Teenagers all over the country experiment with alcohol, but kids in Orthodox Midwood are doing it at their local synagogue.

But these teens aren’t just sipping wine: some of them have gotten so drunk at these parties that they’ve been rushed to the hospital — prompting a handful of Midwood synagogues to change their party policies when teenagers are involved.

An incensed federal judge sentenced a racist Brooklyn woman to indefinite jury duty on Tuesday after she trashed the NYPD and minorities.

“She’s coming back [today], Thursday and Friday — and until the future, when I am ready to dismiss her,” Garaufis said.

So a few weeks back, Mr. Lopez tore himself a fresh piece of packaging paper and wrote out a plea to traffic agents who might not be aware of what he called FedEx policy to leave drivers responsible for certain egregious instances of illegal parking.

“I’m telling you, the sign works,” Mr. Lopez said. “Most of the ticket agents are cool, and respect that we’re out here making a living. They might not have much sympathy for some big corporation, but if they know we’re paying our own tickets, some of them cut us a little slack. Other drivers I know have copied my sign.”

Pennies from wish-makers are far from the only offerings made to these people magnets. Also tossed in are thousands of other coins, cellphones, jewelry, cameras, shoes, sandwich wrappings and the occasional dead rat.

Mr. Holloway stood near an open sewer manhole off Kent Avenue in Brooklyn beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. The hose from one of the trucks was lowered inside the manhole and soon began sucking. The smell from the open manhole was vaguely, almost sweetly, foul; no one odor was detectable, but the odor was there nonetheless.

It was at another open manhole, about nine miles away on East 123rd Street in Manhattan, that teenagers shoveling snow one February day in 1935 did, in fact, see one in a city sewer, or said they saw one. They pulled up a sickly, 125-pound, 8-foot alligator with some clothesline they borrowed from a nearby stove shop, only to kill it with their shovels after it snapped at one of the boys.