Have a Good One

Two Arrested in Parking Dispute

It happened on 72nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues this afternoon.

According to a couple of witnesses I talked to on the street, a parking dispute got physical.

It started when an older guy, trying to work out of a plowed-in parking spot, kept ramming a younger guys' car.

The younger guy protested -- the older guy was really beating up his car.

Things escalated. The older guy apparently threw the first punch.  The younger guy punched back, harder.

The older guy was getting the worst of it when he called 911.

No rescue:  the cops arrested them both and hauled them off in the cruiser.

I got one word:  "shovel".

Christmas Cactus

Is This Guy To Blame?

Mayor Bloomberg's new deputy mayor for operations, Stephen Goldsmith, has come under scrutiny in the aftermath of the city's inept response to the Blizzard of 2010.

All of the other players: police, sanitation, fire and EMS workers, were the same as the last big storm in 2007.  Goldsmith, the former Indianapolis mayor and policy wonk who made his political bones as a government "reinventor", was the only new guy.

Goldsmith's strong suit has been laying off city workers and privatizing services.

He was appointed as deputy mayor for operations in April. The blizzard was his first big test.

By all accounts, the fumble began when Goldsmith and Bloomberg refused to declare a snow emergency after they were told the storm was on the way. First responders knew, by 3 AM on Monday morning, that it was an emergency, but City Hall held out.

The Daily News remembered Rudy Guiliani's response to the Blizzard of 1996, which dumped 20 inches on the city and left stowdrifts 20 feet high.

Guiliani not only declared a snow emergency, but ordered all nonessential vehicles off the road and took 3,300 city buses out of service to clear the way for sanitation trucks and rescue vehicles.

Then he got Gov. George Pataki to send 400 national guardsmen with 100 Humvees, used as ambulances and medical transport vehicles.

Guiliani treated every snowstorm as a big deal and made all his commissioners show up at the command center.

That was then.

Goldsmith didn't show up at the command center until Monday.

Goldsmith is at war with DSNY.  Before the storm hit, he was hard at work trying to gut its unionized workforce by cutting staff and contracting out services.  He is set to demote -- and in some cases cut the pay -- of DSNY supervisors in January, putting them back on garbage trucks.

People are wondering if the supervisors Goldsmith targeted were part of the city's slow response to the storm.  

The article from the Daily News: 

Writers on the Storm

Commenters over at our neighbor Sheepshead Bites are so angry about unplowed streets, they've started writing poetry.

That's right, these people are so fed up, they're rhyming.

The poetry thing started out as a joke, but it's gone viral, as more and more readers weigh in with blizzard poems.

Editor Ned Berke has reached out to invite Bay Ridge residents to add their two cents' worth -- rhymed, of course.

Here's a verse I liked:

(To the tune of Send in the Clowns)

Aren't you rich?
Why don't you care?
We stuck in Brooklyn
Are in despair.
Send in the plows...

If you're ready to rhyme, here's the link.

Linkage

Bay Ridge residents who got sick of waiting and hired their own plows won't be reimbursed by the city [NY 1]

More blizzard details from Bay Ridge [Daily News.]

One of those year-end news roundup thingies, from the Brooklyn Paper.

The story of Brooklyn's Kahnewake Mohawks.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in a 3-car smashup on the snowy Gowanus.

Favorite WTF stories of 2010, from the Village Voice.

Is Mayor Bloomberg's new Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith responsible for the city's disastrous response to the Blizzard of 2010? [Daily News]

The plight of wild animals in New York City [Satya.]

Uh-oh:  the NYC Water Board has scheduled a series of hearings on water rates in 2011 [Citizen Who.]

The city's Department of Education pits public schools and charter schools against each other in a fight for space [Gotham Gazette.]

A 2010 MTA best/worst list from the Straphangers Campaign.

Photos of the snow storm from around the region [WNYC.]

EPA:  hydrofracking contaminated water in Texas;  explosion is threatened [Pro Publica.]

Is publishing doomed, or just different now? [Brooklyn Rail.]

Mourning the death of the American middle class [Alternet.]

Use your year-end donation to help end Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining [Huffpost.]

Matt Taibbi diagnoses the Tea Party "moron complex" [Alternet.]

The Gulf Oil Disaster was caused by BP's reckless growth, cost cutting [Pro Publica.]

The Politics of Snow Removal

As the accusations and excuses fly in the aftermath of the Blizzard of 2010, old lessons are resurfacing.

How the mayor of New York City handles record snowfalls is a political crucible:  blizzards have ended political careers.

Mayor John Lindsay's bungling of the Blizzard of 1969, a legendary political crisis now encoded in the DNA of municipal politics, nearly brought down his administration -- and schooled elected officials in the politics of snow removal.

Forty years on, the lesson seems to have been forgotten.

The Blizzard of '69 nearly paralyzed the city for three days. Schools, streets, subways, airports and other infrastructure didn't come back online until mid-week.

The neglected streets of Queens were impassable: no buses, taxicabs or delivery vehicles; no trash or garbage collection for days.

The famously hands-on Lindsay went to Queens, where his limousine got stuck in the snow and he was booed by the locals, who called him a "bum."

Sanitation workers, who held a grudge against the Lindsay administration for its handling of their 1968 strike, were accused of sabotaging the snow removal effort.

Lindsay's career, once on a presidential trajectory, was capped after his mayoralty ended.

Mayor Bloomberg seemed to fully grasp the politics of snow removal in his response to the Blizzard of 2006.

What happened this time around?

The post from the New York Times Cityroom blog.

More from NBC.

Bloomberg's response to the outrage [Gothamist.]

Fifth Avenue Returns to Life

Paralysis

People in South Brooklyn who could remember said they hadn't seen snowplows, ambulances and buses stuck in the snow since the 1960s.

It took paramedics 3 1/2 hours to reach sixty-three-year-old Dominick Caratozzolo on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge after he had a heart attack yesterday morning.

The 911 call was made at around 8 AM.  Emergency responders didn't show up until a quarter to 12.

Caratozzolo was dead by then.

It took another another 28 hours for the city medical examiner to pick up the body.

The article from the Wall Street Journal.

All a Matter of Perspective

Mayor Bloomberg, whose street looks like this, has urged us outer-boro types to be patient and wait our turn.

Blogger Ned Berke at Sheepshead Bites reports that, over in his neighborhood, there have been no roads, no buses and no trains since the storm.  Businesses remain shuttered, and the sick can't get to the hospital.

Here in Bay Ridge, Fifth Avenue is a toboggan run, and none of the side streets in the north end have been touched.  Traffic is moving on 4th and 6th Avenues, which have been at least partially cleared.

Update:  by 6 PM this evening, my north end street had been plowed, but at 9 PM, 5th Avenue was still impassable.

This is the second day that 5th Avenue, one of the neighborhood's major commercial streets, has been virtually shut down, which has to be affecting the bottom line of the dozens of avenue businesses that depend on foot and automotive traffic.

The post from Sheepshead Bites.

The Big Storm: Still Floundering

Protecting Prostitutes

Hassan Malik allegedly murdered Betty Williams, stuffed her battered body into a suitcase, and left it on the street in Harlem, because he felt she had charged him too much for a sex act.

Every time I read about another prostitute murdered by a john, I think about the double victimization that prostitution represents: to have nothing to sell but sex, and to be criminalized for doing so.

Although we've learned many times over that legislating morality doesn't work (Prohibition), prostitution is criminalized in the US, except in certain parts of Nevada, at the same time "the world's oldest profession" (wink, wink) is romanticized, conventionalized and fetishized ("hooker heels", breast implants.)

Criminalizing sex work has fostered this country's vast black market for sex -- sectors of which are dominated by drug traffickers and sex slavers -- and exposed street prostitutes to eighteen times the risk of being murdered than other women of similar age and race.

People who enter sex work, typically because they are broke, addicted or both, face bleak choices:  work in an illegal brothel or agency or walk the streets alone and unprotected.  They're breaking the law by having sex for pay or using drugs, so they can't, and won't, turn to the police for help, which leaves them at the mercy of their pimps and johns.

Police crackdowns only result in the stroll being moved to another, more dangerous, location.

In some [I would say more enlightened] countries, like the Netherlands, Germany and New Zealand, prostitution has been decriminalized and is treated as any other profession, which at least guarantees prostitutes the safety and security of a fixed workplace and a network of co-workers.

By all accounts, commercializing prostitution would better protect sex workers, improve their working conditions, and provide them with needed social, medical and legal resources.  Legal brothels or agencies would have a profit-based incentive to ensure that their workers were clean and disease-free.

Legalized prostitution, had it existed in this country, could have provided a more humane alternative to the life that Betty Williams was living -- the life that brought her to Hassan Malik's apartment alone, without backup.

Williams, who had a history of drug arrests, may have been an addict. Drug addiction, alcoholism and mental illness, which strike people of all socioeconomic levels, should be proactively and compassionately addressed, rather than simultaneously condemned and enabled by our conflicted society.

Contempt solves nothing.

A related blog post from the Christian Science Monitor.

As did Seattle's Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, the quietly monstrous Joel Rifkin, New York's most prolific serial killer, targeted sex workers exclusively.

The Politics of Pardons

Rapper "Slick Rick", an illegal immigrant whose hits include "Treat Her Like a Prostitute", got one after shooting his cousin and an innocent bystander and serving five years in jail for attempted murder.

Church-going Walter Mitty-with-a-side-of-Clint Eastwood John White, who shot and killed an unarmed teenager in his driveway, walked out of jail after serving only five months for manslaughter when his sentence got commuted, the next best thing to one.

Twenty-four illegal immigrants with criminal records got theirs on Christmas Eve.

But Bay Ridge native John O'Hara, convicted of illegal voting in a politically-motivated prosecution, is still waiting for a pardon after completing five years on probation, a $20,000 fine, 1,500 hours of community service, and reinstatement to practice law.

His crime?  Voting from his girlfriend's address.

More from the Daily News.

More from the Albany Times-Union.

Linkage

Demolition-by-neglect on Admiral's Row [Daily News.]

The latest in the Sheepshead Mosque controversy [Daily News.]

Marty Markowitz lobbies against bike lanes in his holiday card [Daily News.]

I wonder if those poor people ever got off that A train that was stuck for 6 hours in Queens [Queens Crap.]

Yup the A train nightmare ended after 8 hours [AP.]

Why are people leaving New York? [True News.]

The 2010 New Sounds Listener Poll [WNYC.]

Mark Ruffalo stumps on hydrofracking [WNYC.]

Al Franken on net neutrality [Alternet.]

Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell on Net Neutrality [Daily Kos.]

The Big Storm

Denial is a Helluva Drug

Remember Kevin Peter Carroll, who defeated veteran Ralph Perfetto in the race for Democratic District Leader in the 60th AD this fall?

Carroll was a reformer, right?  His Brooklyn Democrats for Change at least fronted a reform agenda.

But the Brooklyn Paper reports that City Council Member Steve Levin (D-Brooklyn Heights) just hired Carroll as his legislative director, typically a patronage job.

Levin came up as the protege of Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez, paying his political dues as Lopez’s chief of staff.

Carroll's new job probably shouldn't come as such a surprise:  his first official act as district leader was to endorse Lopez for county leader;  and, according to the Brooklyn Paper, the Bay Ridge Interpol (now restricted to invited guests) reported that Lopez showed up at the Brooklyn Democrats for Change Christmas party this year.

Levin of course denies that hiring Carroll involved patronage or payback, saying that "politics was not a consideration".

Right.

Park Slope District Leader Chris Owens said Levin hired Carroll as payback for not interfering with Lopez's agenda.

Carroll, tearing a page out of Michael McMahon's campaign playbook, fended off accusations that he has sold out by recasting himself as an "independent".

The article from the Brooklyn Paper.

Bloomberg Linked to Mosque Developers?

The right-wing American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) -- yes, the similarity to "ACLU" is uncanny -- which has filed a lawsuit to stop the Ground Zero Mosque, says that Mayor Michael Bloomberg's response to its FOIL request substantiates the allegations in its lawsuit and shows that Bloomberg's office was secretly involved with the mosque developers.

The ACLJ accused the Mayor’s Office of delaying its FOIL response for more than four months, then releasing only a portion of the required documents, just before Christmas, to hide the extent of its involvement in the mosque project.

The named plaintiff in the lawsuit is Tim Brown, a firefighter and first responder who survived the Twin Towers’ collapse, who alleges that the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, by failing to landmark the 19th century building that would be demolished to build the mosque, acted arbitrarily, abused its discretion, and violated administrative law.

The Mayor's Office has now been added as a defendant in the lawsuit.

According to the ACLJ, the Mayor's 21-page FOIL disclosure reveals that City Hall was in direct communication with the mosque developers and facilitated discussions between the developers and Manhattan Community Board 1.

An email from Shelly Friedman, the developer's attorney, mentions that LPC Chair Robert Tierney sought "political cover" for his agency's decision to deny the building landmark protection.

Politically embarrassing, definitely, but illegal?

The article from Business Wire.

More from Get Religion.

More from the New York Post, condemning the Mayor Bloomberg's administration for facilitating the mosque development.  Since helping to build the mosque would appear to foster, rather than suppress, free exercise, I'm still not sure where the illegality would be.

Snowy Yards

Polar Bears in Swim Trunks and Sneakers

The Coney Island Polar Bear Club, the oldest winter bathing organization in the U.S., will host its annual New Year's Day Swim on January 1, 2011.

Participants will assemble on the Boardwalk at Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island.  Please arrive early:  the swim begins at 1:00 PM sharp. 

Click here for directions.

The NYC Parks Department provides changing facilities on the Boardwalk at Stillwell Avenue.

Pack plenty of warm winter clothing, surf boots or old sneakers, and a camera -- because without that crucial photographic evidence, what's the point?

You can register and pledge to "Freezin for a Reason", the charity fundraiser embedded in the swim, here.

The swim is free for participants and observers, but everyone is encouraged to make a voluntary contribution to the Polar Bears' partner, Camp Sunshine.

The Polar Bears don't just do this crazy thing once a year, oh, no:  they swim in the Atlantic Ocean at Coney Island Beach every Sunday from November through April.

Coverage of the New Year's Day Swim from Gothamist.

"The Infighting Needs to Stop"

On December 7, the New York City Off Track Betting Corporation, in financial crisis for years, closed, leaving an annual $750 million in horse bets -- about 45% of off-track betting statewide -- up for grabs.

If New York can't find a way to hold onto that money, it will be lost to the state's taxpayers.

Problem is how to get the players to the negotiating table.  New York may have the best horse racing in the nation, but its fractured racing industry can't seem to come together to seize the moment.

Michael Cardozo, New York City's Corporation Counsel, warned that about 900 retirees of the city's OTB would lose their medical benefits as of January 1, unless the state steps in to pick up $6 million in annual insurance costs.

The medical benefits hot potato is only a piece of much bigger negotiation, in which industry leaders and New York lawmakers hope to seize the opportunity to modernize horse racing in the aftermath of what was the biggest betting organization in the country.

The State Assembly is considering merging the state's five remaining off-track betting corporations -- upstate and on Long Island -- into one, with possible buy-in by the racing industry.  One proposal being considering is an OTB TV channel offering virtual betting in places like hotels and sports bars.  Another is reaching out to smart phone users through a betting application.

But in the ever-contentious New York racing community, tracks, OTBs, horse owners and breeders can't seem to agree on anything. Tracks, horse owners and breeders want to consolidate betting under their control, cutting the OTBs out. OTBs, created by state government to pass betting revenues along to local governments as property tax relief, say that if they get cut out, the taxpayers will bear the brunt.

At stake in the squabble are more than 35,000 racing industry-supported jobs, which would be gobbled up by offshore and illegal bookmakers, casinos and other competitors if the players can't sort it out in-house.

The article from Crain's New York.

Creche, Fifth Avenue

Gov. David Paterson Grants Clemency to John White

The Rev. Al Sharpton -- but not the Suffolk County prosecutor or the victim's family -- got the chance to talk to Gov. Paterson before he granted clemency this week to John White, the Miller Place man who shot and killed Daniel Cicciaro, Jr. in 2006.

White is a 56-year-old black.  The 17-year-old Cicciaro was white.

Paterson said that, although the victim's mother made some "compelling" points after the fact, he would have freed White anyway.

White, whose conviction had withstood all appeals, came home for Christmas after serving 5 months of a 2-to-4 year prison term for weapons possession and manslaughter.

According to a New York Times account in 2006, Cicciaro and John White's son, Aaron White, then 19, were at a birthday party in Sound Beach that August when an upset girl who lived in the house told guests that White had posted a rape threat against her on an Internet message board.

After White was told to leave, and did, he ended up in a cellphone conversation with Cicciaro, whose friends said White challenged Cicciaro to come to his house in Miller Place and settle it.

In a later account, they accused White of baiting Cicciaro.

Cicciaro turned out to be mistaken in his defense of the girl: the rape threat had been posted by one of Aaron White's friends posing as Aaron, but Cicciaro didn't know that when he and four friends drove up to White’s house at around 11 PM.

White and his father walked out of the house, carrying guns, and ordered the group to leave.

John White repeatedly screamed at Cicciaro “I’m going to kill you”.

Cicciaro challenged back, “Go ahead and shoot me!”

White shot Cicciaro in the face at point-blank range. He later said it was an accident.

White then calmly turned and walked back up his driveway, leaving Cicciaro’s friends to pull him into their car and drive him to a nearby hospital, where he died an hour later.

The encounter, captured on a neighbor's surveillance video, lasted about a minute-and-a-half.

According to White's attorney, the Cicciaro group used the "N" word and made threats against White's family.

According to Cicciaro's family and friends, White's attorney strategically played the race card  -- which turned out to be the "get out of jail free" card -- at his trial.

White had apparently stockpiled dozens of rounds of ammo for the "lynch mob" in his head, which arrived at the foot of his driveway in the form of five unarmed teenage boys.

The Daily News article.

More from Newsday.

The Cicciaros, less "respectable" than the church-going Whites, were branded as "skinheads" during the trial.

In the same Christmas eve pardon session, Paterson freed two dozen illegal immigrants facing deportation.

Linkage

Oh, my.  It seems that Vinnie Gentile's dad is not a nice man [Gothamist.]

A catalog of Bay Ridge Christmas lights [Bay Ridge Talk.]

The new PS 264, an elementary school for the arts, goes up on 4th Avenue in Bay Ridge [Brownstoner.]

How un-seasonable of him:  the Beehive Hairdresser hates on the Dyker Lights.

Will Coney Island succeed as a year-round destination? [City Limits]

Stop shopping?  Not bloody likely. Shoppers came back with a vengeance this Christmas [AP.]

Will closing OTB kill horse racing in New York State? [Gotham Gazette]

City Comptroller John Liu, likely candidate for mayor, hits Bloomberg on CityTime [Wall Street Journal.]

What does the MTA funding crisis mean to the city's future? [City Limits.]

The documentary Gasland  has changed the national dialogue about hydrofracking [The Nation.]

Whoa. This Pulitzer Prize winner thinks our country is on the verge of collapse [Raw Story.]

So it's Christmas, ya'll.  Peace, light, love and laughter. 

Freak Bulldozed

Never mind shooting the Freak: they bulldozed him.

Before eight Coney Island boardwalk tenants could get to a judge in the lawsuit they've filed to keep their businesses, landlord Zamperla Amusements made a "self-help" eviction move on Shoot the Freak.

Zamperla's people showed up with a bulldozer this week and leveled Anthony Berlingieri's attraction, where, for the past ten years, you could shoot paintballs at the eponymous "freak".

Berlingieri told the Post Zamperla gave him no notice before wiping out his business and all of his equipment.

Apparently, the now-empty space will become the entrance to one of Zamperla's new roller coasters.

Zamperla claimed that its actions were legal.  But Berlingieri will get a chance to challenge the eviction at a court hearing next month in the lawsuit he and his fellow business owners have filed to keep Zamperla from throwing them off the boardwalk.

Ruby's Bar, also facing eviction and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, will be open on New Year's Day for an after-party and protest following the annual Coney Island Polar Bear swim.

And if you're hiring for your holiday party, the freak is looking for a gig.

The post from Gothamist.

Green Church Bulletin: New House of Worship

Heads up, preservationist devils: the congregation of the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, after demolishing -- rather than re-purposing -- three sound buildings:  a historic church, a Sunday school building and a parsonage, has filed plans with the city's Department of Buildings to construct a two-story "house of worship" at 364 Ovington Avenue, on the corner it formerly owned at Ovington and 4th Avenues in Bay Ridge.

The former Methodist parsonage, the end house on a limestone-fronted row, was 362 Ovington.  The new construction at 364 Ovington reflects a re-numbering done during the demolition process.

According to Schedule A in the plan application, the BRUMC's new building, 32 feet high to the new school's looming 69 feet, will have a "mezzanine", rather than the second story in the original plans.

No drawings are available yet on the DOB BIS database.

The link to the plan application on BIS, with thanks to DK.

Christmas Lights, 5th Avenue

Access-A-Ride Pilot Uses Yellow Cabs

Yellow cabs will be substituted for MTA Access-A-Ride vans in a new city/MTA pilot program, at a per-trip cost saving of nearly 70%.

Rides will be charged to pre-paid debit cards.

Access-A-Ride provides 24/7 door-to-door transportation for people with disabilities who can't use city bus or subway service.

A trip in a fully-accessible van costs $49, but about 75% of Access-A-Ride customers don't need a lift-equipped vehicle, so 400 of those customers will be taking taxis during the 90-day pilot-- at an average saving of $15 a trip.

Users will still pay $2.25 a trip.

The pilot is only available to customers who need pickup and drop-off below 96th Street in Manhattan and are ambulatory subscribers, meaning they make regular scheduled trips to the same destinations.

The City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission will feed the GPS tripsheet data from each cab ride to the MTA, which will track the location of every pickup and dropoff.

The press release from NYC.Gov.

The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge

Remember blogger Mark Brown of Left in Bay Ridge? Well, as you know, Mark left Bay Ridge and moved back to the West Coast.  I do get the occasional email blast, though, and that's how I found out about Brown's 2007 comedy The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge, called "a delightful new holiday tradition". Ebenezer Scrooze, a year after his miraculous change of heart, has gone back to his old ways:  he's suing Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future for a long list of torts, including slander and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The ghosts hire a barrister, the Rumpole-esque Solomon Rothschild, to defend them. Of course, the penny-pinching Scrooge represents himself. On the witness stand, the Spirit of Christmas Future admits under cross examination that Jacob Marley broke the rules of redemption. Scrooge wins the lawsuit, and Marley and the spirits end up facing a whopping judgment of 40,000 pounds each and get stripped of their redemptive duties -- amounting to a death sentence. But then comes a staggering turn of events in which Scrooge makes the spirits an offer they can't refuse... You can buy the play here.

Chaining Mom and Pop

These are dark days for Mom and Pop in Brooklyn.

In a study that will likely be used by the Walmart forces moving on East New York, The Center for an Urban Future found that 75 national chains moved into Brooklyn between 2009 and 2010 -- more than anywhere else in the city.

Brooklyn now has 1,330 chain stores. Dunkin’ Donuts leads the pack with 126 caffeine stations -- double the market penetration of Subway and McDonald’s.

Flatlands is chain store ground zero (who knew), with 14 new national stores joining the146 national retailers already there.

Bay Ridge racked up four new chain stores this year, including Fabco Shoes, coming to 86th Street -- as local small businesses struggle to survive.

Gentrified Downtown Brooklyn, a public transit hub with heavy foot traffic, has attracted Aeropostale, SYMS/Filene’s Basement, Barney’s Coop, H&M, and the Panera sandwich shop.

Chains avoid young and trendy Williamsburg and Greenpoint, seen by marketers as too "niche".

Maybe hipsters aren't so bad to have around, after all.

The article from the Brooklyn Paper.