The police have increased their presence in Crown Heights after two incidents that have upset the black and Jewish communities and caused unrest between them. And many are recalling the summer of 1991, when the Crown Heights riots shook the city. Last month, a 20-year-old black man, Andrew Charles, the son of a police officer, was attacked by a group of white men believed to be part of the Hasidic anti-crime patrol, Crown Heights Shmira.......

A few months ago we were walking on Lee Avenue in East Williamsburg, and noticed some strange billboard graffiti. It looked like someone had spraypainted a beard over the kid in the ad. At first, we thought it might be the work of Beard, a streetartist who had been putting work up recently, but on closer inspection, it wasn't so much a beard as just a straight crossing out of the face. Last week,......

Haverford graduate, Parks Department project manager, and Greenpoint resident David Langlieb is under fire for writing an essay about his neighborhood in his alumni magazine. According to the Daily News, the essay, ripe with complaints about the old-school Polish residents and self-deprecation about not being an Ivy League graduate, has incensed the Polish American Congress and Councilman David Yassky, who said, "my eyes pretty much popped out of my head when I read this."......

A quick way to recognize just how dramatically New York City has transformed in the past two decades is to consider this fact: Fifteen years ago today a station wagon with four members of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement inside ran over and killed seven-year-old Gavin Cato in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. From the book Crown Heights: Gavin Cato's death set off three days of riots. Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian Orthodox Jew doing research in New......

The notable line from the Post's article about how Williamsburg real estate is on fire: "With Brooklyn fast becoming the new Manhattan — and Queens turning into the new Brooklyn — it stands to reason that Williamsburg could eventually reach the status of a Chelsea or TriBeCa." Lord. So does that mean that Staten Island will be the new Bronx while the Bronx will be the new Queens? New Jersey becomes annexed to be the......

Hasidic Jews! Hipsters! Luxury condos! All the Williamsburg drama you can bear in the Times story today about the Hasidic-hipster tensions in the neighborhood. There's hipster Mikey Weiss telling the Times, "These two Hasidic guys, dressed as Hasidically as you could possibly dress, came in and asked me what kind of people live in this neighborhood..." And then there's the flier "with drawing of the World Trade Center collapsing, and read, in Yiddish: 'How long......

Yesterday, the Post reports Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg staged a protest about the "yuppies" overdeveloping the neighborhood, with new buildings and expensive rents. Not only are rents selling for around $500-600 (vs. regular price of $200) per square foot, a 21 year-old Hasid Joel Klein says, "[The new residents] will have a very liberal lifestyle, contrasting to ours. We have Jewish housing, synagogues, a Jewish medical center. They want to make bars and swimming pools.......