Briefly Noted: Fare-Skipping, Stickers, & Summer Fun

At a recent general MTA meeting, MTA Board Member Sarah Feinberg proposed a new method to combat fare evasion: Public shaming. NY Post reports that Feinberg suggested videotaping fare-skippers and uploading their faces to Youtube, á la the unpopular Inside Edition video. Her proposal was immediately met with outrage, which is several steps further than Cuomo’s plan to deploy officers to popular subway stations.

Demolition of Red Hook’s historic S.W. Bowne building at 595 Smith Street has resumed, Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports, despite an ongoing FDNY investigation following a suspicious fire at the site in June 2018. DOB issued a Stop Work Order on the building in June of last year as well, and Council Member Carlos Menchaca and landmarks activists have been fighting to save the building from being razed. The property’s entire roof is now gone, and a significant portion of its southern façade has been removed, according to the Eagle.

As voters head to the polls today, they might notice that something is missing: Voting stations are no longer giving out ‘I Voted’ stickers. NYC Votes has phased out the popular stickers, replacing them instead with enamel “I Voted” pins. To receive a pin, voters must either sign the NYC Votes Voter Pledge, or text Pledge2019 to +19179796377. The distinctive stickers that New Yorkers once proudly sported will be missed.

Michael Muir, a local Brooklynite, received “Brooklyn Worker of the Month” from the non-profit Building Skills New York. Building Skills works to find employment for struggling New Yorkers. Muir received help from the group last year—they helped him find his current job in construction. Brooklyn Paper reports that Muir was overcome with gratitude, saying “Thank you, Building Skills, for giving me the opportunity to be on the front lines of building hundreds of affordable housing units in the borough that I know and love.”

This Sunday is the 30th anniversary of one of Brooklyn’s favorite movies, Do the Right Thing. Director Spike Lee will host a free block party at the Bed-Stuy intersection where much of the movie was filmed, along Stuyvesant Ave. between Lexington and Quincy. Lee, whose most recent film, BlacKkKlansman (2018), met critical acclaim, said of the block party, “It’s going to be lit.”

In “The Gay Jewish Matador From Brooklyn,” the NY Times writes of Sidney Franklin, a matador whose career lasted from the 1920s through the 1950s. Franklin was an outlier in traditional matador culture for being openly gay to his close friends and for his Judaism. Franklin was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Park Slope in 1903.