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87°72°
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In Manhattan, no [1] between 14 St and South Ferry
No [2] between 149 St-Grand Concourse, Bronx and 96 St, Manhattan
[3] is suspended
Uptown [4][6] trains are delayed while we address a signal problem near 125 St.
In Queens, Flushing-bound [7] skips 52 St and 69 St All trains at Woodside-61 St board from the Manhattan-bound platform
In Upper Manhattan, [A] runs every 30 minutes between Inwood-207 St and 168 St
In Queens, Manhattan-bound [E] skips Briarwood
In Manhattan, uptown [D] runs local from 59 St-Columbus Circle to 125 St
In Queens, Manhattan-bound [F] skips Sutphin Blvd and Briarwood
No [G] between Bedford-Nostrand Avs and Court Sq
In Brooklyn, Manhattan-bound [N] local skips 25 St, Prospect Av, 4 Av-9 St and Union St
Coney Island-Stillwell Av-bound [Q] trains are running with delays after we replaced rails near 7 Av.
In Brooklyn, Manhattan-bound [R] skips 25 St, Prospect Av, 4 Av-9 St and Union St
Mets41-574
Phillies54-441
Dodgers61-36
Yankees54-42
Liberty13-110
Wings16-80The building's own engineer just confirmed what a deleted city report already said: the reinforcement that was supposed to hold up 235 East 42nd Street was never there.
Two columns buckled on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer headquarters on July 7, sending the FDNY into an evacuation and drawing scrutiny from the Manhattan DA and DOI into developer MetroLoft's 1,600-unit conversion, the city's largest office-to-residential project. GACE Consulting Engineers, which drew up the city-approved reinforcement plan, now says the steel that was supposed to strengthen those columns from the 19th to the 21st floor was simply never installed [84]. The Department of Buildings won't say whether the reinforcement was completed, and it quietly deleted a line from its own online complaint log that had blamed the collapse scare on missing steel [88].
“The reinforcement from the 19th floor to the top of the 21st floor, which would have significantly increased the columns' strength, was never installed.”
“If reinforcing plates were missed, how did this escape quality control and special inspections?”
Forty-nine council members just voted a $10,000 bonus for the city's lowest-paid school aides. Forty-two of them also just voted themselves an 18% raise.
The City Council voted 42-6, with Speaker Julie Menin abstaining, to raise pay for council members, the mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough presidents and district attorneys by 18.2%, their first increase since 2016 [2]. The raise follows a recommendation from the three-person pay commission Mayor Mamdani was required to convene under the city charter, a step his last two predecessors skipped in their final terms [2]. Both Mamdani and Menin say they'll decline the raise themselves [2][92]. The same day, the Council also passed a $10,000 bonus for the city's 26,000 public-school paraprofessionals, who start at $32,500 a year; Mamdani says that bill, unlike his own raise, violates state labor law [49].
“The council is going to use every tool in its toolbox to act.”
“In my district there are so many voters who live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to make ends meet... I cannot vote for a bill to raise my own salary.”
A federal judge once wrote that Rikers "would shock the conscience of any citizen who knew of them." Fifty-two years later, the man now in charge quoted her right back at the city.
Six months into his court appointment, Rikers Island remediation manager Nicholas Deml filed his first 33-page action plan Tuesday, ordering the Department of Correction to document every broken cell door by September and proposing a $50 million increase in jail programming funding [55][101]. Deml, a former CIA officer who previously led Vermont's prison system, was appointed by U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain after she found the city in contempt of a decade of court orders meant to make Rikers safer [101]. Between January and May alone, people in custody set 130 fires and were involved in 2,978 fights, his report found [55].
“The failures that define these jails developed over many decades and will not be resolved overnight. Yet these conditions can be reversed.”
“The jails remain untenably dangerous and dysfunctional, and nothing but meaningful and swift forward momentum is acceptable.”
Fifteen strangers boarded the Marilyn Jean IV out of Sheepshead Bay on a recent Wednesday night, sailing past Coney Island toward Sandy Hook to drop lines for croakers in the pitch dark [52]. Captain Tony Reyes has fished these waters since his father took him to grab goldfish by hand in the Bronx River, and thirty years later he still can't explain why he keeps taking the boat out even on nights the crew loses money. "It's a hard life, it really is," he says, but he remembers the ten-year-old who once hauled in a 50-pound sea bass as big as himself, and who still comes back every summer, now nearly 30, to chase the same fish off the same dock [52].