Above, rendering of the proposed park; below, photograph of the site in its current state A $114 million plan to put a waterfront park on the East River, just south of the United Nations, came into focus yesterday; the four-acre site is where a parking lot for a Con Edison power plant used to reside. City Councilman Daniel Gardonick said, "The opportunity to create this riverfront park is an opportunity we cannot afford to......

Illustration of of the BMT from north and south vantage points, via the NYC Economic Development Corp. Plans to construct a glass addition to the top of the Battery Maritime Building moved a little closer to fruition this week with the approval of Community Board 1. The New York Post reports that the Board was a little concerned about the scale of the glass addition that will be added to the century-old structure, but......

The fate of the Moynihan Station in the James Farley post office building remains up in the air and it's unclear whether Madison Square Garden will also relocate to the Farley building. If MSG moves, plans say the old MSG would be razed and a new train tracks would be put on top. The Municipal Arts Society's New Penn Station campaign shares a plan from students (at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture's Historic Preservation Program)......

It's not exactly the cultural or architectural equivalent of the culture-shift that pitted modernism against traditionalism or historicism, but there's a war going on in New York's streets, and it's multirack paper boxes vs. single boxes. On one side are the expensive, well maintained, conservative multiracks that have been introduced into several different Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) around Manhattan. On the other side are the gatherings of cheap-loooking, graffiti- and sticker-covered, molded plastic or metal......

Six anonymous students at Columbia University have gone on a hunger strike to protest the administration's attitude and position on a number of issues, including Columbia's plans for West Harlem/Manhatanville, a series of hate crimes on campus and lack of an ethnic studies program. You can see the full list of demands at the strikers website, as well as explanations for questions like "Why now?"The recent acts of hate on this campus have lent urgency......

The state released the draft scope for the Moynihan Station project today, and while the details have yet to be finalized, The New York Sun outlines the document's major components. Madison Square Garden will be moved into the rear of the Farley Post Office Building, which will be renamed Moynihan Station. A remade Penn Station will be renamed Moynihan East and will feature a sky-lit train hall surrounded by a million square feet of retail......

NY state officials are expected to release the draft scope for the Moynihan Station's environmental impact statement today, which the NY Sun calls the "Spitzer administration's first public display of forward progress" on the project. The redevelopment of Penn Station into a Moynihan Station at the James Farley Post Office building on Eighth Avenue has been in the works for years. In fact, it was October 8 five years ago that the state officially acquired......

Tomorrow afternoon at 2 p.m., the Municipal Arts Society is holding a meeting at Hunter College to present a brainstormed plan for making the East River waterfront in Manhattan's midtown an accessible public waterfront. The idea is that if the rebuilding of the FDR Drive, the decommissioning of the Con Ed power plant, and the expansion of the U.N. are coordinated, there is the opportunity for a waterfront park to be built, and completing the......

You may have noticed that we've added another data source to our Gothamist Newsmap: now twice as much mayhem! Today's catastrophes: a water rescue in the Hudson off Houston Street, a "scaffold incident" at Leonard and Broadway, and double and triple shootings in Queens and Brooklyn. Yikes! On tonight's Nova science Now, Neil deGrasse Tyson (from the Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History) "mass extinction, the 1918 pandemic flu, robot engineer Cynthia......

Tribute in Light, the temporary World Trade Center Memorial, will be moving to a new location this September. Because of development at West and Vesey Streets (Tribute was set up in a parking lot there), the light installation will now be at be stationed at a parking garage near the Battery Tunnel. The News reports that the Municipal Arts Society will pay the MTA $12,000 a year for four years for the space. The MAS......

After a year of build up, the NYC Subway system officially turns 100 today. We love how the NY Times' Randy Kennedy starts his feature about the subway's 100th year (which has some nice interactive features as well):For a New Yorker just one day shy of turning 100 years old, the subway kept crazy hours yesterday. In other words, there were no hours it did not keep. As its neighbors around the world locked......

The New York Times features a cabbie, Philip Frabosilo, who fishes in the East River. Now, while Gothamist has seen intrepid fishermen (no women spotted) on the Hudson, we had assumed that it was just for spot...not eating. But Frabosilo says, "I've caught 15,000 fish here in the last 10 years of my life, and I've eaten 75 meals from the East River...Never got sick once." Fraboliso was featured in a documentary about fisherman......