P.U.M.P. Plan to Transform the Grand Concourse

The Bronx Journal Staff Writer

Air pollution has been a critical issue in the Bronx for years because of the major thoroughfares that snake through the borough.

As a result, two young Columbia University graduate students came up with a plan to address this issue, which recently won a major environmental award.

The students, Dongsei Kim and Jamieson Fajardo, have a proposal that they believe will remedy local pollution. They have invented a pump along the Major Deegan Expressway, which they hope will improve the primary boulevard in the Bronx: The Grand Concourse.

The duo says they want to clean up the air while absorbing noise levels, filtering rainwater and providing green walkways to the waterfront access. With that, this award-winning design would be called a P.U.M.P (purifying Urban Modular parasite) a new kind of air purification that would be affixed to the Major Deegan, which has been linked to high levels of child asthma.

“The Grand Concourse is a symbolic and strong integral part of the Bronx and was a perfect starting point to have,” Kim said. “We already, as a society, spend so much money on infrastructure, and we need to spend more smartly, not more.”

With asthma rates for school-aged children in the South Bronx being nearly twice those of children living elsewhere in New York City, pollution is a major issue.

Until now, studies of air quality in the Bronx have relied on rooftop monitoring stations, but these readings do not exactly reflect the quality of the street-level air that people breathe, according to research studies. So far, these studies have shown that the concentration of industrial facilities in the area correlated or paired with the heavy car and truck traffic. As a result, South Bronx residents are exposed to more air pollutants than other New York residents.

The South Bronx Environmental Health and Policy Study, a collaborative research group, has given a number of recommendations. They include: consider rezoning efforts that will increase park land; build new schools away from heavily congested roads and highways; and require enlisting schools to install air filtration systems.

When Kim and partner Jamieson started researching the Bronx, South Bronx in particular, they discovered that asthma was a big problem, especially for children. “We wanted to address this first, and at the same time address some of the other surrounding issues of the South Bronx,” says Kim.

The South Bronx Environmental Health and Policy Study is not the only research group with ideas on how to cut down this pollution matter. These two Columbia University architect students took it upon themselves, along with five other finalists in the Bronx Museum’s international competition. The competition comes after study after study which show that there is a strong link between high asthma rates and pollution in the Bronx. Researchers found that 66 percent of the borough’s population is affected by major sources of pollution. The asthma hospitalization rate for Bronx children is 70 percent higher than that of New York City as a whole.

Asked if he knew any information about asthma rates in the Bronx, Kim answered “From our research, asthma hospitalization rate for children in the South Bronx is nearly twice to three times more than the national average. Significant reasons for this are the amount of trucks that pass on the expressways and roads that go to Hunts Point.”

According to recent data released by the New York City Department of Health, the Bronx rates are 700 percent higher than the rest of the New York State.

Kim says he looks forward to working with his partner Jamieson.

“It is a great achievement and we both are happy about it,” Kim said. “We are so happy that, this being an ideas competition, our pump might be able to spark a conversation about the new Grand Concourse of the next 100 years.”