It'll be another two years or so before the general public will be invited to gaze upon the unparalleled panoramas of New York City from the observation deck at One World Trade Center, but today, a lucky few got to be the first to visit the quarter-mile-high "room with a view" known as One World Observatory.
Fans of Biggie will remember that the late but relentlessly beloved rap icon often remarked on his hardscrabble younger years in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he grew up in an apartment with a single mother. Now, 41 years after Christopher Wallace was born, and 16 years after he was murdered, the Notorious BIG's childhood home is up for sale. But things, it would appear, "done changed" since Biggie lived there.
Ever since the New York City Police Department initiated its reviled stop-and-frisk technique, the force's laughable refrain has been that its officers are not engaging in racial profiling. It may not look like racial profiling to Mayor Michael Bloomberg or NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, who oversee stop and frisk, but to the millions of blacks and Latinos harassed by the NYPD over the years it is a blatant campaign against dark skin.
Early Tuesday evening, a teenager celebrating his 18th birthday was hit and killed by subway train on Manhattan's Upper West Side as he and his two friends attempted to cross the tracks. One friend made it across while the other still hadn't left the other platform. According to the New York Daily News, both surviving teens saw the train hit their friend, their knees buckling at the sight.
Kimani Gray, the 16-year-old who was killed in Brooklyn on Saturday night by two plainclothes police officers, was shot seven times: four in the front, three in the back. An autopsy report from the Chief Medical Examiner didn't say which bullets hit first, or which killed Gray; it's unclear, therefore, whether he was shot while facing the officers—as they claim—and then turned, or was first shot while his back was turned to them.
Mayor Bloomberg believes that the reason behind New York City's staggering rise in homelessness is not because of the city's high unemployment or incredible inequality, but rather people (who would be in an income bracket very much like the mayor's) who take limos and private jets on their way to the homeless shelter.
New York City's ban on the sale of sugary drinks goes into effect on Tuesday, and The New York Times would have you believe "coffee drinkers... are likely to face a thicket of complications." This is wrong. Coffee drinkers—people who drink actual coffee in appropriate amounts—will be fine. Others—people who drink enormous buckets of caffeinated syrup—are likely to be inconvenienced.
The idea of drones over New York City have inspired art projects and a rap song. Now they may be a reality too. The FAA is investigating a report from an Alitalia passenger jet of a drone spotting over Brooklyn, as he approached JFK airport in Queens. "We saw a drone, ad drone aircraft," the pilot told controllers, according to audio played on Good Morning America, below.
Like a pioneer frontiersman, award-winning blogger Andrew Sullivan struck out last year from the civilized climes of Washington D.C. to settle amidst the ill-mannered squalor of New York City. Unsurprisingly for a man used to the refined urban atmosphere of our nation's capital, Sullivan has found himself repeatedly disappointed—in the manners of his fellow city dwellers, in the city's response to Hurricane Sandy, in his cell-phone reception, in Best Buy, in UPS, in the delivery service that brought his couch, and, perhaps worst of all, in the water temperature at the offices of the Daily Beast. And yet his travails continue. In a searing dispatch today, Sullivan addresses the latest New York City failing to try his patience and test his faith: his new home's barbershop infrastructure.
Despite this winter actually acting wintry and cold, NYC homeless shelters have been turning away homeless families on freezing nights if they cannot prove they have nowhere else to go, the Daily News is reporting. Turning homeless individuals and families away has long been a practice of New York City's Department of Homeless Services, which relentlessly insists that you must stay with a relative or at some prior living arrangement if it is still available to you, leaving many homeless no choice but to sleep on the street rather than return to a bad living situation.
Mayor Bloomberg gave his thirteenth and final State of the City address this afternoon and the city did not get stingy with the theatrics. The event was kickstarted by both dancing adults and dancing children as the mayor himself walked in to some flashy song about New York featuring Jay-Z. The speech itself was forgettable (something about styrofoam, something about weed, and something about clean air), but when it comes down to it, would you rather be remembered for your policies or your jokes about Beyonce?
After two gay men were found strangled in Queens within one week of each other, a City Council member is warning members of the LGBT community that a killer may be targeting them.
The experts said it would all be OK. They told us there would be no rat invasion of New York City after Superstorm Sandy. The scientists swore to us that the rats would not flow from their underground burrows in a squirming tidal wave of horror, fleeing the rising waters.
Have you made plans for this weekend that include traveling outside of your house for even the briefest moment? Cancel them! Or maybe make more of them? The Northeast is about to get walloped or tenderly caressed with either a couple inches or a couple feet of snow.
When former mayor Ed Koch died early yesterday morning, the accolades were quick to descend: he was a "a great man," who "did good," ebulliently pulling his city out of the worst financial disaster it had ever faced. Still, his incredibly long tenure also coincided with both the crack and AIDS epidemic, the latter of which, activist and documentarian David France writes in a piece for New York, he turned a blind eye to:
Ed Koch, who died this morning at 88, was the the only mayor New York City had during its legendarily gritty 1980s, and while his death comes far too late to be the end of an era, it serves as another reminder of how different the city was during his tenure.
