Cultivate your Bronx-born or bred creativity

To the editor,

Daniel Hauben’s five-panel painting “Bronx Vortex” is an ode to one of the busiest intersections of the Bronx — Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse. A rough Vyse Avenue and 174th Street in the Bronx is the setting for a short story by Martin Kleinman that he shared at a reading. On a recent weekend, I had the pleasure of exposure to the work of both of these native Bronxites.

Friday evening, May 1, at Edgehill, the landmarked old church now home to the Kingsbridge Historical Society, I attended the opening reception of Daniel Hauben’s art show, titled “Emergence.” I was particularly drawn to the painting “Bronx Vortex,” and its rows of stores including Krums, which I visited as a little girl for candy or ice cream. I also loved the “Arthur Avenue Market” painting, with its mountains of fruits and vegetables.

The exhibit showcases Danny’s cityscapes as well as his newer fantastical works begun in the days of Covid-19. A resident of Kingsbridge, Danny has always lived in the Bronx, his work focusing on urban landscape.

His art is in the collections of the likes of the Museum of the City of New York. Commissioned work includes “The El” — glass mosaics at the Freeman Street Station — and “A Sense of Place” — 22 paintings adorning the reading room and stairwells at Bronx Community College.

That Sunday, I went to a reading at Riverdale Temple, by member Martin Kleinman of three of his bittersweet short stories. I got goosebumps when his stories mentioned locales from my childhood as well as 9/11 and Covid-19.

Marty is the author of three collections: “Home Front,” “A Shoebox Full of Money” and “When Paris Beckons.” He has read his stories at such venues as our local An Beal Bocht Cafe. He grew up in the Bronx and, while he left for other boroughs, Marty returned, settling in Riverdale.

I find these two Bronx sons inspirational. As a youngster growing up in the Bronx, I loved to draw and paint. Schoolwork and career squashed that passion. But now, after more than 35 years in Manhattan, having retired to Riverdale, I’m doing art again, however unpolished and naïve it may be, in a pastel drawing class at Riverdale Senior Services — taught by Danny. And after decades as a writer and editor for various publications, I have had poetry and Point of View columns published in this newspaper, and recently wrote the last sentence of a memoir, which I will publish independently if not published by a traditional publishing house.

Maybe we guessed correctly that Chazz Palminteri, playwright and screenwriter of “A Bronx Tale,” was Bronx-born. We likely did not know that E.L. Doctorow, author of the historical novel “Ragtime,” or Margaret Bourke-White, photographer of newly built skyscrapers, or Milton Glaser, designer of the “I Love NY” logo, or Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, who later became painter and sculptor Larry Rivers, were all born in the Bronx. There are many more in the past — and the future is wide open.

So, a call to action to native sons and daughters of the Bronx or to those who have adopted as home this mish-mash borough: If you make literary works or pieces of visual art, or anything creative — especially depicting the beauty and grit of the Bronx — do get on with it.

MURIEL ADAMS