Results tagged “NYC”

NYC's Bicycle Access to Buildings Law takes effect tomorrow, requiring commercial buildings to allow tenants to bring their bicycles into offices using the freight elevator. If your employer approves your request to bring your bike up into the office, he or she can submit a formal request to the DOT, which will then require the person who controls the building to complete a Bicycle Access Plan. It's not really that complicated, and Transportation Alternatives has put together a great manual [pdf] to guide you through the whole process.

While those space age automated public toilets—or A.P.T.s, as they're known in the business—have been getting all the attention lately, one atavistic bathroom experience is still quietly savored by the public at Herald and Greeley Squares. It involves actual human attendants, who clean and inspect the restrooms 15 to 25 times a day. Their continued employment is sort of a John Henry victory over the rise of the machines that will soon be operating every train, controlling every taxi, and flushing every toilet.

Bring it on, thieves: Ozone Park octogenarian Harry Luft is ready. Sure, you may have burglarized his house three times in the past 20 years, but just try it one more time. Luft will be wide awake and waiting, monitoring the perimeter of his small property through nine security cameras as you get all cut up on the barbed wire he's strung around his yard. And should you somehow make it past that, good luck getting inside the compound, which is protected by roll-down gates, window bars, four locks on the front door, and Luft's constant vigilance.

      

It it's December, it must be time to visit Dyker Heights, that Brooklyn neighborhood famous for its transcendent Christmas light displays. The spectacle draws onlookers from around the world, and was immortalized in a truly hilarious documentary called Dyker Lights, which takes a priceless "behind-the-scenes" look at the predominantly Italian-American families during preparations for the annual festivities. (PBS will be broadcasting Dyker Lights again this year on Christmas Eve and Christmas day—it's not to be missed.)

Some retirees kill time between Canasta games by moping around the house feeling sorry for themselves, but not former Vice President Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney. He swung by the Fox News clubhouse yesterday with some words of wisdom for our current President, calling his decision to let alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed go on trial in New York a "huge mistake." Obama should take his advice to heart, because if there's one thing Cheney's an expert on, it's huge mistakes terrorism:

This week Sam Sifton at the Times files enthusiastically on Madangsui, which he deems Manhattan’s best Korean barbecue restaurant. The informative review instructs readers how to order and when, plus how to eat: "Now use your chopsticks to drag a piece of cooked meat through the mixture of sesame oil, salt and pepper. Place it on a piece of fresh romaine cupped in your opposite hand in the manner of a tortilla. Add to this some banchan, some slaw, perhaps a dot or two of bean paste or kochujang. Wrap and eat: heaven in Midtown, with cold beer besides. Dessert’s an orange cut into eighths. It tastes of magic and happiness." Sifton also reviews the Tipsy Parson and says, "The food’s not great."

Last week a Bronx motorist threw a ticket agent's hand-held computer to the ground during an angry dispute over a parking ticket issued minutes after his Muni-Meter expired. "I get a five-minute grace period. It was in the media, today on the news," George Collazo reportedly yelled during the altercation. George, if you're reading this, we regret to inform you that your grace is still denied.

The Pink Tea Cup, a West Village institution beloved for its greasy ribs, pork chops, sweet potatoes and biscuits, will close January 3rd! The soul-food restaurant opened in 1957 and relocated to its current Grove Street home in 1982. An employee tells Grub Street that a rent increase is pushing it out of the neighborhood, and they're trying to find another location. Though the soul's still warm, Eater notices that a new entity is already applying for a liquor license at a Community Board 2 meeting tonight. Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and the Post's Liz Smith have patronized the place, started by Florida native Mary Raye to serve soul food "made from the heart with sprinkles of love all over."

Long-simmering tensions between Mayor Bloomberg and undead District Attorney Robert Morgenthau boiled over last week when the mayor's office accused the DA of quietly keeping $83 million in settlements, fines and forfeitures in 62 "secret" bank accounts. One official said Morgenthau's office kept "two sets of books" in order to bypass the city’s financial review process. But Morgenthau's camp insisted the city has known about the accounts for years, and speculated that Bloomberg was actually retaliating against Morgenthau because he's frustrated that 40% of the DA's settlement money still gets kicked up to the state. Bloomberg wants it all, and Morgenthau called his tactics "chickenshit." But that was last week!

In 2005, the city started an education and testing program to help STD-infected high school students, but kids today just can't seem to get enough of these STDs, and now statistics suggest that more students are infected with chlamydia or gonorrhea than when the program started. Nearly 6 percent of the 11,410 teens who submitted voluntary confidential urine samples during the past school year tested positive for one of those two infections. While that percentage is lower than the 2007-08 school year (when 7.3 percent tested positive) it's still up from 2006-07, when the infection rate among a smaller sample of students was just 4.8 percent.

At the end of last month, three people were killed in two hit-and-run accidents in New York City; the motorist responsible for each accident was driving with a suspended license. On Staten Island, the man who killed an elderly Staten Island couple walking to church had his license suspended 29 times, and the driver accused of mowing down 42-year-old bride-to-be Sonya Powell also had a suspended license, for failing to a pay a ticket for going 80 mph in a 50-mph zone. Yesterday, Powell's fiancé David Shephard joined others at City Hall to demand some big changes.

In the wake of the infamous undercover pimp/prostitute videos that got the community outreach group ACORN in such hot water in September, the group hired Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger to conduct an internal investigation. The results are now in, and ACORN's CEO Bertha Lewis calls it "part vindication, part constructive criticism and 100% roadmap to the future." Harshbarger says he "did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff involved; in fact, no action, illegal or otherwise, was ever taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers. Instead, the videos represent the byproduct of ACORN's longstanding management weaknesses, including a lack of training, a lack of procedures and a lack of onsite supervision." Well, that settles that, right?

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has vowed to dedicate the next four years to food. She has a dream that the city can create jobs, improve food quality, support local farmers, and improve the environment by bringing NYC's "food infrastructure" into the 21st century. At a press conference to announce the city’s FRESH supermarket initiative, Quinn unveiled her big FoodWorks New York plan. Over the next six months, the Council will work with experts from a wide spectrum of fields to examine every step in NYC’s food cycle: production, processing, transport, retail, consumption, and post-consumption. During her remarks, Quinn said:

Smaller-sized disposable cans of carbonated corn syrup water will arrive in NYC next week!!! The 7.5 oz Coca-Cola Mini, which has 50 fewer calories than your fat grandpa's boring old 140-calorie 12 ounce can, was celebrated yesterday by children, parents, and The Radio City Rockettes, who taught families a 90-second, "mini" dance routine on the legendary Radio City Music Hall stage. According to a corporate press release pasted on Popsop, the event was emceed by "award-winning journalist" Laurin Sydney, who said, "[Dancing] is something families can do together or people can do alone, and it not only burns calories but it generates joy." Guess what else generates joy!

20 Bayard, that big hubristic building on the edge of McCarren Park in Williamsburg filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday, The Real Deal reports. Are there no hedge funders left who want to live above a blindingly-lit soccer field, 10 minutes from the L train? The building, which was prominently featured on Top Chef, is "nearly full" of owners or renters, but North Development Group apparently owes more than $10 million to more than 50 creditors. The creditor with the largest unsecured claim? A Brooklyn plumber who just saw $325,000 worth of labor go down the crapper, along with the rest of the condo market. (Which kind of takes the fun out of the requisite Nelson laugh.) [Via Curbed]

The rhetoric is ratcheted up to 11 after last week's overwhelming rejection of same-sex marriage in the state Senate, which left gay-rights activists reeling. "It's going to be a bloodbath," one gay "operative" tells the Daily News. "We're going to use every single weapon in our quiver to take these people out. We either need to replace them or scare the hell out of them so they do the right thing." Activists say they'll focus their efforts on the Democrats who they feel betrayed them, and number one on the list is Senator Joseph P. Addabbo of Queens.

Mayor Bloomberg is fighting with Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and Morgenthau is hitting back with "barnyard" vulgarity, as the Times decorously puts it. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Morgenthau said, "If you all weren't newspapers of record, I'd say these were chickenshit comments." He was referring to the Bloomberg camp's supposed discovery of $80 million in settlement money that's being held by the DA's office in what one official described as the equivalent of "offshore accounts." The heated feud underscores long-standing tensions between the mayor and DA.

A analysis of Board of Elections data has determined that Charles Montgomery Burns, the nuclear power magnate immortalized in The Simpsons, would have won the recent NYC mayoral election, had it just been limited to write-in votes. A mysteriously-funded "grassroots" campaign to install Burns as Mayor succeeded in drawing 25 lovingly handwritten votes. But because those bleeding hearts at the Board of Elections let the masses use their vulgar "voting booths," Mr. Burns was denied the excellent opportunity to tell New Yorkers, "In addition to electing me, you may now praise me as your almighty." Of course, Mr. Burns wasn't the only candidate to fare well among the write-in electorate.

       

Click on the images for details on this week's new restaurants and bars, which include Baba, Ofrenda, Vintry Wine & Whiskey, and The Norry at Kampuchea—plus news on this weekend's free Ketel One Canteen, Marfa's terrific new chef, and a new menu at Aretsky’s Patroon.

A bicyclist using the dedicated lanes in Manhattan for five or six blocks will find a vehicle in the way 60% of the time, according to a new survey released by Hunter College. The report found that most vehicles obstructing bike lanes do so for less than 10 minutes, but the abuses are widespread, and occur more frequently during morning rush hour. Graduate students conducted the study on 492 randomly selected street blocks with Class II bike lanes (lanes delineated by painted stripes on city streets) in Manhattan on weekdays from September 22nd to October 23rd, and they even pinpointed Manhattan's most obstructed bike lane. Any guesses?

Looking for that perfect Christmas tree is always a pain, but finding a location that's convenient to your apartment may be even more painful. Nobody wants to walk the all the blocks around their neighborhood looking for a tree, find the perfect 5' tree (small apartments, after all), only to have to drag it 10 blocks to their apartment. So we're putting together this handy dandy map of tree locations around the city in hopes of making it a little easier for everyone to find a tree of their choosing.

[UPDATE BELOW] The Occupy Everything student dissidents have sent out another video from one of their strident street demonstrations, which is always a fun way to start the day. This one is described by the group as "video of last night's incident when the police attacked students at the anti-war march in times square." Man, here we go again, another outrageous example of the police state in action, with pigs cracking skulls to suppress dissent and... Oh, actually, it shows officers using reasonable force to arrest two direct action demonstrators blocking traffic. But then wait until you see how the protesters get attacked once they surround the station house, reciting their favorite chant, "From New York to Greece, Fuck the Police!"

Five female employees at Battery Park Swim and Fitness say they were fired after complaining to human resources about a manager who ran the place like his own personal frat house. A lawsuit filed by two of the former employees, membership consultant Courtney McCallion and trainer/receptionist Maggie Alexander, contends that manager David Anglin was usually about as mature as Rodney Dangerfield on his fifth martini during their employ at the gym, and his harassment included such timeless flirtation gambits as bra-strap snapping and jokes about their cleavage.

Sophia and Jayden surpassed Isabella and Daniel to become the most popular baby names in NYC, according to the Health Department's annual report [pdf] on infant nomenclature. 872 newborn males were named Jayden (the most popular name for black and Hispanic boys) and 511 newborn females were named Sophia (the most popular name among Asians). Madison became a new favorite for girls born to black families, while Ashley was the most popular girl’s name for Hispanic families. For white babies, Daniel is #1 for boys, and Olivia for girls. And as usual, there were some novelties in the mix.

A bookkeeper and community organizer for the embattled antipoverty group Acorn raked in $500,000 in merchandise through a corporate rewards program with Verizon—goodies she had no right to claim, investigators say. As part of an expansive fraud that began five years ago, Donnett Davis allegedly opened a corporate rewards program for Acorn’s 10 to 20 phone lines with Verizon, but named herself as the recipient. She was also able to somehow add (allegedly) another 9,000 DOE phone lines to her rewards account. The haul was pretty sweet.

The Seattle cop killer who was fatally shot by a lone police officer Tuesday made a trip to Manhattan in June to tell a Riverside Drive "cyber-minister" that he was Jesus Christ. Maurice Clemmons twice approached Bishop E. Bernard Jordan, first disturbing a June 13th prayer service by rushing the stage and yelling about his divine status, and then confronting Jordan again the next day. Clemmons, it has been revealed, was a regular in the Zoe Ministries spiritual chat rooms during the time he was on the run from charges ranging from vandalism to child rape.

This week Sam Sifton at the Times tosses one measly star to SD26, the big glitzy Flatiron district reboot of San Domenico, which used to operate on Central Park South. Given the restaurant's lofty ambitions, one star is certainly a disappointment for gregarious owner Tony May, who used to run what many agreed to be "Manhattan’s best classically Italian restaurant. Some elements of that excellence remain in the cooking at SD26 and in the wine list put together by the affable Jason Ferris, the restaurant’s wine director. Others have been buried beneath attempts to modernize the kind of dining that Mr. May says has gone out of fashion: the elegant Italian cuisine he helped bring to New York.

Earlier this year Queens became the latest borough to join the Edible magazine family, a national network of about 60 magazines that cover local food trends and everything artisanal. The second issue of the Queens quarterly drops later this month, and the Daily News marks the occasion by interviewing publisher Leah McLaughlin, who moved to Long Island City three years ago. "We're not just an offshoot of Manhattan," McLaughlin insists. "We're not second fiddle to Brooklyn. Our community is incredibly vibrant and incredibly vital to the success of the region." Okay, fine, nobody's picking on Queens—but when will Staten Island and the Bronx get the Edible treatment?

For at least a year now, the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights has been giving parishioners parking placards for their cars when parking in the bike lane on Henry Street. The placards explain to police that occupants of the vehicle are conducting "Church Business." One local resident, Peter Kaufman, believes "they have some 'understanding' with the 84th Precinct, whereby if they put a sign in their window that they are attending church, they don't get ticketed." On his blog Ink Lake, Kaufman posted video of this epic bike lane block during last Sunday's service [SPOILER: they're parked along the entire block]:

Hot on the heels of "100 Things Restaurant Servers Must Stop Doing!" and "64 Things Restaurant Patrons Must NEVER Do!" comes "30 Secrets Your Waiter Will Never Tell You," compiled from two dozen servers nationwide. It's hardly a secret that servers do unspeakable things to your food when you complain (or just for fun) and silently judge you when you make an unsophisticated request, but there are some new insights here, such as: