Search Results for 'History of Crown Heights'

Crown Heights riot fact, fiction, and plenty of blame

We thought we knew what happened in Crown Heights and who did it. Turns out we were wrong.

We had the major players right but we were foggy onaction and motivation, even though we had watched scenes from the riot on the nightly news; heard commentary from religious leaders, politicians, and community leaders; and lived through the aftermath listening to everyone’s take on what happened.

Certain facts are not in dispute: In August 1991, seven-year-old Gavin Cato, an African-American, was run over by a van driven by a hasidic Jew in a section of Brooklyn known as Crown Heights, a neighborhood where blacks and hasidim lived side by side but did not interact. Several hours later, Yankel Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jew from Australia, was assaulted by a band of young African Americans and stabbed several times by at least one of them, Lemrick Nelson. These names are part of our collective memory. The rest of the story, however, takes different shapes depending upon the teller.

Crown Heights JCC Leader Sued

Board members say chairman owes council millions; Rubashkin claims row is over bet din.

A state court in Brooklyn is weighing whether to require the chairman of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council to turn over financial records to his officers after two directors alleged that he has misdirected funds for personal gain.

But Rabbi Moshe Rubashkin emphatically denies the charges, insisting ‘not a dollar, not 50 cents, not a penny’ was misused. And at least one communal leader says the charges appear ‘baseless.’

Judge Francois Rivera of state Supreme Court earlier this month called on Rabbi Rubashkin to show why an order should not be issued by the court requiring him to open the books. The motion also prevented the installation of three rabbis to a bet din whose election on April 30 is in dispute.

In 1918, a Scab Motorman Caused Worst Wreck in Subway History

When the Brooklyn subway lines had strikebreakers drive trains in 1918, the result was a disaster.

The worst accident in the history of the New York subway system—the Malbone Street wreck of 1918, which killed at least 93 people—happened because an inexperienced strikebreaker drove a train too fast.

On Nov. 1, 1918, ten days before the end of World War I, motormen of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers went on strike against the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, the forerunner of the BMT. BRT officials decided to keep the trains running, using nonstriking workers to drive them.

One of the strikebreakers was Edward Luciano (a.k.a. Antonio Luciano, Anthony Lewis, and Billy Lewis), a 23-year-old BRT dispatcher who’d never driven a train outside of the yards before. He did a 10-hour shift on the Culver line (now the F train), a relatively straight and level route. When rush hour came, the BRT put him on a second shift on the curvier, hillier Fulton Street-Brighton line, which demanded much more skill.