Blog: Hunts Point

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of taking a tour of Hunts Point, a neighborhood in the Bronx with some of the worst rates of poverty, crime, and asthma caused by the enormous quantity of trucks traveling through the neighborhood to the largest food distribution center in the world.

While the area is still very industrial with many brownfield sites, the neighborhood is also experiencing significant improvement, especially two new parks, one on the Bronx River and one on the East River with beautiful views of Queens, Manhattan, and the Hell Gate railroad bridge.

The heart of the community is The Point, which reminds me a great deal of The Tank, except with the addition of after-school arts programs and deep roots in the local community. Both have created communities around the arts, in raw spaces where performers and artists can work at low cost, with a wide variety of performing, visual arts, and public affairs programming. But The Tank draws primarily upper middle class, post-college white people from the far northern end of Manhattan through brownstone Brooklyn and beyond, while The Point's community centers on its neighborhood and the primarily poorer minority residents there, with a strong mission of youth development through after-school activities. Yet both are clear examples of how a space, open to many people and used for many purposes, can become a focal point of a community, which, black or white, rich or poor, we all need.

Can you guess where this is?

No cheating by looking at my photo album.