Belmont area of the Bronx
Posted by Nicky
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Belmont area of the Bronx July 30, 2006 07:43AM |
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Re: Belmont area of the Bronx July 30, 2006 07:37PM |
Registered: 17 years ago Posts: 34 |
Belmont is the "Little Italy" of the Bronx. Home to Arthur Avenue and great Iralian restaurants. Belmont is also home to some of the NYC's most celebrated cultural institutions including the Bronx Zoo, New York Botanical Garden, Enrico Fermi Cultural Center, Fordham University, and wavehill.org.
I don't know where you will be working (if at all) but Belmont is a "schlep" from Manhattan - #4 or D train to Fordham Road then #12 bus heading east; #2 or #5 train to Pelham Parkway then #12 bus heading west; or Metro North Harlem River Line to Fordham Road shuttle bus to Belmont & Bronx Zoo.
I don't know where you will be working (if at all) but Belmont is a "schlep" from Manhattan - #4 or D train to Fordham Road then #12 bus heading east; #2 or #5 train to Pelham Parkway then #12 bus heading west; or Metro North Harlem River Line to Fordham Road shuttle bus to Belmont & Bronx Zoo.
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Re: Belmont area of the Bronx July 30, 2006 08:12PM |
I agree with livetotravel. Belmont is a pretty nice area, and as livetotravel says, it has a heavy Italian influence. There are more and more Albanians living there now, too. But as he says, the major issue there is that it is not directly on a subway line. Also, the shopping within walking distance is ... pretty downscale. You can find anything you need on Fordham Road within a bit of a hike, but it's pretty downscale.
One oddity, though - none of those "celebrated cultural institutions" are in Belmont. The Zoo and Fordham are very close by, and the Garden is within walking distance. Wave Hill is miles away in Riverdale. You can get a damn good cappucino though.
One oddity, though - none of those "celebrated cultural institutions" are in Belmont. The Zoo and Fordham are very close by, and the Garden is within walking distance. Wave Hill is miles away in Riverdale. You can get a damn good cappucino though.
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Re: Belmont area of the Bronx July 31, 2006 07:47AM |
Registered: 17 years ago Posts: 34 |
Hi Red - love reading your posts. Well, as real estate agents say, "proximity is everything." In these days of constantly changing boundries, I'd guess even the most jaded Bronx residents may be laying claim to the Zoo and Bot Gardens ;-)
Here's a "...Thinking of Living in Belmont..." article form the Times from a couple of years ago . . .
July 29, 2001
If You're Thinking of Living In/Belmont; Close-Knit Bronx Area With Italian Aura
By AARON DONOVAN
FOR hundreds of thousands of Italian-Americans in the metropolitan area and beyond, it is ''the old neighborhood,'' a hallowed place remembered at family gatherings, the setting for countless stories told to children and grandchildren. It is Belmont, the Little Italy of the Bronx.
''We didn't know what grass was; our ballparks were the streets,'' said Salvatore Addeo, 68, a co-owner of Addeo & Sons bakery at Hughes Avenue and 186th Street in Belmont, who returns to the neighborhood most weekdays to bake the bread. ''But the best days of my life were here.''
Mr. Addeo moved to Ardsley in Westchester County in 1960, but he continues to run the bakery that his father, Gennaro, founded in 1930. The staff still adds up an order by hand on a paper bag, but Addeo's was ranked as the No. 3 ''Best Buy'' in Zagat's 2000 Guide to the New York Marketplace . Many other restaurants and groceries in the neighborhood are ranked high by the guidebook, including Borgatti's Ravioli, the Calabria Pork Store and Dominick's restaurant, which does not provide menus.
Finding real estate in the area is difficult because most buildings are sold through family and friends. The handful of real estate agents and building management companies in the area advertise mainly rentals. ''Everything that is sold here is sold by word of mouth,'' said Frank Franz, president of the Belmont Small Business Association and a lifelong resident.
Belmont has remained popular in part because of its lively commercial district, its strong ethnic flavor and its proximity to the Bronx Zoo, the New York Botanical Gardens and Fordham University. St. Barnabas Hospital is on the edge of the neighborhood.
In recent years, demand for housing in the area has escalated. Mr. Franz said he received more than 40 phone calls from people asking about availability of apartments in a tenement building with nine apartments that he is rehabilitating. ''There never would have been that kind of interest 5 or 10 years ago,'' he said. Mr. Franz attributed the increased interest to the Bronx's improved image in recent years.
Most of the neighborhood is made up of tenements built from the turn of the last century to the Great Depression. Most tenement buildings, which usually have between 15 and 25 apartments, sell for about $500,000 to $700,000, said Joe Cicciu, executive director of the Belmont-Arthur Avenue Local Development Corporation, which builds low- to middle-income housing in the area.
Most of the apartments are rent stabilized, and as a result the rents are low, according to Mr. Cicciu and Catherine Macri, who manages tenements in the neighborhood for Cosmopolitan Property Management. Rents for the one-bedroom apartments range from $500 to $600, while two bedrooms can go for $600 to $800, they said.
There are also many brick and wood-frame houses for one to four families. The most common are two-family homes, which cost $150,000 to $175,000, Mr. Cicciu said. ''It's good immigrant stock housing.''
The immigrants, first Germans and Irish, began arriving in the 1880's. In the 1890's and thereafter it was Italians, who began moving into the neighborhood when the Third Avenue elevated train was built as far north as Tremont Avenue, said Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian. When newspapers that circulated in Little Italy and East Harlem, both of which were also served by the Third Avenue El, began advertising apartments for rent in Belmont, many immigrants made their way there, he said.
Long before the immigrant influx, during the colonial days, the area was farmland that covered most of the western Bronx. When the land was divided into estates in the mid-19th century, the Belmont area was given to the Lorillard family, tobacco producers. They lived on a mansion on the hill where St. Barnabas Hospital now stands and named their area ''Beautiful Mountain'' or the Latin version, Belle Mont.
When the city began to build streets in the area in the late 19th century, Catherine Lorillard, an admirer of the 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, asked that the main street in the area be named after him, Mr. Ultan said. (Hughes Avenue, one block to the east, was named after John Hughes, the founder of Fordham University and first Roman Catholic archbishop of New York.)
With the exception of some city subsidized towers that were built on the neighborhood's eastern fringe during the 1970's, little was constructed in Belmont from the late 1950's to the mid-1990's. But during the 1990's the area experienced a rebound along with much of the rest of the Bronx, and low-rise buildings designed for Fordham students began to sprout up north of 188th Street.
The Third Avenue el was demolished in 1973, and now the closest subway lines are the B and D under the Grand Concourse, a 15-minute walk away. The best way to get to Manhattan, residents say, is by Metro-North, whose station at East Fordham Road is 20 minutes from Grand Central.
PARKING is scarce, especially in the evenings, when the restaurants are filled. Much of the neighborhood's business comes from visitors -- including celebrities like Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro and Joe Torre -- who come from the suburbs, from Manhattan and from around the world to eat in one of about 10 Italian restaurants or shop in dozens of specialty food shops on or near Arthur Avenue.
The exodus of Italians who lived in the area may have changed the residential character of the neighborhood, which is increasingly heterogeneous as Albanians, immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, Mexicans and Dominicans have moved in, but the commercial feel is still overwhelmingly Italian and old New York.
''In other parts of the city there are individual businesses that are nearly 100 years old,'' said Peter Madonia, 47, owner of the Madonia Brothers bakery on Arthur Avenue, ''But nowhere else are there 12 of them on the same block, all with the same families still running them.''
Most of the owners of the shops have moved to different neighborhoods or to the suburbs. But some have stayed, including Joe Liberatore, who sells plants, fruit and vegetables from a stand in the Arthur Avenue Market, an open market inside a building at 2344 Arthur Avenue that was built in 1940. Mr. Liberatore, 83, arrived in the neighborhood in 1936 and began by selling potatoes and onions from a pushcart for 5 cents for three pounds. ''I've been here since I got off the boat,'' he joked.
''It's not that people moved away,'' said Mr. Liberatore, who lives in one of the few high-rise towers, Keith Plaza.''The younger generation, as they grew up and got married, they moved up to Connecticut, out to Jersey and up to Westchester,'' he said.
Still, the pace of turnover is slow. Vanetta Wilson, a 26-year-old lifelong resident, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Hoffman Street, said, ''The same people have been here for so long that everybody knows everybody.'' She said the neighborhood was convenient for any kind of shopping she needed. ''People come from upstate to go to the bakeries, and we're right next door.''
But her friend, Erin Rimmer, 18, noted that heavy ''tourism,'' as it's called in the neighborhood, does not necessarily make the neighborhood much more livable. ''That's nice that they come here, but once it turns dark, it's dangerous,'' she said.
Once ubiquitous graffiti have been removed, and murder and robbery rates are down from what they were 10 years ago, but Ms. Wilson said the neighborhood was more dangerous now than when she grew up there. ''You can't let the kids walk to school alone,'' she said. ''When I was a kid, we always walked to school alone.''
Ms. Wilson, a stay-at-home mother, attended Public School 32, the Belmont School, on East 183rd Street, where slightly more than a quarter of the 1,094 students read at grade level or above, a rate well below the citywide average of 42 percent.
The neighborhood's other public elementary school, P. S. 205, the Fiorello H. La Guardia School, is a few blocks away on Southern Boulevard. Last year it had an enrollment of 1,043. One third of its students read at or above grade level, according to the Board of Education statistics.
Most children from the local public elementary schools continue on to Middle School 45, the Thomas C. Giordano School, on Lorillard Place, where the extracurricular activities include a competitive chess team, a yearbook and a school newspaper.
There are also two Roman Catholic elementary schools in the area: Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish Elementary School on Bathgate Avenue and St. Martin of Tours Parish Elementary School on 182nd Street. Both cover kindergarten through eighth grade, and tuition is about $1,700 a year.
THERE are also two Catholic high schools in the area. Aquinas High School, for girls, has an enrollment of 788 in Grades 9 through 12 and has been recognized by the United States Department of Education and by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top performing high schools in the country. Its tuition is $3,950 a year. Nearby is Fordham Prep, an all-boys school, where tuition is $8,530 a year. Located on the Fordham University campus, many of its 875 students commute by Metro-North from Westchester.
The public high school for the neighborhood is Theodore Roosevelt High School, on Fordham Road across from the university.
Belmont is home to a number of cultural institutions, including the Belmont Italian-American Playhouse, the Enrico Fermi Cultural Center, a library and center for the study of Italian American culture, and the Bronx Dance Theater, a studio that will celebrate its 25th anniversary in December.
''For an arts organization, that's a long time,'' said Neil Goldstein, the director of the studio, ''but for an institution in this neighborhood, it's chopped liver.''
As an example, the Teitel Brothers specialty grocery shop has been on Arthur Avenue and 186th Street since 1915, when Jacob and Morris Teitel, tailors who had recently arrived from Austria, set up their grocery. ''There was a stable across the street,'' said Jacob's son, Gil Teitel, who owns the shop. ''We used to deliver orders by horse and wagon.''
While Belmont weathered some tough economic times during the 70's and 80's, the close-knit community has provided stability not found in most city neighborhoods. ''We could have taken our businesses and gone up north to Westchester and probably done O.K.,'' Mr. Madonia said. ''But there's just sort of an aura about the place and a sense of community here.''
GAZETTEER
POPULATION: 22,053 (2000 census).
AREA: 0.28 square mile.
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME: $20,053 (1997 estimate).
MEDIAN PRICE OF 2-FAMILY HOUSE: $165,000.
TAXES ON MEDIAN HOUSE: $1,200.
MEDIAN PRICE A YEAR AGO: $160,000.
MEDIAN PRICE FIVE YEARS AGO: $130,000.
MIDRANGE RENT ON 2-BEDROOM APARTMENT: $700.
MIDRANGE RENT A YEAR AGO: $700.
MIDRANGE RENT FIVE YEARS AGO: $550.
DISTANCE FROM MIDTOWN MANHATTAN: 9 miles.
RUSH-HOUR COMMUTATION TO MIDTOWN: 10 to 15 minutes on the Bx12 to Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse, then 30 minutes on the B or D trains. 20 minutes from the Fordham station on Metro-North's Harlem and New Haven Lines ($4.75 one way, $108 for a monthly pass).
GOVERNMENT: City Councilman Joel Rivera (Democrat).
CODES: Area, 718 and 347; ZIP, 10458.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/2006 07:48AM by livetotravel.
Here's a "...Thinking of Living in Belmont..." article form the Times from a couple of years ago . . .
July 29, 2001
If You're Thinking of Living In/Belmont; Close-Knit Bronx Area With Italian Aura
By AARON DONOVAN
FOR hundreds of thousands of Italian-Americans in the metropolitan area and beyond, it is ''the old neighborhood,'' a hallowed place remembered at family gatherings, the setting for countless stories told to children and grandchildren. It is Belmont, the Little Italy of the Bronx.
''We didn't know what grass was; our ballparks were the streets,'' said Salvatore Addeo, 68, a co-owner of Addeo & Sons bakery at Hughes Avenue and 186th Street in Belmont, who returns to the neighborhood most weekdays to bake the bread. ''But the best days of my life were here.''
Mr. Addeo moved to Ardsley in Westchester County in 1960, but he continues to run the bakery that his father, Gennaro, founded in 1930. The staff still adds up an order by hand on a paper bag, but Addeo's was ranked as the No. 3 ''Best Buy'' in Zagat's 2000 Guide to the New York Marketplace . Many other restaurants and groceries in the neighborhood are ranked high by the guidebook, including Borgatti's Ravioli, the Calabria Pork Store and Dominick's restaurant, which does not provide menus.
Finding real estate in the area is difficult because most buildings are sold through family and friends. The handful of real estate agents and building management companies in the area advertise mainly rentals. ''Everything that is sold here is sold by word of mouth,'' said Frank Franz, president of the Belmont Small Business Association and a lifelong resident.
Belmont has remained popular in part because of its lively commercial district, its strong ethnic flavor and its proximity to the Bronx Zoo, the New York Botanical Gardens and Fordham University. St. Barnabas Hospital is on the edge of the neighborhood.
In recent years, demand for housing in the area has escalated. Mr. Franz said he received more than 40 phone calls from people asking about availability of apartments in a tenement building with nine apartments that he is rehabilitating. ''There never would have been that kind of interest 5 or 10 years ago,'' he said. Mr. Franz attributed the increased interest to the Bronx's improved image in recent years.
Most of the neighborhood is made up of tenements built from the turn of the last century to the Great Depression. Most tenement buildings, which usually have between 15 and 25 apartments, sell for about $500,000 to $700,000, said Joe Cicciu, executive director of the Belmont-Arthur Avenue Local Development Corporation, which builds low- to middle-income housing in the area.
Most of the apartments are rent stabilized, and as a result the rents are low, according to Mr. Cicciu and Catherine Macri, who manages tenements in the neighborhood for Cosmopolitan Property Management. Rents for the one-bedroom apartments range from $500 to $600, while two bedrooms can go for $600 to $800, they said.
There are also many brick and wood-frame houses for one to four families. The most common are two-family homes, which cost $150,000 to $175,000, Mr. Cicciu said. ''It's good immigrant stock housing.''
The immigrants, first Germans and Irish, began arriving in the 1880's. In the 1890's and thereafter it was Italians, who began moving into the neighborhood when the Third Avenue elevated train was built as far north as Tremont Avenue, said Lloyd Ultan, the Bronx borough historian. When newspapers that circulated in Little Italy and East Harlem, both of which were also served by the Third Avenue El, began advertising apartments for rent in Belmont, many immigrants made their way there, he said.
Long before the immigrant influx, during the colonial days, the area was farmland that covered most of the western Bronx. When the land was divided into estates in the mid-19th century, the Belmont area was given to the Lorillard family, tobacco producers. They lived on a mansion on the hill where St. Barnabas Hospital now stands and named their area ''Beautiful Mountain'' or the Latin version, Belle Mont.
When the city began to build streets in the area in the late 19th century, Catherine Lorillard, an admirer of the 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, asked that the main street in the area be named after him, Mr. Ultan said. (Hughes Avenue, one block to the east, was named after John Hughes, the founder of Fordham University and first Roman Catholic archbishop of New York.)
With the exception of some city subsidized towers that were built on the neighborhood's eastern fringe during the 1970's, little was constructed in Belmont from the late 1950's to the mid-1990's. But during the 1990's the area experienced a rebound along with much of the rest of the Bronx, and low-rise buildings designed for Fordham students began to sprout up north of 188th Street.
The Third Avenue el was demolished in 1973, and now the closest subway lines are the B and D under the Grand Concourse, a 15-minute walk away. The best way to get to Manhattan, residents say, is by Metro-North, whose station at East Fordham Road is 20 minutes from Grand Central.
PARKING is scarce, especially in the evenings, when the restaurants are filled. Much of the neighborhood's business comes from visitors -- including celebrities like Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro and Joe Torre -- who come from the suburbs, from Manhattan and from around the world to eat in one of about 10 Italian restaurants or shop in dozens of specialty food shops on or near Arthur Avenue.
The exodus of Italians who lived in the area may have changed the residential character of the neighborhood, which is increasingly heterogeneous as Albanians, immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, Mexicans and Dominicans have moved in, but the commercial feel is still overwhelmingly Italian and old New York.
''In other parts of the city there are individual businesses that are nearly 100 years old,'' said Peter Madonia, 47, owner of the Madonia Brothers bakery on Arthur Avenue, ''But nowhere else are there 12 of them on the same block, all with the same families still running them.''
Most of the owners of the shops have moved to different neighborhoods or to the suburbs. But some have stayed, including Joe Liberatore, who sells plants, fruit and vegetables from a stand in the Arthur Avenue Market, an open market inside a building at 2344 Arthur Avenue that was built in 1940. Mr. Liberatore, 83, arrived in the neighborhood in 1936 and began by selling potatoes and onions from a pushcart for 5 cents for three pounds. ''I've been here since I got off the boat,'' he joked.
''It's not that people moved away,'' said Mr. Liberatore, who lives in one of the few high-rise towers, Keith Plaza.''The younger generation, as they grew up and got married, they moved up to Connecticut, out to Jersey and up to Westchester,'' he said.
Still, the pace of turnover is slow. Vanetta Wilson, a 26-year-old lifelong resident, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Hoffman Street, said, ''The same people have been here for so long that everybody knows everybody.'' She said the neighborhood was convenient for any kind of shopping she needed. ''People come from upstate to go to the bakeries, and we're right next door.''
But her friend, Erin Rimmer, 18, noted that heavy ''tourism,'' as it's called in the neighborhood, does not necessarily make the neighborhood much more livable. ''That's nice that they come here, but once it turns dark, it's dangerous,'' she said.
Once ubiquitous graffiti have been removed, and murder and robbery rates are down from what they were 10 years ago, but Ms. Wilson said the neighborhood was more dangerous now than when she grew up there. ''You can't let the kids walk to school alone,'' she said. ''When I was a kid, we always walked to school alone.''
Ms. Wilson, a stay-at-home mother, attended Public School 32, the Belmont School, on East 183rd Street, where slightly more than a quarter of the 1,094 students read at grade level or above, a rate well below the citywide average of 42 percent.
The neighborhood's other public elementary school, P. S. 205, the Fiorello H. La Guardia School, is a few blocks away on Southern Boulevard. Last year it had an enrollment of 1,043. One third of its students read at or above grade level, according to the Board of Education statistics.
Most children from the local public elementary schools continue on to Middle School 45, the Thomas C. Giordano School, on Lorillard Place, where the extracurricular activities include a competitive chess team, a yearbook and a school newspaper.
There are also two Roman Catholic elementary schools in the area: Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish Elementary School on Bathgate Avenue and St. Martin of Tours Parish Elementary School on 182nd Street. Both cover kindergarten through eighth grade, and tuition is about $1,700 a year.
THERE are also two Catholic high schools in the area. Aquinas High School, for girls, has an enrollment of 788 in Grades 9 through 12 and has been recognized by the United States Department of Education and by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top performing high schools in the country. Its tuition is $3,950 a year. Nearby is Fordham Prep, an all-boys school, where tuition is $8,530 a year. Located on the Fordham University campus, many of its 875 students commute by Metro-North from Westchester.
The public high school for the neighborhood is Theodore Roosevelt High School, on Fordham Road across from the university.
Belmont is home to a number of cultural institutions, including the Belmont Italian-American Playhouse, the Enrico Fermi Cultural Center, a library and center for the study of Italian American culture, and the Bronx Dance Theater, a studio that will celebrate its 25th anniversary in December.
''For an arts organization, that's a long time,'' said Neil Goldstein, the director of the studio, ''but for an institution in this neighborhood, it's chopped liver.''
As an example, the Teitel Brothers specialty grocery shop has been on Arthur Avenue and 186th Street since 1915, when Jacob and Morris Teitel, tailors who had recently arrived from Austria, set up their grocery. ''There was a stable across the street,'' said Jacob's son, Gil Teitel, who owns the shop. ''We used to deliver orders by horse and wagon.''
While Belmont weathered some tough economic times during the 70's and 80's, the close-knit community has provided stability not found in most city neighborhoods. ''We could have taken our businesses and gone up north to Westchester and probably done O.K.,'' Mr. Madonia said. ''But there's just sort of an aura about the place and a sense of community here.''
GAZETTEER
POPULATION: 22,053 (2000 census).
AREA: 0.28 square mile.
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME: $20,053 (1997 estimate).
MEDIAN PRICE OF 2-FAMILY HOUSE: $165,000.
TAXES ON MEDIAN HOUSE: $1,200.
MEDIAN PRICE A YEAR AGO: $160,000.
MEDIAN PRICE FIVE YEARS AGO: $130,000.
MIDRANGE RENT ON 2-BEDROOM APARTMENT: $700.
MIDRANGE RENT A YEAR AGO: $700.
MIDRANGE RENT FIVE YEARS AGO: $550.
DISTANCE FROM MIDTOWN MANHATTAN: 9 miles.
RUSH-HOUR COMMUTATION TO MIDTOWN: 10 to 15 minutes on the Bx12 to Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse, then 30 minutes on the B or D trains. 20 minutes from the Fordham station on Metro-North's Harlem and New Haven Lines ($4.75 one way, $108 for a monthly pass).
GOVERNMENT: City Councilman Joel Rivera (Democrat).
CODES: Area, 718 and 347; ZIP, 10458.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/31/2006 07:48AM by livetotravel.
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