Tommy Orange sat at the front of a classroom in the Bronx and listened as a group of high school students discussed his novel “There There.”

A boy with blue glasses raised his hand. “All the characters have some kind of disconnect, even trauma,” says Michael Almanzar, 19. “That’s the world we live in. That’s all around us. It’s not like it’s in a far away land. That is literally your neighbor.”

The class broke into a round of finger-snapping, as if we were at an old-fashioned poetry slam on the Lower East Side and not an English class at the Millennium Art Academy, on the corner of Lafayette and Pugsley Avenue.

Orange took it all in with a mixture of gratitude and humility – the semicircle of serious, committed teenagers; the bulletin board decorated with words describing ‘there there’ (‘hope’, ‘struggle’, ‘mourning’, ‘discovery’); the shelf of well-thumbed copies with dust jackets in various stages of disintegration.

His eyebrows shot up when a student wearing a sweatshirt that read “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” compared the book to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” When three successive students talked about how they related to Oranje’s work because of their own mental health issues, he was on the verge of tears.

“That’s what attracted me to reading in the first place,” Orange said, “the feeling of not being as alone as you thought you were.”

It’s not often that an author walks into a room full of readers, let alone teenagers, talking about characters born into his imagination as if they were living, breathing people. And it’s rare for students to spend time with an author whose fictional world feels like a refuge. Of all the classroom visits he has made since “There There” was released in 2018, the one at the Millennium Art Academy earlier this month was, Orange later said, “the most intense connection I have ever experienced.”

The catalyst for the visit was Rick Ouimet, an energetic ponytailed English teacher who has worked in the fortress-like building for 25 years. Ouimet is the kind of teacher students remember, whether for his contributions to their literary vocabulary – synecdoche, bildungsroman, chiasmus – or for his battered flip phone.

He first heard about “There There” from a colleague whose son recommended it during the pandemic. “I knew from the first paragraph that this was a book our children would identify with,” he said.

The novel follows twelve characters from indigenous communities as they lead up to a powwow at a stadium in Oakland, California, where disaster strikes. “Orange leads you over the drawbridge, and then the span begins to rise,” wrote a critic for The New York Times, Dwight Garner, when it came out. The novel was one of The Times’s 10 best books of 2018 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. According to Orange’s publisher, well over a million copies have been sold.

Ouimet’s suspicion turned out to be true: “Students love the book so much that they don’t realize they are reading it for English class. That is the rare find, the gift of gifts.

Some relevant statistics: Attendance rates op Millennium art are below the city average. Eighty-seven percent of students come from low-income households, which is above the city average.

In the three years since Orange’s novel became a mainstay of the Millennium Art curriculum, pass rates for students taking the Advanced Placement literature exam have more than doubled. Last year, 21 of 26 students earned college credits, exceeding state and global averages. The majority of them, Ouimet said, wrote about “There There.”

When three students in the school’s art-decorated hallway were randomly asked to name a favorite character from “There There,” they all responded without hesitation. It was as if Tony, Jacquie and Opal were people they might encounter at ShopRite.

Briana Reyes, 17, said, “I connected with the characters so much, especially because I had family members with alcohol and drug abuse.”

Last month, Ouimet learned that Orange, who lives in Oakland, would be in New York to promote his second novel, “Wandering Stars.” An idea started to percolate. Ouimet had never invited an author to his class before; Such visits can be pricey and, as he noted, Shakespeare and Zora Neale Hurston are unavailable.

Ouimet wrote a message in his head for over a week, he said, and on Monday, March 4, just after midnight, he sent it to the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau.

“The email felt like a rough draft, but I wasn’t worried,” he said. “It was my midlife college essay.”

The 827-word missive is written in the style Ouimet encourages in his students’ work, full of personality, texture and detail, without the business language that infiltrates so much important professional correspondence.

Ouimet wrote, “In our 12th grade English classroom, in our diverse corner of the South Bronx, in a tight but vibrant urban neighborhood not unlike the Fruitvale, you are our rock star. Our more than rock star. You are our MF Doom, our Eminem, our Earl Sweatshirt, our Tribe Called Red, our Beethoven, our Bobby Big Medicine, our email to Manny, our ethnically ambiguous woman in the next stall, our camera pointing into a tunnel of darkness . ”

Orange, he added, was a hero to these children: “You changed lives.” There was Tahqari Koonce, 17, who drew a parallel between the Oakland Coliseum and the Roman Coliseum; and Natalia Melendez, also 17, who noted that a white gun symbolized the oppression of indigenous tribes. And then there was 18-year-old Dalvyn Urena, who “said he had never read a whole book before ‘There There,'” and now compared it to a Shakespearean sonnet.

He ended with, “Well, it was worth a try. Thank you for taking the time to read this – if it ever finds its way to you. In appreciation (and awe), Rick Ouimet.”

“I took a chance,” Ouimet said. And why not? “My students take a chance every time they open a new book. There is a sigh and they open the page. To see what they gave this book? The love was palpable.”

Within hours, word reached Orange, who was in the middle of a 24-city tour with multiple interviews and events every day. He asked Jordan Rodman, senior director of publicity at Knopf, to do whatever she could to get Ouimet’s class into the mix. There would be no compensation involved. Knopf donated 30 copies of ‘There There’ and 30 copies of ‘Wandering Stars’.

In a large, busy school full of squeaky soles, walkie-talkies and young people, moments of silence are difficult to find. But when Oranje opened his new novel, you could have heard a pin drop.

“It’s important to pronounce things, to pronounce them, like the way we learn to spell by saying words slowly,” Orange read.

He continued: “It is just as important for you to hear yourself speak your stories as it is for others to hear you speak them.”

The students followed along in their own copies, heads bowed and necks looking vulnerable and strong at the same time. Their meaning proved that books, like the spiders described in “There There,” contain “miles of stories, miles of potential home and trap.” On this inconspicuous gray Thursday, Oranje’s work offered both.

After the 13-minute lecture, the questions came, fast and furious, with refreshing bluntness: “What even inspired you to write these two books?” and “Did Octavio die?” and perhaps most pressing: “Why did ‘There There’ end like that?” Not since ‘The Sopranos’ has an ambiguous ending caused more consternation.

“We were like whaaaat?” said one student, keeping the last word in a high pitch.

“It was a tragic story,” said Oranje. “Some people hate it, and I’m sorry.”

He admitted that he had not been a reader in high school: “No one gave me a book and said, this book is for you. There was also a lot going on at home.” He talked about how he staves off writer’s block (by changing his point of view), how he reads his drafts out loud to hear what they sound like. Orange shared his Cheyenne name – Birds Singing in the Morning – and introduced a childhood friend who travels with him on tour.

Despite all this, Ouimet stood quietly at the side of the room. He cast a soft, stinking glance at a group of talkative girls. He used a long wooden pole to open a window. Usually he beamed like a proud parent at a wedding where everyone was dancing.

The truth is that ‘There There’ didn’t just enchant his students: it also had a profound effect on Ouimet himself. When he started teaching the book, he had just retired from coaching football and softball after 22 years.

“I was afraid: If I don’t get coaching, will I still be an effective teacher? ‘There there’ was a renaissance of sorts. “I don’t want to get too sugary,” he said, “but it saved my career somehow.”

Finally the bell sounded. The students stepped back from their desks and lined up to have their books signed by Orange, who took a moment to chat with everyone.

Over the din, Ouimet shouted to anyone still listening, “If you love a book, talk about it!” If you like a story, let other people know about it!”

Tommy Orange has joined a salon of classes in the Bronx and a group of secondary students discussing his novel Ni aquí ni allí.

A Chico that uses a fixture is of great importance. “All our personalities already have some form of deconexy, including trauma, from Michael Almanzar, at the age of 19. “This is the world in life. It’s rodea. It’s not like you’re going into a lugar muy lejano. Es literal u vecino de al lado”.

The class comes as a round of students, as an anticipatory proof of poems on the Lower East Side and not a class of Inglés at the Millennium Art Academy, near Lafayette and Pugsley.

Orange loves it with great gratitude and modest father: the semicircle of serious and dedicated adolescents; the announce table is decorated with a palette that is written on Ni aquí ni allí (“esperanza”, “esfuerzo”, “duelo”, “descubrimiento”); The copying of manoseads is done with the cubes at different levels of disintegration.

If we ever did a study that is a sudadera in English, “Soy loses many more locomotives of the previous years” compare the libro with The Carretera, by Cormac McCarthy. Because three students are another person who identifies with the person of Orange, who struggles with his mental problems, he is placed at the limit of the lagrimas.

“It is true that I do the lesson at the bottom of my life,” says Orange, “the thrill of no solo creation.”

It is not often that an author deals with a study lesson, menos and adolescents, that naive characters live in their imagination as living human beings. Yes, it is unusual for the students to be an author of a world of refuge fiction stories. Most visits are done as is Ni aquí ni allí In 2018, the Millennium Art Academy published one of Orange’s key principles, “the connection was more intense when he experimented”.

The catalyst was the visit to Rick Ouimet, an English professor with caballo-cola, who worked in this building with fortaleza aspects 25 years ago. Ouimet is a tipo of the professor who has gathered the alumni, who want to contribute to their literary vocabulary – sinécdoque, bildungsromanquiasmo—or por su maltrecho telefono plegable.

Supo de Ni aquí ni allí Thank you very much for a colleague he will recommend during the pandemic. “Because of the first time there was a libro with the new chicos on a connection,” you say.

The story of 12 indigenous communities in the previous period of a trip in a stadium of Oakland, California, the tragedy began. “Orange is one of many levadizo players bringing attention to the world’s arcane history,” described a critical look from The New York Times by Dwight Garner, who heard the message. The novel is one of the Times’ ten best books of 2018 and the final of the Premio Pulitzer. When Orange’s editors publish, more than a million copies are sold.

The result of the Ouimet result is approximately: “The students’ enthusiasm is not as great as it is for the language of English. This is the raro hallazgo, the regalo de regalos”.

Algunas estadísticas relevantes: the auxiliary indices a Millennium art están por debajo del promedio de la ciudad. The 87 of the old alumni who follow the family of the bajos will receive a notification from the promedio of the city.

In many years of transcurridos in the field of the novella of Orange has been explored one of the pillars of the plan of the Millennium Art studios, the research on the literature of the new year has become more double. Over time, 21 of the 26 alumni have received university student loans, increasing their real estate and global education promotions. La mayoría de ellos, dijo Ouimet, sobre described Ni aquí ni allí.

When they are shown by three former students decorating with art that is their personal favorite in their era, Ni aquí ni allí, all answers sin dudar. There are times when Tony, Jacquie and Opal are a character that might end up in the local supermarket.

Briana Reyes, 17 years old, said: “Have a lot of contact with our personalities, now that we are comfortable with problems of alcoholism and drogadicción”.

Once I was in Orange, who lived in Oakland, Nueva York’s promotion for his second novel, Walking stars. Empezo an idea. Ouimet nunca before inviting an author of a certain class; These visits could result in both Shakespeare and Zora Neale Hurston becoming unavailable.

You can read a message over a period of more than a week, and on Saturday, March 4, after being up in the middle of the night, you heard Penguin Random House’s conference call department.

“The electronic correo creates a gross profit, but I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “Era mi ensayo universitario de la mediana edad”.

Most of the 827 palabras are described with most of the time that our alumni, personal people, texture and details, infiltrate the company in important professional correspondence.

Ouimet describes: “A new class of English-speaking duos, in a different part of the Bronx, in a city neighborhood with sometimes recurring animations, not much different in Fruitval, there is now another rock. It’s more of a rocky outcrop. There is nuestro MF Doom, nuestro Eminem, nuestro Earl Sweatshirt, nuestro Tribe Called Red, nuestro Beethoven, nuestro Bobby Big Medicine, nuestro electronic equipment for Manny, now there is a double ambiguity in the lado crowd, now the camera is on a dark way of looking”.

Orange, añadió, era un héroe para estos chicos: “Has cambiado vidas”. When Tahqari Koonce, at the age of 17, founded a paralelo between the Coliseo de Oakland and the Romano Coliseo; and Natalia Melendez, at age 17, observed a blank arm that embodied the uprising of the indigenous tribe. And he is Dalvyn Urena, the 18, who now says he has led a full libro Ni aquí ni allí”, and you can compare it with a Shakesperiano.

Conclusion with: “Bueno, valía la pena intentarlo. Thank you for learning this time, it is always so that we can do this. With appreciation (and admiration), Rick Ouimet”.

“Me arriesgué”, dijo Ouimet. Yes, why not? “My students have started finding a new libro. Hay lamentos, en abren la page. Where is the animal a libro? El amor era palpable”.

At the end of the horas, the mensaje is placed in Orange, which is a medium time for 24 ciudades with different entrepreneurs and events. Pidió by Jordan Rodman, director of Knopf’s publicity, who could possibly include the Ouimet class in the agenda. No tendría que pagar nada. Knopf has 30 examples of this Ni aquí ni allí y 30 examples of Walking stars.

And a great escuela and bulliciosa, llena de suelas chirriantes, walkie talkies And while you’re young, moments of silence can be hard to come by. If Orange has a new novel, it might be a bit crowded.

“It is important to see the cosas at a higher level, the sonar must be heard and the pronunciation is removed from the palabras,” said Orange.

And continued: “It is important that you question your history when it comes to old conversations.”

The alumni are confronted with the wonders of their own propios, with the cabeza agachada and the cuello die lucia al mismo tiempo vulnerable en fuerte. If you do this, it will be described as its description Ni aquí ni allí, the libros contain “kilometers of history, kilometers of potential hogares and trampas”. In these young years, Orange’s place is one of the best offers.

During the 13-minute lecture of the preguntas, fast and furious formulas with refrescante franqueza: “¿En qué se inspiró para escribir estos dos libros?”, “¿Octavio murió?”, y, quizá la más apremiante, “¿Por wat Ni aquí ni allí acabo así?”. Desde Loose SopranoThere is an ambiguity that cannot cause consternation.

“Dijimos ¿queeeee?”, commented a researcher, who knows the last word on another note.

“Era una historia trágica”, dijo Orange. “Hay gente que la odia, y lo siento”.

Admit that there is no lecturer in secondary school: “Nadie me dio un libro y me dijo: este libro es para ti. Además, pasaban muchas cosas en mi casa”. It is possible to leave the writing pad (the display points) and use your boradores more and more to continue working. Orange is his favorite cheyenne – Pájaros cantando por la mañana – and presents a childhood friend who talks viaja to the gira.

You can pause for a while at a lado del aula todo the time. Lanzó a soft mirada asesina a puñado de chicas parlanchinas. Use a large piece of bark to create a vent. So it’s a matter of an organ father and a boda in the baila world.

The verdad is que Ni aquí ni allí not only for its alumni: you have a profound effect on the propio Ouimet. While he was a libro player, he started playing football and softbol from the age of 22.

“My question: is there no soy entrepreneur, is this an effective professor? Ni aquí ni allí look at a special renaissance. No quiero ponerme demasiado cursi”, dijo, “pero en cierto modo salvó mi carrera”.

The last sound is the timbre. The students are learning and working to keep Orange sticking to their libros. It’s a moment to chat with one of the people.

On hearing the estruendo, Ouimet gritós a dos los que seguían escuchando: “If you experience a libro, you have the opportunity. If you experience a history, “hagan que otros lo sepan!”.

The 5-year-old twins found lifeless in their mother’s bed in the family’s Bronx apartment last December were smothered to death, according to the city’s medical examiner.

The deaths of the children, a boy and a girl, are being ruled a homicide, said Julie Bolcer, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office. The cause and manner of their deaths were determined Wednesday evening.

No arrests have been made so far, a police spokeswoman said Thursday.

The twins’ deaths had puzzled authorities for nearly three months. Police saw no visible signs of trauma on their bodies, nor did officers find weapons or narcotics in the family’s sixth-floor apartment on East 175th Street near Monroe Avenue in the Mount Hope neighborhood.

The first autopsies were carried out, but Ms Bolcer said further investigation was needed. The medical examiner did not specify what those tests were, although certain tests, including toxicology, neuropathology and histology — a close examination of tissue — often take longer for results to appear.

On December 18, the mother, who police have not named, told officers she had slept in the same bed as her children the night before. She said the last time she saw the children alive was around 5 a.m

When she woke up around 11:20 a.m., she said, she found them stiff and cold. Emergency workers arrived shortly afterwards and performed life-saving measures. The children were pronounced dead 10 minutes later. The boy and girl were discovered foaming at the mouth, Joseph Kenny, chief of police detectives, told reporters later that week.

The mother was taken to an area hospital for examination. The children’s father, a health care assistant, had been working overnight and was not home when they died.

The twins, both of whom had special needs, had been ill in the days before their deaths, Chief Kenny said in December. The boy was vomiting at school on November 30 and was sent home. About two weeks later, he developed a runny nose and other cold symptoms and was sent home from school again. The girl had recently had an ear infection, had been vomiting and had been biting and spitting at school, Chief Kenny said.

Assistant Chief Benjamin Gurley, the commander of the Bronx patrol district, said at a news conference last year that police had never received a report of child abuse or domestic violence at the home.

Neighbors and friends at the time said they were shocked by the news and wondered what had gone wrong.

Candi McDonald, who lives next door to the family, said she was woken up by the mother’s screams. Ms McDonald said she and other neighbors found the mother in the hallway, sobbing, and saw the boy lying by the front door.

“It’s just sad,” Ms. McDonald said at the time. “I feel horrible.”

Maira Bonet, who lives nearby, said the mother had given Ms Bonet’s daughter a birthday present. She had returned the gesture and bought remote-controlled cars, clothes and baby dolls for the twins.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mrs. Bonet said after the children’s deaths. “It breaks my heart.”

For Trevor Barker, a freshman at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, a former professor’s $1 billion gift that will eliminate medical school tuition could be life-changing.

Mr. Barker works two jobs on campus and sends money to his mother in California. He had expected to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. But the free tuition has made him think about new options for his career.

“I hadn’t really thought about family medicine before, but maybe I would like to,” he said.

Family doctors do everything from delivering babies to caring for the elderly – usually in underserved communities. Mr. Barker said he might consider practicing medicine in the Bronx, even though doctors there generally earn less.

The billion dollar donation by Dr. Ruth Gottesman made national news last week for her generosity and for her life story. It also resonated because it didn’t go to a school in Manhattan, where top medical and educational institutions are regularly showered with gifts from billionaires.

Instead, her gift went to the only medical school in New York State’s poorest and unhealthiest county: Einstein, a highly ranked medical school with more than 1,000 students affiliated with a major hospital, Montefiore Medical Center. Almost immediately, doctors and health experts began wondering what effect this would have on health care in a city with high rates of chronic diseases such as diabetes and asthma, and relatively few primary care physicians.

Dr.’s gift Gottesman aims to help Einstein and his medical students and encourage more lower-income students to apply to medical school. It could also encourage students like Mr. Barker to practice medicine in the district. And some health care experts and physicians were optimistic that the boon for Einstein would be felt beyond campus, with a trickle-down effect that would ultimately improve health care throughout the Bronx.

“It will have a profound effect on the entire Bronx because some of those students will remain in the community,” says Dr. Luisa Perez, an internist in the Bronx. “It’s a win-win for everyone to have all that money allocated to the Bronx.”

But Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a health care think tank in Massachusetts, said the money would likely have at best “a marginal impact” on health care in the Bronx.

“Let’s not pretend that these one-off events that could do a little bit of good somewhere are the systemic solution, because they are not,” he said.

The least healthy municipality

Year after year, the Bronx is ranked as the least healthy county in New York, comes in 62nd place out of 62, according to County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, a project of the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute that compares county health metrics. Manhattan, on the other hand, was at number 7, Queens at number 12, Staten Island at number 21 and Brooklyn at number 22.

Within New York City, the Bronx has the highest diabetes rates and rates asthma in children. One in three deaths in the Bronx is classified as ‘premature’, meaning the person died before the age of 65; across the city that percentage is about one in four.

Access to health care and doctors can play an important role in reducing the toll of chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. For example, diabetes can lead to lower limb amputations and kidney failure. But the disease can be controlled through lifestyle and diet changes, medications and blood sugar management – ​​all things GPs try to address with their patients.

“The GP prevents the disease from bothering patients so much that they even have to be amputated, so that they do not end up in a wheelchair three times a week or have to go on dialysis,” says Dr. Perez, member of the SOMOS Community. Care, a large network of physicians working in underserved neighborhoods in New York City.

But even with many more doctors in the Bronx, the prevalence of chronic disease would be difficult to reverse without also addressing the complex factors that contribute to the development of health problems.

Many chronic diseases are rooted in socio-economic circumstances. The high toll of asthma in the South Bronx is related air pollution, diesel exhaust from truck traffic, cockroach particles, mold and other factors related to environmental and housing conditions.

Diabetes can often be prevented by eating healthy, staying physically active, and… keep weight under control. But that can be difficult for people who work multiple jobs, have long commutes and have limited meal options.

“The vast majority of these differences have their origins in the living and social circumstances that long precede the onset of the disease,” said Dr. Saini of the Lown Institute.

Still, doctors’ messages can make a difference. They can encourage patients to exercise more and make healthier choices where possible, such as drinking less juice, eating less rice or rinsing canned vegetables to reduce sodium levels.

From 2015 to 2021, there was a significant improvement in the Bronx’s rankings for “health behavior” — which includes smoking rates, physical activity and diet, according to Charmaine Ruddock, project director at Bronx Health REACH, a community program that aims to reduce health disparities . Ms Ruddock said the improvements were the result of efforts by community groups, doctors and other healthcare providers.

A shortage of doctors

The Bronx has the fewest general practitioners per capita of any municipality. Asked if they have a doctor, Bronx adults are more likely to answer no than those who live elsewhere in the city.

One factor is that the Bronx has a higher percentage of residents on Medicaid, which reimburses doctors at lower rates than private insurance. That translates into lower salaries for doctors. However, the number of primary care physicians per capita in the Bronx has increased significantly over the past fifteen years. It is now only slightly below that of Queens.

Yuliana Dominguez Paez, 24, a first-year medical student at Einstein, wants to do her part to change these statistics.

“I’ll stay in the Bronx,” she said. As far as she knows, she is the only one of the 183 medical students in her class who grew up in the neighborhood. (About half of the students in the class are from New York.) “I would like to stay here and really serve the community that raised me.”

The question is whether others will join her.

Dr. Rikhil Kochhar, an internist in the Bronx, believes the donation could lead to more primary care physicians and pediatricians working in the Bronx. “I think if you take the financial pressure off medical education, it will encourage physicians to stay in these areas,” he said.

Others weren’t so sure. Dr. Saini of the Lown Institute said the donation would help people “who have already set their sights on becoming primary care physicians” to persevere.

But he doubted whether making medical school free would convince many students to pursue more lucrative careers or keep them close when they graduate. “It won’t change the incentive structure,” he said.

Nancy Wallace, who toiled tirelessly to clean up the only freshwater river flowing in New York City, the Bronx, and reclaim it for recreation and as a natural habitat, died on February 15 at her home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. 93.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Lane Wallace.

Ms. Wallace lived in White Plains, N.Y., in the 1980s and launched a broad campaign to save the river, then a 23-mile (37-kilometer) inaccessible watercourse that contained more wreckage, such as the carcasses of junked cars and rusted refrigerators, than wildlife .

The river is largely tidal and brackish from East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx to where Hunts Point meets the salty East River, but is generally considered fresh because it flows south from its source near Kensico Dam in Westchester County .

Although “naturally fresh” is a phrase not typically associated with the Bronx, New York’s only borough on the US mainland is in fact home to Pelham Bay Park, the city’s largest, as well as the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx Zoo. and the Hunts Point Produce Market – and a mainly freshwater river runs through it.

Mrs. Wallace, a career educator and civic leader, joined the board of the Bronx River Restoration in 1982. The following year, when the executive director left, she agreed to fill in temporarily. She held the job for 22 years until retiring in 2006 — a year before biologists at the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Bronx reported their first beaver sighting in the river in two centuries.

Mrs Wallace almost single-handedly raised money from local authorities, charities and private individuals for the restoration; won the support of officials in the Bronx and Westchester County; persuaded local businesses to donate construction equipment and supplies; and recruited Boy Scouts and the City Volunteer Corps, among others, to assist with the cleanup and restoration.

“For the long term, the fundamental thing we need to do is change people’s attitudes toward the river,” she told The New York Times in 1988. “After all, it only became a problem because of what people did with it.”

The Bronx River Restoration and the Bronx River Alliance tried to turn an eyesore – for anyone who could find it along the Bronx River Parkway, the nation’s first – into a place where you can hike and canoe. Conservationists have reclaimed the riverbank to create unlikely oases Starlight Park, along the Sheridan Expressway near East 173rd Street. The city’s parks department now calls the park “a vital link along the Bronx River Greenway.”

Ann Seaver Coolidge Upton was born September 2, 1930 in Marblehead. Her mother, Anna (Pennypacker) Upton, ran the welfare department in Marblehead, and her father, Edward, was a lawyer. Ann was called Nancy, in keeping with a family tradition of giving children an informal name.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1951 and briefly interrupted her master’s studies to marry Bruce A. Wallace, a mechanical engineer, whom she had met while working with inner-city teenagers in Paterson, NJ.

She legally changed her name to Ann U. Wallace in 1977, when she successfully ran for the Common Council in White Plains, although she was still known as Nancy Wallace.

After teaching and traveling after her husband completed his service in the U.S. Army, the couple settled in White Plains in 1959. She worked with the local Parent Teachers Association on a plan to desegregate the local public school system and, as a member of the Common Council, led the city’s groundbreaking, anti-discriminatory Fair Housing Law.

In 1982, she was urged to join the board of Bronx River Restoration, which she immediately accepted.

“I have always been interested in environmental issues and causes; even my children learned to fold their paper lunch bags very carefully and take them home so we could reuse them,” she said in 2005.

In addition to her daughter Lane, Mrs. Wallace is survived by her husband; another daughter, Gail Wallace; a son, David; her sister, Lane Upton Serota; and three grandchildren. In 2012, she moved back to her hometown with her husband.

The river restoration project had been underway for nearly a decade before Ms. Wallace joined the board. It started as a partnership between Anthony Bouza, a Bronx police captain who wanted to divert teenagers from delinquency, and Ruth Anderberg, who had entertained the idea of ​​a restoration for a decade and eventually left her job as a secretary at Fordham University to help start it. to get going.

Ms. Wallace’s staunchest supporters included José E. Serrano, then a state commissioner from the Bronx before he became a U.S. representative; Bea Castiglia-Catullo, fellow member of the River Restoration Council; and then-New York City Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern, who predicted in 1988 that the river would one day be “what it should be: a place for the modern Huckleberry Finns.”

In helping to save the river, Ms. Wallace combined political acumen, a talent for consensus building, and community organizing skills to find common ground between Westchester’s suburban towns and its less affluent towns. neighborhoods bordering the river from the Bronx border at 242nd Street to the East River eight miles south.

“We’re not hoping we’ll drink the water or anything,” she told The Times in 1988. “But we hope to get it clean enough that the fish will want to come back.”

They did, including American eel and the endangered herring.

Manhattan | 67 West 107th Street, No. 1

Manhattan Valley Apartment

$875,000

A 700 square foot apartment with two bedrooms, one bathroom, an open floor plan, a porcelain bathroom with windows, a home office, a washer/dryer and air conditioning with window units, on the first floor of a five-bedroom apartment. story walk-up from 1909 with a live-in supermarket and a bicycle shed. Samantha Rose Frith and Joel Moss, Coldwell Banker Warburg, 646-706-3794; cbwarburg.com

Cost

Common charges: $942 per month
Taxes: $681 per month

Positives

The entire apartment was renovated last year. There is a laundry room in the unit for the washer/dryer. The seller pays closing costs and six months of property taxes.

Cons

The kitchen has little counter space and the bath is small. Windows in the bedroom open to the sidewalk.

Manhattan | 461 West 44th Street, No. 1B

Hell’s Kitchen studio

$400,000

A modernized 25 square meter studio apartment with a windowed bathroom, an office corner step and ample storage space, on the first floor of a six-storey pre-war co-op with a virtual intercom, an elevator, a live-in super, basement storage cages, shared laundry room, a courtyard and a roof terrace. Michael Marc Friedman, 917-771-0961, Keller Williams; knyc.com

Cost

Maintenance: $586 per month

Positives

Subletting is allowed four out of five years after the first year.

Cons

The refrigerator is small. The building does not have a bicycle shed.

Bronx | 2500 Johnson Avenue, No. 16NP

Spuyten Duyvil Cooperative

$1.1 million

An approximately 2,500-square-foot apartment with four bedrooms, two and a half baths, an open living and dining area, two bedrooms with private windowed half baths, a second living room with a kitchenette, ample storage and through-the-wall heating and air conditioning , on the 16th floor of a 20-story 1967 doorman building with a live-in super, public parking garage, basketball court, playground and amenity club including a gym, swimming pool, residents’ lounge, game room, community room and game rooms. Aaron Kass and Geoffrey Weiss, 929-269-3411, Compass; compass.com

Cost

Maintenance: $3,843 per month

Positives

Two of the bedrooms have access to the balconies, which overlook the Henry Hudson Bridge. There are several walk-in closets.

Cons

The two smaller bedrooms have no wardrobes. The kitchen is closed. The maintenance costs are high, but include cable and internet.

Given the rapid pace of the current market, some properties may no longer be available at the time of publication.

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The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift will be used in the future to cover tuition for all students .

The donor, Dr. Ruth Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test and implemented literacy programs. It is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.

The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, better known as Sandy, who was a protege of Warren Buffett and had invested early in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Mr. Buffett built.

The donation is notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it goes to a medical facility in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. The Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths is considered the unhealthiest province in New York City. Over the past generation, a number of billionaires have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to better-known medical schools and hospitals in Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest borough.

While her husband ran an investment firm, First Manhattan, Dr. Gottesman had a long career at Einstein, a renowned medical school, beginning in 1968, when she took a job as director of psychoeducational services. She has been a longtime member of Einstein’s board of trustees and currently serves as chairman.

In recent years, she has become close friends with Dr. Philip Ozuah, the pediatrician who oversees the medical college and its affiliated hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, as CEO of the health care system. That friendship and trust emerged as she thought about what to do with the money her husband left her.

In an interview on Friday at the Einstein campus in the Morris Park neighborhood, Dr. Ozuah and Dr. Gottesman on the donation, how it came about and what it would mean for Einstein medical students.

The friendship

In early 2020, the two sat next to each other on a 6 a.m. flight to West Palm Beach, Florida. It was the first time they spent hours together.

They talked about their childhoods—hers in Baltimore, his, some thirty years later, in Nigeria—and what they had in common. Both had doctorates in education and had spent their careers at the same institution in the Bronx, helping children and families in need.

Dr. Ozuah described moving to New York without knowing a single person in the state and spending years as a community physician in the South Bronx before rising to the top of medical school.

Upon leaving the airport, Dr. Ozuah extended his arm to Dr. Gottesman, not quite 90 at the time, as they approached the curb. She waved him off and told him to “mind your own step,” he recalled with a chuckle.

Within a few weeks, the coronavirus brought the world to a standstill. The husband of Dr. Gottesman, in her 90s, became ill with the new pathogen, and she had a mild case. Dr. Ozuah sent an ambulance to the Gottesman home in Rye, NY, to take them to Montefiore, the largest hospital in the Bronx.

In the weeks that followed, Dr. Ozuah made daily home visits – in full protective gear – to inquire about the couple while Mr. Gottesman recovered. “That’s how the friendship started,” he said. “I probably visited them every day for three weeks in Rye.”

About three years ago, Dr. Ozuah Dr. Gottesman to lead the medical school’s board of trustees. She had done this job before, but considering her age, she was surprised. The gesture reminded her of the fable about the lion and the mouseshe told Dr. at the time. Ozuah, in which she explained that when the lion spares the mouse’s life, the mouse says to him, “Maybe one day I will help you.”

In the story the lion laughs haughtily. “But Phil didn’t say ‘ha, ha, ha,'” she noted with a smile.

The money

The husband of Dr. Gottesman died in 2022 at the age of 96. “Unbeknownst to me, he left me an entire portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock,” she recalls. The instructions were simple: “Do with it what you think is right,” she recalled.

It was overwhelming to think about, so at first she didn’t. But her children encouraged her not to wait too long.

When she focused on the legacy, she immediately realized what she wanted to do, she remembers. “I wanted to fund Einstein students so they could get free tuition,” she said. There was enough money to do that forever, she said.

Over the years, she had interviewed dozens of Einstein’s future medical students. Tuition exceeds $59,000 per year, and many graduate with crushing medical school debt, often more than $200,000.

Not only would future students be able to start their careers without the burden of debt, but she hoped her donation would also enable a broader group of aspiring doctors to apply to medical school. “We have great medical students, but this opens the door to many other students whose economic status is such that they wouldn’t even think about going to medical school,” she said.

“That makes me very happy with this gift,” she added. “I have the opportunity not only to help Phil, but also to help Montefiore and Einstein in a transformative way – and I’m just so proud and so humbled – both – that I was able to do it.”

Dr. Gottesman went to see Dr. in December. Ozuah to tell him that she would give a great gift. She reminded him of the story of the lion and the mouse. This, she explained, was the mouse’s moment.

“If someone said, ‘I’m giving you a transformative gift for medical school,’ what would you do?” she asked.

There were probably three things, Dr. Ozuah said.

“First of all,” he began, “you could get a free education….”

“That’s what I want to do,” she said. He never mentioned the other ideas.

Dr. Gottesman sometimes wonders what her late husband would have thought of her decision.

“I hope he’s smiling and not frowning,” she said, chuckling. “But he gave me the opportunity to do this, and I think he would be happy with it – I hope so.”

Einstein won’t be the first medical school to eliminate tuition.

In 2018, New York University announced it would offer free tuition to medical students saw an increase in the number of applications.

The name

Dr. Gottesman was hesitant to attach her name to her donation. “Nobody needs to know,” Dr. Ozuah initially remembered her saying. But Dr. Ozuah insisted others might find her life inspiring. “Here is someone who is completely committed to the well-being of others and does not want accolades or recognition,” said Dr. Ozuah.

Dr. Ozuah noted that the going rate for putting your name on a medical school or hospital was perhaps one-fifth of Dr. Gottesman. Cornell Medical College and New York Hospital now have the last name of Sanford Weill, the former head of Citigroup. The New York University Medical Center was renamed after Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone. Both men donated hundreds of millions of dollars.

But it is a condition of Dr.’s gift. Gottesman that the Einstein College of Medicine will not change its name. Albert Einstein, the physicist who developed the theory of relativity, agreed to lend his name to the medical school, which opened in 1955.

The name, she noted, couldn’t be right. “We have the damn name – we have Albert Einstein.”

A 45-year-old man was shot to death on a subway in the Bronx early Friday morning, police said.

The man was hit in the chest just after 5 a.m. aboard a southbound D train near the 182nd-183rd Streets station, police said. He was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Police identified three men dressed in all black as potential suspects and said they fled the train after the shooting.

It is not clear what led to the shooting or whether the victim knew his attackers. No arrests have been made, police said.

The northbound and southbound B and D trains passed through the station as police continued their investigation, police said Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Shootings on the New York subway are rare and constitute a fraction of gun crimes in New York City. But the trains have been the setting for several outbreaks of violence this year.

Earlier this month, a 35-year-old man was killed and five other people were injured during the evening rush hour at the Mount Eden Avenue station in the Bronx. And in January, a 45-year-old father of three was fatally shot aboard the No. 3 train in Brooklyn after intervening in an argument.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Several people were shot Monday at the Mount Eden Avenue subway station in the Bronx, police said. No. 4 trains passed through the station in both directions while police investigated. according to New York City Transit.

No information was immediately available on the number of victims and the severity of the injuries suffered by the shot dead.

In a social media message On Monday evening, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she had been briefed on the shooting and had ordered the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the subways, to assist the police investigation.

This is a developing story and will be updated.