Mugger Shot By Wheelchair-Bound Grandmother; Fists Pump At NRA Public Relations Department

“Taking her .357 handgun to the shooting range” = “packing heat on a routine trip to the cornerstore”:

Margaret Johnson, 56, was taking her .357 handgun to the shooting range at 3 p.m. while riding in her electric wheelchair when she was approached by a thief on Lenox Avenue near 133rd Street, police said.

“There’s not much to it. Somebody tried to mug me and I shot him,” said Johnson. “It was very scary.”

The attacker, Deron Johnson, 45, apparently thought the older, handicapped retiree was an easy mark, police said.

Instead, she was a marksman.

When Deron grabbed Margaret’s chain and tried to make a dash, she pulled out her gun and shot him, nailing him in the left elbow, police said.

He dropped the loot and ran, but cops caught up with Deron by following his trail of blood about half a block.

. . .

Cops said Margaret has a license for the pistol, which allows her to keep it in her home and take it to the shooting range.

The story doesn’t follow up to check the hours and/or location of the firing range . . .

Target Coming To Manhattan

The anti-Wal-Mart finds its way into Manhattan:

The cheap-chic retailer inked a lease for a coveted spot of 130,000 square feet at East River Plaza, now rising next to the FDR Drive at East 119th Street in Harlem.

Sources said Target topped Costco for the second-story space, which is above a 110,000-square-foot Home Depot.

Look, It Could Be Worse — Instead Of Making A Tasteless Comparison To Beirut, You Could Actually Be In Beirut

If Manhattan is the playground of the rich, the Battery is the spot over in the back where the older, cooler kids set off M-80s late into the evening:

On a mid-July night in Battery Park City, the architect David Rockwell threw a loft party for 400 friends in celebration of his 50th birthday.

There was food put out from about 20 of the city’s top chefs (many from restaurants that Rockwell had designed). Clowns and players from Cirque du Soliel performed and circulated through the crowd. And at exactly 9:30 p.m. a spectacular fireworks show was launched into the Lower Manhattan sky in honor of the birthday boy.

The party recieved a glowing account in Business Week magazine. Local reviews were less kind. Alarmed by the sound of unannounced exploding fireworks on a Wednesday night, Battery Park City residents began firing off e-mails.

The emails were addressed to Jim Lauer, the chief inspector of the explosive’s [sic] unit for the New York City Fire Department, which handles the permits for all fireworks shows in the city. For the past year, his office has mass e-mailed Downtown residents a listing of the times and locations of the shows. The monthly list and mailing began at the urging of Community Board 1.

“This is B.S,” one e-mailer, a Gateway Plaza resident, wrote. “I am really pissed. There is NO mention of ANY fireworks event in this neighborhood in this sheet.”

Another wrote: “Sounds like Beirut. What idiots are behind these fireworks?”

The unfortunate Beirut reference aside, there’s not much the inspector can do about it:

Later called before CB1’s Quality of Life Committee, Lauer brought the letters with him and read them aloud.

“I don’t need this,” he said.

Anyone with enough money or political pull, he told the committee, can get a permit for a private fireworks show with little more than a day or two notice.

“These people have money to burn” Lauer told the Trib. “What am I going to do, say no?”

According to the list, there have been 18 permits approved for shows in New York Harbor so far this year, three of them launched from a barge just 1,000 off shore near Battery Park.

“Is there any way that we could get less fireworks?” asked Pat Moore, the committee’s chairwoman.

“You could move,” said Lauer.

If We Split It 25,000 Ways, It Comes Out To $200,000 Per Person

Or $446,428.57 a unit:

Although some call it a mission impossible, tenants of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village said yesterday they’ll try to buy the mammoth Manhattan housing complex.

Metropolitan Life has put the 110 East Side apartment buildings up for sale, reportedly for $5 billion, and the tenants plan to compete with well-heeled developers to make a bid.

Nearly three-quarters of the apartments are protected by rent stabilization, but many of the 25,000 residents fear they’ll eventually be priced out of their homes if the 11,200-unit bastion of the middle class is bought by a private developer.

Some real estate experts said a tenant buyout of this size is unprecedented and faces enormous odds.

“I’ve never heard of one of this magnitude,” said Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel, Manhattan real estate appraisers and consultants. “It’s too complex. Too many things can go wrong.”

But one organizer of the residents’ effort, City Councilman Daniel Garodnick (D-Manhattan), insisted that a tenant buyout can be successful with the help of private and public pension funds, governmental assistance and “socially conscious private sector investors.”

“And yes we expect to be able to put together a bid that is competitive and one that would be viewed favorably by MetLife and its shareholders,” said Garodnick, who lives in Peter Cooper Village.

Sixteen Months Later, An Abstract Thing Of Beauty

After initially indicating that owners would be responsible for towing costs, the insurer of the Washington Heights development where a retaining wall collapsed onto the West Side Highway announces that it will ante up for towing, too:

It was with no small sense of wonder that Frank Nadal returned to the scene of the disaster, a huge mound of dirt and debris where a 75-foot retaining wall gave way on May 12, 2005, burying part of Riverside Drive and several parked cars. By yesterday, the cars were unearthed.

“I looked, and they said, ‘It’s right in front of you,'” said Mr. Nadal, the superintendent of the Castle Village apartments near 183rd Street in Manhattan, where the wall collapsed.

“I said, ‘Where is the car?'” Mr. Nadal said. “You couldn’t recognize the thing. It was flat as a pancake.”

For anyone expecting better, it was surely a letdown. After nearly 16 months of waiting, what emerged yesterday was a sorry heap of scrap metal that bore a greater resemblance to abstract art than to automotive technology.

“You can barely tell it was a car,” said John Everett, owner of Cybert Tire and Car Care at 11th Avenue and 51st Street in Manhattan, who was shown a photograph of the wreckage.

For the owners — who had the bad luck to find parking spaces that were legal but in the wrong place at the wrong time — the sight yesterday behind the barricades of a closed northbound entrance to Riverside Drive just north of the George Washington Bridge may have added insult to injury.

For most of the time since the avalanche, the owners had been left in the dark about their responsibility and the extent of their loss. Since auto insurance normally does not cover landslides, several of the car owners filed claims with the Greater New York Mutual Insurance Company, which insures Castle Village.

Greater New York Mutual said it would honor the claims, but it also told the owners that once their cars were dug up, they should be ready to pay towing costs, even if there was little to salvage.

The issue became nettlesome for everyone. The insurance company said the cars had to be dug out and towed so the owners could prove their vehicles were the ones that had been buried, but the owners were aghast at the prospect of even greater costs.

Yesterday, Greater New York Mutual said it would pay the towing costs. Thomas D. Hughes, senior vice president and general counsel for the company, said it was not about to split hairs with the car owners over what was salvageable.

Backstory: Retaining Wall to Henry Hudson Parkway: Drop Dead, Rvr Vus.