Photo by: Maribel Mercado
A downed tree at 1260 Wheeler Avenue between 172nd Street and Westchester Avenue took out a car and blocked the block.
The city’s only mainland borough was spared the brunt of Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge but wind, waves and fire took their toll on waterfront communities.
“City Island is in very bad shape,” Andrea Bender, a spokesman for East Bronx Councilman James Vacca, told City Limits. There was at least one fire, which heavily damaged the famous Tony’s Pier Restaurant at the end of City Island Avenue, and the island saw extensive flooding. “It’s not as bad as Breezy Point, thankfully, but it’s pretty bad.”
In the Silver Beach area, a narrow spit of land near the Bronx footing of the Throggs Neck bridge, residents—assisted by at least one front-loader—shoveled a thick layer of debris off streets and sidewalks. The mixture of garbage, leaves, wood chips and twigs washed through the neighborhood as Long Island Sound came over its banks.
One resident near Edgewater Park said the water reached knee height at one point near the marina. He’d stopped for breakfast at a local Dunkin Donuts inside a BP station only to learn there was no food for sale and the gas station attendant was recording transactions by hand because the store was on “half-power.”
There was also flooding in Locust Manor, according to Bender. In the Harding Park area, a neighborhood of close-built cottages located closer to the Whitestone, basements were apparently flooded, judging by the belongings and refuse seen in backyards, said Maribel Mercado at Community Board 9. Also in CB9, there were multiple trees and wires down.
Sandy hit with random power in other areas of the Bronx. At Eastchester Road and Williamsbridge Road, a massive transformer hung precariously from a snapped light pole next to a McDonald’s. Traffic lights were out this morning across a broad stretch of the East Bronx.
On Gun Hill Road near Webster Avenue, a Dominican restaurant lost its sign, but the rest of the block was untouched. Up the street, Montefiore Medical Center announced on its website that all surgeries were proceeding as planned.
Numerous trees were down in Oval Park in the Norwood section, along Mosholu and Pelham Parkways and in Soundview Park. According to the Riverdale Press, thousands in Riverdale and tens of thousands more elsewhere in the Bronx were without power.
