Clarkstown police were called to the Victoria’s Secret store in the Palisades Center today after it was reported that a man stole 100 bras, estimated to be worth about $4,000. Police got only a vague description — that is, if you consider “a man with 100 bras” to be a vague description.
Joe Queenan, writer for the New York Times, recently spent a day at the Palisades Mall. He wrote about it in the paper, in an article that tears the Palisades Center Mall a new one. This one is a must-read! Couldn’t have said it better myself:
From the outside, the Palisades Center has little to recommend it. Vast, inert, lacking any discernible architectural theme, and plunked down next to the cheerless Interstate that leads to the Tappan Zee Bridge, the mall is often described as a series of interlocking coffins. The Brutalist exterior conveys the impression that some senescent, unemployed Eastern Bloc architect was summoned to the developer’s office and threatened with severe reprisals against his family if he dared to introduce a single visual nuance suggesting that someone had actually designed the building. The visible trash gondolas that greet visitors when they enter from the I-287 side do not help.
Inside the cavernous structure, things improve dramatically. With pipes and panels and air-conditioning vents laid bare, the four sprawling floors suggest a retail version of the Centre Pompidou. The gargantuan, airy building is built around a series of atriums, suggesting that it had been modularly assembled by an industrious but agoraphobic child.
Clarkstown Police arrested 24-year-old Jessica Toodle of Vallejo, California on charges that she possessed a forged North Carolina driver’s license and nine forged credit cards. She was arrested when police responded to the Best Buy at the Palisades Center mall after she allegedly attempted to purchase merchandise with the forged documents. Store employees claimed Toodle tried to purchase three cell phones valued at $1,650 with the forged documents. Police also discovered she had eight other forged credit cards and receipts totaling over $20,000 for merchandise.
Toodle was charged with 21 counts of possession of a forged instrument in the second degree, nine counts of criminal possession of stolen credit cards and four counts of grand larceny in the fourth degree.
Eyewitnesses reported seeing more than 100 kids running amok in the Palisades Center yesterday, screaming and breaking glass. Police were unable to locate any one of the teens. Rockland Journal News reported police spokesperson Sgt. Harry Baumann as saying, “We did have several calls of suspicious incidents with kids, but every time we got to the location, there was nobody there.” Broken glass could still be observed where the teens had been hours later. The story also mentions the February 2006 McDonald’s riot, when fight broke out between 40 children aged 12 to 19, resulting in felony arrests and charges of rioting.
Clarkstown Police and fire officials are investigating a small albeit suspicious fire at the Palisades Center IMAX theater that caused a temporary evacuation of about 50 people. The fire started around midnight, and the local fire departments responded to find that a tarpaulin had apparently been placed over a light, leading to the fire.
Two Acura Integras and one Audi A4 went missing from the Palisades Center mall between 2:30pm and 9pm yesterday. One of the Integras belonged to a Yonkers resident, the other Integra and the Audi belonged to residents of Nanuet. The Audi was recovered in Newark this morning. No arrests have been made. Anyone with information is asked to call Clarkstown Police at 845-639-5800.
The problem is that we don’t have an undercover stolen car unit driving around with a computerized, camera equipped automatic number plate recognition system, constantly running license plates looking for stolen cars.
Wait, we do have one of those.
Interestingly, unlike other unmarked units that carry around undercover or plain clothes officers, this special stolen car unit is said to always be manned by a uniformed officer despite its complete lack of markings. Hopefully this makes these officers easy to distinguish as real police as opposed to impersonators interested in hijacking FedEx trucks with fake badges.
A couple from New York City was arrested after they were found to have stolen $3,500 worth of merchandise from Woodbury Commons and the Palisades Center mall.
Crimes happen on a daily basis at the Palisades Center, no matter how small. Ever been in the stairwells around and in the parking garage? You’d think you were in the bad guy’s underground lair in a Ninja Turtle movie, seeing leaks, rust, burned out and flickering fluorescent lights, and a seemingly endless amount of graffiti and discarded drug bags.
While Clarkstown is claimed to be the second safest city, this statistic would seem to ignore the fact that we have one of the largest 5 malls, connected to three major state highways — 59, 303, and the Thruway. The mall, and the community at large, have a connectedness that provides an easy entrance and escape for people going to and from New York City. The size of the mall provides a great deal of anonymity during busy times. And despite the fact that the mall has more cameras per square foot than the Big Brother house, the responsiveness of the security guards watching it and handling it are the weakest link. With 30 million people in the New York metropolitan area, how many bad apples pop up at the mall?
But maybe these criminals wouldn’t have shoplifted in the first place if Mayor Darden was on patrol at the mall with his police lights like last week. Mayor Darden may have just pulled these people over and then took their parking spot, causing them to get frustrated and leave, preventing them from ever reaching the stores they stole from.
According to the Rockland Urinal News, crime takes no holiday vacation, not even in the Second Safest City.
Clarkstown Police are on the lookout for criminals this holiday season. According to Clarkstown Police Detective Fred Parent, who works with the mall stores on security and crime issues, “There are organized [criminal] groups coming to the mall.”
Even Mayor Darden from Spring Valley got in on the action and tried to help fight crime at the mall … passing traffic with police lights to keep people safe during the holidays.
I happened to be at the Palisades Center mall during the fire that occurred yesterday, which just happened to be Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year — the day that numerous consumer whores travel from afar and line up in the freezing cold to wait for the chance to be told the item they want is already out of stock.
One group of local teens put together a video of exactly how ridiculous this entire event is. They didn’t capture the fire, however, so let me share a few points.
Some friends and I were there ’shopping’, or should we say, ‘watching shopping’. We were headed down the escalators, ready to leave the mall anyway, when our noses started to pick up the scent of something acrid.
“Do you smell smoke,” we asked each other. Within minutes, it was hard to deny that the mall was filling with this white acrid smoke, the kind of smoke that fires produce.
Remembering that Clarkstown is the Second Safest City, shoppers went about their business and pretended like nothing was wrong despite that something was obviously wrong at this point. They simply felt so safe, that they continued shopping even though the building may well have been on fire.
I walked towards where it seemed like the smoke was coming from. Was I stopped by security? Emergency responders? Alarms? Other shoppers? Not at all. No alarms went off, despite that it was difficult to even see while standing in H&M. No strobe lights, no sirens, no evacuations. I literally screamed at the manager of H&M to close the store and get everyone out. They insisted there was no problem as “the fire was upstairs”. Not even a moment later, a Clarkstown Police officer (who was actually wearing a uniform) walked in and said the same thing I said, but got more results. They shut down the store and got everyone out.
I walked upstairs to see Circuit City not filled with smoke at all. So much for the fire “upstairs”. I asked a Circuit City employee what was going on. Never in my life had I seen someone so obviously high on marijuana.
“Like, there was like this fire man, outside. But then like there was this fire inside, then everyone was like ‘get out of here!’ Man,” he uttered in his stoner drawl. We decided this was a good time to leave the mall. On the way out, I stopped and asked a security guard, “Hey, do you know what started the fire?”
“Fire?” he asked. Remember, we’re standing in the smoke still.
“You might want to go talk to your buddies, they’re over there putting out a fire.” Naturally, he smiled and went about his merry business pretending that he understood what I said to him in English.
The next day, we all found out that there actually was no fire in the mall itself, but rather in the ventilation intake for the mall, which had managed to suck in a mass of burning cardboard, allegedly ignited by a carelessly discarded cigarette butt. Of course, no one seemed to care that there should have been fire dampers in the ventilation to prevent this exact scenario from happening.
To summarize:
All in all, it was a happy holiday shopping experience, and we’re just glad that we were safe since steel doesn’t easily melt or burn.