Today, as the administrator for the parkland along the Bronx portion of the river, Martinez oversees a vibrant collection of green space that offers everything from canoe tours to dolphin sightings.

As a political science major at Fordham, Martinez dreamed of a career in politics. He interviewed with New York City Council member Phil Reed after graduating in 1996, and Reed passed his resume along to Tim Tompkins, who had recently founded Partnerships for Parks—a nonprofit dedicated to connecting the city’s communities with their public parks through volunteering opportunities.

Martinez worked for the organization for 17 years, many of which were spent as an outreach coordinator for Bronx parks that he says were neglected over the years. “It was an opportunity to give people the ability to fight for change in their neighborhood,” he said.

After a period working in the Parks Department’s personnel division, Martinez landed his current job. He manages a staff of city employees and partners with the nonprofit Bronx River Alliance to help restore and protect the river, and to engage the community in activities centered around the water.

“You have this unique feature running through the Bronx that a lot of people don’t think about,” he said. “I see myself in the role of connecting people to the river and helping them navigate the system—showing what they can contribute and how they can also benefit from it.”

And his message for those who haven’t visited the Bronx River?

“Take advantage of this natural resource. And once you do, spread the word and let people know that it’s here and experience all it has to offer.”

A decade ago, Fordham officially became a “changemaker campus.” But the changemaking impulse has been at the heart of a Fordham education for generations. Read more about other Fordham changemakers.

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Funding for the new outdoor play space was secured with help from Fordham’s Center for Educational Partnerships, a part of the University’s Graduate School of Education. The center partnered with MS 331 beginning in 2015, providing administrative help and assisting with tasks such as funding requests. GSE graduate Serapha Cruz is the principal of MS 331, which shares the complex with an elementary school, PS 306X. 

Anita Batisti, Ph.D. associate dean and director of the Center for Educational Partnerships, said that one of Fordham’s mandates is to improve the wellness and well-being of students and the community. Studies have shown that clean, well-kept playground equipment helps students feel more connected to their community while promoting exercise and play.

“It really was a natural progression for us to do this,” Batisti said. 

“With our skills for raising money and helping to prepare proposals and bids, we were able to move this process along through the various funding sources.” 

Fordham President Tania Tetlow joined Batisti at the Oct. 25 ribbon-cutting ceremony for the 46,0000-square-foot play area. Also in attendance were GSE Acting Dean Ji Seon Lee, U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres; Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson; Councilmember Pierina Ana Sanchez, who helped secure funding for the project; and representatives from the Trust for Public Land and the Department of Environmental Protection, which oversaw the design and construction of the space.

When work on the $2.85 million project began in 2021, the space in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx was a cracked, crumbling stretch of asphalt. It now features a full basketball court, a volleyball court, game tables, an outdoor classroom, a gazebo, and play equipment for younger children. There is also fitness equipment for older students and community members, benches, a running track, and a turf field for soccer and football.

Since the 1970s, Fordham students have been studying and contributing to the spirit of innovation and community renewal that has come to define what it means to be a Bronxite.

Fifty years ago, a new art form burst forth on the streets of the Bronx, born from rich musical traditions and a spirit of innovation in neighborhoods of color ravaged by deindustrialization and written off by most of the country. In the ensuing decades, the Fordham community has not only studied and celebrated hip-hop as a revolutionary cultural force but also helped preserve its Bronx legacy—through efforts to recognize the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as the genre’s birthplace, and through oral-history interviews with some of hip-hop’s seminal figures.

“I think the lesson is, let’s explore, interrogate, and embrace the cultural creativity of our surrounding areas because it’s unparalleled,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African and African American studies and founding director of Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project.

Naison teaches a popular class, From Rock and Roll to Hip-Hop, that draws on artists like Cardi B, Nas, and Run-DMC to understand the music and its part in U.S. history—and to explore issues he’s spent his career teaching. “I’m not a hip-hop scholar,” he said. “Rather, I’m someone who works to have community voices heard.”

And just as the music has evolved over the past 50 years, so have efforts to revitalize the borough and tell the stories of its residents.

Challenging ‘Deeply Entrenched Stereotypes’

Amplifying community voices is at the heart of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Fordham launched the project in 2002, at the request of the Bronx County Historical Society, to document and preserve the history of Black people in New York City’s northernmost borough. Naison and his team of Fordham students, faculty, and community historians have spoken with hip-hop pioneers like Pete DJ Jones and Kurtis Blow, but the project is much broader: The archive contains verbatim transcripts of interviews with educators, politicians, social workers, businesspeople, clergy members, athletes, and leaders of community-based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the 1930s. The archive, which also includes scholarly essays about the Bronx, was digitized in 2015, making the interviews fully accessible to the public.

“Starting by interviewing a small number of people I already knew,” Naison wrote in Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s (Fordham University Press, 2016), “I stumbled upon a large, passionate, and knowledgeable group of people who had been waiting for years to tell stories of communities long forgotten, communities whose very history challenged deeply entrenched stereotypes about Black and Latino settlement of the Bronx.”

For Naison, the project highlights how the borough, defying the odds, rebuilt neighborhoods following the arson of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. The neighborhoods, with lower crime rates, saw community life flourish again, and in recent decades, the Bronx became a location of choice for new immigrants to New York. BAAHP research includes interviews with Bronxites from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, among other nations. It gives voice to growing, diverse immigrant communities that have enlivened Bronx neighborhoods where Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican people lived before them. “The Bronx is this site where people mix their cultures and they create something new,” Naison said. “It makes this a lot of fun to study.”

Shaping Global Perceptions

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, helped facilitate at least 50 BAAHP interviews from 2004 to 2010, when he was the project’s research director. He said the archive is useful for anyone studying how cities have changed over the decades.

“I hope people use it to think differently about the Bronx, to include the Bronx more deeply and broadly in urban studies in the United States,” said Purnell, now an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Bowdoin College, where he uses the Fordham archive in his own research and in the classroom with his students. “I hope that it also expands how we think about Black people in New York City and in American cities in general from the mid-20th century onward.”

Since 2015, when the BAAHP archives were made available online, the digital recordings have been accessed by thousands of scholars around the world, from Nairobi to Singapore, Paris to Berlin. Peter Schultz Jørgensen, an urbanist and author in Denmark, has been using information from the digital archive to complete a book titled Our Bronx!

“Portraying and documenting everyday life in the Bronx, as it once was, is essential in protecting the people of the Bronx from misrepresentation, while at the same time providing valuable knowledge that can help shape their future,” he said. “Just as BAAHP gathers the web of memory, my book is about the struggles that people and community organizations have waged and are waging in the Bronx. And more important, and encouraging, it talks about how they are now scaling up via the Bronxwide Coalition and their Bronxwide plan for more economic and democratic control of the borough.”

Championing Bronx Renewal

The movement Jørgensen describes is one in which members of the Fordham community have long played key roles, according to historian and journalist Jill Jonnes, author of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. In the mid-1980s, when she published the first edition of the book, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment and arson that had ravaged the borough.

“Today, we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying these neighborhoods,” Jonnes wrote in a preface to the third edition of South Bronx Rising, published last year by Fordham University Press. “Even as fires relentlessly spread across the borough—as landlords extracted what they could from their properties regardless of the human cost—local activists and the social justice Catholics were mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.”

One of those Catholics was Paul Brant, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic (and later priest) who arrived at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the late 1960s to teach and to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. At the time, faith in the viability of cities was at a low point. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, and two decades of studied underinvestment had taken their predictable toll. The Bronx was experiencing the worst of it, and the people who lived in its neighborhoods were demonized as the cause of the problems.

Brant, who died in May 2023 at the age of 82, wanted to understand what could be done. He earned a spot in New York City’s prestigious Urban Fellows program, meant to harness ideas for a city in crisis. Gregarious and forceful, yet able to work diplomatically, he had the backing of Fordham’s president at the time, James Finlay, S.J., to serve as the University’s liaison to the Bronx. With other young Jesuits, he lived in an apartment south of campus, on 187th Street and Marion Avenue, gaining firsthand insight into the scope of neglect and abandonment afflicting the borough.

“Paul felt, well, look, there’s a lot of people still in these neighborhoods. It’s not inevitable that everything gets worse,” said Roger Hayes, GSAS ’95, one of Brant’s former Jesuit seminary classmates. “What are we going to do?”

Long conversations with Hayes and Jim Mitchell, another seminary friend, convinced Brant that solutions to the Bronx’s problems would come by directing the power of the people themselves. In 1972, they formed a neighborhood association in nearby Morris Heights. They used relationships within the parish to confront negligent landlords. Seeing nascent successes there, they moved to launch a larger group.

In 1974, Brant convinced pastors from 10 Catholic parishes to sponsor an organization to fight for the community, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCC) was born. The group expanded to include Protestant and Jewish clergy—membership was always nonsectarian—and went on to train leaders in hundreds of tenant associations and neighborhood groups, including the University Neighborhood Housing Program, which Fordham helped to establish in the early 1980s to create, preserve, and improve affordable housing in the Bronx, and which has been led for many years by Fordham graduate Jim Buckley, FCRH ’76.

All of these groups were knit together across racial lines and around share interests during the worst years of abandonment and destruction. When they learned that rotten apartments had roots beyond individual slumlords, they picketed banks for redlining, the practice of withholding loans to people in neighborhoods considered a poor economic risk. Before long, Bronx homemakers and blue-collar workers were boarding buses to City Hall, demanding meetings with commissioners and testifying at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

With similar people-power organizations nationwide, they won changes in the nation’s banking laws through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, drove reinvestment to cities, and sprouted a new ecosystem of nonprofit affordable housing.

Preserving Hip-Hop’s Bronx Birthplace

It’s the stuff of legend now: On August 11, 1973, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a 100-plus-unit apartment building just blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

Fast forward to 2008, when 1520 Sedgwick was laden with debt acquired by Wall Street investors who were failing to maintain the building. Organizers from the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, a group focused on preserving affordable housing, hoped that documenting 1520’s history would help save it. They asked Fordham professor Mark Naison, Ph.D., to help. His research—which led to a lecture on C-SPAN and was highlighted in an August 2008 appearance on the PBS show History Detectives—helped convince the city government to intervene, eventually preserving the building as a decent and affordable place to live. In 2021, its standing became official: The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution acknowledging 1520 Sedgwick as the birthplace of hip-hop.

Learning About Bronx Renewal

Each year, Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning shares this view of Bronx (and Fordham) history with incoming students, particularly those who participate in its Urban Plunge program in late August. The pre-orientation program gives new students the chance to explore the city’s neighborhoods and join local efforts to foster community development.

“For 30 years, the Plunge experience has offered our students their first introduction to institutions like Part of the Solution and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, organizations founded by Fordham community members in collaboration with local residents that have built community, advocated for justice, and provided services and resources for the whole person,” said Julie Gafney, Ph.D., Fordham’s assistant vice president for strategic mission initiatives and executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Students learn directly from local residents and policy experts about how they can shape policy decisions and build a better future for Fordham and its neighbors. “We really want to introduce first-year students, along with their upper-class mentors, to what’s driving community work in the Bronx right now,” Gafney said. “It’s an ideal ground for fostering a four-year commitment to community solution-building here in the Bronx.”

Reimagining the Cross Bronx

On August 25, nearly 250 first-year Fordham students fanned out across the Bronx as part of Urban Plunge. They served lunch to those in need at POTS—Part of the Solution, where Fordham graduate Jack Marth, FCRH ’86, is the director of programs; they helped refurbish Poe Park and the community-maintained Drew Gardens, adjacent to the Bronx River; and they visited the NWBCCC, now led by Fordham graduate Sandra Lobo, FCRH ’97, GSS ’04.

Students also learned about the Cross Bronx Expressway, a major highway built in the mid-20th century that has been blamed not only for separating Bronx communities but also for worsening air and noise pollution in the borough, contributing to residents’ high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

Before visiting parts of the expressway, students heard from Nilka Martell, founding director of Loving the Bronx, a nonprofit that has been leading community efforts to cap the Cross Bronx and develop public green spaces above and around it. A few years ago, Martell connected with Fordham graduate Alex Levine, FCRH ’14, who was pursuing the same goal.

At Fordham, Levine majored in economics and Chinese studies and interned at the Department of City Planning in the Bronx. By 2020, he was a third-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he co-founded the Bronx One Policy Group, a student advocacy organization focused on capping an approximately 2.5-mile section of the Cross Bronx that runs below street level. The idea is to cover the road with parks and install vents to remove toxic fumes caused by vehicular traffic. They said the cost of the project, estimated to be about $1 billion, would be offset by higher property values and lower health care costs.

“When you think of preventive medicine, it impacts everyone’s life,” Levine told the Bronx Times in 2021. “If we can get a small portion of this capped, then it might be a catalyst to happen on the rest of the highway. This is a project that can save money and lives.”

Martell said Levine’s group connected her with Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who had published a study on the benefits of capping the Cross Bronx.

“We created this perfect trifecta,” she said. They brought their idea to Rep. Ritchie Torres, and in December 2022, the city received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study how to reimagine the Cross Bronx. Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning later received a $25,000 grant from the New York City Department of Transportation as one of only 10 community partners selected to help the department gather input from residents who live near the expressway.

The feasibility-study funding is just a first step, Martell told students during an Urban Plunge panel discussion that featured a representative of the city planning department’s Bronx office and an asthma program manager from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “This isn’t easy,” Martell said. “If this was easy and there was a point-by-point playbook on how to get it done, all these projects would happen.”

But recent Bronx history gives her ample reason to press on. “You know, 40 years ago, we had the restoration of the Bronx River. Fifty years ago, we had the creation of hip-hop.” When there was little support and “no other outlet,” she said, “Bronxites came together to create an outlet.”

“For me, this is what it’s like to be a Bronxite; this is what it’s like to be in the Bronx—to have this kind of energy and these organizing skills to get things done.”

—Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, teaches journalism at Lehman College and is working on a book about the people’s movement that helped rebuild the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s. Taylor Ha is a senior writer and videographer in the president’s office and the marketing and communications division at Fordham.

Horbatiuk, an attorney who majored in history at Fordham College at Lincoln Center before earning a J.D. at Fordham Law School, has been enthralled by the storied bivalve since reading Mark Kurlansky’s 2006 book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. In public talks, he recounts oysters’ emergence as New York City’s leading export in the 19th century, when “New York had street cart vendors selling oysters for a penny a shell.” He also describes the demise of the city’s oyster beds due to overharvesting and pollution.

The Environmental Benefits of Oyster Restoration

In recent years, New Yorkers like Horbatiuk have been reintroducing oysters, not to be eaten but for the environmental benefits—the mollusk’s circulatory system filters contaminants from the city’s waterways, and the reefs help create habitats for other marine life. On Saturday mornings from May through September, he travels to City Island to measure the oysters’ growth, determine how many of them are growing on each craggy shell pulled from Long Island Sound, and pal around with a diverse group of volunteers devoted to the research project.

Measuring and counting the oysters is painstaking work that demands focus and dedication. Horbatiuk clearly has both, as he works methodically through an orange plastic pail filled with oysters affectionally labeled “Kevin’s Bucket.” His volunteer efforts that sunny Saturday morning in August were part of City Island Oyster Reef’s research study on oyster propagation and biodiversity in Long Island Sound. Among the species found living with the oysters that morning were grass shrimp, bristle worms, skillet fish, slipper snails, and boring sponges.

Horbatiuk recalls that in the 1830s, as many as 39 million bushels of oysters were harvested annually, with New York the center of the world’s oyster trade. Since industrialization, however, the oyster beds died. And today’s oysters, while helping to improve water quality by filtering up to 50 gallons of sea water a day, are inedible because the toxins that get filtered out remain in the oyster flesh.

“The history grabbed me first,” said Horbatiuk, who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and now lives in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. “Very few people realize how important they are historically and what they do for the water’s health.”

‘Oysters for a Penny a Shell’

Horbatiuk’s love of the city’s past dates back to his undergraduate days at the Lincoln Center campus. His favorite courses focused on social and intellectual history, which helped illuminate developments in pop culture in American society.

His Saturday morning efforts on City Island dovetail with his role as a volunteer as an ambassador for the Billion Oyster Project, which does public outreach on oyster restoration and monitors oyster propagation in New York waterways. That outreach includes talks he gives throughout the metropolitan area to New Yorkers interested in learning more about the history of oysters. At his talks, he’ll mention that the Fanny Farmer cookbook from the 1860s had 40 recipes for oyster dishes. He’ll also hearken back to the early 1600s, when the Lenape people, who had lived in the region for centuries, traded oysters with the Dutch and piled them high in middens along the coast.

“It’s an easy sell to the public,” he says. “It just captures their imagination when you tell them you could find oysters in Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx, and instead of hot dog carts on the street, New York had street cart vendors selling oysters for a penny a shell.”

In June, he manned a table at the New York Philharmonic performance at Lincoln Center that featured three classical pieces inspired by water—one depicted foreboding ocean moods and a vicious storm, while another portrayed the role of water in an Australian myth. During intermission, he chatted with concertgoers about the oyster project.

In mid-July, he participated in the City of Water Day by visiting the Sebago Canoe Club in Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn to talk about conservation and oyster restoration. That same month he spoke at the Beczak Environmental Education Center in Yonkers about the history of oysters in the Hudson River estuary. That’s where he’s a member of the Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club and served as club commodore from 2019 to 2021.

“Kevin may be a lawyer, but he’s found another passion: the history of oysters,” said Bob Walters, executive director of the Beczak Center. “He tells that story with such enthusiasm and passion. And he’ll share what he’s learned at the drop of a hat.”

The highway, which was constructed in the 1950s and ’60s, has long been blamed for a host of poor health outcomes in the Bronx. In December 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the creation of a study to reimagine the highway, including options such as rerouting it through a tunnel or building parks atop the sunken sections.

That study is being funded by a $2 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed by Congress in 2021.

Giving Voice to Community Members

The Center for Community Engaged Learning was one of 10 community partners chosen to assist the DOT in gathering input from residents who live near the expressway. The center will use the funds to organize listening sessions and collaborate with other community groups, including Gambian Youth Organization, Casa Yurumein, and Bronx Health Link. The groups will work together to organize events and canvas the neighborhoods surrounding the highway.

Aiming to Reunite Neighborhoods

Julie Gafney, director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning, said she hopes the efforts will help reunify neighborhoods that were destroyed when homes of approximately 40,000 residents were demolished to make room for the highway.

“One of the big issues with the Cross Bronx Expressway and other major roadways in the Bronx is it cut people off from access to services, to fresh fruits and vegetables, to public transportation,” she said.

“So we want to make sure that whatever solution we’re looking at is going to unite communities, provide resources to them, and doesn’t inadvertently replicate some of these errors from the past.”

Opportunities for Students

The Cross Bronx Expressway has been a major focus of the center’s recent efforts in the Bronx. Last month, 350 students who participated in Fordham’s annual Urban Plunge toured sections of the highway to learn about its impact. Gafney said members of the Fordham community are continuing to enroll in these “walkshops.” She envisions multiple opportunities for students to get involved in areas such as design, visual arts, architecture, and smart city planning.

“I would love to see as many members of the Fordham community working as possible with us to facilitate those conversations,” she said.

“We’ll be doing everything from canvassing and door-knocking to holding small conversations over coffee with groups of neighbors to hear about how the Cross Bronx is currently affecting them and their communities and what they would like to see. The best ideas, I’m sure, are going to come from the folks who are most impacted by the issue.”

Students in the Urban Plunge program will meet on Friday, Aug. 25, at the Rose Hill campus to discuss the Cross Bronx Expressway, a major highway that has been blamed for worsening air and noise quality and separating communities in the Bronx. In a conversation guided by Nilka Martell, founder and director of the community-based non-profit organization Loving the Bronx, students will learn about health issues associated with the expressway and Martell’s efforts to cap portions of the expressway and develop public green spaces around it. 

“As someone who was born and raised and still lives in the Bronx, I can definitely attest to the fact that the largest impact of these highways is our asthma rates,” Martell said in a 2021 interview with New York Public Radio. “If you visit the Bronx and you ask anyone whether they have asthma or they know of anyone that has asthma, 10 out of 10, they will tell you yes, largely due to the existing infrastructure and the open portions of highways and the overdevelopment around these highways.” 

In addition to Martell, the panel will feature three policy experts who will share their own perspective on health issues associated with the expressway, as well as how public involvement can shape policy-making: Dr. Salihah Dick, asthma program manager in New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Neighborhood Health Action Center in the Bronx; Paul Philps, director of the New York City Department of City Planning‘s office in the Bronx; and Victor Martínez, senior policy advisor for Ritchie Torres, the U.S. representative for New York’s 15th congressional district (that covers most of the South Bronx). Following the panel, students will participate in neighborhood walks along the Cross Bronx Expressway in partnership with local community-based organizations. 

“This collaboration with Nilka Martell, Dr. Salihah Dick, Paul Philps, and Víctor Martínez reinforces our institutional commitment to environmental justice, community engagement, and experiential learning,” said Julie Gafney, Ph.D., assistant vice president of strategic mission initiatives and executive director of Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning. “Together, we are forging a path towards a sustainable and equitable future, aligned with Fordham’s mission and in pursuit of the Laudato Si’ goals. Our united efforts aim to achieve real and lasting solutions to protect our common home.”

The panel discussion, which will take place from 9 to 9:45 a.m. on Edwards Parade, is open to the public. The rain location is the McShane Campus Center, Room 311.

Can You Dig It? was released on August 10 by Audible, as part of a slate of original series celebrating this milestone year. The series, co-created and executive produced by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99, and narrated and co-produced by legendary Public Enemy rapper Chuck D, chronicles the 1971 gang peace treaty in the Bronx that paved the way for hip-hop.

Through both scripted scenes and unscripted interviews, Can You Dig It? tells the story of the murder of Ghetto Brothers member Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin. Benjamin had been working toward a truce among rivals when he was killed, and his death resulted in an escalation of violence. That moment of chaos was followed by the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, organized by the Ghetto Brothers’ Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez, which ushered in an era of relative calm among gangs in the South Bronx. Two years later, on August 11, 1973, with young people in the area safer to socialize across neighborhood boundaries, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

The series features documentary-style interviews with photographers Henry Chalfant and Joe Conzo, pioneering MC Coke La Rock, and a number of former members and associates of the Ghetto Brothers. These are interspersed with Chuck D’s narration, as well as dramatized portions, for which the series tapped into local voice talent from the Bronx’s community arts programs.

“It’s a love letter to the Bronx,” said Master, a composer who is also the founder and owner of Sound + Fission, a music and audio production company.

In a recent interview with Fordham student Jay Doherty, a co-host of WFUV’s What’s What podcast, Master described the story of the truce at the heart of Can You Dig It? as a manifestation of the Jesuit ideal of being people for others. “We applied that mantra by being a vehicle for a story that inspires people, that gives hope to others. That’s what this is all about. Black Benjie, Yellow Benjy, the Ghetto Brothers—they were men for others.”

The series comes at a moment when hip-hop is being celebrated not only as a revolutionary musical force but also as a vital part of New York City history. In June, the Bronx intersection of East 165th Street and Rogers Place was renamed Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin Way, making the site of the murder a landmark—and a reminder of the positive action that came out of the tragedy. In recent decades, Fordham has also been preserving hip-hop’s Bronx legacy, though efforts to recognize 1520 Sedgwick as the genre’s birthplace and through oral-history interviews with seminal figures such as Yellow Benjy and Kurtis Blow as part of the Bronx African American History Project.

“During this 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we hold the attention of the planet,” Chuck D told SPIN in June. “Now is the time to bring out the stories of people who paved the way for hip-hop and shaped its earliest days.”

“We had downloads from Ukraine and the Russian Federation on the same day—two countries at war with one another,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., co-founder of BAAHP and professor of history and African & African American studies at Fordham. “It’s so exciting that people all over the world are interested in our interviews and essays.”

Downloads From Nearly Every Continent

BAAHP was founded more than two decades ago in collaboration with the Bronx County Historical Society in order to preserve the history of the Bronx and its people. The bulk of the archive contains verbatim transcripts of interviews with political leaders, educators, musicians, social workers, businesspeople, clergy, athletes, and leaders of community-based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the 1930s, in addition to scholarly essays about the Bronx. For many years, these articles lived on audio tapes and paper. In 2015, they were uploaded to a digital archive that made their stories fully accessible to the public. 

Since then, thousands of scholars, students, and strangers have accessed the digital archive from around the world. People in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Caribbean have downloaded resources from the archive, according to data from Fordham Libraries. Online visitors in Singapore and Paris even downloaded the entire archive twice, said Naison. 

Among the scholars is Peter Schultz Jørgensen, an urbanist and author in Denmark who is using information from the digital archive to complete his upcoming book “Our Bronx!” 

“Portraying and documenting everyday life in the Bronx, as it once was, is essential in protecting the people of the Bronx from misrepresentation, while at the same time, providing valuable knowledge that can help shape their future,” Jørgensen said. “Just as BAAHP gathers the web of memory, my book is about the struggles that people and community organizations have waged and are waging in the Bronx. And more important, and encouraging, it talks about how they are now scaling up via the Bronx Wide Coalition and their Bronx Wide Plan for more economic and democratic control of the borough.”

The archive is also helpful for those who aren’t familiar with the Bronx, said Mattieu Langlois, a history Ph.D. student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  

“I’m from Canada, so I didn’t know much about the Bronx,” said Langlois, who served as a BAAHP graduate assistant, ensuring interviews were transcribed correctly and uploading them to the archive. “It’s a good source of information for many people.” 

A Treasure Trove for Scholars

It’s unclear what thousands of other visitors are searching for in the archives, said Naison, but he suspects that some are scholars who are researching the history of hip-hop, a genre born in the Bronx that has influenced scores of artists, including Bronx-born rappers like Cardi B and Lil Tjay. Other scholars might be studying immigration—and the Bronx, a city heavily shaped by immigration, is a great model, said Naison. 

“The Bronx has a global reputation for music, but also for immigration and the mixing of cultures,” Naison said. “And our archive brings that to life.”

‘I Hope People Use It To Think Differently About the Bronx’ 

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, a former BAAHP research director from 2004 to 2010 who helped to facilitate at least 50 interviews in the archive, said the archive is also useful for urban studies scholars who are studying how cities have changed over the decades. 

“I hope people use it to think differently about the Bronx, to include the Bronx more deeply and broadly in urban studies in the United States,” said Purnell, now an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Bowdoin College, who uses the archive in his own research and in the classroom with his students. “I hope that it also expands how we think about Black people in New York City and in American cities in general from the mid-20th century onward.”

Naison said his team plans to upload more interviews to the archive—and that their work won’t stop there. 

“It’s ongoing. It’s exciting,” said Naison. “And to know now that people all over the world are interested in this, it makes it even more motivating to keep it going.”

The grant is part of a nationwide AARP Livable Communities initiative, which strives to help communities become great places to live for residents of all ages.

Kicking Off Another Season of Fresh Produce

Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), which oversees the market, kicked off a second season of the weekly market on July 12 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony presided over by Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson.

Fresh produce supplied by two local farms and a community garden in the Bronx was available for purchase under the market’s large tent.

Jennifer Benitez, a 33-year-old Highbridge resident who lives a short walk from the market, which is located in the parking lot of a senior living facility in the South Bronx, came to shop for herself, her husband, and their 18-month-old child. She visited the market every week last year, and was there this Wednesday for watermelon, carrots, lettuce, and cilantro, the latter of which she was especially excited to get fresh.

A native of the Dominican Republic, she joked that she uses cilantro in “pretty much everything.”

“The food from this market is a lot fresher, it has better flavor, and for me, I find it to be better because it’s organic,” she said in Spanish.

“I found the whole market to be beautiful and interesting, especially because a lot of elderly folks in the area enjoy it.”

Expanding Beyond Produce

The market’s expanded footprint features a seating area, a reading nook, and an area for cooking demonstrations. The first cooking demonstration featured local chef Geneva Wilson, who showed visitors how to roast beets.

Cookbooks Made by Fordham Students

The grant also funded the printing of cookbooks that are distributed for free at the market. The book was created by Fordham students in The Anthropology of Food, an undergraduate class taught in the spring by Julie Kleinman, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology.

Students interviewed community members and sourced local recipes to create a cookbook with recipes that are both meaningful to the community and create awareness about the produce available at the market.

Supported by the Center for Community Engaged Learning, the course was a continuation of the market’s academic component. The idea for the market itself was partly conceived last year in the course Ecology and Economics of Food Systems.

Intergenerational Community Building

Surey I. Miranda, director of campus and community engagement at CCEL, said the goal of the market, which will run from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. every Wednesday until mid-November, is to create a neighborhood space that encourages intergenerational community building.

“We want to meet people where they’re at. We want to make sure that they’re not only getting their fresh produce, but they’re able to be connected with key services,” she said.

“So there are going to be different organizations connecting people to their places, so they don’t have to go out of their communities to receive essential services.”

The market’s community co-sponsors include Bestcare, Inc., Essen Health, BridgeBuilders, The Mary Mitchel Family and Youth Center, The Bronx is Reading, Highbridge Community Development Corporation, 1199SEIU, and Catholic Charities Community Services.

“Nowhere is it more critical than here in the Bronx,” said Ritchie Torres, the U.S. representative for New York’s 15th congressional district that covers most of the South Bronx, an area with notorious levels of air pollution and high asthma rates. “For me, it’s not only about environmental protection. It’s about public health.”

The forum, which was sponsored by Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, took place on June 9—coincidentally, just several days after New York City recorded its worst air quality on record. 

“The extreme air pollution that we have seen firsthand here in the Bronx is a glimpse of what can happen if we do nothing or do too little to combat climate change,” said Representative Torres. “This is not speculation. This is reality.”

The Inflation Reduction Act, a new climate and tax law signed by President Joseph Biden last year, is designed to combat climate change, in part by providing monetary incentives to individuals and businesses. This is relevant to the Bronx and its health care sector, which has the power to play a big role in decarbonizing the borough, said Representative Torres. 

“The road to decarbonizing America is going to run through the health care sector because you are the largest employers in the Bronx and elsewhere in the country,” he said, addressing about 20 Bronx health care leaders at the forum. “Twenty-five percent of the Bronx economy is health care; 10% of greenhouse gas emissions is coming from the health care sector.”

Using a PowerPoint presentation, members of the federal Office of Climate Change and Health Equity explained how they are assembling the most relevant parts of the Inflation Reduction Act for the health sector in an online quickfinder, where they can learn more about and take advantage of tax incentives, direct pay provisions, and grants. 

Opal Dunstan, chief operating officer of VIP Community Services, a community health center in the Bronx, said the forum was helpful, but voiced caution. 

“At least we know that the federal government sees the correlation between what’s happening outside and how it impacts the organizations that we operate, but in order to do the things we need to do to address [climate change], we need to have money. … We’re in old buildings and we need to upgrade, but these things have costs,” said Dunstan, adding that she will examine the quickfinder and research tax incentives and grants that could benefit her community center. “It was good information, and hopefully it will help us.” 

Brescia was born in the Bronx on January 11, 1933, and grew up in a small apartment in the borough with his parents and three sisters. “I slept in the living room on what’s called in Italian a branda, a foldout bed, that was kept in the closet when it wasn’t used,” he said in the book Just Kids from the Bronx (Holt, 2015).

His father, a public housing superintendent, hoped that his son would find a lucrative career as a plumber. But one day when Brescia was a boy, a well-dressed physician made a house call to their building.

“There was a lot of talk and excitement about this guy, this doctor,” Brescia recalled. “I was absolutely awed and said, ‘That looks like something I’d like to be.’”

Creating a Revolutionary Medical Procedure

Brescia enrolled at Fordham in 1950, becoming the first member of his extended family to go to college. Four years later, he earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Fordham College at Rose Hill.

“He adored Fordham and the education the Jesuits provided,” said his son Christopher Brescia, who added that his father always wore his class ring. “His love of Fordham was so contagious that five of his nieces and nephews and one granddaughter graduated from there. Ultimately, it was the combination of the spiritual and intellectual excellence of Fordham that propelled him through his entire career.”

He followed his time at Rose Hill by earning an M.D. from Georgetown University in 1958 and completing his medical residency at a Veterans Administration hospital in the Bronx. It was there that he and another physician, Dr. James Cimino, developed a technique to improve kidney dialysis.

At the time, patients could be kept on blood-cleansing dialysis machines only for limited periods of time before risking severe damage to their arteries, among other side effects. Brescia and Cimino discovered a way to stitch an artery and vein together that allowed them to safely and repeatedly use the same location on the body to move blood between the patient and the machine.

That lifesaving breakthrough, known as the Cimino-Brescia fistula, was seen as a source of huge potential profits, and the doctors began dealing with investors to set up dialysis centers around the country. As the contracts sat in legal limbo, though, Brescia said his father encouraged him to give it away. If he didn’t, he said he would be haunted by “the faces of the children … who should be with their parents,” Brescia told Fordham Magazine in 2016.

He and Cimino decided to publish their findings in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1966. Brescia later said that he never made money from the technology. “We took a road. To the left, it looked shiny and gold. But to the right, it looked happier to us.”

An ‘Individualized Approach’ to Palliative Care

In 1962, Brescia, along with Cimino, began working at what was then known as the House of Calvary, a nonprofit medical facility founded in 1899 by a group of widows to care for women in poverty with terminal illnesses in Greenwich Village. By the time Brescia arrived, it had moved to the Bronx and was sponsored by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

In the years that followed, with Brescia as attending physician and Cimino first as chief of medicine and later as medical director, Calvary became fully accredited. It was renamed Calvary Hospital in 1969 and moved to its current location on Eastchester Road in 1978. Brescia was named executive medical director in 1994. Today, Calvary is widely regarded as a leader in end-of-life care, with a mission “to serve where the need is greatest among those who suffer most,” Brescia once said, “to equally relieve their physical, emotional, and spiritual pain.”

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president emeritus of Fordham, recalled working as an orderly at Calvary in the early 1960s, when he was a Jesuit novice.

“I well remember my time there,” Father McShane said, noting that all novices in what was then the New York Province of the Society of Jesus were required to work at Calvary for at least a month as part of their training. “It was a time of great grace for all of us. As one of the nursing sisters at the hospital told us when we arrived, ‘God walks the halls around here—24 hours a day.’ She was right.”

For Jessica Morales, FCRH ’97, who slept on a cot in her mother’s room at Calvary for months while she was being treated for aspiration pneumonia, that presence of God was evident in the kind of care her mother received.

“The care there was so different from the beginning,” she told Fordham Magazine in 2016, noting that hospital staff turned her mother in her bed every two hours, brushed her hair the way she liked, and played her favorite Mexican music to soothe her. “It was an individualized approach.”

“Every time we have a meeting here, everybody’s hugging,” Brescia said. “You have to touch your patients. You have to hold their hands. And it’s got to mean something to you.”

A Lasting Legacy at Calvary, Fordham, and Beyond

The kind of palliative care Brescia and his team offered at Calvary Hospital made him a natural fit to return to his alma mater, which he said gave him “the gift of faith.”

He came back to campus to speak with students and faculty, including at a 2015 symposium titled “Humanizing Medicine: The Achievements and Future of Palliative Care.” Fordham students and faculty have also conducted research at Calvary, and other Calvary medical staff have lectured at the University.

“I was fortunate to hear a couple of presentations by Dr. Brescia,” said Cathy Berkman, Ph.D., director of the palliative care fellowship program at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, which has seen a number of its students and graduates take internships and jobs at Calvary. “It was clear that I was in the presence of a very special physician. The concern, and I think love, that he had for patients at Calvary was so deep and genuine. I know many excellent and dedicated health care professionals, but Dr. Brescia stands out as someone we can all admire and hope to emulate.”

In 1994, Fordham awarded Brescia an honorary doctorate of humane letters. The citation in that year’s commencement program reads in part, “He helps the sick lead productive lives; he leads the dying into the vestibule of heaven.”

Brescia is survived by six children—three of whom are physicians—and nine grandchildren. His wife of 53 years, Monica, died in 2007 of a brain aneurysm.