Isn't is nice how airlines continue to come up with new ways to surprise us? Like, hey, your dog is dead! Or, hey, we're gonna make this trip take 10 extra hours, get to know your neighbor! Or that time they let you sleep on the empty plane. The latest: the luggage you carefully chose and packed for your trip has been inexplicably and utterly destroyed.
What Did United Airlines Do To This Luggage?
City Shredded Perfectly Good Counterfeit Clothing
All of those counterfeit clothes the city confiscates used to go to the needy... but the NY Times reports that this past year city officials destroyed the new, unused clothing and footwear.
Washington Square Park Loses Its Mounds
They finally did it; they finally killed those weird and almost iconic asphalt mounds in Washington Square Park, destroying them with the cool efficiency of a doctor lancing a boil. Which they most certainly were not—they were mysterious '70s-era tributes to the city's ever-imperiled idiosyncrasy. They'll be replaced with safety-first fake-turf clones, as part of the city's multi-million dollar renovation of the park. Curbed reports that the entire southwest quadrant is now "quiet as a crypt, the silence broken only by the scrounging of squirrels." Goodnight, sweet mounds, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
Isabella's Oven Goes Out With a Bang, Sledgehammer, Graffiti
Isabella's Oven, the Lower East Side pizza place deemed one of the top ten in NYC by big eatin' Ed Levine, was abruptly closed at the end of January for, rumor has it, not paying $70K in back rent. Co-owner Teresa Rizzo-Marino told Grub Street she fell behind because she spent $300,000 renovating and rat-proofing the pizzeria, and she had hoped the Seward Park Co-Op board, which controls the property, would give her more time: "I was subjected to mental abuse. They told me to sign over the whole store and [that] they'd forget about what I owed if I gave them the pizza recipe." Now it seems Rizzo-Marino, who is rumored to be the daughter of one board member, inflicted some abuse of her own on the way out the door, taking a sledgehammer and spray paint to the place. Photos on Eater and Grub Street depict a level of destruction which one commenter aptly deemed "poetry." The interior has been savagely trashed, and "threatening and derogatory graffiti" spray painted all over the walls. BURN! You just gonna take that, Co-Op board?
Hill Family Beheaded in the EV
East Village: the King of the Hill people were only trying to remind you that their animated television program was still on—no need to get medieval. This billboard that appeared outside of Tile Bar not long ago contained, at one time, three wooden characters from the show. Quickly, they began to lose limbs. Now disturbing news comes in that only Bobby's torso remains. Guess they should have seen this coming after the massacre of Greenpoint's birthday girl. [via Curbed]

