The Bronx (Almost) Gets Its Due

Okay, okay. I take this back. Great review (in both size and content) about the expanded Bronx Museum of the Arts by Nicolai Ourossoff in today’s NY Times.
But things get a bit dicey when he says that the Arquitectonica-designed addition helps “to shore up the Bronx’s dicey image as well as…reassert its former identity as a haven for the middle class.” First of all, the Bronx has always been at least as much a haven for immigrants (like my own grandfather), fleeing bad times for a better life. The immediate area around the museum is now heavily populated by relatively recent arrivals from Ghana.
And second, some parts of the Bronx—think Riverdale, for example—have never lost their status as so-called “havens” of the middle-class.
As long as Ouroussoff sticks to architecture, rather than sociology, he’ll do just fine.
Speaking of “the building’s low-budget construction”—-how do you raise money for a new wing and neglect to raise ANY money for the museum’s currently nonexistent operating endowment? About one-third of the $2.6-million operating budget comes from government funds. The rest has to be raised from scratch each year. Not a great financial plan.