The bodies of Christopher Alexis Gomez, 17, and Juan Suarez-Ojeda, 18, both of San Diego, California, as well as Tijuana high school student Angel Said Robles, 17, were found in front of the Lomas Verdes housing complex at 5 50 a.m. on Sunday.
I start covering the architecture beat today with a review of Via Verde, a housing project now rising in the South Bronx.
Open House sites range in size from the inspiringly beautiful Via Verde low-income housing project in the Bronx to the ingenious 375-square-foot studio apartment of a designer, Suchi Reddy, in a former dental office on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village.
Sometime late this winter people will start moving into Via Verde, the subsidized housing development now rising on a long, narrow slice of formerly contaminated city property in what used to be one of the worst stretches of the South Bronx.
The wine list is not especially interesting, but the vinho verde — even the house one, served in a carafe — is adequate.
At Via Verde, a new affordable housing complex being marketed in the South Bronx, what started as an idea to provide environmentally friendly green roofs back in 2005 turned into an opportunity to provide gardening plots for residents, said Paul Freitag, a managing director of development at the Jonathan Rose Companies, one of the development partners on Via Verde.
Following up on my review last week of Via Verde, a groundbreaking green housing project soon to be completed in the Melrose section of the South Bronx, I took a walk around that neighborhood with Amanda M. Burden, director the Department of City Planning under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
In 1965, Vargas Llosa published his second novel, The Green House (La casa verde), about a brothel called "The Green House" and how its quasi-mythical presence affects the lives of the characters.
The novel La casa verde (1966; The Green House), set in the Peruvian jungle, combines mythical, popular, and heroic elements to capture the sordid, tragic, and fragmented reality of its characters.
But today the South Bronx is turning around, in some neighborhoods dramatically, and there is no better representative to illustrate that rebirth than what is probably so far the most celebrated of all US green affordable housing developments: Via Verde.
