Bronx Times

After a multi-year effort, elected officials broke ground on the city’s first public school “food forest” at the Adlai Stevenson Educational Campus on July 15.

Joel Heckethorn, principal of Bronx Community High School, said that a former teacher established the garden years ago, but it fell into “a downward disarray” after he retired.

Heckethorn was among the first school leaders to lend support to expand the garden into a forest, and he said much progress has been made in just one year.

Soon, it will be revitalized into an active, multidisciplinary learning space, Heckethorn thanked the elected officials for their investments and enthusiastic support.

“Today is not just about a groundbreaking, but it’s about planning opportunity for our students and our community moving forward,” he said.

📝By Emily Swanson

📸By Emily Swanson

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This summer the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, in Partnership with NYC Parks, will be bringing the Bronx dozens of free outdoor screenings.

Read on to see the showings across the borough this month.

On Wednesday, the Bronx County Historical Society opened a new permanent exhibition at the Museum of Bronx History as part of their programming for America’s 250th anniversary. “The Bronx; Crucible of Liberty. Radicals, Runaways & Revolutionaries; 1600-1850” highlights the importance of areas we now know as the Bronx and lower Westchester county in the country’s broader history.

Steven Payne, director of the Bronx County Historical Society, said the exhibit, explores the tension between Dutch and English traditions of liberty and their colonization/enslavement of indigenous peoples; how enslaved people found their own paths to freedom; the struggles around the Declaration of Independence; and how the struggles around freedom continued even after the United States came into being.

“In anything that we drew on, we wanted to root it in local stories. So even with those large sounding national documents, in the exhibit you’ll find stories of local people who participated in either signing the documents or literally shaping the language of the documents,” Payne said.

📝By Maurice Burbridge

📸 By Maurice Burbridge, Bronx Historical Society, and Sadie Brown

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