Embarrassed city officials promptly called a halt, leaving some low-income New Yorkers with reduced employment prospects.
The transmission stuttered during the opening features, then ground to a halt, leaving the screen complaining of "no signal".
But, while the building was going up, growth in Dubai ground to a halt, leaving much of the new real estate unoccupied and unsold.
Now, all that traffic has screeched to a halt, leaving Israeli and Palestinian associates on separate banks of a deepening trench of misunderstandings.
From the mayor's race to the contests for City Council, what had once been one of the most crowded and chaotic elections in the city's history has practically ground to a halt, leaving candidates in a state of suspension.
Production at the major studios has been brought to a halt, leaving TV networks with a dwindling supply of scripted programmes such as Heroes, CSI and Grey's Anatomy.
Nearly two years since the developer started marketing the investment plan nationwide, work on the homes has come to a halt, leaving 482 investors with half-built houses and thousands of dollars in construction liens.
Export growth has stuttered to a halt, leaving us with a persistent balance of payments problem before the country really starts to spend and suck in huge amounts of imports.
You Were Good in Your Time is evidence of how tremendous Morrissey can still be: a farewell from fan to dying star that suddenly snaps to a halt, leaving two minutes of chillingly abstract noise in its wake, it's heartbreakingly tender and unpredictable.
In that scenario, it's not inconceivable that when the NASDAQ crashed in 2000, the market for private financing would have come to a screeching halt, leaving Amazon without any access to capital — and possibly dead.
