Category: NEWS
Most of you young ‘uns probably don’t even remember the original blue MetroCard (triborough‘s flickr).
Today is the last day of February, and you know what that means? Fare hike time! Yup, your daily commute is about to get a little more expensive—so you might want to catch up on your new world order. You’ve still got until Sunday, March 3rd to absorb the fact that the MTA’s base fare is now $2.50. And don’t you start moaning about how the MTA sucks for doing this—we didn’t see you at any of the fare hike hearings last year! (Not that it would have made a difference anyway.)
So what’s the deal? Here are the important things to remember about the new fares:
- The base fare is now $2.50, not $2.25 a ride. If you buy a single ride ticket, however, it will cost you $2.75.
- The pay-per-ride bonus discount will now be 5% instead of 7% (but it starts to kick in at $5, instead of $10).
- A 30-day unlimited MetroCard will now cost $112 (up from $104). The 7-day unlimited card will cost you $30 (up from $29). And a 7-day express bus plus MetroCard will cost $55 (up from $50).
- A $1 fee will be charged for each new MetroCard you buy. If you want to avoid the fee, simply turn in your expired or damaged card and you’ll get a new one gratis.
Got all that? Good. Because there is one other big change to remember! You no longer need to keep an unlimited and a pay-per-ride MetroCard if you only use the latter for those days when your unlimited has run out. Instead you can just put it all on one card and when your unlimited time runs out, your regular fares will kick in.
Not that complicated, right? So now you are probably wondering about the magic pay-per-ride numbers you want to use so that you don’t have any extra change left over on your card. Not to mention the number of rides you need to take to make an unlimited worthwhile. So let’s answer the latter first: You must ride the subway 13 times (two rides per workday and three on the weekend) to make a 7-day MetroCard worthwhile and you must ride the subway 48 times (two rides per workday and eight on the weekend) to make a 30-day unlimited MetroCard worthwhile.
As for the number to rule them all, $50 is your new magic number. If you have a card with zero balance on it and add $50 and you’ll get a $2.50 bonus, making the card good for exactly 21 rides. And if you can’t afford to put $50 on your card, just make sure you refill with amounts like $10 or $25 so you’ll eventually even out to $50 (and that sweet, sweet zero balance).
Oh, and there is one other thing! All you smart asses who were planning on stocking up on unlimited MetroCards before the fare hike better think again. Unlimited MetroCards purchased on or before March 2 must be activated by Monday, March 11 to obtain their full value. Those activated after that date will allow travel through April 9 for 30-day cards and March 17 for 7-day cards.
Jesse Yomtov, USA TODAY Sports8:48p.m. EST February 24, 2013
50 Cent had a tough time getting to the Daytona 500.
Once he finally arrived, we had the first wreck of the day well before the race even started.
As FOX reporter Erin Andrews wandered around pit road trying to find Danica Patrick, awkwardly speaking to drivers in passing, she spotted the 37-year-old rapper.
Curtis Jackson made a beeline for her and went straight in for the kiss. Andrews did her best to dodge and he wound up settling for her cheek. As she deflected the smooch, Andrews said “I’ve gotta go talk to Danica Patrick.”
Hours later, he tweeted: “Hey I wanted to kiss her so I did”
Not a “P.I.M.P.” move, 50.
In GIF form:
via SB Nation
And in slow-motion:
AP Images
Mayor Michael Bloomberg reveals the new Living Small NYC project.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled yesterday plans for studio apartments in New York City that will be between 275 and 300 square feet—apartments so small they are considered illegal under current building code, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Bloomberg is currently accepting proposals for the apartments, which will be located on E 27th Street and First Avenue in Kips Bay. The apartments would help young professionals find appropriate housing in the city while they start their careers.
The craziest thing about these 300-square-foot apartments (which are about the size of half a subway car) is that they will cost around $2,000 a month to rent.
Under current zoning laws, all apartments must be at least 400 square feet, but Bloomberg said he plans to change the zoning laws to make the new micro-units legal.
Bloomberg said there is a huge demand for single-person households in the city. Currently there are 1.8 million one- and two-person households, but only 1 million studio and one-bedroom apartments, officials said.
The apartments will all be 10 by 30 feet, and must have a window and a kitchen area—talk about luxury! The complex is expected to have around 80 units.
Bloomberg said if he was younger he would be more than happy to live in one of these apartments. He lived in a 600-square-foot studio on 66th St. for $120 a month for nearly a decade, according to The New York Post.
The mayor’s current Upper East Side mansion is 41 times the size of the purposed apartments.
NEW YORK CITY — A Nepali woman and a Mexican man fall in love despite speaking different languages. An Indian sweets shop owner struggles to keep her store open. A Dominican manicurist awaits a marriage proposal from her Chinese-Jewish boyfriend.
All of these scenes take place in “the Jackson Heights Trilogy,” a series of plays created by the Jackson Heights-based company Theatre 167 that is inspired by the neighborhood, and attempts to recreate Jackson Heights’ diversity on the stage.
The three plays — “167 Tongues,” “You Are Now the Owner of This Suitcase,” and “Jackson Heights 3 A.M.” — ran last year at the Queens Theatre and the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, among other local venues.
Now, the trilogy, featuring 18 playwrights and 37 actors in 93 roles, will have a four-week run at the 777 Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen, at 777 8th Ave., starting Feb. 8.
The plays focus on the different cultures and ethnicities that make up Jackson Heights, and how they relate to one another, said Theatre 167 artistic director Ari Laura Keith.
“I really want to do theater that’s addressing these cultural conversations,” Keith said. “So I just thought it was time to create a company that was specifically dedicated to that.”
Born in Davis, Calif., Keith said she grew up all over the world, as her mathematician father was constantly moving to take new opportunities and study the way math exists across different cultures.
Keith found herself living in cities all over Eastern and Western Europe for weeks or months at a time. The result, Keith said, was a growing interest in learning about cultures outside of her own, and led to her moving to Jackson Heights in 2005.
“Living in Jackson Heights was the closest I came to the experience that feels very normal and necessary to me, but is in fact somewhat special and unique,” Keith said. ”It’s one of the things that makes Jackson Heights really extraordinary, in sort of allowing cultures to come together.”
In order to celebrate those cultures, in 2010 Keith created Theatre 167, named after the number of languages rumored to be spoken at Elmhurst Hospital.
That hospital, just south of Roosevelt Avenue in Elmhurst, is also one of the scenes in “167 Tongues.” In that scene a Rwandan night nurse has to negotiate the 167 languages in the hospital emergency room.
In another scene that studies the ever-changing demographics of the neighborhood, two Irish ghosts haunt apartments to try and fix relationships. In addition to looking at Jackson Heights’ shifting demographics over the years, the story also tackles school integration and the history of racial conflict in New York.
In “You Are Now the Owner of This Suitcase,” playwrights stroll around the neighborhood listening to folk tales community members grew up with, and turned them into a collection of all-ages, “magic realist” stories, Keith said.
And in “Jackson Heights 3 A.M.,” playwrights spent the night walking around Jackson Heights between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. interacting with people and using their stories as inspiration, including cab drivers, sex workers, police officers and insomniacs.
The diversity in writers helped to give life to the story, told from multiple angles, Keith said.
“Different writers have different cultural perspectives, which is one of the things that makes this so unique,” said Keith, who conceived and directs the pieces.
During the four-week run, which ends on March 3, there will be alternating shows once a day on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, followed by all three shows on Saturday and two shows on Sunday.
Each of the plays are about two hours long, and on Saturday, there will be a show at noon, 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. It will be the first time all three shows will play back-to-back.
“I fell so deeply in love with both the process and the work we were doing,” Keith said. ”It felt really important to acknowledge and share that experience.”
Gina Schindler with her husband, Officer Matthew Schindler. A lawsuit claims Officer Schindler killed himself because a female supervisor forced him to have sex with her.
(Gina D’Arpino Schindler/Facebook)
JACKSON HEIGHTS — A female sergeant accused of repeatedly making sexual advances that led to a married cop’s suicide told NYPD investigators that the pair was having a consensual relationship, sources said.
DNAinfo.com New York reported exclusively on Wednesday that a lawsuit claims Sgt. Christine Hirtzel forced her subordinate at the 115th Precinct, Officer Matthew Schindler, to have sex or face a bad work schedule.
But Hirtzel, who is married and has two kids, gave a different account to Internal Affairs investigators who looked into the allegations after Schindler’s death, according to sources.
She allegedly said that she and Schindler had a consensual affair and that he killed himself after she tried to end the relationship and pressures at home mounted.
Hirtzel said the day she tried to break up with Schindler, he grew distraught at the precinct station house and claimed he couldn’t live without her, sources said.
“If I can’t have you, then I’m going to kill myself,” Schindler allegedly told the sergeant.
After a despondent Schindler stormed off, Hirtzel confessed to a captain about the romance, sources said.
The captain tried calling Schindler to talk him down, but it was too late. The 14-year veteran cop shot himself with his service hand gun while driving home to his Long Island home on Feb. 13, 2012.
Despite the relationship with a subordinate, Hirtzel was cleared of any impropriety by investigators, sources said.
Schindler’s widow, Gina, is suing Hirtzel and the NYPD, claiming the forced sex drove her husband to take his own life.
“Schindler told defendant Hirtzel, her sexual advances and demands and their concomitant impact on his work environment and career outlook had caused him to contemplate suicide,” the lawsuit says.
Schindler transferred to the 115th Precinct in March 2011 and served as a highway safety officer. At the time, the father of three was the fourth NYPD cop to commit suicide inside of a month.
ASTORIA — Police have released video surveillance footage of a man wanted in connection with three burglaries in Astoria, in which he entered the buildings by cutting a hole in the roof, the NYPD said Thursday.
The suspect allegedly broke into three locations on Broadway in Astoria in December, police said.
On Christmas Eve around 3 a.m., he cut a hole in the roof of the Rite Aid at 47-07 Broadway, but didn’t actually enter the building. That same night, around 5 a.m., he entered Zac Deli on Broadway in the same way and took off with cash and merchandise.
The suspect hit another location a week later on Dec. 31, breaking into Stop and Go deli on Broadway and stealing merchandise.
The man is described as a dark-skinned black male between 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-11, and was last seen wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt with a “G-Unit” logo on the front, white and orange Air Max Nike sneakers and dark-colored jeans.
NEW YORK CITY — New stop-and-frisk numbers released by the NYPD Monday gave a racial breakdown of the targets in 2011— and showed more than 50 percent of them were black.
Though they account for just 23.4 percent of the city’s residential population, black New Yorkers were affected by more than half of 686,000 stops, the report said.
Latinos made up nearly 40 percent. Whites were nearly 10 percent.
“The nearly 686,000 stops conducted in 2011 equated to less than one stop per police officer per week among the 19,600 officers on patrol during the period,” said Paul Browne, the NYPD’s chief spokesman.
While police portrayed the number of stops as being low in relationship to the number of officers on the streets, stop-and-frisks have risen dramatically since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, jumping from 98,000 during his first term to nearly 700,000 by 2011.
Suspected weapons possession was cited as the top reason for stops, accounting for 25.6 percent.
Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct in East New York had the most stops with 31,100, while the 73rd Precinct just next-door in Brownsville came in second with 25,167.
Jackson Heights, Queens, had the third most with 18,156.
Updated February 5, 2013 5:01pm
EAST FLATBUSH — A woman was killed and another hurt after being shot in the basement of an East Flatbush home Tuesday morning.
The women — ages 63 and 37 — were shot inside 359 E. 25th St., near Clarendon Road, just before 10 a.m., according to fire officials.
The older woman was struck in the chest while the other victim was grazed in the head, police said.
“She was talking — she was crying,” said neighbor Roslyn Hunter, 64, of the 37-year-old victim. “It’s horrible.”
Both victims were rushed to Kings County Hospital, where the 63-year-old woman died. The other victim was in stable condition, police said.
Detectives and Emergency Service Unit cops swarmed the home to investigate the shooting, which sources said was preceded by an argument.
A man, 70, was arrested, police said. A firearm was also seized.
Yanick Puzo, 60, who lives on the block, said she saw the older woman being taken out of the house.
“She was lying down on the gurney and both her arms were limp, hanging off of the side,” she said. “She looked lifeless, but they did not cover her face.”
Puzo said she was surprised the shooting happened on the block, which has been named the “greenest” in Brooklynand which Puzo described as a “very, very quiet block.”
Roland Roberts, who has lived on the street for 11 years, said the neighbors take pride in the area’s appearance.
“Every year we enter the Greenest Block in Brooklyn [competition] and we usually win every other year,” Roberts said. “We take care of our houses, we keep the street clean, we all have our garden in the summer. It’s a nice block.”
Man Shot to Death in Queens Village Updated June 30, 2012 3:03pm
June 30, 2012 3:03pm | By Jess Wisloski, DNAinfo Weekend Editor
Police tape on a street on June 6, 2012. (DNAinfo/Jeanmarie Evelly)QUEENS VILLAGE — A 24-year-old man was killed by gunfire in the Queens neighborhood where he lived early Saturday, police said.
Travis Adams was found in front of 212-14 104th Ave. with three bullet wounds at 4:45 a.m. police said, after a 911 alerted them to the shooting.
Adams had been shot twice in the torson and once in the shoulder, according to police, and EMS transported him to Long Island Jewish Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
He lived just steps away from the shooting, police said, and an investigation is ongoing.