12th Street and Avenue A...
Trying to remember the last Saturday night like this one...
The event also marked the installation of a sign designating the tree as an East Village AIDS memorial. The Parks Department donated the spruce in 1992, at the request of former Community Board 3 Chairperson Albert Fabozzi, in remembrance of Glenn Barnett — an advocate of the park’s restoration — also in observance of neighbors’ continuing efforts to maintain the park, and in commemoration of community members lost to AIDS.
"I'm just calling it quits because I just can't go on any further," said Baust ... adding the combination of fatigue and dealing with the city forced him to pack it in early.
"I usually stay there until Christmas Day."
Authorities have two questions for a bushy-bearded mystery man found wandering the East Village with a giant dagger poking out of his backpack back in March:
Who is he? And why did he (allegedly) have a loaded pistol, three more daggers, a stun gun, and a total of 305 additional rounds of ammo in his South Street storage locker?
James Edward O'Donnell, 39 -- that's the name and age he gave cops -- insists he's an American and a war veteran, but when his prints were run after his arrest on St. Marks, he came back with not only no rap sheet, but no drivers license, no Social Security number, nothing.
"This is a very strange case, in that this defendant has been accused of all forms of weapons charges and the people are absolutely uncertain as to his identity or whereabouts," Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lewis Stone said today, as O'Donnell sat before him at the defense table.
A hack from hell rolled up the window on the arm of a man and dragged him for several blocks through the East Village, law-enforcement sources said.
The victim had accidentally left his cellphone in Eddy Brizard's cab on East Houston Street early Saturday morning, the sources said.
Brizard, 56, somehow tracked him down and brought back the phone, but then demanded $20, the sources said.
The man said he didn't have the cash and tried to snatch the phone back through the window -- but the driver allegedly raised the window and snagged the victim's arm.
Brizard was charged with robbery, assault and reckless endangerment, and his hack license was suspended, said a Taxi and Limousine Commission spokesman. The victim was not seriously hurt.
Wishing you a Scary Mary Christmas
from all the folks at Billy's Antiques
The beating death of a homeless man whose body was discovered last week near a Henrico County railyard ended his companion's dreams of a happy life together.
Robert Edwards Dyck, 37, and Lucille Obarzanek, a 28-year-old University of Vermont graduate, were hopping freight trains south from Pennsylvania to New Orleans when Dyck turned up missing and then dead, the victim of blunt-force injuries to his head and chest.
"We were going to try to make a go of it. To get to Louisiana and find work and raise a family," Obarzanek said yesterday.
Dyck and Obarzanek had been in the Richmond area for about three weeks, she said, living in a shantytown near the Acca Yard that the train-jumpers call Valhalla.
But sharing a tarp roof, a fire pit, and a pine-tree-studded junkyard of garbage and empty beer and wine bottles, Obarzanek said, were two men who carried ominous nicknames, "Satan" and "Roofless."
The two men — Samuel E. Gase, 32, aka Satan, and Brandon Thomas Geissler, 21, aka Roofless — appeared in Henrico General District Court yesterday and are being held without bond. Both are charged with voluntary manslaughter in Dyck's death.
I'll probably die of alcoholism. I only drink beer, but I don't know. I'm not going to guarantee my demise. Sometimes I don't feel so right here. Thirty seven. Yeah it's hard core man. No I'm just getting started. The guy that give me my name is like in his sixties and he's got a freight train tattooed on his forehead. I'm just getting started. I ride the sunset. This is my first time in New York but I mainly ride the sunset which is LA to New Orleans.
Do you recall hearing that Giuliani's administration was briefly considering putting all the homeless people on a barge that would circle Manhattan? I remember hearing this, but of course now that I can't find any back up, it seems more like a nutty rumor than reality.
I would urge you to remind your readers to make sure they have renters' insurance, as your possesions are not covered, just the facilities. I would also say it would be a good idea to keep an envelope of important info ready to go near the fastest exit. And also, take the time to think about two possible escape routes, wherever you are.