neighborhood watch

Edgar Allen Poe’s House to Get More Ravenlike

East New York: Due to an infusion of rookie cops, crime is down here and in other traditionally rough Brooklyn hoods like Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, with murder down as much as 20 percent. [NYDN]
Fordham: Edgar Allen Poe’s old country house (which gets 4,000 visitors a year compared to 25,000 in 1923!) will get a quarter-mil fix-up, complete with a new, wing-roofed $2.3 mil visitor’s center inspired by “The Raven.” Dudes, make sure to dig up that creepy tell-tale heart when you do the reno! [Talk Bronx]
Garment District: At the top of the super-tall, Deco-era Nelson Building, there is a “hatch” that you have to climb up if you want to see the amazing view over its edge. Wouldn’t it be cool to fill it with water and make a rooftop pool out of it? [Cleverest]

Lower Manhattan: Santiago Calatrava was designing the jawlike roof of his World Trade Center transit hub to open every September 11 to let in a symbolic ray of light, but it’s cheaper to design it to stay shut, so that’s the new plan. [Crain’s]
Park Slope: Before Evangelists give Slope children free candy and coloring books in a playground here, they ask if the kids have accepted Jesus as their personal savior. Kids who exclaim “F*ck yeah!” get extra candy. [Curbed]
Upper West Side: A construction worker became obsessed with a woman who lived in a building he was working on and rappelled down from the roof and through her bathroom window when she wasn’t home. He was busted and is out on $5,000 bail, but not before buying the woman a series of unappreciated cuddly stuffed bears. [NYP]
Willets Point: This auto-biz district of Queens, which the local community board voted last night to support putting under the city’s massive redevelopment plan, isn’t blighted, as the city argues, but “vital and alive.” And also a great place to get rice, beans, and an empanada washed down with orange soda (see tasty-looking pic). [Vanishing NY]

Edgar Allen Poe’s House to Get More Ravenlike