In a Friday review of the 1933 original production of King Kong, The New York Sun's film critic Bruce Bennett wonders why the low-tech original continues to hold up so well after 75 years, especially in comparison to higher-tech remakes. "How, then, does a puppet made from rabbit fur, a rubber ball, and some socket joints, painstakingly animated frame-by-frame during the depths of the Great Depression, ably kick the motion-capture behemoth of Mr. Jackson's modern edition to film history's curb?" more ›

An effort to get more fresh fruit and vegetables into the hands of poorer and allegedly under-served communities is being fought today by bodega and supermarket owners, who feel that a proposed 1,500 new street vendor licenses will cut into their business. Backers of the new licenses include City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Mayor Bloomberg, who cooperated in introducing the "Green Cart" plan, which will issue licenses to vendors who commit to serving fresh fruit and vegetables in poorer communities. more ›

Less than two weeks after Gov. Spitzer publicly reaffirmed his commitment to going forward with plans to construct Moynihan Station despite a $1 billion funding shortfall, it looks like the matter may be out of his hands. The New York Times is reporting that the whole $14 billion project, which would involve building Moynihan Station at The Farley Post Office building and constructing a new Madison Square Garden on the site, is on the brink of total failure. more ›

James Maietta probably wishes that he lived in an elevator building; especially after firefighters accidentally dropped him down a flight of stairs in November 2006. The 15-foot fall left Maietta crippled and confined to a Yonkers nursing home for a year. Now the man is suing the FDNY. more ›

Frank Bruni, the Times’s top restaurant critic, awards the new 2nd Avenue Deli one star today, which isn’t bad considering it is, despite all the history, still a deli. We popped in there for food and photos just before it reopened at its East 33rd Street location and found the sandwiches (pictured) as monumental as ever; a second visit turned up no sign of the free bowl of gribenes (chicken skin fried in chicken fat) that the owner Jeremy Lebewohl had promised free at every table. more ›

Super Tuesday is supposed to be a decisive catalyst in the presidential campaigns. It may wind up raising more questions than ever, especially with Mayor Bloomberg (not officially) entertaining a run towards 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. more ›

With Mayor Bloomberg up in Albany deriding Gov. Spitzer for bilking the city out of $500 million in promised funding, it's no wonder that the perennial call for secession has arisen. more ›

We were encouraged to hear a statue would be unveiled in Central Park memorializing the racehorse Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner who remained undefeated in all of his races before tragically breaking a leg in the Preakness Stakes (video). more ›

Even while targeted in the Troopergate scandal, State Senate leader Joseph Bruno was living in high style. The New York Sun is reporting that Bruno enjoyed a 3,500 square foot, two-story penthouse suite at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, just weeks before the legislature selected the hotel chain to construct a luxury hotel in Albany.

On November 30, the nine-member board of the Albany Convention Center Authority, which includes a member appointed by Mr. Bruno, voted to begin negotiations with Starwood Hotels and Resorts, of which Sheraton is a subsidiary, as operator of a 400-room hotel to be built in downtown Albany near the senate leader's district. more ›

Two sidewalk Christmas tree salesman are accusing the "company" they worked for last year of leaving them out in the cold on Christmas Eve, waiting for thousands of dollars in wages that never appeared. The yuletide stiffing apparently was in retribution for either 1) skimming sales revenue, or 2) talking publicly about the shadowy figure who allegedly is the kingpin of sidewalk Christmas trees. Last year, an experienced tree-seller and longtime employee of Kevin... more ›

A report released by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that foreign born immigrants living in New York are socioeconomically closer to the average citizen than elsewhere in the country. The study says that New York immigrants are more likely to be in the country legally, have health insurance and tend to be better educated. The New York Times reports that the states with the widest income gaps between immigrants and citizens are California, Texas,... more ›

Metro-North has announced a partnership with Enterprise that will likely appeal to anyone who's been gouged by New York City rental car companies. The New York Sun reports that Enterprise will soon have rental cars at 23 Metro North stations in five upstate counties: Westchester, Orange, Rockland, Dutchess, and Putnam. The program has the potential to encourage more budget-conscious New Yorkers to explore points north beyond the Metro North lines. It's not really much of... more ›

The New York Sun is reporting that the operator of the midtown Japanese restaurant Naniwa has been arrested for trying to bribe a city health inspector in order to avoid a summons. Kazuo Mitsuya allegedly tried to slip the inspector $200 to make the restaurant’s violations just go away. Presumably offended by the low sum offered, the inspector got on the horn with the Department of Investigations, who sent in an undercover officer posing as... more ›

After some City Council members were caught red-handed using public funds to distribute self-promoting ads to voters--even in election years, which is illegal--the council voted 48-1 in favor of banning the practice. The vote comes on the heels of the release of a report [pdf file] by Citizens Union that showed elected officials spent $1 million in paid advertising singing their own praises during the last five years. According to The New York Sun, city... more ›

Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’s latest big-budget musical theater beast – rumored to cost over $16 million – has finally slouched toward Broadway to be born. It opened last night at the Hilton Theater; this morning the Times’s Ben Brantley shuffled out of the delivery room to tell us all about the freak of nature Brooks delivered. Proud ticket buyers who shelled out the record-setting $450 for “premier seats” are probably going to want to put... more ›

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 space. more ›

H. Dale Hemmerdinger, Gov. Spitzer's nominee to replace Peter Kalikow as chairman of the MTA, relinquished his membership in the Harmonie Club, a private social club that some accused of excluding minorities. The club has a membership of 1,100 and none of them are minorities. Mayor Bloomberg is a former member, but he also resigned when the club's complexion came under scrutiny. more ›

Are disputes between dry cleaners and their customers a new source of income for lawyers? The owner of an Upper East Side drycleaning business is suing a man for papering the neighborhood around his store with fliers that impeach the quality of his service. Todd Ofsink owns Todd Layne Cleaners on East 77th St. and is suing Evan Maloney for $100,000 for defamation. Maloney had some negative customer experiences at the store, so he set up a site called ToddLayneCleanersSucks.com and began posting fliers. more ›

(denny farrell, eliot spitzer, andrew cuomo, adriano espaillat, by azipaybarah at flickr) more ›

A memorial to thousands of people buried in downtown Manhattan will open to the public Friday at 1 p.m., and there will be a candlelight procession at 8 p.m. from Battery Park to the monument at Duane and Elk Sts. The African Burial Ground National Monument is set to open 16 years after construction workers discovered human remains while doing foundation work on a downtown federal building. more ›

With September at a near close, we hereby pronounce it the month of 40 Bond. While stories on hotelier Ian Schrager's second foray into residential development started appearing in 2006, interest ratcheted up this month with a slew of closings (Ricky Martin's moving in). Then this week, NY Magazine and The New York Sun devoted even more ink to it. more ›

Governor Spitzer's plan to allow illegal residents of U.S. to get New York State drivers licenses by producing a valid foreign passport is generating widespread opposition. More than 80% of New York's DMV offices are supervised by county clerks and The New York Times reports that many oppose Spitzer's license plan and will resist processing applications that don't include proof of legal residence. Clerks in NYC, Westchester, and Long Island are agents of New York State, and have little autonomy to resist Spitzer's wishes, but the county clerk in Rensselaer County near Albany told the Times he will simply refuse to comply, although he doesn't know the ramifications of butting heads with the governor. more ›

Mayor Bloomberg is back from London, just in time to deliver an address at Cooper Union while the world's media is milling about NYC for the U.N.'s General Assembly. Bloomberg will be appearing as part of a panel near Astor Place to discuss national policy matters. According to The New York Sun, an online site is attracting a growing number of supporters to draft Mayor Bloomberg as a third party candidate in the 2008 Presidential election. Bloomberg resigned from the Republican Party in June, ending a five-year affiliation that allowed him to win consecutive elections for mayoral office without slogging through a Democratic primary race. more ›

Cops seized 160,000 pairs of counterfeit Nike shoes from six locations in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island after conducting a multi-year investigation to disrupt pirated merchandise. The New York Sun reports that it was one of the largest busts of counterfeit goods in US history and one of four recent successful operations that targeted purveyors of fake Microsoft, Motorola, and Nike products. The haul of bogus shoes was reportedly worth $7.1 million. more ›

Just a day after it was announced that Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, could be returning to speak at Columbia University, the Columbia Political Union voted against having him back when it learned that there would be no counter-point speaker. Gilchrist's 2006 appearance at Columbia sparked protests that got out of hand as demonstrators rushed the stage where he was speaking and participants got physical. Eight students were disciplined following the altercation. more ›

The Brooklyn judge presiding over the case of Darryl Littlejohn, the suspected murderer of John Jay graduate student Imette St. Guillen, wants the trial to start as early as next January, even as Littlejohn is facing unrelated charges of kidnapping in a Queens courtroom. Judge Cheryl Chambers ordered another pretrial hearing for October 11 and wants both the defense and prosecution to come to a mutually agreeable date upon which they can get the murder trial moving. more ›

Elected officials, including U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler, are speaking out against the proposed expansion of Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus, directly south of the performing arts complex. The school wants to add 1.5 million square feet of building space to the midtown campus, which includes an undergraduate college and its law school, between Columbus and Amsterdam Aves., nearly tripling the complex's size from the current 800,000 square feet. Fordam gets to avoid complicated issues of eminent domain and displacing current residents, since it already owns all the property that it would like to build on. more ›

A bill before the City Council would limit the hours Dept. of Sanitation agents can issue building owners tickets for having trash on their yards or the sidewalk in front of buildings. Brooklyn councilman Simcha Felder introduced a bill limiting the hours that DOS enforcement agents can ticket New Yorkers for having litter in front of their property, claiming that it is unfair to penalize property owners for litter that appears when they are away from home and unable to collect and dispose of it. The New York Sun quotes Felder saying "The purpose is to finally rein in the ticketing blitz that takes place with sanitation enforcement." more ›

As it is the week before Labor Day, many area schools are welcoming a new class of students to New York in what is generally known as an orientation week. The New York Sun reports on various efforts schools put into shepherding thousands of 18-year-olds into NYC.

First-year students arriving at Barnard, Columbia, and New York University have many activities to choose from this week, including: yoga classes, exclusive tours of the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, chartered Circle Line cruises to the Statue of Liberty, mini-manicures and aromatherapy at on-campus spas, Coney Island beach parties, scavenger hunts in Times Square, walking tours of the East Village and Park Slope, shopping expeditions to SoHo, outings to popular local eateries such as Magnolia Bakery, and a chance to compete for free tickets and reservations to the city's hottest shows and hard-to-get-into restaurants.

Buddhists looking to increase their spiritual merit by rescuing soup-bound turtles, those turtles' rescuers, and the natural ecosystem of Central Park are all coming into conflict in New York. The New York Sun reported yesterday on the practice of fangsheng, which is a Buddhist practice dating back to the 6th century and involves setting turtles or other animals free and supposedly improves the circumstances of one's rebirth. Unfortunately, the species of turtle most frequently purchased in Chinatown and then released in the East River by Buddhists is the red-eared slider, a type of turtle not fit for survival in the briney New York harbor. more ›