Brookly Today: February 21, 2012

February 21, 2012 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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Good morning. Today is the 52nd day of the year. It is the birth anniversary (1907) of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.H. Auden. During the early 1940s, Auden lived in a house at 7 Middagh St., Brooklyn Heights, that was later torn down to make room for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The house was a gathering place for writers and other celebrities, including author Carson McCullers, composer Benjamin Britten and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.

Well-known people who were born today include record company executive David Geffen, actor Kelsey Grammer (“Cheers,” “Frasier”), U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and singer Mary Chapin Carpenter.

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Today at 7 p.m., the 84th Precinct Community Council will hold its regularly scheduled monthly meeting at St. James Cathedral Pavilion at 240 Jay St. The meeting will feature a talk on homelessness by a representative of Common Ground, an organization that helps the homeless.

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According to the Daily News, Brooklyn residents Julia Marchesi and Leon Reid IV are working on a mini-library-branch that’s only 6 feet high and in the shape of a Brooklyn brownstone. The pair want to put the mini-library, which they call “The Hundred Story House,” in Cobble Hill Park this spring. Its 100 books would be available to lend on the honor system.

According to McBrooklyn, Deborah Feldman’s new book, Unorthodox, about her upbringing in Willliamsburg’s Satmar Hasidic community and her eventual rejection of that community, has produced impassioned comments pro and con. Members of the Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox communities allege that she made up many of the stories in the book and that she’s mentally unstable. Others, however, say she’s courageous, determined and talented. In the book, Feldman talks about how she was only taught the rudiments of reading and writing to about the fourth-grade level, and that she knew her husband for only a half hour before she became engaged.

Mid-Hudson News reports that in Fishkill, N.Y., a Brooklyn man was arrested and found to possess 28 counterfeit Walmart gift cards worth $12,163. He had allegedly used several of the counterfeit cards to purchase four Apple iPads. Ladon Pender, 22, was charged with criminal possession of a forged instrument and grand larceny in the fourth degree.

A woman who was pregnant by her boyfriend was shot in the chest by her estranged husband as she went to pick up her daughter from school, according to the Daily News. The incident occurred on Friday in front of P.S. 384 in Bushwick. Juan Torres, who is 35 years older than his estranged wife, Daisy Torres, was charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon and criminal contempt for breaking a stay-away order. Mrs. Torres was taken to Kings County Hospital and released after surgery.