Editor’s Note: The latest edition of the Norwood News is out now, and its our annual Year in Review issue–-a recap of the biggest stories that took place in 2011, in the Bronx and beyond. Over the next week or so, we’ll be rolling these top stories out here on Breaking Bronx. Enjoy, and a happy and healthy New Year to all of our readers!

Two years after the City Council voted down plans to turn the hulking and empty Kingsbridge Armory into a shopping mall, local groups and elected officials spent much of 2011 pondering what should be done now with the 575,000-square-foot space.

In June, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., who has made the redevelopment of the Armory a top priority of his administration, released a long-awaited report on possible future uses for the building, created by a special Armory task force and a group of New York University faculty and graduate students. Despite detailing a number of suggested ideas and totaling 267 pages, the report was criticized by many for lacking substance, and because it offered no clear plan for how the redevelopment of the building would be paid for.

After leading the defeat of the Bloomberg-backed shopping mall plan in 2009, Diaz is under considerable pressure to make progress on the Armory. The building remains empty, while major development projects in other areas of the Bronx have taken off this year, including multi-million dollar shopping centers in Co-op City and at the former Stella D’Oro factory on West 237th Street.

John DeSio, a spokesman for the borough president, told the Norwood News at the time that the point of the task force was not to come up with a proposal or a clear financial plan for the Armory, but to show there was still interest in the site and to call on Mayor Bloomberg to issue a request for proposals (RFP) for the building.

“The work of the task force shows just how much interest there is in this historic structure,” Diaz said in a statement at the time.

Among those interested in taking over the space is Creflo Dollar, a controversial evangelical preacher from Georgia who wants to turn the West Kingsbridge Road building into a “state of the art church facility,” fit with administrative offices, daycare and afterschool program space, a gymnasium, and a recording studio.

Another idea for the Armory that gained traction this year was a proposal by a group of bicycle enthusiasts who want to see the space converted into a bicycling center, complete with a velodrome — an angled, oval bicycling racing track that would be used to host days-long cycling tournaments.

The National Cycling Association, the group behind the plan, is trying to garner support for their idea by attempting to put together a six-day bicycle race at the Armory sometime this spring. But the association cycling idea has yet to identify clear funding sources to prove the viability of their plain.

Jack Kittle, who served on the Armory task force as a representative of the building and trades unions, told the Norwood News in June that this has been the common thread among proposals for the Armory: while there have been plenty of ideas, none have had the political or financial resources to make them a reality.

“We listened to one guy after another,” Kittle said, of the proposals. “No one wanted to bring their own resources to the table.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.