Josefina felt overwhelmed as she and her taxi-driver husband struggled on his $20,000-a-year earnings to support their 4-year-old son and 3-month-old daughter.

“I was very sad,” said Josefina, 37. “I don’t have a lot of money. I’m not working now.”

Recently separated and already raising two children on a minimum-wage salary, Teresa, another Bronx mother, gave birth to a daughter in March.

Then came along a savior for both women: Baby Buggy, a charity started in 2001 by comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s wife, Jessica.

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Underneath the fume-laden FDR Drive near Rutgers Slip, the city is planning two new pavilions where ping-pong, aerobics, tango and karate could become the norm.

The community-centric outdoor plazas would be added to the promenade that winds along Manhattan’s southeastern shoreline, amid the thump of vehicles speeding over expansion joints.

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A world seethes beneath New York where love-seeking straphangers interact with stolen glances between jostling bodies.

Those who enter that world at the L train’s Bedford Avenue stop in Brooklyn take to the Internet more often than riders on any other line to turn furtive eye contact into trysts.

In romance fever’s high-season – the two weeks before and after Valentine’s Day – 421 men and women posted to the “missed connections” thread on craigslist.org hoping to connect with a stranger they chatted with or made eye contact with underground.

(To see maps of the missed connections, click here.)

The Bedford Avenue stop sparked 16 of those postings – the most for any station servicing a single line.

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The city is giving the concrete jungle a makeover: Some 1,000,000 trees are slated to be planted across the five boroughs over the next nine years.

Officials say the Million Tree NYC campaign will boost the number of trees in the city by 20%. The city has raised some $600 million in seed money to fund the greening effort.

Residents along Pennsylvania Ave. in East New York have long contended with speeding vehicles and damage to parked cars that lose sideview mirrors, thanks to reckless drivers.

Now the city wants to reduce parking on the strip. But that’s infuriated local car owners who have proposed their own solution: adding bike lanes.

Cheslea residents are fighting to landmark a townhouse that newly discovered evidence indicates may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

The W. 29th Street home was once owned by Abigail and James Gibbons, two prominent 19th Century abolitionists with ties to Harriet Tubman’s famed escape route for slaves.

Construction on a penthouse addition to the building has been ordered stopped by the city as the Landmarks Preservation Commission considers whether to declare the townhouse a landmark.

For months, Christopher Zambakari has watched online as the U.S. dollar’s value declined – especially its relation to the Ugandan shilling.

A 22-year-old foreign student living in Manhattan, Zambakari and his mother regularly wire money to Uganda to support 15 relatives there.

And while his classmates at the European School of Economics in Midtown rejoice at the strength of the Euro or the British pound, the dollar’s weakness means trouble for the MBA student’s family in Africa.

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In January 2006, Medicare Part D went into effect, subsidizing the cost of prescription drugs for the elderly.

The federal government touts the program as an effective way to offer senior citizens choice and flexibility. But many seniors, including those at the Elmhurst-Jackson Heights Senior Center, say that Part D has left them confused and frustrated.

Staten Island may soon be as well known for its sushi as its pizza.

The number of Japanese restaurants in the borough have tripled in the last four years, by one observer’s estimate. And some of the new eateries, like the Fushimi Restaurant and Lounge, aren’t even Japanese owned.

“It’s really a big trend now,” Joey Tse, Fushimi’s Chinese owner, said of the sushi boom.

Women’s boxing has gained popularity through movies like “Million Dollar Baby,” and professional fighters like Laila Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali.

But the gender gap hasn’t closed much when it comes to money. Jill Emery, a 37-year-old former Golden Gloves champ, has found that making as much cash as the male boxers who train beside her at Gleason’s Gym is her toughest fight yet.