Yes, we’re open!

Bronx community board 7 president Greg Faulkner (left) and board members Paul Foster and Margaret Mack opened the community board office last Saturday and had visits from community activists Anthony Rivieccio, Greg Steele and Ursula Perez Morgan during the CB7 Open House.

The Saturday event was part of a series of open house workshops designed to make the office, located just around the corner from the Grand Concourse on 204th St., open during downtime, since so many work during the week.

Talk around the table at the office included everything from parking to the water filtration plant. Faulkner sits on the plant’s Monitoring Committee and will vote Monday for whether or not to call for an investigation into cost overruns.

Board members will keep Saturday office hours once a month.

Catching up with Tyrone Thomas

Some musicians get paid, others get recognition. Tyrone Thomas, drummer, singer and founder of the funk group The Whole Darn Family, has experienced just touches of both.

If you don’t recognize The Whole Darn family’s name, you might recognize the bass line from their 1976 hit, “7 Minutes of Funk” —which has been sampled by hip hop artists Jay Z & Foxy Brown, Q-Tip, Faith Evans, EPMD and many more. Though Thomas wrote and arranged the now classic breakbeat, he lost the rights to most of the royalties. “I had 100 percent of the publishing taken away from me, and I had 50 percent of the writer’s taken away from me by a manager I trusted to handle the paperwork.” said Thomas.

But Thomas isn’t bitter. He said he’s honored that his song has become one of the most sampled in hip hop history. “I’m thrilled, I’m happy, I’m elated,” he said. “I wanted to reach out to Jay Z to see if maybe he wanted to hear some of my other stuff, you know,” said Thomas. “It never happened, but hey, I’m still living, Jay Z is still living, we might still get together.”

Thomas hails from Richmond, VA, where he started singing in his first group at the age of 10, opening shows for most of the big soul acts of the ’60s. He taught himself to play the drums, and performed with various artists including Patti Labelle, before founding his own band.

We caught up with him for an interview at his apartment in the Bronx in early December, and then met him at the 77th street subway station where he sang old soul classics for straphangers.

Tina Thomas, 25, from Illinois is a younger fan of The Whole Darn Family. She discovered them while sifting through her Dad’s soul collection. “I used to sneak and listen to his records,” said Thomas (who is not related to Tyrone) “During one of my ’sneak attacks,’ I came across the Whole Darn Family and. it just got in my soul! It was so infectious,” she said.

Nowadays Thomas runs his own label Butah Beat records, so he can control the profit he makes– following the trend of many artists to go independent with their music production. But Thomas said that’s not the only reason he ventured out on his own. “When you get older, record labels don’t like to touch you,” he said, “…so I said, let me get my own label, build my own studio, and I did.”

- Allison Veronica Esposito & Mathew R. Warren

World Aids Day: Quilt panels come to the Bronx

Remember the Memorial Aids Quilt? In 1987 it was comprised of 1,920 panels spread over the National Mall in Washington D.C. Now it is the largest ongoing art project in the world, and is divided into 12 foot square display panels that travel all over the country. Each square is dedicated to someone who died from AIDS. There are now more than 44,000 squares, and the panels are displayed across the country each year for World AIDS Day, reminding us of the continuing devastation of the disease.

The Art Gallery at Lehman College in the Bronx will display 2 of those 12 foot panels until December 6th. The gallery is just a short walk from the train.

Kudos to the tireless Cindy Kreisberg and her Health Center for their efforts to promote health awareness, and to the members of the Rainbow Alliance chapter at CUNY Lehman who keep quilting to remind others of the AIDS crisis.

hurts so good

Courtney Gross’s comprehensive article in the Gotham Gazette, “Paying the Price for Living in New York,” finds a lot of the points of tension that make me a New Yorker who hates to move, but really wishes it were easier to live here.

I commute from the Bronx, the borough Gross says actually has a lower weekly wage than the national average. That makes parents up here, already commuting to work, driving forever to find free parking at night and leaving their kids in low-cost child care, even more tired, as they may have to work more than one job. More than half of Bronx residents work in the service industry, where most low-paying jobs are found.

That’s why the Bronx needs development, but at a reasonable rate and with businesses that want to pay decent wages. Otherwise, you have a few million burnt-out city dwellers up here who can easily fall into road rage or domestic violence and lack energy to participate in community activities like neighborhood watches or park clean-ups.

Gross is right in her assessment of how an increase in cost for basics like groceries, subway fare, water and electricity will either push some Bronxites who can afford to leave, out to the ‘burbs, or push them under, into the ugly realm of poverty living  that New Yorkers shouldn’t want up here any more than they did in Times Square.

It’s not easy being green…and good looking

I had the good fortune to sit next to Majora Carter at a lunch once, and experience for myself the young woman’s “drive and tenacity” as an “urban revitalization strategist,” while she told me about projects to take back green space in the Bronx and look for ways to make it more family friendly with trees and parks. After graduating from college, Carter came back to the Bronx, bought a home near where she grew up and founded Sustainable South Bronx.

At the time when we spoke, SSBx was taking on the diesel trucks that idled all day as they loaded/unloaded goods at warehouses near a public school. Since then, they have added all kinds of green projects to their list, such as green-collar job training, making garbage export less noxious to Bronx residens living near a transfer station, planning a greenway on the Bronx waterfront and removal of the Sheriday expressway.

As a Bronx resident, I follow Carter’s progress with interest, and was happy to hear of her award as a MacArthur Fellow. I’m not surprised, since so many green projects for the Bronx involve her organization.

One new project is Green Roofs, which literally grow grass in soil on building tops as an alternative way to keep buildings cool, keep electric usage down and collect rain water that otherwise runs off into overwhelmed sewers. Here’s a picture from the SSBx site(yes , another image on the page shows Carter in heels talking to a green roofer. Who says nature police have to dress badly?):

(You can also watch an entire roof installation if you’re that curious.)

Now another looker is joining the green campaign in the Bronx. Owen Wilson, by way of a contribution to Ed Norton and the oil giant BP’s project The Solar Neighbours Program, has helped fund a green building in the Bronx.

Jacob’s House, named after a local community activist Astin Jacobo, is an eight-story building on Webster Avenue featuring a 3,900 square foot green roof. It also has solar panels (Wilson bought some for his own home to make the contribution), that will run its elevators.

The building owner, Enterprise Community Partners, in cooperation with the low-income housing advocacy group Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation, promises 7 units for homeless seeking housing, six classrooms for early childhood programs and community space.

Jacob’s place isn’t the first green housing in the Bronx. Houses on Sunflower Way in the Melrose section of the Bronx, opened in October 2002. It was the city’s first green project in the High Performance Building Program, an HPD initiative to get buildings to be “at least 30 percent more energy efficient” than building codes demand. Although the homes didn’t have green roofs, the did feature programmable thermostats, 100 percent recycled-content carpeting, high performance windows and fluorescent lighting.

Perhaps we just didn’t hear about that project since the ribbon wasn’t cut by a foxy celebrity.