CITY'S MURDER RATE RISES 8%

By PHILIP MESSING, NY Post

June 25, 2008 -- The city's murder rate is up nearly 8 percent this year - with surges in rapes and robberies as well, police statistics show.

Nevertheless, the NYPD said the city's overall crime has dipped 3 percent so far this year.

Through Sunday, there were 238 murders, compared with 221 during the same period last year - a 7.6 increase. Five additional murders have been reported since Sunday.

The rise in deadly violence has been accompanied by a troubling 6.2 percent increase in rapes, as well as a 4.4 percent rise in robberies.

Drops in four other serious crime categories - assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto - fueled the 3.09 percent decline in overall crime.

Serf says something screwy

Bruno’s announcement came so late in the campaign season (nominating petitions to get on the ballot are due at the State Board of Elections soon), that Democrats won’t have time to field a strong challenger to the likely Republican candidate, Roy McDonald, the local Assemblyman.

“He’s screwing them,” Maltese told me.

Maltese: Bruno is 'Screwing' Democrats

Hey, Serf...

Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno announced his stunning decision that he would not seek re-election just hours after the FBI collected a massive volume of his detailed records dating back to 1995, The Post has learned.

More than 30 boxes of Senate records - gathered pursuant to a federal subpoena issued in March - were carted out of the Capitol and delivered by a Senate van to the Albany office of the US attorney for the Northern District. That office has been probing Bruno's outside consulting business for more than two years.

A law-enforcement source said the US Attorney's Office in the Manhattan-based Southern District of New York was also assisting in the probe.

BRUNO FILES SEIZED

Who's screwing who?

Photo from City Hall News

New Domino sports less glass crap

The design from Beyer Blinder Belle has some changes: the five-story glass addition to the 1884 building has been cut to four stories and been redesigned. The mechanical elements on top have been removed. The old Domino sign, which is currently on an adjacent building would be moved to the top of the landmarked structure. There are also balcony-type structures that have been added to the south side of the building.

Behold the New & Approved Old Domino Plant with Glass Box

More of the same...yet different

I recently asked my cyberbuddy, Andrew Fine, just what IS that weird looking building several blocks north of Queens Plaza? He's provided the answer. And the answer is: Yet another hotel! (And just in time for the tourism bust.)

CB7 makes Willets Point deal with City

"The Committee on Willets Point of Queens Community Board 7 voted 'yes' Monday night to supporting the city's plan to redevelop Willets Point with the following conditions:

1) No eminent domain abuse. (What constitutes abuse? Come on!)
2) They want a $300 million fund for mitigation issues. You know they will settle on 10% of that - it's just another way of them making money off the backs of people who never got a cent for anything from the city over the past 30 years.

Before they started the meeting they said they met with Deputy Mayor Bob Lieber already and got some concessions and that if these 2 things were not met they would vote it down. Sounds like a deal was already made before the hearing.

We need a show of support on Monday 6/30/08 @ 7PM at
UNION NURSING HOME, 33-23 UNION STREET, FLUSHING

at which time the public will be allowed to speak before the vote of the full community board. If we don't stand up now this kind of crap will continue and get worse in Queens. Please show up and support us.

THANKS."

JERRY ANTONACCI
CROWN CONTAINER
718-335-6845

Oh yes, there's no doubt a deal was made, that is how it is always done. Read the Curbed report to see how badly they failed at trying to hide this.

Hunters Point no longer stinks

What you’d never know while strolling through Hunters Point today is that in the late 19th century, the city was seized by the “Hunter’s Point Stenches,” horrible odors caused by “bone boiling,” “offal rendering,” manure boats, and oil refining—all part of the many not-so-pleasant industries that called this part of Queens home at the time.

The “Hunters Point Stenches”

Why we are a 'sanctuary city'

Go to the Web sites for these new high-rises that the Condo Mayor has seeded and nurtured in his two terms. Press the buttons and watch these glorious projects magically sprout and soar like sunflowers in the summer sun.

Yet those of us on the outside looking in could probably forgive them the pieces of sky they steal. We'll put up with the way they cram the cityscape shared by all. What is unforgivable is the refusal to provide the laborers who erect these new palaces a living wage and a safe workplace.

High-Cost Condos, Low-Cost Labor—and Threats of Violence to Union Organizers

[Donald] Capoccia rose as a housing developer as he donated thousands of dollars to the campaigns of Mayor Giuliani, Governor Pataki, and President Bush. He recently told the newsletter The Real Deal that he launched his career by using a truck full of day laborers hired from a street corner. Capoccia found no time last week to speak to the Voice, but his operating methods don't appear to have fundamentally changed.

To construct his tower and its 240 condos—prices: $300,000 to $1 million–plus—Capoccia has opted to use nonunion labor. This alone would be understandable if wages were close to par. But according to Omar Lopez, an organizer for Ironworkers Local 361, where members make $38 an hour plus benefits and pension, workers at the site report that they are receiving from $12 to $25 an hour—with zero benefits. "He's got them working 12-hour days, six days a week," said Lopez. "Then, when they look in their pay envelopes, they're short a lot of hours. When they ask what happened, they're told: 'You'll get it next time.' "

The labor unions are starting to see the writing on the wall...

So many DOB articles, so little time

City's construction horrors spur feds:

Federal safety watchdogs kicked off a two-week crackdown Monday on high-risk building sites after construction accidents claimed 20 lives in New York this year.

New Safety Policy for Construction Cranes

During Congressional testimony in Washington, the acting commissioner of the city’s Department of Buildings, Robert D. LiMandri, announced an overhaul of crane safety policies in response to two fatal crane accidents in New York City.

Audit Says Buildings Dept. Failed to Fix Hazards

On Tuesday, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. released an audit finding that the department has repeatedly failed to make sure that hazardous conditions were fixed.

City's worst buildings escape reinspection despite spike in construction deaths

Despite record construction deaths and destruction, the city failed to reinspect 20% of the worst buidings last year...

Bowling alley as landmark?

A month after Woodhaven Lanes closed, the former bowling alley in Glendale sits vacant, its equipment removed, its block-letter signs discarded and its fate uncertain after five decades of strikes and spares.

Fans of Woodhaven Lanes push for landmark status

But preservation-minded locals are pushing the city to save the brick building - host to a national TV game show in 1959 and 1960 - by making it the first bowling alley landmark in the five boroughs.

To evaluate its merit, the Landmarks Preservation Commission will visit the alley, research its history and expedite the process if demolition is near, said spokeswoman Lisi de Bourbon.

This is very interesting. Everything that's actually historical or architecturally significant in Queens gets one of those "go away" letters from LPC. A non-descript boxy brick bowling alley (remember, only exteriors of buildings are designated and the interior was ripped out already) has the commissioners running out to Queens to take a closer look at it. This commission is a complete joke.

What the duck!?

Stanhope Street at Seneca Avenue...
This wall decoration is creepy on several levels. What ever happened to just hanging a horseshoe for good luck?

Mighty John Young strikes again

...Chris Lundgren's family has lived on 32nd St., between 36th and 37th Aves., in Dutch Kills, since his great-grandparents came from Germany in the early-1900s.

Dutch Kills neighbors together vs. Department of Planning

"My mother and father still live in the house I grew up in," says Lundgren, a Teamster on movie sets who lives at 36-32 32nd St. "In 1996 I bought this house on the same block. My sister also lives on the block. It's a great neighborhood with great people and a great view of Manhattan."

He produces a map of Dutch Kills prepared by the city planners in which their block is shaded with diagonal lines, which the map legend decodes this way: Projected Lots. "Which means the city itself expects these properties to soon be reduced to lots," says Lundgren.

On the map, this little block in Queens that oozes history, a place where four generations of a single family has lived and paid taxes, had been reduced to something called Sub Area C.

A tree grows in Brooklyn (for now)

In recent weeks...residents who live appreciatively in the mulberry’s shade feared the tree faced a new threat: a city chain saw. In May, a note on green paper appeared in the mailbox of the Melameds, who live in Mr. Greiner’s old house, announcing that a city inspector had determined the tree was facing removal pending review because it was diseased.

A Sapling Grows Into a Giant; The Streets Around It Change, Too

Then, one morning in early June, Mark Melamed saw posted signs explaining that trees on the street were scheduled for trimming or removal. The family feared the worst.

The Melameds’ 16-year-old daughter, Caroline, went to school that day “close to tears,” her mother, Helen Melamed, said. The mulberry’s branches scraped Caroline’s window, providing a leafy prism on the neighborhood. She anxiously called home from school to find out what had happened to the tree.

Was the tree’s success something like the neighborhood’s? Just as the houses are now so expensive — too expensive for some who grew up there — now perhaps the tree had grown too large, damaging the sidewalk, raining mulberries and branches on cars, and even endangering those who walk beneath it.

In the Heights

NAOMI FIRSTMAN, a nurse, lives in an apartment building on the corner of 184th Street and Bennett Avenue, in Washington Heights. Or at least that’s where she gets her mail.

“The community is definitely in an uproar,” said a spokeswoman for the local councilman.

Lately, she has been sleeping at a friend’s apartment a few blocks away. Her own apartment, she said, has been rendered virtually uninhabitable by construction noise, and she isn’t talking about familiar New York sounds like the clatter of jackhammers or the beeping of forklifts.

For the past seven months, Ms. Firstman said, a hydraulic hammer has been pounding away at a hulking mass of rock right outside her window. Washington Heights is a rocky place, and the steep hills and palisades for which the neighborhood is named have long served as natural fortifications against development.

Until recently, the lot on Overlook Terrace, a little more than a half-acre, looked much as it must have looked millennia ago, with scrappy trees and bushes clinging to a towering rock formation.

But now a contracting company is breaking down the rock to make way for a 27-story condominium, and local reaction has been, in a word, loud.

“The community is definitely in an uproar,” said Wendy Olivo, a spokeswoman for City Councilman Robert Jackson.

The Sound and the Furious

City Schools Suffer Playground Deficit

New York elementary schools are woefully lacking in outdoor play spaces, with nearly half of all schools having no playground for recess, and schools in minority communities are the worst off, a new report released yesterday by state Senator Jeffrey Klein finds.

Report Finds City Schools Suffer Playground Deficit

Mr. Klein introduced a bill that would ban the construction of any school without a playground and prohibit current schools from using yard space for any purpose that would result in less room for play areas.

"We go to schools that either have nothing in their lot or have old, outdated, and potentially unsafe equipment," the founder and executive director of Out2Play, Andrea Wenner, said.

Hmmm. Maybe instead of selling city-owned land to developers for a $1 so they could overdevelop our neighborhoods, the mayor should have been building schools with adequate playgrounds. Now we have to build school extensions in schoolyards, such as the one at PS49, above. And partly because of this, the kids are suffering from obesity, so we have to bulldoze forests to provide play areas for them. This policy makes sense.

Bruno retiring at end of year

Here's the official statement from Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, as distributed via a press release printed on his distrinctive blue-and-white leadership letterhead:

"Today I met with my Republican colleagues in the Senate and informed them that I will not be running for re-election this November."

'Time To Move On With My Life'

Hmmm...could lose a Republican seat. And as for local state senators, Forand says, "Not so fast, Serph".

Lack of proper city planning kills maritime industry

Four years after the Bloomberg administration allowed IKEA to turn a historic dry dock in Red Hook into a parking lot, a new study has found that the city desperately needs at least seven new docks just like the one it gave up.

IKEA BERTH PANGS: CITY DOCK DEAL A $1B BLUNDER

The city-commissioned study, conducted by SUNY Maritime College, urges the construction of seven new dry docks by 2016. Three must be "graving docks," such as the paved-over one in Red Hook, which can accommodate larger ships.

Industry experts say it would cost about $1 billion just to replace the 730-foot-long former graving dock that was converted into part of a parking lot for the IKEA store, which opened Wednesday.

City officials said they had to rely on outdated data from the previous maritime study, done in 1991, when approving the IKEA project in 2004, adding that the new report was long overdue.

I guess commissioning a new study to find out the needs of the city BEFORE approving the plan would have been too much to ask... But then again, that's how the entire city is being developed. Build now, worry about the consequences later. At least we'll have a big box furniture store that sells cheaply-made pressed-board crap to fall back on.

New crap on Greenpoint's Newel Street

From Miss Heather:

What was the architect thinking when he (or she) decided to pair red brick with olive green and pigeon shit gray stucco? Seriously. Is this person color blind or did he think employing this jarring combination of colors was making a “statement”? Note the patch of yellow paint on the first floor. I am hoping against hope this is primer of something, but my gut instinct tells me otherwise.

I suggested to Miss Heather that maybe the architect was copying Crescent Club in Dutch Kills, but she wasn't buying the Karl Fischer inspiration.

Koslowitz is Running

Current Deputy Queens Borough President and former councilwoman Karen Koslowitz is running to get her old job back. Ain't term limits grand? Recycling isn't just for paper and plastic anymore...

The thought of Karen just makes us want to place an order at McDonalds for some reason.

- FLC

West Nile virus found in Staten Island

BY Kathleen Lucadamo
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

The West Nile Virus was discovered among a pool of mosquitoes in Port Richmond, Staten Island, on Wednesday for the first time this season, Health Department officials said Friday.

No human cases have been detected, but the virus surfaced earlier than usual, officials said.

The city will spray larvicide in wooded and abandoned areas of Staten Island, the Bronx and Queens next week to kill the disease-carrying mosquitoes.

The potentially deadly virus usually causes mild flu-like symptoms, and people over 50 who contract West Nile are the most vulnerable to its effects.

"Fortunately, anyone can avoid infection. The best way to reduce your risk is to wear repellent if you go outdoors in the evening when mosquitoes are most active," said Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden.

Car wash crap

Our featured piece of crap sits on what was previously vacant land.
This scene is in Brooklyn at 2397-2399 Boynton Place, at Avenue X. Now there are 6 units of crap (on paper) here - next to a car wash. Now that's living!! Would love to know where the supposed accessory off-street parking for 6 cars is. Each building has a "rec room" and 4 doors. Wonder why?