Results tagged “nicholasavenue”

As the police try to reconstruct the events of Thursday night's mugging attack, a little more information is offered about some of those involved. Subway conductor Maurice Parks was walking home when he was attacked by a group of muggers in Harlem, at West 139th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue late Thursday night. When stabbed, Parks took out his own knife to defend himself. By the end, the police arrested a wounded attacker and another teen attacker, and found that a man who died in the clash was actually a bystander.

Whoa: A NYC Transit worker who was walking home in Harlem was attacked by a group of four men. One stabbed him, but 5 train conductor Maurice Parks managed to pull out his own knife and retaliate, stabbing one 28-year-old in the chest and a 22-year-old in the stomach.

The Post gives more detail about the brutal attack: Apparently the attacker rushed her when she opened the door to her apartment Friday and beat her. Then he tied her to a futon with coaxial cable, beating and sexually assaulting her. He poured boiling water on her in an attempt to remove DNA evidence and set the futon on fire Saturday afternoon before leaving. But the fire "melted the plastic covering of the coaxial cable" and she was able to escape. A building resident tells the News that the woman "keeps blaming herself" for letting him in.

THEATER: The esteemed Classical Theatre of Harlem is reviving Peter Weiss’s masterpiece Marat/Sade. The dizzying action takes place in an asylum in France, where the infamous Marquis de Sade is sequestered in 1808. To pass the time, he directs a play about the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat during the revolution. His asylum casting pool yields up some magnificent performances, though the production is almost squelched by the hospital administrator, a tool of Napoleon’s post-revolutionary regime. In the right hands, which CTH certainly has, the whole production is a multi-layered feast of subversion. - John Del Signore

Which explains why many subway stations are damp, sometimes with pools of water and drippy ceilings on those dry days (and those free newspapers left at stations - that end up in tracks - aren't helping the drainage systems either). But what's crazy is that incidents like last week's stoppage or even the one in early June are nothing compared to one from over a decade ago:

The worst condition [hydraulics assistant chief Peter] Velasquez has seen was in Harlem in the early 1990s, where a broken water main flooded a station at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue up to the stairwell. Scuba divers had to be called in to shut down the main, and the Transit Authority had to bring in its most powerful weapon: one of two diesel-powered train cars outfitted with pumps that can get rid of 2,700 gallons of water a minute. It took an entire weekend to pump out the water, Mr.Velasquez said.

Two stabbings underground and one above have occured in less than 24 hours, with four people injured. The first one is the C train incident where tourist Chris McCarthy was repeated stabbed by a man who simply walked up to him. McCarthy didn't even realize he had been stabbed until he saw that he was bleeding; the unprovoked stabbing occured near 110th and Central Park West - the stabber got away there, and then the train was stopped at 103rd and CPW to help McCarthy. McCarthy, McCarthy's girlfriend Ganda Krisananuwatara, and another friend took the downtown C at 135th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue; the Post says they took the wrong train after visiting a museum, but it's unclear which museum they went to.

A reader emailed us Monday afternoon, noting that there were at least twenty police cars and tons of officers outside of St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, but the NYPD wasn't saying anything - did Gothamist know what was happening? Short of hacking into a police scanner, Gothamist came up empty... until we heard that a high-ranking police officer had accidentally shot himself in the stomach. The commanding officer for Transit Bureau 3, Captain William Roge, was changing his guns in his office at the 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue stop, removing his .38 for a 9mm, and somehow, the .38 went off. The NY Times reports that it was hard to hear the shots over the subways, but when other officers heard, it seemed like "dozens of police officers" were on the scene.

Lately, it seems like the NYC subway system just likes fires. For what seems like the umpteenth time in the past few months, a fire in a substation caused a shutdown and evacuation of riders on the A, B, C, and D lines, all the way from the Bronx to Brooklyn on some lines. A circuit breaker malfunction (far more serious than a wardrobe malfunction in Gothamist's book) that turned into a fire at the St. Nicholas Avenue and 141st Street stop occured at 11AM and wasn't fixed until 2:30PM, which meant 600 people were stranded on the trains. Newsday noted that this the day after NYC Transit President Lawrence Reuter's claim that the subways were better, and reported, "The stranded straphangers were escorted out of the stalled trains by firefighters and transit crews, some on evacuation devices stretched across to another train that carried them to safety." Does anyone know what the evaucation devices were exactly - special subway style ones? Luckily, there were no major injuries, some passengers were treated for smoke inhalation and a transit worker suffered some burns. What's scary is that some transit union spokespeople are criticizing that ladders placed in tunnels to evacuate passengers and workers were not easily located; in fact, one ladder was locked and there was no key!