Managing Wealth with his Heart – Jonathan Gassman

Jonathan Gassman has taken his knowledge as a CPA and combined it with his experience as a certified financial planner CFP® to provide a heightened level of service to his clients. He is known among his colleagues as an exceptional financial strategist who provides consistent, long-term value to his clients.  


Apryl Cadabra: Spreading Joy, One Face at a Time

To borrow an old cliché, Apryl Cadarba has greasepaint in her blood. In a way, running a children’s entertainment agency she’s carrying on a family tradition. Her father was a clown magician, performing at small venues and parties around The Bronx.

“My father was a welder but whenever there were neighborhood parties he’d go as a magician and I was his assistant,” she says.

She was growing up in the 1960s, watching the...


Dhylles Davis:The Coaching Cupid

Even as a young girl, Dhylles Davis says she was always the “go-to” person in her neighborhood — a person in whom you could trust to share your thoughts and secrets.

Eventually, these rare qualities would help inform her decision to dedicate her life to helping others find purpose.

For the last 20 years, Davis has been assisting clients as a certified professional life coach. Through her Bronx-based business, Dhylles...


The Broadway Beat Broadway BEASTS

Animals don’t always make the best Broadway actors.  This is partly due to their inability to say their lines clearly, but also because trying to get a dog, cat or rat to behave the same way each night is quite hard.  Instead of using real animals, many shows cast humans in animal parts. 

The Lion King,which just entered its 19th year running on Broadway,is one of these shows.  It opened in November of 1997,...


Polarized Pets…and Stressed-Out Kids

Inequality isn’t just bad for people.  It also affects our companion animals.   In the modern American economy, some workers have become money-rich and time-poor.  Others, who lost jobs or were downsized during the recent recession, became time richer but money poor.  And many Americans, forced to work multiple jobs to make ends meet are poor in both time and money.  In each case, pets are affected. 

In the first case,...


Getting Into the Spirit in Port Morris

The Bronx may be the last place you’d expect to find authentic liquor from the Caribbean. But a thriving new startup in the Port Morris neighborhood is changing perceptions one jug at a time.

The Port Morris Distillery, wedged beside the First Avenue Bridge in the Southeast Bronx, has...


Lovie Pignata: Bringing Back a Community’s Heart

Today, the store on Holland Avenue stands empty, rezoned for residential use. But, for more than 20 years, the soda shop owned by current New York State Attorney General Robert Abram’s parents served as the center of the Pelham Parkway South neighborhood.

Lovie Pignata’s dream is to bring back that sense of community in a new incarnation: as Morris Perk, a café that can double as a community center....


Marcos Sierra The Flan Man

Marcos Sierra has a not-so-secret identity in his hometown of The Bronx. He is El Flanadero (in English, roughly, “The Flan Man”). Actually, El Flanadero is the name of Sierra’s company.

For the unfortunate unitiated, flan is a delicious delicacy, a free-standing custard served for dessert throughout the Spanish-speaking world. (The kind of flan we’re talking about here is the one also known as crème caramel, not the savory pies...