Is Harlem angling to be the next Times Square? Chain wise, maybe! Not only did the area just get the nation's first IHOP with a 24-hour takeout window but now the storied strip that is 125th Street is set to get Manhattan's first Red Lobster outside of the tourist trap on the Deuce. Soon, you'll be able to enjoy an Admiral's Feast before stopping by the Apollo. Yay? more ›

NYPD officers pulled a 200 lb Harlem man to safety after he attempted to jump out of a seventh-floor window. more ›

On Friday, a city employee was arrested for allegedly exposing himself to an 11-year-old girl in Harlem last month. Andrew McFall, who works for the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, was charged with public lewdness and endangering the welfare of a child. Now authorities say he was masturbating in front of the girl: “You have a nice ass,” McFall allegedly said to the girl before fleeing. more ›

While his first re-election TV commercials start airing in key states today, President Obama will be heading to New York City today to raise a little cash. Among the stops are Spike Lee's Upper East Side townhouse (someone is really excited!) and the Apollo Theater. Which means'll be wreaking traffic havoc on the Upper East Side (lots of street closures) and Harlem (as well as the Triborough Bridge and FDR Drive)—here's his agenda: more ›

The NYPD says they have arrested a taxi driver accused of raping a passenger who passed out in Williamsburg earlier this year. Gurmeet Singh, 40, was charged with rape, robbery, menacing and sex abuse. more ›

Police are on the hunt for a clever burglar who has been targeting Harlem work sites in order to get access to commercial spaces. In at least 15 incidents since November 11 the NYPD says the bandit has broken holes into walls and rooftops of construction sites in Harlem in order to get access to commercials spaces. more ›

As we know, black-eyed peas are lucky when eaten on the first day of the year, but one man who couldn't find any was Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. The team's owner was at Melba's in Harlem on Sunday, according to the NY Post, but the comfort food restaurant didn't have what he was looking for. The paper reports back that while he got collard greens (representing luck in money), "staff at the West 114th Street eatery omitted the luck portion of the meal. Owner Melba Wilson said, 'I feel a little guilty. I only had mixed rice and peas. On his way out, he gave me a hug and said he wished we had the black-eyed peas because he needed luck." more ›

An 18-year-old Harlem teen was shot dead early Friday morning outside his girlfriend's birthday party by an alleged romantic rival. Walter Sumpter was found with a gunshot wound to the chest outside 254 W. 154th St. just after midnight Friday. The shooting took place outside his girlfriend's 17th birthday party at a local community center: “It all took place outside. The girl wasn’t there, but it looks like a friend of the gunman called him and told him [Sumpter] was there,” a source told the News. more ›

In addition to providing fantastic Rollback prices on that Chronicles of Riddick: Director's Cut DVD you've been eyeing, Wal-Mart also rolls back the number of local businesses around its turf. A recent report [pdf] released by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer's office indicates that the opening of a Wal-Mart on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem would shut down 25% of grocers nearby. It's survival of the fittest: those who don't provide inexpensive tubes of raspberry-chipotle cheese-filled sausage product must let nature take its course. more ›

A 17-year-old cyclist was struck and killed by a truck in Harlem yesterday. According to a NYPD spokesperson, both the cyclist—who was only identified as a Hispanic male—and the truck were traveling westbound on 125th Street near Fifth Avenue when the truck struck the teenager. "I heard a crack," a witness told DNAinfo, noting that it sounded like "air coming out of him." more ›

Convicted rapist Vincent Heyward received a sentence of 428 years in prison yesterday after being found guilty of dozens of felony charges for sexually assaulting five women in Hamilton Heights and Chinatown. Prosecutors told NY1 that Heyward's victims gave statements before the sentencing, and that Heyward received one sentence of 200 years to life, along with a consecutive sentence of 228 years. more ›

Yesterday, an off-duty cop shot an ex-con with a long rap sheet during a confrontation at a Harlem subway station after two teenager girls accused him of groping them. Jacob Sanford, 22, is accused of groping the two teens on their buttocks in the subway station at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue around noon yesterday. And in the ensuing struggle with the off-duty officer who arrested him, Sanford was himself shot in the butt. more ›

The DOT is preparing to extend the protected bike lanes on First and Second Avenue up through East Harlem, adding the lanes and pedestrian refuge islands between 96th Street to 125th Street. Naturally, this is an important opportunity for the tabloids to publish scaremongery stories about bike lanes tearing communities' apart, and so the News has a report today on all the Harlem merchants who "fear soaring asthma rates and losing customers." Alternative headline: Three Misinformed Merchants Worry More About Deliveries Than Safety. more ›

An off-duty cop shot and apprehended a suspected groper in a subway station in Harlem today. The shooting happened on the platform of an A train at the 125th Street station just after 12:30 p.m. According to the News, a mother screamed that her teen daughter had just been groped, and a second woman also came forward that she had been groped. The officer spotted the suspect sitting on a bench in front of the train: “As he approaches [the suspect] the officer identifies himself as a police officer,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. “A struggle ensues and one round is discharged from the officer’s gun, striking the suspect in the [buttocks].“ more ›

A naked man caused a disturbance that resulted in the injury of two police officers in Harlem yesterday. The Post reports that the NYPD responded to several calls of an unclothed man making death threats and "rolling around on the pavement" between Amsterdam Avenue and Convent Avenue on West 145th Street. The NYPD wouldn't give us any more details, but FDNY/EMS tells us that there was a motor vehicle accident that occurred at the scene as police tried to subdue the man. more ›

Police arrested a Bronx man yesterday who is accused of fatally stabbing a 36-year-old woman in her East Harlem apartment last week. Borough of Manhattan Community College student and waitress Rita Morrelli was discovered by her live-in boyfriend with her throat slashed in their East 120th Street studio apartment last Wednesday. And police say that as they closed in to arrest him, they found a suicidal Bakary Camara stabbing himself in the stomach on his couch. “He made admissions about killing [Morelli],” a police source told the News. more ›

Nine Harlem teens were sent to the hospital after a 14-year-old girl reportedly pepper sprayed her classmates yesterday. The incident occurred yesterday around 2 p.m. at the Academy for Social Action, which is one of four schools at 509 W. 129th Street. One student told the Post that the girl had reportedly "sprayed the irritant indiscriminately into the air." more ›

Yesterday a little Harlem liquor store was lambasted by members of the Mount Morris Park Historic District, which has been working hard to class up the neighborhood, and then along came this downmarket booze peddler to Lenox Avenue—their "Champs-Élysées"—with a garish neon sign and bulletproof glass. The sophisticated community improvers were hoping for a nice wine shop where they could enjoy nightly tastings, while others, like local handyman Rick Jones, were simply grateful to have a new "place to get drunk." But now the city is stepping in to restore balance to the Force of Gentrification. more ›

The Mount Morris Park Historic District in East Central Harlem is supposed to be a classy place, where celebrities like Maya Angelou enjoy dainty cucumber sandwiches and intellectual discourse ensconced in their multi-million dollar brownstones. But a new liquor store on Lenox Avenue and 119th Street is threatening to turn the neighborhood into a garish, crime-ridden Pottersville—its flashy neon sign and bulletproof plexiglass has some appalled local residents rushing to condemn the establishment in the "pages" of DNAinfo. more ›

A 36-year-old woman was found stabbed to death in her East Harlem apartment on Wednesday evening. Police say Hunter College student and waitress Rita Morrelli had her throat slashed, and was discovered by her live-in boyfriend in their East 120th Street studio apartment at around 10:15 p.m. Wednesday night. “She was always in a rush, either going to work or going to class. Always moving. She was very sweet,” neighbor Cicely Black told the Post. more ›

One of the precious few perks to living in the District of Columbia (sorry guys) is the wealth of amazing Ethiopian food. We've yet to find an area of New York as concentrated with Ethiopian joints as the U Street corridor and Adams Morgan are, so we were thrilled to bump into Hiyaw Gebryohannes, chef and founder of Taste of Ethiopia, at Foragers market this afternoon. more ›

At 10:30 this morning, elected officials and neighborhood civic leaders began marching 11 miles from 181st and St. Nicholas down to Zuccotti Park, in an event dubbed "End to End for 99%" that seeks to link the communities of Northern Manhattan and the Bronx with the movement in Lower Manhattan. "Our communities have been devastated by the economic assault on middle class and poor families, even as Wall Street has enjoyed a historic financial bonanza," State Senator Adriano Espaillat said in a statement. "We're marching for jobs, we're marching for affordable housing, we're marching for the millionaire's tax," city councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez says. more ›

City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito was driving her mother to the airport at 10:30 p.m. last month when the two heard a "thud" against their Volkswagon Golf as they traveled down Third Avenue. That "thud" happened to be a 9mm bullet fired by a 16-year-old boy, who indiscriminately shot 14 bullets at a rival gang member stopped at a red light. "If I would have been driving any slower. If I would have been, whatever…It just puts things in perspective," Mark-Viverito tells the Daily News. The boy has been arrested on reckless endangerment and weapons charges, but the law seems lacking in a proper statute for nearly killing someone for no reason. more ›

Nineteen alleged members of the “Goodfellas” gang in Harlem have been arrested for smuggling guns and stashing them in every conceivable place they could find, including gutters, mailboxes, roofs, and under stoops. All 19 were charged with conspiracy, and some were also charged with weapons possession, firearms trafficking and attempted murder. “With today’s law enforcement action, we believe we have dismantled one of Central Harlem’s most violent and destructive street gangs,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. more ›

The two 12-year-old boys charged with pushing a Target shopping cart from a fourth-floor walkway onto 47-year-old Upper West Side mother Marion Salmon Hedges last week pleaded (the juvenile equivalent of) not guilty in court yesterday. And the mom for one of the boys offered a tearful apology to Hedges, who is in a coma in critical condition, outside court: “It’s a terrible, terrible thing. I really hope she recuperates. I really, really feel for her and her children,” Rosemary Rosario told reporters. more ›

[Update] A 47-year-old Upper West Side mother is in critical condition at Harlem Hospital this morning after a shopping cart was dropped four stories onto her head, allegedly by a group of bored ruffians. Marion Salmon Hedges, was walking with her son yesterday when, according to police, around 5:45 p.m. a red Target cart was dropped from a walkway that connects Target to a parking lot near East 116th Street and Pleasant Avenue (see: here). Her alleged assailants weren't even 13. more ›