The presence of oil in parts of Greenpoint is well documented, but it looks like someone wants the oil to be cleaned up. This morning there was artwork in the Queens-bound Nassau Avenue G stop asking for a stop to the oil spills. The artwork shows drops of oil on the walls of the station, pools of oil collected on the floors, and paper towels for straphangers to clean up the spill. Reader Shannan tells......

Riders hope that low grades for the G line will eventually lead to improvements, while plans are in place to make the G a more usable line. Despite being the two largest boroughs in New York City, there is only one train line dedicated to getting people from Brooklyn (2.5 million people) to Queens (2.3 million people). All other passages must make their way from one borough, through Manhattan (1.6 million people), and then on......

In the shadows of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, residents of Greenpoint will soon be able to go on a nature walk. The Department of Environmental Protection, which operates the sewage plant, is officially opening the Newtown Creek Nature Walk this Saturday. The 800-foot nature walk along Newtown Creek, which took 9-years and $3.2 million to complete, is landscaped and features access points to the polluted creek. The Times even observed a school......

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......

State attorney general Andrew Cuomo filed suit against oil giant Exxon Mobil to clean up an oil spill along Newtown Creek that is estimated to be twice as large as the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. The suit also names BP, Chevron, KeySpan and Phelps Dodge and is seeking action and fines against the companies that spilled approximately 20 million gallons of fuel into the ground and water of industrial Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The......

New York magazine has a great examination of the Greenpoint pollution problem lurking beneath the neighborhood's surface, and floating along the surface of Newtown Creek. It describes a ten million gallon reservoir of industrial pollution that includes, fuel oil, naptha, gasoline, parrafin wax and likely many more materials that were used along the industrial area of the waterway that separates Brooklyn and Queens. The contamination of the area is hardly breaking news. Brooklyn drew its......

The city may be on the hook for an additional $200 million after the winning bidder on a contract for a proposed underwater filtration plant to be built under VanCortlandt Park said it could not take the work. The second-place bidder is currently contacting suppliers to see if it could complete the work for the $1.3 billion it bid last year. The proposed water treatment plant would filter the 10% of New York's water......

There may be March Madness in the air, but East Village Idiot has the cure for New Yorkers who can't get behind the NCAA: March Radness, which take 64 disparate NYC moments/ people/ objects/ stores/ trends/ nonsense and sees who will reign supreme. Some key matchups are:Bloomberg Region - The U.E.S Crowd (seeded 7) vs. The B&T Crowd (10) - Trans Fat (1) vs. Rats at Taco Bell (16) Isiah Region - The Knicks......

Yesterday, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that the State will sue ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Keyspan and Phelps Dodge over a 17-million-gallon oil spill in Newtown Creek that has spread underneath Greenpoint over 100 acres. The spill was detected in 1978, when a Coast Guard pilot noticed an oil plume; oil seeped underground from ExxonMobil refinery and storage operations since the 1950s. Attorney General Cuomo said:This is one of the worst environmental disasters in the......

Despite winter being upon us, the hipsters of New York took to the streets yesterday with strange, creative outfits and shopping carts in this year's Idiotarod. What's the Idiotarod, you ask? It's like the annual Iditarod from Nome to Anchorage except with teams of human idiots replacing dogs. Some of the more creative costumes we noticed: Wonderwoman, the Noid (think Domino's Pizza campaign), the McDonald's mascots, the Cosbys, Ghostbusters with the Stay Puft Marshmallow......

Bundle up: Arctic air is coming in and it'll be very cold tonight - WABC 7 says "by midnight it will be 18 degrees with a wind chill of zero degrees" - and tomorrow Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: airplane emergency at JFK, a stolen armored car in Queens, and a bank robbery in Midtown. Has Exxon been dumping "100 million gallons of partially treated ground water - water laced with the known carcinogen......

Earlier this year, State Comptroller Alan Hevesi asked that the Department of Environmental Conservation not negotiate a settlement agreement with ExxonMobil about a 1978 oil spill of 17 million gallons (bigger than the Valdez spill) off Newtown Creek. And now, tests that the DEC performed show there are "elevated levels of the carcinogen benzene and the potentially combustible gas methane in the soil". Oh, dear. There will be a public hearing to discuss the new......

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......

Last night we were doing the usual: wandering around looking for one-story buildings for our amateur photography project. Sadly, we chose to hunt for our prey in the West Village, which has a dearth of short structures. If only we had consulted Property Shark before setting out! If you select their "stories on lot" overlay, it tells you how tall each building is-- and two seconds of inspection shows the lowest neighborhoods are Red......

Thanks to everyone who sent us the link to this Times Online article about global warning-- you guys just luuuurve freaking us the buck out: DOZENS of the world’s cities, including London and New York, could be flooded by the end of the century, according to research which suggests that global warming will increase sea levels more rapidly than was previously thought... The first study to combine computer models of rising temperatures with records......