בארא פארק האט דאס העכסטע געבורט ראטע
| 03/02/2007 |
| Baby-making capital of the city - Borough Park leads all neighborhoods in newborns |
| By Lesley Grimm |
Borough Park is booming, all right.
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On any given weekday morning, you'll witness hundreds of tiny feet scurrying to neighborhood schools as fat yellow buses jockey for position on skinny roadways.
The congestion is too much for some; an eruption of car horns temporarily drowns out the commotion of noisy construction sites.
Amid this chaotic scene, you'll also find moms with strollers, one after another, pushing their most precious cargo.
Courier-Life Newspapers conducted a very unofficial survey, and found young fresh faces on just about every Borough Park street.
Well, now it is also official: Borough Park is the baby capital of New York City.
Statistics recently released by the Health Department show this Brooklyn community has the highest birth rate of any neighborhood in the five boroughs.
In 2005 Borough Park recorded 4,733 births, at a rate of 25.6 per 1000 residents.
That equates to an average of thirteen newborns every single day.
''I'm proud to be a part of it,'' said one Borough Park mother, who identified herself only by her first name of Connie.
''Oh yeah, this is a very busy neighborhood,'' said lifelong resident Mandy Spitz, as she waits for a school bus to pick up her eldest daughter.
In the heart of booming Borough Park is the record-setting Maimonides Medical Center.
To call its maternity unit ''busy'' would be an understatement. In both 2005 and 2006, Maimonides delivered a whopping 6,700 babies each year.
''Maimonides Medical Center delivers more babies that any other hospital in the state of New York,'' said Elaine Tynion, Maimonides spokesperson.
Carol Kidney, Nursing Director of Maternity Services, said to accommodate growing demand, Maimonides has expanded to eleven labor suites, with another two currently being renovated.
''It's wonderful, but also challenging at times,'' Kidney said of the influx of newborns.
Borough Park is home to a largely Orthodox Jewish community. Orthodox Jewish couples tend to marry younger, and large families are common.
City Councilmember Simcha Felder, whose district includes Borough Park, said the baby boom was in part a legacy of the Holocaust, noting the neighborhood had the ''largest concentration of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.''
''Whether it's conscious or subconscious, there's certainly an effort to rebuild or replace what was taken away,'' Felder said.
Felder said one of his constituents in Borough Park was a mother to 21 children.
These big families require generously-sized homes, and this need has driven significant construction and renovation projects across the Borough Park neighborhood.
The title of Baby Boom Runner Up belongs to another Brooklyn neighborhood.
Sunset Park recorded the City's second highest birth rate, with 2,550 births in 2005, at a rate of 21.2 babies per 1000 residents.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Bureau of Vital Statistics identified Bayside, Queens as having the City's lowest birth rate, with 703 babies born at a rate of six per 1000 residents. |
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