New York City – Page 8

Good Lord.

Sick puppy Dr. Bartha apparently sent around a lengthy email to various luminaries, including Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here are some lowlights.

My brother died because his wife was able to divorce him with lies and help from N.Y.S., with help of the legal Aid Society, woman’s shelters et cetera.

Now my brother is dead and his ex-wife is enjoying his house. I do not know why he worked all his life.

The same thing happened to me but I am still alive.

How dare the bitch leave me? And take *my* money?

On 1-0/17/01 Cordula, [and daughters] Serena and Johanna left, a few days after the 9/11 disaster Cordula filed for divorce for mental cruelty. If one is a gold digger any lie will do. She never consulted a psychiatrist or priest or rabbi or marriage counselor!!!

She did it after I closed the joint account in which she never deposited any of her earnings and now she could not steal any longer money to send to her accounts in Holland. …

She wouldn’t stay married to me, so she’s a gold digger. And here’s a choice MRA bit:

I can understand if someone wants to divorce it should be easy. There should be no economic incentives in the process! The division of assets should be made, based on the contribution each person. There is no rational explanation for the present method. An automatic division is only giving more incentives to divorce. Cordula did not work for 15 years and still she is supposed to get more than 50%. When slowly she started to work I never saw her money it went to her personal account in a bank in Netherlands. …

If I had had a prenuptial agreement Cordula would have never divorced, there would have been no economic incentive.

Meaning, she would have been shackled to me forever because I wouldn’t have given her enough money to start fresh on her own.

The very idea that divorce is “easy” to get in New York, the last holdout against no-fault, is laughable. But people going through divorces are rarely seeing things as clearly as they could.

And this last bit is off-the-hook unhinged:

Cordula my further staying alive does not make any sense. Work … is pure punishment. I will lose my office. Getting sick even in the most optimal conditions is not easy. Alone is certainly terrible. … Life passed me by and I could not achieve everything I planed.

I hope there will be a memorial built on the place in the memory of Eastern Europeans who were betrayed at Yalta by Pres. Roosevelt. There should be place for the Iraqi.

Dude thinks she’s going to keep the lot just for him, so he can have a memorial there. No, she’s going to sell it (or whoever owns it now, if the auction has taken place) to the highest bidder and make lots of money. She wants out, she wants to be done with him, and he just can’t get that.

Love and Real Estate

Nope, terrorists didn’t have anything to do with yesterday’s explosion on E. 62nd Street. (And, from what Purplegirl tells me, the explosion didn’t have anything to do with my delayed commute — that was due to a body on the tracks. I love New York!)

The story is much, much stranger than that.

Seems that the owner of the brownstone, one Dr. Bartha, blew it up himself. But this wasn’t a straight-up suicide. No, this one has creepy MRA overtones with a soupcon of New York real estate lust.

Just as his historic town house, a landmark used more than half a century ago by American spies, was no ordinary building, Dr. Bartha, 66, was embroiled in a marital split that by all accounts was no ordinary divorce. But he would have done anything to keep that house, including stay married, his lawyer said.

Too bad his wife wasn’t on board with that plan. She’d long since fled the house and moved to a small apartment in Washington Heights with her children — which, if you’re at all familiar with New York neighborhoods, you’ll recognize as a distinct step down from a four-story brownstone on E. 62nd.

Dr. Bartha and his wife were immigrants, he from Romania, she from the Netherlands. They met in Rome, where she was just finishing her doctorate and he was studying medicine. They moved to the US, into his parents’ house, and, like so many other women, she worked to support him while he was studying for his medical boards and eventually put her career aside to raise their daughters.

Despite the fact that the couple was married with children at the time that they bought the house with his parents (for $395K!!!), he considered the house his. That’s just one little insight into his character. The divorce papers (and keep in mind that divorce is an adversarial proceeding in New York) contain more:

The divorce papers described a bizarre, markedly unhappy home life. Dr. Bartha put up “swastika-adorned articles” around the house, according to a court decision, “intentionally traumatizing” her because she is of Jewish descent and was born in “Nazi-occupied” Holland. Dr. Bartha became enraged when she took them down, according to the papers, which also said he ignored his wife as she was treated for breast cancer.

A judge granted her the divorce. He was ordered to pay $1.23 million, plus alimony of $2,000 per month for three years. But the referee in the case held that the couple’s home, then valued at $5 million, was not marital property and that Ms. Hahn had no claim to the home.

Nice, huh? Here is where he puts his foot in it while trying to keep control of her and control of the house as well:

Then Dr. Bartha appealed the decision, a move that would ultimately cost him his house. He wanted to stay married, and would have had to sell or mortgage the house to pay the $1.2 million the court said he owed.

“He didn’t love her,” Mr. Garr said. “He was emotionally and constitutionally opposed to divorce. He was a man who worked all the time and couldn’t stand being alone.”

I wouldn’t want to be alone with him either. Dr. Bartha’s thirst for control backfired on him, as an appellate court decided that the house was marital property after all, and thus his wife was awarded a share in it. The house was ordered sold, but that wasn’t the end of things:

In August 2005, Ms. Hahn received a judgment of $3.6 million, plus a property credit and lawyer’s fees, according to court papers. The total of all money judgments in the matrimonial action against Dr. Bartha came to more than $4 million. Ms. Hahn had complained in court papers that he “has fought me every step of the way in the divorce action,” and said she did not expect that he would satisfy the money judgments. The only way to ensure that he complied, she said, was to have the house sold.

“I have no doubt that respondent will ensconce himself in the marital residence and refuse to leave it after the auction is held,” she said. “He has said many times that he intends to ‘die in my house.’ ”

The eviction papers were served Friday, and on Monday, he blew up the house. The blast injured about 15 bystanders. Dr. Bartha was pulled from the wreckage and now has no house, no wife, and is looking at criminal charges.

Fitting.

UPDATE: I would be remiss if I didn’t add this comment by LowerManhattanite over on Gilliard’s blog:

Let’s see…a guy in a fit of pique and spite tries to cut his ex-wife out of her share of the sale of a five-million dollar town house–by blowing it the f*ck up.

Which of course frees up the lot–worth about four/five times the townhouse and will be sold anyway…and she gets even mo’ money.

Oh yeah…he’s goin’ to jail for arson, depraved indifference (blowing up a building in the middle of a busy mid-town street), destruction of public property (street, gas lines, etc.) and will probably be sued by for millions by injured passers-by.

Three words sum this idiot up.

Wile.

E.

Coyote.

I can remember when a building would blow up and nobody asked if it was terrorism. Now get offa my lawn.

The MTA never tells you anything, so I was left to stew on the platform at Union Square, wondering why in the fuck the trains were so slow during rush hour. Turns out a building on E. 62nd blew up this morning.

But here’s the part where I say to Al Qaeda, “Fuck you, you fucking fucks.” They’ve ruined building collapses. Ruined them! It used to be that the first thing that leapt to mind was a gas leak if a building blew up, or insurance fraud; if the building collapsed, you usually thought there must have been some kind of construction debacle. Buildings blow up now and then, and fall down on occasion. In a more innocent time, we wouldn’t have to get a quote like this in a local story about a building explosion:

White House press secretary Tony Snow said there is no suspicion of terrorism in the explosion.

I’ll say it again: Fuck you, you fucking fucks.

UPDATE: One more thing we never had to worry about before, either: suspiciously-timed and not-very-credible reports of plots to blow up tunnels, or take down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches.

Make Me More Like a Greek Woman

An op/ed in the Times this week is after my own heart — it looks at the problem of subway groping, and compares the reactions of New Yorkers and Greeks.

Around the same time, I spent eight months doing research in Athens, so I decided to record Greek women recounting narratives I could compare to the New Yorkers’. Since most of the subway stories were actually molesting stories, I asked Greek women if they’d ever been molested.

The experiences the Greek women described were similar to those I’d heard from Americans. But there was a difference. Most of the American women — like those recently interviewed in the New York news media — told me they had felt humiliated and helpless and had done or said nothing. Of the 25 stories Greek women told me, only eight concluded with the speaker doing nothing. In the others, she said she had yelled, struck back or both.

One Greek woman told of walking to school with a friend when they were 12 years old, and encountering a man who exposed himself. Their reaction? “We grabbed some rocks and started aiming at his head. … How we didn’t kill him I don’t know. We started to scream out loud.” Another said: “I have given smacks. I have given a punch to a sailor. I have given kicks.”

She went on to say that when she traveled she kept a rock in her pocket for protection, and she described how she used it on a repulsive man who had been dogging her and a friend on vacation in Venice.

I’m not a big fan of violence, but I do like to see women fighting back. Sure beats feeling powerless and humiliated.

Subway Groping

Is nothing new, but I’m glad to see the New York Times writing about it, and the NYPD taking it more seriously.

The article is especially interesting in its detailing of the defense mechanisms that female subway riders use:

Most of the women who reported recent incidents were in their 20’s and younger. But the experience, women said, is so universal, and so scarring, that they continue to feel paranoid and to put on their body armor — the big bag, the bad face — no matter how old they get.

Women know the drill. Just as some men reflexively check to see if they have their wallets on a crowded train, women check their bodies.

Pull in your backside and your front. Wedge a large bag for protection between yourself and the nearest anonymous male rider, who might, just might, be planning something. Put on your fiercest face, and brace yourself for contact that seems too deliberate to be accidental, too prolonged to be random.

Yes, we do know the drill.

Identity Politics

Jo-Ann Mort has a piece in TPM Cafe about identity politics in Brooklyn’s 11th Congressional District. Mort lives in the district, as do I. But she comes to an entirely different conclusion about the race than I do.

A little background: the 11th District was Shirley Chisholm’s seat, and was once a majority-black district created under the Voting Rights Act and anchored by the neighborhoods of Flatbush and Crown Heights. The district lines have since been redrawn to include areas such as Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Cobble Hill, and my neighborhood, Kensington, which were once down-at-the-heel neighborhoods and have since gentrified or are gentrifying.

“You Still Want the Cookie.”

A group of middle-school girls in the South Bronx, tired of the lack of a comprehensive sex-ed curriculum (or, apparently, *any* sex-ed curriculum, since parental pressure has meant the school isn’t even implementing the state-required program), are taking matters into their own hands:

Teach us about the birds and the bees!

That’s the overture from 10 seventh-grade girls at PS 218 in the South Bronx who say they’re tired of relying on raunchy music videos, squeamish parents and uninformed peers to get the straight dope on sex.

Though just 12 and 13 years old, the girls insist their school is failing to meet its mission of “empowering students with purposeful education” because it does not offer sex education – and they’re petitioning to get it.

“The only sex education we have is music videos, the Internet and books because our parents don’t talk about it with us and we don’t get it in school,” said Ashley Reyes, 13, who with her friends collected 206 signatures from classmates and peers.

These girls aren’t blind. They look around their neighborhood and see the toll that lack of information and discussion of sex has taken:

These girls live in a borough where, according to the city Health Department, 12.8 percent of teenage girls become pregnant. Five of the 10 girls said they know a teenager who got pregnant.

“Kids think they know about sex but they really don’t,” said Yanilsa Frias, 13. “They feel pressured by their peers.”

New York state law requires health education be taught, and that it include HIV/AIDS prevention. These girls are claiming (though the school had no comment) that parental squeamishness about sex has prevented even this required information from being taught. There’s no requirement for teaching about sexuality, which means that sometimes it’s taught, sometimes it’s not, and sometimes, the dreaded abstinence-only sex ed is offered.

But these girls, though young, see right through abstinence-only sex ed.

The state spends about $12 million a year – most of it in federal funds – on abstinence-only programs. Meanwhile, a bill gaining traction in Albany called the Healthy Teens Act would create a funding stream for comprehensive sex ed.

Katherine George, 13, who helped write the petition in an after-school program run by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corp. (WHEDCo), said “abstinence only” lessons just don’t cut it.

“Teaching kids abstinence makes them more intrigued,” George said. “Your mom can tell you, ‘Don’t take a cookie from the cookie jar,’ but you still want the cookie.”

The good news from all this is not only the Healthy Teens Act gaining traction, but the City Department of Education is in the process of revising its health education guidelines to include a sex-ed component.

And, of course, there are a bunch of smart, activist girls in the Bronx standing up and demanding knowledge.

Via Broadsheet.

In Your FACE, Minneapolis!

Yeah, I’m pretty well sick to the teeth of the demonization of New York and New Yorkers as loud, pushy, mouthy, rude, dirty, inconsiderate, uncivil, what have you. The corollary to that is the lionization of the “Heartland” as the seat of all that is good and decent in the country.

Well.

All you haters? Bite me.

IT IS the city where eye contact is considered an act of aggression and the most frequently used part of a car is the horn.

But New York is the most polite place in the world, according to a survey which ranked its famously brusque citizens well ahead of those in London in kindness and good manners.

The Big Apple scored 80 per cent in a series of tests, including dropping papers in a street in a busy area, seeing how long it took for someone to help, noting whether doors were held open and if shop assistants said thank you after making a sale.

I think this guy really captured the essence of it:

Native New Yorker Dan Norman, 36, from East Rockaway, said: “The thing to remember is that New Yorkers are not rude, they are brusque.

“People will listen to you, but you’ve got to cut to the chase.”

A guy I went to law school with described New Yorkers thus: “If you fall down on the sidewalk, they’ll help you up. They’ll laugh at you, and tell you you’re a fool, but they’ll help you up.” I know from experience that the tourists clogging Rockefeller Plaza won’t. Not even if you’re wearing a skirt suit.

And because I am courteous, if brusque, a big fuckin’ hat tip to Watertiger.

Because Street Harassment Is Not Ok

It is a rare occurence that I make it through a full day without getting harassed on the street by strange men. I can’t remember the last 24-hour period in which it didn’t happen — the only exceptions I can think of are the few days where I didn’t leave my apartment. It’s frustrating, exhausting, and an experience that most young women I know live with. To be quite honest, it’s to the point where much of the time I don’t notice it anymore — or at least, I expect that when I leave my house, it’s gonna happen.

This is a big, big problem in New York City, and now some powerful women are talking it on with Holla Back New York City. Next time some dude harasses you, snap his picture and send it in. Hot shit.

Any Woman Will Not Do

Ruth Bader Ginsberg does not want to be the only female justice on the Supreme Court. But, she says, “Any woman will not do.”

There are “some women who might be appointed who would not advance human rights or women’s rights,” Ginsburg told those gathered at the New York City Bar Association…Ginsburg stressed that the president should appoint a “fine jurist,” adding that there are many women who fit that mold.

“I have a list of highly qualified women, but the president has not consulted me,” Ginsburg said during a brief interview Wednesday night.

Other women’s rights leaders floated names on qualified moderate jurists. I’m not holding my breath.

Hey, maybe when Jill gets through law school…

Related Reading: Et Tu, Patrick?