Results tagged “onmay”

Last year, Rebekah Johnson went on the lam after allegedly shooting the leader of a Staten Island commune. Over a year later, police found Johnson after she got off a train in Philadelphia yesterday morning. Johnson, who had dodged the authorities after the shooting, was tracked down after she "bought a car in Delaware using her real name, and opened a post office box in nearby Cherry Hill, N.J." per the Post. And the final tip came when a subway rider in Philadelphia recognized her from America's Most Wanted.

The High Bridge, the city’s oldest standing bridge, will get a $65 million face-lift over about two years beginning in 2008, said the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe.

Continue reading "More Parks, Pool & In City's Future"

On May 25, 2006, there was a power outage along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line, a heavily traveled route that stranded over a hundred trains from Amtrak, NJ Transit and other transit companies. Now, nine months later, Amtrak has revealed what went wrong - and it's a doozy. The NY Times reports:

A 4-year-old computer in Philadelphia failed to execute a single command given 36 hours earlier, after maintenance had been done on the evening of May 23, and then failed to alert human controllers that it had not followed instructions, according to an extensive investigation performed by outside experts. The effect was to limit the amount of power available in the system, leaving no margin during periods of peak demand.

Continue reading "2006 Amtrak Outage Blamed On 4-Year-Old Computer"

Ah, Cinco de Mayo. We finally learned the backstory this year. Apparently, several decades after Mexico gained independence from Spain, France sent 6,000 of its soldiers to invade Mexico in 1862. On May 5th of that year, 2,000 ill-equiped but passionate Mexican citizens defeated the French army. Every year, on May 5th, it has been traditional to honor those brave fighters by partaking in a night of music, tequila and authentic Mexican cuisine, and we are here to help you do so.

Gothamist once had big dreams of being a surfer and/or skateboarder (...seriously). Alas, we live too far away from a beach to wake up at 5am and check the local surf report (please note: taking the F train to surf was not a part of the dream)...so the closest we ever got was watching Kate Bosworth's breakout film Blue Crush.

While usually known for its annual swap with bread, Matza – the flat, unleavened bread of Passover, is inspiring downtown artists. The Matzo Files, an artist-run project on the Lower East Side, features “flat” files and thin boxes full of various types of art by over 200 New York artists. Originally located in the Streit's Matzo Factory, it allows a large number of artists to showcase their work at one time, as opposed to conventional galleries which hold only a few artists at a time. Gothamist checked out the Matzo Files gallery and was impressed by the wide range of art -- silkscreen prints, cartoons, photography -- you could just pick from a drawer and study (for some crazy reason, they trust the public).

On May 28th, the new Roland Emmerich film "The Day After Tomorrow" hits theaters, and it's already got NASA and NOAA talking. The film is the story of the new Ice Age. A paleoclimatologist (a scientist who studies the ways weather patterns changed in the past), tries to save the world from the effects of global warming... The plot focusses on New York, but the entire world is experiencing catastrophic hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, and floods while the temperature suddenly drops severely.

This story completely slipped by me when it happened. On May 3, early in the morning, New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain collapsed in a rock slide. This rock formation, immortalized on the New Hampshire quarter, was one of the state's most popular tourist attractions.