Results tagged “brooklyn”

Pity the Nets, they play for our sins. They started the season a record-breaking 0-18, finally won a game last week under new head coach/GM Kiki Vandeweghe, then dropped a stinker to the slightly-less-worse Knicks last night at the Garden. The Knicks and Nets are both playing the salary cap game right now, waving a white flag this season while trying to free up space to lure some of the superstars available in next years free agent bonanza to come over and revitalize each franchise.

       

This morning Mayor Bloomberg and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz held court at McCarren Park Pool for a groundbreaking ceremony. Over the past few years the pool has come back to life with JellyNYC's concerts (now still in search of a new home with help from Senator Schumer) — but soon it will return to being a community pool, thanks to Bloomberg's $50 million PlaNYC renovation. Today he promised he'd be the first to take a dip when the project is done, but so did Marty. Who will make the first splash?! We'll have to wait til 2011 to find out...

20 Bayard, that big hubristic building on the edge of McCarren Park in Williamsburg filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday, The Real Deal reports. Are there no hedge funders left who want to live above a blindingly-lit soccer field, 10 minutes from the L train? The building, which was prominently featured on Top Chef, is "nearly full" of owners or renters, but North Development Group apparently owes more than $10 million to more than 50 creditors. The creditor with the largest unsecured claim? A Brooklyn plumber who just saw $325,000 worth of labor go down the crapper, along with the rest of the condo market. (Which kind of takes the fun out of the requisite Nelson laugh.) [Via Curbed]

Last night, a 51-year-old woman was killed outside her family's home in Brooklyn. Audrey Johnson had stepped outside of 149 Clifton Place, between Classon and Franklin Avenues, apparently to check on her niece's boyfriend, who was being assaulted by three men. She was shot in the head while 14-year-old nephew Daniel Johnson, was shot in the leg.

Manhattan Beach residents have had it up to here with squat concrete planters along Oriental Blvd. and the 4-foot tall vegetation within them. Locals, like Manhattan Beach Neighborhood Association member Edmond Dweck, are living in fear: "It will cause harm eventually...." These vegetative nuisances are said to create hazardous blind spots for drivers turning onto Oriental Blvd. from one of the many quiet side streets.

Did you try to get your morning dose of Pat Kiernan before heading out the door this morning only to be met by the black screen of death? Time Warner Cable is down in Brooklyn, and parts of Queens, for at least a few hours. We called to find out more but their phone is busy, or off the hook, or something.

Last year Chris Muth saved a 7-year-old cat that was trapped in a narrow shaft in a Carroll Gardens apartment building, only to be sent to a mental institution where they said he had a “bizarre delusion [that he] was trying to ‘save’ a cat of his friend." Sure, maybe he shouldn't have ripped apart other people's apartments to save the feline, but the cat did in fact exist, and he did save it.

A bookkeeper and community organizer for the embattled antipoverty group Acorn raked in $500,000 in merchandise through a corporate rewards program with Verizon—goodies she had no right to claim, investigators say. As part of an expansive fraud that began five years ago, Donnett Davis allegedly opened a corporate rewards program for Acorn’s 10 to 20 phone lines with Verizon, but named herself as the recipient. She was also able to somehow add (allegedly) another 9,000 DOE phone lines to her rewards account. The haul was pretty sweet.

Norah Jones's windows have garnered the songstress more attention than her recent albums! Following the news that 10 windows on the side of her home were approved in her new neighborhood's Historic District, the Brooklyn Paper says the Cobble Hill Association are still trying to fight back. They warn that "at least 70 houses inside the historic district that have similarly windowless walls — so if Jones is allowed to set a precedent, the resulting domino effect could change Cobble Hill forever." No, not more windows!

For at least a year now, the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights has been giving parishioners parking placards for their cars when parking in the bike lane on Henry Street. The placards explain to police that occupants of the vehicle are conducting "Church Business." One local resident, Peter Kaufman, believes "they have some 'understanding' with the 84th Precinct, whereby if they put a sign in their window that they are attending church, they don't get ticketed." On his blog Ink Lake, Kaufman posted video of this epic bike lane block during last Sunday's service [SPOILER: they're parked along the entire block]:

Vinegar Hill, that quaint little area between DUMBO and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was declared a Landmark District in 1997 — and today Forgotten NY takes a look at the neighborhood, saying: "Know that this streetscape will likely survive, as is, indefinitely." The area is filled with overgrown alleys, cobblestone streets, structures built in the early 1800s, and places we would like to live. There are even some old cars scattered about. It's worth checking out the photos and history, but would you live there?

Is there any band as old as Sonic Youth (nearly three decades!) still radiating such adventurousness and vitality? (The E-Street band, perhaps, but that's apples/oranges.) On Tuesday night the ever-fresh noise rock quintet unleashed yet another spellbinding show at The Music Hall of Williamsburg—an exhilarating return to form after seeing them swallowed up by the United Palace Theater in July. As if to emphasize their commitment to developing new material, the 90-minute performance skewed toward their most recent album, The Eternal, with highlights including a blistering "Calming the Snake," and an orgasmic "Anti-Orgasm." The night climaxed with a show-closing rendition of timeless classic "Silver Rocket," and though the improvisational segment never quite blasted into outer space, the song burned up completely, inspiring atavistic stage-diving which hilariously culminated in one husky, bespectacled man struggling to get on stage just as the show ended—and diving into the audience anyway.

Brooklyn's Joe Tiralosi doesn't remember much about that day in August when he went to New York Presbyterian Hospital feeling sick and disoriented, then collapsed. But last week the 56-year-old father of two visited the hospital to thank doctors for not giving up on him just because his heart stopped beating for 47 minutes after a sudden cardiac arrest. All told, it took 4,500 chest compressions and eight shocks from a defibrillator to bring him back from the brink. Doctors are calling it a medical miracle, but Tiralosi's also lucky the E.R. he visited happened to have some special equipment.

After they pointed out that the Obama Fried Chicken sign was mysteriously blurred out in a new Clipse video, Brokelyn talked to video director Rik Cordero to find out why. He told them: "The decision was made by the owner of the restaurant, who wouldn't sign our location agreement unless we paid him $3,000 cash. Therefore, the sign had to be edited out for network television. I can’t really knock the guy, because taking out the sign has now given Obama Fried Chicken even more free promotion than if we had left it in." But did anyone on the shoot try the chicken? The question remains.

You'll recall that last week Transportation Alternatives held their Biking Rules PSA Festival at BAM, featuring 40 PSAs created to promote bike safety and responsible cycling (i.e., not pedaling fiendishly down the sidewalk and running over pedestrians, etc.). The videos competed in two main categories, "Why Biking Rules" and "Street Code." Here's one of the winners in the shorter "Street Code" category, which will be broadcast on local TV, at outdoor summer films, and at cultural venues like BAM. Winners Aldo Arias and Pam Tietze also got a cool two grand, which will buy a lot of magical bike lights.

Narcotics investigators seized more than $800,000 and 61 pounds of cocaine worth nearly $1 million in a Williamsburg apartment yesterday. The drugs were hidden under the seat of a portable sauna, and officials say—wait, portable sauna?! Is that really a thing? Turns out yes, it is! It's also one of the last places anyone would want to "chill" while ripping rails, so the suspects probably figured nobody would ever think to look in there for cocaine. Oh well.

    

A tipster spotted this truck stuck under the Q train subway station on Avenue J in Midwood this morning around 8:45 a.m. We're told "the truck was all crumpled and the fire department had to come out." We're guessing at this point they're just waiting for a giant stick of butter.

Remember that whole Obama Fried Chicken debacle? It's back, in a sort of blurred-out-on-MTV kind of way. Brokelyn reports that the Clipse video for “Popular Demand (Popeye’s)” consists mostly of Clipse and Cam'ron and company "in front of a place with a blank yellow marquee." That is, if you see it on MTV, it will appear blank—everywhere else it's running with a fully in-focus sign, reading "Obama Fried Chicken." So whose call was it to lift the OFC sign from the final cut? Surely the artists picked that spot for a reason besides censoring it out.

Service from the 7th Avenue subway station in Park Slope was stopped for a police investigation. It turns out that one person was fatally struck by a Queens-bound G train.

Perhaps crazier than the mystery of where 5th and Broadway was in Williamsburg... the blogger at Pardon Me For Asking dug up an old map showing something called Yellow Hook. Indeed, there was a Yellow Hook! The NYPL (where there's currently a great exhibit mapping New York's shoreline), has some more evidence of this magical land, which was south of Red Hook.

              

This week the world-renowned butcher (or at least borough-renowned) Tom Mylan opened his chop shop in Brooklyn. The Meat Hook has been alive on the internet for some time, with Twitter and Tumblr keeping carnivores up-to-date with the progress at 100 Frost Street in Williamsburg.

Oh dear. A reader just sent in the above photo and tells us, "On my way to work this morning, I spotted a sacrificed chicken on the steps of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception at the corner of Maujer and Leonard in Williamsburg." Clearly it's not for Kapparot. This leaves a few other options: Santeria, an offering from the nearby Cult of Michael Jackson, Twilight marketing.

While some might claim the worst Post Office in Brooklyn is in Park Slope... the Williamsburg USPS worker bees are working the hardest they've ever worked to steal that title away. The South 4th Street outlet is known for slow service and a blatant disregard for customer service... and sometimes technical difficulties! A reader tells us that those on line this past Saturday got the added treat of being told "there was a problem getting the computers started and there would be a delay for the windows."

First Norah Jones got criticized for a nouveau-Tuscany vibe in the kitchen of her new Cobble Hill home—now the songstress is moving right along with her renovation and allegedly sweet-talked the LPC into letting her have a little bit more light. Beautiful, warm, embracing light. Sounds innocent enough, but the NY Post reports that "neighbors don’t want a window into her soul — or home."

One of the most memorable plays we saw last year was The Walworth Farce, a pitch-black comedy by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The story concerned a menacing father who every day forces his two sons to join him in performing a farcical play he wrote about a phony brain surgeon's attempt to cheat his estranged brother out of his inheritance. In that frenzied, hysterical production, the family's shabby apartment doubled as their stage, and all nine parts were played by the housebound men, as a sort of elaborate domestic ritual for an audience of none.

Earlier this morning, a shooting at the Norwood Palace Bar in Brooklyn has left one person dead and others injured. Around 3 a.m., patrons got into a huge fight and then, according to WCBS 2, "Two plain clothes officers with the anti-crime unit entered the bar in Cypress Hill, and that's when, police said, gunfire was exchanged."

   

A sad story appears to be coming to an even sadder end: Oreo, the pit bull mix who survived being thrown off the roof of a 6-story Brooklyn building, is being euthanized today. According to the NY Times, "Oreo was almost impossible to control once her injuries healed, [ASPCA President Ed Sayres] said. Other officials from the society said Oreo had shown extreme aggressiveness during several behavioral examinations: growling, lunging and trying to bite people who came too close." [Update below: Oreo was euthanized this afternoon.]

Teenagers: they ruin everything, especially when armed. Lots of people around Brooklyn loved the 40-cent Tuesday wing deal at Buffalo Wild Wings sports bar in Fort Greene—even Brooklyn Cyclones players were known to wing it there on Tuesdays. But now the restaurant has discontinued the promotion because of multiple shootings and a stabbing involving adolescents who descended upon the establishment Tuesday night. Thanks a lot, minors!

Earlier this year a reader spotted a tourist group coming off the Bedford Avenue L in Williamsburg. So it shouldn't come as too much of a shock that there's now a course at FIT called "Williamsburg, The New Style Frontier." Or at least, there was on October 24th.

If you spend enough time riding a bike around New York, you learn to steer clear of those insane Access-A-Ride drivers, who are employed by NYC Transit to provide transportation for people with disabilities who can't take the subway or bus. In our experience, Access-A-Ride drivers are maniacs, and in recent years, the drivers have been in some high-profile accidents, including a fatality and a hit-and-run.