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Metro-North riders to and from Connecticut will have the option of choosing a quiet ride starting Monday.  The MTA is expanding its Quiet Car Initiative to rush-hour trains on the New Haven Line.

When Brian O. Selznick wrote "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a graphic novel about an orphan in 1930s Paris, he imagined the secret spaces of the Gare Montparnasse train station in Paris. For inspiration, he visited Grand Central Terminal, which we recently explored from its sub basement to its tower.

An audit of the MTA reveals there was systemic abuse of overtime and the payroll system that will cost the state millions.

Outdated technology along Metro-North’s New Haven Line in Connecticut led to multiple train breakdowns – including one last Friday when a train that stalled between Westport and Greens Farms because overhead power lines sagged and tangled, leaving passengers without air conditioning in the heat wave for nearly an hour. All the while, trains on New York tracks ran smoothly.

The Metropolitan Opera has announced that James Levine is pulling out of Thursday night's performances of Die Walküre, due to illness. He'll be replaced by Derrick Inouye, who has conducted other performances at the Met including Tosca and Don Pasquale.

The value of lost, expired or unused Metrocards over the course of a year adds up to a hefty $52 million. To encourage riders to keep better track of cards, the MTA will start charging a $1 Metrocard replacement fee later this year.

The Metropolitan Opera has announced that conductor James Levine is reducing his schedule by about 1/3 for the remainder of the season on the advice of his doctors.

New York Fashion Week, which kicked off Thursday, generates more than $400 million and draws roughly 230,000, including fashion elite, style mavens and A-list celebrities. But it also temporarily employees thousands -- and not all of them are models.

The Museum of Modern Art has acquired a controversial film by artist David Wojnarowicz that was removed from the Smithsonian in November after a religious group objected to the segment in which ants crawl over a crucifix.

A Long Island couple, determined to make their Caribbean-bound cruise, spent the night at Penn Station and are among the passangers who waiting out the snow storm at area train stations and airports. “We spent it with a lot of homeless people,” Bob Fliegel, of Merrick, said Wednesday morning.

A fare increase will make almost every form of transit in the New York area more expensive on starting on Thursday. Subway and bus fares are going up, along with tolls on seven bridges and two tunnels. Prices will also rise on Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North trains.

A bulkhead caught fire at the Park Avenue Lift Bridge at 138th Street in Harlem, just under the Metro-North line Monday morning. Service was suspended in both directions out of Grand Central Station for about three hours, but service has now resumed.

The New York Yankees say longtime public address announcer Bob Sheppard has died. He was 99. His death was confirmed to The Associated Press on Sunday by team spokesman Jason Zillo. Zillo didn't immediately have additional details, but said the team would release them later in the day. Sheppard started ...

Most of the candidates running for New York State Attorney General say they oppose the NYPD's practice of retaining personal information on hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who are stopped and frisked, but not arrested.

Democratic Brooklyn Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries says he believes momentum is building to support a bill ...

Colombians vote in a run-off election Sunday and ex-pats can in New York can cast their votes in Queens and three other locations in the metro-area. In the first-round of the Presidential election in May, 15,000 Colombians in the New York area voted.

In recent weeks, volunteers with Colombia's Green Party ...

Two New York street artists have filed a free-speech lawsuit to block new regulations that cap the number of art vendors in Manhattan's busiest parks. One of the plaintiffs, Robert Lederman, filed a similar lawsuit in 2001 against the administration of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, winning protections for artists selling their ...

US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told graduates of Hostos Community College in the Bronx that the school played a big role in her family's success.

REPORTER: She said her Puerto Rican-born mother had put off going to college, and by the time she was raising two teenagers, she figured it ...

The city will not lay off 4400 teachers this fall, as planned. That announcement was made Wednesday morning just as city principals were gearing up to receive their doomsday budgets for the coming fall.

But the money has to come from somewhere. That's why Mayor Bloomberg has announced that the city will offer no raises to teachers - or principals - for the next two years. The city is facing a shortfall of $500 million in school aid from Albany. The Department of Education says a freeze on raises will save $400 million annually.

In a letter to principals, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wrote:

"I know that we are asking you to make a difficult sacrifice at a time when many of your families are struggling to make ends meet. But at a time when the City—indeed, the entire country—is being forced to make do with less, this plan allows us to retain the most important ingredient in our schools: the hardworking educators who each day are making a real difference in the lives of our students."

However, despite the mayor's announcement that city teachers and principals will not get any raises, both unions were quick to remind everyone that such a proposal needs to be negotiated at the bargaining table. The city's last offer was a 2 percent wage increase for teachers and principals. United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew said nothing had changed - just the mayor's proposal to scale back 2 percent to 0 percent.

"This is a process that the UFT has been involved with for 50 years which is called negotiating contracts," he said. "And if the mayor has a proposal then he needs to take it to the PERB board which is where it's supposed to be."

The MTA is cutting subway and bus service in a number of places--but a mile-long subway tunnel on the Lower East Side is actually being revived.

The tunnel will be used to weld together the eastern branch of the M line and the V line. The tunnel runs from the Broadway-Lafayette ...

Members of New York's Congressional delegation blasted the Obama administration this week for cutting city security funding, but Washington says hundreds of millions already sent to the region remains unspent.

In a letter from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to Rep. Peter King obtained by WNYC, Napolitano said ...