Apologies to Lionel Bart, but I received this flier from Police Officers and higher-ranked brass outside the 71st Street-Continental subway station a few days ago.

Makes sense: over the past few months, we’ve heard more and more stories about petty crimes happening in the area. Have you?

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Here’s an instructional video to inform you about pickpocketing.икони

Need a little escapism? Appropos of nothing, I want to mention to this dusty jewel I found at a Cape Cod used bookstore this summer.

 While I was laid up with the fractured foot, I finally got a chance to read it.

What a lousy piece of schlock, and it doesn’t even mention FoHi much!

It’s the tale of a loud-mouthed, egotistical, bratty American tennis star named “James McLaren” (gee, who could that be?) who quit in his prime and has become a drunk living in the south of France. He gets embroiled in drugs, murder and international espionage when the daughter of a suddenly-deceased tennis legend plucks McLaren out of near oblivion to be the spokesmodel for her father’s failing tennis clothing empire.

There are some mediocre passages about Flushing Meadows and NYC in the “bad old days,” but nothing really great about our neighborhood. But it does have great cover art!

From the Daily News:

George Tutaya, 41, of Rego Park, sold over 2,000 hot bras online over the past two years - and had another 650 bras worth an additional $26,000 in his home when he was caught, prosecutors said.

Read the full story here.

“Secretive and rich, a little scary
Queens Boulevard, tempting boulevard
Waiting there to swallow the unwary”

The Transportation Alternatives press conference on improving safety and creating a bike lane on Queens Boulevard, held Sunday, July 27, was short, sharp and to the point: there is no reason why Queens Boulevard must remain an infamous “Boulevard of Death.” I’d say at about 40 people, including City Council Member James Gennaro, came to support the Rahman family and TransAlt. And I wasn’t the only one who raised an eyebrow or nodded knowingly during the two small but screeching near-misses between cars that occurred during the event.

Asif Rahman’s ghost bike

The press conference took place at the spot where Asif Rahman was run over by a truck in February of this year. This area is directly across the boulevard from The Queens Place mall and the popular Georgia Diner, an area that is in great need of better accommodations for pedestrians and cyclists. You can watch an excellent short video of the press conference, and hear excerpts from Asif’s mother and sister. Note the sign for Forest Hills to the left of the microphones!!

Photo: Forest City

The event got widespread local coverage on The Daily News, amNY, metro, Fox5News and  NBC. I’ve also been following the whole bike lane issue the last couple of months in the local blogosphere and in the neighborhood papers, and I’ve noticed some consistent themes in the comments.

1. People who ride bicycles on NYC streets, especially those who actually use QB, are thrilled and excited.
2. People who know victims of car accidents (pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers) praise efforts to make major thoroughfares safer and calmer.
3. Nearly all the other comments say, “why bother? It’s only going to cost money, cause more accidents and not solve the problem. As long as bicyclists and pedestrians continue to ignore traffic rules and the right of way of cars, they’ll continue to be killed. The victims were too old, too slow or too foolish.”

The resignation, absolute certainty of failure, and blaming of the victim is so classic New York, it could have been written by a Norman Mailer. I once read that New Yorkers are experts at presenting opinion as fact, and it shows. The comment about bike lanes being the cause of more accidents really takes the cake. I’d like to see that data!

And, by the way, have you noticed that folks who post anti-bike comments, who rail against reckless, foolish and lawless pedestrians and cyclists, usually have screen names like “Ninety5rpm” or “race-car-driver?” Here’s a tip, Dale Earnhardt, Jr.: those screen names aren’t exactly helping your cause. Next time, try posting as “ITurnSignals” or “Never-pass-on-the-right,” and I’ll take you a little more seriously.

The press conference

Transportation Alternative’s Deputy Director Noah Budnick (below) introduced the campaign to make Queens Boulevard a “complete street” - meaning a street with “human-friendly signal timing, bike lanes…streets that are sensitive to the needs of all road users.” Despite a welcome reduction in fatalities in recent years, approximately 100 bicyclists and pedestrians are struck on QB each year.

Asif’s mother, Lizi, and sister, Moumita, spoke very movingly. They described Asif’s love of bicycling, poetry and community involvement.  Before the crash, they had never really taken a look at Queens Boulevard. Once they saw the crash site and the rest of QB, they were astounded that no bicycle safety measures exist on the road. The historical lack of concern for bike safety on QB is shocking, and the pedestrian safety measures made in 2001 should not be the end of improvements. How many more people need to die on Queens Boulevard before changes are made, they asked.

    
Councilmember James F. Gennaro (D) (Fresh Meadows) represents the area where the Rahmans live, and has joined them every step of the way in this endeavor. He held up his bike helmet (see below) and said that he wears one whenever he bikes, but a helmet will do nothing to save you when you’re run over by a truck. As Lizi Rahman affirmed later, when her son’s body was found, “Asif’s head and face didn’t have a scratch,” painting a horrifying and sad image of what must have happened.

Councilmember Gennaro’s staff distributed a letter he wrote to the Bloomberg Administration, co-signed by Council Members John Liu and Eric Gioia, calling for a improved safety and a bicycle lane on Queens Boulevard.

Gennaro also echoed what others have said - Let’s face it. Cyclists will continue to use Queens Bouelvard. Bicyclists use QB for the same reasons cars do: it is the most direct way to get into Manhattan. Especially with current gas prices, popular concern about the environment, and improved bike lanes throughout the rest of the city, the number of recreational and commuter cyclists in Queens will only increase. Yet, despite it’s infamous moniker of “The Boulevard of Death”, Queens Boulevard was not included whatsoever in the Mayor’s 2006 3-year, 200-mile plan for safer bicycling in NYC

Queens Boulevard is, at some areas, twelve lanes wide, and is treated by many drivers as a highway. Similar thoroughfares in other boroughs (such as Eastern Parkway) have been improved and beautified. Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn has had a separated, protected off-street biking and walking lane since 1894. Even the Grand Concourse in the Bronx - possibly the second most dangerous road of its kind in NYC -  enjoyed years of car-free Sundays until 1996, and revived in 2006.

Ocean Parkway, arial view (www.nycbikemaps.com)

Ocean Parkway (www.nycbikemaps.com)

Shouldn’t a modern, cosmopolitan society in 2008 be motivated to make changes to a street called “The Boulevard of Death?”

“Queens Boulevard, ruthless boulevard
Destination for the stony-hearted
Queens Boulevard, lethal boulevard
Everyone’s forgotten how they started
Here on Queens Boulevard!”

Pardon my taking license with another Broadway musical, but I couldn’t resist.

(apologies to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton.)

Thanks to Maspeth activist-about-town Christina Wilkinson for this one: After a night of drinking, someone ended up dead on the kitchen floor of a federal Customs agent’s Forest Hills home. The circumstances are hazy, but you can add that to the seemingly growing file of bizarre local deaths.

Last week I once again dealt with the topic of nothing ever happening in Forest Hills and Rego Park–nothing criminal, I mean, except for the occasional bank-robbery spree. Now it turns out that nothing ever happens in Kew Gardens, either. According to the Chron, the 102nd Precinct–that’s KG, Richmond Hill, Woodhaven and northern Ozone Park to you and me–had a paltry one murder in 2007, down from 10 in the previous year. Other sorts of crime weren’t down as much, but they were still down. So feel free to wave a bunch of money around in KG, too.

My favorite detail in the story: Queens is the “safest of the … boroughs,” except it’s not, because Staten Island is the safest borough. Man, if you think Queens gets the short shrift all the time, thank your lucky stars you don’t live anywhere you can only reach by ferry.

Because I’m terrified of everyone and everything, that’s why. Luckily, besides the occasional little family murder scandal and the scourge of organized stalking, nothing bad ever happens in Forest Hills and Rego Park. I’ve talked over and over again on this very site about how safe the 112th precinct is. I remember when I moved here–less than four years ago!–I told everybody that a big reason was that it was one of the safest neighborhoods in the city, with the property values of “up-and-coming” neighborhoods that were loads more dangerous. Seemed like crime rates had nowhere to go but up, but intrepid Daily News reporter Nick Hirshon reports today:

The 112th Precinct, where many aging cops used to go just before retiring, saw robberies drop 42.8% from 2006 - the best improvement in the borough.

Why? It’s because our cops aren’t senile anymore, Hirshon posits. The 112th is no longer “The Snooze Precinct”–now police officers under 60 may be lucky enough to land here. Sign me up!

With crime rates lower than basically anywhere, really, why live anywhere else?

So Queens Crap had an alarmist update earlier this week about MS-13 graffiti on a construction site in Forest Hills. I didn’t really touch it because the people I hear going on and on about MS-13 tend to be apocalyptic loons like Michael “You Should Only Get AIDS and Die, You Pig” Savage, plus isn’t Central American gang graffiti on a construction site as likely to come from undocumented Central American day laborers as from the nearby high school? Anyway, I filed that away until my commute home today, when I saw this artistically tagged on an otherwise unmemorable poster at the 75th Avenue subway station:

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you somehow missed it, the cops–in Georgia!–arrested a suspect in last month’s killing of a Bukharian dentist in front of his 4-year-old daughter and estranged wife. Surprise! He’s related to the aforementioned wife.

Mikhail Mallayev is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, but cops found his prints on the “silencer” (it was a bleach bottle wrapped in duct tape–very professional!). The cops already had his fingerprints because of a 1994 “subway fare-beating bust”–I think that means turnstile jumping. He certainly sounds like a class act.

“I don’t know anything,” he told the Daily News from jail. Sure, he was in New York at the time, but it was for a wedding.

Now, here’s the million-dollar question. The wife has never been declared a suspect. Was she involved in this? Maybe it just a matter of some family revenge without her prior knowledge–we know her family, independent of her, was not pleased with the victim. And would any mother want this to happen in front of her young daughter? This is only going to get more interesting, I think.