Nicole Guzzardi 101 Avenue DIf you read this week’s Voice and thought Yongman Kim’s scheme to relocate the entire Kim’s rental collection to Sicily was pie-in-the-sky, get this: the Kim’s Video mogul tells The Local that he plans to open an “alternative and interactive pizza store” on Avenue D.
Kim’s Video Makes a Pizza, as the venue will be called, will be located at 101 Avenue D, in a new building facing the Jacob Riis Houses that is home to the Arabella 101 rental apartments (it’s also the future home of the Lower Eastside Girls Club).
Mr. Kim said the pizza parlor and wine bar would “intermix the new business and the old using the Kim’s Video mentality and personality.”
If that sounds similar to Two Boots, Mr. Kim thinks otherwise. “My restaurant would be a full-sitting restaurant where young and night owls gather and talk about music, films, art and other cultures,” he told The Local.
The switch to pizza follows what Mr. Kim said was a decline in the video business that started in 2001 and worsened in 2005. “Digital has hurt my business and so has the Internet. It is what caused me to close most of the Kim’s locations,” he said, adding that he had tried, unsuccessfully, to go digital in 1994 (well before Netflix, he pointed out). “I was preparing the Internet venture side of my business. I organized my team and it didn’t work,” he said. “It failed over and over again.” Read more…
A woman was shot at the Jacob Riis Houses early this morning, the police said.
The victim was shot in the thigh shortly after midnight, according to the police. Officers taped off an area at the end of East Sixth Street and were seen examining evidence in the street as well as going in and out of Building 16 of the Riis Houses, at the northeast corner of East Sixth Street and FDR Drive.
The police could not provide the victim’s age or description but said she was taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition. Information about the shooter’s identity was not immediately available.
The incident comes a week after a man was stabbed to death on East Fifth Street and two weeks after another stabbing victim was found at East Fourth Street. In his Crime Scene column on Saturday, Mike Wilson of The Times reported that Carl Knox, the suspect in last weekend’s stabbing, was still at large as of Friday.
Joel Raskin Fox News reports that Hector Xavier Monsegur, the alleged mastermind of high profile hacks under the alias “Sabu,” was a resident of the Jacob Riis Houses. According to Fox, Mr. Monsegur, an unemployed 28-year-old father of two, was arrested by the FBI in June and became an informant who was instrumental in the capture of other fellow “hacktivists.” Sabu was front and center in numerous recent hacks, including the leaking of information belonging to the security company Stratfor, as well as attacks on PayPal and MasterCard.
Joel Raskin
Less than a week after 12-year-old Dashane Santana was killed crossing Delancey Street, a new report finds that intersections near public housing complexes are by far the most dangerous for children.
In the East Village, Lower East Side and Chinatown, “a person struck by a car is nearly two times more likely to be a child than a crash victim on the Upper East Side,” according to the new report released by the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. The data, culled from statistics from the state Division of Motor Vehicles from 1995 to 2009, also highlights intersections on East Houston Street and Delancey Street as high-crash areas.
According to the figures, Ms. Santana, a resident of the Jacob Riis Houses, was disproportionately exposed to dangerous intersections on the east side compared to her peers in other parts of the city. Read more…
