During a conference call with investors yesterday, Forest City Enterprises CEO Charles Ratner acknowledged that a window of opportunity had all but closed for the ambitious, 22-acre housing, retail and stadium project proposed for Brooklyn. But he also insisted that the delay – brought on by recession and dogged opposition from community groups – was just temporary: The economy sometimes alters the timeline, but we have demonstrated our ability to see these projects through to......

A 55-year-old man was found stabbed to death in his Prospect Heights apartment Wednesday night. Police say that Murat St. Hilaire was stabbed in the head with a corkscrew. Carline Renelique, the mother of Hilaire's three children, was worried when she didn't hear from him on Wednesday morning (they do not live together, but he called her every morning). Newsday reports that when she realized he never arrived at Wycoff Heights Medical Center, where he......

Prospect Heights mom and Park Slope Food Coop member Yvonne Brechbuhler got a little something extra in a head of organic lettuce she recently brought home: a little green frog “no bigger than the tip of her pinky finger," according to the Daily News. Brechbuhler discovered the frog (pictured) only when she took out the lettuce to make a salad – after it had been in her refrigerator for three days. She insists that her......

Jose Rivera, who shot at a car full of undercover cops, hitting one of them, was sentenced to 16 years in jail. In February, while driving in Park Slope-Prospect Heights, Rivera thought that the cops were giving him a dirty looks and yelled at them, "You got a beef?" and then fired. The police fired back and later, Rivera's police officer wife seemed to try to cover up the shooting by parking their bullet-ridden car......

Yesterday, people critical of developer Bruce Ratner's massive, billion dollar Atlantic Yards project held the Third Annual Walk Don't Destroy Walkathon. And leading opponent Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn held a press conference asking a new question that goes beyond eminent domain and the size and scale of the plan. Now the question is whether the Atlantic Yards will be safe from a terror risk. Earlier this week, Newark Police Director - and former NYPD......

The Brooklyn Paper has a sad tale of some Prospect Heights kittens. The ferals wandered into the back yard of the Pond family, who immediately fell in love, had them spayed/neutered, called them their own and named them Inky, Blinky, Mookie and Clyde.The Ponds grew so attached to their backyard kitties that they began treating them as if they were their own. They had the cats spayed and neutered. They fed them daily. When the......

We knew it was too long without hearing about Foxy Brown and her legal woes! A Brooklyn woman is accusing the rapper of throwing her Blackberry in her face. Given Foxy's past brushes with the law, she may be in big trouble. Arlene Raymond says that on July 30, at Prospect Place and Carleton, Foxy "just ran into me and she just started screaming, 'I hate you, bitch.' And she hit me with her BlackBerry.......

As anyone who grows vegetables can tell you, it is easy to find yourself drowning in summer squash. We're not gardeners, but even so we find ourselves overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of squash this month. Last week, we were wandering around Prospect Heights when we came across a plastic bag full of zucchini hanging from the fence in front of one of the brownstones. A sign above the bag declared that the zucchini came......

Some 30 years after Landmarks Preservation Commission officials first explored landmarking Crown Heights, the Commission has granted landmark status to the architecturally-rich neighborhood. The Commission voted unanimously today to protect 472 buildings in Crown Heights North. The new district will run from Pacific Street to Dean St., Prospect Place and St. Mark’s Ave and from Bedford to Kingston avenues. The buildings in the district were built from the 1860s to the 1930s and the......

Bruce Ratner’s mega-project isn’t only a catalyst for lawsuits. It’s also behind a push to create a historic district in Prospect Heights. “I think with the Atlantic Yards happening, there’s a real urgency to get it designated,” Municipal Art Society fellow Lisa Kersavage told Gothamist. “The development pressures are increasing dramatically.” Last summer, Kersavage began working with the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council to survey the area, known for its nineteenth-century Neo-Grec and Italianate......

Police officer Jacqueline Melendez Rivera was indicted on two charges related to the February 10 shooting of fellow cop Andrew Suarez. The shooter was Melendez Rivera's husband, Jose Rivera, who shot at Suarez and other undercover officers in an unmarked car while driving in Park Slope. (Suarez was shot in the arm.) Hours later, Melendez Rivera was found by police investigating the shooting, parking Rivera's SUV over a mile away from her Prospect Heights home.......

Last night, police officer Rory Mangra (pictured) attempted to approach a man smoking pot in Prospect Heights, but the man ended up shooting him in the leg. Mangra and his partner, Eric Merizelde, both uniformed but driving in an unmarked car, saw Kingsley Newland light up outside a beauty parlor at Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street in Brooklyn. From the Daily News:Mangra stepped out of the car to approach Newland, but the suspect fled, police......

Forty-six-year-old Paul Torres fell into the downtown 2 tracks at Penn Station right before a train arrived. Luckily, he somehow managed to avoid being hit by rolling in between the tracks. Torres was taken to Bellevue in "serious condition with possible head trauma". While he couldn't remember how he fell (police do not believe he was pushed), Torres was able to say he was happy to be alive. Well, at least when the Daily......

If you've been following along with Gothamist, you'll know that the Splasher has been defacing streetart around the city recently. While many in the streetart community are upset with the Splasher's actions, Swoon has come up with her own solution - redo the pieces the vandal defaced. Sam Horine caught Swoon's pieces in Prospect Heights (around 5th Ave and Flatbush Ave), where you can still see the paint drippings from before she redid the......

Gothamist is here at Joyce Bakeshop in Prospect Heights, where we’ve secretly replaced Scott Lindenbaum’s 12 oz. Fair Trade Gorilla Coffee with a cup of freshly brewed David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee Organic House Roast. For good measure, we’ve also selected one of each flavor cupcake from the Joyce Bakeshop glass case display, and a toasted hazelnut mini financier to accompany the hot beverage. What we found may surprise you. Yes, we said David Lynch......

The hard-hitting polemical film, Brooklyn Matters, lucidly articulates and amplifies the movement to stop Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards plan. Directed and produced by Isabel Hill, the film portrays the AY project as an outrageous scam to be perpetrated upon hoodwinked Brooklynites. Numerous interviews with critical residents, planners, critics, and elected officials portray a scenario in which a cynical developer and corrupt State agencies have hired gullible community allies and a star architect to conceal......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a professor at Brooklyn Law was killed by a garbage truck this morning in Brooklyn Heights and an "all hands" fire broke out on Ludlow and Delancey Street in Manhattan. A Westchester teen got busted by the SPCA after collecting more than 150 animals, and forcing them to live in squalid conditions. The animals included "bearded dragon lizards, rabbits, guinea pigs, turtles, ferrets, chameleons, South American squirrels, cats, hamsters,......

December 7: Alex Prud’homme at O&CO.; Join Alex Prud’homme, Julia Child's grandnephew, as he recounts stories about Julia and reads from her memoir, My Life in France, which he co-authored. He will also be available to sign books, which might make a great present for someone on your holiday shopping list. O&CO.; store, Grand Central Terminal, Graybar Passage--Lexington Ave & 42nd St. (212-973-1472), 6:00 pm, Free. December 8 - 17: Gingerbread Homes for Animals Pastry......

+ Delays are plaguing Philip Johnson’s Urban Glass House. + The Central Park Conservancy is going global. + Paris’ Phare Tower recalls Grand Central Terminal’s machine-age fascination, reports New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. + A map that's “one of the most beautiful, important and accurate plans of New York,” according to IN Phelps Stokes, who designed the University Settlement House at Eldridge and Rivington and Columbia’s St. Paul's Chapel. + An architect who......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a police car MVA on the West Side Highway and Spring Street, a jumper down on Broadway and Havemeyer in Brooklyn, and car vs. building in Greenpoint. Scary: "About one hour ago I was walking down Washington Place and at the corner of Avenue of the Americas, an SUV pulled up onto the sidewalk right in front of me. Two guys jumped out, maybe three, I was kind of......

Forget suspicious fires to smoke out tenants - the new tenant intimidation tool might be masonry! The Daily News reports that all the windows of a Prospect Heights apartment building on Dean Street have been bricked over, except for those belonging to lone holdout Migdalia Barreto. Barreto's rent is $535/month for a two bedroom, and she and her mother refused landlord Mark Schiner's offer of $30,000 to move out (five other families took some sort......

-- Laren was on CNN today in their East Village automat segment! She's now the most famous Gothamista ever! -- If you think your apartment is dirty, check out this brownstone in Prospect Heights. -- The Times has an interesting tale about Park Slope history, in which a shooting in 1973 led to a manslaughter plea yesterday. -- Best movie title ever: "Accepted How to Eat Fried Worms Snakes on a Plane Beerfest" --......

The Atlantic Yards Project's public meeting last night was packed with Brooklyn residents wanting to have their say. WNBC reported that hundreds of people were waiting outside the New York City College of Technology, since the auditorium was full, and inside, "the crowd became unruly, cheering wildly for their cause until security was called in to remove a few of the audience members." That sounds about right - and they had lots of signs......

If every building in New York City was to somehow be wiped off the face of the earth, and I had the power to pick only one to remain standing, I would choose Tom’s Diner in a heartbeat. Though I think of the Chrysler Building like a part of my own body, I would have to let it go. I get chills every time I catch a glimpse of Yankee Stadium, but I would bid......

What's a Cuban sandwich without any pickles? It's just a ham and cheese sandwich, that's what it is. And too many supposedly legitimate "Spanish food" joints think they can get away with serving their Cubanos sans pickles. Even at Mambi's, a Washington Heights institution where they spread an incredibly tasty garlic mayo on the classic sandwich, Cubanos come without pickles more often than not. Mambi's ham and cheese sandwich is delicious, but when I......

Residents of Fort Greene, commence panic! According to this cool diagram created by the Christina Porter Memorial Lighting Lab at Pratt, the Atlantic Yards development will cast most of the neighborhood into a state of perpetual darkness. Brooklyn Papers reports: ...shadows from the developer’s Atlantic Yards mega-project would darken a wide swath of Brooklyn from Prospect Heights to Downtown — including a strip in Fort Greene that won the “Greenest Block in Brooklyn” contest......

An interesting article in the Daily News about how investigators are still pursuing other arson cases that have plagued Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Six fires from January to April claimed four lives and displaced 100 people, and many theories abound - from mortgage fraud to redevelopment fever. And three fires on Pacific Street were all started by an accelerant. Some people have claimed that these fires aren't getting enough attention (apparently some resources......

THEATER: The Ohio Theater is the site of two of summer's best play festivals, and the first, Clubbed Thumb's eleventh Summerworks, started yesterday with Anne Washburn's I Have Loved Strangers, "in which true prophets, false prophets, and non-prophets battle for the salvation of ancient New York." On the company's website http://www.clubbedthumb.org/ you can do some "research" before going, via various eyebrow-raising links; or you can just rely on the winning trifecta of excellent track records:......

Yesterday, there was a press conference to herald the formation of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, which will help improve Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza for pedestrians. According to Transportation Alternatives, is coalition is "made up of civic associations such as the Park Slope Civic Council, the Prospect Heights Parents Association and the Eastern Parkway Cultural Row Association...cultural institutions such as the Prospect Park Alliance, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Heart of Brooklyn Cultural Partnership...advocacy......

Sad: each day seems to bring news of the destruction of a new building in Prospect Heights. Two weeks ago the Underberg Building disappeared, and yesterday Curbed reported the razing of buildings along Dean Street. The picture above, by Horseycraze on Flickr, shows the Vanderbilt Products Building coming down at the beginning of the month. All of this is intended to pave the way for construction on Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards Project-- a bunch......