By Suzanne Keating, Staff Reporter
As groundskeepers prime and primp Yankee Stadium, children across the borough run around makeshift bases while dodging traffic and shoot baskets into rims strapped to lampposts or fire escapes.
Although the borough boasts the city's two largest parks, only one-tenth of one percent of Community District Six -- Bronx Park South, West Farms, East Tremont and Belmont -- is recreational land, according to the city Parks Department.
The lack of green space is particularly marked in Bronx Park South, which abuts the lush Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo, both of which charge entrance fees. Only a handful of playgrounds, basketball courts and playing fields are free. Many parents, fearing violence, tell their children not to visit the parks without supervision.
Instead, to keep children busy on Daly Street at 181st Street, resident Zuma Rivera has organized a platoon of under-12-year-olds to spruce up the street.
"People drop off paint," she says, dipping her brush into a bucket of teal blue paint. "They send their kids to help me."
Up and down the block, boys and girls paint the stones around trees, or the bricks around dirt squares where trees once grew.
"I don't know what happened to these three," Rivera says, pointing to dirt squares. "One day they just disappeared."
Further down the block, 12 children play wiffleball at the intersection of Daly and 180th Street. A curb marks first base, a sweatshirt second and a car fender third.
An ice-cream cart blocks the path to first base, but the game goes on. Victor Fontanez cracks his plastic bat against a yellow tennis ball, smacking it just above the third-floor window of a nearby apartment building -- the Bronx Park South version of Fenway's Green Monster: a home run.
Between hitting the ball and running the bases, these players often pause for traffic. They put up with it, they say, because it's one of the few places in the neighborhood to play.
Last fall, the group played football at an empty lot a couple of vblocks north, but as winter faded, the found the lot carpeted with broken glass.
Down the street, Steven and Anthony Diaz, 7 and 10, shoot two-on-two basketball against Jonathan and Joseph Muriel, 10 and 12. Their hoop is the fire escape's bottom two rungs. The Muriels' cousin, Wendy Rodriguez, 4, weaves through the game, a Dixie cup of flavored ice in hand.
"Watch out for the baby," Anthony hollers, leaping for the hoop.
Iris Diaz, Steven and Anthony's mother, watches the children from her second-story window. Across the street, Jonathan and Joseph's mother is perched at her sill. All over the block, women watch their children from apartment windows, sentinels against trouble.
"We can't go to Crotona without our mother," says Jonathan, referring to the park, a 15-minute walk away. "They do drugs there."
He pulls the crumpled coupons for the Six Flags amusement park in New Jersey out of his pocket. "I'd like to go there," he says.