The Sarajevo Or Beijing Of America

You may think it’s cute to spend a weekend buying counterfeit shit but the truth of the matter is you’re sapping billions from city coffers:

The police call it Counterfeit Alley, and say it is the city’s top haven for knockoff, no-name, and flat-out phony goods. In the last two years, the city has seized close to $50 million in counterfeit goods in the area and shut down, under the same nuisance abatement laws used to clean up Times Square, 15 buildings in the area that they said were once occupied almost entirely by counterfeiters.

But thousands of people still pack the area on weekends. Many are New Yorkers, but some travel hundreds of miles via tour bus, dragging suitcases and rolling duffels full of clothes back home to North Carolina or Pennsylvania. To them, it is a poor man’s shopping mall, an admittedly seedy — and therefore affordable — alternative to the gleaming, teeming Herald Square stores a few blocks away.

“It’s the prices you can get, with what little money you have,” said Ellen Counts, 41, of Belleville, Mich. She comes several times a year for socks, underwear and other clothing for her family, and also buys silver jewelry from the nearby wholesalers for her store back home. “We do our Christmas shopping here.”

Though sidewalk vendors abound in the area, most of the shopping in Counterfeit Alley takes place in a handful of old office buildings along Broadway and the side streets. Most have been divided and subdivided into warrens of dingy boutiques and record stores, run more or less like speakeasies. There are no signs or billboards advertising their presence, only clusters of men at the building entrances muttering questions — “CD’s? Sneakers? What you want, man?”

Answer in the affirmative, and you will be led through the maze to your chosen destination. It is not quite the Galleria. The illicit thrill of entering a room full of $40 faux North Face jackets, for example, is easily sapped by the sound of the door being locked behind a shopper’s back.

. . .

A 2004 report from the city comptroller’s office estimated that New York loses about $1 billion in tax revenue a year from the trade in counterfeit goods, though some analysts say the figure is inflated. The police say they are just as concerned with public safety as lost sales taxes and ripped-off tourists.

MTA To Train Enthusiasts: Sit Down!

The “Rail-fan Window” is slowly being phased out by the MTA:

Rachael Lambert, a 24-year-old office worker and part-time student from Howard Beach, Queens, took a practiced stance on Tuesday at the head of a J train that was clattering eastward across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Peering out the scratched window at the front of the train, she offered in her slight Midwestern twang a running commentary on the view.

“You see the green-yellow?” she said, pointing to a pair of signal lights beside the elevated tracks. “We’re going, but we’re being diverted to the middle track.”

A few minutes later, the train reached one of Ms. Lambert’s favorite spots, near the Myrtle Avenue station, where the M line veers northward across the J line, and in doing so crosses a spaghetti-like tangle of rails.

“It’s great in winter,” she said. “When they’re afraid the switches are going to freeze, there are little pilot lights on them, and they light them, and it looks like the tracks are on fire.”

But Ms. Lambert’s is a dying pastime. Over the last few decades, and with increasing speed, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been phasing out cars with publicly accessible windows in front, a feature that is often called the rail-fan window because of its appeal to subway buffs. In 2000, nearly half of all cars had such windows, according to Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit. This year, they appear in only about one-fifth of the fleet’s roughly 6,200 cars.

And over the next decade, rail-fan windows will probably disappear entirely. A new model of car that lacks the rail-fan window is currently being tested on the A and N lines; the city has ordered 660 of the cars, set to arrive in 2008, and has an option to buy an additional 900 or so.

Everything You Thought Was For Your Protection Actually Just Makes It Worse

Great, now you tell us:

The concrete and metal barriers put up outside buildings in Manhattan deemed possible terrorist targets after Sept. 11 are being removed.

Counterterrorism experts said the planters and traffic medians known as jersey barriers caused pedestrian traffic problems, were in some cases never really needed and could shatter into dangerous flying debris through an explosion in others.

Barriers have been removed at 30 of some 50 to 70 skyscrapers, office buildings and museums, a Transportation Department spokeswoman confirmed last night. [Emph. added because what the fuck!?]

Next you’ll tell us that Operation Hercules is a bad idea because it leaves vulnerable too many police officers in one place . . .

They Act Like Animal Hoarding Is A Bad Thing!

“Cat Lady” — myth or reality? The Queens Tribune investigates:

Pomonok Houses certainly isn’t the first housing complex in Queens, let alone New York City, to have the noxious scent of cat urine seep into its walls and it won’t be the last, according to the New York City ASPCA.

ASPCA Senior Outreach Manager Allison Cardona said the agency sees at least 50 to 100 cases similar to Pomonok throughout the city each year.

“It wasn’t until recently that the data is being recognized as a social problem, a mental health problem,” explained Cardona. “In the past, everyone heard of a cat lady or a little old lady who rescues too many cats, but instances like these are considered animal hoarding.”

Hoarding is when an individual has more than the typical number of companion animals; is in denial of the inability to provide this minimum care; and is in denial of the impact of that failure on the animals, the household, and human occupants of the dwelling, according to the he Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium, a non profit academic research group.

“A lot of times the situation is approached from social service stances, where it’s recognized that you can’t just remove all the animals and everything will be fine,” she said, “because no it’s won’t be fine, and yes, something needs to happen for the human or else they will begin hoarding all over again.”

. . .

Melanie Neer, an Elmhurst woman who had caught national attention for housing close to 120 cats in her studio apartment in 2000 is an example of an animal hoarder who agreed to give up her companions and once again found her apartment crawling with 45 felines in 2006.

Neer was facing eviction and since March 2006 has seen Animal Care and Control cage 27 of her cats, emphasizing that she knows of eight for which they could not find adopters, and which have been euthanized.

Neer never saw her number of pets as being a problem. She simply saw it as living with her “closest friends.”

It is important to recognize that hoarding knows no age, gender, or socioeconomic boundaries, according to HARC. It has been observed in men and women, young and old, married as well as never married or widowed, and in people with professional or white collar jobs.

Backstory on the Pomonok Stench: A Cautionary Tail.

If You Do, Don’t, And If You Further Do, You Really Shouldn’t

Moral of the story — don’t play high-stakes games of dice. Or perhaps if you do play high-stakes games of dice, don’t bet your vehicle. Or maybe, if you do bet your vehicle in a high-stakes game of dice, and you then lose, certainly don’t renege on the bet:

A high-stakes dice game took a near-deadly turn when a drug felon from Stapleton allegedly shot and wounded a loser who bet his car and refused to give it up.

Jerome Mitchell, 19, of Hill Street has been indicted for allegedly attacking the unidentified male shortly before midnight on July 23 at Castleton Avenue and West Street in West Brighton.

A law enforcement source said the victim bet his car in a dice game with Mitchell. The man lost, but when he wouldn’t sign over the vehicle’s title, Mitchell shot him.

The defendant was charged with one count of first-degree assault and three counts of criminal weapon possession.