South Bronx residents gathered near the future site of the HEArts community center to celebrate community and learn more about holistic health on Saturday.
The Fall Health Festival, an event organized by nonprofit organizations South Bronx Unite, the Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards, and Qi Zone Wellness, featured a variety of alternative health showcases, from tai chi and acupuncture sessions to Indigenous spiritual wellness services.
Mychal Johnson, co-founder of South Bronx Unite and the Community Land Stewards, said the fall festival served as a microcosm of what the HEArts Center will stand for.
“Things we envisioned in terms of bringing these elements together…it just brought on this real feeling of community,” said Johnson.
The event also featured art sessions and live music by the community student band Upbeat NYC.
Barry Kostrinsky, a longtime South Bronx community member, said he came to the Fall Festival to connect with longtime friends and see the work that has been done. “It’s nice to see a community grow and change, see the people evolve,” he said. “Everybody tries to do good here.”
South Bronx Unite is a community organization devoted to social, environmental and economic justice in the Mott Haven and Port Morris neighborhoods of the Bronx. They joined forces with Mott Haven Port Morris Community Land Stewards in 2015 to take back spaces for the community in the form of community land trusts.
The group’s latest effort, the HEArts Center, will focus on health, education, and the arts by providing the community with a space for expression and programming.
Saturday’s Fall Festival was the organization’s first. Although the center will focus on education and the arts, Johnson said that health is “paramount to everything.”
“Because of some of the environmental situations and the unhealthy outcomes that [those] helped create, we knew we had to let this be a time where we really put a heavy emphasis on health,” he said.
The South Bronx is home to many environmental pollution factors, such as power plants, last-mile facilities, and the car-heavy expressway.
According to the NYC Environment and Health Data Portal, Mott Haven has some of the highest rates of asthma emergency visits in the city because of these pollutants.
Such hospitalizations can keep children out of school, harming their educational progress. Pollution can also directly affect cognitive abilities in growing children, according to the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.
Both can harm children’s ability to find employment as they become adults, fostering a cycle of poverty. Bronx Community Board 1, which contains Mott Haven and Port Morris, has a poverty rate of nearly 33 percent, higher than the city average of around 18 percent, according to the NYU Furman Center.
“We had to make sure that the community was going to be educated and trained to not be left behind,” said Johnson.
Jiana Smith photo
Many organizations at the Fall Health Festival are also working toward the same goal of fostering community health.
Bronx Móvil is a bilingual harm reduction organization that focuses on caring for people facing drug addiction. Its completely mobile outreach team distributes vital resources, such as Narcan, sleeping bags, and food, to unhoused people around the borough. The Bronx had the highest number of drug overdoses of any borough at around 786 in 2021, according to NYC Health.
Del Rio said that harm reduction organizations like Bronx Móvil can help humanize those who suffer from drug addiction. “It’s not just a person you should walk over like it’s nothing,” said Del Rio. “It’s somebody just like you.”
The building that will become the HEArts Center was once the Lincoln Detox Center, which was founded in 1970 by the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, among other civil rights groups. The organizations took over the building to address drug-related deaths in the community and offer holistic health solutions such as acupuncture.
After the NYPD shut down the Detox Center in 1978, the building continued to be the site of acupuncture and other health services under NYC Health and Hospitals. It has been empty since the clinic relocated in 2013.
In 2023, after a decade of discussion about what to do with the abandoned space, the Land Stewards received approval to start developing the former detox clinic. The HEArts Center is still in the pre-development phase; plans are for it to open between 2025 and 2027.
Johnson said that while he is unsure what the center’s true impact will be, he hopes that its presence will help alleviate social pressures on the community.
“What we can do with the building is it can be continuous work and growth,” said Johnson. “I think it will manifest and grow beyond our wildest expectations.”