Results tagged “hollandtunnel”

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.

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 trips a year up the cables of those bridges.

The mercury vapor lamps that are currently in use on the bridge, he said, are supposed to last about 24,000 hours. At eight hours a night (the lights are turned off at 1 a.m.), that means each bulb should last more than eight years. It gets tricky, though, because workers replace the bulbs before they burn out completely, to minimize noticeable variations between them.

• 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 49 steel deck-truss bridges and found them all to be structurally sound. Still, a bill before the Senate to boost federal spending on bridge maintenance would direct 10% of a $1 billion increase, or $100 million, to New York State.
• A Coast Guard vessel conducting a routine homeland security patrol came upon a 27-year-old man treading water without a life jacket about 400 yards southeast of Staten Island's South Beach.
• Gridskipper has a guide to establishments that brew, distill, and ferment all kinds of potent potables right here in NYC.
• The Gowanus Lounge reports that an F train express line could arrive as early as next year. Or maybe around 2012 or early 2013.
• The New York Times describes the run of the vintage six-car 'A' train yesterday on the line's 75th anniversary.
• IvyGate reports that bars surrounding Columbia University will all be getting ID scanners to keep out underage patrons, and Columbia itself will be picking up the tab for the devices.

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.

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 it were a tin can." We'd like to add "A tin can whose sides are also falling down."

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.

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.

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."

Try to Burn This One, by Melon Bee.

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.

It was another unusually mild, late November morning when we visited 304 Spring at Renwick, just east of Greenwich Street.

1. Uh-oh, missing City Council members, if you miss a meeting, you need a note from your doctor (or other documentation)
2. Curbed's monitoring of Gehry's IAC Building pays off: The windows are properly lined up.
3. Park Slopers are scared of raccoons, possibly to the point of not crossing the street for a non-fat latte
4. The Goya stolen as it was being transported from Ohio to NYC was recovered in NJ! No word if it's going to continue its journey to the Guggenheim
5. Julian Casablancas, Mets fan! On the post-season: "Can I just ask you: as a Mets fan, do you think leaving Heilman in there for the 9th inning was the right move?"
6. The FDNY rescued a 73 year old man from the 50-degree Hudson River water - he was "found in old pilings" near a Holland Tunnel ventilator tower
7. Kottke picks out his favorite of Chris Ware's four Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker covers (we like this one)
8. The probe into State Comptroller Alan Hevesi's actions is getting more power, but it's still unlikely a decision will be made before Pataki leaves office

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.

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. The NY Times has an interesting quote from an anonymous counterterrorism source:

"These are bad guys in Canada and a bad guy in Lebanon talking, but it never advanced beyond that."

Continue reading "Terror Plot Actually Targeted the PATH"

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 NY Times:

Mark J. Mershon, the agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York office, said at a news conference this afternoon that Lebanese officials had taken the plot's "mastermind" into custody in Beirut and that he had confessed. Mr. Mershon said that the Lebanese officials had identified the suspect as Assem Hammoud, a 31-year-old Lebanese native, and reported that Mr. Hammoud had sworn allegiance to Al Qaeda.Mr. Mershon said two of the other eight people he described as "principal players" in the plot had been taken into custody in other countries, although none had yet been charged with any crimes. He said that an investigation was continuing, involving six countries on three continents.

Continue reading "Tunnel Terror Plot Press Conference"

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, it's not surprising that terrorists would want to emulate disasters from nature.

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".

- 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."

- 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.

- And the AP interviews the blogging taxi driver, Melissa Plaut, who is awesome

- 175,000 calls have come into 311 since midnightIs everyone ready for the fun commute home yet? Are your bosses letting you off early so you don't have to walk until 9?

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 Laurie Anderson. The more interesting part of the NY Times article is that community leaders Carole De Saram, Richard Barrett and Jana Haimsohn were the ones who spearheaded the restoration effort: They researched and found that there really was a park there (the city didn't believe them and wanted proof), and ended up suing "sued the federal, state and city governments, contending that removal of the park had been illegal because no one had obtained the State Legislature's approval." That's is some love for the community.

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 he says 'yeah,' we're fine. So we'll talk." Is the man Lorne Michaels in this case? Or Jeff Zucker, which sounds like "hooker," not "f***er," as we learned when watching Fat Actress? When O'Brien was announced (finally) as Jay Leno's successor, the NY Times' Bill Carter suspected Conan and the gang would move to LA. Gothamist hopes that in the meantime, CBS develops another LA talk show, in the post-Letterman era, and The Tonight Show will have to stay in NY. For starters, Conan will need LOTS of sunblock if he's living in LA.

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 buildings, even skipping work, to enjoy the spur of the moment concert. Naturally, the NY Post takes pride in pointing out that Bono yelled that he'd like a coffee and a NY Post. Did you skip work to head to Brooklyn and chase U2 around town? Or did you sit back in your cubicle, looking at the photos on other people's blogs in envy?

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 of popular cooking herbs, Kings County-crafted, organic vegetable wax, scented candles, lavendar and green tea-scented kitchen hand soaps, oversized dish-drying flour sackcloths which spotlight different, colorful varieties of lettuces, tomatoes and herbs (including tarragon, of course).

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 apocalypse and the ripple effect it had on our attitudes, beliefs, and hell—sex drives. Midtown is Gabe Saporta (vocals and bass), Rob Hitt (drums), Tyler Rann (guitar), and Heath Saraceno (Guitar). Gothamist got Rob and Tyler to take time out from their cross-country road trip with Welsh rockers, Lostprophets, and talk city with us. Turns out the Jersey natives are living the NYC dream… complete with shithole apartments, wayward homeless men, and mixed opinions on the Bloomberg regime.

Randy Kim, NBA.com

Harmatz's sons built Lansky Lounge behind Ratner's. Ratner's, which closed in 2002, funnily enough, created a Second Avenue Subway sandwich in 1999, to garner support for the project: "The sandwich, which consists of sardines, onions, red peppers, black olives, tomatoes, and lettuce on a bagel, represents how crammed straphangers feel on the Lexington Avenue line."

Charlie Suisman