The Borough With Everything — Including A Very Viable Candidate For Some Higher Office

Adolfo Carrión Jr.’s Pataki-esque new ads let everyone know the good news about the Bronx’s fine hospitals:

Television viewers in the New York region will learn about a new and intriguing tourist destination this month. It is an exotic land the size of Paris, an urban retreat that gave the world not only hip-hop but also Billy Joel, and is home to a zoo, a baseball stadium and a jeer disguised as a cheer.

The Bronx.

A series of television commercials promoting the borough of 1.3 million will be on the airwaves starting June 25. The 30-second spots, the first television advertisements the Bronx has used to sell itself, are part of a marketing campaign called “We’re Talking the Bronx,” starring Adolfo Carrión Jr., the borough president.

. . .

The ads will run for nine weeks on cable networks including CNN and ESPN in parts of the Bronx, Manhattan and Westchester County. They could be seen by roughly one million viewers, according to Weinrib & Connor, the White Plains advertising agency that produced the commercials.

The spots promoting one of New York City’s grittier boroughs give the place a rather old-fashioned, small-town feel. A fiddle plays pleasantly in the background as Mr. Carrión and others smile at the camera, though the borough’s homegrown musical legacies include hip-hop, doo-wop and salsa.

In one ad, an unidentified representative of Woodlawn Cemetery, one of the financial sponsors of the campaign, stares into the camera and says: “Whether preplanning or at a time of need, come talk with us.”

In others, viewers are whisked from the borough’s Little Italy on Arthur Avenue to the blue-backed seats of Yankee Stadium to the interior of North Central Bronx Hospital, “the hospital of choice for the Norwood community.” There are shots of Mike’s Deli on Arthur Avenue and the eager staff of a Ridgewood Savings Bank branch.

. . .

Mr. Carrión said the goal of the campaign was to generate more tourism to the borough, which attracted about seven million visitors last year. The ads also raise the profile of Mr. Carrión, who is considered a possible candidate for mayor in 2009.

When asked if the ads would help his political future, he said yesterday: “Every time I wake up in the morning and do my job right, it helps me to do whatever I’m going to do next.”

No, That Smells About Right

The good news is we’ve reclaimed the Hunts Point waterfront and built a brand new park. The bad news is now we understand why no one wanted to go down there in the first place:

Christian Román went to Barretto Point Park on the waterfront in Hunts Point for the first time last month when the weather turned warm.

He was pleased by the lovely landscaping in the new five-acre park, which opened last October with an alluring swath of grass and a soft margin of sand along the East River. But although he liked what he saw, he did not like what he smelled.

There was a foul odor in the air that he guessed was a consequence of the park’s location, wedged between a private fertilizer plant and a public wastewater treatment facility.

“When you enter, you don’t really smell it,” said Mr. Román, a 21-year-old senior at St. John’s University who was born and raised in the South Bronx, where he still lives with his parents. “It hits you when you go near the beach volleyball area. You’re like, ‘Whoa.’ I had to cover my mouth with my shirt and walk a little faster.”

Complaints about odors that emanate from industrial facilities in Hunts Point are longstanding, but the $7.2 million park has drawn fresh attention to the problem, especially now as summerlike humidity intensifies the smell.

“We’re glad the park is there,” said Elena Conte, a coordinator at Sustainable South Bronx, an environmental organization. “People are enjoying it whenever they can. But the unresolved odor issues are a deterrent.”

Those Poor, Dumb Strays

Who cares like not at all about the $1 billion it will take to build a proposed new police academy? City Island residents:

At the door of his waterfront home on City Island in the Bronx yesterday, Ken Binder said one word when he learned that the police firing range, just across Eastchester Bay, was slated to close.

“Soon?” he asked eagerly.

Well, not exactly. The range is moving to a police compound in the College Point section of Queens that will not be built for several years.

Still, Mr. Binder, a retired interior designer, was ready to begin celebrating the range’s demise.

“I would get down on my hands and knees and kiss the feet of whoever would take it away,” he said, his words punctuated by a volley of deep pops echoing from across the water.

Since 1959, the New York Police Department has used the peninsula in Pelham Bay Park known as Rodman’s Neck for all manner of ballistic and ordnance-related exercises — target practice, training maneuvers, blowing up of unwanted explosives.

And for just about as long, the residents of City Island, a sort of seafarer’s Mayberry largely isolated from the annoyances of big-city life, have cursed the daylong barrage of booms and rat-a-tats. (Except for the detonation of confiscated fireworks around the Fourth of July. “That’s kind of fun,” Mr. Binder said.)

Then again, there are some who seem to be suffering a sort of Stockholm Syndrome:

“For business, it’s bad,” said the woman at the cash register of the City Island Diner, who would not give her name. “We’ll miss them. The cops are good guys, and they come from all over the place.” As for the noise, she said: “It’s like living next to the subway. You get used to it.”

Up the street at JGL Wines and Liquors, the news seemed to disturb the very order of things.

“Holy mackerel!” said the proprietor, who would not give his name.

His friend Yolanda Cirulli, who had fixed him a lunch of penne aglio e olio, did not know what to think. First Ms. Cirulli, a member of the City Island Civic Association, declared victory, recalling her years of battling the noise. But then she thought of the cats and dogs who live on the firing range and whom she cares for.

“There are at least 25 cats there,” she said, “and those policemen, they love the cats. They treat them very well. What’s going to happen to them?”

JGL’s proprietor added: “Let me tell you another bad thing. When there’s trouble here, the cops are here, instantly. And tons of guys. Last year a guy crashed his motorcycle on the corner. In five minutes, there must have been 50 cops.”

Location Scout: City Island.

I Never Smelled Him

Yes, an actual carny:

The decomposed remains of a carnival worker who was reported missing 10 years ago were found in a Bronx home after a water pipe sprung a leak, authorities said yesterday.

Dwayne Perkins said he went to 911 Ogden Ave. to check on his grandmother Monday evening and stumbled upon the ossified corpse of Michael Johnson in the basement.

As Perkins peered into a dank corner of the basement to inspect a pipe that was spitting steam, he spotted the old bones.

“I was ready to leave when I looked down, and I saw a ball covered in dirt, but when I looked closer, I [realized] it was a skull,” said Perkins, 40.

“It just blew me away.”

He called the police, who discovered a jacket among the heap of bones and rotting flesh. Inside the jacket was Johnson’s identification.

“The cops said the bones were in a disarray, probably because some cats, rats and dogs may have gotten to it,” said Perkins, whose family has owned the house for 35 years.

His uncle, Ray Stirrup, even had a workshop in the basement and was flabbergasted by the disgusting discovery. “Man, just thinking about it — I’ve been sitting here, doing my little projects, and he’s 15 feet behind me. I never smelled him,” said Stirrup, 56.

Johnson had been reported missing in his native state of Ohio and in New York in November 1997. He was 50 years old at the time.

He had been renting a $40-a-week room on a third floor of the three-story, 106-year-old house that’s just a stone’s throw from Yankee Stadium, after befriending fellow carnival worker Charles Byrd, Stirrup’s stepson.

Mama Always Said That If I Slept With Them On The First Date I’ll End Up Mummified In The Norwood Section Of The Bronx

See, this is what happens when you don’t follow The Rules:

For years, neighbors knew little about the frail, older woman who lived at 3280 Perry Avenue, a weathered two-story house in Norwood, in the Bronx. She lived alone, neighbors said, and seemed to value her independence.

About two years ago, though, some people on the block said that they began calling the police when they realized they had not seen the woman in a while.

On Friday, workers who were at the house to remove debris discovered bones inside, and people on the quiet residential block between East 209th Street and Holt Place began sharing scant details about the reticent occupant of the house and puzzling over what could have happened.

The medical examiner’s office confirmed yesterday that the bones found on Friday in the house were human remains. After an autopsy, the identity of the remains and a cause of death had not been determined, according to Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the office.

Yesterday, neighbors remembered a woman who walked slowly and used two canes when she was seen, which was rarely. Those on the block said that in the past the woman had depended upon people next door for help carrying groceries and shoveling snow, but that those neighbors had since moved.

“She was a loner,” said Therese Mulligan, 48, who lives on the block. “She didn’t want much help.”

Vivian Brown, also a resident of the block, said she called the police two winters ago to say that she was concerned because snow was piled high on the porch steps along with stacks of mail. Ms. Brown said that officers searched through waist high piles of refuse inside the house for about 30 minutes before leaving.

Ms. Mulligan said that she, too, had asked the police to look into the house around the same time. Officers showed up, she said, and looked inside but emerged saying they had found nothing amiss.