Neighbors, elected officials and friends from near and far gathered on Feb. 1, the Feast of St. Brigid, to celebrate the victory of the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s in the group’s long struggle to prevent the demolition of the 1849 church on Tompkins Square Park.
The committee saw its dream come true last May when the Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced it had accepted a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor, including $10 million to restore and maintain the building and the parish and another $10 million to endow parish schools in the area.
The donor is still anonymous and the archdiocese has declined to identify the “angel” who made the gift.
Edwin Torres, leader of the committee, told the gathering on Sunday that the archdiocese had received the last $5 million installment of the $10 million for the building restoration on Dec. 16 and that architects and engineers have been working in the building at 119 Avenue B since the beginning of the year.
“We’ve been at the site at least once a week and we’ve spoken to the engineers — they’re testing the bricks and mortar in the church to see the extent of the problems,” Torres said, adding, “This will probably be the last meeting of the committee — we’ve achieved what we set out to 10 years ago. But we’ll continue to monitor the site,” he said.
Lux Interior, who introduced the excitement of deviant rockabilly to the punk era as the lead singer of the Cramps, died early Wednesday in Glendale, Calif. He was 62.
The Cramps were founded in New York around 1976 by Lux Interior (born Erick Purkhiser in Stow, Ohio) and the guitarist Poison Ivy (Kristy Wallace) with a distinct musical and visual style. As connoisseurs of seemingly all forms of trashy pop culture from the 1950s and ’60s — ranging from ghoulish comic books to Z-grade horror films to the rawest garage rock — they developed a sound that mixed the menace of rockabilly’s primitivist fringe with dark psychedelia and the blunt simplicity of punk.
No, it’s not the faltering economy that’s putting venerable New York up for sale and shipment. It may be just coincidental that there is a flurry of outliers who are in a New York state of mind and want a part of it.
“We’re not taking anything from New York — the diner needed saving,” said Cheryl Pierce, who with her husband, Vince, bought the Moondance in 2007 for $7,500. They spent $40,000 to move it 2,125 miles to La Barge in western Wyoming, where it opened on Jan. 12 after a delay to replace a roof collapsed by snow.
It is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. New York has been exporting its bounties, willingly and unwillingly, since the days of Peter Stuyvesant and marauding redcoats.
More recently, according to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, cast-iron eagles from the old Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal have turned up at suburban estates, a kiosk from the 1939 World’s Fair is now a restaurant in New Jersey, parts of an 18th-century ship found at 175 Water Street were sent to the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Va., and old subway cars are swimming with the fishes as artificial reefs off the Delaware coast.
NYPD seeks suspects in ATM "not working"
NEW YORK - Police are looking for four people who have been scheming to steal money from bank customers using cash machines in Manhattan's East Village.
Police said Friday the suspects have run a low-tech scam multiple times since October.
After the target puts his or her bank card into an ATM, a woman approaches and says that machine isn't working. While the victim uses a nearby machine, a second suspect watches and notes the victim's personal code.
That suspect gives the code to a third person, who then punches it into the machine the victim initially used -- and didn't cancel out of. Because the machine is still activated by the victim's card, the suspect is able to use the code to withdraw money.
Police have security-camera photos of at least one suspect.
Big's salary is capped at $500,000, and Carrie is replaced at the paper by a 19-year-old anal sex enthusiast with the nom de plume BrownEye, in honor of the Ivy League school she dropped out of. Money becomes tight, and Big finds that after a lifetime of Cohibas he cannot adjust to El Productos. After a series of comic moonlighting misadventures as a cab driver and new media consultant, he works contacts from his secret past as a NYPD detective and gets some shifts as a bouncer with his old pal Jesse L. Martin. Carrie starts a blog, which she makes racier to draw traffic ("How can I say I love you," her words scrolls across the MacBook screen, "when your balls are in my mouth?") but it still doesn't pay much, and they are forced to move to Greenpoint. There is a poignant, slow-motion moment when Carrie realizes Vera Wang isn't suitable for Studio B.
