Day: March 26, 2025

WOMAN LEADERS WERE HONORED Sunday at a Women’s History Month event by Assemblymember William Colton and Councilmember Susan Zhuang. 

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THE U.S. SUPREME COURT ON MARCH 26 UPHELD a Biden regulation that requires companies making ghost gun kits to treat them like other firearms.

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A BOROUGH PARK STUDENT was given the wrong backpack from a yellow cab, later discovering it held over $100,000 in luxury goods.

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A conservative city lawmaker-led group filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block Mayor Eric Adams’ City of Yes plan — a seismic overhaul of city zoning regulations aimed at building more housing across the five boroughs.

In the suit, filed on Staten Island in Richmond County Supreme Court, the plaintiffs allege that the Adams administration and the City Council violated city and state environmental review laws by passing the City of Yes late last year. If successful, they say the lawsuit would also overturn two other City of Yes zoning plans passed by the administration over the past year—one aimed at cutting carbon emissions and another designed to boost business growth.

A coalition of mostly Republican city and state lawmakers, civic groups, housing associations, and individuals brought the action. The city, mayor, City Council, Department of City Planning, and City Planning Commission are all named as defendants in the suit.

City Council Minority Leader Joann Ariola (R-Queens), during a Wednesday morning City Hall news conference, said their lawsuit “makes it clear that not only did the city lie to all of us, but it also broke the law in the process.”

“What you are seeing here today is a citywide grassroots organization that is fighting back,” she said. “A movement of local residents here in our city fighting back and who refuse to have their neighborhoods destroyed. They will not have their rights trampled.”

Ariola, along with the other lawmakers in the group, has railed against the plan since it was introduced. They argue it would fundamentally alter the outer borough neighborhoods they represent by opening them up to developers seeking to build more housing.

In response to the suit, mayoral spokesperson Zachary Nosanchuk said, “When it comes to housing, there will always be those who say, ‘Not in my backyard,’ but we stand by the city’s thorough and transparent review process and will address any lawsuit when it is received.”

The mayor signed City of Yes into law in December after the 51-member City Council passed it by a 31-to-20 vote. The plan is estimated to yield 82,000 new units of housing distributed across the five boroughs over the next 15 years.

However, the plaintiffs argue that both the administration and the council failed to take a “hard look” at the negative impacts of the zoning overhaul, thus running afoul of both the State Environmental Quality Review Act and city Environmental Regulations.

They also charge that the city was not forthright about how much the changes would strain neighborhoods’ infrastructure and resources by allegedly not factoring in the environmental impacts of the other two City of Yes plans into the housing overhaul. 

“The fact that they looked at it independently, intentionally to minimize the environmental impacts, I don’t believe will be sustained in court,” said Jack Lester, the group’s attorney. “It’s a classic case of what they call unlawful segmentation.”

Conservative Democratic Council Member Robert Holden claimed that the Department of City Planning ignored infrastructure issues in his low-slung southwestern Queens district in passing the plan. Those issues include chronic flooding and an overtaxed electrical grid, he said.

Holden added that building more housing in the neighborhoods he represents would alter the character that brought people there in the first place.

“We’re going to fight like hell to protect our neighborhoods,” Holden said. “We have the right to feel the sun in our backyards because we chose that when we bought our home. We said we want to have sun; we don’t want to have skyscrapers.”

New York City Fringe Festival, the annual indie theater bonanza, is back next month with new shows, new participants, and a whole new borough. 

This year, for the first time, the usually Manhattan-exclusive festival is stepping into Brooklyn, where four shows will play a total of 17 performances at The Rat NYC in Dumbo. Three of those shows — “F***ed Up Fairytales,” “Oil & Whiskey,” and “the Kobold Show” – are making their official debuts at the venue starting April 2. 

Though the festival’s first appearance in Brooklyn is small — 60 of Fringe’s shows will be staged across three theaters in Manhattan — it’s the start of a natural next step for the 18-year-old event, said festival founder and executive director Erez Ziv. 

‘Bring the festival to them’

Ziv and his team started New York City Fringe Festival (then called Frigid Fringe Festival) in 2007. For years, it was a “small boutique festival” with just about 30 shows per year, Ziv said. 

But when the larger New York International Fringe Festival shuttered in 2023, New York City Fringe started attracting more attention.

“We kind of had to grow because this is New York City, it’s a theater city, a lot of people come here for theater — to do it or to see it,” he said. “So we did, and they came.” 

This year, the festival received more applications than ever before, and grew from 45 shows last year to 64. It started a “Bring Your Own Venue” program, allowing groups of artists to decide where they would like to perform. 

“I really wanted to have this festival go outside of Manhattan because when we started our festival 17 years ago, our artists were in Manhattan,” Ziv said. “But they’re not anymore, they’re in Brooklyn, Queens, all over the city, and it would be great to bring the festival to them.”

That’s how The Rat was brought into the fold. The venue opened last summer as a sort of “incubator space” for independent theater artists, said executive director Jennifer Sandella. 

“We were really excited when the Fringe Bring Your Own Venue program approached us about doing some Fringe shows here to sort of connect with the larger New York community as a whole,” she said.

Fairytale characters and ex-lovers take the stage at The Rat 

The venue is small – with space for about 55 people, including standing room — but more accessible than the festival’s flagship UNDER St. Mark’s and the ability to load in multiple shows a week, Ziv said. Plus, it has a bar. 

The bar was a plus for Michael Hagins, Akia Squitieri, and Rachael Langton, the team behind “F***ed Up Fairytales,” which has its first performance at The Rat on April 7. 

The interactive show needed an accessible theater where the actors could move on and off stage to interact with patrons — and where both the actors and the audience could access a bar to participate in an interactive drinking game.

“F***ed Up Fairytales” was born during the pandemic, when in-person theater was impossible. At the start, it was fairly straightforward: Hagins, the playwright, reimagined five classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales as wildly different genres, and actors performed all five at every show.

But that didn’t feel engaging enough for audiences who were watching at home, so they added more interactive elements: a drinking game and ongoing conversations with the Brothers Grimm themselves in the chat. 

As the city emerged from the pandemic, audiences returned to the theater slowly. They had just spent two years sequestered from their friends, Squitieri said, and didn’t want to spend more time sitting silently in a dark room. But they thought “F***ed Up Fairytales,” pulled off the screen and into 3-D space, could bring theatergoers back in. 

“We really wanted to step into a world of fun and a world of joy and play and really have that … spontaneous controlled chaos where everyone is in it together, there’s a sense of community amongst the audience, amongst the cast, and with the cast and the audience,” she said.

The live and in-person version of “F***ed Up Fairytales” debuting at Fringe next month will feature a rotating 14-person cast and five revamped fairytales — including “Rumpelstiltskin” spun into a film noir and “Rapunzel” retold as a spy thriller. At each show, the audience will choose which three stories will be told. 

“It’s an interactive show, and it changes every night depending on who’s on stage and who’s in the audience, and what the audience chooses their adventure to be every night,” Squitieri said. 

The Rat also drew the team behind “Oil & Whiskey,” a new country-western musical making its New York City debut on April 9.

Just an hour long, the musical is about two ex-lovers reuniting at a bar to relive the best and worst of their relationship — and to ask the question, “should we get back together?”

“Oil & Whiskey” was also a pandemic-era project. Producer Alexa Karas and co-writer Kit Nolan had recently moved to Kentucky and Nashville, respectively, and fell in love with country music.

“I think COVID was really a time where we were all taught a lot about relationships, and the truth is throughout life, certain relationships don’t always serve you,” Karas said. “And what better than country western to tell a love story and a breakup story?”

The show was influenced by artists like Zac Brown Band and the Chicks — but Karas said it was Beyoncé’s 2024 foray into country music that pushed them fully into the genre.

Karas said the team is excited to bring the show to New York, and to The Rat, years after she moved out of the city. Dumbo is “vibrant and wonderful,” she said, and several local businesses are teaming up with them for events connected to the shows. 

“While the show is not about returning to an ex, you really shouldn’t return to an ex, we are returning to the stage in New York,” Karas laughed.

As “Oil and Whiskey” and “F***ed Up Fairytales” rehearse in Brooklyn, several local artists are preparing to take their shows to the birthplace of New York City Fringe — Manhattan.

Brooklyn artists branch out 

Longtime Ditmas Park resident and writer Amanda Miller is bringing her newest piece, “Quacks and Whacks: A Cancer Comedy,” to the Chain Theater in Midtown starting April 4.

The show follows middle-school teacher Sharon as she deals with a cancer diagnosis and the American healthcare system — all while her puppeteered cancer cells sing and dance their way through her body. 

“Quacks and Whacks” was co-written by Miller and her mother, Terry, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer three years ago. One day, after a scan, Terry was talking about her cancer cells as if they were campers, Miller said, hiking around her body and setting up campsites.

The image stuck with Miller, who asked her mom if she wanted to write about it. They wrote the show together over Zoom — Miller in Brooklyn, Terry in Los Angeles. Over time, they turned Terry’s other frustrations with the healthcare system into comedy — things like being told she needs an appointment immediately when one isn’t available for weeks, or waiting for a delivery of chemo medicine that never comes. 

“It ended up becoming more about navigating the healthcare system, and all the absurdity of that, in addition to the absurdity of having these cells multiplying inside her body,” Miller said. “The cells themselves are played by puppets, and they are total idiots.”

After a well-received reading of the show last fall, she decided it was time to go bigger. Once the show was accepted to New York City Fringe Festival, Miller recruited another performer and a puppet maker, who created the cancer cell puppets with the help of her husband. 

“Quacks and Whacks” is “more universal” than other shows Miller has created before, she said. She hopes it will help impress the need for audience members to advocate for themselves and their loved ones in healthcare settings – and highlight the need for change in the healthcare system. 

“It’s a very silly show about a very serious subject,” she said. [“It’s] using absurdity and humor to address this topic that can be hard to talk about, and making it more accessible for conversation, and will hopefully inspire people to have more conversations and advocate.” 

Fringe benefits

New York City Fringe Festival prides itself on making space for up-and-coming artists and shows, and as theatermakers prepare for opening night, they emphasized the festival’s differences.

“I think one of the things that’s really important for people to know is that the artists get 100% of the box office [proceeds] from the festival,” Squitieri said. “Right now when arts funding is getting cut, and venues are shutting down, and it’s just harder to make art — having a festival that is artist-first and artist-centric … I think that’s really important.” 

As “Oil & Whiskey” rehearses at The Rat, Karas said the theater and the festival have provided myriad resources and support. 

Sandella said she has been producing theater “for a long time,” and has always loved giving people opportunities to create theater. 

“As a New Yorker, when I was a kid coming up I got to see so many cool, weird things in strange places that made a big effect on me, and there’s not a lot of space for that anymore,” she said. “I think it’s really important that if we can provide spaces for work like that, and we can support the community at large, we should.” 

New York City Fringe Festival runs April 2-20, 2025, at five venues in Manhattan and Queens. Performances at The Rat, 68-117 Jay St. in Dumbo, begin April 2 at 4:30 p.m. Information about performance times, tickets, and more is available online.

Detective Christina Orlando and her four-legged partner Lindsay have been together since 2017. Now at the NYPD ESU K-9 unit, the pair helps train handlers and dogs to handle the city’s biggest emergencies.

In a Brooklyn facility, Orlando serves as a lead trainer to help cops bond with their dogs and get them ready for every kind of scenario that can happen to any unit across the five boroughs — everything from bringing a suspect to justice who has barricaded himself inside an apartment, to looking for the deceased after a catastrophic instant.

Orlando does not take her job lightly. She is the first female K9 trainer in ESU history, carving out a trailblazing path for herself and for other women who yearn to follow in her paw-shaped footsteps.

“I feel very honored to have this position. I know it paves the way for other females to go into a position like this. But I also don’t see it as gender, I see it based on skill sets. Lucky for me, I had enough experience to train with Lindsay, and we had a successful career together as partners,” Orlando told amNewYork. 

At their Brooklyn base of operations, Orlando runs cops on two legs and four through their paces. She conducts obedience training in order for the canines and their handlers to learn from one another. The unit also has an obstacle course set up in order to help the furry police officers learn how to navigate sticky situations that could occur when out in the field.

From burrowing through tunnels to leaping through NYPD car windows, nothing is too “ruff” for these pups — they learn it all. 

“Every day is different. We train the dogs that are in front of us and the handlers that are in front of us. So every day is a different type of training,” Orlando said. “It’s so humbling because there’s so many different personalities, so many different dogs, people. It’s a great experience to really be able to train with so many different personalities.”

While Orlando is the trainer, she has a group of female handlers supporting her, including Detective Monika Grejniec with K9 Tombo, Detective Katrina Narvaez with K9 Freddy, and Police Officer Samantha Kirrane with K9 Quinn, creating a group of female groundbreakers. These women utilize the dogs to find drugs and guns smuggled into cars or even to detect exposure devices; there appears to be very little the canines can’t do.

Still, Lindsay is not just a partner to Orlando; they are like family. The pair live and work together, shaping an unbreakable bond. The detective’s eyes welled up with tears as she recalled their first meeting.

“It was super emotional. I get emotional talking about it now. It was the most emotional thing because I wanted it so badly, and I feel like I worked so hard to get here. And finally, everything that I worked hard for is in this 53-pound dog that I consider my partner,” Orlando said.

Detective Scott Mateyaschuk, who heads up the unit, told amNewYork that Orlando is an asset to the team thanks to her skillset.  

“She brings a real unique perspective to the training, great communication skills, and different aspects that, you know, definitely mentor the other females around,” Mateyaschuk said. “The partnership is a tight bond between the canine and handler, and it’s very unique because you’re probably spending more time with the dog than you are with your family.”

Мэр Нью-Йорка Эрик Адамс сообщил, что ожидается, что New York Yankees и New York Mets сгенерируют в общей сложности 909 миллионов долларов экономической активности в […]