Mayor Bloomberg created a new Business Improvement District on Monday, December 1. The Belmont BID, squeezed between Lorillard Place and Southern Boulevard south of E. Fordham Road to E. 183rd Street, will begin work next year.
It encompasses Fordham University’s Rose Hill Campus, Our Lady Mount Carmel Church and Arthur Avenue’s Little Italy, an aromatic, restaurant-rich neighborhood.
“We don’t see the BID as necessary to survive,” Frank Franz, a Belmont booster who championed the proposal, said. “We see the BID as necessary to explode. We see the BID turning Belmont into a Tri-State tourist destination.”
The BID will assume many of the functions currently performed by the Belmont Small Business Association – a volunteer merchant group. It’s the city’s newest and 61st BID, the 17th approved by Bloomberg. The Bronx now contains eight BIDs.
“The Belmont BID will provide maintenance and sanitation services, security services, marketing and promotion of local businesses, holiday lighting, economic development, beautification and landscaping,” Bloomberg said.
BIDs are self-funded by landlords and overseen by the city’s Department of Small Business Services.
“The city collects the money, but it all comes back to our neighborhood,” said Franz, who sold Belmont merchants on the BID.
Franz believes Belmont could become a Bronx-ish SoHo.
“We plan on adding more nightlife and a grassroots art community,” he said. “The neighborhood is going ‘downtown.’
While some BIDs are instruments of revival, Belmont is quite alive already. Arthur Avenue’s pizzerias and specialty shops dish up prosciutto, canoli and Calabrese, attracting hungry out-of-borough tourists and Bronxites alike.
According to Franz, that’s not all.
“We’re next to a major university,” he said. “The Bronx Zoo and [New York] Botanical Garden draw four to five million people per year. We have our own Metro-North station. We have new housing – large apartments with gourmet kitchens.”
Arthur Avenue could land a hotel, too. Franz has spoken with a national hotel chain. Rooms would start at $250 per night.
Hotel or no, Community Board Six district manager Ivine Galarza expects the new BID to benefit Belmont’s mom-and-pop businesses and, in turn, the entire neighborhood.
“Our merchants do so much – for the Christmas parade, the boys and girls club and little league,” Galarza said. “The BID will keep them around.”
The Belmont BID represents 352 businesses, scattered throughout a neighborhood that contains 2,042 residential units. In its first year, the organization will operate on a $340,000 budget – $45,000 for sanitation and graffiti removal, $35,000 for security, $90,000 for marketing, $60,000 for capital improvements and $110,000 for administration.
Franz still needs to collect the funds, elect a BID board and find an executive director. He predicts the BID will be up and running six months from now.
“This comes at a time of transition,” Vincent Borgese of B&G Clothes said. “The BID will help us maintain our Little Italy identity, so we’re not banging heads with the big guys up on Fordham Road.”
Fordham Road boasts a BID as well, extending along E. Fordham from Jerome to Third avenues. Fordham Road businesses west of Third Avenue were among those that resisted Franz’ Belmont BID overtures.
“Language can be a barrier,” Borgese said. “Merchants think you’re shaking them down.”
Despite its old-Italy feel, Belmont is changing. Many of the neighborhood’s Italian families have moved out. Mexican and Albanian families have replaced them.
“We have two distinct business communities here,” Franz said. “We have the Italian businesses, and we have the general retail and service shops where our 60,000-plus residents buy groceries and do laundry. The BID needs to protect and promote both.”
Franz wants an executive director from Manhattan, someone with BID experience and no Bronx loyalties. He thanked Councilman Joel Rivera for backing the Belmont BID. Rivera passed Bloomberg the BID bill.
“Our parish supports the BID because we stands to benefit,” Father Eric Rapaglia, who heads the Our Lady of Mount Carmel church, said. “Especially the poor in our parish.
People think of the neighborhood as Fordham University, the Bronx Zoo and Arthur Avenue. People forget that this is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Bronx.”
