Kathleen (Kitty) Walsh, a 20-year-old college student, is a real fighter.

The young boxer is battling her way through the Daily News Golden Gloves tournament. The semi-final round for both men and women takes place this month, leading up to the finals at Madison Square Garden on March 25-26.

Walsh is hoping to emerge a champ – and make her way from New York to London for the 2012 Olympics.

What happens to a funeral home when it’s no longer a funeral home?

For Ava Gerber, who recently bought the Robert F. Cranford Funeral Home near Fort Greene Park on DeKalb Avenue, the answer was obvious: turn it into a yoga studio.

Then, bring students to the embalming room and help them meditate on death.

Read More

The price of a horse carriage ride in New York City could rise by $20 – to $54 for a half hour – if a proposed law is passed by City Council. It’s the latest issue to confront the contentious industry, where controversy often focuses on animal rights. The new legislation would further regulate standards for the treatment of carriage horses in addition to providing the first price hike in two decades.

Fridays are Lady Jasmin’s night at the Starlite Lounge. The resident drag queen at this Crown Heights mainstay performs Jennifer Hudson and old-school R&B songs with gusto — sometimes crying, doing backwards summersaults, and hurling her silver stilettos across the stage.

“You gotta see the show,” the regulars at the self-described “oldest black-owned non-discriminating bar in New York” tell the young hipsters who seem to be venturing through the doors these days.

Since opening in 1959, the Starlite Lounge on Nostrand Avenue and Bergen Street has served as a modest safe space for gay, lesbian, and transgendered people of color and their friends in Central Brooklyn. Older gay and straight neighborhood residents throw birthday parties at the Starlite, and gather at the bar after funerals. More recently arrived condo-dwellers pack the house for Thursday night karaoke.

But a recent change in the building’s ownership may force the Starlite Lounge to end its half-century run.

Read More

Fans of “The Room,” who endure long lines outside the Village East Cinema, call the film the “Citizen Kane” of awful movies — and greet the low-budget flick with “Rocky Horror Picture Show”-like enthusiasm at monthly midnight showings.

Read More

The line had formed early outside Cropsey Scrap Iron & Metal in Coney Island — moving vans and minivans, box trucks, pickup trucks and rented U-Hauls.

They waited in a queue that stretched around the block, 33 vehicles in all. Each vehicle was packed with discarded metal items: refrigerators, stoves, radiators, barbecues, a pile of aluminum joists, a dismantled child’s swing set.

Benny Mineo had never seen so many competitors in his 25 years of collecting scrap metal for a living.

Read More

FDNY Chief Brad Walls surveyed the facade of the Whitestone Shopping Center as his firefighters from Battalion 47 approached the flamed-filled Lollipops Diner.

Before the firefighters could turn their hoses on the blaze, the restaurant’s front window melted and the fire jumped to the awning. The overhang burst into flames and rained melted plastic onto the sidewalk like a fire-laden waterfall.

Concerned for his firefighters’ safety, Walls pulled back the battalion.

Water doesn’t trickle down from the right basin of Jeanette Davis‘ sink – it pours.

Puddles have formed under the kitchen cabinet of her W. 135th St. apartment, and the 58-year-old recently used a broom to evict a live rat from her neighbor’s mailbox.

“And this is what I go through every day,” she said.

But starting this winter, her building and its nine six-story companions along a historic row between Lenox and Seventh Aves. will be among the first affordable housing blocks in the country to undergo a green overhaul.

Read More

Read More

For the past few weeks, hope that a health care provider would save Jamaica’s 108-year-old Mary Immaculate Hospital seemed to fade with each IV pole, stretcher and stack of office paper loaded into moving vans.

The Oct. 15 sale of Mary Immaculate Hospital, along with St. John’s Queens Hospital, to a developer appeared to be the end of the line for the two medical centers.

Brooklyn-based firm J. Guttman Realty purchased the hospitals at auction for $26.63 million. The hospitals shut last February after their owner, Caritas Healthcare, Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

After the auction, the Guttman firm announced it plans to use Mary Immaculate for office space, educational and religious facilities.

That came as sad news to many in the neighborhood. Southeast Queens currently has the lowest ratio of doctors to patients in the borough, with 48 primary care doctors per 100,000 people. North of the area, there are 132 doctors per 100,000 people.

“The people in downtown Jamaica and a lot of other people who have lost their jobs and are fending for themselves, they don’t have the ability to go to these other locations and seek doctors out,” said Eugenia Ruddman, president of Hollis Park Gardens Civic Association and member of SQUISH, or Southeast Queens in Support of Health Services, a coalition of community groups and residents formed when Mary Immaculate first faced the threat of closure.

Some 3,000 workers were laid off when the two hospitals closed, but a few stayed on to maintain the buildings until they were sold. The day of the sale, two of a handful of workers left at Mary Immaculate Hospital paused to reflect on the hospital, and the fate of the community they have worked in for over two decades.