was successful, but we give all the power and thanks to God, everyone else helped and that’s a good thing. And the same with the community garden it’s an ongoing thing it’s a lot of work to keep a garden going, but that’s a long way around, a lot of that stuff for me personally came from anger and indignation that, “here we go again,” and “Just stop doing this to our people, this is ridiculous, you guys, stop neglecting us, stop looking the other way. and stop saying what you say, ‘We can get away with this stuff in the South Bronx.’” and its been our legacy, waste transfer station, we had a medical waste incinerator, a lot of issues they dumped on us because we were politically disorganized and because some people were taking money under the table, so that’s a little, but where it all came from now I'm glad that historians and students are learning what happened to us because we were like soldiers in the trenches, and if somebody asked whats going on, “I don't really know whats going on they're shootin’ at me,” we don’t want to be violent were pacifists, we practiced civil disobedience, we stood arm and arm, we are not against the police but they sent the police, but we were in the trenches, so we’re fighting, when the smoke clears it’s important to understand the context and what exactly happened, and why? So it’s not repeated so that we can pass on these tools which we can pass onto the next generation. we say this look i touch that firehouse every day of my life, they may want to come back, we watch that firehouse like a hawk, and the same with the garden, our garden was on the list to be auctioned in the city of New York, and we had to fight for our garden, same thing, a lawsuit citywide with other gardening group, demonstration. They used to come with a bulldozer at five in the morning and drive it in and try to trash the garden and then by the time you got there it was back to an empty lot again. And say, “sorry guys, close it padlock it.” Putting the police in that terrible position, because the cops don't like that either you're using the cops to be like the Gestapo on the community. DG: So they bulldozed your garden and you had to keep building it back up? MR: Well no see they didn't bulldoze our garden, but we had a plan we had those airhorns, we had the people across the street with airhorns and a phone chain and if someone saw a bulldozer at six in the morning and we were going to run up and lay down on the sidewalk, and say, “Go ahead run it over” But I know other gardens Cabo Rojo garden was bulldozed one of my buddies climbed up the tree, and was in the tree and it was like a standoff, now they bulldozed as far as they could and he wasn’t coming out of that bloody tree, it was a demonstration it was to try to prove, but eventually he came down, I don't know if they arrested him, but that was the story with him, but they bulldozed a lot of gardens and I was also part of a group called South Bronx United Gardeners, there were 22 gardens around here we wanted to save them all, I knew we weren't going to save them all, but I said what if we save half, gardens have to stick up for themselves, South Bronx United Gardeners were successful because half of the gardens were saved, then the developers came and nothing against the developers, but we were like, “We took over these gardens when no one was down here and we built them into beautiful gardens. now you wanna come here?” The garden is city land okay? There was a building there once that became usually burned down and then the city demolished the building and then all that rubble laid in that lot and some groups had the idea lets make a garden and they cleared all that out and they put all that dirt in and they put this nice garden, they used to pay 1 dollar a year for that lease and its city land. now technically they were supposed to tell you… half of the gardens were saved because evolutions… the gardens became true community resources and true community meeting places and we have very little green space around here and they became a little pocket of heaven for some people. and they are our green space, they’d become also educational centers because the kids are learning stuff the kids our going to come in our garden [in a couple of weeks] see real plants see real compost bins, see real stuff, right next store so they don't have to go to the Botanical Garden, well they should go… but they could walk right next store and see the whole thing, cherry trees, birds, so it created… it evolved way beyond our wildest dreams which is a wonderful thing which happens… DG: so just to give a time frame, when did this whole thing start, with the firehouse and everything. MR: They started with the firehouse in 1986, we fought for 3 years, and in 1989 they closed, on May 4th 1989 and it reopened July 1st 1990, 14 months later and thank god it’s been open. and I don't think they’ll ever mess with it again but you can never say never. And then the garden came around… it was before that, it started in 1983, but the garden started to get threatened in the 1990s so then things that you think like we got our garden it’s great it’s beautiful… and then all the sudden you started hearing, “They’re going to auction your garden off?” And your like “what?” The garden has a block and a lot number and for the block and the lot number for all the vacant lots it’s listed as… a vacant lot… so some guy downtown sees a block and lot number in the Bronx and says for some reason, “I like 151st street, thats my lucky number, it’s really cheap, but they don't know its a community garden because on the paper it says vacant lot and then it became a community garden, that was a citywide lawsuit and Elliot Spitzer was the attorney General, finally it was all ironed out, a lot of demonstrations, people got arrested, civil disobedience, it was peaceful. finally the city agreed… two major garden groups, Bette Middler’s Group, New York Restoration and the trust for public land, bought a nice bunch of all these community gardens, the Parks Department said, “Okay we won’t touch these gardens and the rest can go to these developers.” Some gardens got consolidated, our garden, we didn't know it, our garden was saved we were part of the lawsuit, this particular day we knew they were going to court and they were, “like we should know by three o’clock” and I called the lawyers and Giuliani was the mayor then. they said “your garden is saved” Giuliani… they struck a deal but your garden is saved. We were like “who?” they said someone bought your garden but not a developer, a trust. We didn’t know it took two weeks we found out it was the Trust for Public Land so our garden will be a Garden forever, whatever forever means… so our garden is saved. but again they were going to come down with bulldozers and clear our garden. but thank god our garden was saved… that would've been somewhere around 1993, whenever Elliot Spitzer, whenever the agreement came with the Giuliani administration, but it never would've happened if the pressure was not brought city wide, but Elliot Spitzer was the champion of that… he did some crazy stuff… but he ironed out that whole agreement him and his staff, i’ll give him credit his people used to come to the South Bronx United Gardeners meetings and… the classic story: David and Goliath…so the Israelites saw the Goliath and said “We can not win,” and David said “he’s a giant, how can i miss him?” And he took the rock and hit the giant because he was a big target… and thats what I saw that we were doing. And they, “Said you can’t fight City Hall are you crazy?” and we were like, “no.” After the firehouse was reopened, there was an article in the Daily News, “A little engine that could” you can fight City Hall and win because thats what happened. you might get you're ass kicked but you got to fight, if they beat you fair and square or they beat you dishonestly then they beat you but at least you just didn't fold, you put up a fight, but the fight is never over, and they told us the fight was over at 41, and it looked over we were crying in the street, then we got madder, we got even crazier because what the hell can you do now? you took the bloody firehouse… we fought with a new anger and energy. but always would hope… it was about Koch but it wasn't about… we saw Koch at parades and we’d say, “Do the right thing, Ed… You can’t close the company.. .you’re doing the wrong thing.. .” He refused to look at the big picture, same thing with the garden. I know it’s about money. You can put up a thing and collect taxes and taxes, I know that, but you see the kids come on earth day, you see the joy the children have, can we just have a little piece a green? Don't you have enough money? When is enough enough? It’s a quality of life issue, and we deserve that. And we built it. It's a wonderful thing when the community achieves. It’s a powerful thing to the children. DG: So it sound like what you’re saying in the beginning when you started our with all this stuff the city was like this unstoppable madness and you had no say. Do you think that changed over time, because of the community’s work became more aware of you guys? MR: Yes I think because of the South Bronx People for Change, which was here fighting for firehouse, over in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx was fighting against drugs and prostitution with the same tools. and I think we built kind of a track record, which somebody once said to us, “you guys are like pit bulls and they just don’t want to deal with you anymore.” We went through the proper channels and we were schooled by some brothers in Brooklyn because they closed their firehouse int he 1970s, we went to the fire commissioner’s house we went to the mayor’s house, every parade in New York City and we’d go with sign and when we saw the mayor running we’d yell “Don’t close engine 41,” and we know they were like, “we don’t want to hear about their house any more.” because we were such a giant pain in the house and that politics get in their ear. Again were a faith based organization there’s a story in the scripture Jesus tells… where the unjust judge, the widow comes and says, “You have to give me my share” and he says, “no I’m not giving it to you, I fear neither god nor man” and she’s a widow so she has no children or husband to fight for her so she keeps knocking on the door and eventually he says once more, “I fear neither god nor man but give her what she wants just to shut her up.” and part of our thing was our persistence. It also about speaking truth to power. why would you close our firehouse? answer me, Don’t gimme no bullshit about money. That the question, why? If you’re mad enough to do it come to the block with the bulldozers meet with the people explain it to the people talk about some options and then do it but they don't they send their minions down here. Buts that’s right, it was this machine and we would just get run over and peel ourselves like in cartoons off the sidewalk and say, “They're right we are a bunch of idiots around here,” and then a lot of self hate comes in and you know… but what we experienced was learning the tools to say there’s ways to addressing this. trying to speak truth to power, using the system and then going around the system and putting pressure… and I think it did build a track record we’re still fighting in this community, were fighting in the New York City housing authority to get peoples apartments cleaned up now South Bronx People for Change doesn't exist anymore there’s a new group called South Bronx Churches, not really that new, and they've done a lot of good stuff in the community but it’s the same concept, organize, put pressure on the politicians, hold them accountable. Our elected officials in that paster were sometimes very week, and normally thats their job to hold them accountable the lines get blurred because sometimes they all seem to be at the same table but in the same bed with each other, they might say something to your face and then walk away and say, “Do what you want, don't listen to those people they’re a pain in the neck,” and we told all of our people you got to fight with us, and we made enemies and we said if you can’t do it, we’ll vote you out, we’re telling you to do your job, don’t you get paid to do this and they get offended, but we’re trying to have a nice relationships, and we’d pull that card… it’s not a card it’s to hold them accountable. And that’s what they do in Riverdale they tell them to their face. They call he politicians and say, “You sit down we’re going to talk to you” and “You go to City Hall and do this,” and they represent the people, around here it was like a third world country its like a South American dictatorship, and these guys in power were out to lunch, making a lot of money, and they’re in bed with the developers as opposed to representing the people in the street. and it will never end but the struggle continues on many other issues still. DG: You say a lot they had the tools the resources when you started out. Tell me a little bit more what kind of things they had how they helped how that community built over the years a success, what sort of tools they had what sort of resources they had. MR: It was a small group that got funding through the Catholic church and some government money for like inner city justice campaigns and basically what they would do is: base up. people power… it was bilingual, Spanish and English, people power, saying, “would you like us to come to your church?” and they provided training, my wife went to the training and I came behind her and she got all of these things going, examine the power structure and who has the power in this situation and you go from the mayor and city council and community board, and you learn the system and then we walked that walk, so they would help you with that, also what they really said was “What is your issues?” First these building on Cortlandt Avenue were being demolished and we say, “Stop demolishing them, we got blocks and blocks of empty block, renovate them, there’s good structures.” We used to go around with a stencil and stencil the building, “This building is claimed by the people.” It meant nothing but again it was what are these people doing in the street? Civil disobedience, this is our building don’t dare touch it. On top of that there were people meeting with HUD and with the city saying, “stop doing this,” young people of color and white, it was a great group learning the power structure, with Koch we’d try to hit the community board, the community board would say, “Well you know we’ll try but…” …”okay write a letter to tell the mayor”…, “I don’t know if I can write a letter you know” cuz you saw they were afraid, they didn’t want to get on the bad side of the mayor and we’d say, “Okay to hell with them.” You saw it they’re in bed, so don’t find them and then the borough president “Well you know the mayor you know how the mayor’s a pain in the ass.” “He is a pain in the ass but wait a minute.” I’ll never forget, once we went to a meeting where there was elected officials, our best friends with the fire union, we went bang! screaming and yelling and shit and when we left the meeting one of my friends from the fire union called me, and said “They had no idea you guys were so militant” and I said “good, good” You can’t buy us you cant buy us they’d say, “what if we just put ambulances in the building, what if we gave you guys like two thousand dollars for you organization.” And we could not be bought cuz we’d say, “no ambulances, 41 and 41 alone.” A lot of people can be bought, organizations can be bought, but that organization was so incredible, for example this is what… and I threw this out I had to go give a talk at the gentrification conference about oral history and this was basically ***explains the chart** One of our friends in Brooklyn said, “Take ‘em to court get some lawyers pro bono, reach out to any group in the city, fire protection, community gardens.” It’s about faith it’s about believing, its about churches, churches are full of nuts and dedicated people, churches scared the shit out of elected officials, they’d say, “Wait a minute how did all these… they got muslims, catholics… lutherans.” We got a letter from Jesse Jackson just before he ran for president back in the late 80’s, we got a letter from the Rainbow Coalition, we were so proud of that, I swear when Ed Koch saw that he went to the bathroom and said, “Wait a minute, gimme a break, why are they reaching out across the country are they nuts? this is nothing, what are they crazy?” But we reach people of faith and when you have demonstrations, they come. Community awareness make the neighborhood realize community action, we had a prayer vigil every night at 7 O’clock in front of the people one or two people rain cold snow somebody would put a hand on the firehouse and pray thats what we believed. And then the press, this was before the internet, mailing things, snail mail, and the press was wonderful to us, and that’s a big job… this is what the South Bronx People for Change… that you have to hit this on every front. At least once a week you tried to hit somewhere, you tried to do something whether it was a phone call, a letter, something, and you just don't let it die. thats hard, keep breathing life into this thing. Everyone wants it do die I swear to god! Even the pastor in the church sometimes will… when our firehouse reopened the paster came and he’s a good man and he came and, we knew this, the pastor came and blessed it, the church bells rang, it was like a movie it was fabulous. He said to Francine my wife, “I never thought you guys would get this firehouse reopened,” and I said, “I knew it… but you’d in the kitchen… “he’s a knucklehead…” because he didn’t have faith, well i’m not saying he didn't have faith he had faith in his religion but he had been a beaten down dude he didn't have faith in the community… and were walking on water we didn't know what the hell we were doing we were a bunch of knuckleheads. and you know… they say courage is fear that has said its prayers. We were scared shitless, we were getting beat up constantly… not literally emotionally. But we kept going forward because we were together, it was a unity. so i dunno… DG: Now about the incinerator, It was late 90’s, there was a medical waste incinerator over on 138th Street and Locust Avenue which is about two miles from here a mile and a half, it was amedical waste incinerator and they would only burn red bag medical waste. It was the only functioning incinerator left in the city of New York, but they built it, they BUILT it in the 90’s. The jewish community of Riverdale said to some people in the South Bronx, “you know they’re building a medical waste incinerator near you?” we said, I don’t think so, who does that anymore. Red bag medical waste is a biological problem it could have disease, so theres a problem there, so when you burn it you burn plastic so now you create a chemical problem. You try to solve a biological problem but you create a chemical problem so the point of it was this technology of incineration was antiquated, you don’t burn anything anymore, you autoclave everything. So this is part of what we had to learn: autoclave means you get all the red bag stuff and you steam it and it becomes a giant block of plastic and the pathogens are dead, and you created steam and steam is not pollution, you could use it has landfill you could recycle it, and we were like wait a minute are you guys crazy? And they hadn’t even finished building and it was “No… it’s going to be staate of the aaart” *fake reassuring* and we were like, “State of the art my ass!” So they built it and community pressure now, tried to get a lawsuit, environmental impact study and a lot of elected officials were in bed with that company that built it. the head of the community board was indicted by the FBI because he took fifty thousand dollars from that medical company that built that incinerator. And we were like. “here we go again.” the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, and that was environmental racism 101 and we did a lot of stuff to fight and push, honestly I did not want to get involved with that I’m done, the firehouse, the garden, we won I’m going to take a vacation, but the guys I got to know them and they’re my brothers now and it’s that voice in your head “oh bullshit i ain’t takin this no more” and it’s “what are you doing to our kids are you guys crazy?” they are nuts they are… their drunk with money, and they see money, and we’re secondary and their pocket came first. and the medical waste incinerator… burning, burning, i smelt it many times, but you would not smell smoke if you got close to it you'd smell a horrible nasty smell of like decaying food and of like a thing that gets in the back of your throat… like a dead body. we fought we fought we fought, legal, the churches again, but the South Bronx clean air coalition was its own entity, we applied a lot of the same principle, we had demonstration and everything. We brought the kids, Bronx Lebanon hospital.. to had the medical waste incinerator a hostpital had to hold the license. Bronx Lebanon Hospital held the license. We used to meet with the heads of BLH and say, “What’s wrong with you? How could you do this in could conscious.” Becasue they got all their medical waste done for nothing. We used to go to BLH with 2-3 busloads of kids lay on the sidewalk and draw chalk marks and every kid would have a mask on and then the kids write the name and we’d say, “You're killing us,” this was before everyone was talking about asthma, we were ahead of the curve. and they were like “It’s not really… it doesn't effect the air” they tell you this to your face and… we fought we fought we fought… at that time the governor was Pataki who was a republican and D’Amato who was a senator was a republican. and we had gained critical mass and the looked really bad, and more stuff was coming out in the press and we wouldn't let up and we kept bringing busload for demonstrations. *giggling* get in the back of the bus with 60 kids and then the guys from Parks Department would have to come out and look at these sidewalks, I’m sure they got those guys with the hoses. It makes everyone who walks into BLH, “wait a min whats going on?” and you say, “The hospital’s holding the permit for the incinerator and they’re burning the medical waste and we have asthma.” and it begs the question, “why are you doing that?” We finally got… the company agreed to get an expert in to come and examine the place they paid for the guy, they gave him total access and he wrote a scathing report how horrible it was in there, bags popping needles falling on the floor poor workers are picking em up with their hand with gloves, throwin’ em back in, the whole thing was a goddam disaster, we always said this he wrote a report that was the torpedo that sunk the ship but they bought the torpedo they paid him… and then Pataki was the hero now where the hell he came from… we don’t care who does it just do it and he did it and it closed. It is still a waste transfer station but they don’t burn no more, and they had these stacks, we wanted reassurance that they were not going to burn again, because they kept the stacks up ad we knew that they had the mechanism. we went to their headquarters in Brooklyn with two busloads of kids and they came out like “what do you want? were no burning no more.” and one of the kids said why don't you take down the stacks? and we were like yeah why don't you take down the stacks? and then you know how things work a few days later, “were going to take down the stacks okay” that was our victory, they had a crane and they said, “Who’s going to press the button to lift the crane?” and they said the borough president and we said “The same borough president who looked the other way when they built that thing?” I don’t think thats right and I know the borough president he’s a nice guy, but we were like “really? The Borough President? I don’t know if thats right.” And they were like. “Well who do you want and we were like one of the kids.” It was the kid and the borough president *giggles* so I always told the kids after that and then we asked them for reparation money, and a lot for the churches and the schools got ten, twenty thousand dollars from Browning-Ferris Industries, and I always told the kids, “Now some neighborhoods will learn history, but to the day you die I want you kids not to just learn the history of the incinerator, you made history, you closed that thing.” Those kids wrote letters to the offices and they're learning how the system works, and don’t spin your wheels on low level people who cant effect it who can effect it the governor go right to the governor and keep going. and then look at that gov. and say how long does he got (If he ain’t gonna change his mind) so lets get the guys who are running next, these are not quick battles these are wars. once your into you’re into it, you're getting yourself beat up a lot and it’s emotionally draining. When it’s a community we joke sometimes and its like war stories like “Remember the days when we did this?” And you cant do this anymore you’d be arrested in a New York minute now-a-days or you gotta get a permit, we would do stuff bang we’d just do stuff, and it was not that far away 1990’s, 2000’s. One of my main points that I keep saying is, “If you could bottle up all that energy do you know how many parks we could’ve built and you made us fight an incinerator? Why didn’t you just let us do it the first week and let us bottle that energy and build more parks and more community gardens and paint murals and do positive things?” But it's the hand were dealt don’t cry about it and just… that model works and those are the tools we learned from the South Bronx People for Change, and they didn't invent them. In hindsight it work and it brings together people, it take a toll and it brings people together. DG: So you said your retired what sort of things do you nowadays in the community? MR: Yeah yeah… I’m never retired till they put me in the ground. Now I’m trying to be involved. There’s always that reactive stuff that we have to you know keep the wolves away from the doors cuz the wolves keep coming and they smell money down here and blood so i still try to be involved in improving police protection, i do help a little bit with the South Bronx churches, which is going to public meetings putting pressure on NYCHA. There’s a big public meeting here with the police commissioner in a few weeks in our church we’re gonna have five hundred people here and say what we need we got some good steps, but they’re not giving us enough cops. But then I stay involved with the garden of course, and I’m all now about proactive, the school has a garden club, I help with the garden club once a week, it’s all fun in games, I firmly believe in that too. We have a stick ball tournament once a year, we have the Easter egg hunt, our garden got totally renovated last year, fabulous, I volunteer at the botanical garden I’m on a committee, big deal… ‘cuz thats the other thing try to be connected across the board, the Bronx Land Trust I’m involved with that, yeah I do stay involved with “The greening community” and then my wife’s a teacher so if I can help her school. And I’m involved with the documentary center, anything to help them keep the building clean, we’ll build frames for the next show, this again elevates our community. I myself, I’m from the Bronx when the documentary deicide to come in I said to myself is this guy crazy? Does he know where he’s putting this documentary center, and the answer is he is crazy, *laughs* but I love him he’s my brother now because you would do it if you weren't *laughs* but it’s made such a magnificent difference. So anything thats involved in young people and energy and positivity, and the magical word is fun. If it’s fun for the kids, and if it’s not fun lets make it fun. What was important to me was play, thats what let us feel safe, that we played games and what we learned from play was yeah were all different colors and teams and we could get really mad at each other, fight with each other, and then it had to end, and you had to shake hands. So I stay busy and there’s enough things that are going on I play music in the church *phone rings* Im a musician…*leaves to answer phone* DG: I think were going to wrap up pretty soon, do you have any more things to say on that MR: No… Me personally i’m so grateful to God, I think live is a gift, i have experience now, theres so many wonderful people i also think its very important to be part of a larger community and I’m never bored, now that’s selfish and personal, but if I can do something to help this community because I’m a part of it, this community gave me so much, so i wanna be able to give back so that how I feel. DG: so when you tell someone where you're from what do you tell them? MR: You can always have fun with it but when people say where ya from I say I'm from the Bronx and if they ask where i say the south Bronx everyone one in the world *laughs* has heard about the South Bronx. a lot of people say “You Don’t still live down do you” so I get that a lot and then I get “You didn't live your family down there do you” we raised each other okay? Yeah you still get that eyeball that theres something wrong with you or you're a masochist. DG: You feel like the South Bronx as a whole is your community and neighborhood and not just melrose? MR: well melrose is my stomping ground but no I’m a product of the South Bronx, and maybe theres some sense of pride, but we've been through hell we’re a much maligned community and I've met people who taught me we need to be the champions of our community and we also need to be honest reflectors in our community. I don’t want to be running this bloody neighborhood but to say sometimes among each other, I like this expression that you young people use, “We gotta step up our game, we have to improve our conduct” now some peoples perceptions are wrong too but I’m proud to say I’m from the South Bronx and I’m proud to have been here all my life and I’ve so many different things. DG: If you’d left what would you miss most, I would miss the people, I would miss my church and the school, and I would miss the people, because this thing is full of characters to and the familiarity, I feel at home here, I’m not blind, I feel safe, now there’s certain blocks certain times of day I would not safe, I could walk down my own block if I saw like six dudes walking up the block I say to myself I might be in some serious trouble here *laughs* but I have plan b, my escape route, if I need to use my escape route, but I would miss the people. The energy, there’s a tremendous energy in this community, these relationships are my entire life, these things I’m involved in, I would miss the overlap in this community if were going to do something we tell the documentary center, we tell the church we tell the paster, we tell the people on the block now they all may not come but theres a good possibility there a lot of overlay and people who are good in this neighborhood, I’m surprised that their egos go in their back pocket, the young man you met Ryan, he’s a wonderful young man he’s a scholar he’s going to a fabulous school and his family comes to the garden and they help. Mario his father, we’ll do something at the garden, and i say i know he ain’t coming and he comes like the Calvary, quiet and he helps, and that sense of we need each other. somebody taught me this a doctor of epidemiology who helps us with our firehouse Dr. Rod Wallace that poor people, working class people whatever you wanna say, we don't have a safety net of bank accounts, property, jewelry, stocks and bonds, what is our safety net? Each other we need each other we literally need each other to get ourselves out of a jam sometimes. To borrow something to assist each other, things that we really need and we depend on each other, a good majority of the time, our wealth, our treasure is each other, and our institutions like our churches and our parishes and things like that. DG: Great. awesome, *laughs* Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio Recording Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Marty Rogers Interview Transcript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dylan Garcia https://melrosestories.org/files/original/2a3f92f567c6ae6235f71fdbaa824248.png aedc3f54ee03b586dd2b65349ee7f5a2 https://melrosestories.org/files/original/06abc9be28a54523dfb5d88f7743343c.m4a 3b7a1663e0044051a12ba2b194abe359 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dylan Garcia Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Audio recording Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 5th 2017, April 21st 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Marty Rogers, Dylan Garcia Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bronx Rising! Maxine Sullivan Women In Jazz Series: Balkan-Influenced Jazz Subject The topic of the resource Helen Merrill, Valerie Capers, and Bobby Sanabria at the Bronx Rising! Maxine Sullivan Women In Jazz Series: Balkan-Influenced event Description An account of the resource Photo of Helen Merrill, Valerie Capers, and Bobby Sanabria at the Bronx Rising! 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Maxine Sullivan Women In Jazz Series: Balkan-Influenced Jazz Subject The topic of the resource Bronx Rising! Maxine Sullivan Women In Jazz Series: Balkan-Influenced Jazz Description An account of the resource Alma Micic Quartet with Rale Micic (guitar), Corcoran Holt (bass), Tom Beckham (vibes) at the Bronx Rising! Maxine Sullivan Women In Jazz Series: Balkan-Influenced Jazz at the Bronx Music Heritage Center Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource EBGallardo/Bronx Music Heritage Center Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived EBGallardo/Bronx Music Heritage Center Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 8, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nathalia Sanchez Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource EBGallardo/Bronx Music Heritage Center https://melrosestories.org/files/original/3c26cd7df8f7fd940f67ae78062cd49f.mp3 d03155346f36e67ff1bd080720f54911 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Language A language of the resource English Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Diamond Naga Siu Description An account of the resource Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Diamond Naga Siu Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ed Garcia Conde Location The location of the interview Melrose 2825 Third Ave, Bronx, NY 10455 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound DNS: Hi. My name is Diamond Naga Siu, and I’m interviewing Mr. Ed Garcia Conde on Thursday, April 13, 2017. This for Professor Rebecca Amato’s (Dis)placed Urban Histories spring 2017 course at NYU Gallatin. Do you mind spelling your name for us, please? EGC: Sure. My name is Ed Garcia Conde, and that’s E-D G-A-R-C (as in Charlie) I-A and second last name is Conde. C-O-N-D-E. DNS: Okay great. So while this is about the neighborhood, I was wondering if I could talk a little about you first — I’d love to hear about your background, your time at Melrose, and you know. EGC: I was actually born at Mott Haven in the old Lincoln Hospital. It was a hospital that was in the South Bronx since before the Civil War, and I was one of the last babies there. It was one of the last years that kids were born there, and I lived for seven years of my life in Mott Haven, but just literally Mott Haven is adjacent to Melrose, so it was just like, we were always there. I went to in Melrose, and then in 1982, while things were still burning… buildings were still being abandoned still. Underdevelopment was opening. It was sort of like a little beacon almost in Melrose on Morris Avenue and 150th and 151st Street, and it’s called Christopher Court. My parents decided to apply for the lotto, you know, the affordable housing lottery back then, and sure enough they were one of the lucky families that were called, and in 1982 — May of 1982, actually May 25, I’ll never forget the date, we moved to Melrose, and I’ve been living here ever since with the exception of a couple years, where I lived in Manhattan and then I put a little stint in New Jersey. New Jersey, I actually broke my lease in New Jersey, cause I just didn’t like it. I broke it one month shy of completing my full year, cause I just couldn’t stand living there. It was a horrible experience. Not because it was a bad neighborhood, but I felt so disconnected from everything, so I came back to Manhattan again, because that’s where I lived before I had moved to Jersey. And while living in Manhattan, I was living in Midtown, living in a nice luxury building. And high floor, but I felt so separated from everyone. Everyone was always cold, there was no sense of neighborhood, and I started looking again, and next thing I know, I’m looking in the Bronx in Melrose, and I found a place literally half a block from my parents’ house. So I moved back. And I was there for a while until things got bad with 9/11, you know? And everybody started losing their jobs including myself, so I ended up moving another half a block into my parents’ house again. And then actually I was there for about five years, until I was able to get back up on my feet. Moved within Melrose, I decided that I’m not going anywhere else. DNS: Okay, great. So your family lived here the whole time? EGC: Yeah, well, my parents were born and raised in Puerto Rico. My father was actually raised both Puerto Rico and here in New York. He came to New York when he was 12, so he’s pretty young. My mother on the other hand, she came when she was 19, so she spent pretty much her whole school years in Puerto Rico and her adult life all over here in New York when she moved in with her sister. And that’s actually how she met my father, because my aunt was married at that time, and coincidentally enough, my uncle — her husband — is my dad’s cousin, so my dad was visiting his cousin one day, and his wife — who happened to be my aunt — and there was my mom, and they fell in love. So it was too sisters married, you know, two cousins. DNS: That’s great. EGC: So I’m related to, my cousins and I are were from that marriage, we’re related on both sides, so it’s like we can’t escape each other. DNS: That’s really funny. What was it like growing up here? EGC: Growing up, I never really thought much about it, you know, the — so many bad things were happening, it just was so normal that buildings were burning and that I could walk six, seven, eight blocks with my mother through the neighborhood and not one person lived on any of those blocks. Whether the buildings were abandoned or it was just rubble and field at that point. So it was sort of interesting you know? Really as a child, you know especially one who’s imaginative like me, and you know, loving fantasy novels and sci-fi and all that stuff, my mind would always wander and sort of create these stories of the landscape around you. So it seemed pretty innocent to me almost. Like, I didn’t know that there was, that that was wrong what was happening around us. Even though we went to Puerto Rico every summer, my mother and I. Dad stayed behind working, because he could never get the vacation days together, because he had just started with New York City transit. So you know, I’m in Puerto Rico in the summers, and in the mountains where my mother grew up on the farm and then I’ll visit my dad’s family and my dad’s father — my grandfather. They were in the city San Juan, you know — beautiful — everything is pretty much kosher. But I never really put two and two together you know, like that why was my existence in Melrose so wrong, versus what that normal scene that I lived in the summers in Puerto Rico. Or where I saw elsewhere whenever we travelled. So it was, like I said, it was really interesting. I remember it was also the height of the crack epidemic, so my mother and I sometimes were walking to my cousin’s house also in Melrose, and I remember one day — the streets were always littered with crack vials. You’d see them everywhere with different colored caps and whatnot. And one day we were walking on Courtlandt Avenue and middle of the day, and there was like a big commotion, people excited. It wasn’t like a negative commotion, you know like a “run away, something’s happening.” And my mother heard people say, “Look, look, they have the blue caps and the yellow caps” and my mother was just curious. She was like, “Maybe they’re selling something, some trinkets or something.” And her mouth just dropped. She had me in my hand, and she’s like, “Let’s get out of here quick, quick, quick,” when she realized the guy was just holding like tons of crack vials with the drugs. That’s when things started becoming a little more real to me as far as what was going around. But it wasn’t until I hit high school that things really started to bother me. I went to school — you know, Catholic school in Melrose — St. Anselm, and it’s borderline Melrose it’s kind of like Melrose-Longwood, Woodstock, which nobody really talks about Woodstock anymore. It sort of got absorbed by Melrose and Longwood. But anyway, that’s where I went to school. I graduated in 1989 from 8th Grade and went to Catholic High School Cardinal Spellman in the North Bronx — largest Catholic School in the New York Archdioceses. It’s one of the top schools in the nation and in the state, and it’s where Sonia Sotomayor graduated from as well among tons of other amazing people. And that school was very mixed. My grammar school was predominantly Latino with a small African American population. And even the Latino was 98 percent Puerto Rican, so that was Melrose. Melrose was mostly Puerto Rican — that’s all I saw everywhere. There were African Americans, but Puerto Ricans were by far the vast majority. And then here I am in high school in 1989 as a freshman, and I’m surrounded by everyone under the sun. Every race, nationality, ethnicity. Everything you can think of. Socioeconomic groups, all of a sudden it wasn’t just low-income families, but it was some very wealthy families as well, all mixed in. So it was a bit of a culture shock for me to see all that. And I liked that, I loved it. But immediately once you started making friends and we’re all hanging out at each other’s houses, I started noticing my friends’ parents they happened to be, my white friends, mostly Italian. Mostly Italians, that was actually the group I ended up hanging out with the most and some of the Irish kids. But none of their parents would ever let my friends come visit me in the South Bronx once they found out that’s where I lived. And that’s when it started hitting me that something was bad, something was going on. But I still didn’t really piece everything together. I just felt really hurt actually that here I come home every day, I’m safe. Even though there are gunshots and yeah, you know, when I look back 1990, which was my freshman year, you know in Melrose and in the 40th precinct part of Melrose, we had well over a hundred murders, and every night I heard gunshots around us, so I guess I grew so accustomed to it that I didn’t realize that it was so bad that it was something really bad. And it took rejection from my friends’ parents to make me feel that way, and it really bothered me a lot and to the point that by the time I was toward my senior year in high school, I hated the Bronx with a passion. I hated my neighborhood… I just couldn’t’ wait to get out. And that was all thanks to, I look back, and that was all thanks to my friends’ parents, you know. For treating me as like I felt like I was being treated like one of those commercials that was like feed the children type of thing. I felt like they were extending some sort of charity toward me. And meanwhile, my parents weren’t low-income. My parents, my dad working in transit, and my mom was working for the archdiocese. We were actually middle-income family. Middle-class, middle-income family, living in the South Bronx. We were an anomaly for the most part, like as far as income went. But we weren’t poor or anything like that. We just happened to live in that neighborhood first by necessity, since that’s where they ended up moving and living, and second by choice at that point. It was affordable. It’s not that they weren’t looking to other places, cause when my parents first got married, they looked for other places on the Grand Concourse, and racism was still really high, and it was still mostly Jewish actually, and once they heard your last name, they wouldn’t show you an apartment, so that was out. Which is why they ended up staying where they were. But you know, going back to the high school, I just couldn’t stand the Bronx at that point. I just couldn’t wait to get out. I just wanted to live somewhere where my friends can feel happy to you know, and safe to come and visit me. I did have one of the friends, eventually their mother did let him actually come over and spend the night once, which was like a groundbreaking thing, but it literally in all my four years of high school, that was the only time that someone from outside my neighborhood, outside the South Bronx actually visited me. You know, it’s stunning. All of my friends that — the only friends that came to visit me in Melrose were the ones who live in Melrose or were in the South Bronx in general, but they weren’t the ones that I always hung out with the most. I spent a lot of my time in the North Bronx, especially during the summers, because there was really no place just to hang out in Melrose and feel safe, so every day I took the bus on Third Avenue at the hub, all the way up to Throggs Neck, while at Westchester Square, then take another bus to Throggs Neck all the way to the end, to literally the last stop. So talk about like, how far I wanted to escape the neighborhood was literally going as far as I could on the bus line, where my best friend who was Italian lived. And every day in summer, that’s what I did every day. Day in and day out. Leave at around 10 in the morning and we hung out. That’s all we wanted to do, that’s all he wanted to do anyway. We’d just veg out, watch TV, walk the neighborhood. It’s all suburban up there, middle class, you know. One-, two-story houses. Nothing bigger much than that. And it’s on the waterfront. Sometimes we’d go to the waterfront, you know, just hang out. But it was all escape the Bronx for me. Escape the South Bronx. DNS: Did you express this to anyone? EGC: No, not really, I never really spoke about it much to anyone except that you know, that I just wanted once I made it would be to move out of the Bronx, and that was just something everyone always said anyways, so it didn’t really seem strange if I had said it. It wasn’t like someone was going to turn and say, “Well, why do you want to leave the Bronx?” Because that’s what everybody does. You either move to Riverdale or one of the nicer parts of the Bronx or just leave the Bronx in general. It wasn’t until college, I didn’t go away. I went to New Rochelle in Westchester County, but I drove every day. I spent as much time as I could there on campus, and I would drive back. I eventually got a job on campus, so I could actually study and work and I’d leave when the library closed at 10, come back home and just park the car, and go to sleep. And rinse, repeat in the morning kind of thing and leave you know Melrose. There was nothing there at that point, I felt. DNS: Is that sentiment the same today? EGC: Not at all. It’s completely different, you know. I love this neighborhood with my heart, with everything. And looking back, I don’t feel guilty for how I felt, because I was younger, and I didn’t understand what was going on around me. It wasn’t like we had the internet either to research for ourselves as easily. It’s not like there were also books published. Everything that was written on the Bronx was always negative, and in the media. So now, it’s like complete love affair with Melrose. I love the vibrancy, I love the mixed-income families that live here, I love everything about it. The different cultures and ethnicities. It’s actually right now, Melrose is the most diverse it’s ever been in its history. You know, Melrose was founded in the 1850s by Germans — German immigrants from the Lower East Side. They came up to what was Westchester County, cause the Bronx wasn’t the Bronx at that point. It was still Westchester, and they spoke with the Morris family, descendants of Governor Morris who was one of the Framers of the Constitution and owned all this land. So they decided to negotiate with the family, like: “We want to buy a parcel of whatever land and move up here.” I think it was about a couple maybe just under of a couple of a hundred families that ended up moving and founding the village of Melrose. It was actually Melrose South, Melrose, and then Melrose East. But they were all connected. And it was from that point, it was German sprinkled in with Irish, then eventually Jewish and Italian as well. And African American eventually started looking at moving in. They started moving in — I’m not quite sure when that happened — I think it was probably in the 20s and 30s. Not much. It wasn’t until the 40s and 50s, and then that was when the Puerto Ricans started moving in. The Italians were here also. Actually, the Italians were here at the turn of the century. There’s still a couple of Italian families left — literally, there are probably only two Italian families left in Melrose from those original families that came over from Italy, you know, like three generations, four generations ago. But now, it’s not just like, when I was growing up, it was mostly Puerto Rican, African American, and then there was actually still Italian. Like the mass I went to at Our Lady of Pity, the first mass was in Italian, the second in Spanish, and then it was English. And then our Christmas masses, every Christmas and holiday mass was done in all three languages, so they didn’t have to have these long services, they’d just lump us all into one. So you know, everyone was always waiting patiently for their language to come up, but it was really mostly the people who only spoke English, because Italian and Spanish, we could pick out and understand pretty much what they were saying, cause the languages are pretty similar. That actually led to me learning Italian and wanting to learn it. That’s probably why I ended up hanging out with so many Italians in high school. Actually, I am 100% fluent in Italian to this day. And that started here in Melrose, because I attended these trilingual masses, because it always fascinated me. That was one thing that I did look back at, you know when I was in high school. “How come my Italian friends up there didn’t want to come down here when we still had Italian families that lived here.” That always baffled me, and every June, they had their Feast of San Antonio, and every June, they would march out of the church — the Italian community — hundreds and do a procession through the neighborhood. And it was really interesting, because it wasn’t just the Italians. At that point, the Italians who lived here, were like I said, dwindling, so the majority who attended the march were Italians who lived in other parts of the Bronx, Westchester County. They all came for the feast day, and they all did the procession. Everyone would literally stop, because they were like, “Where are all these white people coming from? Why are they marching through our streets?” And I was always the one who’s like, “They lived here, you know?” Because a lot of people didn’t know the history of their own neighborhood, and I was always interested about what was here. Like, who was here, and, uh, sorry. I talk in stream of consciousness, so I sort of lost my thought there. Uh, where was I? I forgot where I was actually going with this. Oh, I was talking about the diversity. So as a kid, you know, those were the three main groups, including the Italians and some Dominican families. That’s when Dominicans started migrating to New York, so they still didn’t have a huge presence like they do now. That to me was like a really foreign experience. It was like, “Oh, Latin from somewhere else.” Spanish was very different from ours, and I was like, that’s interesting. I only had a few in my grammar school there was only one Dominican student with me. In high school, there were a lot more. That’s when I actually was exposed more to that culture. But now, it’s Puerto Ricans, it’s Mexicans, it’s African Americans, it’s Dominicans, it’s West Africans. And West Africans — just to lump them in as West African is an injustice, because it’s whatever countries that are there as well. And also other parts of Africa. All living in side by side. And it’s Christians and it’s Muslims, you know. You have literally a Christian church right next to a mosque, so it’s pretty amazing to see everyone coexisting, and no one is fighting. That’s one of the reasons why I love this neighborhood. It’s like, we’re like a living proof of we can actually do it. We can actually live together and survive, you know. I mean, after Melrose and after the fires settled and people started moving back when the new developments were being built, because at one point, Melrose had a population of I think about 25, 27 thousand roughly. But by 1980, it was down to just a little over 3,000, and that’s the era that I lived. I lived in a neighborhood that was pretty much vacant. It was about 400,000 people that left the South Bronx. That left the Bronx in general between 1970 and 1980, so you know down in the South Bronx, we were decimated as far as that goes. People compared us to the bombings in Dresden, Germany. That was the image that a lot of people would conjure when they described South Bronx. And when you look at the old photographs, that’s what it looked like. You literally thought that this was a war-torn country. Where else do you see buildings collapsed, half-collapsed, you know? Burnt out shelves and abandoned churches except in war and war scenes. But then to where we are today in Melrose, you know we owe a lot of the, probably everything to Nos Quedamos We Stay, the organization that pretty much stopped the first time gentrification tried to come into the neighborhood, which was the city. The city had committed I would call them war crimes on our neighborhood through planned shrinkage by cutting out services to us. And if it wasn’t for organizations — grassroots organizations — that fought for our services to come back. I don’t know where we would be, but this neighborhood was rebuilt literally through blood, sweat, tears, and the lives of the people lost during those years. Nos Quedamos came in, because there was a woman by the name of Yolanda Garcia. She caught wind of a plan by the city that wanted to basically raze the entire neighborhood — what was left of the neighborhood — and then create middle-income and upper-middle-class housing condos and co-ops and whatnot. Literally displace the people who lived here, and she was like, “Nope, it’s not going to happen.” And you know, they got together, they fought, you know tooth and nail, and eventually they were able to have to halt the city’s plans, and they were able to design a plan that was for us by us, because if it wasn’t for that, we would have been gentrified long before Harlem and Williamsburg. Like that Williamsburg wasn’t even on the map for gentrification at that point or signs and neither was Harlem. It was actually our neighborhood that would have been the first one to go. So thanks to them, I’m still here. I’m still in my rent-stabilized apartment and my parents are still here, and my friends and family. Cause now we don’t have many empty parcels left. What’s left is already slated for more affordable housing. Although we’re starting to see market-rate housing being built, so now we’re bracing ourselves for the second wave, you know, of gentrification coming now that we built it up, everybody wants to come, so that’s a little scary. DNS: Okay. So with all those factors, did those contribute to the name of your — or not the name — but the slogan of your blog? EGC: Oh, “You think you know the Bronx, but you don’t?” So a little background on that. I started blogging in 2009 on Melrose, and the reason I started writing on Melrose is because… I had already moved out of my parents’ house the second time, and I was during my search actually, during my search for my apartment, every time I looked up Melrose and things like that, I never saw anything positive. Everything was just images of what I grew up with, which was — even though it wasn’t too long ago at that point — they were far enough we were with new construction with affordable housing and families moving in, and the narrative was always negative, it was never positive, which brought me back to my childhood, one that I didn’t really see much wrong. That was because even though there were fires and the drugs and the violence, there was life happening all around us. There we carnivals and street fairs and impromptu gatherings of hundreds of people playing salsa music and cooking up a storm in shopping carts and barbecues in the middle of the streets, cause hey, who were they interrupting? No one, cause there were bocks and blocks of debris around them. Puerto Ricans are known for making do with what they have, you know and just being happy about their circumstances. I mean, it is what it is. It’s almost like a motto in Puerto Rico: they’re still happy. So anyway, going back to the slogan, it was, well that came after. I decided to blog about Melrose, but again, because I was tired of the negative images and the false narratives, and I realized that nobody was telling our story from within. Everyone was just coming in and telling our stories from their eyes, which even though my eyes are biased as well, their eyes are just completely biased, cause they don’t even know the true history or they don’t know the true experience of living in the neighborhood, so how are you actually going to write about it properly? So I started doing that in September of 2009, and it was called Welcome2Melrose, and Welcome to the Village of Melrose was what I had originally called it, cause that’s what we were — we were originally a village. But we were still a village despite having grown, and the slogan once I morphed into Welcome2TheBronx, when I decided to cover everything, cause I realized it wasn’t just Melrose, but it was a Bronx-wide image problem that we had that people were still were thinking that we were burning and that gangs were roving our streets. It became “You think you know the Bronx but you don’t,” and a lot of that had to do with the fact that even I thought I knew the Bronx, but I didn’t. Once I started my love affair with the borough and my neighborhood, I just rushed into the history, looked into every history book that I could and old photographs and asking questions like, “Who’s this, who’s that? Why did this happen?” And that’s pretty much how my slogan came to be, cause I didn’t know, and I figured if I didn’t know and I lived here, if you don’t live here, then you definitely don’t know. DNS: What are some things that people don’t really know about Melrose or even the Bronx? EGC: Well, with Melrose, a lot of people don’t know that it’s the unofficial downtown Bronx. It’s also where the Bronx was founded, officially as the 62nd county at the old Bronx County Courthouse on 161st Street. That’s where the Bronx in 1914 became the 62nd county of New York City, and we officially separated from Manhattan. And Melrose, like I mentioned earlier was founded by German immigrants from the Lower East Side. If you go to Immaculate Conception Church on 150th Street, that was a church that was built by the German community, and if you go in there, the stained glass is all in German. After my original church Our Lady of Pity, we transferred just to one more block to Immaculate Conception, where my grandmother used to go — where she still goes. And that’s where we began service. So as a kid there, I never payed attention to mass much, cause I lived in Catholic schools all my life. My eyes would wander, and I’d read the stained glass, and then I realized that that’s not English, and that’s not Spanish, and that’s not Latin, what is it? And eventually, that’s how I found out that it was German. You know, what else? Melrose, we had an opera house on 149th Street, which George Burns, famous comedian performed at. And the legendary Mae West, she performed there. And as a matter of fact, it was her performance there that sort of gave her her claim to fame. Her sexuality, how she was very scandalous at that time, and she performed a play that she wrote — a piece that she wrote — and it was called “Sex.” And actually, after she performed it, she was arrested for indecency, even though it wasn’t indecency compared to anything with us nowadays. But Lloyd Ulton, the borough historian, the Bronx historian, he says that he likes to think that “Sex” debuted in Melrose at the opera house — that’s where it debuted in the world. You know, there are just so many things. What else about Melrose? Besides that, it’s a nice place to live, and especially now with everyone who’s worked so hard to carve their little corner of the world here in Melrose and so many different nationalities that are here. You know, and then the Bronx in general, I mean, has history, you know. The Bronx was the first borough of New York City. People don’t really realize that, cause in 1874, about 20 years after Melrose was founded — which I find kind of ironic, cause it was Germans from the Lower East Side — they were trying to escape the crammed quarters of that tenement living down there. And this was all farm land. Melrose was all farmland and country, so they came up here to escape and founded a village. And about 20 years later in 1874, the West Bronx gets annexed to New York City, so all of a sudden, they’re part of New York again. And that was 1874, so it was pretty much everything west of the Bronx River. And then in 1895, the rest of what is the Bronx today was annexed from what was Westchester as well. And I think in 1898, like two tiny portions of the Bronx came along with the rest, and for three years, if you count the full annexation basically of the borough, for three years we were the only other part of New York outside of Manhattan, and 1898 is when Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens came onboard. So I like to call us the first borough, you know, we were a borough before it came cool so to speak. You know, the Bronx has always been home to so many immigrants. I mean clearly, we are all immigrants here in North America, but taking it to another step, the Bronx at one point had the largest Jewish population. No borough to this day has ever come close to the amount of Jewish families that they had living in the Bronx. At one point, the estimates were between 40 and 60 percent of the borough. Everywhere you went was a synagogue, kind of like how you have bodegas now. And Christian temples and churches and whatnot. We have the largest population of Albanians. Albanians they settled here as well. We have the largest population of Puerto Ricans of course still. What else do we have? We also have the largest population of Irish from Ireland — Irish immigrants — in Woodlawn. Woodlawn is pretty much an Irish enclave, like you go up there, and it’s not uncommon to hear pretty much a thick Irish brogue, you know, just coming by. Just as you walk by the streets. We also have a very large Bangladeshi community. We still have a large Italian population although it’s dwindled a lot. There’s just so many different ethnicities in the borough just living side by side in different neighborhoods, so a lot of people don’t know that. We’re also the greenest borough, the Bronx. We have the most parkland than any other borough in New York City. Almost a full 25 percent of our land is actually parks. And we have three of the top ten largest parks. The largest park in New York City is in the Bronx — it’s not Central Park like a lot of people think. It’s Pelham Bay Park with about 27, 28 hundred acres, and the third largest park is Van Cortlandt. There’s just so many stories with history. George Washington slept here too, up in Van Cortlandt, and as a matter of fact, it was still Westchester, but what’s considered the final act of the American Revolution was when George Washington entered Manhattan and basically took over. It was considered like that was it. The American Revolution? Done. Well, he did that by leaving Van Courtlandt, the Van Courtlandt Mansion, and that’s where he went into Manhattan and ended it. So we have that claim of history. We also have the first Tibetan Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere. Was here in the Bronx. It’s still here, so that’s another sort of like. That one is another piece of trivia that a lot of people don’t even think about, they’re like, “What? Buddhism? Tibetan? In the Bronx?” It’s like, yeah, they parked themselves right here, you know? Of all places, so a lot of firsts. You know, right just a couple blocks away into Mott Haven, the Lincoln Memorial, the Lincoln statue, that was carved here by the Piccirilli brothers. And the dome of the United States Congress building, the iron support structure, that came from here as well. So it’s a lot of history. And if you go to the main library on 42nd and Fifth Avenue, you’ll notice the lion statues, the famous lion statues Patience and Fortitude, they were also carved here in the Bronx in the neighborhood, over in Mott Haven, which is right next door to Melrose. DNS: Wow. So — EGC: Yeah. And there are so many more things that I can’t even remember off the top of my head, cause I’m on the spot, so I could keep talking about all the other stuff, you know? DNS: It’s all good. Since you started blogging about both Melrose and the Bronx, how have the two changed? EGC: The two have changed drastically since I started blogging. Melrose when I started blogging, we still had a lot of vacant land that was still, it was already slated for development but nothing was going up yet. Since I started blogging, Melrose has gained roughly 4,000 apartments, maybe 5,000 apartments at this point. And there’s like another couple of thousand on its way. The Bronx, sadly, we’re a victim of our own success, cause now developers are turning their eyes on us. Since I started blogging, developers have taken an interest in the borough as the last frontier, cause there’s nowhere else to go — they’ve pretty much exhausted everything, I don’t think Staten Island is much of an option for them to make big bucks, so no offense to people from Staten Island. I love you, cause I go there. But that’s the number one thing you know? We’re worried now. We have these developers now and all these businesses coming to the Bronx. We have the first mall in New York City in almost 25 years to open. It opened up two years ago, going on three now, and not just the regular mall, but a mall with high-end stores with Tiffany and Michael Kors, so there’s this huge confidence by that sector, you know, that is starting to displace mom and pop shops, you know. We’re seeing more small businesses being shut down. People are being pushed out, even though the borough president likes to argue that there’s not displacement happening. But there is. There is. There’s landlord pressures and you know, displacement doesn’t necessary just happen by you being evicted or being priced out of your apartment, but it also happens when your landlord buys you out and says here’s $5,000, move out, you know, and then they’ll raise the rent: double the rent or triple the rent. But what’s $5,000 in New York City? You can’t start a new life like that, and you’re not going to get what you were paying. So like, it’s this whole plan of just pushing us out, and I think those are really the biggest factors. There’s one thing though that I did notice on the positive side is that — I don’t want to say that I started the trend for Bronx pride, cause I didn’t — but when I started blogging, there were really only two blogs around. One of them was someone who’s a friend of mine now. Nicole Perrino, you know. She founded Bronxmama, and it was a resource guide — and it still is to this day — you know, the number one resource guide for families. You know, what to do with your kids in the Bronx, and then there was another one called the BoogieDowner, which kind of covered the whole Bronx, and they were pretty cool. Loved the guys that ran it. The couple — it was a married couple that ran it — but they actually eventually left the Bronx. Not cause they necessarily wanted to, but they had another child, and their support system was in Queens, so it was kind of hard going back and forth on the bridge and expensive, so they decided to move back, and it was because of them leaving that I decided to expand just sort of fill in that gap, because they ended up giving the blog to someone who immediately within a couple of days destroyed practically everything that they built. A solid audience, a loyal audience, they just decided to use it to just advertise a lot of their real estate stuff, and you couldn’t talk about politicians negatively or anything like that. It was just so many rules that I was like, “This is not what a blog should be, you know?” This is like total censorship, so that’s when I decided to do the Bronx thing, but one of the things that I started was with Welcome2TheMelrose that translated to Welcome2TheBronx was Bronx pride… You live here — love it. And the Bronx is beautiful, contrary to popular belief. Even you know, I look back at my childhood, and there was beauty everywhere, even in the rubble there was beauty, and I wanted people to be proud of that and soon after — probably maybe four years after that — I started seeing more similar accounts, social media accounts popping up and people doing the same thing, you know. Showing the Bronx in a positive light, so that’s definitely one of the things that I’ve noticed that I love, you know, that more and more people are taking into their hearts — a borough that we all took for granted at one point. DNS: Okay, what are some things that you would want to change within the Bronx? Or Melrose specifically? EGC: You know, in Melrose, I would love, love, love more than anything for small businesses to be able to own the spaces they actually are in instead of just renting, cause that’s what’s causing the displacement. That’s why they have a lease for 10 years and then now that the market is looking rosier for landlords now when they go to renew their lease, they get an increase and then they don’t get another 10 year lease, they get like a three year lease. And after that three year lease, the rent is probably doubled again. So I think I would love to be able to work with the community to find creative solutions to — not solve that problem completely, cause that’s not something that’s going to go away — but to come up with creative solutions of how can we keep our mom and pop shops around, you know? Those stores, they’re the fabric and life blood of our communities, and there are many of them that actually not only just do business here, but they live here. For example, the restaurant that we went Xochimilco, the owners live one block over in their house that they bought. They were one of the first Mexican families in the neighborhood. They’re sort of pioneers in the South Bronx, you know. They own the laundromat across the street, so it’s like when I call the neighborhood a village, I literally mean it. Cause you have a lot of people who work here and who own businesses here that also live here. And I find that somewhat unique, I don’t see that. I’ve travelled throughout the Bronx, and you know other than communities like City Island, which is expected, cause it’s literally on an island, you know, you don’t see much of that, let alone New York City. So that’s one of the things that I’d definitely like to see. And protections for our people, especially our low-income, the most vulnerable, you know. We need to protect those families instead of pushing them out. Right now, public housing at NYCHA is a disaster, and we need to fix that. Those people deserve better. You know, my grandmother lives there. She’s going to be 85 this year, and she’s been living there for 45 years. You know, luckily her apartment’s fine and in great condition, but the general condition of the building isn’t that great, and I think that we need to take care of those people before we start catering or even think about opening up the neighborhood to anyone else, and that’s not something I necessarily want, you know? I don’t mind like in theory, development is not a bad thing. In theory. A mixed-income neighborhood in theory is not a bad thing, you know. For me, I think it’s great if we can have from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high mixed all together in one neighborhood, but in practice, it never works. In practice, you know, everybody gets pushed out except the ones who can afford it. So I think we really need to focus ourselves more on what we have rather than attracting what we don’t have. And why do we want to attract the crowd that never wanted to be here when it was rough? You know, for me, it’s like they’re undeserving of our beautiful neighborhood and our hard work and you know. Like Yolanda Garcia, she started that organization through anger and love of the neighborhood and anger at the city. And she died. She had a heart attack on Third Avenue, like she was living a stressed life right in the city. So there were many people, many warriors like her that are unnamed that died during the battle so to speak. So again, I question the motives of our borough president who all he wants to do is call it the New Bronx, and there’s nothing new about — it’s not the new Bronx — we’ve always been here. Those are really like the main things, you know. Of course, education for our kids, figure out how we can get our — now that we have free college tuition, hopefully things can start getting brighter for the future generations. DNS: Yeah. How — cause you’ve lived here in like different times of Melrose — what would a normal day kind of look like when you were younger and then when you moved back and then now? Like what was daily life like groceries, laundry? EGC: Daily life when I was a kid. You know, we lived in Christopher Court, my parents are still there, still the original tenants, you know 35 years later. They had a private playground. That was a thing when they were built, you know. They built a private courtyard, a massive courtyard, gorgeous. And we had security. Cause you needed security in the Bronx, but it was a safe space. So I actually had — again, I was privileged — to grow up in the middle of the South Bronx in Melrose, where drugs and guns were everywhere and violence, and people were getting killed. But in our complex, it was an oasis, and I still call it that to this day. But my parents — our apartment — faced the courtyard, so my mother could always keep an eye out, but there we were kids, living a happy life. So after school, it was either playing video games on the Atari once the Nintendo came out or playing in our playground, and then hearing my mom calling out my name. My full name is Eduardo, so she’d be like “Eduardo!” and then I’d here that and be like, “Time to go home, so go upstairs.” And I think that had to do with the fact of why I felt safe in the South Bronx, cause we had that. We had that security guards, the security guards there watching over us and we were able to play in that garden in the middle of the chaos, so you know, my mom at that point, she wasn’t working. When I was born, she worked maybe for a couple years, but you know, she decided to be with me. I’m an only child, so when I grew up, I didn’t have siblings or anything. She decided to stay home, and make sure everything was taken care of with my needs. So I spent a lot of time with my mom. Going shopping. Shopping was always, you know, in the 80s, when I look back, there was a particular path we took, cause you don’t want to go into the worst areas, even though you were in a bad area. You never wanted to go through the public housing, even though my grandmother lived there, you know, and we always went with my father every Saturday for dinner. Which is only four blocks away from us, but we never, we tried to not go through the projects as much, cause that’s where a lot of the guns, we would hear the gunshots coming from. So 149th Street was the safe zone, cause it’s a big commercial district and Third Avenue. So we would always walk up — we took the longer route, cause we were on 150th and 151st, so if we wanted to get to Third Avenue to the shopping district, we could go all the way up 151st Street if we wanted to, but it was easier going through 149th Street, cause at least you have store after store after store versus just you know, a vacant house, a vacant building. But other than that, you know with school and Sundays, going to church with my mom. My dad didn’t go to church until I was about 14, and that was when we transferred from Our Lady of Pity to Immaculate Conception. Our Lady of Pity is closed now, closed about six years ago I think. You know, we had a bakery that we would go to, that’s where we’d get the bread on the weekends. What else? It was just, you know, it was pretty much doing a lot of that with my mom running errands and then on weekends, we’d go away to Pelham Bay Park for picnics and barbecues in the summer with other family and friends. It was always a fun, big production for me, especially when it was a big one we were going out. You know, my mom and the other women in the kitchen, they would rotate kitchens in different houses, you know preparing the food for the next day and you know, going to sleep late and waking up really early so we could take that drive to the beach, you know, it’s like four or five cars, all of us packing in, and now that I think about it, they really sacrificed a lot for us. You know, all this sleep time. I didn’t think about that until just now when I caught a whiff of that memory with all the women in kitchen and the guys, you know, my dad and everyone was buying the supplies. It was a lot. It was a lot for us — gotta thank them when I see them today. You know, that pretty much was routine, you know, every day I would go down to buy the newspaper for my dad. I always wanted to go do that, usually go get the milk as well or the bread. It was always an adventure for me, and then growing up, now in Melrose, it’s pretty much the same, you know. For me, my laundromat is across the street, so it’s the family with the restaurant, that’s where I go do the laundry. I have a dog, so I walk her around the neighborhood, and she’s a Siberian Husky, so she gets a lot of walk. Although when I was in high school and in college, that’s when I had my first dog. Probably one of the most well-known dogs in Melrose ever. His name was Rex, and we rescued him, my ex and I. My first boyfriend actually worked in a motel in Putnam County, and he worked the graveyard shift, so he was just stuck there midnight to 8, and there was this dog that lived at the motel, but he wasn’t taken care of too well, and you can tell, and we couldn’t take it was just eating us away. The dog barely never slept, because every time someone came into the motel — because he lived in the lobby — so he would just run in and greet the people and get excited and bring his toys and everything. And it would break our hearts, and one night, he just said, “Wait here.” Cause I had just dropped him off, and I was like, “Okay.” And then he comes out with Rex in his arms and he throws him in my car, and he’s like, “Run, go, take him!” And I’m like, “Oh my god, we’re dog-napping!” But like I said, they weren’t taking care of him, so we rescued him, and we actually spoke — myself, I had told the story to the priest, you know at Immaculate Conception. And he was like, “You did a good deed. The dog wasn’t being taken care of.” I mean you know, and they didn’t really miss him at the motel, you know. To our knowledge, they never really spoke about it. Cause he had a habit a couple of times running away, so they pretty much attributed it to that. I mean, he was running away clearly, cause he wasn’t being taken care of, so Rex came to live with us in Melrose in Christopher Court, he was a poodle bichon mix, and everyone just fell in love with him, you know. We joke around, he was like “insert your struggle hero,” and he was the first dog in Christopher Court, cause dogs weren’t allowed. So we were like uh oh, what are we going to do? And my mother was like you can’t keep him here, but my mother and my dad just fell in love with him and you know, next thing we know, we eventually actually got taken to court, because of the dog. But there’s a New York City code that if they know that you have the dog for 90 days and they’re still collecting your rent, dog gets grandfathered in, so that’s what eventually happened. And then eventually you started seeing more families taking the risk and now, there’s definitely dogs in the building. So you know, he was a groundbreaking dog, and he was already six years old when we had him — when we got him. And he lived another ten years, he lived a long, full life with us. Travelled to Puerto Rico. But everyone in the neighborhood like, “Hey Rex.” They knew him more than they knew my name, and there’s a big, empty lot that used to be an empty lot until recently. That was fenced in, it was the size of a city block, and it was always perfectly manicured, because it belonged to the building next door, and it was like our unofficial dog run, so I always let him running around there, and then there was the day that we noticed he was getting older and older, and it really came quickly. And one day my mother had come back home early, cause she wasn’t feeling well from work, and she found Rex in the hallway just — not dead — but he couldn’t get up. And she called me crying, and I ran down from work, I left my office, and we took him to the vet. And it turned out that he had a big tumor, but he wasn’t going to be down, but he probably isn’t going to make it, you know. So we decided to bring him home, and we did with a comfort pack so he wasn’t you know, in pain. Just wanted to be with him, and our neighbors started coming, knocking on the door to pay their respects to say goodbye to him. And I’ll never forget that. You know, around 3 in the morning, he passed away. Took him to the animal hospital, and we made preparations to have him buried at the pet cemetery in Westchester, and our neighbors came up for the little — they actually have a private wake area, like a little viewing area, where you can view your pet, the casket before they bury it, and we were like, “Wow. We had a dog that was that famous that people came to his funeral, cause they just loved him that much.” And they were crying with us, right there at the gravesite as the casket’s being lowered and shoveled in. So that’s one aspect of daily life that I just totally had just forgot about it. The routine of just walking the dog, and he always came out with his toy. One of his toys, and everyone just always laughed, cause it was always just some stuffed animal or something. I buried him with the toy, the only toy he brought with him that fateful night that we kidnapped him — dog-napped. It’s not a crime — it’s a rescue. His beloved Sharky, a little plush Sharky, so I buried him with that. I was like, this is what you came with, you know, go with that. I didn’t want to keep to around. I still have his dog ID on my keychain. And now the tradition passed along to my Siberian Husky, you know, walking through the neighborhood. She’s also pretty well-known in the neighborhood as well. A Siberian — she’s red as well, she’s red — so it’s sort of a unique color for Siberian Huskies, but yeah, that’s my routine in the mornings, is walking around the neighborhood. I like to take long walks just to see what’s going on and you know, say hi to people on the way, and that’s how I know if there’s something that needs to be addressed. If there’s a light out at night, if I notice some lights out, I get on the 311 app, and I start reporting them, making sure they get taken care of. If they don’t get taken care of, I forward it to the councilman and say you know, listen, this block has this many number of lights out, and then he’ll push for it. Same thing with NYCHA. If I see something sort of like off, you know, I’ll make sure that that gets taken care of. So I’m sort of like the eyes and ears. And if people tell me, you know, I have people who’ll like tell me like, “Oh, I heard this is what’s happening on my block, can you help us?” And I’m like, “I’ll go take a look.” And I’ll make sure I forward it to the right authority to take care of it. And yeah, that’s kind of like what I do. I shop local. Before, when I was you know, when I was growing up in Melrose, The Hub, that’s the oldest shopping district in the Bronx, The Hub. And Third Avenue and 139th Street when we were crossing, that’s actually the busiest intersection outside of Times Square. It’s over 200,000 pedestrians a day go through there, and you know the whole shopping district is mostly — now it’s changing — you know, a lot of national retailers are coming in, whereas in the 70s and 80s, there were a few, but most of them because of the fires and the economic downturn were small, low-, middle-income families, so I always stayed away. There was always this stigma like, you know, you’re poor if you shop there, you know, don’t shop there, so I would drive to White Plains in the middle of Westchester County 20 miles away to do my shopping when I was in high school and I had my car. And even as an adult, I’d shop in Manhattan, go to J-Crew and all the expensive stores, but it wasn’t until I moved back, and I started loving where I really lived that I started shopping locally. And to this day, I will shop at the mom-and-pop shops first. I get all my clothes, all my shoes and sneakers, I shop for my clothing on Third Avenue. I don’t have that, you know, conflicts anymore. And then I realize how much I’m saving too, and I’m like, “Holy crap, I just got the same designer stuff that I could have gotten for retail, I got it for so much cheaper, you know.” And you know, I ran Bronx Fashion Week for two years. We had it in Melrose at one at the old courthouse, and I was the vice president of public relations and marketing, but I was doing most of the logistics behind it, and I shopped on Third Avenue for those events, and everyone was always asking me, “Oh, what are you wearing? Where’d you get that?” And I’m like, “Third Avenue,” and they’re like, “No.” And I’m like, “Yes!” So my friends are like, “Are you kidding me? You really got that?” And I’m like, I give them the store names and I’m like, “Check these stores out — a lot of gems there.” And you know the fact that really no one likes saying that they shop there is even better, because you’re going to find things that no one else is wearing. So it’s pretty funny. Even my mom, she’s like, “Oh my god, you did a turn around. You would never shop at Third Avenue. You used to cry if I bought you things from Alexander’s, and now you don’t care.” And I’m like, “You know, I want a vote with my dollars, you know.” I want to make sure that goes to our businesses in the neighborhood, so you know, like I said, it’s the mom-and-pop shops first. If I can’t find it there, I’ll try to find it at another mom and pop shop in another neighborhood if possible. And then if not, if I have to go to a national chain, like a retailer, it has to be in the Bronx. You know, like I don’t buy anything that’s not in the Bronx, unless it’s just not here, you know. My electronics, that’s kind of like the only thing that actually I don’t support mom and pop shops, because I kind of like —they’re not that trustworthy usually with electronics — so you never know what you’re getting even if it’s refurbished or not, so I have no shame in saying I go to the Best Buy. But I do it in the Bronx, so I make sure that tax money stays here, cause for me it’s really important you know to keep the dollars. Food shopping, I do the same. I do the food shopping the neighborhood, farmers’ markets when the season’s here. We have a number of farmers’ markets throughout, you know. We have one in the hub sometimes, another one next to Lincoln Hospital twice a day — I mean, twice a week — and then there’s the granddaddy of them all on 161st on the Grand Concourse on Tuesdays, that’s my favorite. So that’s where I get a lot of my produce, and everything else I get it at local — I shop at Aldi’s, it’s a national chain. The reason I do is it’s kind of hard not to, you know, you get things for 50 percent off, versus supermarkets, so until the supermarkets start lowering their prices, that I won’t. And that again, is I’m voting with my dollars, you know. Hopefully, they’ll realize they’re losing you know, a lot of business. You know, and we have plenty of supermarkets in the neighborhood, so there’s you know, in theory you’d think that with so much competition, it’d be cheaper. But it’s not. But Aldi’s rocks. Last night, Aldi’s was closed already, and I had to go get milk, cereal — I drink almond milk — milk, cereal and Splenda, and I went to the supermarket, cause I had no choice, and I spent 15 bucks, and I felt so bad, because at Aldi’s, I would have spent about six bucks. I was like, wow, that’s like nine bucks. I could have saved that for something else, you know. So yeah, that’s what I do. DNS: Do you think other people have that same mentality? EGC: Yeah, I see a lot of people, a lot of my neighbors, do the same thing — they try to keep things local, and I do have conversations with people like, “Hey, have you ever thought about shopping here? Try to keep it local.” Another thing about Melrose actually that I forgot to mention that people may not know just hit me, cause it’s part of my daily life, in the summer especially is our community gardens. We have about 17, and no other neighborhood in New York City has that high concentration of community gardens, and you know, they’re just special places. Most of them — actually, pretty much all of them — were founded by the Puerto Rican community. The oldest one is Casa de Chema, which is on Brooke Avenue between 157 and 156, and it’s basically a cultural center. I mean, you go there, and there’s live music there on the weekends. The founder passed away two years ago unexpectedly, and he’s credited as one of the first in New York City to build a traditional casitas, which are the little houses that were common in Puerto Rico at one point. It was a lot poorer — pretty much all the houses were little wooden shacks and bungalows — so the Puerto Rican community decided to build those things in the empty lots that were left behind by the rubble sort of like back home, and yeah, that’s another important part that I totally had forgotten about, how a lot of these lots were brought back to life since they were abandoned by community gardens, you know. DNS: Absolutely. So unfortunately, our time is almost up, but is there anything else you’d like to say about growing up in Melrose, the Bronx, the neighborhood, how it’s changing? EGC: No, I mean, I think I covered it. I don’t know, what do you think? DNS: Do you have any final thoughts? EGC: These are always the rough ones, the final thoughts. Yeah, I do. I have a final thought. I want Melrose and the Bronx to stay Melrose and the Bronx. I don’t want it to become a generic, gentrified, homogenous, bland, soulless place, you know. I want it to be a place where people come to and not only realize their dreams but live them, you know and stay here. I don’t want people who don’t really care about the history. All they want to do is just create their own version of what they want to see, you know. I want them to see what we have and appreciate it and ask how they can contribute, you know, or how they can help. Instead of saying, “Hey, we have an idea, what do you think?” Don’t come in that way. Come in respecting the existing culture, respecting the existing history, you know. Respecting the countless lives that were lost, because that’s what they’re doing. They’re coming into our neighborhood, you know, and you’re basically standing on those shoulders, so respect them. Ask them. Ask the people who’re here, “What do you need? How can I be of help?” Understand your privilege basically and use it for the greater good. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Audio File Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:12:23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ed Garcia Conde Oral History Interview Subject The topic of the resource Life in Melrose then and now Description An account of the resource Eduardo Garcia Conde was born in Mott Haven in 1975, and goes by the name of Ed. He has two words of his last name as part of the Puerto Rican tradition — both his parents moved to the South Bronx from Puerto Rico before their 20s. Ed grew up as a single child and moved to Melrose at seven years old after his parents won a housing lottery for Christopher Court, which is right off the 149 Street-Grand Concourse subway stop. Although he left the South Bronx after graduating college — a goal that formed in high school — he gravitated back to Melrose for the community and life of the neighborhood. He is a former real estate appraiser and is now an active member of the large LGBTQ community in Melrose. But his main job consists of running his Welcome2TheBronx blog, which garners 100,000 to 200,000 readers per month. Since his blog aims to represent the whole Bronx, he spends a lot of time walking the borough to try showing an unbiased perspective of the Bronx. He wants to share narratives of the Bronx that most people do not see or hear. And now, here is his story from when he was growing up with the city still burning, to now as he fights with his neighborhood to avoid its gentrification. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ed Garcia Conde Diamond Naga Siu Language A language of the resource English blogger ed garcia conde Interview Melrose oral history welcome2thebronx https://melrosestories.org/files/original/680ad910dff49ff7fcdf0bf25e8f05fd.mp3 d0994f096af7f2795199cc317710ecb1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Elissa Carmona Subject The topic of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Elissa Carmona unpacks the history and culture of the Melrose area using her first-hand experiences, grant-writing research, and thoughtful hindsight. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elissa Carmona Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 8th, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Maria Polzin Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Location The location of the interview DreamYard, South Bronx Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:04:00 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview Audio Subject The topic of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Elissa Carmona speaks on her experience as a grant writer, mother, and band leader in Morrisania. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elissa Carmona Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 8th, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Maria Polzin https://melrosestories.org/files/original/1c6fe86cb7eba09ccaba33ff51d6513f.pdf 9457a7c4851321fa4a9effba50e6b514 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Elissa Carmona Subject The topic of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Elissa Carmona unpacks the history and culture of the Melrose area using her first-hand experiences, grant-writing research, and thoughtful hindsight. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elissa Carmona Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 8th, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Maria Polzin Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transcript of Interview Subject The topic of the resource A transcription of the interview with Elissa Carmona. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elissa Carmona Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Maria Polzin https://melrosestories.org/files/original/3d93c715752efe4894998ecdb6c967c8.jpg 7c3daa8b1fa02847b8e9e7339c0709d5 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Elissa Carmona Subject The topic of the resource Oral History Description An account of the resource Elissa Carmona unpacks the history and culture of the Melrose area using her first-hand experiences, grant-writing research, and thoughtful hindsight. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elissa Carmona Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource April 8th, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Maria Polzin Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Digital photograph Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Portrait of Elissa Description An account of the resource Elissa Carmona singing for the Morrisania Band. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elissa Carmona Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Maria Polzin