In the inimitable fashion of really smart students anywhere, the students of the Bronx Charter School for the Arts were all but jumping out of their seats as they sought to attract the attention of the grown-up at the head of the room one day last month.
Oh-oh-oh, they exclaimed, as they stretched their hands up so high that they looked as if with one more upward push they might leave the ground.
Governor David Paterson had come to visit Hunts Point, and the students who had shuttled to The Point to meet him had questions.
Bringing his health commissioner, his environmental commissioner and the area’s local elected officials, the governor had come to talk about asthma. The students wanted to talk about it, too. Many of them suffer from the disease. Nearly a quarter of all the elementary school students in the South Bronx do. And all of them have friends and family members who have trouble breathing because of asthma.
The children know why the disease has reached epidemic proportions here. It’s because the air is polluted. The foul smells from the city’s sewer plant, the NYOFCo fertilizer plant and dozens of smaller industrial plants signal unhealthy emissions.
Even more, though, the traffic—especially the truck traffic–that roars along the Bruckner and Sheridan expressways and rumbles down local streets is to blame.
“Soot particles spewing from the exhaust of diesel trucks” are a major contributor to the epidemic, found a five-year study completed two years ago.
“If you live in the South Bronx, your child is twice as likely to attend a school near a highway as other children in the city,” said the lead investigator of the study, conducted by the NYU School of Medicine, the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and four community groups, The Point Community Development Corporation, Sports Foundation, Inc., We Stay/Nos Quedamos, and Youth Ministries for Peace & Justice, with help from Congressman Jose Serrano.
Once off those highways, thousands of trucks make their way to the food distribution center, to other warehouses, to industrial sites and to NYOFCo.
The governor brought news of modest help in the form of a campaign to ticket trucks that idle on local streets. He seemed to recognize that more was needed, as well. “Our inappropriate placement of hazardous waste facilities in neighborhoods that can’t fight back is going to have to stop,” he declared.
Sadly, the city’s press corps of daily newspaper, radio and television reporters couldn’t have been less interested. All they wanted to talk about was whom the governor planned to appoint to the U.S. Senate.
As they peppered Paterson with questions about replacing Hillary Clinton, a frustrated City Councilwoman Maria Carmen del Arroyo whispered in the governor’s ear, “Does anyone here want to talk about asthma?”
When Paterson repeated her question, the reporters chuckled and went right back to asking about the Senate seat.
So it was left to fifth-graders—who finally got to lower their outstretched arms after the press corps had left–to ask the really important questions. Said Yailene Gonzalez: “What can we do to help stop pollution?”
That’s the right question, not only because it gets to the root of the problem, but because of that “we.”
Local residents have allies: NYU did the asthma study; Lehman College did another; Pratt has been a long-time supporter of the community, contributing its planning expertise; Hunter College publishes this newspaper to help give residents information and a voice.
But to the press corps, and therefore to much of the city, Hunts Point might as well be Mars.
So in the end change will come by showing the governor (and the rest of the politicians) that ours are not “neighborhoods that can’t fight back.”
Change will come from the streets and meeting halls of Hunts Point and Longwood and other South Bronx neighborhoods, where residents and their advocacy organizations gather to make it clear that it’s wrong to foul the air and inflict disease on a community, and a mistake to conclude that because people are poor they are powerless.