Only in NYC

What the city's own records say about how New York actually behaves.

The Record

New York City Edition 6 Stories

A rooster mid-crow — the 311 call that stopped us.

Weird But True

What New Yorkers Called 311 About This Summer

A rooster in Queens. A wildlife sighting across from the Central Park wall. Bees on Prospect Place, again. Eighty-two illegal-fireworks calls in sixty days. The last three months of New York, in the words of the people who picked up the phone.

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East Harlem streetscape near 125th Street and 2nd Avenue

Data & Policy

What the city is asking developers to build next to — E 125th & 2nd Ave by the numbers

The Mamdani administration just opened bids on a 140-unit affordable project at 2453 2nd Avenue. Within 250 meters: 40 buildings, 75 open HPD violations, 2 in AEP, and 299 rodent 311 calls in the last year.

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Richman Plaza, a large Bronx residential high-rise at dusk with scattered lit windows

Data & Policy

Every Nine Hours, New York Quietly Tells Another Household to Get Out

NYC issued 255 vacate orders in the last 90 days — one every nine hours. 788 units displaced. 4,419 active orders the city has declared unsafe and never marked fixed. And one Bronx complex has had 19 fire-driven partial unit vacates since 2013.

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Editorial illustration of a vintage rotary phone with a monkey, rooster, snake, pigeon, helicopter, and firework swirling out of the receiver

Weird But True

The 10 Wildest 311 Complaints New Yorkers Have Actually Filed

22 calls about a monkey. 49 about a snake in someone's apartment. 604 about roosters. 93,740 about helicopters. A decade of New York dialing 311 to report things that, somewhere else, would be a hallucination.

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Editorial illustration of a single helicopter over the Manhattan skyline at dusk with sound waves rippling across the rooftops

Data & Policy

The NYC Noise Complaint That Grew 460% in Three Years

In 2020, New Yorkers filed 5,641 311 complaints about helicopter noise. In 2023, they filed 31,567. Nobody voted on this. The helicopters just got louder, and one borough is bearing almost all of it.

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Data & Policy

The $95 Million Apartment With a Trash Chute That "Sounds Like a Bomb"

432 Park Avenue scores in the B range on Brix. Zero open HPD violations, zero open DOB violations. The condo board is suing the developers for $125 million over 1,500 construction defects. Both things are true at the same time — and the gap is the story.

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Field notes

From the record, verbatim

Lines pulled straight from NYC housing files. Nothing embellished.