Articles in the “news” category

(NYC Mayor's Office Flickr) A day after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a public health emergency requiring pretty much all Williamsburg residents to make sure they’re vaccinated against the measles, he’s being threatened with a lawsuit....

1 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights. (Google Street View) A second construction worker died in an on-the-job accident this week, falling from a 13-story Brooklyn Heights building on Wednesday morning. According to the Department of Buildings,...

(via Wikimedia) A man wearing an MTA uniform has been accused of groping a woman on a Bronx subway platform on Tuesday, police said. According to authorities, the unidentified man approached a 27-year-old woman waiting for...

It’s a BIZARRE story that just took an even more bizarre turn.An Easter display outside a NJ dentist office featuring mannequins dressed in lingerie was getting a lot of attention for the obvious reasons.Some neighbors said it...

Transit workers leafletted at Bedford Avenue on Wednesday morning. (Shumita Basu) A group of transit workers are calling on the MTA to postpone its planned L train construction work—which is scheduled to start on April 26th—until...

That's the Spirit! (YouTube) A Newark-bound woman has earned the never-coveted distinction of going viral on a Spirit flight, after staging a pre-departure meltdown that involved briefly flashing the plane. According to the good folks at...

Rendering of 50 West 66th Street by architecture firm Snøhetta In a sharp turn of events, Billionaires' Row developer Extell has been granted permission to proceed with building an Upper West Side residential skyscraper that is...

Marijuana plants grow in Massachusetts, which recently legalized cannabis (Steven Senne/AP/Shutterstock) “This is REAL different than government!” said Jason Starr, bounding onto the stage, backed by hiphop, at SubCulture, a small subterranean performance space in SoHo....

Portia Ravenelle and Orlando Moore. (via Facebook) Update: Law enforcement officials in the Dominican Republic matched Portia Ravenelle's fingerprints to one of the two bodies previously believed to be a missing Westchester couple. The U.S. Department...

(Gothamist) A former warehouse and construction site collapsed in Williamsburg on Wednesday morning, raining bricks and scaffolding onto the sidewalk and street below, and wrecking a few parked cars. Miraculously, no pedestrians were injured, police said....

(Shutterstock) An 80-year-old Queens resident has been arrested for a cold case double murder in Virginia dating back over forty years. Authorities in Virginia Beach say that DNA evidence linked Ernest Broadnax to the killings of...

Mayor de Blasio embracing Councilman Kalman Yeger at an event last month (Kalman Yeger/Twitter) Embattled City Councilmember Kalman Yeger was officially ousted from the body's Immigration Committee on Tuesday, weeks after sparking outrage for his repeated...

Erskin Felix, who prosecutors say led the kidnapping and murder of Menachem Stark. (Brooklyn District Attorney's Office Handout) Erskin Felix, the Crown Heights man who led the charge in kidnapping and accidentally murdering Menachem Stark, the...

Pedro Hernandez's suffered stab wounds to his face and back in the altercation (Courtesy of Manuel Gomez) Pedro Hernandez, the Bronx teenager whose year-long pre-trial detention on Rikers Island helped build momentum for ending cash bail,...

200 Amsterdam (Elizabeth Kim/Gothamist) A group of Upper West Side residents and elected officials are calling on the city to stop construction of a controversial residential tower following a court decision that found that the building...

The Jane Hotel. (via Yelp) An employee at Manhattan's Jane Hotel used a master key to sneak into a guest's room as she slept and rape her, according to court documents filed Monday. The woman, a...

Residents of the Orthodox Jewish community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in 2013 (Bebeto Matthews/AP/Shutterstock) Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared a public health emergency amid an ongoing outbreak of measles in Brooklyn's ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. According to...

Samana, in the Dominican Republic, where two New York tourists reportedly went missing. (Wikimedia Commons) A New York couple disappeared during their vacation in the Dominican Republic last month, missing their flight home and going conspicuously...

(JUSTIN LANE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) "Autonomous vehicles have the potential to save time and save lives," Governor Andrew Cuomo said way back in 2017, heralding the passage of a law that allowed self-driving cars to be tested in New...

The Essex at 115 Delancey Street (Elizabeth Kim/Gothamist) For Beatriz Guzmán, the mission to get an apartment in the Lower East Side’s new Essex Crossing development began with the accidental discovery of a faded letter. The...

(NYPD) An elderly woman was assaulted while waiting on line for a movie at the Upper West Side AMC 84th Street, and police are hoping the public can help them find the person who attacked her....

Photograph by bzumba / Flickr A fire broke out in the Union Square subway station on Tuesday morning, blanketing passengers with smoke. A NYC Transit spokesperson says that the fire was caused by debris on the...

311 East 50th Street, where a window washer reportedly died from a head injury caused by a falling brick. (Google Street View) A construction worker died Monday morning after his scaffolding pulled a copestone loose from...

The roll out of sweet three-wheelers for transit cops has apparently not dissuaded officers from driving into the city. (via Facebook) Add the city's 38,000 police officers to the growing chorus of voices demanding a personal...

Church of the Nativity held its last mass in 2015. (Photo by Wikicommons) Facing increasing pressure from low-income housing activists over the fate of two shuttered East Village churches, the Catholic Church on Monday pledged to...

C. auris, a fungus resistant to many medications, cultured in a petri dish at a CDC laboratory. (Public Domain) During this past glorious spring weekend, The New York Times published some light reading about Candida auris,...

A sign from March 27, 2019 explaining the local state of emergency is displayed at the Rockland County Health Department in Pomona, N.Y. (Photo Credit: Seth Wenig/AP/Shutterstock) Unvaccinated children, many of whom had been staying at...

Allison Mack pleaded guilty to two racketeering charges on Monday, April 8th. (JUSTIN LANE/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock) A sobbing Allison Mack appeared in Brooklyn court on Monday to enter a guilty plea in the federal case against Nxivm, a...

A 2017 Tax Day march in NYC (Scott Lynch / Gothamist) One day after the president's chief of staff vowed that Congressional Democrats would "never" get their hands on Trump's tax returns, state lawmakers in Albany...

Jeanine Cammarata (NYPD News/Twitter) The estranged husband of Jeanine Cammarata, the Staten Island teacher whose badly charred body police found in a storage unit last week, has been formally accused of killing her. Along with his...

An NYPD officer rides a dirt bike in Harlem (screenshot) A month after an NYPD officer was seen crashing a confiscated e-bike in the Bronx, a cop ran a red light and crashed a dirt bike...

(Baptiste Pons/Flickr) Finally, New York City is in store for some balmy temperatures this weekend. Which means you're probably thinking of getting out of your hibernation den and basking in all that the city has to...

Inside the East Side Access's eastern cavern in 2015 (Jake Dobkin / Gothamist) Sure, Andrew Cuomo has been governor for more than eight years, but his career as an MTA good governance stickler/major capital project remixer...

(NYPD News/Twitter) Jeanine Cammarata, the teacher missing since last weekend, has been identified as the victim found early Thursday morning in a Staten Island storage unit, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner confirmed Friday. Her...

(nycmayorsoffice Flickr) City Comptroller Scott Stringer announced on Friday that he is issuing a subpoena for appraisal information and other documents used by the de Blasio administration to purchase a $173 million real estate portfolio from...

Protesters outside the governor's office on Thursday (Aviva Stahl / Gothamist) For roughly the past year, seven of the nineteen seats on the New York State Parole Board have sat vacant. Tasked with overseeing about 12,000...

(AP/Shutterstock) Disgraced former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner will be forced to register as a sex offender for sending lewd messages to a teenager. Bronx Supreme Court Judge Raymond Bruce ordered the designation during a court...

In the summer of 2013, Gothamist published the first of many advice columns from native New Yorker Jake Dobkin, kicking things off with the timeless question, "Is It Normal For Roaches To Crawl Through My Hair...

(Courtesy of Downtown Alliance) An 81-year-old woman was fatally struck by a shuttle bus driver in Lower Manhattan yesterday evening. According to police, Arlene Kalfus was pronounced dead outside her Battery Park City apartment at around...

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Manhattan Thursday evening to call for the Special Counsel’s Trump-Russia investigation to be released to the public in full. The demonstration came on the heels of reports suggesting Attorney...

Cayuga Centers office in East Harlem. (Beth Fertig/WNYC) Two Guatemalan fathers and their children are seeking monetary damages from the U.S. government over its family separation policy at the border last year, claiming the children suffered...

Officer Daniel Pantaleo's claim that he used a legal "takedown maneuver" in the fatal arrest of Eric Garner now has the backing of the NYPD's top surgeon, who apparently determined that no chokehold occurred after reviewing...

A screenshot from the anti-abortion performance screened for a bunch of NYC fifth graders. (via YouTube) A teacher at a Lower East Side elementary school screened an evangelical, anti-abortion video for her fifth grade dance class,...

Mayor Bill de Blasio announces Vicki Been will serve as the new Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development. Blue Room, City Hall. (Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office) For five years, Alicia Glen wielded an enormous amount...

East Drive near Center Drive, in Prospect Park. (Googlemaps) The NYPD is currently looking for a man who has sexually assaulted, harassed, and robbed at least three women in Brooklyn's Prospect Park within the past several...

IT'S PARTICIPATORY BUDGET TIME HELL YES. (airdone/Shutterstock) It's the most wonderful time of the year; the time when the city lets CHILDREN help decide how to spend $35 MILLION in municipal funding. Yes, participatory budget week...

A woman pushes a stroller outside the Designer Spot, one of the establishments in Monsey where Rockland County officials say people were exposed to measles. (Gwynne Hogan / Gothamist) Parents of unvaccinated children in Rockland County...

[Sad Update Below] A sneaky Trash Panda was caught sneaking around a subway station in Manhattan and captured by police this week. The incident happened around 2 a.m. Wednesday at the 14th Street/6th Avenue subway station. Police...

Sunshine Cinema has vanished from most New Yorkers’ minds—shuttered for more than a year and turned into yet another boarded-up development site, its fate had been sealed in 2017. Then, nothing happened. But the beloved Lower...

Linda Douglas (Courtesy of husband John Douglas) A 67-year-old Brooklyn pedestrian on her way to work was killed by the driver of a tractor trailer on Wednesday morning. The driver fled the scene, according to authorities,...

(FDNY) A devastating fire tore through a Brooklyn apartment building on Wednesday afternoon, and the hot spots continued to flare up on Thursday morning. The fire broke out on the top of floor of 702 44th...

(NYPD News/Twitter) Police believe a body found in a Staten Island storage unit early Thursday morning might belong to Jeanine Cammarata, who was reported missing on Tuesday. Her estranged husband, whom Jeanine reportedly served with divorce...

(Google Maps) A woman says that she was attacked while leaving a Brooklyn subway station, and that the assault was provoked by an argument she had on the train with the suspect. The incident took place...

Rendering of 161 Maiden Lane A 670-foot, 58-story luxury condo project that is among the city’s tallest waterfront towers is leaning three inches north because of a faulty foundation, according to recently filed court documents. The...

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza (Jessica Gould / WNYC) It’s been one year since Richard Carranza stepped into the job as leader of the country’s largest public school system. Since he arrived as the mayor's second-choice guy,...

A cyclist navigates Dyckman Street last week (Brad Aaron / Gothamist) Street safety advocates lobbied the DOT for nearly a decade before the agency finally installed a parking-protected bike lane on Dyckman Street, in Inwood. The...

The triple cantilever. (Shutterstock) Just as Governor Andrew Cuomo swooped in with a panel of experts with a new plan for the L train shutdown, Mayor Bill de Blasio has now announced he's assembled a crack...

Saheed Vassel's father delivering remarks outside City Hall on Wednesday (Paula Moura/Gothamist) Advocates, neighbors, and fellow victims of police violence gathered on Wednesday to demand justice for Saheed Vassell, the 34-year-old man fatally shot in Crown...

One of the new OMNY readers, spotted at the Broadway-Lafayette/Bleecker Street station. (Jason Stack) OMNY, the MTA's new tap card system, has been spotted at several subway stations throughout the city in recent weeks. On Twitter...

Sandy Hook beach in New Jersey. (Wikimedia Commons) New Jersey's beaches are filthy, not that ours are any better: Do you remember the last time you took a swim in the Rockaways and emerged from the...

All illustrations by Clarisa Diaz, WNYC/Gothamist. Source: NY State Dept. of Environmental Conservation & NY State Dept. of Health April marks the opening of fishing season for many types of fish around New York, but before...

The intersection of Kings Highway and Avenue D (Google Maps) A teenager died after crashing into a tree in Flatlands, Brooklyn on Tuesday, injuring his two passengers after losing control of the car in a possible...

(Marimo0/Shutterstock) With yesterday's passage of the budget, New York became the second state in the country to ban most single-use plastic bags. Back when the ban was just a possibility, some voiced concerns that it did...

(Courtesy of KolHaolam) A swath of South Brooklyn was effectively shut down earlier today, as tens of thousands of mourners packed the streets for the funeral of the longtime leader of the Skulen Hasidic sect, Rabbi...

(Stefan Georgi / Flickr) The cry for the pied-à-terre tax was triggered by what many New Yorkers viewed as an obscene $238 million purchase of a penthouse by billionaire hedge fund owner Ken Griffin, who plans...

Mayor Bill de Blasio speaking at the NYPD's graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden (Mary Altaffer/AP/Shutterstock) Pushing the NYPD to reform itself can feel like a sisyphean task — even for the independent city office tasked...

Dong Shixiang delivers food on his illegal e-bike on the Upper West Side in 2018 (Scott Heins / Gothamist) Aside from the bigger accomplishments of congestion pricing, eliminating many instances of cash bail, and banning plastic...

Lauren Salzman. (Seth Wenig/AP/Shutterstock) A second ringleader of Nxivm, the alleged upstate cult and sex trafficking ring, pleaded guilty in a Brooklyn federal court last week, and newly unsealed court papers add another dark dimension to...

Meet the new boss (Stephen Nessen) In the midst of finalizing the state budget, passing congestion pricing, not passing recreational marijuana, and banning plastic bags last weekend, Albany lawmakers also found time to hold a hearing...

Some clues from New York's Escape the Room in Midtown. (via Yelp) Turns out some of the city's escape room experiences have been operating well below board. An FDNY probe sparked by a fatal escape room...

Cuomo, seen here in 2017 enjoying the new bridge he named after his dad, just gave himself a raise that will bring his salary to $250,000. (Governor Andrew Cuomo's Flickr) The new $175 billion state budget,...

Rosa DeLauro speaks at an event advocating the Paycheck Fairness Act. Rep DeLauro has introduced the bill every year since 1997. (J Scott Applewhite/AP/Shutterstock) Working women continue to earn less than their male counterparts in New...

Mayor de Blasio embracing Councilman Kalman Yeger at an event last month (Kalman Yeger/Twitter) Brooklyn Councilman Kalman Yeger will be removed from the body’s immigration committee amid widespread outrage over his repeated claim that "Palestine does...

Reporting on idling trucks has given some vigilante citizens a chunk of change (Joanna Purlich / Gothamist) Idling—the gas-guzzling, toxic fume-spewing practice of leaving your car engine running without moving—has long been denounced by environmental activists...

A lead-footed traffic cop has been caught on video ramming an NYPD cruiser into two parked cars in Queens, in an apparently misguided—and wildly reckless!—attempt to clear the road of traffic. Footage of the incident, which...

Assembly Majority Leader Crystal D. Peoples-Stokes, D- Buffalo, speaks while debating bills in the Assembly Chamber at the state Capitol, Sunday, March, 31st. (Hans Pennink/AP/Shutterstock) Fewer plastic bags across New York. New tolls around Manhattan. Taxes...

(Scott Lynch / Flickr) The birds are dying at alarming rates, chiefly because we have built them a city full of towering booby traps: Birds keep flying into the sides of glass-forward buildings, resulting in tens...

Transportation and safe streets advocate Peter Beadle speaking at Sunday's rally in Rego Park (Ross Barkan / Gothamist) More than two dozen transportation activists and local residents rallied in a Queens park on Sunday afternoon, demanding...