The body of a 17-year-old boy was found outside 205 Eldridge Street (near Stanton) earlier this morning. He had a gunshot wound in the head and was pronounced dead at Bellevue. Witnesses said they heard shots around 2 a.m. A motive is not known at this time.......

A pingpong hall was a Chinatown brothel's way into the wallets of public high school students. The Post reports that a brothel at 39 Eldridge Street was shut down after parents of Pace High School students realized the brothel owners were targeting their sons. Benjie Zheng and Ming Liuchang are accused of promoting the Robo-Pong Training Center with business cards that had a "contact number, an image of a topless woman - and a word,......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: Airmail in Brooklyn, truck vs train overpass in 31st St & 20th Ave in Queens, an amputation at Grant St & St Pauls Ave in Staten Island and a bomb scare at Broadway and Mercer (NYU) in Manhattan. A former deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani is now an "ambassador" for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. But it's not that shocking, since Fran Reiter had lead the Liberal Party before joining......

Part of a larger block party on Eldridge Street tomorrow is the annual Egg Rolls and Egg Creams Festival. For just $2, (a dollar increase from last year), you get a kosher egg roll and a classic egg cream, mixed on site by a professional and made with Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, the best choice for an authentic experience. The fried kosher egg roll will be missing the standard tiny bits of red pork, of......

There are few funnier things than stories about firefighters looking for a water leak and finding a million dollar pot operation in the meantime. Yesterday morning, the Daily New reports someone called 911 to say there was "water gushing out of a three-story attached house on Palmer Avenue" in the Bronx. So when the FDNY investigated, they found water running AND 270 pot plants! Two 23 year olds, Kelly Suarez and Jose Colon, were charged......

- Now that winter is here, The Paupered Chef explores whether one can reproduce as great steak in a home broiler as can be achieved on an outdoor grill. - Some great photos, mostly seafood and vegetables, from Bisceglie, Italy from Josh Friedland. - Mr. Bruni grabs a chat with John LaFemina. Initially the topic was about rhythms of crowds at new restaurants that are not big-splash openings, but the conversation veered over to the......

Chinatown has moved on up to East 14th Street. Well, at least a little piece of it has, at Vanessa’s Dumplings. The proprietor, Vanessa Weng, opened this outpost a few months ago between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, after starting a smaller dumpling shop years before on Eldridge Street. At first, the new Vanessa’s looks like yet another storefront serving Americanized Chinese glop, but there is some fairly authentic Beijing-style street food here. The namesake dish......

April 8: Broadway Panhandler Knife Sharpening Benefit Bring your knives to Broadway Panhandler to get sharpened and benefit City Harvest at the same time. We did this last year and can't tell you what a difference a sharp knife can make, especially when it's combined with doing something good for the world. Between 11:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m., bring in up to three knives and get 'em professionally sharpened for a mere $10. You can sharpen......

Have you ever found yourself walking in the Lower East Side at night thinking 'Geez, I hope this neighborhood looks exactly like this forever?" Well, it seems that you aren't the only one. Thanks to the efforts of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum at least some of it might never change a bit. The museum, despite vocal opposition among many property owners in the area, has asked Community Board 3 for assisstance in......

We were walking by the Eldridge Street Synagogue this morning, and we noticed they were putting four new towers on the roof. Back in 2005, Tien visited the synagogue and got some interior shots. He also found a little info on the temple: "The Eldridge Street Synagogue... was built in 1887 and one of the first built in the US by Eastern European Jews. It's already being restored and repaired with the bulk of......

This says a lot of human nature: Firefighters discovered a hydroponic farm in a Brooklyn apartment only after someone complained about a water leak. AM New York says that the "smell of marijuana was unmistakable in the hallway" but no one ever complained about that. So, when a neighbor called 911 about the leak, firefighters found a "full-scale hydroponic marijuana operation." The police are still looking for the couple who rented the apartment and seemingly......

The NYPD thinking about scaling back small pot busts and shift the focus on "major busts." Newsday reports that misdemeanor pot arrests would be limited to 40% for the Narcotics Division, while they would focus on dismantling drug crews that "peddle cocaine or heroin." Hey, now! Cops are privately grousing about Narcotics head Assistant Chief Anthony Izzo's plan will give pot smokers the liberty to smoke up everywhere. A police official defended Izzo, saying, "He......

June 3 -- June 9: Germany: a SENSE-sational Experience Okay, the name leaves something to be desired, but you can still sample a variety of German foods and beverages and view cooking demonstrations by chefs at Grand Central Terminal's Vanderbilt Hall every day from 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Red cabbage and spätzle? But, of course. Gummi bears? Got 'em. The event is sponsored by the German Agricultural Marketing Board, the German National Tourist Office, the German......

Even more audacious than the Eldridge Street marijuana farm that was upstairs from a nursery school, it seems that the Gambino crime family had huge pot operation in Brooklyn and Queens near schools. The federal authorities busted the ring yesterday, and we think Newsday quote sums up the operation: "An organized crime operation that's produced high-quality marijuana since 1997 at a 100-acre upstate farm, a Bayside house and a Brooklyn warehouse outfitted with hydroponic troughs......

Those disgusting couches you see on sidewalk might be secret special drug repositories. A man used his truck and a U-Haul to move 170 pounds of coke hidden in a couch, driving from El Paso, TX to New York. Eddie Guitterez left the couch on a Bronx street, as well as abandoned the truck and U-Haul, in 2002. Apparenly neighborhood crackheads had been sitting on the couch but didn't realize they were sitting on the......

Another interesting fact about the Eldridge Street pot farm: Downstairs was a children's day care center and next store was a middle school. According to the Daily News, the day care center started to pay "closer attention" to the entrepreneurial neighbors after a leak (possibly from the $1 million farm's special irrigation system). Brilliant. Police investigators told the Times that the farm looked like "an Amazon forest." And in tangentially related news, charges of......

Police officers had been called to investigate reports of drug use at an apartment at 39 Eldridge Street. Police followed a strong marijuana smell to an apartment that had sliding bookcases which concealed a marijuana farm. There was an estimated $1 million of marijuana growing in the space with "specially built irrigation and ventilation system" (a ventilation system that didn't work that well, Gothamist thinks). The Post reports that when the police got a search......