Results tagged “councilmancharlesbarron”

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: smoke inhalation victims at Centre and White Sts. in Manhattan, a shooting on Neptune Ave. in Brooklyn, and a truck vs. overpass at 155th St. and South Rd. in Queens.
• Design firm EDAW was chosen to plan the Steeplechase Plaza for a now-vacant lot near the Coney Island boardwalk. The development beneath the Parachute Jump may include a water park and a platform for viewing Cyclones minor league baseball games.
• A large brokerage firm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is saying the Corcoran Group's report claiming an 8% increase in average condo prices in the neighborhood during 2007 is incorrect. Aptsandlofts.com says that it's seen a 10-12% retreat in condo prices since the market's peak in early 2006.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is seeking the dismissal of a civil suit against her filed by Council Member Charles Barron's former chief of staff Viola Plummer. Quinn gave Plummer the boot when the councilman's aide refused to sign a pledge to compose herself while the City Council was in session.

A federal judge dismissed defamation charges against City Councilman John Liu related to an incident last year when Liu called radio personality DJ Star a "sick, racist pedophile." The characterization was a reaction to an on-air taunt at a rival DJ, when DJ Star (Troi Torain), solicited information on where DJ Envy of Hot 97 lived so he could sexually defile his four-year-old daughter. DJ Star also called DJ Envy's wife, who is Asian, several racist epithets. Torain was arrested following the incident and eventually fired from Power 105.

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.

As we mentioned, City Councilman Charles Barron held his press conference yesterday to announce his candidacy for the 2009 Brooklyn Borough Presidency. He told the crowds that his platform included affordable housing, health care accessibility, more jobs, standing up to developers who use eminent domain, ending mayor control of schools and more would help everyone. "Am I going to be a borough president for all the people? Absolutely. But I'm letting y'all know now, I'm taking care of black folk. Unapologetically."

Councilman Charles Barron stood on the steps of Brooklyn's Borough Hall yesterday and announced that he would be running to become the first African-Amercian Borough President in Brooklyn's history. The Daily News reports that Barron wasted no time in denigrating the current Beep Marty Markowitz. "We've had a cheerleader. Now we need a real leader in Brooklyn." Barron was referring to Markowitz's seemingly perpetual sunny disposition and love of public appearances while looking faintly ridiculous.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn fired Councilman Charles Barron's chief of staff Viola Plummer yesterday. Quinn had required Plummer to sign a letter agreeing to behave during meetings, after Plummer heckled Quinn during a meeting about street namings and made reference to an "assassination" of Councilman Leroy Comrie, but Plummer refused (she has maintained that she meant a "assassination" of Comrie's character and/or political prospects). And Plummer filed a $1 million racial discrimination suit against Quinn.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a church shooting on Schenectady Ave. in Brooklyn, a pedestrian struck on West 17th St. and Union Square West in Manhattan, and a water rescue in Raitian Bay between Staten Island and Sandy Hook, NJ.
• City Councilman Charles Barron's chief of staff, Viola Plummer, was suspended for six weeks from the City Council and by Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who she's also heckled, with a promise of reinstatment if she promises to behave herself. Plummer is in her 70s, but threatened another Councilman with assassination on a contentious vote.
• A grand jury in a federal court case voted to indict four alleged plotters that wanted to blow up JFK airport, kill thousands, and cripple the U.S. economy with a harebrained scheme to take out a pipeline that runs towards the airport.
• "...the red, white and blue leader of the Avengers was felled by an assassin's bullet on the steps of a New York federal courthouse." Captain America got capped, by Marvel Comics no less.
• A 21-year-old White Plains worker at the Rye Playland Amusement Park was killed when thrown from a gyrating ride. Gabriela Garin had changed shifts with another ride operator and then got on the ride to make sure visitors were properly secured, when her replacement started the ride.
• The new rules against noise and trans-fats go into effect tomorrow. Somehow we feel that NYers will remain louder, skinnier, and better looking than the rest of the country, regardless of what laws are passed.
• The City has a list of all the designated grilling areas around the five boroughs. The Parks Dept. says "Designated Barbecuing Areas," but frankly, we don't want to get into all that right now.
• We've pretty much given up on listening to radio, but this blog may point us to something it's possible we'll want to hear. Thank you New York Radio Guide.
• The Staten Island Advance points out that Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious plan to make all yellow cabs hybrid in a few years overlooks the livery cabs that service the outer boroughs. Car service owners and drivers would prefer to keep it that way.

Despite having been defeated in a City Council vote, where his chief of staff heckled Council Speaker Christine Quinn and threatened a black councilman with assassination, Councilman Charles Barron renamed a street in Brooklyn "Sonny Abubadika Carson Avenue" anyway, declaring that the renaming "is official whether they [presumably the city] take that sign down or not." Sonny Carson's name was struck from a list of people who would get honorary street signs earlier this spring. Council Speaker Quinn felt he was too divisive a figure in the city's history. This sparked a City Hall battle that frayed nerves and invoked additional police protection.

Photograph by dietrich on Flickr

As if the whole failed Sonny Carson street naming proposal brouhaha needed more wackiness! Today, The New York Sun takes a look at City Councilman Charles Barron's chief of staff, Viola Plummer. During the Sonny Carson street naming debate, Plummer heckled City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and later threatened an assassination "on" another member, Leroy Comrie, who abstained from voting. Barron had laughed the incident off as political squabbling between political opponents, but one couldn't help be reminded of the assassination of Brooklyn Councilman James Davis in 1994

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn struck Sonny Carson's name from a list of of New Yorkers to be honored with a street named after them because she thought the political activist was too divisive a figure. Carson was a proponent of black economic empowerment and was distemperate in his views of other New York groups (e.g., whites, Jews, Koreans). Councilman Charles Barron, who shares Carson's past as a radical activist, thought Carson's exclusion from the list was more divisive than anything Carson had ever done, and indeed, voting on an amendment Wednesday to re-add his name split almost entirely down racial lines and the session was extremely acrimonious.

Mayor Bloomberg spent Memorial Day at a number of different events in Queens and spoke about a number of issues:

The NYPD decided not to appeal a judge's decision that the NYPD should declassify its surveillance documents from the 2004 RNC, so it has set up a special NYPD RNC Documents website with the documents. Of course, you have to scroll down to the very bottom for a zip file of the 600 pages of documents. And what's above the documents is the NYPD's rather thorough explanation/ defense justifying why it did such extensive surveillance of disparate groups and people, listing various terror incidents between 2001 and the convention as well as other incidents of protest. Here is Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's statement:

“I think a close examination of the documents is going to show that the New York City Police Department did an outstanding job in protecting the City during the Republican National Convention. People wanted to come here and shut down the City, to replicate what happened in Seattle, Montreal and Genoa. We simply didn't let that happen, and I think it'll just underscore the outstanding work of the men and women of the Department. In terms of gathering information, the vast majority of information that was gathered was open-source information. It was gathered from the Internet; these groups that were coming here were advertising what they were going to do — bragging about what they were going to do. It wasn't particularly difficult to get the vast majority of this information.”

ACT UP, Sierra Club, City Council members (Charles Barron, David Weprin, Bill Perkins), Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Johnny Cash Bloc, MSNBC, A31 Coalition, NYCLU, NOW, Planned Parenthood, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Stuyvesant High School Students, Westboro Baptist Church, Indymedia, Democratic National Committee, Coalition of Fire and Police Unions, Grandmothers Against War, Falun Gong, Arab Muslim American Foundation, Time's Up, Billionaires For Bush, United for Peace and Justice, The Surveillance Camera Players, ACLU, Hip Hop Summit Action Network, The Federation of East Village Artists, Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, Restaurant Opportunity Center of New York

The incident where a 14-year-old boy was allegedly assaulted by rapper Tony Yayo for wearing a Czar Entertainment t-shirt (Yayo's management company's rival) has now entered the third phase. The first phase was outcry and denial from both sides. The second phase was a press conference held by the Reverend Al Sharpton decrying the violence of the rap industry. And the third phase is the inevitable rap song.

Three detectives were charged in the November 2006 shooting of Sean Bell outside a Queens nightclub, and all three pleaded not guilty. Two of the police officers, Detectives Michael Oliver and Gescard Isnora, face serious charges that include first-degree and second-degree manslaughter (it was originally thought they would only face second-degree manslaughter), while Detective Marc Cooper faces charges of reckless endangerment. When asked how he would plea, Isnora's lawyer Philip Karasyk said, "Not guilty of each and every count of the indictment."

Yesterday morning, an off-duty police officer killed another clubgoer who was threatening another off-duty cop. At Brooklyn's The Elite Ark, which was having a Notorious B.I.G. tribute, a shoving match started that caused a commotion. Twenty-one year-old Kristen McKenzie allegedly fired a gun at an unarmed off-duty detective's head, but missed. The detective then tackled McKenzie, trying to get the gun, and the gun went off, injuring the detective. The NY Times reports that he "ended up on the ground with Mr. McKenzie straddling him."

Yesterday, the NYPD revealed a plan hatched by a Rikers inmate to kill Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and place a bomb at 1 Police Plaza. David Brown, an ex-con who is in jail because he violated his parole by "disobeying an order of protection against his ex-wife" (he tried to kill her in 2001), told an undercover cop posing as a hit he was "fed up with the case where the guy got shot 50 times," referring to Sean Bell. Brown allegedly added the shooting "got me frustrated to the point where I want [Commissioner Kelly] murdered." Other things the 400-pound inmate said: "I want his head chopped off" and "I want them to feel like I'm a motherf------ terrorist."

It's a new semester at City College and it'll be a new round of fighting over a campus center's "Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur" sign. The Daily News reports that City Councilman Charles Barron re-placed the controversial sign for the City College NY community center and vows to re-place it if it's taken down again:

"We are here to say to the City University that we have a right to self-determination, that we have a right to free speech, that we have a right to freedom of expression," Barron said. "We are saying that you can't determine who our heroines and heroes are going to be."

The City Council questioned Police Commissioner Ray Kelly about NYPD tactics in the wake of the fatal shooting of Sean Bell. The Council was aggressive and straightforward; for instance, Councilman David Yassky said , "Too many African-American New Yorkers feel that they are at risk or that their family members are at risk of mistreatment, whether it be to be stopped without reason or to be victimized by excessive force."

The Mayor touted the news that NYC's unemployment rate dropped to 4.3% last month, saying, "News that our average unemployment rate in 2006 was the lowest on record is yet another example how New York's recovery from 9/11 is exceeding our wildest dreams." The unemployment rate has been below 5% September through December, which Crain's says is the "first below-5% performance since the 1980's." (The record low was in October, when the rate was 4.1%.) And in December of 2005, the NYC unemployment rate was 5.8%.

Residential groups on the Upper East Side had filed a lawsuit to stop the building of a garbage transfer station at East 91st Street and the FDR Drive, but a judge dismissed the suit, noting that the plan would "further the city's announced, rational goals of promoting equity among the boroughs for responsibility over waste disposal, and reducing truck traffic." Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg proposed the controversial plan almost two years ago and tried to get it passed last year but the City Council foiled it. He managed to get enough votes this year from the City Council, but the lawsuit was still pending.

The police played a 911 call made during Monday's Brooklyn barbecue shooting. The NYPD claimed that housing cop Jason Jeremiah was hit on the head with a Razor scooter, causing him to shoot the attacker and the call seemed to support that: "One guy is down because he beat the cop in the back with a bike, with a scooter, and the cop shot him...He took one of the kid's scooters and he beat the cop across the back." Officer Jeremiah shot Robert Ramirez in the chest, and Ramirez is still at Brookdale Hospital. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said that scooters have been used in other recent attacks and that it can be a "fairly lethal weapon, particularly if you start swinging it."

Though Borough Park is quiet after Tuesday night's fire-and-almost brimstone clash between Hasidim and police over the arrest of an old man who did break the law, tempers are still flaring. Arthur Schick, the 75 year old man whose chatting on a cellphone while driving raised police interest, says the officer who pushed him to the ground said, "This is the way we treat a nigger." Schick also felt that the crowds that protested and set fires behaved badly as well. The police, in turn, defended their actions, though Police Commissioner Kelly did say Chief Esposito admitted to swearing while trying to control the situation, (or, as City Councilman Simcha Felder explained, Esposito said something like "I want heads rolling"..."Get the 'F' Jews out of here. Get the 'F' Jews out of here.") but didn't use racial epithets, instead saying something like, "Get these f---ing people out of here." Oh, and the police say that Schick did yell at the police and instigated others, by saying, "See what they're doing to me!" Well, if you're 75 and being shackled by cops, you probably would cause a fuss.

ship the city's garbage via barges, in order to cut sanitation truck traffic, by creating/renovating marine transfer stations in the city. One was in Miller's Upper East Side district, making him primed to fight the Mayor on this. The interesting thing is that many politicians in poorer districts actually supported this trash plan (not to mention the NRDC), because many trash stations are located in their districts. The NY Times reports that many Council members were upset over the vote, with City Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn saying, "This is the most embarrassing day I've had since I've been on the Council."

The Mayor got good news and bad news from the City Council yesterday. Good news: The City Council approved the city's plan to revelop Brooklyn's Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront. The one lone opposing vote came from Councilman Charles Barron, who said, "There has to be a day in this City Council where we don't settle for less than 50 percent affordable housing" - the current plan has a provision requiring new apartment buildings to have one-third affordable housing.

While the Mayor and City Council Speaker Gifford Miller may seem similar - they are white...they live on the Upper East Side...uh... - they actually aren't, and the NY Times examined their extremely political spitting match. Gothamist liked how Mayor Bloomberg views Miller as unaccomplished and unambitious, because next to him, who can be (this does not bode well for prospective suitors for Emma and Georgina), but there was another quote that got us thinking:

City Councilman Eric Gioia, a close associate of Mr. Miller, says the friction stems in part from the vast age gap between the two. "I think the mayor looks at Gifford and says, 'Why don't you just listen to me?'" he said. "And Gifford looks at the mayor and says, 'Why can't you see things from a different perspective?'"

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has decided to "unvite" Cracker Barrel from visiting Brooklyn. Last week, politicians, community leaders, and even our readers were up in arms about Markowitz having the Cracker Barrel folks up for a courtesy visit, to bring some Southern chain-style cooking to Brooklyn. Markowitz alluded to some of the chain's past problems with gay and black employees when he said:

"I do not believe they are ready for Brooklyn. It is our greatest source of pride that Brooklyn's diversity of races, faiths and ethnicities is unrivaled anywhere in the world, and any company that is interested in doing business in Brooklyn must respect and celebrate that diversity. We have no plans to meet with Cracker Barrel."