Results tagged “vandalism”

Pre-Halloween vandals ransacked Carroll Gardens on Friday in one of the least intelligent fits of teenaged angst that we've heard of in a long time. The neighborhood blog Pardon Me For Asking reports that three teens ran wild on Court Street at around 2 am, "overturning newspaper stands at the corner of President Street, throwing planters they found in front gardens onto the street, and smashing the Marco Polo Valet Parking sign right through the back of this car."

Some jerk in Juniper Valley Park in Queens sawed down twelve trees in the past week, many of them new plantings, according to the Daily News. Queens Parks Commissioner Dorothy Lewandowski said, "It appears premeditated. They came in the park with a power saw." She said the trees cost about $1,000 apiece, which sounds about right, as that is at least two and half times what any high-end retail nursery (PDF) would charge you for the choicest ornamental tree available.

School's out—here comes trouble. Two teenagers have been arrested after they went on "an anti-Semitic spree" on Thursday afternoon in Manhattan. Two boys, 15 and 16 respectively, drew swastikas in black Sharpie on walls at both the Bialystoker Synagogue and the United Hebrew Center on the Lower East Side. At the Hebrew Center, they also lit off smoke bombs; at the synagogue, they hurled eggs and also wrote an anti-Semitic slur on the wall. The synagogue happens to be the East Broadway temple where Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has worshiped since he was four years old. Silver told NY1, "This is a crime, not against the synagogue; this is a crime against society. When people choose to desecrate a house of worship, it doesn't matter whether it's a church, a synagogue. It is just a despicable act that really should tug at the heartstrings of all of us." It's believed that a nearby surveillance camera led police to the two teens.

Isabella's Oven, the Lower East Side pizza place deemed one of the top ten in NYC by big eatin' Ed Levine, was abruptly closed at the end of January for, rumor has it, not paying $70K in back rent. Co-owner Teresa Rizzo-Marino told Grub Street she fell behind because she spent $300,000 renovating and rat-proofing the pizzeria, and she had hoped the Seward Park Co-Op board, which controls the property, would give her more time: "I was subjected to mental abuse. They told me to sign over the whole store and [that] they'd forget about what I owed if I gave them the pizza recipe." Now it seems Rizzo-Marino, who is rumored to be the daughter of one board member, inflicted some abuse of her own on the way out the door, taking a sledgehammer and spray paint to the place. Photos on Eater and Grub Street depict a level of destruction which one commenter aptly deemed "poetry." The interior has been savagely trashed, and "threatening and derogatory graffiti" spray painted all over the walls. BURN! You just gonna take that, Co-Op board?

Over the past few years graffiti has been on the rise citywide, so it's no surprise that 2008 saw an increase in the colorful activity as well. The Daily News reports on some new NYPD stats, noting that while graffiti complaints were up 10% on a whole, Brooklyn in particular is losing its battle against vandals, reporting more complaints and less arrests in 2008.

A reader sent us the above photo today, saying "a friend snapped this on the new E train this morning, and no one can figure out what it means. do you guys know?" We asked the MTA and they told us: "A quick check says this is not an icon we use. Looks like the sign was vandalized. And I won’t even hazard a guess as to what it is meant to represent." So what do you guys think this vandal is trying to get fellow straphangers to stop doing?

Baby Jesus is coming strapped this Christmas—with GPS! Many churches and synagogues in the area are equipping their nativity scenes and menorah displays with the locating system to impede hooligans who often use the holiday season to get their jollies via vandalism, costing the places of worship up to thousands of dollars for the sometimes pricey decorations. New York-based firm BrickHouse Secruity offered free, short term loans of GPS to religious institutions that now will be notified immediately by email if their display is moved. Reverend Bob Gorman of St. Ambrose Church in Old Bridge, New Jersey told The Star-Leger, "We call it God's Positioning System." Their church is currently planning to to drill a hole in Baby Jesus' backside to slip in the GPS device before the figure is placed in the manger on Christmas Eve. Somewhere King Herod wonders in defeat, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Over the past week, temples in the NYC area have been vandalized. In Staten Island, swastikas were spray-painted on a Bay Terrace synagogue; there is a $13,000 reward for information leading to a suspect's arrest and conviction. At a Dix Hills, Long Island synagogue, the word "JEWS" was spray-painted on the exterior on Saturday. And also on Saturday, torahs were stolen from a Queens synagogue--the suspect had access to keys and was able to disarm the alarm. The Queens Jewish Center hopes for the safe return of the torahs, which are worth $500,000.

Yesterday there was some chatter about the Hello Health subway ad campaign, mainly how its empty word bubble design (unsurprisingly) acted as a magnet for vandals! AnimalNY mentioned that the MTA was responsible for pulling the ad campaign, which launched when Hello Health opened its doors in Williamsburg. Today, however, they uncovered that there was a little bit of finger pointing going on, and it was actually "CBS Outdoor, the exclusive media managing agency for the MTA's entire system" who requested the creative be changed.

A Bronx neighborhood was outraged last month when a building's mural memorializing 9/11 and a local firefighter who was killed at the World Trade Center was tagged by a graffiti artist. The tagger painted his initials directly over the face of Peter Bielfeld. Tips eventually led police to arrest 16-year-old Avery Prince, who goes by the tag SIPS and has since apologized for defacing the mural.

Tao Lin's promotional spam-mongering tactics have not made Gawker a fan of the author; last year the website addressed Lin, saying, "I know you're reading this. I just want you to know that because of your ill-conceived self-marketing strategy, you have 100% guaranteed that I will never read your damned book. You're maybe perhaps the single most irritating person we've ever had to deal with." They added that his stunts are "retarded" and "deceptive."

Sure, getting dumped hurts, but does that mean you need to deface an entire neighborhood? A Brooklyn man was arrested after police discovered he was behind a number of swastikas found in Brooklyn, apparently acting out after being left for another (possibly more stable) man.