Amateur Video of Man Being Beaten up in Sunnyside

Hey, Whoever that was who posted as me STOP IT. I am not sorry for a damn thing I said, I’m sorry you’re too freaking sensitive to deal with the truth.

@Krissi Up until recently people have moved in and out of Sunnyside without complaint from natives. All kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds and aspirations. But they did not move here en mass, because the neighborhood was “chic” or “hip” or whatever word may apply. They came and left at the same rate as any other neighborhood. And were assimilated or sent of with the normal amount of neighborly ease.

What is happening now is very different. We are part of a greater economic upheveal taking place across the country. Sunnyside had its economic stratum ranging from the comfortable to the destitute, but now people with another set of assumptions about life are arriving in greater numbers and changing the place to suit themselves.

They have a lot more money and all the things that go with it. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that, it is simply unnerving and discomfiting to those of us who grew up here and earned through long apprenticeship the right to be leaders in the community. Without any ill intent, newcomers naturally band together, form their own coalition and take things in their direction, heedless of people they don’t even know, have never met and don’t understand, who feel affronted.

It is an old story, but human beings don’t seem to learn except through experience. The only aphorism I can think of is “When in Rome do as the Romans do.” Try to be be a little more interested in your long-time neighbors. ask them for their input and local wisdom before forging ahead with bright and shiny changes. Many of the changes that have taken place just on my block and the one next are ones we who have lived here have dreamed of and longed for. It just would have been nice if people with more political influence than we had had made us part of the change, let us be significant participants in it. Instead, the new powers forged ahead, made the changes and are dealing with an alienated populace. It was the right thing done the wrong way. A lack of diplomacy.

Remember, you are new here, but the neighborhood is almost a hundred years old. Take it easy, get to know the place and the people, we are a kindly, homey bunch.

Reading these comments leads me to the conclusion that the people posting here are either all 80 and don’t know which “label” applies to which group or you all live under a rock and are completely out of touch. Let me school you…

1. Hipsters. Most hipsters are a) under 35; and b) do not have children. So, the people you see with kids in strollers and iPhones are NOT hipsters, they are more likely white professionals making somewhere in the range of $50k – $80k. Exactly the sort of families that might be able to afford a decent 1 or 2 bedroom apartment on the north side of Sunnyside. Hipsters refers to a very specific subset of people generally 20-35 with similar tastes in music, fashion and art. Williamsburg is their preferred base, but do live in Greenpoint which is more affordable or Bushwick if they come from lower-income backgrounds or just want to seem edgy.

2. Yuppies – see above. Solid middle income earners who tend to work in white collar professions.

3. Hippies – a label hard to apply to anyone under the age of 60 other than the occassional smelly backpacker or squatter and I don’t think I have EVER seen anyone fitting that description in Sunnyside. And if there are any 60 y.o. hippies living in Sunnyside, then they deserve to be here, since they’ve probably lived here longer than you’ve been alive, Ruben.

4. Ruben – the guy who thinks everyone discriminates against him and doesn’t realize that everyone encounters people who don’t hold the door for them in their own bldg (I’ve lived in mine for going on 7 years and have plenty of Asian/Latino/White neighbors who have never said a “hello” to me and who continue to NOT hold the door for me – and I’m a white woman, by the way). I believe Ruben is also the person who a couple of weeks ago referred to the owners of Habibi as “those people” who hate women. Quite honestly, I can’t think of a bigger “hater” than Ruben. So, Ruben, stop hating on everyone else because you feel slighted. The problem might just be that you’re an ass.

@ Ruben
The Hipsters have money, but no class or common social graces. Oh, they will fawn all over each other over glasses of overpriced wine, but God forbid you say “hello” to one of their kids as they smile as you pass them by.
My daughter is almost 15. When she was in a stroller, she would smile at people and they would make cute comments and say “hello”, like people in a real community do. It was fun to walk around and greet other people on the street….even if you only knew them by sight.
Now these Hipsters walk down the street with their kids while yakking on their iPhones and if you happen to wave back a kid in a stroller who is smiling and waving at you, they flip out and look at you as if you were mugging them!
The Hipsters provide nothing to the community except higher prices for all.

Now about that bookstore . . .

I used to live on the south side, and while I have to agree that the north side is prettier, it is not better. I loved living in Sunnyside, but the unavailability of an affordable 2 bedroom to buy made me move to northern Woodside/Astoria. If I could have stayed, I would have done so happily.

Yes, there are people who move to Sunnyside simply because they can’t afford to live where they really want to live. And yes, you can pick them out by their snottiness. The good thing is that they make a break for it on the weekends to huddle in LIC or LES bars.

I agree about the dog shit problem, that it is more prevalent in Sunnyside south. It just seems a coincidence that the more Latinos there are in the neighborhood, the more litter and shit there is that doesn’t get cleaned up, third world style. I’m saying this as a Latina – who has manners. However, there was a big problem in Celtic Park when I lived there that people were letting their dogs – who couldn’t hold it in any longer – pee in the courtyard, and there was unattended shit on a few occasions too.

Shit happens everywhere – pun not intended. This fight that someone recorded on their phone instead of using the thing for its traditional purpose was likely two idiot teenagers fighting over something, probably trivial. Things like that don’t surprise me anymore, for they happen everywhere. Teens today are pretty awful.

I do miss Sunnyside, though certainly not the 7 train and the 45 minute commute to Grand Central that it brings. It looks as though the neighborhood is getting plenty of new restaurants. I plan to visit soon.

@Anonymous Thanks for some much-needed levity!

Neighborhood Eye

You are right, if I could afford it, I would have probably stayed and purchased a place in Manhattan and raised my kids there. But I knew a girl who grew up on 43rd Street, and liked what I saw. Sunnyside is a great neighborhood, with lots of amenities, good commute, affordable, with nice people. Why else would people move here?

If this was a shiatty neighborhood, people wouldn’t come.

Every old timer I know is happy to see young people move into the neighborhood and grow their lives here. The only angry people I see are on this blog.

“Looking at the natives here reminds them that they aren’t making enough to do what they really want to do.”

I don’t think you are wrong at all with this…and this is probably the cause of the whole Northside/Southside “debate”. Last year I was at Quaint having dinner at the bar when a 2 brothers from the Midwest started asking me about the neighborhood and rents (I work in RE), as it was recommended to them as an affordable alternative to Manhattan. They had been in NYC for all of 3 days. They started railing on the southside, saying how awful it was and how much better the northside was. I was so pissed off. My husband and I work very hard to afford our home, and I’m proud of our neighborhood (the WHOLE neighborhood). The last thing I needed was Midwest twits telling me that they thought my neighborhood was awful. I cut the conversation short, told them how rude they were, and left them there.

The funny part was, with rents being so strong in Sunnyside, they couldn’t even afford to live on the Northside, let alone the Southside! Lol!

In my opinion, they just thought they were too “good” to live in a largely immigrant neighborhood.

It’s that attitude that hurst NYC as a whole, in my opinion.

Well without context who knows what’s going on? Maybe that guy deserved a beating. Maybe he just molested a child…. Who knows? From the looks of it, the guy beating up the fool on the ground maybe a bar/resturant employee. Wearing All back with long pants on a hot summer evening would fit the standard service industry uniform would it not? Maybe the fellow getting beat tried to skip out on a tab or steal a tip sitting on a table or bar. Again who knows?

Ahhh…the human urge to label everything continues on this site.

Ruben, what’s a yuppie? What’s a hippie? Because you seem to conflate the two. I think they’re almost antonyms. But one thing is clear – whoever they are, they’re really bad.

Maybe, instead of trying to invent new ways to distinguish ourselves from the “other,” we can just see each other as human beings who happen to be neighbors.

Anyway, a random, isolated fight on a street corner says as much about a neighborhood as a random piece of trash thrown on the street. In the last few years, there have been a few break-ins/sexual assaults on the Upper East Side. Does that mean UES is a shit neighborhood?

@Ruben have you ever heard of reverse racism? I’m also not a yuppie, I am white and live on the south side of Queens BLVD. It’s not a race thing it’s a class thing but you’re not intelligent enough to see that

Hey Herbie, I am actually Latino..so how am I racist? see how you hippies jump to conclusions? Everyone is racist in this world EXCEPT you huh? I guess what I was getting at before I went on a rant is that he took a left into the latino project side which is the worst part of Sunnyside because its the poor side. But then I realized the worst part of Sunnyside is all the yuppies who move in infesting this town with their D-baggery.

glad I cleared that up!

While it’s horrifying to see violence like this, I agree with Ruben: This looks like two men who know each other fighting, not like a random street crime. That doesn’t make it okay, but that hardly makes it a reason for neighborhood panic, or comments about how Sunnyside is going down the tubes.

It’s also not a reason to get all racist, but commenters on this blog don’t seem to need much provocation to flaunt just how narrow-minded and bigoted they are, so, no surprise there.

I am laughing at these comments. Oh the neighborhood is going to hell! Where are all these people coming from??? you got it all wrong, That guy made a left which is in the direction of the poorer side of Sunnyside…the projects side. the Latino side.

That beating is nothing …cut short by an alarm

The reality is that the real people ruining Sunnyside are all the YUPPIES moving in. You out of town hippies have RUINED Sunnyside by driving up prices. Judging by the comments I’ll say you’re mostly privileged people who have never encountered a real confrontation. Just a ton of passive aggressiveness.

I got you people moving into my building every other week. You never hold the doors because you think I don’t live in it and you don’t want to risk letting in a criminal yet you never make ANY effort to get to know your neighbors. You don’t say hello or good morning, all you do is walk your effin dog up and down the block waiting for your overpriced farmers market to roll in when the BETTER markets in the neighborhood could use your support.

Sunnyside is one of the greatest and safest neighborhoods in Queens..PERIOD. I have walked these streets at all hours of the night all my life and the worst I’ve seen is some idiot get hit by a car on Queens Blvd cuz he didn’t look at the red light.

The video doesn’t show a robbery, it shows a fight …between two men. that’s it. it happens…

It doesn’t look like it was too late, there were still kids and families walking around, any idea what time and which date this was? Why can’t this be used as evidence to catch the guy who did the beating, or find this guy and see what the problem was, maybe he hit someone and thought he could get away with it?

This place is getting worse and worse.. what the hell is happening to sunnyside? Why did we suddenly start getting lowlifes moving into the neighborhood? Did williamsburg rents suddenly increase or something?

Additionally that corner, and the “bakery store” there has always been full of idiots who bother people with their crowd.

@Tom

Let me guess. There have been NO recent groping incidents, burglaries or car thefts on the north side. Having said that, I do acknowledge Mike Novak’s exemplary actions in the face of such anti-social behavior as recorded recently on this site. And the poor man, according to his own accounts, is surrounded by neighbors who let their dogs crap all over the sidewalk and leave it there for people to step in. And Lodati Park, north side, is hardly a bastion of upstanding, well behaved citizens.

this definitely doesn’t make me feel safe.

thats not queens blvd its 45 street and Greenpont ave