I'm falling behind in the Broken Angel issue, but caught this from the Clinton Hill Blog:
On 10/10/06 Broken Angel suffered minimal damage from a fire at the top of the structure. The cause of the fire is unknown and still under investigation. Broken Angel has been an active project of construction by my family beginning in 1979. Major construction was finished in 2002, and all work done thereafter has been for the purpose of maintaining the building. The fire brought the attention of the Department of Buildings (DOB), previous interactions had occurred in 1986, and 2002 with no action taken against the building. During the course of building and maintaining the structure there have been no accidents or complaints. Compared with most modern construction projects, such as the Time Warner building in NYC, this is an excellent record. It raises questions as to why large developers are allowed to continue construction when they pose a risk to the community, whereas Broken Angel, which has no history of construction problems, has been singled out as a danger. My mother and father, the legal guardians and owners of Broken Angel were threatened with eviction for 6 days. On the 7th day they were vacated by the police without a court order or engineer's report. We question the necessity and the humanity of this action. They were told that this was done for their safety; however action was taken prior to any inspection of the interior of the building by an engineer. Furthermore, we were told that the building would be demolished in 3 weeks if an architect did not submit plans to bring it to code. We have been compliant with this request. We are thankful to the firm of Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture http://www.jpda.net/news.html for all of their help and support. On Thursday (10/26/06) an engineer from the DOB toured the structure, and the next day the DOB released a different story. A DOB spokesperson recently commented to the Daily News (10/27/06) that any demolition orders, if warranted will take approximately 3 months to begin.
[emphasis mine]
Dig it, folks. As usual the DOB is full of shit. I love how everybody is so ready to buy their line and run around fretfully murmuring, "Oh Broken Angel is soooo dangerous! Why didn't the Woods bring it up to code in 1979?? Why can't there be a coffee house with a kids room on that spot?" The Woods stick to their guns, and the DOB starts slowly backing down. By the time it's all sorted out I bet the DOB will have forgotten all about this. I know, they're not exactly free 'n clear yet, but they've got backup, they've got a history of successfully fighting these allegations before. And the DOB is a pretty lame bureaucracy that seems to give passes to the truly serious violators while hassling small fry and people who follow the rules.
In other semi-good news: regarding the Clinton Hill woman who was attacked on her own stoop, her attacker is now on Riker's Island awaiting trial. Turns out he committed his crime on his way home from meeting with his parole officer (!) He had a couple hours before he had to be in for curfew (!) and apparently decided he had enough freedom for a while. His dropped cellphone led to his capture. I'm glad he's caught, but really, what an idiotic way to get busted. A real waste of protoplasm, this guy.
