The MTA will announce on Monday the official timeline for the long-awaited L train shutdown, the New York Times reports. The Canarsie tube—the tunnel running under the East River, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn—will be shut for eighteen months, beginning in January 2019.
The controversy surrounding Israel and the Boycott Divest and Sanctions movement continues to tear at the fabric of America’s most hallowed institutions. This spring, it was the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign; last week, it was the University of California. Now, it’s the venerated aisles of the Park Slope Food Co-Op.
Earlier this year, an investigative report from WNYC revealed two illegal voter purges that removed more than 120,000 people from voting rolls in Brooklyn, which some pundits described as “annoying” and “not voter suppression.” In fact, according to WNYC, voters in majority-Hispanic election districts were purged at a rate nearly 60 percent greater than in all other districts.
Empire Mayonnaise, the Brooklyn artisanal mayonnaise store once parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch about gentrification, is being forced to move because the neighborhood “has gotten really expensive.” I bet they are so sick of the joke you are making right now.
Since March, 75 people were infected with chicken pox in a South Williamsburg Orthodox Jewish community. The NYC health department is investigating the outbreak which almost exclusively affected infants and children up to 10 years old who were not vaccinated against the varicella virus or hadn’t finished the vaccination course.
An 11-year-old boy was charged with a hate crime for allegedly setting fire to a Jewish Yeshiva school bus in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the New York Daily News is reporting. Surveillance video taken Sunday evening shows several young boys darting in and out of the bus shortly before a fire erupts within it.
Earlier month, attorneys for ex-NYPD cop Peter Liang, who, in February, was found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of Akai Gurley, filed a motion arguing that Juror No. 9, Michael Vargas, should not have been allowed on the panel. His estranged father, it turns out, served time for manslaughter. Vargas also made a number of anti-cop comments on Facebook.
Peggy Noonan’s body may be in Manhattan, and her soul may be in Ronald Reagan’s coffin—but her mind, now and forever, is in Brooklyn, at a street fair she went to a few years back.
The NYPD can be relied on to take down or arrest all manner of dangerous criminal in New York: drug dealer, gang man, subway knifer, extremely famous tennis star, murderer, burglar, sidewalk griller. Now we can add another class of lowlife to the list: friendly neighborhood mailman.
Andre Hatchett was 24 years old when he was convicted of murdering a woman in a Brooklyn park. This week, he was exonerated and set free at the age of 49.
On Wednesday, the New York Times reports, Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson said that prosecutors would dismiss first-degree rape charges against the five teenagers who were accused of attacking an 18-year-old woman in Brooklyn early this year.
The purported cocaine kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman may be sent to Brooklyn to be prosecuted if he is extradited from Mexico, according to federal Justice Department officials cited in the Wall Street Journal today.
Rookie NYPD officer Peter Liang, who is charged with manslaughter and official misconduct in the November 2014 shooting death of Akai Gurley, testified in his own defense on Monday. “His eyes were rolled back,” Liang said of the mortally wounded Gurley. “He was just laying there very still.”
In his State of the City speech on Thursday—attendance at which his administration is working very diligently to limit to friendly faces only—Mayor Bill de Blasio will unveil, among other things, his proposal to build a streetcar line along the East River, connecting Sunset Park, Brooklyn, with Astoria, Queens.
On Sunday, the New York Times reports, 28-year-old Serge Duthely hanged himself while in police custody. This is the third time someone has hanged himself in an NYPD holding cell since May.
A few weeks ago, officials at New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority announced preliminary plans to repair and fortify the Canarsie subway tunnel beneath the East River, a job that would require temporarily shutting down L train service between Williamsburg and Manhattan (either completely for an entire year, or just on weekends for three years). The announcement was initially greeted as a joke aimed at the neighborhood’s creative residents—the L train? Shut down? Hahaha!—but now those residents have begun to register actual alarm. Gothamist has the details from a recent town hall meeting (bolding ours):
“Although the events that unfolded at the Osborn Playground on Jan. 7 are still unclear, what seems obvious, as it did in the case of Akai Gurley, mistakenly shot to death in a dark stairway in the Louis Pink Houses...is the inconsistency with which ‘broken windows’ policing is practiced.”
The Brooklyn district attorney alerted the court Thursday that he would not make the initial deadline to obtain indictments against four of the five teenagers arrested on suspicion of raping an 18-year-old woman at a Brownsville playground earlier this month. As such, those suspects are to be released without bail.
