HUNTS POINT MOVES A QUARTER OF THIS CITY'S PRODUCE

The step at 42-01-03 Broadway is about seven inches tall. New Ho Wah has held that Astoria corner for decades. That seven inches is now a federal lawsuit, the newest entry on a docket of roughly three dozen filed against Queens small businesses since 2012 by a single plaintiff, according to a New York Post review of the court filings. The restaurant and its landlord are both named. The ramp still did not get built.

Last July a cooling tower in Central Harlem started pushing out a mist nobody on the sidewalk could see. Seven people died and roughly 90 were hospitalized, per Gothamist and the city's own accounting. Inspectors traced it to two towers on two city owned properties. The agency policing those towers was, in the same stretch, running its leanest inspection operation in years.

For ten years 98 North 6th Street was a door anyone could walk through. Urban Outfitters ran a multi-floor store there with a rooftop bar, a restaurant, and a ground-floor market selling work by local designers. It closed in April 2024 when the lease ran out, and Brownstoner reported the chain had been paying below-market rent on a building whose renewal price would run much higher. The storefront has sat empty since. What replaces it will check your name at the door.

Sixty percent of the people cooking, prepping, and washing dishes in this city were born in another country, per the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, which estimates roughly one in five is undocumented. The Center for Migration Studies counts food service as the city's single biggest employer of undocumented workers, around 58,000. Albany closed the contract. It left the phone call open.

Next Stop Vegan has cooked Caribbean vegan food in Brooklyn Heights for nearly ten years. Its owners say someone built a fake Reddit account in the restaurant's name and used it to steer a crowd already primed to distrust them. Impersonation is not criticism. Anonymity is not accountability.

On July 7 near the Unisphere, the city's chief climate officer stood beside a cart running on a swappable battery instead of a gasoline generator, supplied by a Brooklyn company called PopWheels. The pilot runs six months and covers ten carts. The city has roughly twenty thousand.