A 24-year-old woman was sexually assaulted and robbed while waiting for a bus at busy Richmond Hill Road at 7:30PM. The bus stop, between Vassar and Merry Mount Streets, is, as the Staten Island Advances points out, just a "quarter-mile from both the Staten Island Mall and the 122nd Precinct satellite police station." The victim was grabbed from behind and taken through an open gate into a home's backyard. There, the attacker, claiming he had......

There's a great NY Times article about the overcrowding at Richmond High School in Queens. The building was meant for 1,800 students, but 3,600 students attend the school. How is that possible? Well, there are 22 trailers "encased within chain-link fencing, occupy the school’s former yard, evoking the ambience of the Port Elizabeth container-ship terminal." Ha! Given that Mayor Bloomberg keeps touting his success with the school system, it's interesting to hear about Richmond Hill.......

Santa came early and dumped some carnivorous coal down the throats of vegetarians in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood this weekend. The NY Press has reported that the beloved Veggie Castle – so named because it was converted from an old White Castle fast food restaurant – has abruptly closed. The Veggie Castle was as famous for repurposing the White Castle as it was for its vegetarian twist on Caribbean classics, offering such delicacies as jerk tofu,......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a stabbing on 168th St. and Hillside Ave. in Queens, a sexual assault at Stanton and Attorney Sts. in Manhattan, and a missing child on Himrod St. in Brooklyn. Artist Eve Mosher is outlining in chalk the high water lines that floods will reach every four years by 2080 if global warming continues unabated. The project can be seen at her site highwaterline. Six-year-old Natalie Shea is now a......

Your overstuffed kitchen drawer of take-out menus is minuscule compared to the menus Daniel Rayas collected over a four month period. Newsday has a fantastic profile of the Texan grandfather who moved to New York City to help care for his newborn granddaughter and found a flexible part-time job that has taken him all over the city. Looking to make some money to pay for room and board, Rayas responded to an ad on Craigslist......

The police continued to look for the robbers who shot a Queens bodega owner in the face on Monday night. Bolivar Cruz, a Dominican immigrant, is still on life support; the Post reports that two of his seven daughters were working in store at the time and that Cruz tried to protect them. According to Police Commissioner Kelly, Cruz did take out a gun (unlicensed) but did not get a chance to fire it. It's......

Early yesterday morning, a fire broke out inside a Met Food Market in the Richmond Hill area of Queens. And it turned out a number of workers had been locked inside. Apparently some workers had been removing floor tiles with a blowtorch, but it's unclear if that was the cause of the fire. The Daily News reports that the workers trapped in the building "huddled in the basement of the burning Met Food Markets and......

Tody on the Gothamist NewsMap: a carjacking in Staten Island; a missing patient at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn; and a fatal accident in Queens. The Staten Island carjacking, which included a police chase, injured three people, including a child and a police officer. One suspect is in custody and police are on scene looking for a possible 2nd suspect. The fatal accident in Queens was a small school bus striking a 23 year-old woman......

Juan Franjul turned himself in for Saturday's sad hit-and-run death of 12 year old Jacob Colon. Franjul had gotten into an accident where he tried to get the other driver to accept money instead of reporting it to the police; when the driver refused, Franjul drove off, ran a red light and hit Colon in the Richmond Hill section of Queens. Franjul is a mechanic who had been returning the car to the owner. Colon's......

When 24 year old Priscilla Pimentel didn't go home to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving, her family was worried. Her brother and sister went to her home at 102-9 87th Avenue in Richmond Hill and found Pimentel stabbed to death in her bathtub. She was stabbed in the chest and arms, her hands were bound behind her back and the body of her pet pit bull was next to her. A neighbor said, "Her sister ran out......

The Metrocard is dispensable in ways that the MTA probably never guessed. In fact, the subways seem to be the transport of choice for suspected sex attacker, Peter Braunstein, who has been dodging the police for the past two weeks. The NY Post says that the NYPD has been able to track Braunstein's whereabouts because he purchased an unlimited Metrocard with his credit card, putting him at West Fourth Street and near Richmond Hill on......

Gothamist's nomination for the spookiest place in NYC: the boat graveyard in Staten Island. We stumbled across a great gallery of pictures of it on Opacity today-- and then went back and got all the details on (where else?) Forgotten-NY. Halloween is coming up pretty soon.-- can anyone think of scarier spots in the five boroughs? And Staten Island gets an Apple Store; score one for Richmond Hill.......

Fernando Ferrer's overstatement about his NYC public education (a master's at Baruch, after years of Catholic schooling) has lead to Mayor Bloomberg's campaign to issue press releases and certain tabloids, as Gawker points out, to enjoy creating insane covers and some serious questioning about blogging as candidates. It turns out that Mayor Mike doesn't write his own posts either! Shocking! Ferrer was asked about the offending post while with Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, who......

One of the teens involved in the shooting of Nicole duFresne told police that duFresne was targeted because she and her friends looked happy. It seems that Ashley Evans and another female were being bothered by the guys in the groups about the girls didn't "fight or do anything." The NY Times has details about her statement:"I then initiated the next action by saying, 'The next person I see, I'm just going to hit them,'"......

A woman was run over by a J Train yesterday. The MTA believe that the woman froze to death "before being struck" - her body was only seen just before the train came into the 104th Street station in Richmond Hill, Queens. The train did hit the brakes, but three cars had passed over her body. She appeared to be homeless, and the city medical examiner will be doing an autopsy to find out......

The City opened up the newly renovated $1.9 million Forest Park recreational complex yesterday. The complex features artificial turf and new seating for what is one of the city's most popular ball fields. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe touted the benefits of the artificial turf to the media, saying, "you don't have to cut the grass. You don't have to have an irrigation system. You don't have to put down pesticides," which might make the fake......