Man's best friend was saluted as one Bay Ridge's resident savior, as Lexi the bichon frise was honored at St. Patrick's Church yesterday. Last month, when Linda Deutsch was taking the 5-year-old dog for a walk, Lexi refused to go to the elevator and instead dragged Deutsche down the hall. It turned out that Lexi heard the cries of neighbor James Postler--an 85-year-old deacon at the church--who had fallen hours earlier and managed to crawled......

Police have arrested a homeless man for allegedly raping a woman in her Bay Ridge apartment last week. The suspect is identified as Ralph DiMassi, 39, who, according to the Post, is on parole for robbery. The Post adds, DiMassi "was ratted out by a pal arrested on Staten Island for shoplifting." The friend said DiMassi "did something bad to a woman in Bay Ridge last week." The victim had been hit with a screwdriver......

The NYPD released surveillance footage of the suspect in the Bay Ridge rape on Wednesday. Police believe the man seen running down a street in the video raped a woman in her apartment building on Wednesday morning; he had apparently been lurking in and around the building. He is now described as "white, between 30 and 40, and about 5-foot-10 with brown hair and brown eyes." There is a $12,000 reward for information leading to......

Some creepy details about the Wednesday attack and rape of a Bay Ridge resident: The Post reports the 39-year-old victim spoke to neighbors about the incident. The rapist, who grabbed the woman as she was leaving her apartment for work and dragged her to the basement where he assaulted her, apparently said, "I'm sorry. I'm going through some hard times. I didn't mean to do this. Will you please forgive me?" And he allegedly made......

Police are looking for a rape suspect who attacked a woman in Brooklyn yesterday morning. According to WABC 7, the victim, 29, was on her way to work when she "was surprised by a man near her apartment building along Fort Hamilton Parkway around 8:40 a.m. He struck the victim over the head with a screwdriver and raped her in an alley." A neighbor told WCBS 2, "Basically this morning when I left, the victim,......

The two carriage horses who ran amok through Bay Ridge Sunday are recovering nicely on a Connecticut farm, the Daily News reports. Stormy and Elvis, snow-colored, 2,000-pound Percherons who work pulling buggies for Valentine Carriage, survived with just scratched-up legs. However, driver Richie Valentine Jacobson fractured five ribs after being thrown from the carriage onto a town car's windshield. The buggy was about to pick up bride-to-be Nunzie Lumberto when a pole snapped, spooking the......

A mother of two says that she witnessed two cops "doing doughnuts" with their patrol car on a Bay Ridge baseball field. While walking around the neighborhood early Sunday evening, January Hagan saw the patrol car revving up in the outfield until it began spinning out of control. She says that the car spun so wildly that the officers almost hit a pair of kids on tricycles, telling the NY Daily News, "The police car......

Today Bay Ridge is exactly 365 days separated from the tornado that touched down in the neighborhood, and NY1 is reporting that the dust has settled and things are getting back to normal for the most part. The morning of August 8th one year ago, an EF-2 tornado touched down wiping out homes and automobiles with winds of up to 135 mph. One resident reflects on the damage done at the time, while another says......

Others may sit passively by while New York City loses 10 of its precious 235 Starbucks, but Andrew El-Kadi, who lives above a doomed Starbucks in Bay Ridge, is making a stand. He’s turning up the heat on Starbucks by handing out flyers and starting an online petition to keep his downstairs Starbucks open, because "when you feel strongly about something, [it] doesn't have to be limited to starving children in Africa or the Israeli-Palestinian......

This is horrible. A 65-year-old man was arrested for sodomizing a 16-year-old boy yesterday morning on a Bay Ridge Street. Apparently the NYPD narcotics unit was monitoring a surveillance camera when they saw Reham Ali hiding something between two parked cars around Seventh Avenue and 64th Street. The Daily News reports that two officers went to see what was happening and found Ali "holding down and sodomizing" the mentally retarded boy. A police source told......

Two bodega owners in Bay Ridge fought off a robbery earlier this week by taking justice into their own hands...with machetes. The Post reports that when three thieves tried to rob the S & J Meat Market Monday of $2,000 in cigarettes, brothers and co-owners Mohammed and Sammy Othman confronted them with foot-and-a-half-long machetes. "My knife's bigger than yours!" Sammy yelled at one of the robbers who had pulled a four-inch blade. After containing two......

The Brooklyn community board that covers Bay Ridge is fed up with the food vendors who clog 86th Street – all three of them. “The issue is cleanliness,” asserts the board’s District Manager Josephine Beckmann, whose husband is a police lieutenant. “It would be best to have no vending at all. It just causes problems.” So the board has unanimously urged the city’s Department of Small Business Services to banish them from the block. Sam......

Yesterday, police announced they arrested people running a drug den on 93rd Street in Brooklyn, thanks to the help of neighbors who banded together. Resident Jason Miller told NY1 he and his neighbors "came together through a local web forum and there were many neighbors that were feeling much the same fear and issues that we were already observing." The web forum is BayRidgeTalk.com, a message board when residents started to voice complaints about the......

As we all learned from the 1982 film Poltergeist, it is never a good idea to build anything over a burial ground. Seems even developers took this warning to heart, as one just removed 211 bodies from a graveyard that's in the way of their sweet new luxury condos. The NY Post reports:A Brooklyn church yesterday cleared out the remains of 211 corpses that had been buried for more than a century in an adjacent......

Today Frank Bruni reviews Adour (pictured), the four-month-old St. Regis Hotel restaurant conceived by extravagant French chef Alain Ducasse. While it’s not “rapturous” enough to merit the Times’s highest four star rating, it’s still “first-rate: polished service, a knockout wine list, beautiful oil-poached cod, gorgeous roasted lamb and exquisite desserts.” And Bruni does confirm our earlier speculation about some kind of haute bagel on the menu. On the other side of the spectrum and the......

Photographs of Senator McCain at Verrazano Pizzeria by Mary Altaffer/AP Senator John McCain headed visited New York today. He stopped off to appear on The View in Manhattan and discussed a homeowner aid plan in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. And while in Bay Ridge, he went to Verrazano Pizza on 4th Avenue and 91st Street and bought a $3 slice of pepperoni pizza. He told the counter worker to keep the change from a $20,......

Image: The Bay Ridge Rover. Last week a group of concerned Bay Ridge parents and local officials held a rally and picket line outside a neighborhood Verizon Wireless retailer. The group was demanding the company remove the cell phone receivers installed on a rooftop near P.S. 185; they say the receivers emit dangerously high radiofrequency (RF) emissions and should not be placed near schools. They are also calling for legislation limiting where the receivers can......

by Marcus Woollen at flickr After the many questions about the unofficial Democratic primary results, the NYC Board of Elections has released the official results for the February 5 primary results, confirming a Clinton victory in the Big Apple. She won 55% of the vote with 527,941 votes, to Barack Obama's 43% (413,898 votes). A total of 955,966 votes were cast, meaning 34% of the city's registered Democrats voted. Since you might be curious......

The Miss Brooklyn Pageant is coming back to town this coming Saturday after a 16-year absence from the scene (and they've returned in the MySpace age). The winner of the night will advance to the Miss New York Pageant, having a shot at becoming Miss America herself. Kim Thomas, executive director of the Miss Brooklyn Scholarship Program, told The Brooklyn Paper that, “The face of Miss America has changed. We’re looking for someone outgoing and......

Map from The Brooklyn Paper The Brooklyn Paper has an interesting map showing how Brooklyn's donations to Clinton and Obama have changed over the past year. Gersh Kuntzman writes, "Just-released campaign finance filings that cover the second half of 2007 show that Obama made strong inroads into 'Hillary Country,' specifically turning Brooklyn Heights, Bay Ridge, Bushwick, Canarsie and Greenpoint from Hillary red to Barack blue." In total for Brooklyn, Obama has raised almost $600,000,......

Frank Bruni, the Times’s top restaurant critic, awards the new 2nd Avenue Deli one star today, which isn’t bad considering it is, despite all the history, still a deli. We popped in there for food and photos just before it reopened at its East 33rd Street location and found the sandwiches (pictured) as monumental as ever; a second visit turned up no sign of the free bowl of gribenes (chicken skin fried in chicken fat)......

According to new NYPD statistics, graffiti complaints in Brooklyn rose 96% last year, with arrests in the borough increasing by 33%. Citywide, complaints almost doubled from 4,886 in 2006 to 8,866 in 2007, and total arrests rose from 2,962 to 3,786. Williamsburg leads the tagging trend with a total of 186 complaints. “It's so expensive here, yet it looks like a dump,” long-time Williamsburg resident Mel Costello, 63, declared to the Daily News. “It's......

Not only are New York gyms poorly run, but the establishments that are supposed to make you healthier are doing the opposite. The Daily News reports on the germ-ridden gyms of the city in a fairly unsurprising article. The paper spot-checked Dolphin Fitness, Equinox, Crunch, NYSC and YMCAs around New York and "uncovered potentially harmful bacteria lingering all over exercise mats, bicycles, drinking fountains and other surfaces. The equipment posing the highest risks are cardiovascular......

A con artist has been using Craigslist to scam gullible apartment seekers out of hundreds of dollars, according to the Daily News. Nothing new here, except this time the scheme so sketchy it’s hard to feel too sorry for the victims. Using the alias JoAnn Rinaggio, a compulsive check bouncer named JoAnne Smith has been posting listings for a fully furnished two-bedroom with a balcony in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. This amazing place can be yours......

A 23-year-old animal groomer in Brooklyn is facing charges of animal cruelty and could spend up to a year in jail if convicted. The charges stem from an experience Igor Kisil and his Burmese cat Nusha had with groomer Bechir Bejaoui of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Kisil says that when he went to pick up his small cat, who weighs only three pounds, she was returned to him in a carrying case covered with blood. Kisil......

A Bay Ridge pharmacist embroiled in a public steroid investigation appears to have killed himself. John Rossi was found last night in the office above the pharmacy, with a fatal gunshot wound to his head and a pistol in his hand. Bottles of Johnnie Walker whiskey, Valium, and Coca-Cola were on the desk in front of his body; another bullet slug was found in the office, causing a police source to tell the Daily News,......

About once a year or so Gothamist makes a pilgrimage to Bensonhurst’s 18th Avenue for some Sicilian soul food. A little over 15 years ago, 18th Avenue between Bay Ridge Parkway and McDonald Avenue was dubbed "Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard." While that entire length may have been named in honor of the Italian explorer, the stretch where we usually explore the wonders of Southern Italian food lies between between Bay Ridge Parkway and 65 Street. Depending......

It’s rare when a book causes the sudden desire to collect large quantities of AP flour, unsalted butter and sugar, but that’s what Greg Patent’s A Baker’s Odyssey might do to you. Other traditional bake-books operate within the wholly confined orbit of strudel and streusels; A Baker’s Odyssey has strudels galore but is also about forgotten or esoteric American immigrant recipes, so it also covers kulich and chin chin cookies, shoofly pie and puran poori.......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a pedestrian struck on Woodward Ave. and Cornelia St. in Queens, a burn victim on West 52nd St. in Manhattan, and a carjacking on 141st St. and Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Chaka Khan joins the cast of the Broadway musical The Color Purple. I feel for you, ticket holders. Tomorrow is your last chance to register for voting in New York's February 5th primary. Using handheld computers to identify......

And then there were three. The “Couch Potato” publicity stunt going on over at ESPN Zone – the favorite restaurant of Yo La Tengo’s James McNew – took a dramatic turn when one of the four contestants abruptly dropped out of the butt-numbing competition. The quitter was Rutgers student Lindsay Wagenblast, the only female participant, who had “emerged as the favorite” in the contest, which started New Year's Day and involves sitting in a recliner......