Use handbags with zippers and locks, and never carry wallets in back pockets.

Beware of loud arguments or commotions that may be staged to distract commuters as their pockets are picked.

If you are unnecessarily bumped or crowded on public transportation, be aware that you might be positioned for pickpocketing.

If your pocket is picked, yell out immediately to warn the driver or conductor, and alert everyone else that there’s a pickpocket on board.

TRAFFIC DISPUTE
A young driver got into a fight with another driver that ended in blows on Wednesday, Nov. 28. The reason the two confronted each other was unspecified, but they began arguing around 1 p.m. at the corner of Third Avenue and East 79th Street. The argument escalated into a brawl, resulting in a bloody nose for the young driver, a 22-year-old. The other driver fled the scene in a truck, and is now wanted for assault. Two New Yorkers witnessed the fight, and one of them managed to capture it on video.

WORSE TRAFFIC DISPUTE
Unrelated to the above incident, another punching fit erupted from a traffic dispute at York Avenue and East 87th Street on the same day, Nov. 28. At around 2:15 p.m., a vehicle clipped the elbow of a 50-year-old pedestrian as he was crossing the street’s crosswalk. It was the vehicle’s middle-aged driver who was angriest, though, because he reportedly got out of the car, grabbed the pedestrian by the throat and unleashed a barrage of punches on him, injuring his right shoulder and ear. This driver fled the scene, too, and remains at large, wanted for assault.

PURSE SWIPE
A young Upper West Sider was enjoying a night at a bar on Saturday when her purse was snatched. The 29-year-old had hung her purse on a hook near where she was sitting at the Second Avenue restaurant around 10 p.m. She then went to the bathroom and mingled for half an hour, after which she returned to her seat to find the purse missing. Asking around to see if anyone had seen someone snatch it, she found the purse on the restaurant’s floor by some tables. When she looked inside, she discovered that her iPhone and wallet were missing. The wallet contained $40 cash and various credit cards, all of which she canceled.

FAILED SHOPLIFTING ATTEMPT
A worker at a cosmetics store on East 86th Street witnessed a shoplifting attempt on Saturday. At around 4:30 p.m., a 67-year-old woman entered the store and began walking around and sneakily emptying boxes, placing their contents in her shopping bag. The items included facial cleaning foams and firming agents, worth over $1,000 in total. Then, the woman attempted to walk out of the store without paying for anything. The witness reported the theft, and the woman was arrested for grand larceny.

PURSE SNATCHER
An unidentified man attacked a 51-year-old woman as she was walking along East 80th Street on Monday and seized her purse. According to the victim, an East 85th Street resident, the man approached her around 11 p.m. and demanded money. He then threw her against a pole and onto the ground as he grabbed her purse, but only took a pack of cigarettes from a small bag within the purse. The thief fled toward Fifth Avenue, and remains at large.

SHOPLIFT FEVER
One shoplifter did not know when to quit on Monday. Workers at a pharmacy on Second Avenue first confronted him outside their store around 4 p.m. after he swiped goods from their store. He argued with the workers, then fled toward East 63rd Street. A witness told the workers that the shoplifter left a shopping bag in a newspaper box on 63rd Street, so the workers went to investigate, and were confronted by the shoplifter, who told them, “That’s my stuff.” The group got into another dispute, then the thief suddenly grabbed a gold chain off the neck of one of the store workers, a 59-year-old Bronx resident, and fled toward Third Avenue. The workers chased the perp and found the chain discarded on the sidewalk. The thief has not been caught.

BODEGA BRAWL
Two men got into a fight in a Second Avenue bodega on Saturday. A 37-year-old was talking with friends around the grocery store’s entrance before the altercation at about 12:45 a.m., and then was attacked by a 27-year-old, who punched him in the face multiple times. What caused the fight was not reported, but the attacker was arrested for assault shortly after the incident.

PHONE SWIPE
A young woman riding the M86 bus was busy with her iPhone around 10 p.m. on Monday when the device was suddenly snatched from her hand. Startled, she looked up and saw a teenage boy’s back as he ran off the bus at a stop. The victim, a 26-year-old who lives on East 88th Street, stored her driver’s license and credit cards in the phone’s case. Police were able to arrest the thief, a 15-year-old, later in the day.

MEAN CUSTOMER
A rowdy patron crossed the line last week when he punched a bar worker in the face. Prior to the attack, the worker, 56, asked the 18-year-old patron and his friends to leave the Third Avenue bar around 1:30 a.m. last Thursday, Nov. 22. The patron was apparently unhappy with this request, and lashed out at the worker, causing a laceration over the worker’s right eye. The worker reported the attack to police, and the patron was arrested for assault.

Students in front of PS 158

Parents and politicians are clashing with the Department of Education (DOE) in a war of numbers and need on the Upper East Side. While residents insist that they must have another middle school and soon in the neighborhood, the DOE is holding parents at bay, pointing to data they say indicates that elementary school seats are in far higher demand.

The flashpoint of the debate currently rests in the hallways of the Bayard Taylor School, P.S. 158, on York Avenue between East 77th and 78th streets. That building’s annex most recently held the first classes of the newly opened East Side Elementary, P.S. 267, which will be moving to its permanent home on East 63rd Street this fall. The annex was also home to East Side Middle School several years ago, a fact that parents cite as evidence that another new middle school could easily coexist in the building again.

Assembly Member Micah Kellner has been pounding the pavement outside elementary schools for weeks, gathering signatures—at last count almost 2,000—for his petition to urge the DOE to open a new middle school as soon as possible.

“This chancellor has said middle schools are the key to people’s success, and my [dstrict's] parents want better middle school options—they want more middle school options,” said Kellner.
He has accused the DOE of playing games with the data and driving families out of the
neighborhood when they feel their children’s middle school options are limited. He
said he has heard from parents who, when their child isn’t placed in one of the coveted
middle schools in the neighborhood, feel that their only choice is private school or moving to the suburbs.

“I’m not advocating for one middle school option over another—that’s for the DOE and the parents to decide,” Kellner said. “The more the DOE drags their feet, the more they’re harming our kids.”

The discrepancy between what parents and the Community Education Council want and what the DOE is willing to provide lies partly in the geography of the school district. District 2 encompasses the Upper East Side as well as all of Midtown and
Downtown. In theory, a student could live in the East 90s and attend a middle school
in the Financial District, but most parents would prefer their young kids take a short
walk or bus ride to a nearby school, rather than commute by subway for half an hour each way. What this means for DOE data is that while the numbers show an overall excess of 1,500 middle school seats in the district, those empty seats aren’t broken
down by neighborhood, and parents say open seats in other neighborhoods aren’t what they have in mind.

“The DOE says there are plenty of seats for middle school, but that’s if you want to send your kids to Chinatown or the lower West Side. That’s ridiculous if you want a neighborhood school,” said Todd Helmrich, the parent of a daughter entering 1st grade
and a son starting kindergarten at P.S. 158 this fall. He said he’s been alarmed by the
travails of stressed-out parents of older students trying to get their kids into middle
school, which is why he’s stepping in now.

Helmich said the two main options in the neighborhood aren’t viable for everyone—East Side Middle is very difficult to get into and Robert Wagner is quite large for a middle school, which makes some parents look for options elsewhere.

“The thought of having to put a 6th grader on a subway during rush hour to go all the way downtown is terrible to me,” Helmrich said.

At a recent press conference to hail the opening of a new elementary school in the Our Lady of Good Counsel building on East 91st Street, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the DOE will heed their data but will also listen to parents.

“We have to be sensitive to what the data actually says. At the same time, we’re going
to be conscious of hearing what the parents have to say, and they’re going to have to be
able to justify where they think that need is and why,” Walcott said. He called the process an “ongoing discussion” and said that the DOE has been trying to determine targeted needs for each district and neighborhood.

Kellner insisted that the data the DOE cites is disingenuous.

“They really make up the numbers to meet whatever decisions they’ve already made,” he said. “Elementary school kids turn into middle school kids. It’s literally biology. Unless Dennis Walcott is spending all that money on consultants developing a freeze ray, we’re going to need a new middle school.”

Most Upper East Siders are familiar with landmarking, the process of certifying a building with historical designation. What many aren”t aware of are the ways an owner can fight to de-landmark a building, and that”s what is happening at 429 E. 64th St., and 430 E. 65th St., two buildings better known as part of the City and Suburban First Avenue Estates.

Last year, the Stahl York Avenue Company, which owns the buildings, sued the City of New York to overturn the landmark status for those two addresses. In June, an appellate court upheld a lower court”s decision to dismiss Stahl”s petition to have the landmark status rescinded. The court found LPC”s designation of the buildings was appropriate. But Stahl is still battling to work around the landmark status, now through the filing of a hardship application requesting permission to demolish the buildings, in a fight that goes back decades, over a history that stretches almost a century.

Bird's-eye view of the apartment building at 429 E. 64th St. that Stahl York Avenue Company is attempting to have de-landmarked so they can build a new high-rise. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Stahl”s main contention is that they can”t make a reasonable return of at least 6 percent on the properties, citing the small size of the apartments and lack of amenities in the buildings. Through their attorney, Stahl declined to comment for this story.

“They’re saying we have wooden kitchen counter tops, that we have tiny little tubs that are 48 inches, that we don”t have microwaves,” said Monica McLaughlin, a lawyer who has lived in the building for 20 years. She said that she’s read Stahl’s application and documentation, and claims that much of it is untrue.

“He’s presenting these apartments as complete hovels that need millions of dollars of work before normal people will live in them. It’s a pretty insulting document,” said McLaughlin. “He’s saying that the apartments are inferior, that they can’t be expanded or made bigger, which is ridiculous.”

Janet Nonamaker has lived in one of the buildings for 33 years. She is one of three tenants occupying one of the sections of apartments, and the entire complex has a 50 percent vacancy rate. Walking around the perimeter of the buildings, one can peer into open windows and see empty apartments, cabinet doors askew, broken fixtures, dust and debris collecting everywhere. Nonamaker claims that the landlord is slow to repair the common areas and the occupied apartments; she feels that they are biding their time until they can demolish the buildings and start from scratch.

“When they build their 20-story glass tower, there’s not going to be anything affordable,” said Nonamaker. “I’m retired. I live on a pension and Social Security. What am I going to do?” While Stahl is legally required to offer rent-regulated tenants comparable apartments in a new building, they would no longer be regulated.

The battle over the building isn’t just about rents; it’s also about preserving city history. The First Avenue Estate was built between 1898 and 1915, during a time when city philanthropists began to address the appalling conditions of the tenement buildings in which many poor, working families lived. City and Suburban was a privately financed – Cornelius Vanderbilt was among the high-profile investors –  limited-dividend company that set out to provide the model for building low-cost, higher-quality living spaces for working class families. According to an LPC report from 1990, the company “voluntarily agreed to limit their profits in order to provide wage earners with comfortable, safe, hygienic, well-maintained housing at market rates… In its projects City and Suburban emphasized large-scale development likening itself to a chain store, able to offer quality goods at bargain prices because of large-scale organization.”

The architect for the project, Philip H. Ohm, based his design on the concept of the light court tenement, first proposed by architect Enest Flagg, which describes the use of windows in each room as well as the organization around a central open court and a wide entryway. These buildings stood in stark contrast to the squalid conditions offered by railroad-style flats, in which only the front and back rooms (each room would house an entire family) had access to air and light.

“These apartments are not fancy, but they’re livable,” said Elizabeth McCracken, who lived in one for 23 years and now lives across the street, working with Friends of First Avenue Estates to help preserve the buildings. “They have amenities that modern apartments don’t have. Every room had a window, allowing for light and air.”

Fast forward to 1990, when LPC designated the entire block as landmarks, and also bestowed landmark status on another City and Suburban Development, the York Avenue Estates at East 78th Street. But just weeks before it legally died on September 1 of that year, the Board of Estimates, the precursor to the City Council, voted in the middle of the night to overturn LPC’s decision on both the York Avenue and First Avenue Estates in what it called a compromise between preservationists and landowners. Critics called it a backroom deal motivated by politics. One of the landowners in question, Peter Kalikow, owned the York Avenue Estates; he also owned the New York Post at the time.

Advocacy groups sued the city, alleging that an improper decision had been made, and lost. But those representing the York Avenue Estates appealed and won, returning the protection of landmark status uptown; the First Avenue Estates remained un-landmarked, until four years ago.

Starting in 2004, Friends of First Avenue Estate and other landmark advocates, including City Council Member Jessica Lappin, began pushing for LPC to designate the First Avenue Estates, and Community Board 8 voted in support of it. In 2006, Stahl sent a memo to tenants of the buildings at First Avenue Estates, explaining that they were forced to begin performing facade work to the buildings in response to what they called a sudden attempt by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Stahl had obtained legal permits to change some architectural elements of the buildings, and, according to the memo, felt that by removing these external characteristics, they would avoid landmark status. But LPC considered more than just the visual aspects of the buildings.

“These buildings are significant for their architectural and cultural heritage. They were one of the first model tenement complexes built with private funds,” said Tara Kelly, executive director of Friends of the Upper East Historic Districts. “In 2006, the Landmarks Commission was really correcting a wrong that had been made in 1990.”

LPC restored landmark status to the First Avenue Estates, despite strong protests from Stahl and from the Real Estate Board of New York, in 2007. Stahl promptly sued, arguing that the Board of Estimates made a proper decision in 1990 and that LPC and the City Council should be bound by it. They also contended that the original architect”s work was inferior to that of James Ware, who designed the 13 other buildings on the block, and that the recent facade work rendered any architectural significance obsolete. After losing in state Supreme Court, Stahl appealed, and the appellate court dismissed the case, finding that “petitioner’s argument overlooks that in 1990 the LPC had determined that the entire First Avenue Estate, not just some of the buildings individually, was a landmark site, and that but for the modification by the BOE, the entire block would have had landmark status since 1990.”

The LPC will hold a public hearing on Stahl’s application, which has not yet been calendared. Until then, residents and advocates simply wait.

“It’s very nerve-wracking,” said McLaughlin. “Not knowing whether your building is going to be knocked down.”