Photo Courtesy of Raymond Normandeau/Normandeau Newswire

Raymond Normandeau, press secretary of the Queensbridge Houses Tenants Council in Queens, was tired of the conditions in the Queensbridge housing project where he has lived since 1973, and decided it was time to engage in a little community activism.

While he may no longer be a member of the Astoria ambulance corps (or small time film actor) as he was in the eighties, Normandeau, who is legally blind, always has several projects on his plate—primarily non-threatening but direct ways of getting the authorities to pay attention to tenants’ plights.

And it’s not the violence at Queensbridge with which Normandeau is most concerned, violence which rappers like Jay-Z—who grew up in Queensbridge—have memorialized in their music.

“I lived here through the crack epidemic,” said Normandeau, “when we heard gunshots once a week.” He added he’s grown accustomed to life in the Queens borough project, as, surely, “even people in Afghanistan grow accustomed.” And, Normandeau points out, security has been better since so many chain hotels have cropped up in the area, some “just a gunshot away.”

“Maybe a tourist got robbed or something,” said Normandeau, of the increased security. “I go online to see their [hotel] room prices.” Many prices are in the $129-$200 range.

No, it’s the day-to-day quality of life with which Normandeau takes issue. One major problem confronting Queensbridge tenants, according to him, is the amount of dog feces which accumulates around the housing project (inside and out). It may sound like a joke—even I had a good laugh when the ever-eloquent Normandeau described the situation—but then I saw the pictures. Frankly, they were beyond disturbing.

Unfortunately it seems the only way to get anything done, is to “raise a stink” (my words). It has to be the right kind of stink though, explains Normandeau, it must come about through the graceful “pressuring and embarrassment” of local officials. He’s already tried, with little success, to get the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)’s attention on Twitter, where he actively follows their feed and peppers them with questions about when various repairs will come through.

Photo Courtesy of Raymond Normandeau/Normandeau Newswire

That’s why Normandeau started the “Queensbridge Landscaping Magazine” (more of a magazine cover, but that’s just a technicality), and in conjunction with the endeavor, Normandeau also organized a contest.

“I asked people to send in photos,” said Normandeau. “The freshest pile, the strangest-looking pile, a pile that had been stepped in a lot.” And piles, he accrued. Thirty-nine of them to be exact, which is how many photos are featured on Normandeau’s website, devoted to the contest (click strictly at your own risk).

Normandeau then took his “Landscaping Magazine” covers, complete with graphic visuals, and began distributing them at community meetings, where local politicians and government officials would convene. This seemed to be exactly the sort of whimsical embarrassment Normandeau describes, the very kick-in-the-pants humiliated officials needed to clean up Queensbridge a bit.

It doesn’t stop at the fecal matter though. Normandeau knows better than anyone it’s not easy navigating a rundown project when you’re technically blind. Obstacles on sidewalks, lights that stay burned out for years…it’s a blind man’s Ironman. That’s why Normandeau released the “Blind Navigating” cover for his “Queensbridge Landscaping Magazine.”

“Blind Tenants Navigate Booby Traps,” the cover headline reads. He handed this one out at meetings too.

Photo Courtesy of Raymond Normandeau/Normandeau Newswire

Normandeau describes the positive aftermath: “‘Blind Navigating’ got [the] sidewalk fixed within days after I handed it out. [The] sidewalk had been like that for over one year.”

Tenants may “feel that NYCHA treats [them] as unwanted,” as Normandeau points out, but as one man, he has finally found a way to be heard through his acts of vigilanteism.

Normandeau also operates the Queensbridge website, which takes, among other things, event submissions: “Having an Event? Community meeting? Open house for Apartment sublet? Art show? Performance? Gun fight?”

The website leaves no wrong untouched, also decrying NYPD and NYCHA’s laissez-faire policies: “Smoking knapsack at a sensitive location? Take photos, run to safety. The NYPD may not be interested, but we are!”

Queensbridge Houses website (courtesy of Normandeau)

D’Usse’s most high-profile support, however, came from Jay-Z.  This marks the first time the rapper-mogul has publicly endorsed a cognac. Just in case the high-profile crowd and the panoramic view did not provide enough eye-candy, the co-owner of soon to be Brooklyn Nets brought in flat screen TVs so the crowd could cheer on the Knicks as they battled the Miami Heat. DJ Jus Ske rocked the house all evening with – not surprisingly – more than a few Jay-Z tunes.  And while the Knicks’ season unfortunately came to an end that night, New Yorkers can look forward to sampling the remarkably smooth cognac when it hits shelves this summer.

To read more from AVENUE Insider click here.

By Leonora Desar

Alec Baldwin is on top of the world, perched high above the deserted city on the rooftop of an exclusive nightclub just before the break of dawn. “Hand that back,” he says to Mary-Kate Olsen—or is it Ashley?—who snatches Baldwin’s cell phone away before sinking into a designer red velvet couch flush with fallen change and lost cigarette lighters.

Past them, supermodels like skyscrapers in summer blues and lilacs glide past one another like ships. “Leo, have you seen Leo?” they implore tipsily, backlit against the city as Tupac’s hologram slips out from some dark corner. Wispy and iridescent, it circles the bar like a fine thread of cigarette smoke before retreating behind the folds of a tightly drawn curtain.

Or so I imagined, along with all other sorts of outlandish, fictitious stories about Downtown celebrities. After all, in our star-obsessed culture, the rich and famous are seductive, mythical beings who flirt and play against only the most lavish of backdrops (which, for some reason or other, always seem to sit high up on rooftops).

To get past the velvet ropes, I asked New York’s servers to give me their dish on some Downtown superstars—the scandals! the tantrums! the intrigue! But what they served up was even harder to believe than what I had originally envisioned.

OK, so I didn’t expect to hear that Baldwin flirted with the Olsen twins. But I had hoped that digging around about the Greenwich Village actor, famed for his Twitter tirades as much as for his talent, would be a good way to go about researching this story. I must be in for some juicy revelations, right?

“He’s very friendly and polite,” declared a source at Nolita restaurant Emporio.

“He was a super nice guy, a good tipper,” gushed a former server at Popover Cafe. “He would always talk to some of the waiters who were also actors and see what they were doing, encourage them.”

“Alec’s awesome, he makes you feel like you’re at the table with him,” echoed an insider at Pure Food and Wine, where the 54-year-old star first met his 28-year-old fiancée, yoga teacher Hilaria Thomas. “When you walk by, he says, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ He’ll ask you how you’ve been and introduce you to someone. He’s not wanting you to go away. It’s almost hard to pull away from the table because he’s engaging you in this really fun, playful, sweet, witty way.”

But this was practically criticism compared to what people had to say about West Village star Sarah Jessica Parker, of Sex and the City fame.

“She’s a real doll, really nice and down to earth, just a regular girl,” Prime Burger owner Michael DiMiceli revealed. “I’ll never forget it, she was sitting one day by herself, trying to be inconspicuous, and there were a bunch of school kids here on a trip. They recognized her and went over to her one by one. She didn’t just sign an autograph, she asked each of them their name. I was very impressed by that.”

He was equally impressed when she chatted up his wife and daughter for half an hour. “She was having a regular conversation with them like she was nobody special. That’s what I really like about her—she’s always nice. She always pays her check, never expects things for free or anything like that.”

But if you want to hear someone really sing her praises, ask how the actress behaves on a bad night. Parker was dining at Café Luxembourg with husband Matthew Broderick when, according to her server, another patron mistakenly took her jacket. Inside were her lines for the Broadway show Once Upon a Mattress, which she was supposed to have learned for rehearsal the following day.

“She was gracious, didn’t lose her temper at all,” said the server. “She was also very personable and real with me. She acknowledged me as a person, not just someone waiting on her.”

You can imagine how, after all of this, I wasn’t exactly shocked when others started raving about Tribeca couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z. “So nice!” “So gracious!” “Super normal!” “Not at all high maintenance!”

“Jay-Z and Beyoncé are a casual, sweet couple,” praised one server. “They treat the staff very well, tip very well. They have a normal dinner and don’t ask for special treatment, even though they get it. They’re not picky or particular. You can tell they’re a regular couple enjoying each other’s company more than anything.”

Is there anyone who’s not so sweet and down to earth? I asked my sources.

“Katie Holmes was kind of standoffish,” confessed a Downtown waitress. “She was quiet, looked down a lot.”

Oh?

“It was hard for her to eat in the restaurant because the paparazzi kept trying to take photos of her through the windows. She wasn’t nasty or anything—she was respectful.”

The wind had finally left my sails. Where were the scandals? The tantrums? The intrigue? Celebrities were just about as exciting as your average New Yorker (though obviously with more glamorous clothes and high-powered friends). I was starting to see how the gossip rags might get desperate enough to embellish or even fabricate their material. At this point, I’d rather write a tell-all column about Mother Theresa.

“Well, what did you expect?” asked a friend and former server as we wove through Greenwich Village avenues, eyes peeled for familiar, front-page faces. “This is New York, not L.A. Even the most famous people are just living their lives here like everyone else. They get their takeout at the same place every day, go to Starbucks. It’s not an issue of who they are.”

But by now, all I see are celebrities. Celebrities standing beneath the eerie neon of a street lamp, silhouetted. Celebrities just beyond the glass pane of every taxi passing by. In the corner, by the DJ booth, on the red velvet sofas of another supposedly star-saturated lounge we’re about to leave behind.

But wouldn’t you know it? All the superstars and legends are really at home watching TV. The bar’s emptied out, and in the light, the designer couches are not truly red at all—just a deep, dull pink.