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From: News and Views | Beyond the City | No one around 168th St. and Walton Ave. in the South Bronx was paying much attention yesterday to the melodrama in Miami, where adults have trotted a kidnapped kid in front of national television each day for four months to keep the last Cold War alive. Certainly not Sylvia Rosario, president of the parents association at the new Rafael Hernandez School, or her good friend Nancy Biberman. Both women have spent decades fighting for children others forgot, and they don't need Dan Rather or Diane Sawyer to point out the fakes. Around noon, Biberman walked through the spotless sun-bathed halls of the apartment building she has created for 130 poor and homeless families. The huge Renaissance-style building served for 50 years as the main structure in a block-long campus that once housed Morrisania Hospital. Morrisania was closed in 1976 when the city went broke. For the next 20 years, the site was an abandoned eyesore, with bums and drug dealers turning it into the biggest symbol of hopelessness in all the South Bronx. Eventually, Biberman came along, with a group she had founded called the Urban Horizon's Economic Development Center, and she got Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer to back her dream of quality low-cost housing for the poor. By 1997, the first families, a third of them previously homeless, began moving into the apartments she created. Not only were the apartments affordable — rents are capped at a third of a family's income, and three-bedroom units go for as low as $500 a month — but the quality of construction has drawn universal praise. Spacious rooms, high ceilings, huge arched windows that fill each apartment with light and modern tiled kitchens and bathrooms are just a few of the details that have won the renovated building national recognition. "I've lived in lots of places," said Rafael Cortijo, one of the tenants. "None compare to this. I'll be in this place until I die." But Biberman refused to be content with just good housing. She kept pushing to turn the rest of the hospital complex into an educational campus. She teamed up with Rosario to pressure the Board of Education to deliver on its promise of a new permanent home for the Rafael Hernandez School, one of the few magnet schools in the city that teaches both English and Spanish to every child. The school finally opened in September. "It took us 10 years of fighting," Rosario said. "But I tell people, the folks who built the George Washington Bridge didn't do it for themselves. They built it for everybody. That's how I feel about this school. It's for all the children for years to come, not just mine." As soon as the school opened, Biberman was ready with a complete after-school program for 350 students, funded by philanthropist George Soros. And for kids too young to go to school, she opened a 100-child day care center on the ground floor of the main hospital building. For the mothers of those children, and for any mother in the neighborhood, she established the Women's Housing and Economic Development Corp., which seeks to move women off welfare and into the working world. Among its projects are a culinary school and catering service, job-preparation programs and a training program that prepares women to run their own home child-care operations — even the South Bronx's only women's fitness center. Already, the home child-care network provides an additional 500 slots around the Bronx. "There is a synergy in her programs that is amazing," said Ferrer. "She is moving women off of dependency and into being entrepreneurs and into being independent." For Biberman, who grew up in the affluent suburbs outside Philadelphia and graduated from Barnard College, spending all these years among the poor of the South Bronx and being a part of a neighborhood's resurrection has been a reward she wouldn't trade for anything. The zealots surrounding that house in Little Havana in the name of Elian Gonzalez could not begin to understand what real concern for forgotten children is about. |
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