Results tagged “citycouncilwoman”

Yesterday, we briefly mentioned that Viola Plummer, former City Council staffer under Councilman Charles Barron, was forcibly removed from a City Council meeting. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn fired Plummer, who had heckled her during meetings and referenced an "assassination" of another City Council member (assassination of his career, Plummer later claimed), for not agreeing to behave during meetings. Plummer filed a $1 million lawsuit against Quinn and continues to work for Barron as a volunteer.

Mayor Bloomberg just hates congestion: He announced a plan to more aggressively go after drivers who "block the box" at intersections. The city describe box blocking as "driving into an intersection as the light is changing without room to continue through it, thus blocking traffic," and it seriously sucks. Mayor Bloomberg wants to allow all 2,800 traffic agents to issue tickets (for some reason, only a few traffic enforcement agents can issue them now) in a faster and more efficient way with handheld devices and increase the fine from $90 to $115.

Yesterday morning, a 200-foot long chunk of a rooftop parapet on a Brooklyn building collapsed onto the street. While this would be news no matter what or where it happened, the building is the Ward Bread Bakery, which happens to be one of many buildings that are being demolished for the massive Atlantic Yards project in downtown Brooklyn. The Department of Buildings is inspecting neighboring buildings and 350 people, including those living in a shelter next door, were evacuated as a precaution.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: shots fired early this evening on Blake Ave. in Brooklyn, a homicide/suicide on 225th St. in Queens this afternoon, and a sexual assault early this morning on West 120th St. in Manhattan.
• City Council Speaker Christine Quinn wants black activist Sonny Carson stricken from the list of nominees for proposed street names because she thinks he was divisive and anti-white. Former Black Panther and current Brooklyn Council Member Charles Barron disagrees with the exclusion, noting that Brooklyn is full of streets named after racists and slaveholders, and calls Carson a hero.
• City Council members will vote on a proposal to restrict the growth of pedicabs in the city the day after Earth Day (Sunday the 22nd). Opponents hope the proximity of the two events will sway Council Members in favor of the pedicabs.
• The founder of the Zone Chefs diet service plead guilty along with several mobsters of running a boiler-room stock scheme designed to thin investors' wallets.
• Mayor Bloomberg reactivated a portion of the Staten Island Railroad in order to shift waste transfer from New York to New Jersey away from trucks and towards rail transport.
• Rep. Jerrold Nadler and City Councilwoman Gale Brewer are two more politicians who wrote letters in support of a class trip to Cuba, that wasn't actually a school event and that no one knew anything about at the time.
• Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff says the plan for a Santiago Calatrava-designed gondola is still in the works. The elaborate cable car system would transport passengers to and from Manhattan and Brooklyn via Governors Island.
• Despite pouring boiling water all over his victim to destroy DNA evidence, the Washington Hamilton Heights rapist did leave some at the scene and the police are in possession of it.
• The Tom Cruise-hosted fund-raiser to support a 9/11 rescue worker detoxification program isn't until tomorrow, but the City Council has already issued a proclamation honoring the late Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard for contributing his vitamin and sauna therapy program to the world.

(gowanus, by f.trainer at flickr)

Last Friday's Critical Mass with the NYPD's new parade rules (groups of 50 or more must apply for permits) certainly got many of you commenting. For those of you who didn't participate in the ride or see it unfold, our videographer Kelly Loudenberg filed this video. She was even riding in the pedicab with City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez!

The Department of Buildings ordered workers to "immediately demolish" the rest of a Harlem building that partially collapsed yesterday morning. The vacant building's roof suddenly fell as workers had been preparing it for demolition. One witness told the Post, "I heard a loud noise. The building started shaking. It was moving and cracking. Then there was a cloud. The cloud was faster than me. By the time I crossed the street it had completely covered me."

City Councilwoman Gale Brewer is introducing an intriguing bill: Business owners would be fined if they keep their windows or doors open while the air-conditioning is on. The NY Sun reports that the bill would "make it illegal for windows to be open while an air conditioner is operating and would require all doors to be closed except to allow people to enter or exit a building." The fine would be $200 per open window or door!

If you live in the 40th District, an area that covers parts of Crown Heights, Flatbush and East Flatbush, you can vote in tomorrow special election to the seat that used to belong to former City Councilwoman - now Congresswoman - Yvette Clarke. And there's another special election for a City Council seat in Staten Island as well, so South Shore voters, head to the polls.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese's decision to close a number of city churches may have been inevitable, but it doesn't make for very good PR for the Catholic Church, especially when you see distraught parishioners being led from a church, handcuffed for trespassing. Last night, six female parishioners at Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in East Harlem were arrested after holding a vigil to protest the church's closure. One of the parishioners, Carmen Villegas, told WABC 7, "If you experience going to your home, and that your locks have been changed, you feel that you have been evicted from your home. So when I saw the changing of those locks, I feel evicted from my home."

The city's Franchise and Concession Review Committee is scheduled to vote this coming week on whether or not to approve a proposal to have twenty Manhattan private schools pay for part of the renovation of Randall's Island athletic fields in return for exclusive use of a majority of the fields. The plan, which is separate from the controversial water park, calls for schools such as Dalton and Spence to pay the city $52 million dollars over twenty years. The city would kick in an additional $18 million for the fields, and $53 million for island infrastructure. In return for the payment the schools would get exclusive 3-6 p.m. use of at least two-thirds of the 63 playing fields.

Yesterday, officials welcomed Barclays as the winner in the $400 million naming rights derby for Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project. The NY Times reports that the Nets looked at various entities to pitch the idea of becoming lucky one to pay lots of money to have its name on the Frank Gehry-designed arena and decided Barclays Bank "needed a game changer, that they don’t have as big a presence or brand recognition here as in the U.K." As they say, a sucker is born every minute!

As if bottle service nightclubs wasn't fancy enough: amNY reports that City Councilwoman Melinda Katz is proposes that nightclubs should have waiters pour drinks for those with bottle service at nightclubs. Katz says this would be a way to keep people from drinking too much and underage drinking. Hmm, what about drink stealing? Or people buying drinks for others? And restaurants won't have to worry - this proposal would only affect nightclubs.

They say New York is home to a million stories, and so far this year, we've published 7021 of them here on Gothamist. So in case you missed any of those, let's take a little stroll back in time, and review the most significant stories the past 12 months, shall we? Here's part one of a semi-chronological look at 2006; part two will go up tomorrow:

It had been a few days since anyone had seen Haydee Soto or her children, 13 year old Valerie Rivera and 15 year old John James Bordoy at the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene. A smell had been coming from the family's apartment, so neighbors and relatives asked the police to open the door, only to find a grim scene. The dead bodies of Soto, Rivera, and Bordoy, as well as Hector Viera, in different rooms. Police believe Viera killed the three with a baseball bat and then committed suicide by overdosing (a hypodermic needle was found in his arm). The bodies were so badly beaten that the NY Times says that "it made it unclear what had caused their deaths," but City Councilwoman Letitia James said, "All indications are that it was a murder-suicide." The Post on the crime:

Cops theorized that Viera first killed the mom in the living room while her children were at school, then dragged her body into her bed to make it seem as if she were sleeping. They suspect he then separately killed each of the children as they arrived home.

While the NY Times delicately writes the relationship between Soto and Viera was "murky," the Daily and Post report that Soto and Viera were half-siblings may have been lovers as well. While Soto would call Viera her brother, the Post reports that Rivera told friend Carmen Tirado about her mother and Viera, saying Soto "doesn't like to be by herself." Tirado told the Daily News, "He always slept in her room. Valerie didn't believe that was her uncle, because why would her uncle sleep with her mom? In the street, he acted like she was his girl." Soto and Viera's family, however, deny the allegations. Bordoy's aunt said about Bordoy and Rivera, "They were great kids. Their father is destroyed." Bordoy had muscular dystrophy and used a wheelchair.

Sergeant James Rector had just left work at a police recruiting office near the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene when he saw a teenager pointing a gun execution-style at a man on the street. Rector yelled for 17 year old Eric Hines to stop and identified himself as a police officer, but Hines shot him twice. Rector, while hit in the ankle and butt, managed to shoot 11 rounds at Hines, hitting him in the leg and on the right side. Rector is recovering from his wounds while Hines died from his injuries. Hines's initial target was treated for a shot in the leg and was also questioned by police.

City Councilwoman Yvette Clarke won the hotly contested 11th District Congressional primary in Brooklyn yesterday. Clarke got 31% of the vote, with fellow City Council member - and the only white candidate in the four-way race - David Yassky getting 26%, State Senator Carl Andrews with 23% and Chris Owens, Mayor Owens who is retiring the Congressional seat, getting under 20%.

Oh, City Councilwoman Yvette Clarke. You get a big dose of attention from the NY Times on Wednesday about your run for Major Owen's Congressional Seat, but then it turns out you never graduated from Oberlin, the way your campaign literature in 2004 and 2005 claimed you did. Clarke was a few credits short of a degree, and her aides said that she had finished them up at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. The problem? Oberlin never got those transcripts. Oops! Yesterday, the Daily News had a statement from Clarke about the incident, where she claimed she thought she had "fulfilled the requirements for a bachelor's degree," but then "discovered" that she never actually finished those classes. What? Clarke is 41 - that's not old and no reason to forget taking a class that would give you a college degree.

The Atlantic Yards Project's public meeting last night was packed with Brooklyn residents wanting to have their say. WNBC reported that hundreds of people were waiting outside the New York City College of Technology, since the auditorium was full, and inside, "the crowd became unruly, cheering wildly for their cause until security was called in to remove a few of the audience members." That sounds about right - and they had lots of signs for and against the project! About 300 people had signed up to speak, and since 3 minutes is allowed for each person, that would mean a public meeting that would go on for more than half a day.

- And our favorite, from City Councilwoman Jessica Lappin: "When I went to Stuyvesant and none of us had cellphones. And people came from neighboring schools and tried to beat us up anyway."Of course, that was in the old Stuyvesant days, when kids from Washington Irving High School would harrass Stuy kids walking eastward. Anyway, Deputy Mayor Derek Walcott told the City Council the Mayor would not move away from its policy. Take that from the Bloomberg "311 - it's all about information" Administration!

People are wondering why City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is so quiet about the Atlantic Yards project. The Observer points out that Quinn was instrumental in leading City Hall opposition to the West Side Stadium, with the suggestion being that Quinn is thinking about running for Mayor and will need to keep certain people happy. Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's Daniel Goldstein tells the Observer, "It would not be a principled position for her to support it as it is currently proposed," while City Councilwoman Letitia James, whose district will be affected by the project, says, "We’re still negotiating with the Speaker’s office. She definitely remembers that I was there for Hudson Yards.” Oh, yeah, Hudson Yards - that's what the West Side project was called.

There's a NY Times article about NYC TV, our city's TV station, and basically crediting the turnaround from just showing City Council meetings and mayor press conferences to showcasing more cultural and social offerings, like short films, shows about hip-hop in the city, and what do for $9.99 in one day. But some critics, like City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, think the shows are too much about tourism and stuff that doesn't matter to real New Yorkers, "What are we learning from it? They're focusing on tourists and visitors rather than on New Yorkers who need basic services and want to know what their elected officials are doing." To which Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler says he enjoys "What's Cooking at Gracie" because his "idea of cooking is cereal."

Last September, the city announced that wireless internet would be coming to ten parks around the city, perhaps by summer. Fast forward nine months, only Battery Park's wifi has been completed, but the city set a deadline for all other parks to be wireless ready by July. Nevermind that WiFi Salon is unsure whether they can make it - owner Marshall W. Brown said, "That's the timetable set forth by Parks. Let's see if that's attainable... It's obviously going to be tight, but I'm confident we'll be able to pull it off." City Councilwoman Gale Brewer thinks the process is taking too long, saying, "Free wireless Internet in our city parks is a no-brainer. We should be wiring as much of New York City as possible." Yeah, there's only so much one can do on a Treo! But it's true - NYC has lagged behind other cities and even its own parks (think Bryant Park) in offering free WiFi, but maybe it's because there are so many Starbucks around, not to mention WiFi you can steal.

A $750,000 real estate commission? Gothamist is so totally in the wrong business! A real estate broker is suing two brokers and owner of a building leased to the Department of Education claiming that she was discriminated against because she was Muslim and thereby lost out on a fee. Ihsan Amatullah says she first showed the East 76th Street Sotheby's warehouse where the Department of Education has its Eleanor Roosevelt High School, but that City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, head of the council's Education Committee, sent the deal to a "personal friend" broker Peter Berman. Amatullah says that Moskowitz "refused to have a person of Islamic faith broker the lease." Moskowitz, who is not named in the lawsuit, denies that anything like that happened, and Berman's lawyer tells the Post, "There is not one scintilla of truth to any of this."

dangerous due to radio waves and possible radiation. Dunh dunh dunh, even though there isn't any conclusive cell phone-cancer link. Moskowitz says a list of the cell phones and how many radio waves will hit your body if you use them sans headphones, and the two worst offenders are Motorola models V.120E and V.60x. Moskowitz said, "I didn't want to be alarmist. I just wanted consumers to be educated and to make their own decisions about the possible health risks." Let's face it - just like Gothamist, she must believe that Special Agent Dana Scully got cancer from her cellphone.

City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz is set to release a report on the noisiest bars in the city today, says the Post. The report, based on complaints made to 311, cites Sutra Club on First Avenue as the noisiest bar in the city with a whopping 235 complaints (the owner chalks it up to an angry neighbor who "discovered her power in 311 and would call every single night as a strategy."). The runner-up in noise/complaint production is Morrisey Park on St. Mark's followed by Rothko on Suffolk St followed by the 11th Street Bar.