Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
In the first week of each month, a group of about a dozen West African women, all residents of Twin Park Northwest in the Bronx, gathered in Apartment 12 G, the home of an elderly woman, to offer respect and assistance. “We were giving her $5,” says Haja Camara, who moved into the building in 2011. During the feast, this same group of women visited 12 ji as well – they dressed up and listened to yoso d’or music and cooked okra broth or yasa braised chicken.
Twin Parks Northwest – the building in which a Sunday morning fire killed 17 people, eight of them children – is unusually sectarian in almost every respect. In addition to taking care of the people in the building who need extra help (this applies to anyone with a problem, says Camara—whether they’re “Hispanic, American or African, we’ll send a donation, even if it’s just a little”) residents tend to walk To Masjid Al-Fawzan, the nearest mosque, to pray together; Five times a day. Neighbors address each other in the hallway by “sister” or “brother” and tell newcomers where to find the best halal lamb.
The community was at the forefront of the minds of a handful of Reverends (and a few rabbis) who envisioned, in the late 1960s, the 12-story, 2,250-unit Twin Parks in Tremont of which the North West Tower is a part. Hoping to build affordable, integrated housing for the increasingly racially divided Mid-Bronx community (at the time, the area consisted mostly of Italians, Puerto Ricans, and blacks from New York), religious leaders set their sights on the untapped stretch of Tremont between Crotona and Bronx parks. They founded a nonprofit housing company aptly named, the Twin Parks Association (TPA), in 1966. “Housing would be the beginning of relationships,” TPA leader Reverend James Sudbrook said at the time.
In 1969, after years of bureaucratic and financial setbacks, Department of Foreign Trade leaders reluctantly handed the project over to Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s barely-approved planning and development agency, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC). With controversial urban planner Edward Logue (known for superlative urban renewal projects across the East Coast that Jane Jacobs says have “mercilessly” divided black low-income communities) at the helm, UDC has turned the Twin Gardens into something of a design project. Logue hired six of the city’s best young architects (including Richard Meier and James Polshek) to build the double gardens as “jacket pocket housing” – scattered apartments built into the neighborhood’s existing fabric (as their clothing-inspired name suggests) small and airy unlike Robert Moses Towers that were demolished and reconstructed. Before the Twin Parks opened, UDC’s brass seniors moved into an apartment for a week to give the architects their feedback, such as where to place the phone booths.
Twin Parks North West, which abuts a three-street intersection on one side and a steep rocky slope on the other, was one of the project’s toughest topographical sites. The architecture firm Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen, built a tower with a pedestrian walkway underneath, which connects an open plaza in the front with a public staircase down to Webster Street in the back. Partner in charge Lo-Yi Chan (who later designed Dartmouth College) added a children’s play court and a herb garden above the stairs. Inside, there was a mixture of one-level studios and two-storey multi-room duplexes designed in 20 different designs (a building that compares the Architectural Forum to Abstract Art). This design scheme is unusual not only for low-income dwellings, which often feature mid-size cookie-cutter units, but New York City apartments in general, which typically do not have internal stairs (a feature generally reserved for brownstones and townhouses). ). In 1973, residents, mostly Puerto Ricans and blacks from New York, moved into apartments with wardrobes, reliable heating, and amenities that many of the building’s early residents said they didn’t have in previous apartments). They paid about $10 to $30 a month. In 1975, the last residents of Twin Parks moved into residence; Later that year, UDC went bankrupt, promoting the housing project as one of its last.
By 1980, the play space was partially filled and the park was dead. Gang violence in community yards in Twin Parks became a regular occurrence, and areas close to the Bronx were burned. Meanwhile, a community of Gambians was growing in the area. The first to move to Twin Parks Northwest appears to have been Abdouli Touray, a diamond dealer by day and Islamic scholar by night who became a community leader, eventually founding the African Islamic Society from his apartment and making an Islamic show. Services for neighbors and Muhammad Ali alike. By the time his nephew, Baccaray Camara, moved to the Bronx in 1988, Toray was already a kind of “mascot” for West African society, he says — and Twin Parks Northwest was known as New York. times I mentioned this week, as “Toray Tower”. Throughout the 1980s, a generation of Gambians immigrated to the Bronx. At the time, the smaller West African community in the Bronx had fewer resources. There were no halal grocery stores and hair salons on every corner, and Kamara remembers only one mosque nearby, which he says was so crowded during the holidays that Muslims in Tremont took the subway to Harlem to pray. Despite this, Toray knew where to buy halal meat and would organize a neighbor’s wedding ceremony in a pinch.
The Tremont community in West Africa more than doubled in the early days. At the same time, residents have been fighting to keep the few affordable units in Twin Parks, which, as part of the government’s Mitchell Lama program, can be converted into units at market price periodically. In 2013, the project received $39.6 million in government funding; Funding that went toward building upgrades, such as energy-efficient lighting and new boilers, and the transfer of the twin parks from UDC to another government agency, guaranteeing residents another 40 years at similar housing prices. Mohamed Keita, who immigrated to the Bronx from Côte d’Ivoire in 2010, moved from his family home to Twin Parks Northwest in 2020; After a month of searching for accommodation, the apartment, the first apartment he lived in alone, was the only place he could find affordable. (It immediately sounded very familiar, he says—his mom and sister both had friends in the building, and he celebrated Thanksgiving the first year with a neighbor.) That same year, Twin Parks North West was bought for $10.5 million by the trio of affordable housing developers. prestigious cost; Among them is Camber Property Group, a developer already credited with “miracle” public housing renovations in the Bronx, led by Andrew Moelis and Rick Gruber, recently selected for Eric Adams’ 56-person housing transition team.
Post-sales operational improvements pledged with mixed results – between 2014 and 2019, like Curbed Reported earlier this week, four violations were issued for self-closing door issues; They were all resolved, although many tenants reported after the fire that they were not working. Keita says the abuses don’t paint an accurate picture in the first place, though, because her neighbors were often too afraid to call 311 to complain. “Immigrants don’t want to progress,” he says. In addition, previous attempts to change things from the inside did not go well. Keita says all of the tenants recently gathered to file a complaint after management removed 24-hour security from the building. “We didn’t feel safe,” he said. “People were just coming in. So we had a meeting with all the tenants, we took it to management, and nothing changed. People gave up.”
Most residents of Twin Parks Northwest have been housed in temporary housing for the past week. Among them are Camara and her five children. I was relieved to learn that the woman from 12G was still alive, but some of the others I collected monthly had died in the fire. “It’s all gone,” she says of her community, now scattered among Bronx hotel rooms. Camara has not returned to her apartment since the fire. She wants to capture the clothes and family photos that are still there, but – like many residents – does not plan to return to the residence permanently. “After seeing the kids who used to sleep in my house die in that building, I can’t bear to go back,” she says. “That’s the only reason I don’t want to go back. Otherwise, I like it there.”