To be a young harbor seal taking some time from swimming to sun! A young seal was seen hanging out at the 79th Street Boast Basin yesterday morning the Parks Department. Sergeant Rakeem Taylor told City Room, "He was moving around pretty fine, yawning and sunning himself," and estimated the seal to be "3 to 4 feet long and about 90 pounds." Taylor said that the seal's appearance means the Hudson is clean enough for......

As you shivered your way to work, you can at least be reassured that yesterday was the coldest August day since 1911 (when subways cost a nickel!). Yesterday's high was 59 degrees, taking the mantle of coldest August 21 ever. WCBS 2 meteorologist Jason Cali explained, "This unusual blast of cold air smashed our previous record for the coldest high temperature on August 21, which is 64 degrees, set back in 1999." For reference,......

A bit of heat today and tomorrow, showers late Tuesday and early Wednesday, and very pleasant weather to welcome the summer solstice on Thursday are this week's weather highlights. Today and tomorrow's weather is being brought to us by a weak high pressure system. High pressure systems aren't usually associated with exciting weather so Gothamist has to dig into the subtleties. This particular system has a lot of moisture near the ground but is......

If you're cooped up in a stuffy apartment this muggy afternoon, consider visiting one of New York's many zoos. The cool customers pictured above are residents of the Central Park Zoo. There's also the Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium at Coney Island. If you can't make it to any of those, you can always settle for the Penguin Cam. (penguins, by contrast and compare at flickr)......

An 18-year-old student who attends either a high school or college, depending on which paper you're reading, was stabbed yesterday morning on Manhattan's East Side. The motive for the attack is uncertain, but people are willing to speculate. In the Daily News (identifying the victim, Alton McCarthy, as a college freshman), McCarthy's mother paints a picture of her son cutting through Central Park to catch a train home, when he is set upon by a......

What's a polar bear to do when it is 72 in January? Well, if you're a member of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, you stage a silent protest. The Times reports eight members of the club cancelled their Saturday swim, because the water was too warm. Perhaps more interestingly, the News reports it was nine members of the club and the Post says ten! According to Polar Bear Club treasurer Tom McGann, yesterday was......

Even though Central Park's famous gay penguin couple Silo and Roy broke up (Silo, the Anne Heche of the penguin world, took to a lady penguin named Scrappy), they were immortalized in the adorable children's book, And Tango Makes Three. And Tango Makes Three recounts how Silo and Roy were given a fertilized egg to hatch, after they unsuccessfully tried to hatch a rock - and baby girl Tango was born. But the book......

Today, a drunken man visiting the Beijing Zoo climbed into the panda habitat - and there was also "hugging" and biting. Reports say that 35 year old Zhang Xinyan had drunk "four draught beers" before heading to the zoo, where he was suddenly overcome with a desire to touch Gu Gu, a 6 year old male panda. Gu Gu freaked out and bit Zhang's, so then Zhang bit back. Zookeepers managed to get Gu......

We didn't make it to the Central Park Zoo for the icy food-for-animals competition, but luckily Julia Meredith Levy did. She sent us a detailed report:Ice replaced Iron in a Chef competition yesterday at Central Park Zoo. Fittingly, the contest's taste testers were Polar Bears Gus and Ida, weighing in at 1,000 and 700 pounds respectively. In the wild, their diets consist mainly of seals, eating as much as 100 pounds in one setting. On......

Just because we are fans of Gus, the formerly depressed polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, we want to bring your attention to the Times story of how the zoo's polar bears were keeping cool in the heat. Unlike humans, they do not get upset when the subway's power is out or when the thunder and lighting prevent them from watching TV (thanks, satellites!). Instead, Gus and Ida cope with not living in......

- This week's New York has a story, not yet online, on the shocking and tragic execution-style murder of Tiesha Sargeant in which her drug dealing boyfriend admits to having sold $6,000 worth of weed the day of the murder. - What happens when the Department of Buildings decides the Bed-Stuy building you just bought a condo in is illegally built? "No bank will give a loan on this, you can't refinance or take......

Uhm, really? According to Police Chief Michael Collins "officers took prudent steps to handle what may have been a dangerous situation" on Thursday when eight officers jumped and arrested a balloon artist as he pulled his bike up to his normal place of business outside of the Central Park Zoo. His crime? Leaving an $850 rainbow striped electric air pump behind in a Starbucks. The cops said it looked like a bomb. It sounds......

The oldest known female sea lion in captivity, Breezy the Sea Lion, was quietly euthanized yesterday. Breezy, who lived in the New York Aquarium at Coney Island from 1972 until 1990, spent the past sixteen years hanging out in the Central Park Zoo. When living in Coney Island Breezy got a reputation for her outgoing personality: "She Was feisty in her youth! She wasn't the biggest sea lion in the exhibit, but she seemed......

Tomorrow is Earth Day, and there are a number of events in the city. Many are occuring at Grand Central Terminal, where there are exhibits, demonstrations, and musical perfomances with exhibitors like the Audobon Society, Google Earth and Recycle a Bicycle - check out Earth Day NY 2006. There's an Earth Awareness Festival tomorrow on Waverly Place, the events the Parks Department is organizing, and we are very partial to the events occuring at......

Not only are seals coming back to the harbor but they are coming to the Zoo, too. The Post has a story on the one of the newest additions to the Central Park Zoo, a one-year-old half-blind harbor seal named Herbie. Maybe this story is running now to keep people's mind off of the wild animals in the area?Anyway The year-old pup was found stranded on a dock in Maine last year, partly blind......

- A man was arrested in connection to the Staten Island brush fires - MP3 of NYC FM radio on the night John Lennon died - Join the Great River Sweep to clean up the Hudson! - Female firefighters will finally get their own bathrooms - The Villager raises interesting questions about the post-murder fate of the Falls - As the Gawker empire will go on display in a storefront office, the countdown begins......

Sunny skies and temperatures above fifty will do a quick number on the snow. The sidewalks will a gloppy, sloppy mess for a few days. If there's any snow mounds left by the weekend they are going to freeze hard. A relatively dry cold front looks like it will move through on Friday. The front will bring high winds and cold air. Saturday and Sunday will be chilly. The cold spell will only last a......

Yesterday was the city's first weekday dealing with the "Blizzard of 2006," and it actually wasn't that bad, with snow starting to melt and people not complaining as much as they could about snow removal. The usual rule of thumb in determining how much a snow storm's cleanup cost is $1 million per inch of snow, but Mayor Bloomberg said he doubt the clean-up would cost $26.9 million. Forget clean-up, how about fixing potholes......

With Halloween in three days, our attention must be turned to those who cannot speak about their costumes: The animals. Tomorrow, at Fort Greene Park, dog owners will converge with their canines in awesome outfits for the Great PUPkin. But what about kitty cats? The Post's Julia Szabo put up this photograph of her cat Huey in a festive costume from Posh Paws on the Upper East Side, but we suspect Huey was given a......

While we're on the topic of trains, check out this great gallery of art from 148 subway stations. Be sure to click through on the art project title-- there are subpages for each with a ton of images. Our favorite gallery is of the Urban Oasis mosaics at the 5th Avenue stop on the N/R-- created by Ann Schaumburger, they celebrate the animals at the nearby Central Park Zoo.......

On Wednesday, the polar bear Gus and Ida at the Central Park Zoo held a press conference, with some help from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The point was to announce that the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace would take legal action against the government for further endangering the already-endangered polar bears: Global warming is leading to polar bears' natural habitats to melt out. And the press conference's location was to drive home......

Double-decker tour buses have in the past decade become a standard part of the average tourist's trip to the Big Apple. You see them everywhere in Manhattan and in the past few years they've even made it out to the wilds of Brooklyn. Sometimes when you're standing on a corner you can catch a snippet of the what a tour guide is telling their innocent charges, but other than that the average New Yorker has......

And now for your "Saturday Afternoon Gothamist Animal Update": -We'd heard it before, but the picture in the Times was too cute: Silo and Roy, the Central Park Zoo's famous gay penguins, have split up. Worse, Silo (right) now seems to be partnering with a female penguin named Scrappy (left). But don't worry, there are still four other same-sex pairs of penguins at the Central Park Zoo, including Tango, the female penguin that Silo......

Wi-Fi Salon is installing Wi-Fi into 10 city parks over the next few months. Central Park will have eight hot spots (including the zoo, Delacorte Theater, and Boathouse), as will Orchard Beach, Flushing Meadows, Van Cortlandt, Pelham Bay, Prospect, Riverside, Union Square, and Washington Square Parks. The Daily News says that Battery Park's hotspot, near Battery Gardens, is already running and that Wi-Fi Salon is paying the Parks Department for the right to install the......

If March of the Penguins failed to satisfy your appetite for adorable penguin action, march yourself right over to the bookstore and check out And Tango Makes Three. Gothamist must admit that we could not resist judging this book by its cover, seeing as we were instantly smitten. But it only got better when we looked inside. This is the true story of Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo......

Gothamist loved The March of the Penguins (the drama! the weather! the adorable baby penguins!) so much that we decided we had to see some penguins, since this town may never give us the pandas we deserve. And the NY Post had the same idea, dispatching a reporter to visit the penguins of Coney Island. Reporter Michael Kane had a Costeau-y narration ("In an isolated and untamed Atlantic outpost separated from civilization by a......

Now, the NY Times had a feature about how the new Dreamworks animated film, Madagascar, went to great lengths accurately recreate New York City, such as looking at blueprints of Grand Central Terminal. And Gothamist does think those scenes look amazing - as well as how the animators depicted the Central Park Zoo. But one thing Gothamist feels we need to point out about the film, which is about the Central Park Zoo's zebra,......

[Gothamist is happy to welcome David Hirschman, who guested as an interviewer last summer, to our family. David will be covering a variety of subjects; today is his first look at how NYC is portrayed in movies.] The way NYC is depicted in the passable Will Smith vehicle Hitch is not unlike how it has been portrayed over the last decade in Sex and the City and Friends; it's that whimsical fantasy world where everyone......

Gothamist wishes everyone a Merry Christmas as well as a Happy Last Saturday in December if you don't happen to celebrate Christmas. We loved this Reuters photo by Chip East which celebrates two of our favorite things: Gus the polar bear in Central Park and holiday gift giving. Here, he has just received "trout with peanut butter and chocolate sauce, topped with whipped cream in a large cardboard barrel decorated with drawings of a......

Monkeys have been getting a bad rap lately, so Gothamist thought it was nice of Michael Cosentino at Meccapixel to show them - their marmoset brethren, really - some love. It looks like there will be a series of Central Park Zoo photos coming to Meccapixel, so look out. However, there's some more follow-up on the human-attacking macaque helper monkey, Darla: Apparently owner Steven Seidler won't say where Darla is hiding out after the......