Did you know that there's an annual competition of NYC street performers to determine who gets the right to the lucrative spots in the subway system? There is, and you can listen to it here. These are the musicians you will feel the urge to assault in a few months. [Time]

A jury today acquitted that stockbroker who upended a fellow spin-class participant's stationary bike. Christopher Carter had gone after Stuart Sugarman for shouting "Yeah!" and "You go girl!" at the top of his lungs after the class instructor declined to intervene. The district attorney went after him for assault, which would have carried up to a year in prison, but jurors were sympathetic to Carter's plight. One told the Times: "I probably would have helped Carter with telling the instructor, 'Look at this guy. He's being a nuisance.'" Well, yes, but Sugarman spent two weeks in the hospital with neck injuries. What does it take to get Equinox gym to intervene in one of these classes? And, most importantly, is it really a safe place for so many of our alleged closeted gay celebrities? [Times] (Public domain photo via Wikipedia)

Tatum O'Neal, the child actress who won an Oscar at age 10 and then got heavily into drugs, booze, and self-destruction, was arrested last night for trying to buy coke not far from her Lower East Side apartment. Her situation is sad—she's struggled with serious addiction for a long time, but has reportedly been clean for two years. The second thing to be said, though, is: A veteran wealthy druggie was "spotted handing money to a street dealer," seriously? That method is far too gauche for the sophisticated cokehead.

One of the apartments destroyed in the crane collapse that killed four on Friday belonged to John Odermatt, the former commissioner of New York's Office of Emergency Management. In his old job, he was responsible for coordinating the city's response to 9/11 and the blackout. Below, a video tour of his ravaged domicile.

At least two people were killed when a construction crane collapsed on Manhattan's Upper East Side shortly after 8 a.m. this morning. In this clip—with breaking shots of what can only be described as carnage from the scene—a reporter explains the crane's unfortunate configuration: it was actually hanging all the way over the street below, like a "gondola." Its collapse damaged at least 18 floors of a nearby apartment building. This is the second major crane collapse in the city in as many months. Click to watch the clip.

Gothamist.com, the NYC news-about-town blog, today posted a straightforward item about a 19-year-old woman who was raped in her apartment building in Soho last night. They described the suspect: "a black man, about 5'8" and 200 pounds, with a possibly pockmarked face, and he may be between 20-30 years old." Now, we were under the impression that Gothamist's readers are mainly drawn from the broad hipster demographic. So either our impression is way off, or many hipsters are thinly-veiled racist fucks (somewhat true, actually). Because the comments quickly turned into a call to throw black men off buildings:

Last year, tabloids were abuzz with the story of a spinning class gone bad on the Upper East Side. One man was assaulted by another man, right in the middle of class. To be fair, the man who was assaulted—48-year-old Stuart Sugarman—is the type of guy who likes to shout out "you go girl!" and "great song!" during spinning class. A fellow spinner, irate at Stuart's unceasing exclamations, grabbed his bike and slammed him against the wall. Now the case has finally come to trial, and Sugarman took the stand yesterday, resulting in what is perhaps the finest exercise-related legal news story of the year:

At a new condo in the East Village in NYC, a volatile mix of summer weather, a rooftop pool, gays, hipsters, and wealthy young hedge fund yuppies conspired to form a party that resulted, predictably, in drinking, drugs, debauchery, and defecation. Disasters of this type never happened when all members of various disparate cultural groups stayed neatly separated from each other, in neighborhoods segmented by class, wealth, race, and sexual preference. A Curbed tipster gives a brief glimpse into this dangerous world in which ubiquitous money obliterates traditional social boundaries and brings together GayHipYups in search of intoxication:

So much racism news today! What else are non-Caucasians concerned about? Their massive erasure from the portrayal of New York City in its marketing campaign to tourists, that's what! The city's laughably titled "Just ask the locals" campaign encourages clueless tourists to ask famous NYC celebrities—who are friendly, and stationed at strategic spots throughout town—where to go in the city. Deborah Harry likes Kenkeleba Garden in the East Village! But now people are grumbling, because a little counting reveals that an outrageously disproportionate number of the celebs featured in the campaign are white. Latinos, it seems, just don't sell:

Because it's a lazy Friday before a long weekend, it's time to talk a bit about sports. But this is important! The Knicks, to everyone's chagrin, drew only the sixth pick in the upcoming NBA draft. Had they landed the first pick, they would have been assured of getting Derrick Rose, the best player in the nation and a great point guard, which is what the team needs. Now, draft projections say they may end up picking OJ Mayo, the USC guard and former high school phenom. Who could also be good! Why is this important? Now that supervillain Isaiah Thomas has been fired as Knicks coach, the city needs to heal again. This draft will set the tone for the team's resurrection. Even if you don't like sports, you must wish fervently for a strong Knicks squad, for the sake of NYC's honor—we cannot afford for our city to be trashed by middle American teams. It's bad for everyone here, and everyone who runs America is here, so it's bad for America. Below, a highlight video of Derrick Rose (maybe they can trade up for him!) and one of OJ May (did you know he had such a sweet jumpshot? I didn't.). THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Though he does not know it, Verlyn Klinkenborg is my nemesis. He's a member of the New York Times editorial board. Like all of the board's members, he has the privilege of using the most valuable op-ed space in American newspapers as a bulletin board for his personal musings. Verlyn takes advantage of this power to write regular items about "The Rural Life," all of which I can summarize as follows: "As I strolled through the country or gazed out my window, I saw nature, which I ruminated upon. Tra la, tra la, tra la." If I have to open up the Sunday paper one more time and see a chunk of editorial page real estate occupied by an "Editorial Notebook" essay inspired solely by window-gazing, I simply don't know what I will do. So Verlyn: I'd like to offer you a gentleman's agreement.

The Lower East Side is changing! You blink once, and the neighborhood has gone from an immigrant-packed hovel of tenements to a rich jerk-packed hovel. Of condos! The National Trust for Historic Preservation has just named the entire freaking neighborhood one the nation's 11 most endangered places:

The mystery NYC subway poster artist whose works have instilled in us a new respect for cut-and-paste vandalism has a Flickr account! And it's chock-full of impressive works that have heretofore been seen only by those commuters lucky enough to happen upon them. But now we're bringing you five of the best new ad art remixes from his collection. Help "Fight marc ecko with one hand," after the jump:

Middling Queens neighborhood Jackson Heights (whoa now, Queens residents) is taking on fancy Brooklyn writer's enclave Park Slope in some provocative ads! "More Park Less Slope" they say, mystifyingly. "Queens Is The New Brooklyn." They also made themselves a neat little "JH" logo shaped as a man resembling Mr. Peanut. Break out the checkbooks, home buyers! Jackson Heights is preferable to Park Slope, based on arrogance levels alone. But the established lowest-to-highest rankings of NYC boroughs (Staten Island- Bronx- Queens- Brooklyn- Manhattan- Philadelphia) will never change. Bigger picture of the aspirational ad, after the jump.

25-year-old sketch artist Jason Polan has an unachievable goal: to draw every person in New York. He moved here from Michigan, and was seized by the desire to capture all of us—you, me, Graydon Carter—in quick, vague line drawings. So far he has "a couple hundred sketches," which means that, assuming a static city population of 8 million and a generous rate of 50 sketches per day, fives days a week, Jason will be finishing his project up in a little more than 615 years. If you like, you can email him and tell him where you're going to be at a certain time and he'll show up and sketch you. Cute, but not really doing wonders for your time efficiency, Jason. After the jump, a few samples of his work. At least he's quick!

Bungalow 8 founder and Manhattan nightclub soothsayer Amy Sacco is being humble! "Most everything's overrated [about NYC nightlife]," she says. "Even I'm overrated!" She thinks that London is now "much more interesting than NYC." Funny, because last time we checked in on her London branch of Bungalow 8, local reviewers were calling it "empty." Surely those days are past? Well, recently they haven't been calling it empty, exactly—just overpriced, overcharging, and helmed by an ill-mannered doorman!:

A crazy man may be videotaping YOUR crotch. And putting the footage on the internet for all to see! The Post, in what is (trend alert) almost surely another story developed solely by poking around on YouTube, alerts the city to a man known only as "househead7d5." He enjoys taping men's crotches—at a phone booth, on the bus, on the subway—and posting the videos online, with clever comments like, "guy on the phone showin a little......gay sweatpants bulge phonebooth NYC," or, even creepier, "I love it when they fall asleep! not the biggest basket but he was a cutie pie nonetheless!" So who is this penis-peering multimedia madman? After the jump, we will investigate!

New York City: It is surrounded by New York state. This is the key message that state officials are hoping to communicate to you, the public, with their new and improved "I Love NY" campaign [NYT]. "There are a lot of beautiful pictures of serene mountains and lakes. How do you make your mountains and lakes different?" asked an ad exec. By polluting them with dioxin and a plethora of prescription drugs? No, it turns out the answer is to suggest that "we have the pulsating heart and soul of New York City in everything we do." In fact, it looks like the whole campaign is an attempt to slingshot some tourists out of the city for little jaunts upstate. Which will be hard, because New York state pretty much sucks.

No matter how you feel about the British stencil artist Banksy, you have to admit one thing: his stuff sells for a lot of money. His works have been going for over half a million dollars lately. A homeowner in the UK with a Banksy mural on the side of her house decided to simply sell the mural through an art gallery, and throw in the home for free. But one NYC store owner lucky enough to have a Banksy piece on his building (pictured) was either too ignorant, or too stubborn to take advantage of it. Yes: he painted over it. I hope he loved his momentarily whitewashed wall, because it cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. The kind of funny, and kind of painful pictures [via SuperTouch] of the man in the revenue-destroying act, after the jump. Ouch.

Not content to simply line the subway station entrances, station walls, station signs, and interior of buses and trains with advertisements, New York City transit is reportedly set to enter the final frontier: ads on the outsides of subway trains. They're already testing out the idea with Continental Airlines ads on the 42nd St. shuttle [NYP]. Subway officials think this idea will go great with their existing "brand cars," where one advertiser takes over the interior of a whole car. As terrifying as this practice sounds, we know they need the money. So we'd like to strike a compromise: they're allowed to sell every last inch of the trains to advertisers, but in return they have to bring back this practice: