Smoke condition at Dyker school after construction crews leave adhesive on radiator

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A smoke condition at a Dyker Heights school on Friday, January 26 left a classroom full of students suffering from light smoke inhalation. However, both administrators and local officials say the incident could have been much worse.

“I was on my way into the office when I got a text that said there was a report of a fire on the fourth floor of William McKinley Junior High School,” recalled John Quaglione, an aide to State Senator Marty Golden. “I said, ‘I’ll just go over there and check it out.’”

When he got to the school, located at 7301 Fort Hamilton Parkway, he found that it had self-evacuated after the incident, which drew a bevy of fire trucks, ambulances and cop cars – but, luckily, there were no flames.

“My first instinct was to look up at the building and, thankfully, there were no flames raging out of any of the windows, which was reassuring, but the response was incredible so I knew it was more than a false alarm,” said Quaglione, a parent to public school children and the husband of an assistant principal.

A false alarm it certainly wasn’t, said longtime principal of the school Janice Geary, who confirmed that the cause of the smoke condition was leftover debris, specifically a container of adhesive from the previous day’s construction left atop a radiator unit inside the building.

According to the FDNY, the call came in at around 10:21 a.m. and there were just over 30 patients – nine of whom were sent to Maimonides Medical Center out of extra precaution due to difficulty breathing. The others were triaged at the scene.

“The city’s response was absolutely incredible,” said Geary. “The students received medical attention right there on the spot. Then, it was back to business as usual at the building.”

Quaglione, offering similar kudos to the first responders, also shone a light on Geary for her leadership amongst the chaos.

“Hats off to Janice Geary and her administration who, for many years, has run a great school. She’s a real true building leader,” he told this paper. “When you think about it, there’s [a lot of people in that school, even more when] you include staff. In 10 seconds, that school went into emergency mode, an evacuation plan was made, it was followed to a t, and the children and staff cooperated. It was just an awesome job all around.”

Geary – McKinley’s principal for close to 15 years – credited staff. “We’re an experienced administrative team,” she said, adding, “In my 14 years here, I’ve had floods, I’ve had this, I’ve had that – I’ve seen it all.”

According to Geary, all affected students – even those sent out for secondary treatment – were released by 3 p.m. that afternoon.

A number of students were temporarily based across the street at St. Ephrem School until the FDNY gave the all clear to re-enter the building.

Riveting premiere of “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box” at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center

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Adrienne Kennedy is brilliant.

She will make you weep.

Her first new play in a decade, “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box,” packs a devastating emotional wallop.

The just-opened play is making its world premiere at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center in the Brooklyn Cultural District.

It is a searing work about segregation, sex, violence and a pair of seriously star-crossed 17-year-old lovers from small-town Georgia in 1941.

Kennedy, whom the New York Times has called “one of the finest living American playwrights,” delivers a breathtaking evocation of the Deep South in the grip of Jim Crow with her tale of Kay and Chris.

When the play begins, Kay is standing beside a railing at the top of a stairwell at her boarding school, gazing down at a school play that’s in progress. For a moment, you are reminded of Juliet on her famous balcony. Then, down below, her Romeo appears, namely Chris.

 

Motherless children

As you soon discover, biracial Kay, played by Juliana Canfield, is a motherless child.

Her dead mother was black and 15 years old. Her father was white and rich.

Not long after Kay was born, her mother shot herself in the head. Or did she?

Most of the black people in Montefiore, Georgia, think Kay’s father killed her mother – and kept her heart in a green glass box.

Chris, played by Tom Pecinka, is white. He is motherless, too. He has just come from his mama’s funeral.

Chris’ father is rich, one of the biggest landowners in southern Georgia, in fact.

Dear Old Dad has Nazi friends in Germany. He has three children whose mothers were black. He is the “architect of the town’s segregation,” Kennedy writes in her stage directions for the play.

In their initial scene together, Kay agrees to marry Chris.

Musings full of pain and perplexity

After that, they spend the rest of the play until the very end on separate parts of the stage, composing letters to each other that they speak as monologues.

Their monologues are musings full of pain and perplexity about their parents, which Canfield and Pecinka turn into mesmerizing theatre.

Kay and Chris are separated because she’s at Atlanta University and he has headed to New York City to become an actor. He’s in his dressing room at an amateur production of “Bitter Sweet,” a Noel Coward play that, by the way, is about star-crossed lovers.

At one point, Pecinka creates a particularly poignant moment by singing the song “Dear Little Café” from “Bitter Sweet.”

Coward’s play was turned into a 1940 movie starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Kay and Chris had both seen it back home in Georgia, sitting in separate, segregated parts of the movie theatre.

They have decided that when the war is over, they will go to Paris together, just like the characters in “Bitter Sweet.”

 

Echoes of 16th-century bloodshed

Throughout the play, there’s a third person on stage with Kay and Chris.

He’s sitting there even before “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box” begins.

He’s actually a mannequin, painted ghost-white and dressed in a man’s suit.

In the play’s early scenes, he’s like the proverbial elephant in the room. His presence, though unacknowledged, can’t be ignored.

He seems like a ghostly reminder of all those white people in Montefiore who will be outraged by the young couple’s plans to wed.

In due course, the mannequin’s identity is revealed. He’s a stand-in for Chris’ father, Harrison Aherne.

The actor who plays Chris also plays Harrison Aherne by speaking the elder character’s lines and moving the mannequin around a bit.

Pecinka and the mannequin interact in a pas-de-deux that’s arrestingly odd – and riveting to watch.

Most of Harrison Aherne’s lines in “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box” come from Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play, “The Massacre at Paris.”

Pecinka reads some of them from a book as a clue to the audience that they are drawn from literature of old.

The lines are menacing and terrible. You are right to be frightened by them.

“The Massacre at Paris” is about French Catholics’ slaughter of thousands of Protestant Huguenots in 1572 and the French nobility’s use of this outbreak of religious warfare as a pretext to conspire murderously against one another.

The massacre occurred after the marriage of Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre to Margaret of Valois, the Catholic sister of King Charles IX of France.

 

An important voice in American theatre since the 1960s

Kennedy has been an important voice in American theatre since the early 1960s. When a new play of hers makes its debut, it’s a very big deal.

She has won Obie Awards for three of her plays starting in 1964 for “Funnyhouse of a Negro.” She also won an Obie for Lifetime Achievement.

Over the years, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, been a visiting professor at Harvard and Berkeley and been commissioned to write plays for Jerome Robbins and Juilliard and numerous other theatres.

“He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box” is directed by Evan Yionoulis, who helmed an award-winning revival of Kennedy’s play “Ohio State Murders” for Theatre for a New Audience in 2007.

Canfield and Pecinka are both Yale School of Drama grads who studied with Yionoulis.

Canfield plays a recurring role in “Succession,” an upcoming HBO series. Pecinka has appeared in Shakespeare in the Park and other Off-Broadway productions.

* * *

Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is staging “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box” by renowned playwright Adrienne Kennedy.

The play runs through Feb. 11.

TFANA’s venue, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is located at 262 Ashland Place in Fort Greene.

For tickets, go to tfana.org or call 866-811-4111.

Who’s afraid of Starbucks? Not this Brooklyn coffee tycoon

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Starbucks was well underway in pursuing its manifest destiny to blanket the world with its coffee shops when Murat Uyaroglu, a Turkish immigrant living in Brooklyn, decided there was room in the business for him too. His angle: he would do it better, from the espresso to the decor. “I saw the game changing,” Uyaroglu says. “Coffee started being treated like wine; it’s special. It’s important where you get it, how you roast it, how you brew it.”

The recipe is working. This month Uyaroglu opened the fifth location of his coffee-bar-and-café chain, Hungry Ghost, on the ground floor of a high-rise apartment building at 80 Dekalb Ave. Set across the street from the LIU Brooklyn campus in Fort Greene, it’s the fourth Hungry Ghost within about a one-mile stretch. (The fifth shop is inside NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan.) By June, Uyaroglu plans to open two more shops in Brooklyn and another in Tribeca. But you can’t convince him he’s expanding too fast.

“People say, ‘What, are you crazy? You’re opening three locations in five blocks?’,” says the 39-year-old Uyaroglu. “Actually, I could do five in five blocks!” Creating a coffee-shop brand has a lot to do with understanding the flow of foot traffic in the neighborhoods, because commuters typically walk the same route every day, Uyaroglu explains. The many subway stations near Hungry Ghost locations help ensure that traffic flow, while having multiple locations provides fiscal flexibility–if one shop’s revenue is down, the others can help support the business.

Convenience isn’t enough, though, says the entrepreneur. The most important factor in building a customer base is the consistency of the product, Uyaroglu says. “If you do your job right, they’re always going to come back to you.” Hungry Ghost makes an obsession of quality, acknowledging on its website, “We seek out baristas who share our passion for coffee and are not afraid to chase the perfect [espresso] shot and coincidentally become very overcaffeinated.”  

Uyaroglu made a decision early on to focus on the brewing and serving rather than the roasting, choosing Stumptown Coffee Roasters as his supplier. The Portland, Ore.-based company, one of the pioneers of the third-wave, artisanal-coffee movement, has a roasting plant in the Red Hook neighborhood.

While many customers may grab-and-go, Uyaroglu designed his shops as places for people to linger, which he attributes to his Turkish roots. “You go to a café [there], you relax, see what’s going on, drink, talk, meet–and that was the idea,” says Uyaroglu, a native of Istanbul.

At age 12, still living in Turkey, he worked at his father’s electronics store and later at a tool manufacturer run by his father’s cousin. Though he joyfully just worked the cash registers and boxed products, Uyaroglu says he learned some of his most important business lessons during those formative years, including how to negotiate, he says, and “dealing with people, day to day, understanding how people react to certain conversations, and where you want to set your limits, without pissing people off,” he says.  

While in college in Turkey, he opened up an internet café, which he sold six months later at a handsome profit, he says. The next year, Uyaroglu relocated to Washington, D.C., to learn English and study business. There he met his future wife, a writer from Minnesota, and quickly lost all desire to return to Turkey.

The pair married three years later, and eventually moved to Prospect Heights. When he saw an opportunity in 2006 to take over the business of a nearby coffee shop on Sterling Place called Prospect Perk, Uyaroglu borrowed some money from his father-in-law and went about fixing up the place, including its coffee.

After five years of practice in getting the formula right, he decided his next act would be to take it up a level by designing a flagship store on Flatbush Avenue. He embraced the seemingly sanity-questioning strategy of investing heavily on the café’s interior design. “People said, ‘What are you doing? It’s a coffee shop, not a restaurant,’” Uyaroglu recounts. “But it paid off.”

The flagship location’s rustic-chic look–a classically Brooklyn style with exposed brick, tin ceilings and wood tables, chairs and floors–has a dash of postmodern sleekness and has become the template for all of Uyaroglu’s Hungry Ghost outposts. Many people have asked if the brand name is a reference to the insatiable spirits in Buddhist teachings, but the genesis is more serendipitous. A friend of Uyaroglu’s once suggested they meet at a New England diner called Friendly Toast, which Uyaroglu initially misheard. He later embraced the accidental coinage for his new shop because he associated it with caffeine culture and the hungry souls of artists.

With their coffee or tea, Hungry Ghost customers can enjoy imported French pastries, as well as breakfast offerings at the larger shops. Italian sodas and kombucha on tap add a further cosmopolitan touch. “People are not going to settle with mediocre options in New York,” Uyaroglu says.

One of the few things Uyaroglu feels ambivalent about is the issue of Wi-Fi usage in coffee shops, which has sparked a backlash among customers who feel the laptop-toting hordes take up too much table space. At Hungry Ghost, the smaller locations don’t give out Wi-Fi passwords at all; the larger ones do, but offer limited seating to those with laptops. “It’s a sensitive issue. We want to serve both clientele,” he says, including those who “want to go to a coffee shop and not feel like you went into a library,” and freelancers, who “shouldn’t feel alienated from the space just because you want to sit down with your laptop.” The forthcoming East Williamsburg café will span about 1,500 sq. ft., with plenty of seating for both kinds of customers, he says.

Uyaroglu and his wife, who now have two children, reside in Fort Greene, with easy access to Uyaroglu’s growing hospitality empire. It now includes a well-reviewed craft-cocktail bar, Sweet Polly, which the entrepreneur opened two years ago on Sixth Avenue, not far from the Hungry Ghost flagship. As with the coffee shops, attention to detail is paid at Sweet Polly, from the colorful cocktails to the décor and ambiance. Uyaroglu said he might open another bar sometime next year, but has to get the other coffee shops up and running first. “I don’t know what the end game is, really,” Uyaroglu says. “But, so far, one shop at a time, that’s my goal.”

Michael Stahl is a freelance writer and editor. A former high school English teacher, he has written for Rolling Stone, Vice, the Village Voice, Narratively, Splitsider, Outside Magazine and other publications.

 

Brooklyn Bar Association Foundation Law Committee helps co-op dwellers know their rights

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The Brooklyn Bar Association’s Foundation Law Committee hosted a public seminar on Monday for co-op dwellers titled “Co-op Living: Know Your Rights as a Shareholder and as a Renter,” during which an attorney explained the common problems that arise and how to handle them.

The Foundation Law Committee, which is chaired by Fern Finkel, is the public and philanthropic arm of the Brooklyn Bar Association (BBA) and regularly hosts public forums to inform the community of their legal rights.

“All of these programs are free to the public,” Finkel said. “I see a few attorneys and judges here tonight, but this is really meant for all of your neighbors, your friends and your community.

It’s really hard to get legal advice from practitioners in a field, but here is a great and unique opportunity.”

BBA trustee Jimmy Lathrop was the lecturer. He spoke for an hour and a half on the rights of cooperative shareholders and renters under the Martin Act and NYS Constitution. Afterward he stayed and spoke one-on-one with some of the more than 80 attendees.

“Jimmy Lathrop worked for a while for the BBA and has done extensive pro bono work,” Finkel said. “His credentials go on and on, but what he is really known for is his expertise and ability to handle complex matters in the housing court, landlord tenant court, co-ops and condos and a number of other fields. He has a wonderful office and a real ability to listen.”

In explaining the intricacies of dealing with co-ops, Lathrop started by explaining exactly how owning or renting in a cooperative building is different from typical buildings.

“Cooperatives are very unique ownership regimes where different property interests are created,” Lathrop said. “A cooperative corporation buys a building and the cooperative is actually the owner and then shareholders purchase the cooperative shares which are then personal property and the corporation enters into long-term leases called proprietary leases entitling each shareholder to occupy a particular unit.

“Cooperatives are bound by their rules, much like a Rubik’s cube there are only so many things you can do with a cooperative unless it’s included in the offering plan, the articles of incorporation and the bylaws,” he explained.

Lathrop said that the varying motivations behind cooperative owners often lead to conflicts of interest between dwellers and even between the owner of a cooperative and the co-op board.

“As with all corporations, cooperative corporations owe their shareholders fiduciary duties and these responsibilities sometimes conflict with duties the corporation acting as landlord owes to a proprietary lessee,” he said. “That means that sometimes the cooperative has to choose the needs of the many over the needs of the few.”

The event was sponsored by the BBA’s Lawyer Referral Service (LRS), which it broadcasted over the internet using Facebook Live. LRS plans to sponsor similar topics in the future and will broadcast them live as well.

“The Lawyer Referral Service is a one of a kind nonprofit legal organization,” Lathrop said. “It screens attorneys for experience and expertise; they’re all interviewed by the LRS. It’s among the most successful legal organizations for referral services. Roseann Hiebert has been given numerous accommodations for her work with serving a very large community of litigants here in Kings County.”

Upcoming events that will be hosted by the Foundation Law Committee include one coming up on March 26 that will cover consumer debt and bankruptcy. That lecture will be conducted by Richard Klass. Then on April 30, it will host a “Know Your Rights” seminar on criminal law in conjunction with the Brooklyn Defender Services. All events are held at the Brooklyn Bar Association.

 

Brooklyn judge will consider Trump’s anti-Latino remarks in DACA decision

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A Brooklyn federal judge said in court on Tuesday that he cannot make a decision regarding the status of young undocumented immigrants in the country on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program without considering President Donald Trump’s “incendiary” anti-Latino comments.

“The statements that were made during the election cycle were extremely volatile,” said Judge Nicholas Garaufis in court, referring to Trump’s recurring comments that had painted Latinos with a broad negative brush.

“This came from the top. This isn’t ordinary,” Garaufis added while DACA recipients in the audience nodded. “It’s not what we see from our leaders, I hope.”

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman appeared in court, leading 16 other attorneys general motioning for a temporary injunction to stop the termination of DACA. The program is quickly approaching a March 5 deadline to cease after Trump called for its “orderly wind down” on Sept. 5, 2017.

A representative from Schneiderman’s office, Lourdes Rosado argued that the decision to end the program was fueled with bias, partly based on the many anti-immigrant and specifically Latino comments from the president. Of the 689,800 active recipients, known as “Dreamers,” roughly 94 percent are Latino.

When government lawyer Stephen Pezzi argued against the comments being used for consideration, Garaufis asked how he could decide by not taking into account the words by “the man who sits in the oval office.”

The plaintiffs, who are also made up of numerous Dreamers, called for the injunction because the possibly temporary injunction ruled by Judge William Alsup in California on Jan. 9 was not enough to protect all Dreamers.

“There are New Yorkers that are left out of the injunction record in California,” Schneiderman said outside the court. “No one has raised any argument that the Dreamers should not be allowed to stay here. These are people who work and play by the rules.”

Rosado argued that the rescinding of DACA would negatively impact New York, as its recipients combine to a large number of workers that contribute to the state economy.

In addition to the injunction, the government proposed dismissing the case, which is likely to go to the U.S. Court of Appeals 2nd Circuit. Part of their argument alluded to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ remarks that the program was unlawfully implemented.

Garaufis had a message for Sessions too.

“He seems to think the courts cannot have an opinion because he ruled,” Garaufis said about Sessions. “He’s not here is he? It’s better that he’s not.”

The judge did not yet deliver any decisions on Tuesday.

Dreamers have had a tumultuous past year, beginning with the tension pressed upon them from the election of President Trump with his hard-stance politics on illegal immigration.

Then roughly seven months into his presidency, he called for an end to the Obama-era immigration program unless Congress could work out a permanent solution.

Negotiations on the issue are now presented as a tipping point for the federal government’s spending plan, which lack of compromise on led to the Jan. 20 government shutdown.

Dreamers were among crowds of protesters who marched on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Prospect Park West home after Democrats were unable to keep the government closed over the immigration argument.

The government is currently being funded through Feb. 8 in exchange for a promise from Republican leaders to address Dreamers’ future, but President Donald Trump has presented an ultimatum of approval of his $25 billion U.S. Mexico border wall.

“We cannot wait for Congress. We need the court, the courts to come out with a solution for us Dreamers,” Martin Batalla Vidal, a Dreamer and plaintiff said before pausing to cry. “We’ve been here all our lives. Going back to our country is going back to a country we don’t know.”

Person of the Year: Success after success crowned retired Councilmember Vincent Gentile’s 20 years in public office

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The political landscape in southwest Brooklyn has just dramatically shifted.

After 20 years in the forefront of action across Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bath Beach and Bensonhurst, Vincent Gentile — most recently a city councilmember for 14 years, and previously a state senator for six — has returned to private life, as a result of term limits.

Behind him, Gentile leaves a dramatic legacy of two decades of accomplishment that he savored in a recent interview with this newspaper.

From ensuring funding for universal pre-k in Community School District 20 in his freshman year in the State Senate (1997), well before universal pre-k existed across the city, to legislation designed to crack down on illegal home conversions, signed into law in his last months in the City Council, Gentile has unabashedly fought for his constituents and, by extension, residents of New York City as a whole, during a distinguished career.

It was a career that — because of his willingness to be everywhere, all the time, wherever he was needed or wanted — early on also saw Gentile dubbed “Senator Everywhere,” a work ethic he carried with him to the City Council.

“I’m blessed to have been in this position for as long as I have been,” Gentile told this paper. “There are great, great, great neighborhoods in Brooklyn. To be elected to represent neighborhoods like these in the Senate and City Council, everyday I was so proud to be the one to represent them.”

His political career actually began while he was still in school. A graduate of McKinley Intermediate School and Fort Hamilton High School, Gentile dipped his toes into the arena when he ran for and became class representative at McKinley while he was in the eighth grade. He followed that up with a successful ninth grade run for president of the student government, before heading to Fort Hamilton where he also became student government president.

“I was voted class politician,” Gentile recalled, adding, “I didn’t start out in public service in the clubhouse. I started out in community service.”

Early on in his fledgling career, the young Gentile became president of the Bay Ridge Community Council (BRCC), an umbrella organization of organizations that dates back to the 1950s and through which many a Bay Ridge or Dyker Heights civic leader has learned the ropes.

Gentile’s career has clearly always been predicated on service. He attended law school and subsequently took a job as an assistant district attorney, prior to making his first run for office, an unsuccessful one, back in 1994, when he challenged then-State Senator Robert DiCarlo, a Republican, for the right to represent the 23rd Senate District (which encompassed portions of southwest Brooklyn and Staten Island) in Albany.

Despite having no money and no name recognition, the young Gentile pulled in 42 percent of the vote in that election, leading Democratic honchos in the area to back him when he decided to try again, two years later.

It was, as he said, a “squeaker,” but in 1996 he garnered 51 percent of the vote in a tense, three-way race, against DiCarlo, who was running on the Conservative Party line, and John Gangemi, Jr., who had pulled an upset in the September primary and snagged the GOP nomination, wresting it away from the incumbent.

While in the Senate minority, Gentile still managed to have an impact for his constituents. His first bill (which was ultimately passed under another senator) was to eliminate the state’s sales tax on clothing and footwear costing less than $110. He also introduced legislation that eased the burden of prescription drug prices on senior citizens, by expanding the state’s EPIC program, and another which expanded eligibility for rent relief for seniors under the SCRIE program.

Gentile ultimately held the Senate seat for three terms, despite spirited challenges in 1998 by former-State Senator Chris Mega, and 2000 by DiCarlo, trying to make a comeback.

Then, as a result of the Census, redistricting happened, and Senate Republicans as the chamber’s majority party drew a new 22nd Senate District that they believed would be favorable to a GOP candidate, cutting off the portion of Staten Island that had been part of the district Gentile represented, and snaking a newly configured district in the opposite direction, through additional portions of Brooklyn up to Gerritsen Beach and Marine Park.

To make up the new 23rd District, the Staten Island portion of the old district was attached to Coney Island, where Gentile was unknown and where he was unlikely to challenge the incumbent Democrat, Seymour Lachman. So Gentile ran in the new 22nd Senate District against another very popular local politician, then-City Councilmember Marty Golden, who defeated Gentile in 2002 in a hard-fought election.

That didn’t stop Gentile, who decided to run, instead, in the February, 2003 special election for the City Council seat Golden had vacated, winning the post in even more of a “squeaker” than his 1996 victory.

In a five-way race, Gentile (one of four Democrats seeking the position) eked out a 31-vote victory over the sole Republican in the race, Rosemarie O’Keefe, former CAU Commissioner under former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, beginning his 14-year career in the Council a month after the special election had been held (with the delay occasioned by the need to count all the paper ballots, an arduous process).

With such a long career, there have been many highlights. Indeed, Gentile arrived at this newspaper’s office for an interview about his time in public office with a seven-page precis of his career that, yet, did not include all of his accomplishments.

What is he most proud of? “That would have to be the down-zoning of both Bay Ridge and Fort Hamilton [in 2005], and Dyker Heights [in 2007],” Gentile replied. “I say that for two reasons: how difficult it was to craft — the 246 blocks in Bay Ridge and Fort Hamilton was the largest one in Brooklyn history at the time — and also the fact that the down-zoning preserved the contextual character of the neighborhoods. It is going to last long after I’m gone.”

In addition, Gentile cited the 2005 elimination of Sunday parking meters, necessitated when, through an administrative change, the city — under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg — began charging for parking on many strips where previously, the meters had been idle on Sundays, whether or not churchgoers had relied on those once-free parking spots to go to their place of worship.

“I called it my Pay to Pray legislation,” Gentile noted, adding that, to make it law, the bill needed enough Council backing to override a mayoral veto.

In more recent years, Gentile took on another problem that threatened the quality of life in the neighborhoods he represented — illegal conversions, in which one and two-family homes are reconfigured by unscrupulous developers into multi-family dwellings that endanger both their inhabitants as well as first responders, as well as overburdening existing city infrastructure.

A recent law tackling the issue that was authored by Gentile increases the monetary penalties for “aggravated illegal conversions” as well as giving city agencies additional authority with respect to inspections of suspected illegal conversions. His legislation, Gentile said, “Give the city the strongest tools ever to address the problem.”

And, he added, another of his 2017 bills represented “first-time-ever regulation of hookah smoke, by making hookahs part of the Smoke-Free Air Act.”

But a local legislator’s job isn’t only about passing laws; it’s also about bringing home the bacon and, over his career, Gentile did precisely that.

Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Marty Maher “calls me the $40 million man,” Gentile noted, for the amount of money he has brought in for parks in his district [$20 million allocated directly plus “another $20 million leveraged from other players”], adding up to “More money than ever for local parks,” he went on.

This includes a dog run and field lights at Dyker Beach Park, new synthetic turf fields for both St. Patrick’s (on Shore Road) and St. Anselm’s (on Fort Hamilton Parkway) as well as a new synthetic turf soccer field for Dyker Beach Park, plus renovation coming to the tennis courts at Fort Hamilton Parkway and 100th Street, an impending (but fully funded) $4.2 million renovation and rehabilitation of the Shore Road Park field house at 97th Street, and $5.2 million in upcoming renovations for the Fort Hamilton High School field complex.

And, parks were not the only beneficiaries. Over his career in the City Council, Gentile brought back to the district more than $80 million in local funding for capital projects as well as to help non-profit groups and hospitals serving the district.

Gentile also successfully advocated — not once, but twice — for funding to provide the city’s cops with state-of-the art bulletproof vests to replace the older ones that were no longer adequate, a cause he took up after a local police officer, P.O. Anthony Mosomillo, was shot to death in 1998, and took up again after the 2014 shooting deaths of two other officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.

Over the years of his public service, Gentile was one of the loudest voices in favor of returning ferry service to the 69th Street Pier. Early on in his City Council career, he allocated money for a spud barge that would allow ferries to dock at the pier.

While that never came to fruition, his advocacy was not lost on a one-time fellow City Councilmember, now Mayor Bill de Blasio, who attended one of Gentile’s press conferences on the subject. Lo and behold, when citywide ferry service was announced, the pier was on one of the Manhattan-bound routes. “He remembered,” said Gentile.

“Having been an advocate for ferry service for so many years, when I was told by the mayor that Bay Ridge would be one of the stops, I asked him to repeat it,” Gentile recalled. “It was that important to me.”

In addition, Gentile was behind the successful effort to have a school built on the site of the beloved “Green Church,” formally the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, at Fourth and Ovington Avenues, after the church was torn down for condos that were never built.

“I convinced the Department of Education to make it a school,” Gentile recalled. He also, he said, worked with the School Construction Authority to ensure that the building’s design saluted its predecessor, including the purchase of the original rose window from the sanctuary.

“We didn’t save the church but we kept the lot for public use,” Gentile reflected, “and at least we have a reminder of what used to be at the site.”

While reminiscing, Gentile made a point of citing the relationships he’s built over the years with the district’s older residents whom he hosted for proms and picnics. “They are very special,” he stressed. “They taught me a great deal about perseverance, toughing it out through the bad times and the good times, and they also taught me that seniors have a good time.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he added, though, at 59, Gentile has a ways to go before it’s his turn. What’s up next? His future, he said, “Is uncertain right now. I’m in the process of screening for a possible judicial position but there’s no guarantee, so I’m also looking for other opportunities in public service, which is what I like to do best. Otherwise, I could do private legal work or cross-section with government so if anyone out there has any ideas, please let me know.”

Would he run again for office? “I really don’t have any plans right now but one thing I’ve learned in politics is never say never,” Gentile rejoined.

Brooklyn bank robber with bad memory turns himself in after seeing wanted poster

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A Brooklyn man with a bad memory was arraigned in federal court on Saturday for robbing a bank in Crown Heights after he recognized himself in a wanted poster and turned himself in.

Juan Carlos Marrero, a 40-year-old from Brooklyn, was charged with robbing the Chase Bank on Utica Avenue in Crown Heights on Jan. 20 at approximately 9 a.m.

That morning, according to the criminal complaint, he approached a teller, put a backpack on the ground next to himself, passed the teller a black plastic bag before he said, “I don’t know what’s in the backpack, but it’s loaded. Give me everything you have. Put it in the bag.”

Marrero told the teller that his family was being held hostage in order to get him to rob the bank, according to the complaint.

After the teller informed Marrero that there was no money to surrender, Marrero left the bank without the backpack, according to the complaint. Investigators found two white plastic bottles and computer parts in the bag.

The defendant turned himself in five days later after he recognized himself on a wanted poster in connection to the robbery. When he met with police officers the next day, he confirmed that he was the person in surveillance photos. He was then read his Miranda rights and spoke with officers.

Marrero told investigators that he had no memory of the event.

Fontbonne students earn praise in science talent search

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Two enterprising Fontbonne Hall Academy students are winning praise for the research papers they submitted to a nationwide science competition.

Fontbonne seniors Kristina Scarfo and Teressa Martinelli were both awarded badges for the work they handed in for the Regeneron Science Talent Search, one of the country’s oldest science and math competitions for high school seniors.

Scarfo earned the Regeneron Science Talent Search Research Report Badge, an honor given to the student who produces a well-written, college-level, research report based on independent science research. She worked in consultation with Dr. Philip Schatz of Saint. Joseph’s University on her paper “Gender Differences in Concussion Symptoms as Reported by Youth Athletes and their Parents.”

Martinelli, who was also awarded the Report Badge, submitted a paper titled “Increased Risk of Attentional Bias in First-Time Parents Exhibiting Symptoms of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression During Pregnancy.”

She worked for two years under the mentorship of Dr. Clancy Blair at New York University to produce her research paper.

In addition to the Report Badge, Martinelli earned a Student Initiative Badge in the talent search.

Scarfo and Martinelli are members of the Science Research Program at Fontbonne Hall Academy, a three-year sequence of classes that allows students conduct their own unique scientific investigations while working under the guidance of a research scientist.

Students in the Science Research Program enter their research papers into the Regeneron Science Talent Search as well as other competitions during their senior year.

Located at 9901 Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Fontbonne Hall Academy is a Catholic high school for girls. The school is sponsored by the Sisters of Saint Joseph, a religious order of nuns.

“For 80 years, Fontbonne Hall Academy has been preparing young women to become professional leaders who serve their communities with confidence and compassion. We challenge our students to achieve their highest intellectual and creative potential in science, math, the arts and humanities by providing them with the tools necessary to achieve success in their college studies and their chosen career,” Principal Mary Ann Spicijaric wrote in a message on the school’s website.

 

For more information about academic programs at the school, visit www.fontbonne.org.

 

Panda Express to donate profits to P.S.-I.S. 104

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The owners of a new Asian-inspired fast food restaurant opening up in Bay Ridge are making themselves at home in their new neighborhood by doing a good deed for local school children.

Panda Express, which is set to open at 416 86th St. on Friday, Feb. 2, is donating 20 percent of its opening day profits to P.S./I.S. 104, an elementary-intermediate school in Bay Ridge.

It’s perhaps no accident that P.S./I.S. 104 was selected by the owners of Panda Express to receive a donation. Located at 9115 Fifth Ave., the school has a longstanding tradition of recognizing the accomplishments of civic do-gooders in Bay Ridge. The PTA hosts a Brotherhood Tea each year and presents an award to a community leader.

The California-based owners of the Panda Express restaurant chain announced the donation plans this week.

The grand opening of the new eatery will also include workers handing out fortune cookies and coupons to shoppers on 86th Street.

“We look forward to introducing our delicious American Chinese comfort food to even more guests in the area. As we continue to expand our footprint on the East Coast, our associates feel honored to bring our community-centric culture and signature service to Brooklyn,” Yingying Chen, area coach of operations for Panda Express, said in a statement.

Panda Express will be open daily from 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. The menu items include Original Orange Chicken, SweetFire Chicken Breast, Honey Walnut Shrimp and Shanghai Angus Steak.

From opening day through March 27, the restaurant will serve a limited time menu featuring a “WokSmart” entree that has strips of all-white meat chicken breasts, diced Chinese sausage, red and green bell peppers, celery, fermented black beans and whole dry chili peppers in a savory sauce.

As Panda Express establishes a foothold in Bay Ridge, it will continue to explore ways it can perform charitable endeavors in the community, the restaurant’s representatives said.

The new eatery, located in the heart of the Bay Ridge 86th Street Business Improvement District, will provide jobs for more than 20 Brooklyn residents, representatives said.

Founded in 1983, Panda Express is part of the Panda Restaurant Group. The company owns more than 2,000 locations throughout the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico, Guam, Guatemala, Canada, Mexico, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Japan and South Korea.

For more information on Panda Express, visit www.pandaexpress.com.