Mixed emotions engulfed a recent Community Board 7 Housing/Land Use and Zoning Committee meeting when the Stagg Group, a housing development firm, sat down to present plans for a 13-story building to be built at the crossroads of Norwood and Bedford Park.

Mark Stagg, CEO of the Stagg Group, and the firm’s executive vice president, Adolfo Carrion, laid out the plans for the Mosholu Grand, a 153-unit residence to be built at 150 Van Cortlandt Ave. The building gets its name from its proximity to Mosholu Parkway and the Grand Concourse.

“We think this is a tremendous opportunity at the north end of the Grand Concourse in a great neighborhood near Montefiore Medical Center, near shopping, near mass transit,” Carrion, who once served as Bronx Borough President, said.

Attendees believed that the building, staying within zoning limits, would add to an already congested neighborhood where school overcrowding, traffic, and parking remains problematic.

“This community, which always has a small-town feel, is beginning to feel not like that anymore. It is becoming overwhelming at times,” Betty Arce, a longtime resident of Norwood, said at the meeting.

The project’s building size certainly conflicts with an overall vision pushed by Anthony Rivieccio, a Bedford Park resident who led a grassroots campaign to downzone Mosholu Parkway and its surrounding blocks.  “For the last six months we have fought and have been very successful in trying to get Mosholu Parkway downzoned to an R5 status,” Rivieccio, referring to the lower zoning designation he seeks for the neighborhood, said. CB7 officially backed the plan in February.

“The community is very much in favor of having smaller building-downzoning,” Jean Hill, committee chair, said.

Carrion and Stagg justified the building’s size, given the current affordable housing crunch across the city.

“[T]here is a housing emergency in New York,” Carrion said. “We have a two percent vacancy rate. It’s always a buyer’s market.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” Stagg said of the project. “It’s city planning.”

The proposed site, once home to a gas station, has been decontaminated and approved by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, according to Carrion and Stagg. The report is still pending.

“The reports are coming out, they become part of public record because it is a New York City HPD job, and [Housing Development Corporation funded],” said Carrion, referring to the latter agency whose task is to fund housing projects with conditions.

Stagg is also building a second, 10-story, 62-unit residence on St. George’s Crescent, directly behind the Mosholu Grand. While the project remains in the early stages, the space is home to a colony of feral cats, which cannot be domesticated.

“We want to work with this. Let’s talk about how we can do it and how we can go about it,” said Stagg.

Roxanne Delgado, an animal activist in Bedford Park, said, “The problem with relocating cats is that their survival rate is very low because you’re introducing new cats to other cats. Sometimes they chase them out and they can get hit by cars.” For now, the Guardian Angels, a neighborhood watch group, has been looking after the cats.

Expected date of completion for the Mosholu Grand is spring of 2019.

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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.