The Long Arm of the Law Even Reaches Into Subway BathroomsGetting all colonial in Union Square, watching crabs rut in Marine Park, letting go of fancy F-train plans in the Slope, and busting the gays in Forest Hills. All that and more in our week’s-end boroughs report.
neighborhood watch
The ‘Crazy Super’ Has a Dog Named Pretty GirlBay Ridge: Richard Martin, the “crazy super” who posts homicidally threatening signs about trash disposal, says of his tenants “They’re Arab; they don’t give a f*ck”; has a cute Pekinese named Pretty Girl; and worships Jeanine Pirro. Feast on his cranky, strangely lovable weirdness. [NYP]
Chelsea: Facing lawsuits from folks who say it’s too loud and polluting to be there, the 30th St. pier heliport floats a plan to move itself onto two barges offshore. And Curbed is right… this homespun sketch of the plan indeed features the quaintest, gentlest West Side Highway we’ve ever seen. [Villager via Curbed]
Ditmas Park: Folks in these gentrifying, pretty parts know that the hatred currently directed at Park Slope will soon be visited upon them. And they’re probably right. [Ditmas Park Blog]
neighborhood watch
Multicultural Caroling in Ditmas Park: It’s the New Trick-or-TreatingBay Ridge: With its unsolved crimes and rampant development, is the Ridge what L.A. was like back in the noir-y, true-crime forties and fifties? Seems a little grandiose for us. [Bay Ridge Rover]
Bedford-Stuyvesant: Okay, okay, it’s not the richest hood, but couldn’t they put up some holiday decorations? [Bed-Stuy Blog]
Ditmas Park: If you want to carol at the tree-lighting next weekend, you’d better know your Christmas and Hanukkah songs, but you’ll get extra credit if you can bring the Kwanzaa and solstice beats, too. [Ditmas Park Blog]
neighborhood watch
Beware of British Men Bearing ‘StachesDitmas Park: That bright-red trail of blood at the Newkirk subway station? No worries, just a guy who slashed his hand while playing with a pen knife! [Ditmas Park Blog]
Dumbo: Wow, look at the big fat space on Main Street where performance den Galapagos will go in the wake of its move from Williamsburg. [DumboNYC]
East Village: Who’s the dude with the mustache, British accent, and “big soulful brown eyes” who’s ripping off small, women-owned boutiques? [Vanishing New York]
neighborhood watch
Ditmas Park Manse Finds a Fixer to Up ItDitmas Park: Remember that beautiful, dilapidated mansion on the market for $1.75 mil that New York featured a while back? It just sold for $1.55 mil. Happy fix-up, somebody. [Ditmas Park Blog]
East Village: Gentrification haters have two fun protests tonight — one of the imminent Cooper Square Hotel, another of a local shoot for SATC ripoff Lipstick Jungle. [Vanishing New York]
Greenpoint: Chuck, fuck, but definitely not marry. That’s how Miss Heather feels about the daily papers that rip stories off from her posts (like last week’s one about sneakers hanging from phone lines) without crediting her blog. Girl, you gotta change that scatological blog title … yeah, even for the gutter mouth Post! [Newyorkshitty]
neighborhood watch
Gentrifying Ditmas Park: The Move That Dare Not Speak Its NameAstoria: Graffiti gives this not-even-moved-into-yet new building “a cozy, ‘lived-in’ feel.” [Curbed]
Clinton Hill: Hipsters turned breeders will learn this weekend how to replace skateboards with infants as their top new accessory. [Still Hip Brooklyn via A Child Grows in Brooklyn]
Ditmas Park: The hood’s pioneering yups preen over their new cafés and shops but balk at charges of gentrification. You can’t have it both ways, people! [Ditmas Park Blog]
neighborhood watch
Bushwick: Now With Ice Caves!Bedford-Stuyvesant: Wanna know if your Bed-Stuy block is respectable? Check to see if FreshDirect delivers there. [Bed Stuy Blog]
Bushwick: If you rent a subterranean room in the Lair, you won’t get a window, but you will enjoy “the only indoor ice cave that Bushwick has ever seen.” Sounds like breaking even to us. [Curbed]
Ditmas Park: All those serious-looking South Asians outside P.S. 139 the other day? They were there for local elections for the Chittagong Association, which sends disaster relief to folks back home in Bangladesh. Duh! [Ditmas Park Blog]
neighborhood watch
The Coen Brothers Pony Up for the HeightsBrooklyn Heights: The figures are in: To say thanks for letting them shake up the hood while shooting a new Clooney flick here, the Coen brothers gave the Brooklyn Heights Association $10,000, and a few other groups one or two thou each. [Brooklyn Paper]
Ditmas Park: In this fast-gentrifying hood, “Go back to Park Slope” is a four-letter word. [Ditmas Park Blog]
Downtown Brooklyn: A Renzo Piano–designed complex of housing and office space is planned to take the place of City Tech’s Klitgord Auditorium. With a name like that, maybe best that it come down after all. [McBrooklyn]
neighborhood watch
Don’t Worry, There Will Still Be Four Starbucks at Astor PlaceAstor Place: If ever a Starbucks were to be missed, it might be this big one, where the world meets up. But it’s not closing … they’re just fixing the sign. And yet, the longtime newsstand here will be replaced with a shiny glass box. [Vanishing New York]
Bedford-Stuyvesant: Cops are — wisely — advising parents not to let their kids play with a toy 9 mm that looks uncannily realistic. [Bed-Stuy Blog]
Ditmas Park: A bit less than $800,000 will get you this picture-postcard of domestic bliss: cute white house, front yard, white picket fence … and roaring street-level subway just ten feet away! [Ditmas Park Blog]
Harlem: Paging Tracy James, paging Tracy James. (That’s Diana Ross’s designer turned supermodel character in Mahogany, FYI.) Please report to the Apollo this Sunday for the 50th annual Ebony fashion fair… [Uptown Flavor]
Long Island City: The city thinks this burgeoning condo-tower haven is “poor” and “underdeveloped” enough to make it worth wooing colleges to move here. [NYS via Queens Crap]
Sheepshead Bay: Um, not to sound peevish, but would someone please dredge the entrance to the bay before it gets any narrower? Pretty soon a clam roll won’t be able to sail through here. [Gerritsen Beach]
Williamsburg: Advertising for the Edge condo takes a page from the Basic Instinct flash-that-muff playbook. And how bold to pair sex and Asian men. [Copyranter via Curbed]
intel
Foliage Filcher Attacks Ditmas ParkSomeone is stealing the potted plants in Ditmas Park. Anger is blooming in the leafy Brooklyn neighborhood of million-dollar Victorians over eyewitness accounts of a thirtysomething black woman in a pink dress plucking ferns, philodendrons, and a cactus from yards and porches then making off with them on her bike. “We have a private paid patrol” in the neighborhood, says Gary Sucher, a resident who claims he’s had about $150 of vegetation stolen, “and I’ve alerted them to be on the lookout for suspicious activity in terms of someone carrying a bunch of plants.” Locals say the thief is still at large and speculate she’s fencing the hot greens to area plant vendors. But Mary Kay Gallagher, a local real-estate agent, has figured out the solution, should the plant-poacher be caught. “Send her into Manhattan,” she said. “They have plants there, but they’re harder to get at.” —Tim Murphy
neighborhood watch
Brooklyn Pinup Girls
• Brooklyn:Get the borough man in your life a Brooklyn Girls calendar (right). But only if he likes white girls. [Trendy Nation via Sunset Parker]
• Chelsea: The Limelight is resurrected as retail space. So instead of a “drug supermarket,” it will just be an actual market. [NYP]
• Clinton Hill: Find all the bars, restaurants, and stores on this new neighborhood map. [Clinton Hill Blog]
• Coney Island: Will Big Apple Circus get a permanent performance space on the boardwalk? [Brooklyn Eagle via Gowanus Lounge]
• Fort Greene: If the weekend’s “Merry Gridlock” event protesting Atlantic Yards is any indication of the traffic from Atlantic Yards, we’re screwed. Good thing the vote is delayed till next year. [Dope on the Slope]
• Williamsburg: Ride your bike to the Bedford Avenue L station. With wider sidewalks and new bike racks, there will be plenty of room. [Streetsblog]
in other news
Feds to City: Get Moving
We are, apparently, in the money. Charlie Rangel hasn’t yet taken over the House Ways and Means Committee, and yet already New York is getting the means to improve our ways. Today’s papers report that the U.S. Department of Transportation has given final approval to some $2.6 billion in funding for two major New York transit projects. The Second Avenue subway — pardon us, the T line — will get $693 million of federal money. (Does this mean freelance writer Jane Everhart will get to keep her apartment?) And the East Side Access project, which will linking the LIRR to Grand Central will get $2.6 billion from the Feds, the most money ever earmarked to a mass-transit project. It’s weird: It’s almost like Washington wants to stay on our good side or something.
Long Planned, Transit Projects Get U.S. Help [NYT]
in other news
If You Spun It, Here’s How It Would Have Happened
Now that we know Judith Regan was fired from HarperCollins over a volley of anti-Semitic remarks, it strikes us that with the recent bumper crop of Great Moments in Racism — Michael Richards–gate, Rosie-gate, Mel Gibson Über alles — our culture has found a new cottage industry: Awesome excuses for Great Moments in Racism. And nearly all of them have shown up already in the Regan affair. After the jump, a cheat sheet for spinning your next ching chong.
in other news
White House Movie of the Week
Here’s the photo that ran in today’s Times of the newly refurbished White House Situation Room. Although still not as sleek and/or oppressive as its many Hollywood avatars, from 24 to Strangelove’s War Room, at least now it has LCD flat screens, better sound isolation, fiber-optic ca — wait a second. Who’s on that screen on the right? It sure doesn’t look like Tony Blair or Pervez Musharraf or Dick Cheney. Is it … could it be … yup, a quick canvass of our filmic colleagues provides a consensus: It’s Nicolas Cage. Note the thoughtful chin-gripping action — so intense. The scene, then, is one of the earlier sequences from Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. (“God, I do hope it’s Con Air,” said New York film editor Logan Hill, before conceding it’s not.) We’re, of course, shocked that the White House would play a movie about 9/11 while showing off the new Situation Room. But ever better is this: The DVD just came out last week.
Overhaul Moves White House Data Center Into Modern Era [NYT]
in other news
Breaking: Jailing People for Speaking Out May Be IllegalA Manhattan federal jury has confirmed something you probably knew all along: It seems throwing political protesters in the slammer, instead of writing them a ticket, kinda sorta interferes with the First Amendment. The NYPD’s lock-’em-up policy, born amid the paranoia of 2001, was short-lived (it’s already off the books) and resulted in about 30 arrests, which now may mean 30 settlements for NYPD to cough up. The biggest mistake the boys in blue apparently made was committing the policy to the books in the first place: Nothing leaves a paper trail like, well, paper. The demonstrators’ side alleged that the practice had existed for years as an unwritten rule — ever since the 1999 Amadou Diallo shooting and the spate of rallies it occasioned. Lacking concrete proof, the jury didn’t buy it; if it had, the city would be looking at about 350 more settlements. Darned First Amendment.
Jury Rules Against NYPD’s Rally Lockups [NYDN]
office-party patrol
Eating — and Eating! — With the ‘Daily News’; Drinking and Dancing With ‘Star’With less than a week left till Christmas, company-holiday-party season is nearing its end. But for a last few fabulous nights, it keeps going strong — and naturally crasher extraordinaire Julia Allison is there. Last night she hit the Daily News do at the Copa and the Star shindig at Dirty Disco. Which one had a face-painter? Which one had only caffeinated vodka? Julia’s reports await.
neighborhood watch
It’s Not Easy Being GreenLower East Side: Developers may mow over the “Children’s Magical Garden” at Norfolk and Stanton Streets. [The Villager]
Park Slope: You can now get ticketed for having a leafy street. [Daily Slope]
Ditmas Park: Lefty java joint Vox Pop to turn chain? [Brooklyn Papers]
Greenwich Village: Why are there so many empty storefronts on Thompson Street? Because the landlord is an ass, naturally. [Curbed]
Prospect Heights: Does a shiny new JCC mark the completion of gentrification? [Brooklynian]
Dyker Heights: By next year, city kids will be teeing off at the first junior golf center in the nation. [NY1]
vu.
House-Hunting in Ditmas Park–Ditmas Park West–Midwood ParkThink you can’t own a house — not a townhouse but a house house, with a yard and a garage and a front porch — in the city for less than $3 million? Wrong. If you didn’t know any better, you’d never think you were in the Big Apple when you walk through the leafy streets — and past the gracious, detached houses — of Ditmas Park and neighboring Midwood Park. Co-op apartments exist here, too, but the neighborhoods are really better known for their enviable assortment of large houses with equally impressive gardens out back. (Ditmas Park, after all, was a former Guggenheim stomping grounds.) Prices run the gamut from $150,000 for a one-bedroom in a prewar building to $1 million-plus for charming Victorians with modernized plumbing and electrical systems and thankfully intact details like gables and fretwork. It’s not every weekend, after all, you can go to an actual open house.