What's Under Your Feet in New York City?(practical.engineering) |
What's Under Your Feet in New York City?(practical.engineering) |
(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.)
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
> 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.