This morning, the reservation line for for this year's Open House New York weekend on October 15-16 opened for business (complete with a new $5 booking fee). And, as some of you may have noticed, OHNY's website was a mess this morning—crashing, freezing and otherwise being totally useless, with many of the weekend's most popular sites "selling out" before people could even log on. Are we trying to tour a sewage treatment plant or score Radiohead tickets?! We spoke to OHNY officials about the snafu, and here's the latest: more ›

This past Sunday, the city rolled out select bus service on the M15 route, in which buses ideally zip along their own lanes and riders purchase tickets before getting on so as not to hold everyone up while fumbling for their MetroCards. Reviews weren't great, with people complaining about ticket machines running out of paper, buses running late, and MTA workers being generally unhelpful. And if you think that was bad, you might not want to read about what it was like on its weekday debut yesterday. It's pretty gruesome. more ›

Earlier today, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn sent out an email blast encouraging New Yorkers to donate relief supplies to help the people of Haiti. But someone in her office pulled a major boner and forwarded a letter Quinn previously sent in 2008, seeking help for Haiti's hurricane victims. Oh, fiddlesticks. Shortly thereafter, Quinn's office fired out a new letter, seeking help for victims of the current tragedy. more ›

A man who was wrongly jailed on Rikers Island for 17 months has accepted a $145,000 settlement with the city because a detective misidentified his fingerprints. Dwight Gomas was residing in Atlanta in 2004 when he was suddenly arrested by U.S. marshals for an armed robbery at a Howard Beach jewelry store. Detective Eileen Barrett had matched a partial finger print from the crime scene to Gomas, whose prints were on file after his only prior arrest as an adult: driving with a suspended license in Brooklyn. Gomas maintained his innocence before a grand jury, but was indicted and couldn't make bail. Languishing on Rikers, his Legal Aid lawyer urged him to accept a plea offer of five years in prison, but he refused. Luckily, veteran detective Daniel Perruzzaa finally conducted a routine review of the fingerprints. He tells the Daily News, "When I looked at it, I said, 'You know what? This is a screwup; this is not his fingerprints." Oopsy! Gomas was released after 523 days in jail, but by then his girlfriend and their child moved in with another man. On the plus side, he pulled in $145K in less than two years on Rikers, so we're sure there's no hard feelings. more ›