Talk Bronx New York

Lifedome Cinema Ministries On ‘Life Support’ To Lose Church

A Bronx congregation and a real estate company are locked in a legal battle over ownership of the church building.

The church claims a real estate company grabbed the building away from it, but the company claims the church is trying to avoid paying owed rent.

The battle is being waged in Bronx Supreme Court, where Lifedome Cinema Ministries is suing Mohamad Saad and his Barack Real Estate Corp., which provided financial help when the church was on the verge of being evicted.

Attorney Joe Altman, who represents Saad, said the church is trying to avoid paying the $156,000 it owes in back rent.

According to the lawsuit, the church faced eviction from its building at 3942-3950 White Plains Road and invited Saad and his company to invest in the building, which includes retail stores, to save the church.

“My client has been very patient,” Altman said. “The church has been there a long time and didn’t pay their rent.

“The property was foreclosed and the church entered into an agreement to pay rent to my client, but they haven’t paid anything.”

Bishop Alexander Kissi said the company has reneged on the deal.

“We got stabbed in the back,” he said. “We have a commitment on the table to buy back the property, but they want to throw the church out of our own building.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Saad was slated to hold the title on the property for one year to give the church more time to save money to buy it back.

Saad also agreed to allow the church to continue to sublet space to the existing stores and pay $20,000 a month in rent.

The church claims in the suit that it had relied on a promise from Saad to renovate and enlarge the stores to attract more retail to the property but that after the deal was in place he refused to comply.

“Lifedome needed financial help and thought they found it,” said Lifedome’s attorney, Surajudeen Agbaje. “The new owners reneged on the deal and the church is trying to compel them to honor the agreement, but they refuse.”

Church officials said they owned the church building for more than seven years and held church services and missionary activities in the building for more than 13 years before they ran into financial troubles.

SOURCE: NYDailyNews.com

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

 New York Residents Stuck In The Past Due To Cable Glitch

For more than a million Time Warner Cable customers in New York, it was as if daylight saving time never happened.

After setting their clocks forward an hour as they were supposed to, some people awoke Sunday morning to find that many of their cable television programs seemed to be running an hour behind schedule, at least according to the onscreen guide.

“It’s affecting a lot of people,” said a Time Warner customer service representative when queried by phone. “It’s all over the city — Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx.”

The source of the problem, she said, was related to the set-top boxes, which unscramble the signals transmitted over cable. Some of the boxes were somehow askew, thrown by the adjustment to the new time, through human error, technical failure or gremlins yet to be identified.

Programs were not appearing in accordance with the onscreen guide, and people were calling in — some angry, but most just confused.

A Time Warner spokesman, Alex Dudley, said he could confirm only that the outages affected “at least a million people in Brooklyn and Queens,” with no evidence of trouble elsewhere.

SOURCE: NYTimes.com

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

This Article Was Submitted By a TalkBX Reader.

If You Would Like an Article Posted on TalkBX You Can Send The Article To

TalkBox AT TalkBX.Com or VIA Our Contact Page

St. Pius V School in the Bronx Being Closed

Diana Santana was making her usual morning rounds at St. Pius V School in the Bronx on Wednesday when the principal, Violeta G. Domingo, pulled her aside to tell her something. As she spoke, Ms. Domingo stumbled over her words, and her voice cracked. Ms. Santana, who has two children at the school, sensed something was wrong.

The principal finally let it out.

“We are closing,” she said. “They are closing us down.”

On Friday, the Archdiocese of New York made public its announcement that St. Pius was one of six schools that would close for good in June because of financial struggles and declining enrollments. St. Pius has 229 students in prekindergarten through eighth grade, 75 fewer than it had in 2004, the archdiocese said.

Ms. Santana, who is the public relations officer for St. Pius’s parent-teacher association, said she cried when Ms. Domingo told her the news.

“It’s devastating,” Ms. Santana said on Saturday. “It’s really devastating. There’s no words to explain how I feel right now.”

Ms. Santana said that St. Pius, open for 95 years, is more than a school. It is the hub of a close-knit community in the mostly Hispanic Mott Haven section of the Bronx, linking generations. Ms. Santana graduated from St. Pius in 1971. Three of her children have graduated from the school, and she now has twin daughters there in seventh grade, a grandson in second grade and a granddaughter in first grade.

“I feel like we’re being robbed out of something we need in this community,” Ms. Santana said. “It’s a family thing.”

Most St. Pius students live within walking distance and come from poor backgrounds, Ms. Santana said. Everyone, teachers, parents and students, knows one another, she said.

Read more..

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post