Results tagged “bigdig”

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a double shooting on St. Johns Pl. in Brooklyn, a collapse on Grant Ave. in the Bronx, and a barricaded emotionally disturbed person on 102nd St. in Queens.
• Like Robert Moses in reverse, Mayor Bloomberg wants highways to give way to housing by covering roads like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, as well as rail yards, and constructing housing above them. New York's own Big Dig?
• Ricki Lake's documentary, which is debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival, includes scenes of her giving birth in the bathtub in her West Village apartment. She made her assistant clean the tub afterwards, because there's natural and then there's just gross.
• Attractive adult NYC virgins talk about their decisions to not go all the way in a slideshow presentation.
• NY1 political reporter Dominic Carter requested his mother's medical records after her death. Unbeknownst to him, Carter's mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who once choked him and thought about throwing him out a window when he was a child.
• A Brooklyn yeshiva is serving eviction notices to the residents––many elderly and disabled––of a property it owns to make way for a studyhall and more classrooms.
• 13 miles of mostly straight, flat NY highway that is the site of a disproportionate number of fatal crashes.
• NJ Governor Jon Corzine may just stay in bed and run the state better, faster, and without ribbon cuttings, via video. We have the technology.
• The City Council voted to override Mayor Bloomberg's vetoes on a metal bat ban and pedicab-limiting regulations.

(Daffodils, by hashishin at flickr)

Breathe easy, New York City - the NYPD has removed the LED pieces with Aqua Teen Hunger Force's mooninite Ignignokt from locations. It's unclear where they were, but WNBC reported that one was at 54th Street and 9th Avenue. And don't worry, folks, the Boston police have arrested Peter Berdovsky for planting the LED devices. Berdovsky's website, Zebbler.com, shows the locations of 20 devices (or, as the Massachusetts authorities are calling them, "hoax devices").

Ooh, the debate over whether or put the West Side Highway underground for a stretch on the Upper West Side (Lincoln Center area, really) in the West 60s is examined in the NY Times. And there's a graphic of how the tunnel would be placed and how new parkspace would be created as a result. The undergrounding of the highway won't happen for at least 10 years, and the project's funding is debatable, but the Riverside South Planning Corporation is excavating the ground.

But with the box ready when the viaduct needs to be replaced, the cost of rerouting the highway could be about the same as building a new viaduct. Some excavation would still be necessary, because the space for the box between 65th and 69th Streets was filled in when the first of the apartment buildings was being built. The box was suggested in the city's 1992 agreement that allowed Riverside South to be built, and the responsibility for building it was the developer's.

The RSPC's executive director Michael Bradley emphasizes that the $180 million is not Westway or Boston's Big Dig, and says this project, a "Rubik's Cube of construction" will "save a ton of money and heartaches." And Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe likes the idea, saying, "I think a lot of people now realize no matter how nice Hudson River Park is, it would have been nicer if Westway had been built in some configuration. The highway would have been underground, we would have had a much larger park and a much better connection from the community to the park."

- A suspended Bronx police officer was arrested again for allegedly raping a woman who he'd offered a lift.