New York

‘The Pathway I Was Walking on Was Next to a Fenced-In Basketball Court’

Published

11 months ago

August 6, 2023

Press Room

‘The Pathway I Was Walking on Was Next to a Fenced-In Basketball Court’

Buzzing Along

Dear Diary:

I was walking home from the subway station at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, enjoying the latest in a string of warm, breezy, late-spring days.

As I passed a playground at the edge of Morningside Park, I buzzed my lips — something I had begun to do since deciding to finally pursue a lifelong aspiration of learning to play the trumpet.

The pathway I was walking on was next to a fenced-in basketball court where some children were shooting hoops while others watched. A girl who looked to be 10 or 11 was sitting at the base of the fence with her back to me as I approached and then passed her.

All of a sudden, she started to jerk her head from left to right and back while fanning her ears. As she was making these motions, she looked over her shoulder toward me and discovered where the buzzing sound was coming from.

“I thought it was a mosquito,” she said.

I smiled, apologized and explained that, yes, it was me and that I was “exercising my embouchure.”

As I moved away from her, I continued to buzz, enjoying the splendid day that it was.

— Ozier Muhammad

What’s for Dinner?

Dear Diary:

I was on the prepared food line at Zabar’s behind a slightly built older woman. The counterman asked what she would like.

She said she couldn’t decide.

The counterman smiled.

“You had the chicken last night,” he said, “so you should probably have the fish tonight.”

“Thank you, Manuel,” she said. “I will.”

— Les Mattis

N.Y.C. Layover

Dear Diary:

Growing up in rural Georgia, I had always been warned about New York City. My father, who was born in Atlanta, went so far as to tell me he would pay for my film studies “anywhere but New York or California, as you’re weird enough now.”

I remembered my one crossing of the Mason-Dixon Line, to Illinois as a child, for the joy I felt at seeing snow and the trauma of hearing adults curse.

So when I set off at 20 in 1975 for a highly anticipated, chaperoned tour of 12 countries in 10 days, the prospect of changing planes in New York for a flight to London filled me with trepidation.

Sure enough, the flight was delayed, meaning I would have to spend the night in the city, if just at the airport. Somehow, I struck up a conversation with a baggage handler.

“Why don’t you come to a party with me?” he said.

He soon got off work and shepherded me to a teeming apartment with pot smoke and friendliness filling the air, and conversation and cocktails flowing freely.

I socialized for a while and then found a space in a closet to nap until the baggage handler woke me and graciously took me back to the airport to catch my plane.

— Deborah Wilbrink

A Pleco in Times Square

Dear Diary:

I was desperate to give my last pleco away. It was the only one left from a tankful of fish I had adopted from a neighbor.

Checking Craigslist, I found a posting that said, “Need large plecos/possible trade.” I contacted the poster, and we agreed to meet at the Times Square station on the platform for the A, C and E trains. I put my fish in a bucket of water and headed out.

When the man and I met at the station, he put the bucket into a rolling suitcase and then zipped the suitcase up. He said his wife was a teacher and that her students would love to have the pleco in their classroom.

I thanked him and watched as he walked away with the suitcase and bucket and pleco in tow.

— Michelle Ann Carvell

Boxers or Briefs?

Dear Diary:

On a broiling summer day in July 2008, I was in the underwear section of a deserted men’s department at Macy’s in Herald Square, taking advantage of the store’s air-conditioning as I looked for some new underwear.

A small older woman approached me and asked in a lilting Irish accent if I might help her.

Of course, I said.

“I’m looking for a pair of underpants for an older gentleman,” she said, “but I don’t know what style an older gentleman might wear.”

“Well,” I said, “I might avoid briefs, if I were you.” I ushered her away from the displays of the more revealing items and toward some practical alternatives.

“Perhaps a boxer or an old-fashioned Y-front,” I suggested, “and in not too lurid a color. Or you might even run to a check.”

She seemed to like that idea and picked out a three-pack of checked boxers. Then she hesitated and explained that she only needed one pair. We searched again and found a single pair.

She seemed pleased with her choice, and as we said goodbye, she thanked me gently for my help.

“By the way,” she said, “I forgot to mention that the gentleman in question is deceased.”

— Jeremy Wayne

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Illustrations by Agnes Lee

New York

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Published

7 days ago

July 1, 2024

Press Room

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

By Ana Ley, Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris

Ana Ley spent more than 12 hours at M.T.A. board meetings last week. Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris and 25 of their colleagues spent the morning counting more than 22,000 cars.

July 1, 2024

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

Here’s what we saw:

Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.

It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates

Queens-Midtown Tunnel	50,600
Lincoln Tunnel	49,200
Williamsburg Bridge	27,900
Manhattan Bridge	24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel	23,100
Queensboro Bridge	21,700
Brooklyn Bridge	17,100
Holland Tunnel	15,400
All other entrances	118,000
Total	347,000

Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.

Methodology

We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.

Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.

We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.

We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.

For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

Published

1 month ago

June 3, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

Published

1 month ago

May 31, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter