The Bronx Zoo is located in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, within Bronx Park.

Stephen Ritz A teacher growing green in the South Bronx

Well, you know, I'm from the Bronx. I can't say Basingstoke.

And I must say, I spent time in the Bronx working with these kids.

Now, somewhere over the rainbow, my friends, is the South Bronx of America. And we're doing it.

Today In November 2006, the Zoo opened up brand new eco friendly restrooms outside the Bronx River Gate.

And it resonated for me. I grew up as a poor kid in the South Bronx ghetto, a Sicilian family everyone lived in the past and present.

Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two like the South Bronx did?

And here I've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low income buildings and affordable housing.

That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a greenway movement in the South Bronx.

And the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years.

Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx.

Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx.

In the late '40s, my dad a Pullman porter, son of a slave bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later he married my mom.

Career Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he joined the faculty in 1968 and has taught for over thirty years.

We run a project called the Bronx Ecological Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restorations, so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well paying jobs.

And I wonder what the point is and then I know, and I see that Hy Meyerowitz, Rick Meyerowitz's father, a dry cleaning supply salesman from the Bronx, won the Charlie Chaplin look alike contest in 1931.

There's toadie, dee dee, nishi, dignity, coochie snorcher, cooter, labi, gladis siegelman, va, wee wee, whore spot, nappy dugout, mungo, ghoulie, powder box, a mimi in Miami, a split knish in Philadelphia, and a schmende in the Bronx.

And Rick and I were on our way to a party in the Bronx, and somebody said Bronxistan, and somebody said Ferreristan, and we came up with this New Yorker cover, which we were able to we didn't know what we were doing.

But perhaps the most popular has been that we've got another array of these boys in the Bronx River, where the first beaver crazy as he is to have moved in and built a lodge in New York in 250 years, hangs out.

In the Bronx or in Soho, in Washington Square or Times Square, in front of the New York Public Library or near a hot dog stand, across all the planets races, the banal vies with the exceptional for one s attention.

It was also the last project designed by Chief Engineer Othmar Ammann, who had designed most of the other major crossings into and within New York City, including the George Washington Bridge, the Bayonne Bridge, the Bronx Whitestone Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, and the Throgs Neck Bridge.

Anyway OK. Katrina. Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation think hip hop and jazz.

A whirlwind of energy and ideas, Stephen Ritz is a teacher in New York's tough South Bronx, where he and his kids grow lush gardens for food, greenery and jobs. Just try to keep up with this New York treasure as he spins through the many, many ways there are to grow hope in a neighborhood many have written off, or in your own. em em