SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

Bennett Castello. Source: New York State Division of Criminal Justice via nbcnewyork.com

A man suspected of attempting to rape a 13-year-old girl in a Gravesend elevator last week has been arrested. According to a report by NBC NY, the police arrested 40-year-old Bennett Castello, a registered sex offender.

According to authorities, on April 30 at a Gravesend building located on Avenue Z and West 2nd Street, Castello was riding down an elevator with the victim when he allegedly pulled a pair of scissors and attempted to rape her. When the elevator door opened, he ran off and the girl was unharmed.

Castello was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, burglary and rape.

In 1998, Castello was convicted of sex crimes against a victim who was over 21. As a result of his conviction, he was classified as a violent sex offender.

Look at what some hate-filled clown did. A reader sent this photo in this morning. It happened on Avenue Z and Haring Street, an area where many of the community’s Muslim residents live.

We’re waiting to hear if this was reported to police, and if it’s being investigated as a hate crime.

Update (10:45 a.m.): Reader Vadym S. confirms that police are investigating. We’re still waiting to hear from NYPD whether or not it’s being referred to the Hate Crimes Unit.

Update (12:45 p.m.): Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has weighed in, with a statement condemning the vandalism.

This revolting act of prejudice was meant to intimidate New Yorkers on their streets and in their homes – but because of our unity and our strength, it’s not going to work. We won’t stand for anti-Muslim bigotry – not in Sheepshead Bay, not in Brooklyn, not anywhere in our city. Anyone with information on these perpetrators should come forward right away by calling 1-800-577-TIPS.

Update (2:28 p.m.): District Leader Ari Kagan, a candidate for City Council, also weighed in:

I was deeply saddened and troubled to learn of yesterday’s hate crime, targeting Muslims, in Sheepshead Bay. Southern Brooklyn is a vibrant, diverse community, home to families from all across the world. There is absolutely no place for such hateful behavior in our communities. We must stand with our District Attorney to ensure these perpetrators are brought to justice. Our neighbors will, of course, assist the NYPD with their investigation. I encourage any one with information on this crime to step forward.

Kagan, it’s worth noting, is against the Voorhies Avenue mosque, protests over which some say has made this kind of anti-Muslim sentiment publicly acceptable.

It seems like every spring there’s a new thing going on over at the 1307 Avenue Z Puff Caffe storefront. Back in 2011, they renovated and introduced cheese and chocolate fondue to their lineup. In 2012, they closed for renovations.

Now, in 2013, they’re switching gears altogether and are going full-steam-ahead on a true cafe concept – and with a tweaked name, Puff Cafe & Coffee. There’s counter-service for coffee, tea and espresso beverages from Italian coffee maker Lavazza, pastries, comfortable seating and free wi-fi. There’s a whole new menu, and I’m assuming the signage will change soon to reflect that it’s more of a cafe than a hookah and fondue lounge.

One very important change is that they’ve opened up the front of the store to natural light with a glass storefront – making the whole place a lot more welcoming.

They haven’t changed their website yet (puffcaffe.com – not cafe!), so we can all still enjoy the boo-bee-boo-bop dance beat that starts playing on every single load of every single page without a way to turn it off. We’ll miss that.

After 38 years in the same location, Abe’s Frame Shoppe is leaving its 2606 East 16th Street location for new digs.

Erica Sherman spotted the hand-written note on the sign the other day and snapped the above photo. The note said the business has moved and offers up a telephone number but not an address.

We called the number to find out the new address, but were greeted by an answering machine informing us that all work is temporarily being done in a new location that’s not open to the public, and that they’re looking for a new storefront from which to serve customers. They’re keeping the (718) 648-9090 number.

The building itself, on the corner of Avenue Z, is now entirely vacant. It used to house the Sheepshead Bay Gourmet Market, Learning Wheel and others, but, one by one, each business vanished. The landlord, Waldorf Realty Co., is renovating the property, and told us back in 2010 that they were not renewing some of the business’ leases so that they could market the property as one large space.

Source: Brownstoner. Click to enlarge

Tennis anyone?

The popular racquet sport, along with yoga, swimming and dancing, are returning to the intersection of Shell Road and Avenue Z in Gravesend in what is set to be Brooklyn’s largest sports complex.

Sheepshead Bites first learned about the deal from the broker, Brian Hanson of Massey Knakel Realty Services, and now a report by Brownstoner provides a few new details.

Costing $20 million, the 140,000 square-foot complex, dubbed MatchPoint NYC, will feature a whopping nine indoor tennis courts, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a restaurant. It replaces the Brooklyn Racquet Club, which closed in 2011 and was later demolished.

Set to open in six months, the facility – developed by Dmitry Druzhinsky and tennis coach Noumroud Moukhatasov, and spearheaded by entrepreneur Sergey Rybak – will provide an outlet to accommodate for the huge Russian love of tennis.

Sheepshead Bay Fruit & Vegetables Market at 1717 Avenue Z unveiled a new wing of the building approximately two weeks ago. The wing, located on the East 18th Street side of the building, expands their deli and bakery offerings, and even has a small counter for hot coffee, soups and other goodies.

Parts of the storefront are still under construction, and we’ve got a feeling some floor rearrangement is forthcoming, but it’s so far a welcome addition. After all, we’re a big fan of the boureks and other baked goods, so more space for these goodies is, well, goodie.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a return of the business’ hot tables, which were once housed in an annex a block away – Sheepshead Bay Gourmet Market, on East 16th Street and Avenue Z – but closed down in 2009.

The section of the building that they’ve expanded into used to be the HemOnCare medical center, which seems to have moved to Avenue S. Construction has been going on for a few months, employees told us.

Congrats to Sheepshead Bay Fruit & Vegetables Market.

A nurse at work at the Coney Island Hospital Urgent Care Center.

Though the staff and administration at Coney Island Hospital (2601 Ocean Parkway) continue on the arduous road of repairing the hospital after Superstorm Sandy, they have announced the opening of their Urgent Care Center.

An important note is that the Urgent Care Center is not an emergency room. The center cannot treat true emergencies and no patients will be admitted. They do not have functioning X-ray machines, MRIs or food services.

Thus, the staff requests that you call 9-1-1 if an individual is severely injured or suffering serious or life-threatening issues. The Urgent Care Center is for less serious injuries and will send true emergency cases to another hospital, which could cost valuable care time.

The Urgent Care Center can be accessed through the East 6th Street entrance.

Here is what the hospital currently offers:

• Available for adult and pediatric patients 24/7
• Available for obstetric patients from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. (prior to 8 p.m., patients can visit the OB/GYN clinic in Tower 107)
• Pediatric clinic services are available in Tower 105 24/7
• OB/GYN clinic services are available in Tower 107 24/7
• Limited Medical Clinic Services are being offered on Tower 2 West, Monday to Friday: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Please call (718) 794-5912 for further information regarding Medical Clinic Services.
• Limited Medical Specialty Services are being offered on Tower 2 East, Monday to Friday: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Please call (718) 794 – 5911 for further information regarding Medical Specialty Services.

Patients already receiving Mental Health Services at Coney Island Hospital are presently being seen in Hammett Building as follows:

• Chemical Dependency (4th floor in the Hammett) from Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
• Adult and Children Outpatient Services (2nd and 4th floor Hammett) on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Wednesday: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday: 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Call Mental Health Services at (718) 319-2994.

Rehab Services are being offered on Tower T8E, Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (by appointment only).

Further contacts for the various services are:

• Physical Therapy contact: (718) 616-3922
• Occupational Therapy contact: (718) 616 – 3961
• Rehab Consultation contact: (718) 616 – 4052

If you have an urgent need to renew a prescription, please come to the Coney Island Hospital Tower Building, 1st floor with your medication bottles. The phone numbers for prescription refills are (718) 794-6712 and (718) 794-6641.

UPDATE (12/6/2012): Coney Island Hospital has just expanded its offerings at the Urgent Care Center. They write:

A separate radiology location will have the capability to perform portable X-rays and sonograms.   A mobile CT scan has been installed adjacent to the Urgent Care Center. For radiology orders, escorts will transport the patient from their bed to the radiology suite. Results will be promptly read by an on-site radiologist.

Stella Angel with her daughter (center) and neighborhood girls in front of their Sheepshead Bay Road storefront.

Click to enlarge.

When Arielle Angel’s grandmother, Stella, passed away, she wrote the obituary. Angel, a Brooklyn-based writer, didn’t plan for a home for the obituary. It was written for family and close friends. When the obituary landed in our inbox, it found a home.

Stella Angel lived in Sheepshead Bay. She owned and operated a local grocery with her husband, David Angel here. She raised a family at East 6th Street and Avenue Z because her own extended family, the Rosas, all lived within walking distance.

Their store, Bay Food Market, was bought from a guy named Mario. No one seems to recall his last name now.

It stood across the street from Dan’s Supreme, a larger supermarket that could have put the mom-and-pop bodega out of business. Instead, the two groceries competed for customers. For years, the Angels engaged in price wars and forewent but little profit. They almost always set their closing time an hour later than Dan’s.

My grandmother, Stella Angel, who lived and worked in Sheepshead Bay from the time of her immigration to the United States in 1952 until her retirement in the early 1980s, died in her sleep last Saturday morning. She was 93-years-old.

She was born Stella Rosa in Salonika, Greece, in 1920, the middle child of five in a middle-class family. Like all of the Rosa men, her father was a butcher. Salonika was a unique Jewish community; its members were descendants of those who had fled the Spanish Inquisition, and they still kept a medieval dialect of Spanish called Ladino as their language.

Keep reading Arielle’s touching obituary

Source: YAI.org

Several autistic and developmentally disabled people who previously lived in group homes in Sheepshead Bay are among the hundreds left displaced after Superstorm Sandy took a heavy toll on their facilities.

YAI Network, an organization which manages several such homes in the area, announced today that two of their homes in Sheepshead Bay were severely damaged, causing their autistic and disabled clients to move into temporary digs.

According to the release, one of the homes is on East 13th Street, and the other is on Avenue Z. Both were in Zone A and suffered a combined $300,000 worth of damage, mostly from the approximately eight feet of water that filled the basements.

“This is really like rebuilding the house,” said Vida Mani, the assistant coordinator in YAI’s Residential Department. “There was water and debris all over the place. One washer was on top of another, air conditioning units floated out of the wall, and we had a big refrigerator that ended up on a shelf.”

The East 13th Street home housed 10 residents and the Avenue Z location held six. All residents were evacuated ahead of the storm to different homes throughout Brooklyn, the release notes.

Aside from the damage, YAI said it lost $2.1 million in lost revenue due to a suspension of its day programs and medical practices, as well as overtime costs for workers deployed to help the displaced residents.

“This storm affected everyone,” said Stephen E. Freeman, CEO of YAI. “And it showed us so clearly that the people we support experienced the same sense of loss and disruption of life as other citizens. They couldn’t leave their homes, they couldn’t get to work and they couldn’t see their friends and families.”

Although FEMA reimbursements are expected to cover most of the repairs to the homes, it won’t cover the lost revenues. YAI has established a Storm Restoration Fund to not only cover some of the losses, but to upgrade their 100 group homes with permanent generators to prevent future disruptions. Donations can be made here.

Source: Google Maps

Continuing our coverage of landlords who have been less than responsive to tenants devastated by Hurricane Sandy, The New York Post highlights the plight of those located at the 2101 Avenue Z. The apartment building still doesn’t have heat or electricity since Sandy struck late in October.

Residents of the building, which include young children and the elderly, have taken to pasting signs in the windows that read, “Help!” and “We Have Rights.”

The tenants of the neglected apartment building blame their landlord, Leonid Rubanov.

“Our landlord came the next day [after Sandy] to collect the rent. He said, ‘I need the money to do the repairs.’ Then three, four days went by, he doesn’t pick up the phone, he doesn’t do anything,” Alex Kudryavtsev, 26, who lives in the building with his wife and 3-year-old daughter. “We went over to his house in Manhattan Beach and the repairs on his house were already under way,” he said. “Instead of putting the money toward our residence, he decided his house was more important.”

The landlord, Leonid Rubanov, declined to answer the door at his lavish home, adorned with wrought ironwork, silk drapes, columns and ornamental flourishes.

“If you’re from the newspaper, you have to call the Department of Buildings and HPD. It’s a bad idea to come to my home,” he told The Post, referring to the city’s Department of Housing Preservations and Development.

HPD has issued several violations to Rubanov, and sources said more inspections are expected today.

Sandy has apparently put the spotlight on some of our local slumlords. We hope Rubanov gets his things in order as it has been over three weeks and temperatures continue to decrease.