You can count on New Yorkers to express a full spectrum of feelings about the many diverse neighborhoods they call home. For Bronx residents, though, there’s something specific and shared about how they relate to their slice of NYC. Something earnest and unpretentious. What is it?
“It’s the most authentic borough,” says Ed García Conde, an SLU student who founded and runs the popular online platform Welcome2TheBronx. He’s lived there his whole life – except for a brief spell in Manhattan, which he found sterile and unfriendly. He hasn’t discovered many Bronxites at SLU, but if he meets one, he said: “When it’s a Bronx thing, you lock eyes, like ‘we know,’ you know? It’s something special, actually.”
Through his website and social media, Ed has been bringing what’s special about the Bronx to readers and viewers for 15 years. Now he’s enrolled in the Urban Studies B.A. program at SLU to add more depth and context to his city expertise – and to complete the degree he began years ago at a college nearby.
Son of the South Bronx
Born in 1975, Ed was a kid in Melrose during some of the Bronx’s darkest days. Business and local government deliberately disinvested from the borough, and arsonists burned countless buildings to claim insurance payouts. Just as that devastation was ending in the 1980’s, crack cocaine arrived and caused new waves of misery. Being not just underdogs, but survivors is part of the Bronx identity, Ed says (for his age and older, at least).
His own childhood was loving and stable. Ed was the only child of two parents who immigrated from Puerto Rico, and his grandmother lived nearby. He also had 21 first cousins who were like siblings. He attended St. Anselm School through 8th grade, then Cardinal Spellman High School and Iona University – all private, Catholic schools.
Today, Ed lives in Melrose just four blocks away from his parents – who still live in the apartment where he grew up – and four blocks away, in the other direction, from his grandmother.
SLU has been a revelation because, finally, he’s in a school setting where the students, teachers and staff look more like his New York. Until now, the only Latino teacher he ever had was in high school Spanish.
“This is my first exposure to public education, period. I’ve never been into a public school. One thing that I noticed, obviously, is the student body and professors are reflective of the population of New York City,” he said. “My first semester here, everyone was of color, all my professors, and I never experienced that. It was a little emotional. Like, ‘oh, that’s how that feels.’ Even the student body felt very mixed and working-class and I had never experienced that in school.”
Proclaiming ‘Welcome2TheBronx’
Enter “The Bronx” into your web browser today, and some of the first things that pop up are the Bronx Tourism Council and a list of “15 EPIC Things to Do in The Bronx (NYC’s Coolest Borough).”
It’s a far cry from 2009, when Ed launched Welcome2TheBronx. Back then, he resented that web searches about his home borough would mostly deliver accounts of the bad old days or current crime.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said. “I was like, that’s not what my neighborhood is. We’re more than just the crime statistics that you see on TV. I wanted to focus on the positive that was happening.”
The website started as a hobby, but it took off and soon Ed was being quoted by the Daily News and The New York Times. The Times did a Bronx story about rediscovered caves where beer was aged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the area was heavily German and dotted with breweries.
“Those local histories were always fascinating for me. I was proud of all this local history. So I started sharing that on the blog,” Ed said. He calls himself “nosy” and a natural interviewer, whether recording his grandparents as a child or putting questions to old-timers as an adult. In addition to history, the website’s topics include arts and culture, small businesses, and real estate development.
Welcome2TheBronx contains heaps of Bronx lore, but Ed has been adding fewer new articles lately. In recent years, people have been reading less — which can be seen clearly on the site’s back end — and that’s led him to experience writer’s block. He’s using this time to do a site redesign, not to mention his SLU schoolwork.
Ed is confident that he’ll ramp back up to regular production soon. W2TB pays his bills, for one thing, and it’s a valued local resource: Columbia University Libraries even preserves an archive of the site for scholarly research. Indeed, the fact that researchers kept coming to him as a Bronx expert is a major reason why he’s now finishing his B.A. and looking ahead to a Ph.D.
A while back, a doctoral student contacted Ed to say their book was being published, “and this was probably like the fifth or sixth book that I’ve been quoted in for a Ph.D. student,” he said. “And something snapped. Like I said, okay, if I’m good enough to be a source for so many books, why don’t I have my Ph.D.?”
But Ed says even if he ends up earning a doctorate in cultural anthropology, urban planning or otherwise, he will continue producing Welcome2TheBronx.
Learning the Language
In addition to being a self-taught journalist and publisher, Ed identifies as a community advocate and organizer. Among other involvements, he’s on the advisory council for the nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, and for almost a decade has served as emcee for the annual “Bronx Parks Speak Up” event. (It will take place again on February 28th.)
Ed’s courses at SLU have added new dimensions to this work. “One of the things that I’ve appreciated, coming to SLU, was that I’ve spent so many years dedicated to organizing and working in my communities, but I didn’t have the language about what I was doing,” he said. “So when I took Public Administration last semester, and Introduction to U.S. Social and Economic Policy, all of a sudden I had the language for things I was doing already. That was very special.”
The language of Urban Studies is one of many he’s learned. Ed grew up speaking English and Spanish, and learned Italian fluently as well. He taught himself Portuguese and is working on German now. He seems enviably well-rounded: biking to and from his courses in Midtown, raising rescue cats Tux and Leia, and relaxing with video games, when he’s not spending time with his boyfriend of five years.
In today’s South Bronx, sparkling new apartment towers have sprouted along the coast of Port Morris (often incorrectly called Mott Haven, Ed notes), which are not affordable for his neighbors. Does this have anything to do with the online welcome that Ed has issued for over 15 years? He wonders. It could be a subject for a dissertation.