The New York City Department of Environmental Protection reached its first milestone in its efforts to clean up the Gowanus Canal Monday, when it shut down for repairs the 100-year-old tunnel designed to aerate and deodorize the smelly, polluted waterway.
At a hearing in Brooklyn, people called on the charter revision commission to take on a wider range of issues–from lulus to land-use–than its staff has targeted.
Opponents of the Harlem Children’s Zone’s plans to open a school in the St. Nicholas Houses are organizing a grassroots effort aimed to prevent it.
The Brooklyn canal’s Superfund designation has triggered a hunt for the corporations responsible for more than a century of pollution.
When the Charter Revision Commission meets Monday night, it will weigh its staff’s recommendations against advocates’ calls for a wider vision.
City Limits toured a few downtown cooling centers during today’s heat wave to find out what happens there.
Mayor Bloomberg selected Stephen Goldsmith for his experience “reinventing government.” But the former Indianapolis mayor’s record is complex.
At its last full meeting on June 9, the New York City Council dealt with legislation on taxi licenses, property taxes and health insurance for spouses of prison guards. But what dominated its agenda was land—deciding what could be built on it and how it could be used.There was an application for a sidewalk café in the west forties, a measure creating an urban development action area in the Bronx’s Belmont section and a special zoning permit on Kosciuszko Street in Brooklyn. With a rapid set of votes, the City Council executed its role in the city’s multilayered land-use process.What’s wrong with that process? A lot, according to both developers and the community advocates—the belligerents in many land use battles. On Thursday evening both sides will pitch their ideas for reform to the city’s Charter Revision Commission, which is considering changes to the city’s 400-page constitution.Thursday’s meeting—to be held at 6 p.m. at the Flushing Branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, located at 41-17 Main Street in Flushing—is the last of five “issues forums” that the commission called to study parts of the charter that might warrant change.
When New York City public schools let out next week, the tests will have just begun for many teens, who will face rising crime and the weakest young adult job market in history.
Times Square. In its colorful and danger-filled heyday of the 1970s and ’80s, porn shops, drug pushers, prostitutes and pistol-toting stickup men were the price of admission. But the venue has been a tourist-friendly commercial strip for some 15 years. In early April, for few minutes, that changed.On Easter night, a series of brawls and violent confrontations broke out in Times Square and nearby Herald Square among roaming bands of youths, reportedly resulting in the shooting of three women and one man, whose ages ranged from 18 to 21. A 20-year-old Bronx man was arrested in two of the shootings.
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