And if your name is Winston, it's just best if you stay above ground, or stick to the subway system.
Luckily ChatGPt does a pretty good impression https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6a6662e9af6c81918523fb06d1384e74
(Also pedantic, but it’s not the entire city: there’s a Manhattan eruv that covers a large part of Manhattan, while Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have separate smaller eruvim.)
> following the law of the highest of high courts to the letter.
but I don't think that "there is no 'high court' at all" is one, for believers.
It also has a status page! https://eruv.nyc/
Like a lot of the rules are very fuzzy in their origin. The whole kosher business comes from a passage about "Not boiling a kid in it's mothers milk". I think most people would interpret that much more literally and you couldn't kill a child goat (kid) and boil it in it's mothers milk; and probably also extend it to other animals like cows. But I'd still think that killing a kid and putting a slice on cheese on the meat would be fine.
So if somebody is going to be obtuse with what you can do it seems like it'd be good fun to figure out all the ways around it.
Religious infighting with 2 fundamentalist sects that somehow boiled down to some people digging a tunnel connecting 2 buildings because of... reasons? Like it seems like they thought that if they built the tunnel that'd magically lead to everyone deciding "You know what, this expansion project is a good thing!"
Very bizarre.
Regardless, I'm glad it got shut down before a collapse killed someone.
The very short version is that both groups claim ownership of that building, and one of them wants to expand it significantly. Neither group is allowed to modify the building because of a court order, so the one that wants to modify it did it surreptitiously in an attempt to create facts on the ground that would modify the status quo.
(Obviously none of this is sensible, but the actual reasons are pretty quotidian.)
> four defendants refused to accept a plea deal and were set to be tried in April 2025
I can find loads of stories reporting those facts, but I can't find an account of what happened next. Did they change their pleas? Were they tried?
This was unexpected though:
> stills taken from videos of the synagogue's interior as well as the room leading to the tunnel, which showed a stained mattress and high chair, respectively, fueled antisemitic conspiracy theories
> A USA Today fact-check stated that the stained mattress seen in viral videos had been removed from behind wood paneling of the synagogue rather than from the tunnel itself, undermining online speculation that the mattresses were in the tunnel
https://xcancel.com/Truthtellerftm/status/197901264211193488...
I'd say it was an utterly braindead move and pretty much everyone involved is lucky to be alive.
There's just so, so much dangerous stuff you can hit below ground - high voltage cables that really, really do not like it if you even nick them, high current cables giving off nasty electromagnetic fields, ordinary low voltage cables whose isolation is already degraded, old water, gas, steam and sewer mains that may or may not burst simply because the only thing holding together the rust is the pressure from the soil, other, maybe long forgotten tunnels...
And that's before even getting into the issue of potentially getting caved in, creating a sinkhole or an ingress avenue for stormwater.
[1]: https://sohobroadway.org/soho-broadway-block-by-belgian-bloc...