Pete Fornatale, 66, died on Thursday after suffering a brain hemorrhage earlier this month. He was one of those DJs who came along at a time when the popular culture was throbbing with change and the music both drove it and reflected it back.

Admission to The Bronx Museum of the Arts will be free starting Thursday in an effort to attract more of the borough's residents to the museum. The $5 adult tickets and $3 student and senior tickets were a barrier to entry to the institution, which is located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country.

The Bronx Zoo has a new female Baringo giraffe calf. When she was born this month, the calf was roughly 6 feet tall and over 100 pounds, according to the Bronx Zoo.

Chicago rapper Common stopped by Eagle Academy for Young Men in the South Bronx on Monday morning to talk to the school's 500-plus students about how they could achieve their dreams. He also performed two raps. The rapper said he wanted to visit Eagle after hearing about the school while serving on an education reform panel at Lincoln Center last year.

Here are four arts institutions — all of which will have openings and host events this month — to check out in The Bronx, Staten Island and Southampton: Wavehill, The Bronx River Art Center, The Alice Austen House and The Parrish Art Museum.

Fifteen hens made the trip from the Queens County Farm Museum to the South Bronx this past week to take up roosts in a volunteer-built coop in Brook Park. The chickens were part of a program at the farm that allows city school kids to incubate eggs and watch them hatch. Check out a video of the coop here.

This month, cultural institutions around the city are paying respect to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks through literature, visual arts, theater, dance, music, and film. Here's our guide to what's happening around town.

An air conditioning unit has lately been the hottest -- or coolest -- commodity around town. But to the dismay of many overheated residents looking to buy or replace a broken AC unit, they've all but sold out in area retail stores.

Pig roasts, improv marathons, Revolutionary War tours and urban foraging. There's no shortage of things to do in the city this Independence Day weekend. Here's our shortlist of happenings around NYC.

The weather may be getting nicer, but this week's film offerings are enough to keep cinephiles indoors in the cool dark of a cineplex. Three intriguing film festivals — the Northside Film Festival in Williamsburg, the BAM CinemaFest at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the ninth annual Bronx International Film Festival at Lehman College — start screening films on Thursday.

Trophies made of tire, a can of pickles spinning on a turntable, two gigantic pop-up books and walls covered in graffiti. These are some of the pieces featured in "El Museo's Bienal: The (S) File 2011," an exhibit that opened on Tuesday at El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem.

This month, the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx pays tribute to America's national flower with its show "Resplendent Roses." The garden has an additional 91 different varieties of roses blooming in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden this year, bringing its velvety bud count to an astounding 4,000 roses.

Although some city slickers head for the hills during the summer — to the Hamptons, to Fire Island, to the Shore or to the Catskills — most music fans agree that New York City's outdoor summer concert fare can not be beat. Here are some of the myriad musical happenings we'll be at this summer.

The solstice may not officially ring in summer till June 21, but that's no reason to hold off on celebrating this week's warm weather with family and friends (and a nice pair of white pants, perhaps) in one of the city's free public parks. Here's our shortlist to the best.

It's time to stash the sleds and snowgear and dust off the boogie board: There's a beach in your borough in which you can lounge, slather on some sunblock and enjoy a good read. Don't forget to leave the cigarettes at home — city beaches are now smoke-free.

A lot of people travel for work. But for Bronx resident Lucia Martinez, that means flying back and forth to Mexico every single week. Her mission: To shuttle gifts between Mexican immigrants in New York to their family back home. "Some people come over to New York without having any family here," says twenty-one-year-old Martinez. "So these packages help them feel less lonely."

The last of baseball's Negro League teams folded in the 1960s. But a museum in the footprint of Yankee Stadium is reminding baseball fans of the League's history. The Bronx Museum of the Arts has an exhibit containing 50 artifacts from the Negro League teams on view—from a child's bat signed by Jackie Robinson to vintage Ebbets Field flannels.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, the Irish Arts Center is giving out 10,000 free books penned by Irish and Irish-American writers on Thursday.

Though it looks like any fluorescent-lit church basement, community center or public school teacher's lounge, the basement of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx's Morris Heights neighborhood has a monumental history. It was on this unlikely linoleum floor, under the workaday dropped ceiling, that Clive Campbell a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc first set up the turntables and guitar amp that gave life to what is known now as the sound system and hip-hop music.

"He was the guy who first laid it down and played it for a party crowd," says hip-hop historian Marcus Reeves.

New York City’s northern-most borough isn’t called the Boogie-Down Bronx for nothing. From hip-hop to salsa to funk to doo wop to rock to folk, the borough is packed with musical talent. We had to make some serious calls about which BX-born musicians would make the cut for our “Boogie-Down Mixtape."