Well, this is a curious problem for FedEx's tracking system. How do you track your valuable packages when the truck carrying them has been stolen!?! A FedEx express truck was stopped on Manhattan's west side this morning by gun-wielding carjackers, who made off with the 18-wheeler. The driver was forced into a car and found in Brooklyn at around 1:30 a.m. A FedEx spokesman said the driver, who is not a suspect, was uninjured. The......

The Independent Budget Office released a report examining who might be affected by congestion pricing. The report, "Behind the Wheel: Who Drives Into The Proposed 'Congestion Zone'" can be read here (PDF) but the topline is that drivers are middle-class and over half are from Nassau County, Westchester, NJ, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. The report states, "Looking at the extremes of the earnings distribution for all congestion zone commuters, motor vehicle users were less likely......

The sewer main break that brought 15-20 feet of water to 90 West Street's basement garage now means its residents will be homeless for at least two weeks. Electricity and other utilities to the building were turned off and it was thought things would be fixed in 2-3 days, but building management told residents that the "central electrical distribution room" was so damaged that it needs to be "entirely replaced." One resident walked up 20......

Yesterday morning's rain caused a recently installed sewer main to burst, flooding the basement and parking garage of a Battery Park City luxury apartment building. Water levels reached up to 20 feet. Not only were car owners greeted with news that their vehicles were either submerged or floating on top of sewer water, hundreds of tenants at 90 West Street were evacuated. Fire officials explained that, per WNBC, "rain flooded a re-routed sewer pipe,......

On December 1, 2006 around 9:30PM, 22-year-old Eric Ng was biking north on bike path by the West Side Highway. Around the same time, 27-year-old Eugene Cidron, leaving a party at Chelsea Piers in his BMW, mistook the bike path for the actual highway, drove south on the bike path and fatally struck Ng near West Street - at least a mile from Chelsea Piers. Ng was hit so hard that his bicycle and shoe......

When some Con Ed workers at Ground Zero found some human remains in a manhole last October, the city promised it would expand the search for remains (especially since it was revealed that the initial search for remains was more of a rush job). Now the city says that it will search under two more spots: West Street, in front of the World Financial Center, and Cedar Street, between Washington and West Streets. Deputy Mayor......

We've heard of people taking up residence in commercial spaces all around the city, so hearing about NYU students living in an office space doesn't come as much of a surprise. The Times reports on some desperate measures being taken in order to live in this city. Students on tight budgets find it especially tough to find housing. Last fall, Kate Harvey, a part-time nanny and a junior at N.Y.U., and eight friends saved on......

In yet another sign that the state and city government want big business at the redeveloping area near the World Trade Center, the NY Times reports that JPMorgan Chase is "in negotiations...to build a 1.3 million-square foot skyscraper." And not only would thousands of employees move from Midtown (277 Park Ave.; the bank would keep 270 Park), the skyscraper would be at 130 Liberty St. - where the toxic Deutsche Building is being dismantled.Chase wants......

The city has announced that parts of West Street will be closed so searchers can look for remains from the World Trade Center attacks. Last October, Con Ed workers excavating a manhole found human remains, leading to renewed searches which have since yielded over 400 bone fragments. According to the NY Times, a memo Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler sent to Mayor Bloomberg noted that closing West Street was necessary so workers could excavate recently discovered......

It's on! This year's Idiotarod, sponsored by Carts of Brooklyn, started in Brooklyn, and the craziness was on. Our report from the field: Race start relocated from Williamsburg to Greenpoint... Clay and Franklin. Huge police presence... Helicopters. Race will proceed... Cops say anyone off sidewalk is getting arrested. No second warning. Dozens of teams... Hundreds of people in costume. First checkpoint is on Creenpoint Ave at West Street... Update 1: On pulaski bridge... Pretty......

The controversial proposal to turn the UPS lot on Spring Street and West Street into a place for 106 Sanitation trucks may align Donald Trump with critics of his planned Trump Soho Hotel. The Donald takes a break from blabbing about ladies of The View and tells the Post, "I don't like trucks, the fumes, the traffic from the standpoint of the community... If the community wanted help, I would certainly help." Still the Trump......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a 10-75 on Chambers and West Street, a pedestrian struck on East 18th and Park, and a burn victim at JFK. Talk about a hard luck case: "A homeless man who threatened a tenant in a Brooklyn apartment building where he was smoking crack had his leg amputated after the resident attacked him with a machete, cops said yesterday." The Brooklyn Papers changed their name (to The Brooklyn Paper--......

After over 200 hundred bone fragments have been found in recent searches for remains at the World Trade Center site, Mayor Bloomberg is expanding the search considerably. Here's the Mayor's press release about a report from the Despartment of Design and Construction:Although the report finds that the vast majority of the site had been thoroughly searched and is free of human remains, it recommends the continued excavations on the haul road where remains have been......

- A study in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine shows that the lungs first responders to the September 11 attacks had the equivalent of 12 years of aging. The study continues to bolster constant claims that the World Trade Center's toxic dust had a deleterious effect on firefighters. amNew York reports the president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association as saying the city needs to help September 11's first responders: "There......

ART OPENING: The Martinez Gallery presents SELF-PORTRAIT an exhibition that "puts the artists behind the graffiti movement on display, challenging stereotypes about both the form and its practitioners. This collective self-portrait, which includes the work of twelve contemporary graffiti writers, exposes a history that the institutional art world and politicians, ignore and even censor." Featuring CASE 2, COCO 144, GIZ, JA, KEZ 5, LES, NATO, NOXER, RATE, SKUF, TRACY 168 and VFR. - Jason Laning......

A cab carrying a group of friends early Sunday morning crashed into a building, causing one passenger to be thrown from the car and then fatally hit by an oncoming cab. The accident claimed the life of Danielle Ricco, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, as the cab headed south on the West Side Highway. The cab's other passengers claim the driver, Hassan Afzal, was trying to scare them by driving quickly, after......

Seems the graffiti discussion we spotted in Williamsburg in March was just the tip of the iceberg. We spotted this door on West Street in Greenpoint yesterday, and it looks like it picks up where the last piece left off. Don't these people know about Williamsboard?......

Joe wrote in to remind us that the massive Greenpoint Terminal Market was one month ago today. He also pointed out this massive gallery of GTM pictures from the intrepid explorers at LTVsquad . Related: lots of people have been taking pictures of the ruins and leftover piles of clothes on the GTM lot. We were down on West Street in Greenpoint yesterday, and the whole block was starting to stink of mold. Yum!......

Yesterday we bicycled into Brooklyn with JCN to get some pictures of the rubble left over from the Greenpoint Terminal Market fire. The police still have a few blocks of West Street closed off, but a furniture store in one of the remaining buildings was open for a "fire sale." We walked into the store and out the back, and snapped a bunch of pictures of the ruins. You can see the whole set......

Insky on Flickr put up a nice shot of the ruins of the Greenpoint Terminal Fire-- you can check out the full set here. These are the first aftermath shots that really show the scope of the damage-- the landscape on West Street is radically different than it was at this time last week. [Related: the Post has a good article about the mechanics of fighting the fire-- apparently if the wind hadn't been......

A five-alarm fire at the abandoned Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse/Market is being fought this morning in dramatic fashion: News choppers show that the FDNY's marine units are at work - the warehouse occupie a 200' by 600' lot along the East River. (WNBC's Vivian Lee, on location, said the fire was making it feel like a 100 degree day even 50 yards away.) Last year, Tien visited the terminal market last year and found a......

There's an interesting article in the Village Voice about downtown residents unhappy with all the Town Cars in the neighborhood. The cars wait for employees at investment banks and the like, and Community Board 1 passed a resolution forcing Goldman Sachs, which is building a new skyscraper on West Street, to "minimize the impact of black cars" to the area. An agreement was reached (GS will keep its cars in a garage until they are......

One of our favorite historians is Howard Zinn. Alongside our copy of A People's History of the United States is Zinn's play "Marx in Soho". The play portrays the return of Marx a century after his death. Stuck in an afterlife where intellectuals, artists, and radicals are sent (sounds awesome!) Marx is given permission to return to Soho London to have his say. A bureaucratic mix-up sends him to Soho in New York, where he......

A woman was arrested after she stole a flatbed truck and then led the police on a chase throughout downtown Manhattan. When a sanitation truck called the police about a hit and run at 3AM, police went into pursuit mode for 30 minutes, chasing the runaway flatbed truck on "West Street through the streets of Greenwich Village and back south on Greenwich Street until [the driver] was finally stopped at the corner of State and......

The sad Jets host the disappointing Raiders, Sunday at 1 p.m. in East Rutherford. With former Giants QB Kerry Collins struggling, Oakland looks to start the physical Marques Tuiasosopo, who hasn't even taken a snap in game action this season. On another football note, this is Heisman Trophy weekend, and while the award will be bestowed Saturday night on ESPN from the Nokia Theatre for the first time, tonight marks the annual tradition of the......

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has posted an animated video of what the deconstruction of the Deutsche Bank at 130 Liberty Street will look like. It won't be demolished; rather, it will be carefully "detoxified and disassembled" because it is still extremely contaminated after September 11, 2001. The video is very cool (once you get past why it has to be deconstructed), showing that scaffolding will go up for crews to clean the building and......

There was a NY Times City section about the almost $30 million Houston Street construction project that will start this August and last for many, many years, from West Street to the Bowery. From the jawdropping scope of the project to the not-incidental project cost, Gothamist's first thought was "Wait, you mean the construction already on Houston isn't associated with this project?" Our second thought was, "No, not the part of Houston west of Broadway!......

The U.S. Department of Transportation is giving New York and New Jersey $899 million for transit projects at the World Trade Center. The bulk of the money, $478 million, will go to an underground screening center that "would be the security conduit for all vehicles entering the ramps, roadways, loading docks and parking areas serving the new trade center buildings." Hey, that means 12 years after the first World Trade Center bombing, the government is......

There's some scintillating High Line news: The New York Times reports that Dia Art will move its galleries from Chelsea to the entrance of the High Line at Washington and Gansevoort Streets: The city owns 820 Washington Street and is supporting Dia's proposed museum, which must go through a public review and be approved by the city. Plans call for possibly demolishing the existing structure, an old meatpacking facility now in disrepair, and building a......

A Citigroup-employed reader send us the latest security memo from Citigroup and writes, "As if dozens of gun-toting NYPD cops werent enough...now we ave to put up with dog searches as well....all those investment bankers are going to have to leave their stashes at home." The dilemma of being able to nail that deal and act like a jerk while high as a kite or getting arrested for drug possession - tough one. Check out......