New York Parking Space Sales Shift Into High Gear

--In New York City, where space is at a premium, a real estate agent has begun selling parking spaces for cars at $29,000 a spot--plus a $142.66 monthly maintenance fee. Harold Pronskly of 841 Garage Associates has already sold 39 of the car condominiums in a parking garage in Brooklyn to customers who want a guaranteed place to park their car, and someone to keep an eye on it, the Daily News reported. Pronskly called the purchase “a good investment” and said he hoped to have all 145 spaces in the garage sold by Christmas. Junior high school Principal Meryl Friedman, who lives in the gentrified Park Slope district of Brooklyn, bought one of the spaces in the six-story garage, and she doesn’t even own a car. Her Mercedes-Benz was stolen in March. “I don’t have a car now,” she said. “But now that I have a space to park a car, I have an excuse to go out and buy a new one.”

--Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine A. Ferraro said Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) would have selected her as his running mate had he won the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. “I happen to know that Gary Hart would have picked me if he’d gotten the nomination,” Ferraro said in an interview in the July issue of McCall’s magazine. Hart never announced his choice for a running mate in the 1984 election but said he was seriously considering a woman. Ferraro said she is uncertain about her future. “I was a good trial lawyer,” she said. “I love the law. Would anybody offer me a job with a law firm now? I don’t know.”

--Eamon Burke left his home in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, for the Soviet Union after saying, “It’s dumb how much red tape there is around dismantling nuclear weapons.” The freckle-faced, red-haired 11-year-old planned to present Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev with a peace scroll signed by more than 1,000 Australian schoolchildren. But he said he plans to avoid bringing up the Chernobyl nuclear accident when he meets with the Soviet leader, who has invited him to visit the Soviet Union.

--Donna Ashlock, the 15-year-old Patterson, Calif., girl who received the heart of a classmate in a transplant operation after he died of a brain hemorrhage, is undergoing treatment for organ rejection at Pacific Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. Her doctor, Andrew Fryer, described the episode as minor and said that Donna is expected to be in the hospital for up to 12 days.