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August 25, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Tourists have discovered a new attraction, previously hidden by the waters around New York City — whale watching. While it may not be as exciting as the lights of Times Square and its suddenly notorious mascots, visitors to the city are apparently thrilled to sit on a boat and wait for a glimpse of a humpback […]

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Sophie Weiner

Quoth the raven, “The fuck you lookin’ at?” The New York Times reports that ravens have been sighted in Chelsea and Greenwich Village over the last few months. The common raven is native to much of North America, but there had been only a few sightings of the bird in the city until the 1960’s. (Edgar Allen Poe’s famous […]

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Sophie Weiner

According to city records, 35% of New York’s 8,894 public phones are broken. The Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications has stated that Verizon may be in part at fault for the mass failure, as the company is largely responsible for repair of public phones and hasn’t stepped up to fix them in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Despite their state […]

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August 22, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Over the last five years, 20,000 more people have been recorded as homeless in New York City, DNAinfo reports that the worsening crisis has lead to more shelters, with their residency up 60% from 2009 and 1,000 more people since the beginning of the year. There are now 54,841 people living in homeless shelters in the […]

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August 20, 2014 Sophie Weiner

The iconic Upper East Side dive bar Subway Inn was granted a restraining order just days before their planned eviction. The bar was opened just after prohibition ended. On their Facebook page, the bar thanked the people of New York for this temporary halt. “On behalf of entire Salinas family, we cannot express the immense […]

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Sophie Weiner

The New York Times reports that Jabbar Collins, who spent 16 years in prison after being wrongly accused of murder, has settled with the city for $10 million. He was convicted in 1994 of killing an Orthodox rabbi under district attorney Charles J. Hynes. Collins’ lawyer Joel B. Rubin found that Hynes used dubious practices in his original […]

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August 19, 2014 Sophie Weiner

The number of violations of the “pooper scooper” law — which carries a $250 fine for those who don’t clean up after their dogs — are the highest in the Bronx and Queens, DNAinfo reports. Bronx residents were cited for breaking the law 252 times in the last two years, which Queens followed with 68 and […]

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August 8, 2014 Sophie Weiner

This week, the New York Department of Education listed 40 schools in the city as “persistently dangerous.” This was determined by the number of violent incidents vs. the total student population. Of those schools, 17 are in Brooklyn, making it the highest concentration of “dangerous” schools in any borough; 11 of the schools are located in the […]

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August 7, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Having trouble reinforcing your closely held prejudiced beliefs? There’s an app for that! SketchFactor, which will be released Friday, helps users avoid “sketchy” (shady? dangerous? what?) areas of the city. Created by Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington, the crowdsourced program will aggregate the collective feelings of people who own iPhones about “sketchy” neighborhoods. McGuire told Crain’s that the impetus for […]

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July 30, 2014 Sophie Weiner

Port Authority recently sent a cease and desist letter to Manhattan retail store Fishs Eddy over their use of the New York City skyline and tunnels on dishware. The store has been selling these dishes for 13 years, but Port Authority is very concerned about them co-opting what they consider their property. The Wire quoted the cease and […]

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