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The article features YouTube polyglot Frankie Light (born Frankie Smith) and his visit to Brooklyn, New York to speak with the members of the Hasidic community. The videos of the conversations are posted by Light on his YouTube channel. Also cited are other polyglots like Light's friend Arieh Smith, and how Light was inspired by the videos of polyglot Moses McCormick.

The article focuses on how two groups supporting different basketball heroes are vying to name the court at St. Andrew's playground in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in New York City. Topics covered include the filing of a petition by a group of people to rename the basketball court after basketball legend Connie Hawkins, and the effort by Samantha Lewis to rename the same playground after her father Sonny Lewis who ran athletic programs at the neighborhood.

The article reports on Yemeni American entrepreneurs to leverage their coffee heritage to enter the coffee business in the U.S. In Brooklyn, New York, Yemeni Hakim Sulaimani launched his business Yafa Cafe that uses coffee beans from Yemen's rugged Yafa'a mountains. Also cited are the Qahwah House in Williamsburg, New York, and the coffee variety called coffea arabica used by the Yemenis.

The article focuses on Native American Bohemia in Boerum Hill.

The article discusses that the Regal UA Court Street in Brooklyn was uncharacteristically quiet, and Posters for "Jackass Forever" and "Am erican Underdog" hung in its windows, but the curving ma rquee had been stripped of its letters, and its glass doors were locked.

The article looks at the culture and quality of life at a single-room-occupancy building in New York City during Christmas of 2006. A brief history of single-room-occupancy buildings in New York City is presented. Of particular focus is Angelo Medina, a tenant in the building, and how he handles the solitude of the holidays. Profiles of other tenants are provided. Commentary from Medina is included.

This article describes the experiences and the hopes of some of the Dominican Republic baseball players who play for the New York Yankees minor league team, the Staten Island Yankees. Francisco Castillo and others arrived in June to be placed in student living quarters in New York City and to be paid about $1,000 per month. To these young men it was much better than living in the poor conditions of the Dominican Republic. The chance of making it to Yankee Stadium are very slim for most of the players.

Focuses on the Korean restaurant business in New York City. How Korean food compares to Japanese food; Effort of restauranteurs at Korean Temple Cuisine and other restaurants to attract non-Korean diners; Examples of several restaurants, including SuRa and Dok Suni; Comments of Korean Temple's Jennifer Maeng, customers and others about the approach to dining service, decór, and food presentation; Indication that New York City's Korean population is concentrated in Queens.

George Kramer sat hunched on his stool behind the counter of the small hardware store on Coney Island Avenue, gazing out the window at the passing traffic. He was bundled up in a heavy sweater, a maroon wool cap folded above his ears. Toward the back of the store, beyond Mr. Kramer's field of vision, Isaac Abraham was rifling through a cabinet. Mr. Abraham, the store's owner for many years, knows Mr. Kramer about as well as anybody, and he was about to give a demonstration. Quietly, he removed a faucet knob from the cabinet and hid it behind his back. Then he approached the counter and clapped it down with a flourish. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IN hard times, few local figures are as vital as the bartender-philosopher. And no bartender-philosopher is quite like Peter Napolitano. Mr. Napolitano, 57, serves drinks at Melody Lanes, a bowling alley in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The first thing that strikes you about him, when you take a break from the clatter of the bowling lanes and pad into the carpeted barroom, is his stage-ready appearance: the tuxedo shirt and red bowtie; the black suspenders; the twinkling blue eyes; the salt-and-pepper hair slicked back with gel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A FEW weeks ago, a 43-year-old Yorkville resident named Geoffrey Croft was walking through Ruppert Playground, a shady little patch of asphalt near his apartment, when he spotted a team of workers drilling holes in the ground. The sight, he said later, made him sick to his stomach. Mr. Croft realized that the workers were conducting test borings, which probably signaled plans to construct a building on the site. After doing some research, he discovered that back in 1983, the city had sold the site to a private developer, the Related Companies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BY consensus, the Hotel Chelsea is not the hub of bohemian life it used to be. Two summers ago, Stanley Bard, the beloved longtime manager, was replaced by a corporate management team. Rents rose, artists left. Those who managed to stay were confronted by a battery of disturbing changes: The pigeonhole mailboxes behind the front desk were removed, and Bob Dylan's old room underwent renovations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

JUST over two years ago, Representative Gary Ackerman, whose district includes parts of Queens and Long Island, wrote to the Federal Aviation Administration to criticize a city plan to build a waste transfer station in College Point, Queens. According to the plan, the station would be built directly across Flushing Bay from a runway at La Guardia Airport. One of Mr. Ackerman's concerns was that the garbage collected at the site could attract what he described as ''hungry birds'' that could interfere with planes taking off from across the water. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN you think of the Upper West Side, you think of the lines at Zabar's, the benches on the Broadway malls and prewar apartment buildings with musty odors and narrow hallways. Even though there have always been pockets of luxury in the neighborhood, and even as the area has grown increasingly expensive in recent years, the area remains associated in many minds with certain trappings of middle-class life. This is one reason that eyebrows were raised a month ago when local residents learned of a plan to establish a residential club for the extremely wealthy in a town house at 15 West 68th Street, just off Central Park West. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

OPEN the city's administrative code book to any of the sections that deal with street-vending regulations, and you're likely to find yourself staring uncomprehendingly at phrases like ''rules promulgated pursuant thereto.'' A native English speaker with a good dictionary might be able to manage. But what if your native language is Spanish? Or Bengali? Or Arabic? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

EARLIER this year, a restaurateur in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, named Cody Utzman posted a comment on his blog in which he described his newest neighborhood venture, a store specializing in organic foods, as a small grocery, a general store and a market. By the time an article about the project appeared in The Brooklyn Paper about two months later, he and his marketing team had settled on a new synonym, one well suited to these populist times; the store, Mr. Utzman is now fond of saying, is a bodega. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

OVER the past two decades, the city's demographics have changed drastically, if gradually: Mexicans, Bangladeshis and West Africans have poured in; other groups have poured out. From his desk at the New York City Department of City Planning, Arun Peter Lobo has watched it all unfold. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A TAVERN called Players Sports Restaurant and Lounge, on West 32nd Street near Broadway, is unlike most sports bars. You can choose from a selection of soju (Korean vodka) or order oh jing uh (dried squid) to go with your beer. West 32nd Street is the heart of Koreatown, of course, and on Tuesday night, the entertainment suited the setting. On a large projection screen and seven television sets, the South Korean national baseball team was facing its archrival, Japan, in the second round of the World Baseball Classic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A FEW weeks ago, Gale Brewer, a councilwoman representing the Upper West Side, wrote a letter to the commissioner of the State Department of Transportation. ''A plague of advertisements,'' as she put it, was spreading through her district and beyond. ''Perhaps you are familiar with them,'' she wrote. ''They purport to advertise 'moving companies,' and are taped to street light poles in a systematic way.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LOUIS SORKIN has been an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History since 1978, and he is an expert in that most reviled blood-sucking creature, the bed bug. As bed-bug complaints in the city have skyrocketed in recent years -- calls to 311 rose 34 percent, to 9,213, in the past fiscal year -- New Yorkers have flocked to him for advice. A mild-mannered man who studied entomology at the University of Connecticut, Mr. Sorkin, 55, works in an office cluttered with vials and jars, a picture of Spiderman, old typewriters and shelves lined with bug-related literature (''The Ants of Ohio,'' ''Sphecid Wasps of the World''). Tarantulas live in tanks by the office door. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A FEW months ago, the brothers Darryl and Stuart Romanoff, owners of a row of 1930s market buildings on West 13th Street, revealed plans to build a 250-foot office tower on the site. Preservationists were not pleased. Although the buildings are not exactly pretty, their clean, straight lines and casement windows evoke the Art Deco era in which they were built. And like many buildings in the meatpacking district, they boast distinctive metal canopies that stretch over the sidewalk, so as to shield butchers' wares from the sun. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN a former community organizer named Barack Obama began his bid for the presidency, it cast a spotlight on an uncelebrated profession. In New York, the history of community organizing is long, and Luis Garden Acosta has been around for much of it. Born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to a Puerto Rican mother and a Dominican father, Mr. Acosta, 63, started out in the 1960s as a Catholic antiwar organizer and then as a member of the Young Lords, a militant Puerto Rican activist group, before founding El Puente, a community organization in Williamsburg, where he now lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IN September, Christine Quinn, the City Council speaker, unveiled a bill to address an issue that she believes is too often ignored by New Yorkers. The bill aims to protect the patients and staff of local health clinics that perform abortions from harassment by anti-abortion activists who gather outside the clinics' doors. ''If you ask a lot of New Yorkers, they would say, 'This doesn't go on in our city, in New York,' '' Ms. Quinn said. ''The truth is, it does.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AS a salty veteran of New York's age-old tenant-landlord battles, Bob Kalin, a tenant organizer for an advocacy group called Housing Conservation Coordinators, has seen, as he put it, ''every insane combination you can imagine'' -- from residential buildings run as hotels to a single-room-occupancy hotel run as a house of prostitution. But at a tenant meeting on Tuesday evening in the laundry room of a six-story brick apartment building on West 65th Street, near Central Park West, he admitted that even he was somewhat out of his depth. And as he pointed out to the roomful of disgruntled tenants, ''I've been doing this for 29 years.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

CUT off from the rest of Brooklyn by expressways, Red Hook can feel like a small town, and as in any small town, newcomers can have a hard time fitting in. Especially when they are trailed by television cameras. Back in July, the Brooklyn blogosphere began to buzz with rumors that MTV's next season of ''The Real World,'' the long-running reality series whose new season begins airing in early January, would be set in this old dockworkers' neighborhood of weathered brick row houses and quiet cobblestone streets. Among the owners and patrons of local bars, the news was not received warmly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IN a city whose mayor has been one of the nation's most outspoken proponents of gun control, Councilwoman Diana Reyna of Brooklyn has distinguished herself by considering a bill to ban sales of a different weapon: the machete. In July and August, four machete attacks were reported in the southern part of Williamsburg, where many of Ms. Reyna's constituents live. Late last month, worries over machete violence again rippled through the community when a stray bullet hit a 5-year-old girl in nearby Ridgewood during a shootout. One of the young people involved in the attack was seen wielding a machete. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN Tony Nunziato, a florist from Maspeth, Queens, decided to run for State Assembly this year, he noted that the odds were against him. A political newcomer running as a conservative Republican was unlikely to succeed in the predominantly Democratic 30th District. To prevail over Margaret Markey, a 10-year Democratic incumbent, Mr. Nunziato would need to court young, Democratic-leaning voters -- in other words, people voting for Senator Barack Obama. So he did what Mr. Obama's campaign had already done to such lucrative effect: He set up a multimedia Web site that, by some accounts, is the most advanced achievement in the short history of Queens e-politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR years, residents of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, have complained about a dearth of fresh produce in the neighborhood, and the problem seemed to only worsen in June with the closing of a Key Food on Third Avenue and 94th Street. So when word spread that a farmers' market would open on Oct. 4 in the parking lot of the shuttered Key Food, much rejoicing ensued. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IN the six years since Donna Walrond moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, she has found much to like about the neighborhood. Her rent is cheap, the neighbors are friendly, and crime is decidedly down. There's just one problem. ''We have two good restaurants,'' she said the other day in the toy-strewn living room of her three-bedroom apartment on MacDonough Street. ''And they don't deliver.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THIS has been a historical political season, not only for the country's presidential candidates but also for the Lin Sing Association, a 108-year-old fraternal club above a trinket shop in a six-story building on Mott Street in Chinatown. Until recently, Lin Sing served primarily as a mutual aid society and social hall, a place where elderly Chinese compatriots gathered over cups of tea or glasses of schnapps to discuss the headlines from home. But over the past few years, the club has evolved into a veritable political powerhouse, largely because of the efforts of its sprightly, irrepressible leader, Eddie Chiu. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AT the Manhattan Plaza Health Club, on West 43rd Street near 10th Avenue, members often discuss the peculiar challenges of living in a neighborhood that also happens to be the crossroads of the world. But lately, the chats on the treadmills have focused on one particular issue: the swelling ranks of private buses and vans that pick up passengers in the area -- not from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, on Eighth Avenue, but from the streets nearby. ''They're everywhere,'' said Piper Smith, an illustrators' agent who is a regular at the club. ''They seem to be reproducing as we speak.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IF a collective grumble of skepticism could be heard rising from the kitchens of East Harlem lately, that's because some members of the neighborhood's Mexican-American community have felt gastronomically under siege. First it was the tomatoes. Then it was the cilantro, the serrano peppers and the jalapenos -- all staples of Mexican cuisine. In June and July, as salmonella poisoning claimed one victim after another, the federal government scrutinized the nation's salsa, certain that a culprit lurked within one of the ingredients. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IN the summer of 2001, Roberto Sosa, a delivery driver for a sewing machine company, started a soccer organization for Mexican-American children in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Its name, Liga Mexicana de Futbol Infantil, or Mexican Children's Soccer League, was straightforward enough -- except that all the players were boys. Mr. Sosa, 37, had grown up in Puebla, a city in Mexico, where in those days -- the 1980s -- soccer was a guy thing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A DAY before the start of the Democratic National Convention, on an airplane somewhere over the Midwest, The New Yorker'sesteemed political essayist Hendrik Hertzberg was spotted eating a sandwich. About 10 rows behind him sat a group of reporters from lesser-known New York-based publications: The Irish Echo, The Haitian Times, Sing Tao Daily, The Weekly Bangla Patrika, a Polish-language newspaper called Nowy Dziennik and an Arabic-English paper called Aramica. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

GIVEN the standing of the automobile in New York's hierarchy of transportation modes, some city residents may be surprised to learn that there's a place in Manhattan known as Automobile Row. The strip, which extends from West 41st Street to 57th Street on 11th Avenue, is lined with dealerships, their tinted-glass facades and vast, serene interiors conjuring visions of suburbia. Generally speaking, this is not a good time for American auto dealerships. Soaring gas prices and fears of a recession have contributed to a decline in car sales nationwide, and last year, according to the National Automotive Dealers Association, 430 franchised new-car dealerships closed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

JOE LONG, the owner of Birdell's, a venerable independent record store on Nostrand Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, has supplied three generations of music lovers with 45s, 78s, 33s, cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs and the occasional dollop of fatherly advice. Mr. Long, or, as some people know him, Mr. Birdell, began working at the store in 1957 and bought it from the original owner 10 years later. As black music has evolved, from blues and rock 'n' roll in the '50s to soul and funk in the '60s and '70s to hip-hop in the '80s and beyond, so has the store. The back room is still crammed with hundreds of 45s in their decaying paper sleeves, but not for long. Mr. Long, who is 70, is planning to sell his entire vinyl inventory to a British collector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SIX days a week, Rafael Cordero, an employee of two senior citizen centers in Washington Heights, delivers hot meals to elderly people who lack the strength, stamina or, for one reason or another, ability to leave their homes. Although Mr. Cordero's title is driver, his job involves much more than operating a van. Once, while dropping off a meal at a woman's apartment, he noticed that the woman was struggling to breathe. Then he smelled something that suggested that she had been unable to properly clean up after her cat. Suspecting that the woman had asthma that was worsened by the presence of the pet, he called her social worker, who arranged to have the cat removed from the apartment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IT began in 1998 with a routine act of bureaucracy, a decision by the city's Department of Transportation to put up a pair of red and white metal signs in the eastern section of Chinatown, on a desolate block in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. The signs, which bore the cryptic message ''Bus Layover Area -- 6 a.m.-midnight,'' in effect allowed private interstate buses to wait briefly by the curb, seven days a week. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

STEPHANIE PEDERSON, an author of books on beauty and health and the mother of a kindergartner named Leif, first became aware of the problem in September. It was Leif's first day at Public School 116, on East 33rd Street in Kips Bay, and Ms. Pederson had just arrived to drop him off. ''When I saw how large his class was, my heart just sank,'' she said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

MANUEL ARRANGO, a construction mechanic, works high above the pavement, toiling over masonry, brickwork, and waterproofing. On Monday night, at a training session for scaffold workers held in a church in Westchester Square in the northeast Bronx, Mr. Arrango also did a turn -- literally -- as a fashion model. A burly man who this evening was wearing a denim jacket with a gold chain over his beige T-shirt, he slipped his sneakers through the leg loops of a blue safety harness, then pulled the shoulder straps over his broad shoulders. After a few adjustments were made, he strutted and pivoted in the aisle of the church as though he were on a catwalk in Milan. From the audience came cheers and hoots and -- what would you expect from a roomful of construction workers? -- a provocative whistle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

RESIDENTS of Dutch Kills, a postage stamp of a neighborhood near Queens Plaza in the western part of the borough, love its abundant light and low-rise charm. So with construction under way on a 16-story hotel with a curving glass facade at the corner of 39th Avenue and 29th Street, the local reception is not universally warm. ''I hate it,'' said Tracey Florio, a bookkeeper who lives nearby. ''It looks like a spaceship.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FEW people have suffered more as a result of the monumental failures of the New York Knicks than the Irish. For years, the blocks surrounding Madison Square Garden have been strewn with Irish pubs -- West Side joints, the old-timers might say -- and when the Knicks are doing well, these Blarney Stones and Blarney Rocks do a brisk business. Lately, though, the Knicks have not been doing well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE Mayflower Hotel in Washington has a curving facade, lots of gold leaf and a lounge with a piano. President Harry Truman called the hotel, which stands just five minutes by foot from the front door of the White House, ''Washington's second-best address.'' The Days Hotel Broadway, at 94th Street on the Upper West Side, seems a rather more pedestrian affair. The beige brick facade is drab; the lobby is decorated with a fake fireplace and a library stocked with false books, and a sign near an elevator reads, ''Please use other elevators.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE PLAZA HOTEL, which reopened on March 1 after a three-year renovation, employs a handsomely attired staff of bellmen (gold-braided uniforms), doormen (silver whistles) and housekeepers (white aprons), along with several concierges (pinstriped suits) and assistant managers (embroidered damask blouses). The demands of today's traveler may, however, exceed the capacities of traditional hotel personnel. That would explain why the Plaza also engages 15 men and 2 women who wear black morning coats and white gloves and who, upon request, will do a number of things for you, like laying out your clothes in the morning, employing on your selection of socks a venerable technique referred to as the royal fold. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]