Last Friday afternoon-into-evening, commuters leaving NYC through the Lincoln Tunnel were treated to hours of delays, because a suspicious package was left on I-495 West. It turned out to be two bottles filled with an ultimately harmless liquid, but the damage was done: Traffic was diverted to local roads in NJ, commuter bus passengers were hating their devotion to mass transit, and there were still hours of residual delays. The Post dubs the perp, "Lincoln......

Photograph of an injured worker being unloaded from the construction bucket from reader Nick Sonderup There are reports that a crane lost its load of concrete beams at Spring and 6th Avenue. The beams hit the building and sidewalk scaffolding and people are trapped. One fatality is being reported. Photograph of workers on the sidewalk pointing by from stconrad on Flickr The reports indicate the accident occurred at a building under contraction at 246......

Like the GWB and the Holland Tunnel, the Brooklyn Bridge will have LED lights installed next year, but how exactly do the bulbs get replaced? The NY Times says it only takes one man to screw in these bulbs. Okay, maybe he has some help. Ben Cipriano, the leader of a crew of electricians who maintain the four major East River Bridges for the city’s Department of Transportation, and his colleagues make about a dozen......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a possible abduction at the Mobil gas station off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, a suspicious death on Cornelia St. in Queens, and a pedestrian struck at Buffalo St. and Hylan Blvd. on Staten Island. The Dept. of Buildings declined to revoke permits for Donald Trump's planned 46-story Trump SoHo "hotel" on Spring St. near the Holland Tunnel. A State Bridge Task Force completed its inspection of New York's......

Traffic through the Holland tunnel was stalled this morning after two buses collided, with many passengers winding up in the hospital. The Daily News reports that an Atlantic Express bus slammed on its brakes after a car veered into its lane (drivers are not allowed to change lines while in the Holland Tunnel) and a following bus crashed into it. The second bus was from BTC Transportation and headed from Atlantic City to Chinatown. The......

We've seen Port Authority workers measure the heights of trucks to make sure they will fit in either the Holland or Lincoln Tunnel. But yesterday one driver refused to stop and proceeded to drive his 13' 6" truck through the Lincoln Tunnel's 13' high center tube. And what does a truck look like after doing that? Well, check out the photograph from the NY Times, which describes its roof as being peeled back "as if......

After the Sun mentioned the Mayor's upcoming Earth Day PlaNYC speech may include mention of a congestion tax, even more details about what the speech will include have come out. The NY Times says the Mayor is "expected to advocate more than 100 proposals," from cleaning up polluted sites to making buildings more energy efficient. The most controversial part of the plan is the congestion pricing idea. The NY Times says Bloomberg administration staffers......

We knew the Catholic Church was sneaky, but we never thought that a cardinal would stoop this low! Cardinal Egan had a meeting with the priest at Our Lady of Vilnius Church yesterday, only to take the opportunity to lock the church while the priest was gone! The Post reports that security guards were dispatched to lock the doors, leaving parishioners to cry when they found a closed church and no mass. Parishioners held......

The controversial proposal to turn the UPS lot on Spring Street and West Street into a place for 106 Sanitation trucks may align Donald Trump with critics of his planned Trump Soho Hotel. The Donald takes a break from blabbing about ladies of The View and tells the Post, "I don't like trucks, the fumes, the traffic from the standpoint of the community... If the community wanted help, I would certainly help." Still the Trump......

Subway special on the Gothamist Newsmap: a person struck by an A train in Brooklyn, a stabbing on the J train in Queens, and a "train job" (?) at Newkirk Avenue. Rosie's Trump beef now extends to Barbara Walters, who appears to have been stabbing her in the back in private conversations with Donald Trump: "Are you looking me in the face and denying you didn't tell him you didn't say this? You're a......

This is just the way you want to end your work week before Christmas holiday: Hearing from the NY Times that the PATH tunnels are "seen as fragile" in a bomb attack. Even a small ("a significant but not necessarily very large") bomb would cause a PATH tunnel to flood in 6 minutes. How did the Times find out about an analysis that was given to the Port Authority three weeks ago? A government official......

It was another unusually mild, late November morning when we visited 304 Spring at Renwick, just east of Greenwich Street. The first building designed by Zakrzewski & Hyde, 304 Spring is located in the western edges of SoHo sometimes referred to as Hudson Square, which has transformed since the area was rezoned for residential use in 2003. It's a bit frenetic over there, being steps from the Ear Inn and Philip Johnson's Urban Glass House,......

Uh-oh, missing City Council members, if you miss a meeting, you need a note from your doctor (or other documentation) Curbed's monitoring of Gehry's IAC Building pays off: The windows are properly lined up. Park Slopers are scared of raccoons, possibly to the point of not crossing the street for a non-fat latte The Goya stolen as it was being transported from Ohio to NYC was recovered in NJ! No word if it's going......

A couple of years ago, while leaving a show at Irving Plaza, one of the many people handing out cd's - handed us a cd. It wasn't in any fancy packaging, wasn't eye catching for any reason, and we held on to it and listened later that night. The band was called The Epochs, and we had a new rule about listening to cd's handed to us on the street. The EP was good,......

On the anniversary of the London subway bombings, US and city officials made a big show out of confirming that three men had been arrested for plotting to bomb various tunnels leading into Manhattan. But the tunnels they were looking at were PATH tunnels to the World Trade Center and Christopher Street - not the Holland Tunnel or even the Lincoln Tunnel as previously mentioned by the Daily News and Senator Schumer respectively. Interesting.......

Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Kelly, and representatives from the Port Authority and FBI gave a press conference about the tunnel terror plot a few hours ago. This morning, the Daily News revealed that officials had "foiled" a plot to flood the city Katrina-style (no matter how technically unfeasible it would be), sending people into a tailspin, both the "crap, no" and the "the government is making this too big a deal" kinds. From the......

As London remembers the first anniversary of its deadly subway attacks, the Daily News reveals that jihadists were plotting to blow up the Holland Tunnel in order to flood lower Manhattan. The plot was apparently in the works months ago, with a "pledge" of support from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, with hopes, as the News puts it, "to drown the Financial District as New Orleans was by Hurricane Katrina." Well, given government response to floods,......

Real estate disputes are, almost by definition, never pretty and no matter what somebody is going to come out of them looking bad. In the case of the landmarked Starrett-Lehigh Building on 26th street and 11th Avenue the bad looking people would be the buildings owners, 601 West Associates, and one famous tenant whose name starts with "M" and ends with "artha Stewart". To wit: yesterday Ask Gothamist got this self-answering question in our......

- Turns out Mayor Bloomberg and NJ Governor Corzine teamed up to convince Pataki to rework any sort of Ground Zero proposal to Larry Silverstein. And re: the NY Times' mention of past NY-NJ spats, we wish we remembered how Mayor Koch "once symbolically boarded up the entrance to the Holland Tunnel over the loss of jobs to New Jersey." - Some City Council members want Con Ed to pay fines when people get shocked......

- Lawyers for Paramount and Columbia Pictures are suing a 63-year-old teacher's aide for allegedly downloading a copy of "The Longest Yard." Yes, the Adam Sandler movie. - The man fired by Bloomie for playing Solitaire hasn't quite left the news yet. The Times looks at his impressive name while one radio host teased Mike about it. - You hear the one about the X-rated fortune cookies? - A company in the United Arab......

- No more district superintendents for 200 public school - Police issue tickets because of quotas - big surprise! - Five Queens students were hurt by the same men in separate attacks - As is the property, parking spaces at the Time Warner Center are $$$ - Don't take the Holland Tunnel Sunday morning - there will be sign installation (though it might be good for pictures) - And the AP interviews the blogging......

This afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg updated everyone on how New York City is coping with the transit strike. 1010 WINS has a nice summary of it on their site. Developments today include: - NYPD working 12 hour shifts (hello overtime!) and the traffic is being handled by the police cadets - LIRR handled an extra 45,000 riders this morning - There is now shuttle service at Kew Gardens, Forrest Hills and Woodside (lots of love for......

Canal Park, a Parks Department project started in 2003, will be opened today in a dedication ceremony. There had been a park there in the late 1800s, later redesigned by Calvert Vaux and Samuel Parsons Jr., but it was "removed" in order to build the Holland Tunnel. The NY Times says that the land was once a garbage truck parking lot, but tonight, after the dedication, there will be a concert with Lou Reed and......

In a re-election year stumping opportunity, the Mayor visited Conan O'Brien's talk show last night and asked him to bring the Tonight Show back to NYC. And Gothamist says, "Please, do!" The AP says that Mayor Bling "jokingly tried to make a deal," offering to give O'Brien a park permit for the Late Night softball team if he stayed in NYC. Conan said, "It's not up to me, I work for the man. If......

Gothamist will have a more extensive wrap-up of U2's "so secret, it's a record label's wet dream with all the buzz" Brooklyn concert from Janelle, but we loved this photo by Steven Tom of The Edge in front of a Holland Tunnel sign [U2 spent a good part of the day on a flat bed truck, filming their upcoming video]. And reader Jill sent us this Bono photo from midtown. Thousands flocked from office......

Six month-old Tarragon Home & Garden puts Gothamist in mind of those old Calgon commericals, where the put-upon housewife winds down amidst bubbles and luxurious botanical fragrances. Walking into this store we seem to be transported to a quaint corner of New England rather than urban Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. And, we "home and hearth"-happy Gothamist types are captivated by shop-owner Indira Hamilton's selection of herbal and botanical inspired wares, such as full-length aprons sporting bunches......

For those music fans interested in sampling various genres, Midtown is a band to watch. Too jaded to be teen-friendly emo, too emotional to be fuck-all indie, Midtown walks the fine line between pop and punk better than most bands they tend to get grouped with (Saves the Day, Jimmy Eat World, New Found Glory). Though fairly young, the band sounds grizzled and seasoned like only a New York offspring can, singing about post-9/11......

Randy Kim, NBA.com...

Harold Harmatz, who owned Ratner's on the Lower East Side, died last week. His obituary in the Times is especially rich, showing how Harmatz both ran a linchpin of LES dining that offered "onion rolls, blintzes and the restaurant's staff of famously no-nonsense waiters" 24 hours a day in the days before gentrification and led the fight to prevent Robert Moses from building an expressway over the Lower East Side that would connect Williamsburg Bridge......

Charlie Suisman...