Museum Guard, by Atomische at flickrToday on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bank robbery on Amboy Rd. in Staten Island, another bank robbery on 5th Ave. in Manhattan, and a scaffolding collapse on Grand Concourse and 149th St. in the Bronx. A building slated for destruction on Governors Island will become a lab for the FDNY to examine the dynamics of high-rise fires and how best to defeat them. Fire crews from cities around the......

The police have released a sketch of the suspect who attacked and robbed a man of $149,000 in cash on West 56th Street on Friday. The incident, which occurred around 2PM, scared Midtown pedestrians as a shot was fired. But in spite of the number of witnesses, the suspect got away. The victim, 50-year-old Seton Ijams, had withdrawn the money from a Chase bank on Sixth Avenue and West 56th Street. According to the Daily......

A 30-year-old man lost his life last night after locking himself out of his apartment. Sometime between 8:15 p.m. and 8:40 p.m., Paul Reilly fell five stories, landing on his back in the courtyard behind the building where he lived on 65th St. and 1st Ave. in Manhattan. Reilly, who had apparently gained entrance to the building but was locked out of his apartment, attempted to climb out a hallway window, over to a window......

A psychologist was slashed to death in her office building at 79th Street and York last night. Another therapist was seriously injured; the suspect is still at large. Police believe that Dr. Kathryn Faughey was killed by a patient during a 9PM session. Dr. Kent Shinback, a colleague in the same practice, ran into Faughey's office when he heard her screaming and tried to stop the patient, but he was, per the Daily News, "slashed......

A doctor who practices in NJ with admitting privileges at New York Presbyterian Hospital. His 94-year-old mother. Her $832,453 savings. And a wall collapse in Upper Manhattan. In a case Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau called "a mini-Astor case," Dr. Robin Motz was accused of stealing his mother's savings since 2003. Motz, who pleaded not guilty to grand larceny and money laundering, assumed power of attorney for his mother, Minnie Motz, a retired librarian. According to......

A 38-year-old construction worker from Brooklyn is suing New York Presbyterian Hospital for giving him more medical attention than he cared for, and then having him arrested. Brian Persaud went to the ER at NY Presbyterian after a plank hit him on the head at a work site, causing a head laceration that required eight stitches. Although Persaud walked into the ER and was fully mobile, doctors told him that he should get an anal......

After posthumously leaving $12 million to her dog, Leona Helmsley is ready to spread the wealth with humans through her own charitable trust (created in 1999). Yesterday Christie's announced they would be auctioning off paintings, sculptures, furniture and other property from the late real estate mogul's numerous homes. Spokesman Rik Pike stated that each auction will take place this year, and "the collection reflects a sophisticated taste and a wonderful sense of style across a......

The two men who fell more than 40 stories, when the window washing rig they had just stepped onto collapsed, were brothers. Edgar and Alcides Moreno were Ecuadorians who had come to the U.S. and lived in Linden, NJ. They worked for City Wide Window Cleaning and were regular fixtures at the Solow Tower Apartments building on East 66th St. The brothers were just starting work yesterday morning when they may have stepped on to......

An Upper East Side lingerie shop was robbed yesterday by a man posing as a vacuum cleaner salesman. In what the New York Post describes as a "Panty Raid," a black man in his 40s or 50s was let into Lingerie & Company on 3rd Ave. and 71st St., where he bound the 77-year-old clerk in the back room and robbed the store of cash and merchandise. The Daily News writes that the "Park Ave.......

The health scare of the season continued this week with news of an outbreak of the methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) "superbug" at an Upper East Side hospital's children's ward. The New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center said that nine infants were infected with the drug-resistant strain of bacteria that killed a New York 7th Grader last month. Omar Rivera Jr. was felled by the staph infection on October 14th after being misdiagnosed at Kings County......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting at West 138th St. and Broadway in Manhattan, a triple shooting on Hunter Ave. in the Bronx, and a bomb threat at the intersection of Prospect and 5th Aves. in Brooklyn. Residents of Starrett City received a letter from the housing complex's owners that they intend to opt out of the state's subsidized housing program. One third of the 6,000 apartments at Starrett City are subsidized and......

All four of the local papers devote attention to the Detusche Bank building fire, which took place 8 days ago and took the lives of two firefighters. Here's a roundup:Newsday reports that state politicians suggest hiring retired firefighters to inspect buildings for things like "poor sprinklers, blocked doorways and malfunctioning standpipes." The Deutsche Bank building's standpipe had a 20-foot piece missing, and the FDNY had not kept up with inspections to the under-demolition building......

The city continued clean-up at the site of Wednesday's Midtown steam pipe explosion at East 41st and Lexington Avenue. Vanderbilt Avenue has been reopened, and Third Avenue was scheduled to be reopened today. Clean up of 42nd Street between Third and Park should be done by Monday, while clean up of Lexington between 42nd and 43rd should be done by the end of the weekend. Here's what the city said about the asbestos samples:The......

Her name known worldwide, Liz Claiborne has died at the age of 78. The designer had a rare form of cancer affecting the abdominal lining, complications of which put her in the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where she died Tuesday. Born in Brussels, she ended up in New York as her family was driving through Manhattan (after Claiborne had already gotten a taste for design by winning a contest) when she told them she was staying.......

Early yesterday morning, 12-year-old honors student Kirsys Rodriguez was shot in the lower back when a fight broke out in the Fordham section of the Bronx. The Daily News reports "rival gangs of Dominicans and African-Americans started arguing" during a party, and the fight spilled out to the street. At least 20 men were "facing off over accusations someone had stolen the $200 cell phone." One of the men started firing a gun, and Kirsys......

When the police arrived at a Cambria Heights house 13 minutes after receiving a 911 call from a distressed woman, they found four dead bodies. Twenty-year-old Jimmie Dawkins shot his mother, her boyfriend, and the boyfriend's health care aide before shooting himself. The police say that hospital worker Sonia Taylor called 911 at 11:38AM, fearing for her life when her son arrived. She told the operator, "A terrible thing is going to happen." But Dawkins......

Babies who just can't wait to become born and bred New Yorkers are being delivered more and more frequently by cesarean section these days, reports the Daily News. C-sections are most common at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Columbia, where almost 40% of all births are via the scalpel. Other hospitals with high rates include St. Vincent's in Staten Island, Cornell on the Upper East side, and Flushing Hospital in Queens. About 28% of all city......

Lots of news out of the Shake Shack today. First, the "Z" in the "Frozen" sign collapsed, nearly killing a man, and then they announced that the Shack will be closing its doors for winter on December 1. These pictures from the Ron Mueck show at the Brooklyn Museum are freaky! Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a Hazmat condition with victims on Warren Street in Brooklyn, an aircraft emergency at JFK, and a fire......

Iin yet another story of a con artist duping an elderly person, an 81 year old astronomer was bilked by a 31 year old scammer out of over $200,000. The fact that Joseph Gossner is a prominent city philanthropist lands him on the cover of the Daily News - he was taken in by Janet Costello, who told him she suffered from breast cancer and needed money to pay the bills, but actually used the......

A surveillance camera in a Long Island City apartment building stairwell shows a man staring at a knife - most likely after he attacked a Chinese food delivery man. Police say the suspect called in a food order from a payphone to be delivered to 35-20 21st Street in LIC. The suspect let the deliveryman into the building, and after arriving on the fourth floor, he stabbed the deliveryman in the chest and back multiple......

And you thought they spent all of their time ranking the colleges you just had to go to and then spent the next 4 years doing everything but studying and now remember nothing. But the folks at U.S. News and World Report also like to make cute little lists of other things - and this time its hospitals! This week the magazine named 7 New York City hospitals in several Top 10 lists in its......

It's getting a little easier to be green these days. There are ten new greenmarkets opening around the city, spreading around the summer bounty of fresh produce. One of the city's goals in creating the new markets is to make seasonal produce more accessible to low-income city residents. To this end, many of the greenmarkets will take senior coupons, WIC coupons, and EBT cards. The new Greenmarket locations, hours of operation and opening dates......

As the weather gets better, we see more and more people jogging, bicycling, and rollerblading through the City streets. And when we see these same people coupled with an iPod, we just cringe and hope that Rocky soundtrack doesn’t distract from the yellow cab bearing down on them. But as it turns out, street athletes might want to be more careful with what comes out of the cab rather than the cab itself. Despite the......

Eager to show New York - and the nation - that he can still get up around, Governor Pataki "crashed" a press conference that his doctors held today at New York Presbyterian Hospital uptown. The 2008 presidential hopeful said, "Rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated." Oh, darn... wait, did we say that aloud? A big reason why Pataki appeared on TV was to allay his mother's fears who has probably been reading between the......

Well, that's just our working theory as Governor Pataki is sulking in his hospital room for yet another day. Doctors say that they are just monitoring his condition, to be sure an abscess doesn't form, but Gothamist's conspiracy think tank believes that New York Presbyterian Hospital is working with people who believe Albany and the governor have been shortchanging New Yorkers (in education, for starters). The NY Times suggests that NYPH hasn't been issuing as......

While Governor Pataki might not care about the state of NYC's public schools - or NYC, he sure does like its hospitals: He headed to NY Presbyterian Hospital yesterday for a second surgery to clear an intestinal blockage that was preventing him from, um, being regular. This sent the local news media looking for a crash course in GI medicine, in search of new ways to obliquely refer to bowel movements but still make sure......

Yesterday we mentioned that Governor Pataki was having, er, difficulties after his appendectomy last week. We just wanted to share with the Governor's staff a new study from the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital in California. Apparently chewing gum after intestinal surgery can help get one's bowels moving and can get them home from the hospital sooner. After any abdominal surgery, especially one in which the bowels are disturbed, the intestines can slow down or simply......

Gersh Kuntzman and Marc Dinkin, Creators of SUV: The Musical!...

After the suspicious deaths of two patients from Legionnaire's disease at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (neither patient was hospitalized for Legionnaire's), it turns out that the hospital had been trying to treat its water pipes and the possibility of Legionnaire's outbreaks in them since last year. The Daily News "obtained state records" that showed Columbia Presbyterian only told a few hospital employees about the Legionnaire's possibility. The disease can further worsen people with compromised immune systems,......

Columbia Presbyterian Hospital enjoys one of the best reputations in the country. So, when you hear that a man died of Legionnaire's disease while being treated there, you're perturbed. Especially since the Legionnaire's outbreak was apparently in the hospital's water supply, and the patient had water sprayed into his throat for sleep apnea. Since Legionnaire's can be especially harmful to people who had weak immune systems, having Legionnaire's bacteria in a hospital is very bad.......