Did you hear all those sirens around 9:30 p.m. last night? They were probably attending to a huge fire at 147 Conselyea St. near Graham Avenue. Twitter photos show emergency vehicles parked on Metropolitan Avenue and a large crowd watching.
A 59-year-old woman died in the fire, according to DNAinfo. It took 100 firefighters more than three hours to put out the blaze.
Tipsters told us last night that the fire was near the intersection of Graham and Metropolitan and Tony’s Pizzeria. It turns out that one of the residents of the building works at the pizzeria.
The New York Post says that the 59-year-old may have started the fire with a cigarette.
While you were laying on a roof somewhere and eating a hot dog on Sunday, zombies briefly occupied the neighborhood as part of the annual NYC Zombie Crawl. Participants donned head to toe zombie makeup and tattered clothing and traveled from Trash Bar to Grand Victory, McCarren Park, Spike Hill, and Public Assembly. The first stop had had makeup artists for the not-so-DIY-ers, while the other stops had live music, contests, drink specials, and giveaways.
As horrifying as some of the Brooklyn zombies may have looked, nothing comes close to the real life “zombie” incident that same day. As you’ve probably read by now, Florida police shot and killed a naked man who was eating the face of another man on the side of a causeway. Not only was he consuming human flesh, but it took multiple bullets to take him out. Authorities believe he was in a drug-induced paralysis, but if that doesn’t sound like the beginning of a George Romero film, we don’t know what does.
For those of you interested, zombies originate from the voodoo tradition in which priests used rituals and powders to turn enemies into the “walking dead.” The term “zombie” first appeared in print in 1792 as a Creole word meaning spirit, but unlike other Hollywood monsters like the werewolf or vampire, the zombie as we know it today has no literary tradition. The creatures first appeared in film in 1932′s White Zombie.
According to the Times, the $50 million renovation includes changing the pool’s rectangular rectangle into a U shape with a concrete beach in the middle. The beach will have spray showers and the color of the pool will be cerulean blue.
“We didn’t cut any corners,” Mr. Walentas said. “If we had, this just wouldn’t have worked.” ….
The hotel’s website, proudly declares: “Wythe has rooms for artists, friends, brewmasters, musicians, concertgoers, mothers, brothers, grandmothers, bowlers, interns, twins, engineers, vignerons, and chefs,” which sounds exactly right.
The same exacting quality is behind every bar (four, counting the event spaces) and on every plate in Reynards. “You won’t read the farmer’s name on the menu because we’re not into boasting, but know that we’ve met every single one of our producers and shaken their hand, and that is the kind of experience we want to share with our guests,”
People speculated – somewhat facetiously – that Friday’s bomb scare on Bedford Avenue must have been an art project because, after all, it is Williamsburg. Turns out they were right. 50-year-old artist and Brooklyn resident Takeshi Miyakawa was behind the installation and has since been arrested.
Police apprehended Miyakawa on Saturday when he was putting up another installation at the intersection of Bedford, Lorimer, and Nassau and charged him with planting false bombs. He was arraigned on Sunday and will be put through a 30 day mental health evaluation.
The objects – “I Love New York” bags that contain LED lights and battery packs – were for NY Design Week and supposedly would have come down today. An artist who works with Miyakawa described him as “polite, calm, and presentable.” The New York Times states that the artist intended the installation to be “a display of his love for the city.”
According to his website, Miyakawa was born in Japan and has been living in New York City since 1989. He mostly designs furniture, some of which is priced at $20,000.
The L train to Manhattan stopped running around 9:45 a.m., sources report. According to the @NYCTrains Twitter feed, there is a police investigation at Union Square.
Here’s a video of school children in Greenpoint protesting the recent decision to cut half of School Settlement’s 153 free after school programs in Brooklyn.
Hopefully the protest will be just as effective as it is adorable. Look at this colorful signs!
Mr. Kiernan has spent the last year lobbying to fill Regis Philbin’s seat on “Live! With Kelly,” and he has had a handful of guest host appearances on the morning show in the last two months. It is precisely this timing that helps make Mr. Kiernan’s move seem, on the face of it, rather odd.
Here he is, a local celebrity, pounding on the door of one of the most coveted jobs in broadcasting, the glitter of national-talk-show fairy dust sprinkled in his neat blond hair. And there he goes, moving from a fabulous penthouse on the Upper West Side to a house with vanilla-colored siding that is across the street from a hardware store and costs half as much as the place where he lives now.
No, the choice is not obvious. But on a walk through their new home on a rainy afternoon last week, Mr. Kiernan and his wife, Dawn, explained that at first sight, the house, its garden, the neighborhood and even the L train got under their skin.
“We’re under no illusions that it could be confused with a trophy property from the front,” Mr. Kiernan said, explaining that the location and the pristine interior were much more important to them. “We’re not trying to build a showy property. We just want a comfortable place to live with our family.”
And it will be comfortable, indeed.
The kitchen opens up into an immense back garden, all warm reddish brick and leafy trees. The couple’s daughters, Lucy, 10, and Maeve, 7, will have their own floor. And the 2,600-square-foot home was fully renovated just over a year ago by a family that planned to stay for the long haul, Mr. Kiernan said. The structural steel, the plumbing, the electrical systems — all were spruced up.
While you were busy yesterday sleeping off your Cinco de Mayo hangover, France was electing a new president. Socialist candidate François Hollande won 51.6% of the vote, beating incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, who had 48.4%.
So what should you know about Hollande? One of his biggest challenges will be dealing with European and national debt, which he plans to address by raising taxes on the rich and corporations. He also wants more teachers, judges, and houses, and supports gay marriage. The mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, is also an important French Socialist politician.
Oh, and his official campaign video is set to “Ni**as in Paris.” Quite a different direction from Sarkozy’s politics.
Hollande may take office as soon as May 14th. At least Sarkozy can always fall back on his wife’s singingacting career.
Get to a rooftop if you can, the space shuttle Enterprise is flying over New York City right now. Jalopnik posted this handy map of the shuttle’s route, via NYC Aviation. It will be landing at JFK at 11:30 a.m.
#SpotTheShuttle and #Enterprise are both trending on Twitter in New York right now.
