Raising Weeksville

A cohesive family unit is important, just not at gunpoint:

A Brooklyn man enraged that his ex-girlfriend wouldn’t let him see their infant daughter kidnapped the child at gunpoint Tuesday, police said.

Shawn Fariera, 20, and a friend busted into Melissa Fyffe’s Weeksville apartment about 5:40 p.m., saying they had some clothes for 3-month-old Shamiece, cops and witnesses said.

“He bum-rushed the door,” said Fyffe, 21, who has a protective order against Fariera. “He grabbed her off my mother’s bed. While he had her in his arms, he pulled a small black gun out of his back pocket and put it to my face.”

Fariera’s friend grabbed some baby blankets from the bed, and the duo escaped through a back door in the building, Fyffe said.

Adjustable Rate Mortgages — Ugg (Boot)!

The plight of the self-consciously trendy is they’re always a step or two behind:

The promise of learning the cold, hard realities of today’s housing market is what brought more than a dozen skinny-jean-wearing, tattoo-sporting members of Williamsburg’s art and music scene to Hugs bar last month to attend [real estate agent Eve] Levine’s first “Hipster Mortgage Night.”

It’s the latest version of a marketing campaign Levin first began as mere barroom lectures.

“There is so much information people just don’t know,” said Levine, a musician and artist herself who created the event not only as a tool for marketing her own business, but also a means of supplying financial and home buying know-how to a group of people she bluntly describes as “the opposite of Wall Street.”

Members of that group, frankly, agree with that assessment.

“Figuring out how to buy a home in New York City is like climbing Mount Everest,” said Margaret Raimondi, who attended the event with her fiancé, Brad Augustine.

“Hopefully, ‘Hipster Mortgage Night’ will make it more like climbing Mount Rainier,” she added, referring to the much-shorter mountain in Washington State.

On Jerks, Jackasses And Morons

The immutables of city life — jerks will never move in to the center of the subway car, jackasses will continue to prove to the neighborhood that even if they don’t have the nicest automobile they surely have the loudest car stereo and your moronic, retarded tenants will never ever learn how to separate their recycling:

Richard Martin, the 71-year-old superintendent at 278 91st St., recently ended his showdown against tenants who were careless about throwing out their garbage, and has agreed to drag the nine moldering trashcans from the lobby of the building back to their rightful spot outside.

“I don’t care anymore,” said Martin, who burst onto the public consciousness last year, after The Brooklyn Paper wrote a story about the hostile hand-written signs he posted on the building lambasting his tenants as “lazy” and “dangerous” for not properly putting out their trash.

“Tenants don’t care, landlord don’t care, Ritchie Martin don’t care.”

His sudden lack of concern is a stark contrast to back in November, when Martin’s notes — all featuring his black, green and red all caps scrawl — angrily told tenants what he expected: “Take covers off to put your garbage in and put covers back on. You tenants better stop being stupid and retarded.”

When tenants failed to respond to his colorful signs, Martin hauled the garbage up to the roof, forcing some tenants to hike as many as five floors to get rid of their trash.

“It’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline,” said one local resident of Martin’s antics.

And sure enough, the tenants continued to mix waste and recyclables.

Martin then brought out the big guns: He pulled the eight trashcans inside, forcing residents to live with piled up garbage in the lobby of their building.

Earlier: What A Country.

You Snooze, You Lose, Buddy, Fuhgeddaboudit!

Mrs. Markowitz swag-gers her way around town:

Who knew the first lady of Brooklyn was also its biggest booster?

Jamie Markowitz, the wife of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, scooped up eight pricey fiberglass place mats – works of art by pop artist Takashi Murakami – set aside for guests at a glitzy Brooklyn Museum gala.

The limited-edition Technicolor mats, which have sold for $1,000 on eBay after a similar event, were included in a grab bag of pricey freebies for guests celebrating the opening of the artist’s three-month exhibition last Thursday.

“It’s a little true,” Markowitz laughed Sunday when asked about an item on RadarOnline.com that painted her as a tad greedy.

Radar reported that when several guests who didn’t get a mat asked for one of her eight, she replied, “You guys really should have acted faster. This is Brooklyn!”

To another, she said, “You snooze, you lose, buddy. Forget it.”

Nothing Gentrifies A Neighborhood Like A Closed Laundromat

The thing about neighborhood amenities is that you really, really only need one thing — a laundromat:

Hundreds of residents of a public housing project in Vinegar Hill have been forced to walk nearly a mile to do their laundry ever since the on-site Laundromat closed last year.

Farragut Houses, the city-run, 10-tower complex of 3,440 residents, has zero laundry facilities within a nearly 20-block radius.

“It is almost a year since we’ve had a Laundromat,” said Ines, 64, who declined to give her last name.

So at about 7 am last Friday, there was Ines, setting out from the intersection of Navy Street and Flushing Avenue with a cart piled high with laundry, making the first steps of a 25-minute walk to a Laundromat on Myrtle Avenue.

“It’s terrible,” said Ines, who added that the trip was especially difficult thanks to her respiratory problems.

. . .

The weekly march to one of the two Myrtle Avenue Laundromats — one at North Portland Avenue, the other at Carlton Avenue — would not be necessary if the city found another operator for the basement laundry space at 191 Sand St., which was closed last year because it “was not up to code,” said Howard Marder, spokesman for the New York City Housing Authority.

He added that there “is no immediate plan” to put a new laundry facility into the Farragut Houses.

. . .

Some residents, like tenants association President Deborah Stewart, have their own washing machines. But many others, she said, make the “long and very inconvenient” walk to Myrtle.

Or, like her neighbor Deborah Ansley, they rely on relatives to drive them out of the neighborhood.

“I have a daughter who lives out in East New York, and she comes and drives me,” said Ansley, who has two herniated discs so she cannot make the trek to the Laundromat.

Unlike other gentrified neighborhoods, DUMBO, which borders the Farragut Houses, has no Laundromats — though there are plenty of coffee shops and restaurants and no less than two modern design shops.

In part, that’s because all of the new luxury developments have a washer and dryer in each unit.

Circumstances aren’t much better at neighboring housing projects, according to Ed Brown, the president of the Ingersoll Tenants Association in Fort Greene.

Ingersoll hasn’t had a Laundromat in more than 11 years. Meanwhile, the Laundromat directly across the street from the project has been demolished to make way for John Castimatidis’s luxury residential development — one that the Gristedes owner has put off indefinitely, thanks to the credit crisis.