Update at 1:23 p.m.: The situation is still tense on Lincoln Place. Police cars and trucks fill the street and in the courtyard of 225 Lincoln Place police are setting up netting to add to add to the air mattress they installed hours ago. 

Police are trying to communicate with the woman who is barricaded in her apartment. Police officers on the roof of the building are dangling a microphone down in front of one of her windows.

Reporters and photographers from the Daily News and the Post wait on the street below for something to happen. Neighbors are shaking their heads saying how sad this is. Many are asking the same question: why do they need so much man power for this situation, which is basically a suicide watch.

Earlier: This morning at 8:30 when I walked east on Lincoln Place between 7th and 8th Avenue in Park Slope, I noticed a few police cars and an ambulance. I asked one of the cops what was going on.

"Someone's not feeling well," he said with the brevity of a New York City police officer.

It's 11:30 am and the street is now closed to traffic; there's a police line on the north side of the street closing the sidewalk off pedestrians. There are more than ten police, ambulance and fire vehicles crowding the street. Another police officer was willing to say, "There's  a problem with a crazy lady." A bystander laughed. "I think they've overreacting unless she has an Uzi."

As I got closer to 233 225 Lincoln Place, a tidy brown brick coop with a Chippendale style entrance, I spoke to a man who lives in the building.

"She's crazy," he told me. "This morning at 7am I heard banging. It was her and her husband. It's very sad." This man, who lives downstairs from her, told me that the police were in his apartment to learn the layout.

It's amazing the amount of police power that is on Lincoln Place right now.

Another neighbor told me that the woman, who is said to be an opera singer, was in an accident 20 years and suffered some kind of head trauma. "When she's on her meds she's fine. But when she goes off…"

The woman shook her head. "I don't think she has a gun. I feel for her husband. He looked terrible when he came out."

Apparently she's been committed to mental institutions numerous times. Ray, a local dog trainer, who has a client in the building saw the woman, who lives in apartment 4E, last week. "She was knocking on doors on the 5th floor and bothering people," he said. According to Ray, who says he has a degree in Forensic Psychology, "the woman behaves like someone who is schizophrenic/bi-polar." She told him that her husband has cancer.

Clearly, the police seem to think she's a real threat to herself, her husband or her neighbors (although they have not evacuated the building). She may have been holding her husband hostage because a hostage vehicle is parked front of the building and neighbors saw him being ushered out into the vehicle where he is now. They've set up an air mattress in the courtyard (in case she jumps) and there are two gurneys set up in front of the building.

Some kids in the building next door said she was banging the pipes with a hammer. Everyone seems to know about the crazy woman in that building.

The doorman of 235 Lincoln Place told me that his building hired this woman to garden their tree pods. I remember seeing a heavy set woman with a shopping cart who used to work for hours on those tree pods. Apparently when tenents complimented her work she would curse at them and say very nasty things.  

She no longer gardens their tree pods.