I Guess It’s A Start . . .

The healthiest choice at a Bronx bodega? It’s a tough one:

All this week, nine western Bronx restaurants and five bodegas will be offering free samples of the healthiest dishes on their menus or shelves.

The bodegas, near schools, will offer samples of such healthy products as baked chips, low-fat milk and fruit. Organized by Bronx Health REACH and its sister program, Bronx Healthy Hearts, the Bronx Food Festival hopes to potato-chip away at the borough’s burgeoning beltline, with an estimated 27% of its residents considered obese.

We’ve got a long way to go when “baked chips” are one of the healthiest options . . .

In The City That Never Sleeps, A Corner Where Streets Are Never Sweeped

There are many amazing details buried in this story:

City Island, the last bastion of alternate-side-free parking in the Bronx, has been spared for now.

But the trade-off is another two years of road construction along its main thoroughfare.

At a public hearing last week, Community Board 10 voted to table a motion to add parking regulations along City Island Ave., which runs along the entire island.

The motion will probably not be brought before the board again until after a sewer project and the replacement of the bridge leading to the island are completed, according to those familiar with the issue.

“It probably won’t be happening for quite some time,” said District Manager Kenneth Kearns. “I would guess it’d be a minimum of two years.”

The Garden Club of City Island requested that alternate-side parking be enforced for 30 minutes twice a week to give street sweepers a chance to clean the road, which becomes traffic-congested, especially on weekends and during the summer, when hordes of visitors come to the island for its numerous seafood restaurants.

Until recently, the club paid two workers to sweep the mile-long street on foot, even though city regulations hold property owners responsible for cleaning 18 inches into the street in front of their properties.

One of those workers graduated college and no longer had time to clean. The other, a senior citizen, could not handle the whole road alone.

Is the most amazing detail A) there’s a little corner of the city where alternate-side parking doesn’t exist (a veritable Big Rock Candy Mountain for car owners); B) a two-man crew consisting of an elderly person and a college student has been cleaning the entire road; or C) alternate-side parking actually exists for the purpose of sweeping the streets?

Obviously the answer is C . . .

Location Scout: City Island.

It’s Hard Out There For An Executive Director Of An Arts Organization In East Tremont

It’s hard out there for an arts organization when prostitutes mistake your donors for johns:

The Bronx River Art Center tries to escape its noisy urban surroundings by facing the lush, green riverfront.

But it can’t escape the drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps and petty criminals who camp in front of its doors.

Visitors’ vehicles have been vandalized. Potential donors have been propositioned by prostitutes, and the number of parents bringing their children to free art classes is down in recent months, according to the staff.

“It’s an infestation,” said Gail Nathan, the center’s executive director. “We fear for the kids coming to the art center. We fear for our staff and visitors.”

She ought to know. Her car has been vandalized five times and her tires have been slashed. She now parks five blocks away from the center to avoid the wrath of criminals.

Damn You, Hagstrom! Damn You, Ultan!

New York City is a city of neighborhoods . . . except when it comes to the Bronx:

Lloyd Ultan went looking for a Bronx neighborhood the other day called Williamsbridge.

He was overqualified for this seemingly simple task. Mr. Ultan, the borough historian, teaches a course at Lehman College on the history of the Bronx and has written or co-written eight books about the borough. He even wrote the 182-word entry on Williamsbridge in the Encyclopedia of New York City.

Williamsbridge is a section of the Bronx near Woodlawn Cemetery that has a clearly defined border separating it from Wakefield, another neighborhood to the north, according to city maps and Mr. Ultan’s entry in the encyclopedia: East 233rd Street. But as Mr. Ultan stood on White Plains Road at East 228th Street in theoretical Williamsbridge, merchants and residents, asked to identify the neighborhood, called it White Plains Road or Wakefield instead.

“I never hear it called anything but White Plains Road,” said Juliet Adler, 43, who works in a hair salon and has lived nearby on East 224th Street for six years.

In the Bronx, as Mr. Ultan has long suspected, it’s easy to find an address, but hard to find a neighborhood.

. . .

People throughout the borough’s 42 square miles, in fact, often have a simple, instinctive answer when asked to name the neighborhood where they live or work. One man sitting on a metal folding chair outside a flower shop at East 138th Street and Brook Avenue summed up the response one recent afternoon when he looked with both suspicion and pity on the person asking the question and said, in all seriousness: “The Bronx.”

Upon seeing Manny Fernandez’s knowing smirk, the man rose from his chair, folded it, and beat Manny over the head with the chair, just like Manny once saw on the WWF while he was mindlessly flipping through the channels after an exhausting day of traipsing through the Bronx searching for quotes about topics as inane as “Where’s Williamsbridge?”

I’m kidding.

But, seriously, shit just gets scary when the Times drops the Gertrude Stein bomb:

In a place where there is no there there, as Gertrude Stein once wrote of far away but equally abstract Oakland, Calif., it is perhaps no surprise that no one can say with certainty just how many Bronx neighborhoods there are there. According to a Department of City Planning map of the city’s neighborhoods, the Bronx has 49. The map publisher Hagstrom identifies 69. The borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., says 61. The Mayor’s Community Assistance Unit, in a listing of the borough’s community boards, names 68. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, lists 44.

Rachaele Raynoff, a spokeswoman for the planning department, said the agency’s neighborhood map, “New York: A City of Neighborhoods,” was a guide, not gospel. Not even Dan Donovan, topographic engineer and urban planner in the borough president’s office, has definitive answers about the locations of Bronx neighborhoods.

“There’s no definition for neighborhoods,” Mr. Donovan said. “Every individual has definitions for their own neighborhoods and for the neighborhoods in the Bronx as a whole. It’s always been amorphous.”

[Lloyd Ultan is a smart guy — don’t blame us if he led you astray!]

With Any Luck It’ll Be Off Limits For Years While Environmental Agencies Conduct Studies . . . But The Only Thing Better Would Be If It Cost Millions Just To Clean Up

A deal that looks better and better with each passing day:

Now that the old-growth trees have been felled and the earth-moving machines have started to dig up Macombs Dam Park, what will the residents surrounding the $1.3 billion new Yankee Stadium project be left with for replacement parks?

Polluted land, according to city and federal documents.

Under the current stadium are two 15,000-gallon oil tanks, which were found to be leaking, and soil in all of the replacement parkland contains “semi-volatile compounds and/or metals at concentrations exceeding [New York State Department of Environmental Conservation] Cleanup Objectives,” noted National Park Service executive Jack Howard when he signed off on the city’s park-swap plan.

Though the contaminated land is cited in this NPS go-ahead as well as the city’s Final Environmental Impact Statement, it’s not mentioned in any of the appraisals performed to comply with federal and state laws.