How Dare You Barge Right In Here!

Discarding large objects (cars, appliances — what have you) in city parks is nothing new, but who dumps a barge (two whole barges!) in Jamaica Bay? This guy:

Firefighters, the U.S. Coast Guard, and state environmental agents have been hard at work trying to unravel a bizarre mystery in Jamaica Bay.

Broad Channel residents have been reporting to the Fire Department since Sept. 23 that an unidentified tugboat abandoned two old barges in the Barbados basin in the bay. After weeks of phone calls, firefighters responded to the site last week and found that one boat had sunk while another was half under water, according to a Coast Guard command duty officer.

“We’re not sure if it was sunk on its own,” Coast Guard Lt. Craig Toomey said Saturday as officers launched an investigation in the boats’ origins.

Toomey said the Coast Guard did not know who owned either of the boats, but had determined that the half-sunk ship was an old city Sanitation Department barge.

A license number had been painted on the half sunken boat, which had an official license number of DS74, according to Toomey.

Residents said they saw a suspicious tugboat bring in the rusting barges. Several community members said they had not seen or heard from the pilot since he dropped off the barges.

“They knew right away that something was wrong when they saw that guy,” Jamaica Bay Eco Watchers member Dan Mundy said of his neighbors who spotted the tug boat.

My Time Is Also Money, So Don’t Get Any Ideas, Perps-To-Be — When You Steal Our Subway, You Steal From Everyone!

The “power problem” plaguing Lexington Avenue trains during rush hour last night was on account of this nitwit:

Subway service on the East Side was disrupted for nearly two hours yesterday after an above-ground thief turned tunnel rat to make his getaway.

The thug robbed a street-cart food vendor on 116th Street and Lexington Avenue and dashed into the nearby No. 6 station at about 3:45 p.m., sources said.

He then ran straight for tunnel and headed uptown, as cops ran toward him on the tracks from 125th Street, the sources said.

Local and express service was halted between 96th and 125th streets during a manhunt that included two K9 units.

Yet the perp still got away. There are at least three levels of tunnels in that stretch of subway, and he managed to “get lost” in them.

Service was restored a little before 6 p.m.

Like A Good Novelist Or Sculptor, Deborah Solomon Molds And Crafts Her Raw Materials Until The Finished Product Is Just Right (Read: She Asks And Reasks Questions And Edits Down The Answers Until The Interview Says Exactly What She Wants, Which Is Roughly The Same As Making Up Stuff, When You Think About It)

Matt Elzweig explains in the New York Press how the Times Sunday Magazine’s Deborah Solomon comes off as such a pain in the ass in those preciously bratty Q-and-A features:

When I began my reporting three weeks ago, this story was slated to be a benign profile of an incisive, witty, cantankerous, high-profile-but-not-quite-famous, powerful, puzzling, playful, combative contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. Through Deborah Solomon’s weekly column, a Q-and-A interview that has become a popular staple of the Times’ Sunday magazine since its launch in 2003, the former art critic and author of two biographies has developed a voice easily as distinctive as the ones she features.

Most of my interviews with people in Solomon’s column over the years reflected positive overall experiences. (Several of those contacted either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) But after conversations with two prominent Solomon Q-and-A subjects — Ira Glass, the popular host of Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” and Amy Dickinson, the nationally-syndicated advice columnist who replaced Ann Landers in 2003 — the story became more complicated. Both Glass and Dickinson, without any prompting and in significant detail, told me that in the published versions of their interviews, Solomon had made up questions, after the fact, to match answers that, at least in one instance, she had taken out of their original context.

“[Solomon] rewrites her questions and then applies any question to any answer that a person says,” Glass told me in a tape-recorded telephone interview.

Both experienced journalists, Glass and Dickinson accused Solomon of violating basic ethical standards by making up dialogue never said during their conversations with her — conversations Solomon taped. Dickinson (in a tape-recorded telephone interview) described an exchange that she says “didn’t happen” during her interview, that she said Solomon put together using her quotes. Glass went even further; of one exchange, he said that “she never actually asked that question,” and added that Solomon “was changing context in a way that changed what I meant.” In Glass’s case, he told a fact-checker for the magazine about the distortion of the interview, in an attempt to have it corrected. “I made my case as forcefully as I knew how,” Glass said in an email to me last week, “but I guess he just disagreed with me.”

We Are All 9/11 Survivors Now

The pathology of 9/11 victimhood, writ small:

Tania Head’s story, as shared over the years with reporters, students, friends and hundreds of visitors to ground zero, was a remarkable account of both life and death.

She had, she said, survived the terror attack on the World Trade Center despite having been badly burned when the plane crashed into the upper floors of the south tower.

Crawling through the chaos and carnage on the 78th floor that morning, she said, she encountered a dying man who handed her his inscribed wedding ring, which she later returned to his widow.

Her own life was saved, she said, by a selfless volunteer who stanched the flames on her burning clothes before she was helped down the stairs. It was a journey she said she had the strength to make because she kept thinking of a beautiful white dress she was to wear at her coming marriage ceremony to a man named Dave.

But later she would discover, she said, that Dave, her fiancé, and in some versions her husband, had perished in the north tower.

As a matter of history, Ms. Head’s account made her one of only 19 survivors who had been at or above the point of impact when the planes hit. As a matter of emotion, her story deeply moved audiences like college students to whom she spoke and visitors at ground zero, where she has long led tours for the Tribute W.T.C. Visitor Center for visitors including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Gov. George E. Pataki.

“What I witnessed there I will never forget,” she told a gathering at Baruch College at a memorial event in 2006. “It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.”

. . .

But no part of her story, it turns out, has been verified.

The family and friends of the man to whom she claimed to be engaged say they have never heard of Tania Head and view the relationship she describes with the man, who truly died in the north tower, as an impossibility.

A spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch & Company, where she told people she worked at the time of the terror attack, said the company had no record of employing a Tania Head.

And few people, it seems, who embraced the gripping immediacy and pain of her account ever asked the name of the man whose ring she had returned, or that of the hospital where she was treated, or the identities of the people she met with in the south tower on the morning of 9/11.

. . .

In recent weeks, The New York Times sought to interview Ms. Head about her experiences on 9/11 because she had, in other settings, presented a poignant account of survival and loss. But she canceled three scheduled interviews, citing her privacy and emotional turmoil, and declined to provide details to corroborate her story. During a telephone conversation on Tuesday, she would not explain her reticence, saying only that she had not filed any claims with the federal Victim Compensation Fund. “I have done nothing illegal,” Ms. Head said.

She has retained a lawyer, Stephanie Furgang Adwar, to represent her. Also on Tuesday, in response to a question about the accuracy of Ms. Head’s account, Ms. Adwar said in an e-mail message, “With regard to the veracity of my client’s story, neither my client, nor I, have any comment.”

(The Times likes this sort of thing, doesn’t it?)

Maybe Jeremy Piven — Or If You’re Lucky, Wallace Shawn — Will Play You In The Feature Film

There are at least two acts in there somewhere (some enterprising whippersnapper needs to supply the third):

The Carroll Gardens widow who fought to die in the home she’d lived in her entire life, won a Pyrrhic victory this month — dying in the apartment on Aug. 12 and defeating a developer’s two-year-long quest to evict her.

Angelina Visconti, 88, died of natural causes at Long Island College Hospital, though she was still a resident of the Cheever Place rowhouse.

“She got her wish, and that was what it was all about,” said Leonard Visconti, her son. “She always said she was born here, she wanted to die here.”

Visconti’s residency became an issue in 2005, when her nephew Joseph DeLeonibus, the son of Visconti’s late twin sister, tried to evict her so he could make a killing in the booming Carroll Gardens real-estate market.

The house was eventually sold for $1.13 million to developer Wayne Warnock, who picked up the eviction proceedings where DeLeonibus left off.

Earlier: Notices To Quit Thicker Than Blood.