Hate The Church, Love Its Buildings

It was high-tension back-and-forth drama for St. Brigid’s Church last week, with details straight out of a movie script:

It was an anxious week for East Villagers who have been fighting to save the turn-of-the-century old P.S. 64 and 158-year-old St. Brigid’s Church from demolition. Some neighbors and activists have been involved in both struggles, and probably could have used a scorecard to keep up with the flurry of emergency press conferences outside the two historic Avenue B buildings — located just a block apart — plus a candlelight vigil and court hearing.

Last Friday, State Supreme Court Judge Barbara Kapnick enjoined further demolition of St. Brigid’s Church until Aug. 24, pending a Board of Standards and Appeals hearing on the validity of the demolition permit.

Last Thursday — just two days after demolition workers started hacking historic terracotta off the old P.S. 64 building on E. Ninth St. — a demolition crew a block to the south pounded an ugly hole through the back wall of St. Brigid’s Church, starting the destruction of the historic East Village famine church. The workers shoved antique wooden pews and delicate wainscoting from inside the church through the hole and into a rear yard. Then — as stunned and angry neighbors and former St. Brigid’s parishioners pleaded with him to stop — one of the workers, smiling, spun his bulldozer over the pile, crushing it all to bits.

. . .

Next morning at 7 a.m., to the anguish of about 20 neighbors, activists and former parishioners who showed up hoping to head off further destruction, the workers — this time wielding long crowbars — knocked out the seven, 25-foot-tall, painted, stained-glass windows on the church’s north side. Again, the neighbors and former parishioners begged them to stop.

“When I saw those crowbars destroying those stained-glass windows this morning, I thought about the Taliban destroying those Buddhas in Afghanistan,” said Matt Metzgar, a former East Village squatter who had been among the protesters shouting for the workers not to break the windows.

“We were all yelling ‘Stop!’ We were screaming,” said Beth Sopkow. “We were all calling 311 and E.P.A, saying that there were hazardous conditions and dust.”

Patti Kelly, who has a stained-glass studio on Avenue C and also had sadly watched as the venerable windows depicting Jesus’ life were smashed, estimated they were worth $100,000 apiece.

“That was heartbreaking, because I know exactly what it takes to do those windows. It took them a year to do them,” she said.

Perhaps you assumed that godless New Yorkers were uninterested in churches. That would be untrue:

At a candlelight vigil outside St. Brigid’s the night before, East Villagers accused the archdiocese of planning to cash in by developing the prime property on the eastern edge of Tompkins Square Park.

A large silver crucifix ring on his finger, poet Barry Allen shouted, “Our Lord Jesus went into the temple and threw out the money changers — goddammit!”

“I love the building and the color, that beautiful yellow, right at the park,” said Susi Schropp. Though she never attended the church, she said, “It’s beyond just being a parishioner — it’s about the community being besieged.”

. . .

Jerome O’Connor, who used to own St. Dymphna’s bar on St. Mark’s Pl., originally had the idea to investigate the demolition permit to check if it was valid — which is the only thing currently standing in the way of the building being razed.

“You don’t tear down a 158-year-old church for anything,” O’Connor said. “I’d like to see all the Catholic churches leveled, because of what they do. But not this one.”

Who’s The Big Frankenfish That Survives On Land And Makes You His Bitch? Snap! It’s The Northern Snakehead!

A year after the superpredator snakehead fish was found in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the problem fish is still not entirely under control:

The “frankenfish” lives.

That’s the verdict of state wildlife officials, who continue to catch the northern snakehead — popularly known as “the frankenfish” for its voracious appetite, razor sharp teeth and ability to live out of water for hours — in Willow and Meadow lakes in Flushing Meadows Park.

A Queens College professor first spotted the alien invaders more than a year ago. After hunting the fish with weighted nets, trawling the waters with a boat fitted with small electric shockers and even flooding the lakes with seawater, state biologists have yet to eliminate the hardy predators.

Only last week, Jim Gilmore, natural resources supervisor with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, pulled three more out of the two lakes. He was quick to put the catch in perspective. “We’ve found quite a few animals, but we’ve yet to find any juveniles,” Gilmore said. “You’re not seeing hundreds of them.”

The snakehead is an invasive species that is illegal to import or release into the wild. Biologists suspect it was introduced into Willow and Meadow lakes as part of a Buddhist ritual, or in the hopes of stocking the lakes with the fish, a delicacy in Asian countries. The northern snakehead can grow up to 3 feet long, has a sleek, torpedo shaped body and mottled, snake like scales.

Having pledged to eradicate the snakeheads after their discovery last summer, the Parks Department and the Department of Environmental Conservation have been unable to wipe out the tenacious fish, but are hesitant to take more extreme measures.

“A drastic solution would be poisoning both lakes. That would be a severe thing, and we’re hopefully not going to do that,” Gilmore said.

The danger of the snakehead is its status as an “apex,” or top, predator. Once it secures a position in an ecosystem and begins reproducing, it can quickly take over the top of the food chain, breed prodigiously and eventually wipe out weaker native species.

According to Gilmore, the good news is that the failure to catch any juveniles suggest that the snakeheads are not breeding successfully. “I was more concerned last summer,” he added. “I don’t think they’re taking the lake over. I think we’re eventually going to get rid of them.”

Location scout: Meadow Lake.

Just What I Needed

The 2nd Avenue Deli will become a bank branch:

The East Village building where the famed Second Avenue Deli served matzo ball soup and pastrami for five decades is becoming a bank branch, according to a broker involved in the deal finalized Wednesday.

Chase signed a lease for the corner property on East 10th Street and Second Avenue, as well as a newsstand next door, said Jonathan Krieger, a broker for Robert K. Futterman and Associates.

Backstory: How Much Corned Beef Do You Have To Sell To Make Rent?

A Loose Coalition Of Antibar Activists Seeks To Halt The Assault On The Senses

The Villager’s Lincoln Anderson is on the verge of popularizing a new phrase — “antibar activists”* — in the course of profiling a woman who is raising children next to an East Village bar:

Last month, a few neighbors held a protest rally outside that bar, Boxcar, between 10th and 11th Sts. Their ranks were swelled by antibar activists who don’t live in the neighborhood, including individuals who had coalesced to push for the closing of The Falls, the Soho bar where Imette St. Guillen was last seen in February before her murder, allegedly by a bouncer.

Wearing a nightgown and robe, Liz Glass, who lives around the corner on E. 11th St. and whose first-floor apartment’s backyard abuts Boxcar’s backyard garden, organized the rally. With her were her three young children, ages 2 through 7, whom she says are kept awake by the bar’s noise, the older two of whom toted protest signs.

“We can’t sleep anyway. It’s a pajama protest,” Glass said, with a forlorn expression.

More than a year ago, Boxcar agreed to a curfew for its backyard of 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends.

However, shortly after the bar agreed to the backyard curfew, Community Board 3 passed a resolution calling for the State Liquor Authority to close the bar’s backyard entirely. Glass, the bar’s primary critic, is asking the S.L.A. to follow through on the resolution.

Although Glass is the neighbor most affected by the noise, others say they are too.

“I moved to here to be by the beautiful park, and then I got this,” said Eden Fromberg, an OB/GYN doctor who lives on 10th St. whose rear windows face into the block’s interior. “Somehow, with the A/C on and a tape of a babbling brook playing, I can still hear them,” she said of her unsuccessful efforts to block out the bar’s noise at night.

A woman from Huntington House, a shelter for female parolees and their families on the other side of Avenue B, saw the protest and came over to briefly lend support and add her name to their petition.

“Let me sign it!” Haydee Figueroa said, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth as she grabbed the clipboard. She said she was angry “because of the bullshit in the morning — 2 a.m., 3 a.m. they come out to talk and to fight. This one is worse,” she said, gesturing at Lakeside Lounge a few doors down from Boxcar. “A lot of women can’t sleep,” she said.

Although it’s unclear how much noise is too much noise, one’s threshold seems to lower when you involve a two-year-old:

Boxcar also built a sound-barrier wall between its backyard and Glass’s backyard — Glass called in a complaint to the Department of Buildings as the bar was building it because they didn’t have a permit. Spingola says they didn’t know they needed a permit.

Standing in Glass’s backyard around 10:30 p.m. the night of the protest, a steady mumble of voices could be heard from Gnocco, a restaurant on 10th St. with a backyard dining area. Less audible was the sound from Boxcar’s backyard. Inside Glass’s apartment, with the windows closed, it was hard to hear anything from either place.

“We have no violations — no noise violations, since she started her thing,” said Spingola. “The Department of Environmental Protection was here last Thursday night and we did not get a violation. And D.E.P. doesn’t mess around.”

*The first recorded (or at least Googlable) reference seems to be Anderson’s After ‘Falls murder,’ a flood of concerns about bar safety from March 2006.

Out: Unsightly Coin-Op Laundromats And Check Cashing Places; In: Dog Walkers

Development brings upscale professionals. Upscale professionals bring dogs. And dogs demand dogwalkers:

With huge residential developments in construction all along the East River waterfront, and hundreds of upscale professionals flocking to the neighborhood, Long Island City now has a new growth industry: professional dog walking.

“I’m going to need an assistant soon, once all these buildings go up,” said Cynthia Zapata, 36, who walks dogs from the Avalon Riverview building on 50th Avenue.

Zapata started walking dogs part time two years ago “to make a few extra bucks,” she said. Now she walks 10 or more dogs a day. At $10 for a walk, a run in the park and a few minutes playing catch or Frisbee, the job soon became a major source of income.

She’s not the only one to see profit at the end of a leash. “I have a few customers who have their dogs walked seven days a week, every day of the year,” says Hanna Polaski, who works at the City Dog Lounge on Vernon Boulevard. City Dog’s walking service doesn’t come cheap either — at $12 for a half hour, five weekday walks add up to almost $300 per month. But with many commuters leaving early in the morning and returning late at night, their dog’s comfort is worth the price.

And if the residents of Avalon Riverview are any indication, the additional residential towers under construction will swell Long Island City’s population — four footed and two footed alike.

“There are more dogs than there are kids,” said Rob McSparron, the concierge of the 372 unit rental building that opened in 2002. He estimated that one out of every four apartments has a dog. At an average rent of $3,000 per month, and some apartments fetching more than $6,000, the dogs reflect their owners’ upscale tastes.

“It’s mostly purebreds,” McSparron said. “You see a lot of bulldogs and Labradors, and a lot of the yippy little Paris Hilton dogs.”

. . .

The character of the neighborhood is already changing quickly, according to Polaski. Having worked at City Dog Lounge for two years, she can tell by the dogs. “No more mutts,” she said. “All the city people that are coming, they bring in purebreds and more of the little dogs.”

One of the most popular new breeds she sees is the Maltese, which Polaski describes as a “small, fluffy, white ball of fur.”

The type of dog owners are changing too.

“They come in here and ask for clothes for the doggies, for nail polish,” Polaski says. “We don’t sell that here. For us, a dog is a dog. We love doggies but we treat them like dogs and not like little kids.”