New York City has spent centuries collecting stories that sound too strange to be true. From Mafia-run gay bars and subway token suckers to a rabbit that terrorized Central Park and a cat sent through a pneumatic mail tube, these 50 facts reveal an even stranger side of the five boroughs. If you missed the first collection, read Part 1.
1 Uber Cut Alcohol-Related Collisions Citywide
After Uber entered New York City in 2011, alcohol-related collision rates fell by 25 to 35 percent in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. A CUNY Graduate Center economics study estimated that the decline amounted to about 40 fewer crashes each month.
2. In 2010, NYC beekeepers noticed their bees making strange red honey, a mystery that eventually exposed the city’s largest marijuana farm beneath a Brooklyn cherry factory. Tests traced the color to Red Dye No. 40 in syrup outside Dell’s Maraschino Cherries in Red Hook, giving investigators a reason to inspect the factory while pursuing an earlier tip. In 2015, they moved magnetically secured shelves and uncovered a hidden staircase leading to a 2,500-square-foot farm containing 120 grow lamps, 100 pounds of marijuana, seeds for 60 varieties, and $125,000 in cash. During the search, the factory’s owner, a man named Arthur Mondella, locked himself in a bathroom and died by suicide.
3. In 2004, four elderly tenants refused to leave their rent-controlled homes in Manhattan’s Mayflower Hotel after the Zeckendorf brothers bought it for $400 million and planned to transform it into the exclusive 15 Central Park West. Their leases prevented the developers from evicting them, so the brothers paid all four to move. The final holdout, a 73-year-old man named Herbert Sukenik, remained in his mold-covered, 350-square-foot room for two years before reportedly accepting $17 million. He also received lifetime use of a $2 million apartment in Essex House for just $1 a month in rent.
4. In 1959, a Little Italy mobster named Ralph “Raffie” Cuomo opened Ray’s Pizza at 27 Prince Street as a front for their drug dealing. It soon became headquarters for the Lucchese crime family’s Prince Street crew. The mobsters handled heroin and cash in the unfinished basement directly beneath the pizza ovens while the restaurant built a famous name upstairs. Police caught Cuomo with $25 million worth of heroin in 1969, but he returned to Ray’s after prison and resumed dealing. In 2011, his heirs sold the building for $5.9 million, making its real estate almost as profitable as the drug business.
5. In 2020, the New York Public Library marked its 125th anniversary by ranking the ten most checked-out books in its history using circulation records, popularity, catalog longevity, and other factors. American author Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day led with 485,583 checkouts, followed by The Cat in the Hat, 1984, Where the Wild Things Are, To Kill a Mockingbird, Charlotte’s Web, Fahrenheit 451, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Goodnight Moon received an honorable mention because American children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore opposed the book and kept it out of the library from 1947 until 1972, costing it 25 years of potential checkouts.
6 Times Square Revelers Wore Diapers
New Year’s Eve revelers in Times Square can spend up to 12 hours packed inside barricaded viewing areas, where leaving means losing their place. Organizers provide no portable restrooms, so some adults wear diapers while parents reportedly let children relieve themselves in the street. The 60-second ball drop therefore demands an entire day of waiting without reliable access to food, warmth, or toilets.
7. In 2003, a woman named Elizabeth Gibson found Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo’s 1970 work Tres Personajes in the trash on a New York City curb, unaware that it was worth about $1 million. Gibson knew little about modern art, but she felt the painting “had power” and carried it home. After four years of research, she learned through PBS that thieves had stolen it from a Houston couple’s storage locker in 1987. Sotheby’s sold the recovered painting for $1,049,000 in November 2007, and Gibson received a $15,000 reward plus a portion of the sale price.
8. In 1978, a woman named Diane Hartley was completing her undergraduate architecture thesis when she discovered that New York’s 59-story Citicorp Center could topple if powerful winds struck its corners. After Hartley raised the problem with a junior staffer, chief structural engineer William LeMessurier checked her calculations and found that a collapse-level storm could strike every 55 years, or every 16 years if a blackout disabled the building’s 400-ton stabilizer. His team secretly welded the skyscraper’s joints at night while the NYPD prepared an evacuation plan covering a 10-block radius and 2,500 Red Cross volunteers stood ready. The public did not learn about the crisis until 1995.
9. The New York City subway has used light bulbs that screw in “backwards,” with left-handed threads that tighten counterclockwise instead of clockwise like standard household bulbs. The incompatible design discouraged theft because anyone who stole a subway bulb could not use it in an ordinary home fixture.
10. From the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s, a Mafia-controlled cartel dominated private trash collection for New York City businesses, an industry worth $1.5 billion annually by 1995. The mob inflated prices and protected customer territories through threats, extortion, arson, and forced cartel membership. An NYPD detective named Rick Cowen spent three years undercover and recorded hundreds of hours of evidence, leading authorities to charge 72 defendants in 1997 and dismantle their companies. Garbage removal prices fell 40 percent, cutting costs by an estimated $600 million, although later corporate consolidation reportedly erased those savings.
11 Ballet Shoes Cost $780,000 Annually
New York City Ballet spends about $780,000 annually on 9,000 to 11,000 pairs of footwear, with nearly 6,000 pairs stored beneath Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater. Dancers wear out 500 to 800 pairs of pointe shoes during the six-week run of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker. Two weeks of Swan Lake consume even more because, according to shoe room supervisor and former principal dancer Linnette Roe, the entire company remains en pointe throughout the production.
12. During the 2018-2019 season, the average annual household income of a Broadway theatergoer reached $261,000, according to the Broadway League. The audience also averaged 42.3 years old, while 81 percent of attendees aged 25 or older had completed college and 41 percent held graduate degrees. Despite those affluent demographics, tourists accounted for 65 percent of all Broadway admissions that season.
13. By 1960, the 350 Jewish artisans of New York City’s Bagel Bakers Local 338 union had handmade almost all of the 250,000 bagels NYC needed every day. Bench men kneaded, shaped, and boiled the dough before oven men baked the bagels and sent them to customers on strings of five dozen. Their control weakened after Lender’s Bagels adopted Canadian inventor Daniel Thompson’s automated bagel machine in 1962, which produced 300 dozen bagels in the time two men needed to roll 125 dozen. Local 338 merged into a larger bakers’ union in the early 1970s.
14. Some luxury co-op buildings in New York City require buyers to win approval from a resident board, and even celebrity status cannot guarantee entry. After divorcing Sony Records CEO Tommy Mottola, Mariah Carey offered $8 million in cash for Barbra Streisand’s Ardsley penthouse. Carey arrived at her interview with a bare midriff and three bodyguards, then reportedly answered, “Mr. Biggie, he be dead,” when a board member asked whether The Notorious B.I.G. might visit. The board rejected Carey’s application, so she bought a triplex at 90 Franklin Street in Tribeca instead.
15. The Truman Show delusion describes a belief that one’s life is a staged reality show, although medical authorities do not recognize it as a separate diagnosis in the DSM. After 9/11, one patient traveled across the country to New York City to determine whether the Twin Towers had actually fallen, believing the televised attacks might be an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline.
16 ManhattAnt Was European Lasius Emarginatus
In 2011, biologists discovered an unidentified ant in Broadway medians at 63rd and 76th Streets in Manhattan and nicknamed it the “ManhattAnt.” Researchers initially believed it might be a species found nowhere else, although they had not formally identified it. In 2024, genetic and physical analysis confirmed it as Lasius emarginatus, a species native to central and southern Europe. By then, it had become one of New York City’s most common ants and was spreading into New Jersey and Long Island at roughly 2 kilometers per year.
17. New York City’s otherwise safe tap water contains tiny crustaceans called copepods, creating a dispute over whether it is kosher and that observant Jews may drink it unfiltered. Some Orthodox rabbinic authorities permit the water, but others consider the visible organisms forbidden under Jewish dietary law. Because the issue remains disputed, the Orthodox Union requires filtration in OU-certified food-service establishments and advises individuals to consult their own Orthodox rabbi.
18. At the Statue of Liberty’s feet, a broken shackle and chain lie partly hidden beneath her robes and remain difficult to see from the ground. The chain rests beside her right foot, disappears beneath the drapery, and reappears before her left foot with its end link broken. French political thinker and abolitionist Edouard de Laboulaye proposed the statue after the Union’s 1865 victory and the abolition of slavery, making the broken restraints symbols of freedom from servitude and oppression.
19. In 2016, 13 secret apartments remained on the upper floors of New York Public Library branches. Andrew Carnegie’s $5.2 million gift had helped build coal-heated libraries that required live-in custodians to keep their furnaces burning, so the workers moved upstairs with their families. Their children read the books after closing, played on the roofs, and sometimes helped dust shelves or shovel coal. As heating systems improved and custodians retired, the library converted many apartments into public facilities, including a teen center inside the former Fort Washington residence.
20. In 1993, Staten Island voted to secede from New York City, with 65 percent of voters approving a charter that would have made the borough an independent city. Because the referendum was nonbinding, the plan required state action, and the New York State Assembly blocked it. American politician Rudy Giuliani won the mayoral election on the same ballot after promising to address the borough’s grievances, and his administration later made the Staten Island Ferry free and closed the Fresh Kills Landfill.
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21 Hot Dog Cart Cost $289,500
In 2013, a hot dog cart just outside the Central Park Zoo carried a $289,500 annual concession fee for the right to operate at Fifth Avenue and East 62nd Street. A man named Mohammad Mastafa paid NYC Parks for the location, which attracted the highest bid among 150 park pushcart sites across the city. Four other Central Park vendors paid more than $200,000 a year, while the city’s park pushcart concessions generated about $4.5 million annually.
22. On December 15, 1973, a dump truck carrying asphalt caused an 80-foot section of Manhattan’s West Side Elevated Highway to collapse between Little West 12th Street and Gansevoort Street. Investigators discovered that the truck carried 30 short tons of asphalt and exceeded its permitted weight by 9 short tons, while a sedan fell through the opening behind it without seriously injuring either driver. Officials blamed Edenwald Construction Corp. of Whitestone, Queens, then awarded the same company a no-bid contract to clear the wreckage.
23. New York City’s Billion Oyster Project is restoring millions of oysters to New York Harbor to filter the water and rebuild marine habitats. The nonprofit aims to restore one billion oysters by 2035, and by December 2025, it had returned more than 150 million oysters and restored 17 acres of reef. About 80 restaurants supply discarded shells, which the project leaves outside for a year to cleanse naturally. New York Harbor School students then place juvenile oysters on the cleaned shells before returning them to the harbor.
24. In 1853, the New York State Legislature authorized Central Park, whose eventual 843 acres cost about $7.4 million to acquire. Fourteen years later, the United States bought more than 600,000 square miles of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. The Manhattan parkland therefore cost about $200,000 more than Alaska.
25. From the early 1960s, the price of a New York City pizza slice tracked the cost of a subway ride with uncanny precision, a pattern a man named Eric M. Bram described in The New York Times in 1980. The humorous economic law later became known as the Pizza Principle and successfully pointed to the fare’s rise to $2 in 2003. A 2014 study concluded that the relationship still held after roughly 50 years. Pizza prices later rose faster than transit fares, and by late 2025 the once-reliable principle no longer worked.
