Former NYPD top brass in hot water

From DNA Info:

Former NYPD Chief of Department Philip Banks received between $250,000 and $500,000 from a politically connected businessman at the center of a federal probe into a pay-for-favors scandal engulfing the NYPD and City Hall, DNAinfo New York has learned.

Jona Rechnitz — owner of the Manhattan-based real estate firm JSR Capital who also has ties to Mayor Bill de Blasio — made the "investments" payout to Banks in 2014 while Banks was serving as the highest-ranking uniformed officer in charge of the NYPD’s daily operations.

The money was reported by Banks on his “exit” financial disclosure form filed with the city’s Conflict of Interest Board on Nov. 30, 2014, a month after he abruptly quit the NYPD, turning down a promotion to First Deputy Commissioner.

Banks' attorney, Benjamin Brafman, declined comment for this story.

Banks was the first choice of first lady Chirlane McCray to succeed Ray Kelly as Police Commissioner over Bill Bratton, who got the job, sources said.

Rent regulated apartments restored

From the Daily News:

State authorities say they have returned 50,000 improperly deregulated apartments in New York City to rent regulation while restoring more than $2.25 million in overcharged rent to tenants in the last four years.

Homes and Community Renewal’s Tenant Protection Unit in 2012 began tracking down rental apartments in the city that had disappeared from state data.

Notifying owners who failed to register rent-stabilized units since 2009 resulted in restoring tenant rights, officials said.

Long commutes for eastern Queens

From the Times Ledger:

Residents of Jamaica and the Rockaways who commute to work have longer average traveling times than the residents of any neighborhood in the five boroughs, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future.

The report, which was released March 31, found that the average commute to work from the Rockaways was 53 minutes, with Jamaica a close second at 51 minutes. These commutes far exceed the national average commute of 26 minutes, the report said.

“Average commutes range from 53 minutes in the Rockaways to 26 minutes in the Financial District and Greenwich Village,” the report stated. “In other words, over the course of a five-day work week, Rockaway residents will spend four hours and 29 minutes more time commuting than those who live in Downtown Manhattan.”

Workers commuting from Bellerose/Rosedale have the third-longest average commute of Queens residents at 47 minutes.

Although Manhattan remains the commuting center for many New Yorkers, most employees who live in the city work in the borough in which they reside. This includes Queens residents, where 41 percent of Queens commuters traveling to a job in the borough. The number of Queens residents who also work in the borough jumped 28 percent from 2000 to 2014. Queens residents are also more likely than the workers of any other borough to travel to a job outside of the city with 13 percent commuting to points beyond the city.

1939 color film of College Point

"These are, I believe, the earliest Kodachrome home movies that my grandfather Gustave Martens filmed with his 16mm camera. Naturally he chose to film friends, flowers, and family - - including my father who was 10 years old at the time. The sea plane that appears at the end is taking off from the East River. The little white-haired lady is my great-great grandmother who was born in the 1860s!"

Subway service sucks even more than before

From NY1:

Grab a seat, check your phone, get comfortable - the wait for a train could be long.

"They've been having a lot of track, signal problems and stuff like that. So I find that the timing is off," said one subway rider.

So does a new audit from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. It says riders are enduring longer waits for trains on three quarters of the MTA's 21 major lines.

"Service has deteriorated. I don't think it's any big surprise to most of the riders waiting on the platform for a train that hasn't arrived yet," said Matt Sweeney, a spokesperson for the state comptroller's office.

The audit examined wait times, the MTA's targets for the number of minutes between trains.

The comptroller says in the first half of 2015, the MTA met those targets systemwide 78.4 percent of the time, a falloff from the previous year.

But DiNapoli says the MTA's measurement may make subway performance appear better than it is because the agency tallies each line’s average performance, treating puny shuttle service the same as longer lines like the A train.

"When they average in shuttles with something as major as the Lexington Avenue line, it raises the performance of the Lexington Avenue line," Sweeney said.

In all, 16 major lines saw an increase in wait times last year. Just five lines saw an improvement.