Go Green Walk

As New York City gets greener, more people are getting involved. 1199 SEIU Child Care Corp. and the Fordham Road Business Improvement District (BID) are pairing up for a day of awareness.

On May 17 at 10 a.m. about 500 children and their families will walk along Fordham Road and end in Poe Park, where there will be a fair with performances from the children, a dj in the bandstand, presentations on the kids’ science fair projects and popcorn, along with free blood screenings and other health services.

Of the children at 1199 SEIU, who range in age from 8 months to 4 years old, the 4 year olds have been leaning about keeping the environment and themselves healthy by doing experiments. For one of the experiments, the kids put Vaseline on index cards and left it on the windowsill, checking it with a magnifying glass. By the tenth day, the Vaseline was dark.

“They got to see how dirty the air is on Fordham Road,” said Bonnie Mallonga, chief operating officer of 1199 SEIU.

In another experiment, the children put a t-shirt, a piece of plastic and a banana each in some dirt to see how they would decompose. This environmental focus of the child care facility has always been a concern, and because NYC is slowly going green and the most recent science fair was a success, Mallonga decided to take the project to the streets.

The Go Green walk involves much preparation beforehand. The BID has handed out surveys to its 350 or so members, while 1199 SEIU has distributed them to the 250 families it serves. The surveys ask how concerned business owners are about environmentally-friendly practices, and what “Go Green” represents to them. In addition to these surveys, the results of which will be presented at Poe Park after the walk, the children are going to the businesses and conducting interviews with business owners. Two children from each class are preparing with practice interviews so they aren’t too shy around the new faces.

The surveys and interviews are aimed to “gauge awareness” of the businesses, said Dan Bernstein, director of the BID.

“If a child is there, it might be a little easier for them to want to participate,” he said.

There are questions as to how much the children understand about what they are learning. In order to gauge this, Mallonga and the teachers use charts and have one-on-one meetings with the kids to see how much they are absorbing. The real results occur at home, though, where the parents report that their kids talk about their projects, pushing their families to have recycling bins at home.

“They really don’t understand why people don’t recycle,” said Bernstein of the kids.

In March, the classes made recycling bins and painted them green. However, Toni-Ann Campbell, a teacher at 1199 SEIU, said they had to get rid of them because they were falling apart and getting smelly. The children “keep asking if we can continue,” she said, so 1199 SEIU is talking with the Department of Sanitation to get proper recycling bins so the kids can continue recycling.

There have been some harder lessons. One of the projects was to trace where the waste from the Child Care Corps go. The kids went outside and saw the private garbage company dumping the garbage and recycled materials together. Mallonga says they will be conducting a letter writing campaign to see if they can change this.

There is a precedent for seeing change come from their efforts. After learning about recycling, some of the children wrote letters to the cafeteria about their findings, and now the kitchen has stopped using Styrofoam and replaced it with paper. The next idea is to switch to using real spoons instead of plastic ones.

Although much work needs to be done before the children are ready for the Go Green Walk, they are doing what Mallonga calls transformative learning, where the kids are changing behavior based on the what they are learning.

“These are the children of the future,” Mallonga said. “They need to take care of the environment because they will be the ones profiting from it.”

Salsa at Mambo 101

When Omar Martinez started teaching salsa in the Bronx in 2003, he had 40 students and used the space in what used to be Jimmy's Bronx Café one night a week. Today, five years later, he has his own studio and around 125 students in nine classes a week.

Starting his own business without any prior experience wasn't easy, but with the help of friends and a little persistence, Martinez now owns Mambo 101, a basement studio off of Fordham Road. The entrance of the studio is unassuming: a silver-painted metal door with a red awning reading "Mambo 101" crunched between the signs and buildings around it. Inside, there are two mirrored rooms where salsa music is blasting as students learn Susy Q's and hook flicks.

After moving to the current 214 East 188th Street location almost five years ago, Martinez was struggling to run his own business while working a day job as a pre-print manager for a printing company. Carlos Vasquez, owner of La Salsa de Hoy in Brooklyn, where Martinez first started teaching lessons in 1997, gave him advice, telling him to worry first about getting students and then about other aspects. By handing out fliers and through word of mouth, "slowly but surely it started to grow," he said. After three months, he could afford wall-to-wall mirrors, and a few months later, he painted the studio.

"I don't make that much doing this," he said. "It's a sacrifice I make with my life. But it's paying my son's way through college."

"I have fun with this," he added. "There are days I'm sick and I'm manic because I want to come in."

Martinez runs his studio a little differently than others. While many schools teach on a per-class basis where anyone can drop in and learn a few steps, students pay for monthly lessons at Mambo 101 and follow a curriculum. A list of 80 "shines," or individual dance moves, hangs above the floor-length mirrors, and in each week, the instructors progress one or two moves down the list.

"It feels like you're learning from the core," Yvette Rivera, 51, a student in the beginner class, said.

Mambo 101 fosters building upon skills taught, and when an instructor starts a beginner class, they continue with the same students until too many of them drop out. To date, the longest class with the same group of people has been progressing for one year and two months. According to Martinez, this way the students get to know each other and become friends. Some meet to practice during the week and form friendships that last beyond the class.

There is a trend of long-lasting connections at Mambo 101 that extends beyond students. Angelique Hernandez, Fordham alumna, CBA '06, would wait in the studio as her mom took lessons about four years ago. Martinez saw her dancing and gave her things to do while she waited, showing her how to break down the moves to be able to teach them. Martinez decided to bring Hernandez to his lessons with Eddie Torres, innovator of the "Mambo on 2" step popular in New York and what Mambo 101 teaches.

"I think Omar had an idea of what he wanted with me before he told me," Hernandez said. In fact, that was true.

"I can tell somebody's potential just by looking at them," said Martinez. "I took Angelique to Eddie Torrez to test her. By the following week, she was fine." Now, Hernandez teaches her own class.

Martinez has a long-standing relationship with his office manager, Damiana Garcia, who describes herself as "Omar's right hand." The two met in 1999 in an AOL chat room. She started taking lessons at Jimmy's Bronx Café, followed the studio in a location change, and now works as an office manager and has started teaching her own class.

The classes themselves are two hours long, one night a week. If you work at it, Martinez said, within three months you understand the counts and mechanics of the dance, and within six months a student can be a "decent dancer." But it's not about "breeding professionals, but teaching regular people to dance." Martinez recalled a story from his earlier salsa days when he went to a club and saw a girl he wanted to ask to dance. He got up the courage to ask her and she turned him down.

"I took lessons, and when I went back, she saw me," he said. "She came up to me and asked me to dance, and I turned her down."

But it's not all about competition.

"It's such a fun dance to learn," said Martinez. "It's not just dancing, but a way of life."

Pizza Palates

Pizza is a food that permeates our lives as New Yorkers; it's everywhere you go. People eat pizza for dinner, lunch, and yes, sometimes for breakfast. We eat it hot from the oven or cold the next morning, at parties or on the subway. At any temperature, meal or location, you can find a slice waiting to be eaten.

But this versatile food isn't simply a lump of ingredients. It brings with it many different meanings - from a family business, to an art, to nourishment - and there are likewise a variety of opinions as to what makes it great.

In 1889, pizza was invented in Naples, Italy. Though it was originally a meal for peasants, Raffaele Esposito made the first pizza for visiting royalty. He used mozzarella, basil and tomatoes (which were actually brought over from the Americas) to represent the colors of the Italian flag. Historians know, though, that in ancient times, Israelites, Egyptians and others in the Middle East were making unleavened bread like pitas, and Greeks and Romans in the Mediterranean were eating flatbread with olive oil and spices on top.

The first pizzeria in America was opened in 1905 by Gennaro Lombardi on Spring Street in New York City. Today it is hailed as the best pizza in the nation according to magazines like Forbes Traveler. Forbes Traveler features 10 pizzerias in the United States; four of them are in New York City, two of those are on Arthur Avenue.

Ranking second in Forbes Traveler is Zero Otto Nove, located at 2357 Arthur Avenue. The name reflects the area code for Solerno, 089, the Italian town that owner Roberto Paciullo is from. Zero Otto Nove opened six months ago and already it has risen to the top.

Part of the reason for its success is the pizza maker, Riccardo Rinaldo, an Italian from Solerno who has been in America for about as long as Zero Otto Nove has been open. He is young and made pizza for over seven years in Italy before he was introduced to Roberto by the owner of Trattoria Da Sasa, a restaurant in Solerno.

Rinaldo said that the pizza in Solerno is much softer than it is in America, Rinaldo said. When he came to the Bronx, he made pizza that was crunchier than he was used to, though still softer than most New York pizza.

"The first word I learn is 'crispy,'" he said with an Italian accent.

To many people, the dough is the most important part. This is true for Stan Petti of Full Moon Pizza at 600 E. 187th Street. He said that each pizza restaurant has its own characteristics, setting it apart from the others.

"Everybody talks about our crust," Petti said.

Full Moon doesn't use a brick oven, which some think is essential for pizza perfection. Petti says that it is a different process, one that is not ideal for him. With a brick oven, heat is regulated with wood, which takes more attention, and the opening is small and inconvenient when you are frequently opening and closing the oven in a small space.

Rinaldo agrees that it is a different process but said that the pizza cooks faster in brick ovens. Gas ovens cook slowly and dry up the ingredients, he explained through hand gestures and the translation of Paciullo's wife, Chiara.

Mario's Restaurant at 2342 Arthur Avenue uses a combination of the two types of ovens: a brick oven that is gas-heated. This seems to work for them since Forbes Traveler lists Mario's as the tenth best pizza in America. Joseph Migliucci is the fourth-generation owner of the store, since his great-grandmother used to make pizza and other meals in 1919. His secret to great pizza is no one particular thing.

"It's about the formula," Migliucci said. "It's a combo of everything: good ingredients, whole milk mozzarella, basil, olive oil."

It's not about the pizza for everyone. For Sal and Pina Natale, owners of Pugsley's Pizza, it's about family, from their own to Fordham students. Sal wants Pugsley's to be a place students can develop talents, like singing in the Pugsley's Idol competition coming up this month. Everything in Pugsley's says family, from the photos of students hanging on the walls and ceilings, to the old photos of Sal's family sprawled out on the blue and white checkered table, to the home video of a little girl eating pasta playing on the TV.

Pugsley's hasn't forgotten about the pizza, though. Although Sal won't reveal his secrets, he says that he and Pina make food home-style, like you would eat in your own kitchen.

"We're not chefs, we're artists," he said.

Whether it is about the pizza or the people you're eating with, there is no doubt that this flat, round bread has become something more than physical nourishment. If you want to add something to your own experience, take a walk to Arthur Avenue and get your own dough, sauce and cheese, call a few friends and make your own meaning.