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By Courier Staff
Brooklyn Daily
A veteran Courier columnist departs for the opinion pages in the sky. A Catholic academy plans to shut down after 52 years. A woman receives a letter mailed 45 years ago. Month in Review recaps these and other top reports that headlined in our print and web editions in April.
RIP, Lou: Courier Life columnist Lou Powsner, a World War II veteran and urban gladiator who famously battled politicians, special interests, and bureaucrats, died in his sleep at his Bensonhurst home on April 6 at the age of 93. Powsner’s popular column, “Speak Out,” was a Brooklyn Graphic staple since the 1950s, attracting a broad fan base with his candid and spunky take on community issues. The former haberdasher, whose storefront on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island survived the stormy decades of the ’60s through the ’80s, fought for brighter street lights to help halt nighttime crime, and locked horns with the city over parking meters, which he said gave shopping malls an unfair advantage over his beloved mom-and-pop stores. Powsner, a staff sergeant with the 64th Bomb Squad Army Air Force known as “Kelly’s Kobras,” was laid to rest at the Veterans Cemetery of Forest Green Park in Morganville, N.J.
End of term: Bishop Ford High School was a community fixture in Windsor Terrace for the past 52 years, but the co-ed Catholic academy will graduate its final senior class in June due to dwindling enrollment. Ford was known for its athletics program, while Drake, R.E.M. and other artists filmed their music videos there, but a 75 percent decrease in rolls — from 1,347 students in 2006 to 499 this year — triggered its closure, said school officials.
Late delivery: Neither snow nor rain nor four decades of roving could derail this snail mail from completing its appointed round. Marine Park resident Susan Heifetz almost keeled over when she received a letter from her dead mom — postmarked 1969! Heifetz, who received the correspondence from a man living in her childhood Homecrest apartment, “freaked out” when she learned that the envelope was sealed with a lipstick kiss — a trademark of her late mother. The miraculous missive was a birthday card her parents dropped in the mail the day before her 19th birthday, 45 years ago.
Slippodrome: The $74-million Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Center at Lakeside, an outdoor, two-rink skating complex in Prospect Park, reopened as a roller rink, with one major slip-up — it’s made of concrete. Ouch! Our fearless reporters weighed in on the new roller-a-rama: Megan Riesz donned neon rental skates to check out the track, but took a tumble on the unforgiving surface. Danielle Furfaro — a roller-skating expert and former blocker for the Gotham Girls teams Queens of Pain and the Grand Central Terminators — claimed polished wood was prince of the roller tops, but gave the frog a thumbs up for outdoor durability. The rink will host youth and adult roller hockey clinics, in addition to roller derby leagues such as Brooklyn’s Gotham Girls.
Midwood mall: A tony, mixed-use commercial development coming to a humble stretch of Kings Highway near the B and Q lines where mom-and-pop stores once stood was met with cheers and jeers, as supporters and opponents haggled that hordes of new shoppers meant more street-clogging traffic. A two-story structure on a roughly one-block strip between E. 16th and E. 17th streets was home to around 10 businesses a couple of years ago, but all of them closed or relocated to make room for a five-story building that preliminary plans show will include two floors of commercial space, three floors of offices, and about 20 parking spaces — not nearly enough to accommodate the expected flood of shoppers, said local leaders. Stay tuned.
Disastrous relief: There’s no calm after the storm for Coney Island’s hard-hit victims of Hurricane Sandy. Residents testified at a City Council hearing that the Big Apple’s slow-as-molasses recovery program is making them relapse even further, with demoralized people subsisting in the People’s Playground in skeletal homes in urgent need of repairs. Just three city households shared $100,000 in stipends for single-family home repairs since June 2013, but Mayor DeBlasio promised relief, saying he would cut 500 new reimbursement checks and start 500 reconstruction projects by summer’s end.
Solemn stroll: The faithful turned the streets of Bensonhurst into an outdoor house of worship, marking Christianity’s most sobering day with a Good Friday procession to commemorate Christ’s crucifixion. More than 2,000 marchers carried crosses, and statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary along 16th Avenue to 20th Avenue for culminating rites at Saint Dominic’s Roman Catholic Church on 75th Street. The 20-year-old march, whose attendance has surged as the area’s Catholic community declined, included all of the major Catholic congregations in Bensonhurst, as well as the Knights of Columbus.
Shorter buses: The supersized B44 Select Bus Service is gobbling up precious parking spots along Nostrand Avenue, complained Sheepshead Bay leaders, who called upon the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to replace the extra-long buckets of bolts — which have 22 additional seats — with regular ones to restore the area’s automobile serenity. Reader unmasked: Prodigal news website pundit Tal Barzilai from Pleasantville, N.Y. routinely rousts fellow online readers with pugnacious posts about bike-rider and pedestrian accountability, comparing critics of a crackdown on two-wheeled and two-footed road hogs to panderers for the Palestinian political party Hamas. So, when a gent claiming to be the verbose vituperator showed up for a road safety hearing at Borough Hall — 39 miles away from his supposed Westchester County home — we couldn’t resist doing a story, sparking a Twitter frenzy about our man of the hour.
Rogue buggies: Dollar vans are charging twice that amount to make a buck these days, but that hasn’t given them any street cred with Park Slope cops who www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/37/16/dtg-78-dollar-van-crackdown-2014-04-18-bk_37_16.html">ticketed nine drivers and seized 14 of the rogue pickups that ferry riders along Flatbush and Atlantic avenues without proper permits. The clampdown was racially motivated, claimed activists, since many of the operators are African American or from the Caribbean, but cops said they were only responding to complaints that the vans were blocking bus stops.
Grimm news: Bay Ridge Rep. Michael Grimm, long believed to be the subject of a federal probe into his campaign financing techniques, was indicted for tax fraud. The former FBI agent turned himself in before claiming he was not guilty of paying employees at his Manhattan restaurant, Healthalicious, under the table while he ran the business, which he closed shortly after being elected to Congress.