Results tagged “brooklynheights”

One Brooklyn Heights resident alerted fellow neighbors about possible gang activity in the neighborhood this week, after spotting four unruly teenagers on Hicks.

Some Brooklyn Heights residents say the cacophony from helicopters using the downtown Manhattan heliport is ruining their nice little neighborhood, with eight to ten flights landing every hour at the downtown heliport, just across the East River. Resident Neil Calet tells the Post, "We can no longer sit on our balcony because even nose-to-nose conversation is impossible." (Which means they probably can't hear the tiny violin we're playing, either.) Some fear it's about to get worse, because in April the city will shift sightseeing tours from the West 30th Street heliport to the downtown heliport. You gonna take that, Brooklyn Heights?

How did Brooklyn Heights ring in the Jewish New Year? With swastikas painted inside the First Unitarian Universalist Church on Monroe Street. Sigh. Police said there were also “very inappropriate statements," but did not get more specific. [BHB]

How much federal stimulus money does it take to change a lightbulb? Brooklyn Heights Association President Judy Stanton brokered a $650,000 deal in order to replace the already functioning streetlamps in Brooklyn Heights with more old timey looking ones. How quaint!

            

If you've been to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or Brooklyn Landing recently, you've probably noticed lots of work going on at the Brooklyn Bridge Park site. We were curious about what's been happening, and asked the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation to give us a tour of the current site. While things are still very much under construction now, they told us that parts of the park will open as early as the end of this year.

Last summer Special Olympics made waves when they came out in full force to protest Ben Stiller's , after a challenge this season where Joan Rivers created a detergent ad called "Jesse James and the Midgets." The chairman of the conference told reporters, "Historically, the word 'midget' has been used to objectify people, like in the circus." He would like to see the FCC ban the word and has written an open letter to NBC. The president of the Little People's Long Island chapter told Newsday, "It's not acceptable to call people the N-word, just as it's not acceptable to call people the M-word. The chosen term now is LP, or little person." Little people have not made it onto Wikipedia's LP disambiguation page, where they hope to one day be listed alongside Launchpad McQuack.

Next week New Yorkers can refrain from being part of the tourism boom at Oregon's Roloff Farms (where stars of TLC reality show Little People, Big World live) because the city is welcoming the Little People of America's national convention in Brooklyn. Their website announces that the convention of over 3,000 little people and their families will take place July 4-10, "at the beautiful Brooklyn Marriott Hotel, located near the Brooklyn Bridge, and just a short hop across the river from Manhattan." The Daily News reports that the Marriott has lowered beds, sinks and ironing boards in preparation, along with a lower check-in desk in the lobby and higher stools in the bar area. Is it wrong that we noticed that the little people's arrivals just happen to coincide with the closing of The Wiz starring Ashanti on Broadway—the musical that snubbed its predecessor's famous casting by having the Munchkins played by tall folks in swivel chairs? Silent protest?

              

Last night Magda Sayeg gathered up the knitting troops to bring these colorful knit "tags" to Brooklyn. 69 Meters is a public art installation commissioned by the Montague Street Business Improvement District and created by Knitta Please (the group which Sayeg is the founder). They've tagged everything from city buses to the Great Wall of China, so why not Brooklyn Heights? Let's hope the rain this morning didn't make the crafty pieces as soggy as that puppy did.

Exactly a year and a day after Brooklyn Heights institution Armando's closed its doors, the Daily News has learned that the beloved neighborhood Italian restaurant will reopen at the same location. After 72 years in business, Armando's called it quits last year and was replaced by the Spicy Pickle sandwich chain. Armando's owner Peter Byros, who also owns the Montague Street building housing the restaurant, tells the News, "[Spicy Pickle] didn't make it; they defaulted on their lease." His daughter Maria will now manage the new incarnation of Armando's, which once upon a time hosted the Dodgers after their games, and other regulars over the years including Norman Mailer, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. Maria says, "We're going to keep it in a similar style - Old New York - but freshened up," and Lost City reports that Byros plans to bring back the restaurant's classic neon lobster sign.

Parents paying $20,000 or more a year to send their kids to St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights aren't too thrilled about the Federal probation office that's opened up 100 feet down the street. Earlier this week, just ten minutes before school let out, a parolee who had served 12 years in jail on drug-related charges bolted from the building as officers tried to arrest him for assault. Karen Fischer was about to pick up her son Sebastian when she saw officers chasing the man; she tells Channel 9 one of the officers reached for his gun but thought better of it. St. Ann's dean Larry Weiss says, "This is exactly what we were told was not going to happen." Weiss was also promised there wouldn't be sex offenders coming into the office; turns out 53 sex offenders—including 6 convicted pedophiles—have swung by since they opened. At least the good news for Sebastian is that his mom will definitely picking him up on time this year. [Brownstoner]

According to the NY Times, P.S. 8 in Brooklyn Heights was once praised by city officials for its turnaround from a school "avoided by the well-off residents of neighboring brownstones" to one "so popular...it has doubled its enrollment since 2002." Even city officials recently praised its success. But now, the city will give it an F on its school report card, because the Department of Education says students aren't improving at a rate comparable to other schools. However, others blame the city's grading system. As Inside Schools put it, "More-than-majority weight on student academic progress — measured by standardized test scores — means that schools that start with more kids on or above grade level can show less ‘progress’ than more challenged schools."

How many trees have to die before someone does something about Olafur Eliasson’s waterfalls? Earlier this month the Parks Department and the Public Art Fund admitted that the salty East River spray from the Brooklyn Bridge waterfall was making the leaves on trees at the River Cafe in DUMBO go prematurely brown. Now the Brooklyn Paper reports that the trees at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade are suffering from the same affliction, brought on by the salt slowing photosynthesis. Officials have assured tree-huggers that the spray from what BP calls Eliasson's "four-headed killing machine" doesn't pose any "long-term danger," but the way things are going, it's only a matter of time before some Earth First! activists start climbing up the falls to try and hang protest banners.

Since moving into a Brooklyn Heights apartment occupied by author H.P. Lovecraft in the '20s, a pair of roommates have been having some weird experiences. A picture "mysteriously leaped off" the wall, the hammer used to hang the picture disappeared, a Ouija board seance really freaked everybody out, and a humming noise has gone unexplained. One of the tenants, Nellie Kurtzman (daughter of famous Mad Magazine founding editor Harvey Kurtzman), tells the Post she doesn't believe in ghosts, but she concedes that the apartment, which Lovecraft described as "something unwholesome, something furtive, something vast lying subterraneanly in obnoxious slumber" in his story "The Horror at Red Hook," is weird. Or maybe Lovecraft is just pissed about having "two Jews living here."

Dan Kaufman, the man accused of stealing customers’ credit card info at several Brooklyn Heights eateries, now knows what it feels like to be on the wrong end of crime. According to the Brooklyn Paper, Kaufman returned home to find the locks changed at his apartment on Pierrepont Street. When a locksmith finally came and opened the door, he discovered that the place had been “ransacked.” The article doesn’t definitively say who’s responsible, but one possible suspect is Alan Young, Kaufman’s estranged business partner at the now-closed restaurants; Young just so happens to own the apartment that Kaufman rents. Also, Kaufman’s just a patsy – his lawyer says it was Young stealing the credit card info all along!

Yesterday at around 4:40 p.m., reports came in that a male was found dead, from an apparent stabbing, in a brownstone on Hicks Street, at the corner of Love Lane in Brooklyn Heights. Today the NY Sun says that the "42-year-old man [Graham Barnett] was found dead with multiple stab wounds to his torso"--he was reportedly found in the bathtub and the police recovered knives from the scene. It is suspected that Barnett, who had lived in the neighborhood for 30 years and was married with two twin daughters, committed suicide.

Dan Kaufman, the co-owner and manager of Busy Chef in Brooklyn Heights who stands accused of identity theft and credit card forgery, is out on bail thanks to his girlfriend, who put up $50,000 after a judge refused to believe that Kaufman's own bail money was obtained legally. A grand jury convened this week to hear the 19 charges against Kaufman, who allegedly charged a total of $24,978.53 to 19 customers' credit card accounts. The Brooklyn Paper reports that Kaufman also has a notorious reputation in Boston, where the landlord of a wine bar run by Kaufman was forced to sue him for unpaid rent. And a former supplier to Kaufman in Boston says “He screwed people three ways to Sunday. I don’t know how he does it — he can look at you smiling and lie to your face, and not even bat an eyelash.”

This is any credit (or debit) card user's worst nightmare: Dan Kaufman, who manages Blue Pig ice cream, Oven pizza, Busy Chef and Wine Bar in Brooklyn Heights, was arrested for taking $25,000 from customers' credit cards. According to the Post, Kaufman would take "credit card slips from Wine Bar and Oven, and then ran them through again at his Busy Chef stores and an outlet on Court Street, pocketing the dough." Kaufman surrendered yesterday and Brooklyn Heights Blog reports the charges include various counts of identity theft and grand larceny. And remember: ALWAYS check your credit card statements.

This is way better than the Tony Soprano wardrobe auction, now you can be the proud owner of an authentic Cosby sweater! Just in time for Father's Day, too. USA Today reports:

Cosby's daughter, Evin, said her mother and father were cleaning out a closet recently when they came across a batch of the sweaters her dad wore when he played Huxtable on NBC's The Cosby Show from 1984 to 1992.

Continue reading "Cliff Huxtable's Sweaters for Sale"

After stalling their landlord’s attempt to build a parking garage in their courtyard next to the BQE two years ago, tenants and other community activists are still fighting the proposal. Built in 1890, the Riverside Apartments at Columbia Place and Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights were regarded as a great advancement in tenement living. Located near the Columbia Place docks, the nine buildings were unique for their running toilets, common courtyard, ventilation, and fireproofing, something unheard of for tenements at the time.

    

Yesterday afternoon, a fire broke out at the Gristedes at Henry and Clark Streets in Brooklyn Heights. All shoppers and employees were evacuated and there were no reported injuries. According to Brooklyn Heights Blog, there was an electrical malfunction in the deli section. McBrooklyn found out from a police officer, "what the fire didn't get, the water from the Fire Department did" (the basement is flooded).

Last month The Brooklyn Eagle had a report on how Brooklyn has been sucking the creative lifeblood right out of Manhattan. In recent years Brooklyn has experienced a 33.2 percent increase in the number of self-employed creatives, while Manhattan’s growth during the same period was a mere 6.5 percent.

Brooklyn Heights residents may have thought their neighborhood had earned a respite from anti-Semitic graffiti after the arrest and confession of Ivaylo Ivanov, who committed and then confessed to a string of vandalism incidents last year that left Brooklyn Heights peppered with swastikas in spray paint. But last week another wall was defaced with a symbol of hate. The incident involved a a brick apartment building at 22 Remsen St. The swastika was first spotted by Donald Brennan, who owns a nearby building. He told The New York Times "'I was sitting in my car at the curb with my family, I looked over my shoulder and I saw it there,' he said, adding that he felt 'absolutely shocked, kind of sick.'”

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, whereas Clinton raised $726,524.

When you're found to be making pipe bombs amidst an apartment arsenal of weapons and then confess to painting swastikas in your Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, expect the book to be thrown at you repeatedly. Ivaylo Ivanov was charged with over 100 criminal counts for his activities.

The story of Ivaylo Ivanov just gets more and more strange. First, he calls the cops saying that he was shot in the hand only to admit that he shot himself. Next, the police investigate the situation only to find a cache of assorted weapons and pipe bombs at Ivanov's residence. Now the 31-year-old ex-con admits to defacing Brooklyn Heights with swastikas last year.

Yesterday we mentioned that a cache of weapons - including a number of pipe bombs - were found in a Remsen Street apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Now it turns out the apartment was shared by an ex-con and a professor at Columbia University!

After a man arrived at a Brooklyn hospital with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gun shot wound to his hand, police investigating the incident discovered a cache of weapons, including multiple pipe bombs, in his Brooklyn Heights apartment. Police could not rule out terrorism as they confiscated weapons and possibly explosive devices from the man's apartment on Remsen St. And they weren't going to let neighbors relax either.

Danish–Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson will work with the Public Art Fund – a nonprofit that brought Anish Kapoor's "Sky Mirror" and Jeff Koons's "Puppy," to Rockefeller Center – to bring freestanding waterfalls to the East River this spring. The project will be officially announced tomorrow, but a source tells the Sun that the waterfalls will rise 60 to 70 feet above the water, which is more than half as high as the Brooklyn Bridge roadway. The spectacle will be visible from the area around the Seaport and Brooklyn Heights.

Brooklyn bars and restaurants rejoice: you can once again put your sandwich board signs on the sidewalk without fear of tickets from the Department of Sanitation! Your free and effective method for seducing customers with daily specials and clever jokes about drinking the pain away is now perfectly legal. Of course, this does not give you permission to lose all restraint and play music or let people dance.