THEFT ON 88TH STREET
At 3 a.m. on Jan. 22, a 22-year-old man was walking home on the Upper East Side. On East 88th Street, he told police, three young black males approached him. One of them allegedly said, “Give me your wallet, do you have any money?” Another punched the victim in the face, while the third one kicked him. Then, one of the men went through the victim’s pockets and took his cellphone and wallet. One perpetrator told him to count backward from 1,000, and not to look back because “we know where you live,” and his partner in crime told the victim, “We can shoot you right now.” The assailants then fled on foot. Police searched the area, but no one was found, and no arrests have been made.

MAN HIT BY WOMAN WIELDING CANE
A 46-year-old man was on an MTA bus on Jan. 21 during evening rush hour when he saw a woman in front of him attempt to hit a child with her cane. The man tried to restrain the woman, who then turned around and struck him in the left eye with her cane. A nearby witness, a 48-year-old man from the Bronx, confirmed these events. The 66-year-old woman was arrested for assault, but at most, she will be charged with a misdemeanor.

EX-BOYFRIEND MAKES TROUBLE
On Jan. 20, a 21-year-old woman was returning home to her apartment on East 89th Street when she was approached by her ex-boyfriend. She told police he then proceeded to slap her and drag her down the building stairs. The young woman did not suffer any injuries, but her cellphone was damaged. Police are still on the lookout for the assailant, a 30-year-old Hispanic male, 5’8”, who was wearing a black jacket and jeans at the time of the attack.

PHONE SCAM SNAGS TWO MORE VICTIMS
In what is starting to emerge as a pattern of scams targeting elderly people, an 89-year-old man and 64-year-old female reported getting a phone call from an unknown person on Jan. 17 in their apartment on East 76th Street. The caller claimed to be their granddaughter, saying she had been arrested in North Carolina. The caller instructed the couple to wire $14,700 for bail in California. The victims sent over the money, and soon after, received another call asking for an additional $3,950. At this point, they called their granddaughter, who said that she had actually not been arrested. In total, they were swindled out of over $18,000.

CELLPHONE SNATCHER
On Jan. 17, a 33-year-old woman was walking on Lexington Avenue and East 95th Street, when an unknown woman approached her and started yelling at her in Spanish. The perp then grabbed the cellphone out of the woman’s hand and fled. She was last seen running eastbound on 95th Street. The woman’s iPhone, worth $800, was stolen, and has not been retrieved.

TAXI TROUBLE

On Sunday, Jan. 13, a taxi driver from Brooklyn picked up a passenger at West 48th Street, who requested to be taken to East 77th Street. Upon arrival, the passenger paid and then proceeded to punch the driver in the nose, causing lacerations and bruising. The unknown perp, described as a black male wearing a white baseball cap and a yellow jacket, then ran off in an unknown direction. The victim was taken to the hospital and released. Police are still on the lookout for the perp.

CROCODILE-SKIN WALLET SNAPPED UP AT GYM
A 26-year-old woman who lives at East 61st Street was at a gym on Lexington Avenue. She left her wallet on a bench, and went to brush her hair. When she returned, the $180 crocodile-skin wallet was gone, as well as her debit card, social security card and several credit cards. No arrests have been made, and the victim canceled her credit cards before they could be used.

ASSAULT AT PIZZERIA
On a recent Wednesday night, a 49-year-old woman from Brooklyn was eating pizza at a pizzeria on First Avenue. A highly intoxicated man became unruly and punched her without provocation with a closed fist, then ran away. The victim suffered a small cut on her nose. A description of the perp is not available at this time, and no arrests have yet been made.

CREDIT CARD THIEVES GO ON SHOPPING SPREE
A 31-year-old woman, a resident of East 84th Street, was eating inside a bakery on Third Avenue on Jan. 9, and left her purse on the floor. Unbeknownst to her, someone removed credit cards from her purse. The thief made more than $1,600 worth of purchases at a trendy clothing store, then spent $50 at a convenience store. The perp has not been caught yet, and so far the money and credit cards have not been recovered. The woman has since cancelled her credit cards.

MOVIE THEATER NABBING
At a movie theater on East 86th Street, a 27-year-old woman, who lives on West End Ave., left her seat to go to the bathroom. When she returned, her purse was gone. Shortly thereafter, $117 was charged on her credit card. The woman’s passport was also in the bag. None of the stolen items—a $570 designer bag, a $500 smart phone, a $400 wallet, as well as cash and identification—has been recovered. The case is still open.

Jackie Peu-Duvallon, a historic preservation consultant, and Tara Kelly, Executive Director of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, check out buildings on East 83rd St.

By Paul Bisceglio

If you live in Yorkville, don’t be surprised if you see Tara Kelly or one of her volunteers standing on the street, notepad in hand, staring at your building.

“As soon as people know you aren’t a developer, they usually don’t mind,” Kelly said. “I tell them I’m from Friends, and they say, ‘Oh, I love Friends!’”

Kelly is the executive director of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, a nonprofit on Lexington Avenue whose mission is to keep the Upper East Side’s—and, right now, specifically Yorkville’s—diverse history intact.

“What we aim to preserve is any place that has a distinct sense of place,” Kelly explained. The organization, which was founded in 1982, primarily goes about preservation through architecture. The Upper East Side’s buildings have been built, rebuilt, torn down and altered for centuries, so Friends’ job is to sift through miles of architectural variety along the city’s streets to find what is worth holding on to.

To do so, Friends performs “cultural resources surveys,” which is a fancy term for walking through neighborhoods and taking notes on buildings—all buildings. In Yorkville, the organization is currently cataloguing every lot in the neighborhood. Since 2010, the project has been recruiting volunteers throughout the Upper East Side to fill out survey forms for every building on a block, accounting for things like each building’s style, materials, window type, similarity to others in the neighborhood and overall perceived historical value.

Jackie Peu-Duvallon, a historic preservation consultant who lives at East 89th Street and Madison Avenue, has volunteered with Friends for about a year. She joined Kelly last week to survey East 83rd Street from Third to Second avenues.

“I want to maintain a sense of place between what my husband [who was born on the Upper East Side] experienced and what my son will experience,” Peu-Duvallon said of her motivation for participating in the survey. “As a resident, it becomes disconcerting when you see things like Second Avenue becoming a canyon of glass towers. You wonder, is this the neighborhood that people used to know and love, or is this becoming something else now? Are we losing character in giving up historic buildings that may have gone unrecognized?”

Peu-Duvallon and Kelly overlooked no door, step or windowpane as they surveyed each building along East 83rd Street, chatting architecture, snapping pictures and cracking jokes about a couple of less-than-sound aesthetic choices. Kelly explained that Friends seeks out buildings of individual cultural importance—like St. Elizabeth of Hungary, an attractive old Catholic church on the block—and that contain details reflecting the neighborhood’s overall historic character.

Friends ultimately does not decide what buildings are preserved, though. That is the job of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, a governmental agency with the legal power to designate single structures or entire districts as historical landmarks. Roughly 30,000 buildings in New York City—about 3 percent of all buildings—are landmarked either individually or within historic districts.

Kelly wishes there were more. A significant part of Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts’ resources are devoted to identifying and recommending landmarks worth of designation—an approval process which, according to Kelly, takes from three months to multiple years depending on feasibility and the commission’s interest in the proposed site—but Kelly says that her organization is also dedicated to exploring ways of teaching communities about their cultural landmarks when designation is not practical. If a neighborhood has historic door fronts, say, or interesting signage, Friends notes these details in their surveys, and may use them to create a photo exhibition on their website.

Kelly also noted that regardless of how many buildings are landmarked, her job will never be done. “The city is ever evolving,” she said. “Buildings built now are landmarks of the future. As long as there are new buildings, there will be landmarks to be designated.”

Contracting Crime
One unfortunate contractor was a victim of burglary on Thursday, May 17 on East 59th Street, where a crook broke into his truck and stole a valuable piece of equipment. The victim had parked his car at the job site and got to work; when he returned at about 9 p.m., he found all the locks on his truck were busted and an electronic tester valued at $15,000 was missing. There were no eyewitnesses to the crime, and the case is still open.

False Tickets Fiasco

With the Stanley Cup playoffs in full swing, tickets to the live games are sure to be sold for big bucks. One unfortunate Long Island man was the victim of grand larceny when he purchased five tickets to an NHL game and discovered they were fakes when he and his pals went to Madison Square Garden to catch the game. The victim traveled to Third Avenue and East 66th Street on Wednesday, May 16 to meet with a man who called himself Glen Read. The man sold him the fake tickets to the game for $2,500.
So far, there have been no arrests in this case.

High-Priced Hijinks
Jewelry stores are high-value targets for crooks, and a dastardly duo took advantage of one unfortunate store on the Upper East Side Monday, May 21. At 3:30 p.m., a man and a woman entered a store located on Lexington Avenue. After looking around at the merchandise, the woman garnered the attention of the clerk by dropping some of the display jewelry. While the clerk was busy aiding the woman, the man shoved as many items as he could into his pockets. Only later did the clerk realize that the two had made off with seven items, ranging from necklaces to earrings. Overall, the theft cost the store $20,000. So far, there have been no arrests made in the case.

Slippery after Burglary
On Thursday, May 17, at 10 a.m., an employee was buffing the floors of a business on the Upper East Side to prepare for the coming day of business. While he was hard at work, a slinky crook snuck in the service entrance of the business, snatched a Compaq notebook computer and booked it from the premises. The notebook is valued at $300. Currently, the NYPD is viewing video surveillance that is believed to have footage of the crook, who was not seen by the employee.

By Briehn Trumbauer

In honor of this week’s upcoming New York Baby Show, the picks feature great chances for new and expectant parents to bond over their new and exciting journey. But, like always, we snuck in some rockin’ events for the kids, too!

Monday, May 14

String Art at the Children’s Museum of the Art

103 Charlton Street

12pm

Inspired by artist Sheila Hicks, kiddos ages five and up will learn all about string art and then have the opportunity to weave and wrap rope to make their own project. 

Tuesday, May 15

Tia Mowry Book Signing at Yummy Mummy

1201 Lexington Avenue

6:30pm

Remember Tia Mowry from the ABC sitcom Sister, Sister? Now she’s all grown up with a husband, a baby and…a book! Tia will read from Oh Baby!—her hysterical account of all-things pregnancy. Mums and mommies-to-be are welcome. Tasty sweets will be served, and everyone will leave with a signed copy of the book. Call 212-879-8669 to reserve your spot.

Wednesday, May 16

New Parent Get-Together at the 92Y

1395 Lexington Avenue

10:30am-12pm

All new parents and their babies are welcome at this weekly get-together. Share stories, learn valuable parenting tips and make new friends (your babies will, too!). This week’s topic is “Grandparents — Good Advice/Bad Advice.” Discuss what happens when Grandma or Grandpa gives the kids too much candy—but also spoils them with love.

To read the full listings click here.

Since opening Sfoglia on a barren stretch of Lexington Avenue in 2006, husband-and-wife owners Ron Suhanosky and Colleen Marnell-Suhanosky have been inundated with hungry Upper East Siders who were thrilled to have a sought-after pasta joint in the neighborhood. The couple made their first foray into cookbooks last September with Pasta Sfoglia (Wiley and Sons, Inc., $29.95), which won a 2010 James Beard Award in the single subject category and was included on several fall best cookbook lists.

Ron Suhanosky says he will reveal plans for another restaurant in the coming weeks—but it won’t be in New York.

Ron, who deals with the savory side of the menu while Colleen handles bread and pastries, sat down on a recent rainy afternoon to talk about how best to get a reservation at Sfoglia, customer pet peeves and when his wife once poisoned the family. We’ll have to wait to get Colleen’s side of the story, as she was due to return from Italy the following day, where she’d been living with their kids for a year so they could learn Italian.

Q: How does one go around writing a cookbook?
A: Well, you hire somebody to help you.

Q: To do the writing?
A: Not necessarily. I think that the great success to a cookbook is if you translate a recipe from a commercial kitchen to a home kitchen. That’s really the difficulty in creating a cookbook. I didn’t have too much trouble doing that. I had help from my co-writer, Susan Simon, and she’s written cookbooks before so she was able to help translate a recipe to the home kitchen.

Q: What is the biggest misconception about cooking pasta at home? People think it’s an easy, simple meal.
A: Great pasta dishes are all about the marriage of the sauce and the pasta and the pasta water—which is one of the recipes that I fought really hard to have in that book, because it’s such a major part of each recipe. My editor was like, “There is a recipe for pasta water?” And there is: You have plain water and you’re putting pasta in it and there is salt and you’re using that as part of an ingredient to the finished dish. That really helps the marriage of the two. The misconception about that in America is that you put the sauce over the pasta, and really the whole idea is that you are supposed to marry the two together and create this unbelievable bowl of pasta.

Q: Have you ever used jarred sauce at home?
A: No, never done that. It’s funny that you bring this up because I’ve been approached recently to create my own tomato sauce. And I won’t do it because it defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to get across and what I believe in—that you really can make a quick tomato sauce. There’s nothing difficult about it. In the time that you cook pasta, which is in 7-8 minutes, you could have a pasta sauce.

Q: What goes in it?
A: Garlic, olive oil, tomato and basil. You let it cook and then you add the pasta to the sauce.

Q: Between you and your wife, who’s a better cook? Although I guess that’s not the best question because you’re savory, she’s sweet.
A: Colleen is a good cook, although there have been times that she has actually poisoned us. When we’re living in Nantucket it was all over the news. She is a forager and she once picked what she thought was wild asparagus but it was blue indigo so we had to get our stomachs pumped.

Q: What is blue indigo?
A: It’s like a hallucinate drug. I was drinking that charcoal shake [in the hospital] and it was awful.

Q: So she’s not allowed to forage anymore?
A: Not for me. She can forage for herself.

Q: Do you have any guilty pleasures when it comes to food? Like Kraft macaroni and cheese, Twinkies?
A: I love peanut M&Ms—that is what I call my piato uniquo in Italian. It’s a one-plate meal. Every now and then I binge on a bag of potato chips like any American would.

Q: So no Olive Garden?
A: No, no, I rather starve than eat that kind of stuff.

Q: Would you ever consider opening another restaurant in New York City?
A: Yes, actually I’m considering it right now.

Q: Can you tell us where, or is it a secret?
A: I can’t.

Q: When will we know?
A: Maybe in a month. But it’s not in New York City, or New York State, for that matter.

Q: You’ve been a guest on the Martha Stewart show before. You liked doing it?
A: I wouldn’t say that I liked it. I would say more that I was told that I was good on television so that’s how I am going to pursue it.

Q: Are you nervous on television?
A: No, I just don’t want to go about it with an ego. My approach about everything really has been with my ego just below the radar. I think it is better received that way. It’s more important that I get across what I’m trying to teach people or express to people. Not so much about me being the chef.

Q: Like Rachael Ray?
A: Well, that’s entertainment. Mine is more practical.

Q: This place is always jam-packed. Do you have any tips for people who want to dine here at a normal hour?
A: Getting through to us on the phone is a difficult process because we can only answer the phone when the phone calls come in, and we really do have two phone lines and we only have one person working the phones. What I tell people is to email their requests. We have a great website that people can go on and look at the menu and preview what the restaurant’s about.

Q: Any pet peeves that diners do?
A: Last night, actually, I had this incident that was kind of funny. I took a walk-in party of two. Seemed like a young hip couple. She was looking at the menu and she looked like she was perplexed about what to order and before I could even get into any detail about the menu she asked me if I had chicken piccata or veal milanese. And I was so close to letting out of my mouth, “I think you’re in the wrong part of this town. Maybe you should be downtown in Little Italy because that is where they carry that stuff.” I literally went on Facebook and posted it on my Facebook page—all these question marks: chicken picatta? Wrong part of town! I talked her into getting the pappardelle Bolognese. We brought out the pasta and literally she started picking off the pieces of parsley that we sprinkled on top. I just thought, those are the people—I wish I had some sort of doorbell at the front so they’d let me know that they were coming in and [I] could say, “No that’s OK—take a right turn down the street, there’s a place that serves that kind of stuff.”

Q: If somebody does send back food, chefs don’t do anything bad to it. Not here, of course, but in general.
A: No, no. You mean like if it has fallen on the floor, do we put it back on the plate?

Q: Or if they are allergic to something, do you just pick it off?
A: We just make fun of them in the back.

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Transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.