[Users] fwd: [Nyi-l] Might be interesting to do in conjunction with next year's

[defiant at internetspeech.com]

Hi, This message is forwarded to you for your necessary action. 
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Nature Getaway Is Close as the Bronx  BY KATE TAYLOR - Staff Reporter of the Sun July 27, 2007 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/59305  For New Yorkers without a weekend home, or even a car to make a day trip possible, one nature excursion is no farther away than the end of the nos. 2 and 5 lines: canoeing on the Bronx River. You can go on your own with a permit, but group trips are also organized by the Bronx River Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring and protecting the river. On a recent Saturday, around two dozen would-be canoe paddlers, including a reporter and a photographer, met in Shoelace Park, a few blocks from the 219th Street station, for the "Border to Mouth" trip. The trip goes through the New York Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo, then down a more industrial stretch of the river, and ends at Hunts Point Riverside Park, just before the opening into the East River. It is free, although a $10 donation to cover canoe insurance is suggested.  The majority of the crowd was Bronx residents, though there were a handful of people from other boroughs or from Westchester, and a group from Springfield, New Jersey. One member of the latter admitted she was surprised when a friend suggested an outing in the Bronx. "My idea of the Bronx was . what's that movie? 'Fort Apache, the Bronx,'" she said, referring to the 1981 movie about an embattled police precinct in the South Bronx.  In the 1960s and 1970s, the river's overgrown banks made it a magnet for crime. Long before then, in the late 19th century, the river had become essentially an open sewer, in which factories, farms, and housing developments dumped their refuse. At one point the contamination was so bad that animals started dying in the Bronx Zoo.  Then in 1974, a group of community activists, supported by Bronx Borough Police Commander Anthony Bouza, formed the Bronx River Restoration Project, the predecessor to the Bronx River Alliance.