Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: falling debris on W 47th St. and 8th Ave. in Manhattan, a shooting on Broadway on Staten Island, and a suspicious boat at the Verrazano Bridge near Brooklyn. For a reason unrelated to terrorism, the U.S. Parks Dept. is going to keep the crown of the Statue of Liberty closed because it's a fire death-trap. Iranian President Mahmoud Amahdinejad's wish to visit Ground Zero was blocked due to security......

Will there ever be a point when there are stories about the Greenpoint oil spill cleanup, instead of stories about how big and dangerous the spill is? Representatives Anthony Weiner and Nydia Velazquez released the results of the first EPA study (first study ever after, what, 29 years!) of the Greenpoint oil spill, and they are pretty ugly. Here some excerpts from the press release: The original estimated size of the spill of 17 million......

That's what State Comptroller Alan Hevesi is asking. He advised the Department of Environmental Conservation not to negotiate an agreement with Exxon over the Greenpoint oil spill clean up because the spill needs to be thoroughly examined. Back in 1978, a Coast Guard pilot noticed an oil plume off Newtown Creek: It turned out that 17 million gallons (more than the 11 million from the Exxon Valdez spill) of oil had been spilling since the......

When most of us think of oil spills, we think of cute seal pups that end up coated with the stuff, with scruffy Greenpeacers on bended knee trying to scrub them clean. But some Brooklynites have had only one thing on their mind thanks to a 55 acre oil spill that took place over 50 years ago: cancer. A 1950 tanker explosion that leaked almost 17 million gallons of oil and gas into the ground......