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Traffic on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue on Dec. 8, 2024.
Photo by Dean Moses
A sweeping decision from Suffolk County has exposed what many New Yorkers feel when paying their car insurance bills: fraudsters are exploiting our auto insurance system, and law-abiding drivers are footing the bill.
In Integon v. Salazar-Ochoa, Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice Maureen T. Liccione dismissed eight auto accident claims after finding they were part of an organized staged-crash scheme targeting New York’s no-fault insurance system. The court described a coordinated operation involving “junker” vehicles, commercial box trucks, more than 100 medical providers, and a recurring cast of claimants and attorneys. Policies were issued, accidents staged almost immediately, before premiums were even paid, and then canceled for nonpayment.
Liccione’s words resonate statewide: “Insurance fraud is not a victimless crime. Because premium increases partly incorporate fraud costs, insurance fraud hurts all policyholders, not just insurers.”
That is the reality facing New Yorkers who are paying some of the highest insurance costs in the country. The average driver in this state pays roughly $336 per month, or more than $4,000 annually — that’s nearly $1,500 above the national average. Industry estimates suggest that fraud alone adds as much as $300 per driver each year. And the problem keeps getting worse. In 2023, insurers reported over 38,000 suspected auto insurance fraud cases to New York regulators, including over 1,700 staged crashes. In 2025, insurers reported 43,811 suspected incidents of motor vehicle insurance fraud to state regulators — an 80% increase since 2020.
The Suffolk County case reads like a textbook example of how organized fraud rings operate. According to court filings, each of the eight dismissed claims shared striking similarities: three occupants per vehicle, crashes occurring in the same Queens area, and treatment funneled through just two medical offices. Nearly all claimants used the same attorney. More than 100 healthcare providers were named. Vehicles were strategically rear-ended by commercial trucks to maximize potential payouts. The pattern was systemic.
When a single coordinated operation can orchestrate eight staged crashes and involve dozens of medical providers, it underscores how vulnerable New York’s insurance framework has become to increasingly sophisticated fraud networks. Structural reform is required. That is why Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed auto insurance reforms deserve serious bipartisan consideration.
The governor’s plan targets the very tactics exposed in the Suffolk County case. It would allow prosecutors to pursue criminal penalties against individuals who organize staged accidents, not just the driver behind the wheel. It would strengthen the state’s ability to disqualify medical providers who participate in fraudulent billing schemes. It would extend the time insurers have to investigate suspected fraud, rather than forcing determinations within an artificially short 30-day window. Taken together, these measures would shift the risk calculus for fraud rings that view New York as fertile ground today.
Beyond fraud enforcement, the proposals address deeper structural issues that fuel excessive litigation and inflated payouts. New York is among a minority of states that allow drivers who are “mostly at fault” for a crash to still recover extensive damages. Comparative negligence reform, or “fair-share liability,” would introduce accountability by limiting full damages to those primarily responsible for an accident and ensuring that defendants less than 50% at fault are responsible only for the damages they caused. This would better align liability with responsibility — a commonsense principle embraced in most states.
Similarly, Hochul proposes tightening New York’s “serious injury” threshold so that non-economic damages are awarded only in cases involving truly serious injuries. This would help prevent temporary conditions from giving rise to unnecessary and protracted litigation, without compromising protections for legitimate accident victims.
Finally, reforms encouraging telematics and safe-driving incentives recognize a simple principle: drivers who follow the rules and operate safely should pay less. Technology now makes that possible in ways that were unthinkable decades ago.
There is also a broader consumer protection safeguard built into the governor’s approach. New York’s Excess Profit Law requires insurers to return profits to policyholders if earnings exceed statutory thresholds. If fraud reduction and targeted liability reforms lower system costs, regulators can ensure that savings are passed through to drivers, and not retained as windfall profits to insurance companies.
Whether one approaches this as a consumer protection matter or a law enforcement priority, the conclusion is the same: organized fraud rings and outdated liability standards drive up premiums for everyone.
This issue highlights something increasingly rare in today’s political climate: broad bipartisan agreement. A new statewide survey from Beacon Research found that New York voters overwhelmingly support reforming this broken system: 86% of voters support the governor’s plan to lower auto insurance premiums. And support for reform cuts across party lines. More than 80 percent of Democrats, Republicans, and independents back changes to the insurance system, with similarly strong support across every region in the state. In an era defined by polarization, this level of consensus is striking, and lawmakers ought to listen.
The time for a comprehensive reset is now. By uniting across party lines to crack down on staged accidents, tighten liability standards, and modernize no-fault rules, state and local leaders can reduce the hidden fraud tax burdening New Yorkers.
Insurance fraud is not a victimless crime. The victims are every family and business owner who opens their renewal notice and wonders why the premium keeps going up. The Suffolk County court has provided the evidence. Lawmakers must provide the solution.
Matthew Dausis the transportation technology chair for the University Transportation Research Center, Region 2 (NY/NJ) at the City University of New York
Weddings and funerals are perhaps the rituals that most bind cultures across space and time. This affords Dao—the sixth feature by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis—an enrapturing universality born of detailed specificity, as it presents a funeral commemoration in West Africa alongside a wedding in France a year later. The film places unrelenting emphasis on the meaning behind traditions and their subsequent evolution when people move away and return. And yet, this sharp focus on migration is expressed through liberating artistry, which engenders an alluring familiarity that makes the three-hour runtime feel like a breeze.
Dao, named for the Taoist belief in an unceasing motion that flows through and unites all things, is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but it is also a surprising exploration of cinematic process. It begins with Gomis offering a documentary peek into his casting—or at least, a peek he frames in documentary form—before dramatizing the more intimate parts of his life. The script was inspired by a funeral ceremony for Gomis’ father in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. The writer-director welcomes us into this personal tale through the lens of his professional identity to highlight how the filmic and the cultural, and the individual and the social, inextricably overlap.
It’s here, in this pseudo-documentary introduction, that we meet several of the movie’s actors as they first audition and screen test together. These include the nonprofessional Katy Corréa, the film’s eventual lead, who seems reluctant to participate but whose input Gomis actively seeks. In fact, he asks most of his actresses—many of them first- or second-generation Africans in France—what types of roles they fantasize about playing. Some suggest doctors. Others conjure complicated, villainous vixens. The implicit suggestion is that this exercise is about the kinds of complex parts, or even real-world professions, they are often denied.
Before long, Gomis introduces his bifurcated plot, in which Corréa’s character, the middle-aged immigrant Gloria, returns to her small Guinean village a year after her father’s funeral for a commemoration ceremony. It is also the first time in many years that her French-born daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio, also glimpsed in the movie’s opening) has visited the dusty rural locale, making it a long-overdue opportunity to connect with her roots. However, she no longer speaks any of the local languages, such as Wolof and Manjak, if she ever learned them in the first place, leaving her mother to act as interpreter and cultural guide as she meets various aunts, uncles and distant relations.
The two women are greeted with a mix of beaming pride and subtle disdain by the poverty-stricken village, highlighting the ever-complicated dynamics of postcolonial emigration and its unavoidable class dimensions. It is here, while introducing Nour to her relatives—who inevitably comment on how much she has grown—that Gloria also mentions her daughter’s pending nuptials the following year. This quickly propels us forward in time to the wedding and its lush countryside retreat, as the plot reveals itself to be largely a cinéma vérité depiction of each series of events as they might naturally unfold.
Cutting unobtrusively back and forth between the wedding and the days-long memorial, Gomis implicitly binds together the two halves of Nour and Gloria’s lived experiences through extended scenes of family gatherings and song and dance. He films these parallel narratives with the same warmth he brought to his musically tinged Congolese family drama Félicité, which in 2017 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale. Although Dao left this year’s festival empty-handed—a major surprise—it remains a significant contribution to contemporary African cinema.
DAO ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars) Directed by: Alain Gomis Written by: Alain Gomis Starring: Katy Correa, D’Johé Kouadio, Samir Guesmi, Mike Etienne, Nicolas Gomis Running time: 185 min.
There is no dearth of conversations in the village about the lingering effects of colonial rule, and no shortage of awkward interactions either, such as an estranged cousin arriving at Nour’s reception with a surprise pregnant girlfriend. This leads to numerous stilted exchanges and eventually a hilarious scuffle. Gomis orchestrates it all with such free-flowing verve that it feels neither academic nor overly chaotic, but entirely naturalistic, as though he had simply dropped in on a real family and begun filming.
Gomis builds each extended scene with immense care, both for the moments themselves and for the way they adhere to the larger back-and-forth structure. The result is often euphoric. The aforementioned fisticuffs, despite their sloppiness, become the subject of some of the most rousing filmmaking you are likely to see all year, set against a jazzy soundtrack whose rhythms mirror the movie’s improvised nature. Back in the motherland, the instrumentation takes on more culturally specific tones, but the fundamentals always cross-pollinate: rhythm and percussion, joy and uncertainty.
However, the biggest difference between the movie’s two halves is perhaps the level of rootedness in each ritual. The village commemorations are centuries old, and Nour learns their meaning for the first time as each tradition unfolds. In contrast, her wedding is a patchwork of cultures, both French and West African, with popular English-language tunes and even made-up a cappella songs included for good measure. As much as Dao is a film about death, it is also, as its title suggests, a film of cultural rebirth and of finding oneself in moments of uncertainty—not just individually, but collectively—and of conjuring tangible things and ethereal ideas to pass down.
And yet, despite the movie highlighting the distinction between native and diaspora cultures, the very roots of tradition loop back around by its end in lucid fashion. Gomis never equivocates and avoids didacticism through a robust presentation of the village’s folkloric beliefs, which, when it comes to memorializing the dead, center on finding certainty through spiritual communion to better understand how the deceased died and what they leave behind. Regardless of where Gomis places his camera—in the place he is from or where he is headed—he finds people at their most vulnerable, reconnecting with old friends and lovers and preserving or creating rituals to confront the uncertainty of existence itself.
Through all this, Gomis’s filmmaking embodies the very concept of Dao—perpetual spiritual motion that binds people together despite historical tumult. The result is a work of documentary simplicity imbued with a sense of occasion. When it begins, you may only have a faint sense of who is who. But three hours later, it’s as though you have spent a lifetime with these families that now feel like your own.
Living with Tom in New Mexico, Judy had not found the freedom, sexual or otherwise, that she had been after when she left John; to the contrary, she had quickly found herself in another bad marriage. Frustrated, she poured her liberatory aspirations into the book; despite her failure of nerve at the end, Sandy Pressman takes herself for a wilder ride than Judy ever had — flying away to a secret assignation with one lover, sleeping with her brother-in-law at a party (a pool party, where the women ended up drunk and topless), dating the husband of a friend in an open marriage.
“I was wild,” Judy said. “My fantasies were wild.” She remembered having dinner with her agent, Claire Smith, and Smith’s husband in Brooklyn, after both the Smiths had read a draft of Wifey. “Everyone was so scandalized by it. But [Claire] was not so scandalized so that she wouldn’t sell it. A lot of people wanted me to change my name, warning me I would ruin my lovely career if I published this under my own name.” Before publication, she sent a draft to John. “I said, ‘If there is anything in this book that you don’t want, let me know.’ And he said to me, ‘I don’t care … It’s okay with me.’” Judy wasn’t sure that John ever read it — “I don’t think John ever read any of my books” — but at least she had his blessing.
While she refused to publish under a pseudonym, she did make one concession to the dictates of decency. In an early draft, Judy had written a scene in which Sandy uses her dog to pleasure herself. “The dog did a little licking of Sandy, and that was very satisfying,” she said. “A little oral sex.” The scene was pure fiction — as an adult, Judy never even owned a dog — but it felt true to Sandy’s character. “It seemed like a good thing to do, [for] somebody who was unfulfilled.” Judy couldn’t remember who asked her to remove the scene; it might have been Claire Smith, or her editor, Phyllis Grann, or Helen Honig Meyer, the publisher of Dell, which oversaw Laurel, Judy’s paperback publisher. Judy heard, second- or thirdhand, that when the book went to Meyer, “she was absolutely scandalized — something to do with [how] her granddaughter liked my books.” Whatever the case, the dog had to go.
When Wifey was published in September 1978, critics mostly agreed that it was not a good book. The Los Angeles Times critic liked Wifey, calling it “a voyage into reality that is somehow funny in spite of its frustrations and disappointments.” But that was a minority point of view.The Minneapolis Tribune critic said she “didn’t feel much of anything except that there was a lot to wade through on the way to the occasionally risqué,” while the Roanoke Times said the book “meets no needs and offers little fun” and “is a collection of stereotypes performing redundant sexual activities amidst much melodrama and shallow perceptions.”
It’s hard to credit the assertion that the book “offers little fun,” for, if anything, the book offers too much fun, at the expense of characterization. It’s easy to see how Sandy steps out on her marriage but much harder to make sense of her bizarre internal monologue (using a vinegar douche, Sandy imagines that she is concocting “cunt vinaigrette”), or her willingness to go to bed with any man who comes on to her, including her friend’s husband, whose foreplay involves calling her animal names (“my mountain goat, my baby burro”). The problem, for the novel, is not that Sandy is experimental, adventuresome, or even obscene, but rather that she seems to change from page to page. Judy would later stress her own instability during that period (“I was wild”); it’s hardly surprising that the character onto whom she projected her inner life, the character who conceivably would let a dog go down on her, did not entirely cohere on the page.
Yet the novel has its strengths, ignored by its critics and, presumably, by its millions of readers, who flocked to the sexy stuff, the inferior pastiche of Erica Jong, Jacqueline Susann, or Anne Roiphe. Sneaking around in the bushes, the old Judy Blume is still there. For one thing, she is still a funny writer, unparalleled at depicting a turtle-swallowing toddler or, it turns out, a predictable husband. “Rules and Regulations for a Norman Pressman Fuck,” one section begins. “The room must be dark so they do not have to look at each other. There will be one kiss, with tongue, to get things going. His fingers will pass lightly over her breasts, travel down her belly to her cunt, and stop. He will attempt to find her clitoris.” And so on, unsparingly. Wifey also has, nestled in all the moist valleys between breasts and ass cheeks, insightful writing about racial injustice (there is a subplot about whether the Pressmans should sell their house to a Black family), class tensions (between the Pressmans and their friends, between Norman and his employees), and, as ever, the indignities of being young and female. There is a genuine pathos to the story of Sandy’s twin nieces, agreed by all to be unattractive, thanks to their weight and their noses. When it’s time for the twins’ joint nose jobs, long planned by their mother, Sandy drives her mother into New York City to visit the girls in the hospital. The scene offers a pitiless view of the sexism, and materialism, of the culture in which the girls were being raised.
“It’s a shame they got the Lefferts’ noses instead of ours,” the twins’ grandmother Mona says to Sandy, their aunt. (Sandy feels the same way; earlier in the book, we read of her surprise that her sister “had produced such unattractive children.”) Mona has it on good authority that although a nose job typically costs $1,800, because they are twins and because of professional courtesy (their father, whom Sandy has slept with, is a gynecologist), “they’re getting a break — two thousand dollars for both.” Whatever its merits — and it had some — Wifey was treated by readers and critics as less important than its author. Judy Blume had become one of those celebrities — like Barbra Streisand, say, or Elizabeth Taylor — who was bigger than her body of work. A magazine story about Judy, while occasioned by a new book, could ignore the book and focus on the personal life of the woman who had created it, because that was what readers really wanted to know about. Shortly after the publication of Wifey, two of the country’s most widely read magazines ran long stories about Judy. Neither one could have enhanced her reputation as a serious writer.
In October 1978, People ran a 2,000-word profile by John Neary, which, with its numerous photographs by his wife, Joan Neary, stretched over five pages. The spread opens with a full-page photograph of Judy looking straight at the camera, in a lacy teddy, leaning back against some sort of comforter or pillow. And it’s all downhill from there. The text of the article is a reasonable summation of her career, beginning with the present (Wifey is a smash, in its third printing, paperback rights sold for $350,000) and looking back at her beginnings (the NYU writing class, early rejection letters). But it is, alas, punctuated by the Blume-ian clichés about her weight (100 pounds, “103 on a fat day,” Judy says) and her youthful appearance. “Judy is always mistaken for a daughter when she answers the door of her sprawling, $140,000 adobe home,” the article says, referring to the house in Santa Fe that she had bought after two years in Los Alamos (the article doesn’t say so, but Kitchens did not contribute to the purchase of their houses). Discussing the impact of Margaret on her career, Judy makes herself sound uncharacteristically naïve: “That was the first time I felt, ‘My God, I really can do this! These people are taking me seriously! This is not just pretend, not just something to keep me out of Saks!’” The quotation may have been Judy’s — a mordant allusion to John Blume, who had made the Saks joke about her writing — but the exclamation points, which drive home the false impression that she is a giddy child or a recovering shopaholic, were People’s added touch.
Still, Judy colluded with this lightweight approach, this portrait of the artist as a sex kitten. According to Judy, photographer Joan Neary came up with the idea of posing her in a teddy, and Judy just went along with it. But Neary said that wasn’t so. “As a photographer I never posed anyone for a picture — just hung around long enough for people to relax and forget about me,” Neary said. As for the teddy, Neary said it couldn’t have been her idea: “How would I have known she had that garment?” On the second page of the article, Judy is shown fully dressed but with her arms around Tom’s neck and her legs wrapped around his waist; he is holding her in the air, as if he has just spun her around and they have come to a dizzy stop. The caption reads: “In a playful moment, Judy tells husband Tom, ‘I let you live out your fantasies. This is position No. 32.’”
On the final page of the article, the photograph at the top shows Judy lying barefoot on a bed, on her stomach, her head propped on one hand, while the other hand holds a pen, scribbling something on a pad of paper. Just as the opening photograph of the piece shows her in bed, wearing skimpy nightclothes, the final photograph implies that she scarcely leaves the bed, save for a change of clothes. Sex, writing — it’s all in the bedroom. The caption under the final photograph reads, “‘I do not see myself as a great novelist,’ she says, ‘but it brings people pleasure, and me pleasure. So why not?’”
Judy always regretted collaborating with the Nearys. “They knew what People wanted, and they delivered.” The article prompted a disappointed letter from novelist Norma Klein, a friend and frequent correspondent. “When I saw that terrible photo of you in People, dressed in the nightgown with that shy, frightened smile on your face, I practically wanted to cry,” Klein wrote. “It was so pathetic and unnecessary. Don’t play into that.” If the People article manages to erase Judy’s career as a pioneering writer for children, painting her instead as a semi-talented dilettante of adult literature, holed up in the bedroom writing about the pleasure principle, with breaks to give Tom “position No. 32,” the New York Times Magazine article that ran two months later does her the disservice — or was it meant to be a favor? — of overlooking the adult novel altogether. The Times Magazine piece, which mentions Wifey only twice, is by Joyce Maynard, who at 25 was already a literary star herself. Maynard had become precociously famous with the 1972 publication, in the Times Magazine, of “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” an essay that she expanded the next year into a full-length memoir. By the time she wrote the Blume profile, Maynard had dropped out of Yale, moved in with the writer J.D. Salinger (he had sent her a fan letter after reading her essay in the Times Magazine), left Salinger, gotten married, and had a baby. She brought the baby to her interview with Judy in Manhattan.
By assigning the profile to a 20-something memoirist celebrated for writing about her own adolescence, the Times Magazine was in effect overdetermining the piece that they would get: an appraisal of Judy the children’s writer. “When Judy Blume visits bookstores to autograph copies of ‘Wifey,’ it is the kids who besiege her,” Maynard wrote. “Every week more than 200 of them write her letters — requesting bust-development exercises and asking for more details on how you get a baby. ‘How can I tell my mother that I know some things about sex?’ Or, simply, ‘I am desperate.’” Maynard effectively sidesteps the occasion for the profile — Judy’s new, bestselling, sexy adult novel — to offer an evaluation of her outsize role in youth culture. Maynard is saying to adults, You may have heard about this sensation called Wifey, but are you aware of what the author means to your daughters?
“Coming of Age with Judy Blume” is a long piece — it was the longest profile of Judy to date — and, with her ample word limit, Maynard limns the basics of Judy’s life. She inserts in the middle, in the heart of the piece, a trip to Bath, Ohio, where she interviews girls and their mothers about the appeal of Judy’s work and explains the twisty road a Blume hardcover can travel: “Then Beth Rice went on a shopping trip with Christiane Boustani and told Christiane’s mother it was O.K. to buy the book. Christiane got the book from Beth after Beth had read it. Heather Benson, age 13, borrowed Forever on a choir trip. Possibly it was Beth Rice’s copy, now covered in brown paper, since one belonging to another girl was confiscated by a teacher at the Bath Middle School. Heather’s mother, Pat, found the copy Heather had, picked it up and was so shocked she couldn’t put it down.”
Maynard’s Times profile is the rare piece that quotes actual young people about what Judy means to them, and it’s one of the first to connect her popularity with the rising number of parents challenging her books, asking that the books be removed from schools or libraries — a good sign, it’s implied, since it’s the kind of thing that happens to authors only once they get popular. The accompanying photographs are of Judy talking to teenagers and of daughters and mothers quoted in the piece. In short, Maynard takes Judy — and her readership — seriously.
Nevertheless, certain clichés follow Judy from article to article. Her youthful mien, for example, remains irresistible to the journalist, even the shrewd Maynard: daughter Randy is “often taken for Judy’s sister”; Judy “still has a girlish voice, and in figure she could be about 12 years old”; she “could fit right in as a guest at a seventh-grade slumber party.” More interesting, Judy herself is far too self-deprecating; she’s unwilling or unable to own her talent. “I can’t entirely explain why they [sell], myself,” Judy tells Maynard about her books’ success. “I know I’m no great literary figure.”
A 19-story residential project proposed in Noho heads to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission next month.
When the city rezoned Soho and Noho in 2021, most of the 56-block plan overlapped with historic districts. That meant, despite the zoning changes allowing more residential space in the neighborhoods, new development within most of the rezoning area would still need sign-off from Landmarks.
Which is why a plan for a parking lot in Noho is heading to the commission for approval.
Edward J. Minskoff Equities wants to build a 195-foot project at 375 Lafayette Street, currently home to a parking lot that can accommodate up to 200 vehicles. The developer is seeking to build between 200 and 210 housing units, with 50 to 53 affordable to those earning, on average, 60 percent of the area median income. The proposal also includes up to 7,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.
The apartment would be split into two buildings, which allows the developer to avoid paying higher construction wages that kick in at 150 units for projects looking to receive the property tax break 485x.
A building of this kind is permitted under the district’s M1-5/R9X zoning, but because the site falls within an area known as the Noho Historic District Extension, the developer must secure Landmarks approval to move forward.
The process has been a bumpy one.
Last week, Community Board 2 recommended that Landmarks reject the project unless the developer reduces its bulk and makes other changes. The board cited a lack of “harmony” with most of the buildings in the district. The position echoed criticism from Village Preservation, which called the proposed building “dramatically out of scale.”
It also questioned why estimates for the project’s unit count hadn’t increased, despite a density bump from the Universal Affordability Preference (provided under the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity). The city previously projected, when the site had a floor area ratio of 9.7, that 212 residences would be built. Now, with a proposed FAR of 10.8, the unit count is still within that range.
On social media, Open New York blamed NIMBYs for “blatantly weaponizing ‘preservation’ to block housing on a surface parking lot.”
The fight over this project is playing out as the city is starting to see the housing ballot measures — which are largely aimed at speeding up approvals and preventing City Council members from unilaterally killing housing projects — play out.
Last week the city announced the first project to go through the new Expedited Land Use Review Procedure. The 84-unit housing project in the Bronx will undergo a 90-day review, instead of the usual 200-plus day Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.
This week, the threat of an appeals board reversing the City Council’s rejection of a project was also put to the test. Ahead of a Tuesday vote on a 248-unit project in her district, Council member Vickie Paladino indicated she would likely vote yes on the project in order to preserve some influence over the development — rather than have it sent to the three-person appeals board. (The three-person board can’t make changes to an application, but it can scrap modifications made by the City Council.)
“Make no mistake — if I vote no the developers have no reason to work with us from that point on,” she says in a Facebook video over the weekend. “It will be entirely between them and the Borough President and Mayor. And I do not want us to give up that remaining leverage.”
She also indicated that she expects to run into similar conundrums going forward.
“Since these ballot props passed, my office has been inundated with calls from developers looking to build here,” she said. “Every single empty lot in the district is now up for grabs. And I will not be able to stop much of it.”
But the Council also approved two new historic districts in Brooklyn on Tuesday, and other neighborhoods could follow suit to, say, sidestep City of Yes for Housing Opportunity or ensure further scrutiny from Landmarks.
As for the Lafayette Street project, the commission is slated to consider the proposal on March 10.
What we’re thinking about: Will you be attending the first rental ripoff hearing this week? Send a note to kathryn@therealdeal.com.
A thing we’ve learned: The rental ripoff hearings won’t be a large production but will feature one-on-one (largely private) testimony between tenants and city officials. The first is scheduled for Thursday.
Elsewhere in New York…
— Mayor Zohran Mamdani named Sideya Sherman as the new chair of the City Planning Commission and director of the Department of City Planning. Sherman most recently served as the chief equity officer and commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice. She also previously worked for NYCHA, the Municipal Art Society and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Mamdani reappointed Eric Enderlin as president of the Housing Development Corporation and Edith Hsu-Chen as executive director of DCP.
— The NYPD says it is investigating a snowball fight that broke out in Washington Square Park on Monday. Gothamist reports that officials released photos of two people wanted for allegedly assaulting an officer.
Closing Time
Residential: The top residential deal recorded Tuesday was $12.5 million for a 3,491-square-foot condominium unit at 25 Columbus Circle in Lincoln Square. Adam Modlin and Andrew Nierenberg had the listing.
Commercial: The top commercial deal recorded was $53 million for a 12,172-square-foot development site at 118 Tenth Avenue in Chelsea. The Real Deal reported on the sale by Benny Barampov to Toll Brothers.
New to the Market: The highest price for a residential property hitting the market was $9.5 million for a pre-war cooperative unit at 875 Park Avenue on the Upper East Side. Elana Schoppmann with Compass has the listing.
Breaking Ground: The largest new building permit filed was for a proposed 10,910-square-foot, six-story multi-family project at 16 West 129th Street in North Harlem. STUDIO C Architecture filed the permit on behalf of Etai Vardi of Trademark Development Group.
New York’s troubled prison system still has the same number of vacancies as it did a year ago, when thousands of officers walked off the job in an illegal three-week strike.
State Corrections Commissioner Daniel Martuscello acknowledged during a recent budget hearing that his department still has 4,600 unfilled corrections officer positions, despite special recruiting campaigns and less stringent hiring requirements.
As a result, there are no plans to draw down roughly 3,000 National Guard troops still stationed in prisons around the state. Lawmakers said during the hearing that they’re wary of the extra costs associated with the ongoing shortage, which have already topped $1 billion.
“The executive budget allocates $535 million for the National Guard. That represents over 4,000 COs, if you converted that to CO salary and fringe,” said state Sen. Dan Stec, a North Country Republican whose district includes seven prisons.
He said Guard personnel are “untrained and unqualified” to do the work of corrections officers.
State Sen. Julia Salazar, a Brooklyn Democrat who chairs the chamber’s corrections committee, agreed.
“I’ve repeatedly heard from [corrections department] staff and incarcerated individuals that the National Guard generally are not playing a helpful role in prison operations,” she said. “There must be a better solution to staffing levels.”
Martuscello rejected Salazar’s assertion. He said having Guard personnel available to assist in some prison functions allowed various programs – including academic and rehabilitation activities – to take place.
“They are certainly allowing us to provide a better work-life balance,” he said.
All sides agreed that the solution is to recruit more officers. Martuscello insisted the department is making progress, but acknowledged that there are still 4,600 open guard positions across the state’s 42 prisons.
Martuscello said there are now 20,000 people on a list eligible for a slot at the department’s eight-week training academy. Attrition rates have fallen by more than 75% from their peak last year, he said, and things are now “moving in the right direction to get off of relying on the National Guard, but I couldn’t speak more highly of them today.”
Hochul proposed the $535 million for the Guard in her executive budget, but complained about having to do so.
“It’s a major drain on us to have to be paying for all these National Guard members to do the job that I need people who work for me directly to do,” she said last month.
Republican lawmakers said the state needs to change prison discipline policies to help recruit more corrections officers. Last year, striking officers blamed the 2021 Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement law, which limited the use of solitary confinement, for contributing to an increase in prison violence. They demanded the law’s repeal.
“Albany Democrats are burning through over a billion dollars while refusing to address the policy failures that caused this crisis,” said Assemblymember Chris Friend, a Republican from the Oneonta area. “There’s no plan to end the Guard deployment, no accountability for the spending and no willingness to admit the HALT Act has made our prisons more dangerous.”
Advocates of the measure, like Salazar, said HALT has never been fully implemented. A working group including Martuscello and major labor unions last year recommended changes to the law that could result in more frequent use of solitary confinement.
Stec and other Republicans pushed Hochul to include those changes in her $262.7 billion budget plan. Inserting unrelated issues into budget bills gives the governor leverage to advance policies that might not otherwise pass the Legislature.
Hochul didn’t include any prison policy in budget amendments released last week. In a statement, spokesperson Jess D’Amelia was noncommittal.
“Governor Hochul is laser-focused on implementing fundamental, systemwide changes to the state’s correction system to ensure our facilities are run in a safe and efficient manner for all,” D’Amelia said. “Our administration will continue to partner with our partners in the Legislature to explore all options to improve the state’s corrections system.”
When we heard that Donald Trump’s 2026 State of the Union Address would break his own record for the longest-ever presidential speech to Congress, a lot of us figured he’d combine improvised attacks on his enemies with his assigned mission of convincing people he had a plan to deal with pervasive economic discontent. In fact, he mostly appeared to stick to his script. On many topics, he was succinct rather than expansive or weave-y. The speech was very long primarily because of its extraordinary number of gimmicks, theatrics, and props, with multiple medals being awarded right there in the gallery, and the speechifying being regularly interrupted with extra-long standing ovations from the Republicans in the room. For a while, you felt that the veteran TV star at the podium was channeling Oprah, showering awards on the worthiest people in his studio audience.
The address did not, however, break any significant new ground. He had one surprise, an endorsement of a ban on insider trading by members of Congress, and one relatively novel (already leaked) proposal: a deal with tech companies to absorb utility costs created by their AI data centers. But that was about it.
The first half-hour of the speech was the familiar “American carnage” litany of bile hurled at Joe Biden’s administration, with the usual lies and exaggerations designed to make Trump’s record look better by making his predecessor’s record look dark and even sinister. Then he moved into his own economic agenda, and visibly lost momentum. There was a tiny flutter of emotion in his voice when he deplored the Supreme Court’s decision blowing up his tariff regime, which he rather childishly dismissed as irrelevant because he had come up with an alternative scheme. But he quickly moved on.
For a good while, we wondered if we were witnessing the first truly boring Trump speech on record. It was only when he moved on to what might be described as the “culture war” section of the address that he got some of his old verve back. Murderous immigrants, gruesome murders, monstrous transgender surgeries, stuffed ballot boxes, criminals being turned out of jail to do crimes again — it was the 2024 election message all over again. He did not say a single word to address the widespread dismay, extending even to Republicans, about the murderous tactics deployed by ICE and the Border Patrol as part of his mass deportation initiative.
When he finally transitioned to the obligatory section on world events, Trump lost his mojo again. While many expected a bombshell announcement about an impending military attack on Iran, he mumbled his way through what he’s said a hundred times before about denying that country nuclear weapons. He said almost nothing about the Russia-Ukraine war, and literally did not mention China — allegedly the greatest global challenger to our country — even once.
Most of all, this was almost certainly the most partisan speech any president has ever delivered to Congress, exceeding even his belligerent message a year ago. Over and over again, he accused Democrats — not just their supposed “radical left” element, but all of them — of conscious, deliberate betrayal of the country, by opening the borders, the prisons, the very gates of hell. He called them “crazy,” too. Knowing that many Democrats had resolved to show “silent defiance” during the address, he pulled off one neat trick: presenting a phony antithesis between the interests of U.S. citizens and “illegal aliens” and demanding they stand up for the country! He expertly prolonged the moment as Republicans hooted and cheered while Democrats sat sullenly. But the fact remains that in a narrowly divided Congress, Trump will need Democrats to get anything done the rest of the year. He detonated that slim possibility instead.
This probably didn’t win over many swing voters unhappy with the economy, but it surely, like the entire speech, thrilled his base. And since he gave very much the speech scripted for him, we have to conclude that its object was to shore up that base rather than to expand it. Perhaps he and his advisors truly believe the economy is going to go gangbusters later this year, or that Trump’s party will be awarded with continued control of Congress without much of an effort to change anyone’s mind.
If you tuned into the SOTU address expecting policy innovations or a different Trump tone, you had to be disappointed. It appears he will go into difficult midterm elections standing pat on his record, his message, and his unshakable belief in his own greatness.
The Albany County District Attorney is pursuing a case against 55-year-old James Yerdon, accusing him of sexually assaulting two boys over a multi-year period in the capital region.
MANHATTAN, New York (WABC) — The NYPD has released images of four people they are looking to question after several NYPD officers were hit with snowballs and injured on Monday.
They released photos of two people on Tuesday afternoon, and then released images of another pair of individuals hours later.
The NYPD has released images of four people they are looking to question after several NYPD officers were hit with snowballs and injured on Monday.
New York City Mayor Mamdani on Tuesday said that he does not believe anyone should be charged in the incident.
“From the videos that I’ve seen, it looks like a snowball fight,” he said.
The Police Benevolent Association blasted the mayor’s response as a failure of leadership.
“This was not just a ‘snowball fight.’ This was an assault – by adults throwing chunks of ice and rocks – that landed two police officers in the hospital with head and face injuries,” PBA President Patrick Hendry said.
Officers responded to Washington Square Park in Manhattan at 4 p.m. on Monday to a report of multiple individuals on a roof inside the park.
When they arrived on the scene, police say the crowd began throwing snowballs at them.
Two officers would end up in the emergency room after being struck in the face and head. No one was arrested. The leaders of the city’s police unions are outraged and demanding a criminal investigation.
“This was disgraceful. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a game. It was a vicious attack. An assault on two New York City police forces that landed them in the hospital,” Hendry said.
After viewing the video of the melee, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch agreed. Posting on social media, “The behavior depicted is disgraceful, and it is criminal. Our detectives are investigating this matter.”
But this afternoon, Mayor Mamdani downplayed the episode after being asked multiple times.
“I can just tell you from the video I saw, it looked like kids at a snowball fight,” Mamdani said.
Rahul Nag was there. He told us that it started off as harmless fun but escalated when several young people began tossing snow from the roof of the park’s restrooms. The officers were confronted after they arrived to investigate.
“It wasn’t supposed to be violent. It was – it started out as a very fun thing to do. And then, you know, it just escalated, and there weren’t any older kids or older people out here. It was just young kids having fun. And then it kind of became a back-and-forth thing between NYPD and those young kids, you know what I mean?” Nag said.
Mamdani said the officers and all city workers must be treated with respect.
“They have been keeping New Yorkers safe. And they have also been at the heart of our efforts of digging New Yorkers’ cars out of these kinds of conditions and ensuring that our ambulances, our MTA buses, can keep functioning. Across this city, they and our entire city workforce deserve to be treated with respect,” he said.
NYC Mayor Mamdani held a news conference on Tuesday afternoon
Mamdani added, “The only person in our city’s workforce who deserves to be hit with a snowball is me.”
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President Donald Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address in history Tuesday night, touting his administration’s economic policies and immigration enforcement, while condemning Democrats and the previous administration.
Trump also made a series of exaggerated, misleading and false claims throughout the course of the evening on topics ranging from the economy to crime to elections.
Here’s what the president got right — and wrong — in his address.
Did Trump lift millions off food stamps?
“We have lifted 2.4 million Americans — a record — off of food stamps,” Trump said.
Verdict
This needs context.
Analysis
Nearly 42 million Americans rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, informally known as food stamps.
Around 2.4 million people are expected to lose eligibility for the program because of new work requirements passed in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, according to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank.
But the timeline for making sure that people meet those requirements varies by state, so some of the cuts haven’t happened yet. And there is no proposed federal program to supplement the loss of food assistance.
Under the new work requirements, adults ages 55 to 64 and parents whose youngest children are at least 14 years old must document 80 hours per month of work, education or volunteering to maintain SNAP benefits. Without such documentation, they are eligible for food stamps for only three months within a three-year period. The law also gets rid of exemptions for veterans and people experiencing homelessness.
Did the ‘Warrior Dividend’ money come from tariffs?
“Every service member recently received a Warrior Dividend of $1,776. They put it on my desk. We got the money from tariffs and other things. A lot of money we have,” Trump said.
Verdict
The claim that “Warrior Dividend” payments came from tariffs is false.
Analysis
According to a Pentagon release in December, the money to pay 1.28 million active-duty service members and 174,000 reserve members $1,776 each came from a supplemental housing fund that Congress appropriated as part of Trump’s massive domestic spending bill last summer.
The funds were delivered to recipients “as a nontaxable supplement to their regular monthly housing allowance,” the internal Pentagon News Service reported in December.
As part of the announcement, Jules W. Hurst III, the acting comptroller for the Defense Department, said at the time, “We are grateful to President Trump, Chairman [Roger] Wicker, Chairman [Mike] Rogers and the other members of Congress who have made this Warrior Dividend possible through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Trump says there’s almost ‘no crime anymore’ in D.C.
“[W]e have almost no crime anymore in Washington, D.C. How did that happen? In fact, crime in Washington is now at the lowest level ever recorded, and murders in D.C. this January were down close to 100% from a year ago,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is exaggerated.
Analysis
Crime in Washington has fallen in all but one category in 2026 so far, according to data published by the Metropolitan Police Department. (Assault with a dangerous weapon is the only category that has increased in 2026.) That data also showed declines in 2025 from 2024 in all violent crime and property crime categories.
But it is not accurate to say there is “almost no crime” in Washington.
Since Jan. 1, there have been nine homicides, 126 assaults with a dangerous weapon and 322 motor vehicle thefts in the city. Year-to-date, homicides are down 67%.
Trump claims other presidents failed to lower drug prices
“I am also ending the wildly inflated cost of prescription drugs. Other presidents tried to do it, but they never could. They didn’t even come close,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is false.
Analysis
In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, capping insulin at $35 a month for people on Medicare, placing a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket drug costs for people on Medicare and, for the first time, allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of some of its most expensive medications. On Jan. 1, the first negotiated prices took effect, including for the blockbuster blood thinner Eliquis and the cancer drug Imbruvica. After the law capped insulin costs for Medicare patients, drugmakers also extended $35 monthly caps to privately insured patients.
By contrast, Trump has stuck voluntary deals with at least 16 drugmakers in exchange for tariff relief. He launched the self-pay platform TrumpRx, which so far offers cash prices on 43 medications. Most of those deals, however, don’t change what people with private insurance or Medicare pay at the pharmacy counter. Medicaid patients already tend to pay little or nothing for prescriptions. And many of the drugs listed on TrumpRx have generic versions that cost less than the advertised prices.
Was inflation at record levels when Trump assumed office?
“The Biden administration and its allies in Congress gave us the worst inflation in history of our country. But in 12 months, my administration has driven core inflation down to the lowest level in more than five years, and in the last three months of 2025 it was down to 1.7%,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is false.
Analysis
Inflation is not typically measured in just three-month periods. The consumer-price index, the most cited inflation metric, includes food and energy. While energy prices have been dropping, food prices have been on the rise over the last year.
On an annual basis, inflation when Trump took office was 2.9%, which is not a record high level.
Inflation fell as low as 2.3% in April before it spiked again after his sweeping worldwide tariffs were introduced.
Recent record inflation was experienced in 2022 when it hit 8.9%. The highest inflation ever experienced happened in the 1980s, when it reached as high as around 14%.
Trump said more Americans are working now than ever before
“More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country.” Trump said.
Verdict
This is true.
Analysis
The statement is correct, though the labor market’s rate of growth has slowed sharply since Trump took office, and 2025 was the worst year for job creation since 2020. Excluding recessions, 2025 was actually the worst year for job creation since 2003.
A total of 584,000 jobs were created last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down significantly from more than 2 million in both 2024 and 2023. In 2022, as the economy bounced back from the pandemic, more than 4.5 million jobs were created. The pace of job creation is also slower than it was in each of the first three years of Trump’s first term.
President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday, touting his administration’s policies on immigration and trade.
Did Trump secure $18 trillion in investments in U.S.?
“I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, pouring in from all over the globe,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is false.
Analysis
While a number of companies, such as tech firms, semiconductor companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers, have made public commitments to invest in the U.S., many of those commitments are either only slight increases from previous announcements or in line with previous plans. In addition, the commitments and investments the White House touted on its own website total $9.7 trillion.
A review of the White House list also found the $9.7 trillion figure to be misleading. More than $2.5 trillion of that is not investments, Bloomberg Economics found in November. About $3.5 trillion of that comes from opaque sovereign pledges, and another $3.5 trillion is corporate investments. Of those corporate investments, $2.9 trillion is planned for data centers.
“More than $250 billion of the White House pledges were announced or planned before Trump retook office in January,” Bloomberg Economics researchers also found.
Many of the commitments are also over the long term and are likely to be subject to change. For example, it recently took drugmaker Fujifilm Biotechnologies five years to open one factory in North Carolina.
Did Trump eliminate taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security?
“We held strong, and with the Great Big Beautiful Bill, we gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors,” Trump said.
Verdict
This needs context.
Analysis
It’s true that Trump cut taxes for seniors and hourly workers with the bill he signed into law last year, but he didn’t eliminate all the taxes he mentioned here. Some workers can now deduct overtime and tips, though there are income caps and maximum deduction limits. While some seniors may pay less in tax thanks to a new deduction, Social Security income is still taxed.
Trump says the murder rate is the lowest it’s been in 125 years
“Last year, the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history. This is the biggest decline, think of it, in recorded history, the lowest number in over 125 years,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is true.
Analysis
This is true, according to an analysis of crime data published last month by the Council on Criminal Justice, an independent, nonpartisan group.
The group’s January analysis predicted that “when nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility” that the homicide level “would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.”
Trump says the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ was the largest tax cut in history
“Last year, I urged this Congress to begin the mission by passing the largest tax cut in American history, and our Republican majority delivered so beautifully,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is false.
Analysis
Trump is referring in this statement to his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which he signed into law in July. The law cut taxes for many people and businesses while also significantly cutting an array of federal programs.
Trump says 70,000 new construction jobs have been added
“We have added 70,000 new construction jobs in just a very short period of time,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is exaggerated.
Analysis
From January 2025 to January 2026, 44,000 construction jobs were added, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, far fewer than the 70,000 Trump touted.
Did Biden allow millions of migrants, including murderers, into the U.S.?
“They poured in by the millions and millions — from prisons, from mental institutions. There were murders — 11,888 murders. They came into our country. You allowed that to happen,” Trump said, in reference to Biden.
Verdict
This needs context.
Analysis
It’s true that 10 million people entered the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration, but there’s no evidence that millions of migrants were coming from prisons and mental institutions, as Trump claims.
As for the claim about 11,888 murders, there are more than 13,000 convicted murderers without legal status who are not in ICE custody, but that figure can’t be blamed exclusively on Biden. It’s not clear when those migrants arrived in the U.S. — they could have entered at any point over the last four decades or even earlier, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The 13,000 number also includes noncitizens in state and federal prisons.
Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota shouted in dissent at President Trump as he urged the House to prohibit sanctuary cities.
Trump claims $19 billion in fraud committed in Minnesota
“When it comes to the corruption that is plundering, it really is plundering, America, there’s been no more stunning example than Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion dollars from the American taxpayer. We have all the information, and in actuality, the number is much higher than that,” Trump said.
Verdict
This lacks evidence.
Analysis
The figure far exceeds estimates from the Justice Department, which has so far charged 98 people in Minnesota, 85 of whom are Somali, with $1 billion of fraud. The House Oversight Committee has estimated the fraud “could exceed $9 billion” as investigations continue.
Federal prosecutors, who began investigating the fraud allegations during the Biden administration, have also indicated that the total amount of federal taxpayer money that was misused could be as much as about $9 billion. That number stems from a federal prosecutor’s public statement that estimated that half of the $18 billion in federal funds paid out to 14 programs in the state may have been fraudulent.
Trump says egg and beef prices are declining
“The price of eggs is down 60%,” Trump said. “And even beef, which was very high, is starting to come down significantly.”
Verdict
This needs context.
Analysis
Egg prices came down over the last year — dipping around 48% from January 2025 to January 2026, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Meanwhile, beef prices keep hitting all-time highs — with ground beef reaching a fresh record at $6.75 per pound last month, up nearly 22% from the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Has Trump ended 8 wars?
“I ended eight wars,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is exaggerated.
Analysis
There is no consensus about how many wars or potential wars Trump has ended. And where peace has prevailed, Trump’s impact as a mediator is up for debate.
Trump has claimed credit for ending conflicts between Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Thailand and Cambodia, Serbia and Kosovo, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and India and Pakistan.
In some cases, fighting has resumed after declarations of peace or ceasefires, including between Thailand and Cambodia and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And in other cases, there was no shooting war in the first place, as with Egypt and Ethiopia, but Trump’s envoys sought to defuse tensions that could trigger a conflict over a dam project.
Trump has claimed that in his first term, a U.S.-brokered economic secured peace between Serbia and Kosovo. The two sides have not been in a shooting war since the 1990s, but deep political tensions persist, despite the deal agreed upon during Trump’s first term.
Some of the countries’ leaders have said Trump helped end the fighting, including between Israel and Iran, Thailand and Cambodia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Pakistan and India. Pakistan has described Trump as having played an instrumental role in ending a war with India. But India’s government has denied that the U.S. played a role in negotiating the ceasefire, saying the fighting ended as a result of direct talks between the two countries.
Israel and regional experts have credited Trump with helping end a 12-day war between Israel and Iran after he ordered airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear sites. Trump is now threatening another U.S. air attack on Iran depending on the outcome of diplomatic talks with Iranian officials Thursday.
Even some of Trump’s critics have praised his role in helping broker a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, though the ceasefire remains fragile.
Will the SAVE America Act get rid of mail voting?
“I’m asking you to approve the SAVE America Act,” Trump said. “It’s very simple. All voters must show voter ID. All voters must show proof of citizenship. No more crooked mail-in ballots, except for illness, disability, military or travel.”
Verdict
Trump’s comments about mail-in ballots are false.
Analysis
The SAVE America Act, which was approved by the House but has not passed the Senate, proposes adding significant new proof of citizenship and voter ID requirements, but it wouldn’t eliminate mail voting.
Trump claims cheating in elections is ‘rampant’
“Cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant,” Trump said.
Verdict
This is false.
Analysis
There is no evidence of widespread fraud in American elections. The conservative Heritage Foundation has collected only dozens of cases of fraud in key swing states amid tens of millions of ballots cast over decades.
Aria Bendix , Dan De Luce, Kayla Steinberg, Julia Ainsley, Berkeley Lovelace Jr. , Steve Kopack and Christina Wilkie contributed.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger delivered the Democratic rebuttal to President Trump’s State of the Union address, slamming the White House over cost of living concerns.
Monday, Feb. 24, marked the 55th day of Zohran Mamdani’s term as mayor. amNewYork is following Mamdani around his first 100 days in office as we closely track his progress on fulfilling campaign promises, appointing key leaders to government posts, and managing the city’s finances. Here’s a summary of what the mayor did.
As New York City continued digging out from the historic blizzard, public schools reopened on Tuesday with 12,000 teachers absent and about 63.3% of students returning — a decision that Mayor Zohran Mamdani defended as necessary, but one that raised concerns among City Council leaders.
Speaking at a snowstorm update briefing on Feb. 24, Mamdani said the city was not in a position to pivot to remote instruction after midwinter break, noting that it could not ensure students had access to devices, making a last-minute switch to remote learning unworkable.
He argued that schools play a critical role beyond academics, providing meals, mental health support, and childcare for working families, services he said were especially important once conditions were deemed safe after students had their first traditional snow day since 2019 on Monday.
The mayor credited more than 8,000 Department of Education staff who worked through the weekend clearing snow, restoring heat and power, and preparing school buildings for reopening. Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said more than 5,000 substitute teachers were brought in to cover absences after the call-outs of 15.38% of the workforce.
Transportation disruptions appeared limited despite lingering storm impacts. City Hall said about 150,000 students typically rely on school buses, but only 78 complaints were reported Tuesday, with 15 of roughly 8,000 routes experiencing delays.
Still, the decision to reopen drew concern from lawmakers representing districts hit hardest by the storm.
Council Speaker Julie Menin said at a separate press briefing on Tuesday that she heard from numerous council members whose constituents were uneasy about sending children back to school so soon.
“I heard from many council members, including Kamillah Hanks in Staten Island and Kayla Santosuosso of Brooklyn, who were hearing from parents concerned about getting their children to school and who really wanted the flexibility of a remote option,” Menin said. She added that flexibility should be considered during future major storms.
Recently-elected Council Member Santosuosso on Tuesday said that despite the Department of Sanitation “moving mountains” overnight, it still wasn’t enough.
“I’ve got teachers telling me the staff absences outweigh the sub headcount, and no shortage of hellish commutes for parents, kids, and teachers,” she posted on X.
Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
The school reopening came as the city continued an all-hands response to what Mamdani called the “snowstorm of the decade.” Some neighborhoods, particularly on Staten Island, recorded 28 to 30 inches of snow, with high winds creating deep drifts that slowed cleanup efforts.
City officials said 2,600 sanitation workers operated in successive 12-hour shifts, deploying more than 3,000 pieces of equipment and spreading over 143 million pounds of salt to plow every street across the five boroughs at least once. Sanitation crews also cleared thousands of crosswalks, fire hydrants, and bus stops, with additional work continuing due to blowing snow.
An enhanced Code Blue remained in effect through Wednesday morning, with outreach teams making more than 250 placements for homeless New Yorkers since the weekend. Trash collection was suspended on Tuesday and set to resume on Wednesday evening, while alternate side parking was suspended through the end of the week.
As temperatures rise later this week, city officials warned of falling snow and ice from rooftops and urged property owners to clear roofs safely.
Education: CUNY professor’s hot-mic moment was reprehensible, says mayor
“They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” Allyson Friedman, an associate biology professor at Hunter College, reportedly said on Zoom while her mic was live.
Friedman later told the New York Times that her full remarks “make clear these abhorrent views are not my own, nor were they directed at any student or group.”
Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
When asked about the appropriate punishment for the remark and what it says about tensions surrounding the Upper West Side school relocation, Mamdani called the comment “reprehensible” and said it reflected “the exact kind of language that makes students feel as if they don’t belong within our public school system.” He added that the city is “looking to build a public school system that is home for each and every person that calls this city home.”
Chancellor Samuels echoed Mamdani, calling the remark “abhorrent” and saying students “deserve so much better.” Samuels said the administration will work with the superintendent and school communities to repair any harm and strengthen teachers’ ability to address underlying issues in city schools.
Pressed on whether Friedman should be fired, Mamdani said it would be part of the investigation into next steps, as Samuels had outlined.
Earlier Tuesday, Mamdani announced that he had appointed Sideya Sherman to lead the Department of City Planning and the City Planning Commission, while reappointing Eric Enderlin as President of the Housing Development Corporation and Edith Hsu-Chen as DCP Executive Director.
Sherman, formerly the city’s Chief Equity Officer, has a long history in urban planning and affordable housing, including leadership roles at NYCHA and the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity.
Hsu-Chen has been DCP’s executive director since 2022 and played a role in the “City of Yes” zoning reforms aimed at promoting housing, sustainability, and economic development. Enderlin, meanwhile, has led HDC since 2016, overseeing billions in municipal housing bonds and the financing of thousands of affordable homes.
Then Executive Director of the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion & Equity Sideya Sherman pictured in 2021.NYC Mayoral Photography Unit
The appointments come as the city implements new initiatives to speed up affordable housing construction, including the Land Inventory Fast Track (LIFT) and the Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) task forces. Last week, DCP launched the first public review under the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure (ELURP) for an affordable housing project in Mott Haven, Bronx.
Mayor Mamdani framed the changes as central to his administration’s affordability agenda, while Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning Leila Bozorg called the leadership team “critical to shaping the lived reality of our city.”
“Sideya Sherman understands that planning is not an abstract exercise – it is about whether working people can afford to live in the city they call home. Her record in community engagement and equitable development makes her exactly the leader we need at City Planning,” said Mamdani.
“I’m confident that she and Edith Hsu-Chen will move with urgency to deliver affordability, advance fair housing and build a city that works for everyday New Yorkers — not just the wealthy and well-connected,” Mamdani continued. “Eric Enderlin will continue to lead HDC’s groundbreaking work as the nation’s largest municipal Housing Finance Agency, bringing innovative financing tools to bear to build a more affordable city, starting with the homes that dot the five boroughs.”
Annemarie Gray, Executive Director of Open New York, said Sherman’s appointment comes at a pivotal moment for the city’s housing policy. “New York City’s housing shortage is inextricably linked with its history of exclusionary zoning, and solving one means confronting the other,” Gray said. She added that Sherman “brings a deep understanding of the connection between racial equity and fair housing,” and that recent voter-approved charter changes give the city new tools to approve more homes faster.
Art Mill Museum, Doha, designed by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena and scheduled to open in 2030. Photo courtesy Qatar Museums
Cranes hover above Saadiyat Island as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi moves toward completion. In Thailand, Dib Bangkok added another institutional node to Southeast Asia’s expanding art landscape. And the Art Mill Museum in Doha will open its doors in 2030, signaling a long-term cultural horizon. Meanwhile, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has announced job cuts, the National Gallery in London has launched a voluntary exit scheme and MUSAC in León has seen its collecting and exhibition budgets shrink dramatically since its inception. The question is no longer whether the art world is expanding, but under what conditions institutions can sustain themselves and at what pace. The global art system is entering a structural shift in which cultural authority is shaped by uneven speeds of consolidation and retreat.
When the center loses momentum
In the United States, museums have long been funded by a hybrid model that was part philanthropy, part corporate sponsorship, part ticket revenue. That flexibility once appeared to be a strength. It enabled institutions to expand collections, mount blockbuster exhibitions and cultivate global audiences. But it also left them exposed to economic and political volatility. Federal arts funding remains comparatively modest and private donors can shift priorities quickly.
Since President Trump took office, one-third of American museums have lost government grants or contracts, exacerbating an already fragile financial landscape in which more than a quarter of institutions report being worse off than in 2019. The effects have reached major museums, including Boston’s MFA, SFMOMA, the Kennedy Center, the Guggenheim, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Regarding the financial precariousness of museums built primarily on private philanthropy, as is particularly the case now in the U.S., Dr. Georgina S. Walker, author of The Private Collector’s Museums: Public Good versus Private Gain, told Observer that “the recent period of rapid private museum building has fundamentally altered what is understood to be ‘a museum’ and the relevance of an art collection, and thus, maintaining personal collections and museums intact, and in perpetuity, has become less of a focus than it has been in the past.” She added that this situation is “due to the volatility of individual initiatives and sheer number of art projects that have materialized since the early 2000s.”
The pressures are not confined to the United States. In the United Kingdom, cultural funding has been under strain since Brexit-era budget reductions, with institutions navigating years of tightened public support. The latest episode is unfolding at the National Gallery in London, which faces an £8.2 million deficit and has launched a voluntary exit scheme, with compulsory redundancies possible if savings targets are not met, as reported by Martin Bailey in the Art Newspaper.
The façade of MUSAC, León (2005), designed by Mansilla + Tuñón and recipient of the 2007 Mies van der Rohe Award. Photo courtesy Ángel Marcos / MUSAC
The strain extends beyond the United Kingdom. In Antwerp, the Museum of Contemporary Art M HKA was slated for dismantling as part of a broader restructuring of the Flemish cultural landscape before public backlash forced a reversal. In the Netherlands—long considered emblematic of Europe’s most generous subsidy model, especially during the 1980s—minister of education, culture and science Eppo Bruins announced in Parliament further reductions in cultural spending as part of broader budget reallocations aimed at increasing defense expenditure in response to geopolitical pressures, including the war in Ukraine. In Spain, the museum boom of the early 2000s produced landmark institutions such as MUSAC in León, inaugurated in 2005 with an initial acquisitions budget of €1.5 million. Today that figure has reportedly fallen to roughly €70,000, with some exhibitions extending for nine months at a time—a shift that reflects the narrowing operational capacity of many regional museums built during the expansionary years, including Domus Artium DA2 in Salamanca, TEA Tenerife, IVAM in Valencia and the Centro Niemeyer in Avilés.
None of this signals collapse. Western museums remain powerful, globally connected and intellectually influential. But the assumption of institutional stability—once taken for granted—is increasingly conditional. Elsewhere, the trajectory looks markedly different.
The long ascent at the margins
For other regions, entry into the global mainstream followed a different rhythm. In Latin America, consolidation took roughly half a century. From the founding of the Bienal de São Paulo in 1951—long the region’s primary international platform—to the establishment of Tate’s Latin American Acquisitions Committee in 2002, which expanded representation in major Western collections, the path to sustained institutional visibility unfolded gradually. Milestones such as the Havana Biennial, founded in 1984, and the opening of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires MALBA by the private collector Eduardo Costantini in 2001 strengthened regional infrastructure, while commercial platforms such as ZONAMACO in Mexico City, launched in 2002, and ARTBO in Bogotá, established in 2004, signaled a parallel effort to consolidate market presence. Yet much of the validation apparatus—auction houses, blue-chip galleries and critical publishing—remained concentrated in New York, London and Paris. As visibility expanded, authority often remained elsewhere.
Installation view of “Flow, Flower: Bloom!” by Laure Prouvost, during the 36th Bienal de São Paulo. Natt Fejfar
Pablo Helguera, artist and professor at the New School, reflected that “during the mid-20th Century, Latin American modernist artists were incorporated into international markets when their work could be aligned with dominant Western aesthetic movements. By contrast, in the 1990s, the rise of global biennial culture and postcolonial curatorial discourse shifted attention toward contextually grounded, post-conceptual practices which, together with the globalization of the art market and the expansion of institutional acquisitions and fairs, contributed to the increasing prominence of Latin American artists whose critical recognition translated into market value.”
Asia’s trajectory has been markedly faster, from the launch of the Gwangju Biennale in 1995-established in dialogue with European curatorial models and shaped early on by figures such as Harald Szeemann to the opening of M+ in Hong Kong in 2021, now widely regarded as Asia’s most significant museum of visual culture—the region consolidated institutional scale in roughly a quarter-century. A decisive turning point came in 2013 with the inauguration of Art Basel Hong Kong, which repositioned the city as the central node of the Asian art market.
Installation view of “Robert Rauschenberg and Asia” at M+ in 2025. Photo courtesy Dan Leung / M+, Hong Kong
This perspective is echoed by Doryun Chong, artistic director and chief curator of M+ in Hong Kong, who opined that Art Basel Hong Kong “has helped establish and cement the city’s status as the premier hub for contemporary art trades in Asia,” while also contributing to “stimulate the growth of scenes in other Asian cities, from Seoul to Shanghai to Singapore.” He also pointed to the collaboration between Art Basel Hong Kong and M+ as “a unique example of long-term commercial-non-profit partnership that is still going strong.”
A further view comes from Agnes Lin, founder and director of the Osage Foundation in Hong Kong. She argued that “the launch of Art Basel Hong Kong significantly elevated the city’s position within Asia by expanding awareness of international artists and stimulating stronger collecting interest across the region. It generated considerable energy and drew global attention, reinforcing Hong Kong’s role as a central hub in the regional art ecosystem.” Yet Lin noted the paradox that “while this transformation added dynamism, it also posed challenges for smaller galleries, which often found it harder to compete within a framework shaped by Art Basel’s strong brand identity and curatorial influence.”
The contrast becomes clearer when viewed against Australia. Despite launching the Sydney Biennale in 1973 and establishing the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art APT in 1993—one of the earliest sustained platforms for contemporary Asian art and a key driver behind the Queensland Art Gallery’s emergence as one of the region’s most significant collectors—Australia has struggled to translate curatorial leadership into sustained global market centrality. Professor Emeritus John Clark of the University of Sydney argues that “Australia is too far away from New York-London-Paris-Basel for art market actors to come regularly, and its art market and institutional sales are too small to justify casual visits.” Early institutional initiative, in other words, did not automatically produce accelerated integration.
Compressed growth at speed
The Gulf operates at a markedly different tempo. In Doha, the opening of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in 2010 marked the consolidation of a state-led cultural strategy. The arrival of Art Basel Qatar in 2026 signals the integration of the most influential global fair brand into the regional ecosystem. In roughly 15 years, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Saudi Arabia have established institutional, art market and epistemic infrastructures operating at the highest tier of the international art world.
With regard to the pace and structure of cultural development in the Gulf, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Dr. Alia Al-Senussi, who co-authored Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy?, observed that “this began in approximately 2004-2005 with initiatives across the GCC, but the world’s attention is now on the Gulf because of the rapid acceleration in government initiatives related to art and culture, particularly in Saudi Arabia with Vision 2030.” She further noted that it is “not just a transactional moment of attention, but an ongoing dialogue … with the international art world,” suggesting that “the ancient trade routes are realigning and reigniting to recenter the world around the Gulf.”
An interior view of Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by architect Jean Nouvel, with the “rain of light” effect that mimics palm frond shadows in an oasis. Photo courtesy Agnieszka Stankiewicz / Unsplash
Across the Gulf, this acceleration is constantly visible. The Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in 2017, with the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi nearing completion and Frieze Abu Dhabi set to launch in November 2026, further embedding the Gulf within the London-centered fair circuit. In Saudi Arabia, Saudi Vision 2030 has placed cultural development at the heart of national planning, from the transformation of AlUla and its partnership with the Centre Pompidou to the launch of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and the Islamic Arts Biennale held in Jeddah. In Qatar, alongside Art Basel Qatar, initiatives such as the Rubaiya Quadrennial reinforce the country’s ambition to consolidate curatorial authority as well as market presence. Museums, global fair platforms, large-scale biennials and universities such as VCUarts and NYU Abu Dhabi have emerged in close succession rather than over generations.
This is not a reinvention of the art system. The white cube, the international biennial and the global art fair remain intact. What distinguishes the Gulf is the compression of time: infrastructures that evolved gradually over generations are being assembled within an accelerated timeframe by nation-led strategies that combine soft-power diplomacy, city branding and creative cultures with identity policies.
A question of velocity
Taken together, these divergent trajectories suggest that the global art system is no longer divided simply between center and periphery, nor between established and emerging markets. It is divided, increasingly, by institutional velocity. In Western Europe and the United States, museum ecosystems, market hierarchies and cultural authority took centuries to consolidate. Latin America required roughly 50 years to secure sustained institutional integration. East Asia achieved comparable consolidation in approximately 25 years. In the Gulf, a comparable scale of institutional ambition has unfolded within 15 years.
Some regions are recalibrating long-standing infrastructures under financial and political pressure. Others are integrating into global circuits after decades of gradual recognition. And a few are implementing existing models at unprecedented speed.
Cultural authority in the coming decade may depend less on inherited prestige than on the capacity to sustain institutions through volatility. If the 20th Century was defined by accumulation—collections, archives and reputations—the next phase will be defined by tempo and by who is able to sustain it.
Another redeveloped townhouse by a Brooklyn development darling topped the Brooklyn luxury market last week.
The home was one of 20 — including seven condos and 13 single-family homes — to snag a contract from Feb. 16 to Feb. 22 for a total contract volume of $75 million, according to Compass’ weekly report. The previous week saw 22 contracts signed for a total contract volume of $66 million.
Last week, luxury homes with deals signed had a median asking price of nearly $3 million, an average price per square foot of $1,346 and an average days on market of 116.
The priciest deal was for a redeveloped townhouse at 17 Douglass Street in Cobble Hill asking over $9.8 million.
The property was a project by Eckstrom NYC, a seven-year-old development firm led by husband–wife duo Carlos Saavedra and Nicole Eckstrom, the development firm has converted a number of properties into high-end single-family homes that have scored top contracts.
The home at 17 Douglass spans 4,700 square feet. The five-bedroom, five-bathroom home also has a fitness room, sauna, elevator and multiple outdoor areas.
Unlike many past Eckstrom projects, 17 Douglass Street comes fully finished. Eckstrom has marketed most of its townhouses before construction is complete and collaborated with buyers on final touches. Last month, Eckstrom closed its sale of 170 Clinton Street for $14 million.
The developer also recently announced that it would be launching a five-property portfolio with the Gambino Group at Compass, including its first two properties in Manhattan.
The second priciest contract signed last week was for a Midwood home at 1315 Ocean Parkway asking $7.4 million.
Spanning almost 4,700 square feet across three levels, the detached home has four bedrooms and seven bathrooms. The home also includes an indoor gym and a private elevator.
Century 21 Melanie Kishk Realty’s Melanie Kishk had the listing.
Midwood has been an epicenter of expensive South Brooklyn home sales, although many of those deals have typically happened off-market. In December, real estate investor Yosef Hakoun bought a single-family home at 1010 East 8th Street for $8 million, according to public records.
Read more
Brooklyn townhouse development darling expands to Manhattan
Real estate exec sells $9M Midwood home
How one developer is selling Brooklyn townhouses for eight figures
Savannah Guthrie’s family is offering up to $1 million for the return of her 84-year-old mother, Nancy, she announced in a February 24 Instagram video. “We still believe in a miracle,” the Today anchor said. “We still believe that she can come home.” Nancy was initially reported missing in Arizona on February 1. Law enforcement suspect that she was abducted from her home and have released images that appear to show a masked, armed individual tampering with Nancy’s front-door camera. Although Savannah acknowledged that Nancy may already be “dancing in heaven,” she said her family needs to know where she is so that they can either have a “glorious” homecoming or celebrate her “beautiful, brave, courageous, and noble life.”
In her post caption, Savannah urged anyone with information to contact the FBI at 1-800-225-5324 or reach out to her directly, noting that they can remain anonymous. She also clarified that her family’s reward will be paid only if it is consistent with the criteria for payment set by the FBI, which has offered up to $100,000 for information “leading to the location of Nancy Guthrie and/or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in her disappearance.” (Now that he’s done downing beers with the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Olympics, perhaps FBI director Kash Patel will have more free time to follow any leads in this investigation?)
In the weeks since Nancy’s disappearance, some people have expressed frustration online that all missing-persons cases do not receive the same level of concern and coverage in the media. Savannah acknowledged in her video that her family is not alone in this “uncertainty,” explaining that for that reason, they are also donating $500,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “We are hoping that the attention that has been given to our mom and our family will extend to all the families like ours,” she said, “who are in need and need prayers and need support.”
Because we keep getting blizzards in years that end with six, here are your early links: Collapsing trees, pork roll is thriving, American Girl doll remix and more. [ more › ]
NEW YORK (WABC) — Mass transit services partially returned for the Tuesday morning commute after a major winter blizzard that slammed the Tri-State area with up to two feet of snow in some parts, Sunday into Monday afternoon.
The storm has impacted everything from New York City subways and buses, the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North, New Jersey Transit and ferries.
You can find a full list of updates to mass transit services below.
Long Island Rail Road
The LIRR is operating limited service Tuesday, on the Ronkonkoma, Huntington, Babylon, Oyster Bay, Montauk, and Port Washington branches. Montauk service will be limited to trains between Speonk and points west. Oyster Bay service will operate westbound in the morning and add eastbound after the morning rush.
The Port Washington and Ronkonkoma branches will run on an hourly schedule, Babylon and Huntington branches will operate on a half-hourly schedule. Port Jefferson Branch trains will run every hour and a half. Oyster Bay Branch trains will run every two hours. The first eastbound train will leave at 10:45 a.m. Service to Jamaica and Atlantic Terminal will run every 20 minutes.
Crews are running patrol and de-icing trains to prevent ice buildup on the third rail, working on interlockings, and clearing fallen trees from tracks caused by high winds. The LIRR will work to restore service on the other branches throughout the day Tuesday and service will resume on a rolling basis as conditions allow.
Metro-North Railroad
For Tuesday, Metro-North Railroad will operate an enhanced Saturday schedule on the Hudson, Harlem and New Haven Lines. This modified schedule provides two-thirds of regular weekday service.
The Hudson Rail Link connecting bus will resume Tuesday, along with the shuttle buses that have been substituting for the Haverstraw-Ossining Ferry.
New York City Subway
Some express service will continue to run on the local tracks for the morning rush hour, along with modified service in the Rockaways, with shuttle trains running between Euclid Avenue and the Rockaways, serving all stations.
NYC Transit is working to restore service on the Staten Island Railway as quickly as possible.
New York City Buses
Buses continue to run a winter weather schedule with routes subject to detours and curtailments based on road conditions in local areas.
Longer accordion-style buses remain off the road and continue to be replaced with 40-foot standard buses operating with chained wheels.
Customers should expect slower travel times and rolling service modifications while efforts to improve road conditions are underway.
MTA Bridges and Tunnels
Reduced speeds are posted at many bridges and tunnels.
New Jersey Transit
NJ Transit rail service (except Atlantic City Rail Line) will operate on a Presidents’ Day holiday schedule with some adjustments, the agency said.
Service by Rail Line
Morristown, Gladstone & Montclair-Boonton Lines Operating on a Presidents’ Day schedule with all Midtown Direct service to Penn Station New York diverted to Hoboken. Cross honoring in Hoboken will be in effect with PATH (to 33rdSt.), NY Waterway Ferry (to Midtown/W39th St.) and NJ TRANSIT 126 bus as part of the Portal Cutover adjustments.
Pascack Valley Line and Main-Bergen & Port Jervis Lines Operating as scheduled on a Presidents’ Day schedule
Atlantic City Rail Line Operating on a regular weekday schedule
Trains on the Northeast Corridor, North Jersey Coast Line, and Raritan Valley Lines will have the following schedule adjustments due to Amtrak work being done on the Northeast Corridor to clear snow from their track switches. Amtrak’s work will continue overnight, and these adjustments will remain in place until their work is complete.
Northeast Corridor Operating on a Presidents’ Day schedule.
North Jersey Coast Line & Raritan Valley Line Operating on a Presidents’ Day schedule from Long Branch to New York. Bay Head service will remain suspended.
Bus, Light Rail and Access Link will all operate on a regular weekday schedule beginning with the start of the service day on Tuesday morning. However, customers should be prepared for possible delays, detours or cancellations depending on roadway conditions.
MORE MASS TRANSIT SERVICES
Staten Island Railway – Service suspended in both directions
Staten Island Ferry — Modified schedule running every 30-minutes
NYC Ferry – Operating a modified weekday schedule Tuesday with staggered start times by route
Bee-Line Buses and Paratransit– Running with service changes
NICE Bus — Limited service running on 30 or 60 minute intervals
Suffolk County Transit — Suspended until Tuesday, expected 10 a.m. start
Have a breaking news tip or an idea for a story we should cover? Send it to Eyewitness News using the form below. If attaching a video or photo, terms of use apply.
The snowstorm was the ninth biggest ever for Central Park, which saw 19.7 inches. Totals were piling up all day. Here are some of the biggest accumulations around the tri-state area.
According to the National Weather Service, a handful of spots on Long Island and in New Jersey saw 30 inches or more. The Long Island town of Islip may have gotten the most of anywhere in the region, with 31 inches overall. That’s its biggest snowstorm since 1963.
Use the map below to see updated totals from your area:
Here are some of the highest totals from around the tri-state:
Central Islip, Long Island: 31 in.
Lyndhurst, New Jersey: 30.7 in.
Carlstadt, New Jersey: 30.2 in.
East Islip, Long Island: 30 in.
Patchogue, Long Island: 30 in.
Babylon, Long Island: 29.5 in.
Leonia, New Jersey: 29.7 in.
Grasmere, Staten Island: 29 in.
Holbrook, Long Island: 29 in.
Nesconset, Long Island: 28.8 in.
Todt Hill, Staten Island: 27.8 in.
Haworth, New Jersey: 27.6 in
Englewood, New Jersey: 27.5 in.
Newark Airport: 27.1 in.
Ridgefield, New Jersey: 27.1 in.
Dongan Hills, Staten Island: 27 in.
North Merrick, Long Island: 25.4 in.
Greenville, Westchester County: 24.1 in.
Hartsdale, Westchester County: 24 in.
Valhalla, Westchester County: 24 in.
Mott Haven, Bronx: 23.4 in.
Whitestone, Queens: 23 in.
Washington Heights, Manhattan: 22.8 in.
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn: 22.5 in.
Here’s a look at snow totals from around New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (updated as of 3 p.m. Monday):
The Scotia-Glenville Board of Education voted to close Glen-Worden elementary school at a meeting on February 9. Tonight, Superintendent Susan Swartz presented a new transition plan.
Jonte Richardson says he will no longer serve as a judge in the BAFTAs’ emerging talent category after how they handled the airing of racial slurs at last night’s ceremony. “After considerable soul-searching, I feel compelled to withdraw from the BAFTA emerging talent judging panel. The organisation’s handling of the unfortunate Tourette’s N-Word incident last night at the awards was utterly unforgivable,” he wrote on LinkedIn on February 22. “I cannot and will not contribute my time energy and expertise to an organisation that has repeatedly failed to safeguard the dignity of its Black guests, members and the Black creative community.”
When Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting on stage, John Davidson, the inspiration for the movie I Swear, about his life with Tourette’s, shouted the N-word, and that moment was included in the broadcast. During the show, host Alan Cumming explained what happened. “You may have heard some strong and offensive language tonight,” he shared. “If you have seen the film I Swear, you will know that film is about the experience of a person with Tourette’s syndrome. Tourette’s syndrome is a disability, and the tics you have heard tonight are involuntary, which means the person who has Tourette’s syndrome has no control over their language. We apologize if you were offended.” The wording of the initial apology during the broadcast did not feel appropriate, especially because other parts of the show were edited out.
“However, when an organisation like BAFTA, with its own long history of systemic racism, refuses to acknowledge the harm inflicted on both the Black and disabled communities and offer an appropriate apology, remaining involved would be tantamount to condoning its behaviour,” Richardson continued. “I hope BAFTA leadership comprehend the damage they and the BBC have caused and take the necessary steps to ensure their production staff are inclusive enough to prevent such an issue in the future.”
Prospect Heights: “My wife’s handiwork after shoveling.” Photo: John Lin
New York City was hit with its first blizzard in nearly a decade on Sunday and Monday, and we askedNew York readers to send in their photos from the storm. View the best of those submissions below (be sure to read the captions), and to skip to the newest additions to the gallery, click here.
If you want to send in your own images of windows, stoops, blocks, and/or adventures, email them with your name, where you are, and what’s going on in the picture to snow@nymag.com. (By submitting to snow@nymag.com, you are agreeing to these terms.)
The blizzard in Soho: “Nothing quite compares to the quiet that fills NYC on a snow day, where we all slow down to appreciate the little things around us: taking our pets out on a daily walk, the vendors who are open no matter what, and the times where we can play with our loved ones.” Photo: Valeria Flores
Photo: Valeria Flores
The western view from Manhattan Plaza. Photo: René Grayre
The steps to a townhouse in midtown Manhattan. Photo: Brent Nemetz
Prospect Park. Photo: Chelsey P. Seys
Prospect Park. Photo: Chelsey P. Seys
Nancy made these images on her way to snowshoe in Central Park. Photo: Nancy Lucci
Photo: Nancy Lucci
“Yesterday on my way back inside, I instinctively looked up to be certain I was turning on the correct street. For the first time ever, snow was blocking my view. I made it to my destination, only a little disoriented.” Photo: Tess Davis
From a walk around North Brooklyn. Photo: Ellie Taylor
Photo: Ellie Taylor
In Manhattan: “Checking whether the James A. Farley Building post office was open (no).” Photo: Alison Selover
“It’s Ramadan, so if someone invites you to Iftar, you go, even if it’s in Williamsburg and you live in Bed-Stuy off the C train (which got suspended).” Photo: Arif Javed
Bed-Stuy transit. Photo: Ylrahcs
Photo: Ylrahcs
Perfect snowman conditions in Washington Heights. Photo: Allyson Schettino
Buried bikes in Brooklyn. Photo: Eric Lucier
“A view down Central Park West. I was standing in the middle of Central Park West. There were no cars.” Photo: Rachel Ringler
Morning in Manhattan. Photo: Danielle Goldstein
View from the Bronx. Photo: Jennifer Lopez
Cleaning off a car in Brooklyn. Photo: Markie Resendez
“This is our dog Enzo in Inwood Hill Park today at about 2 p.m. The snow is approximately one Enzo high.” Photo: Caitlin Beach
My fire escape in Union Square. Photo: Don Willmott
Snow on West 94th Street. Photo: Katherine Montgomery
A geometric scene in Murray Hill. Photo: Deborah Estévez
Snow on a window frame in Murray Hill. Photo: Deborah Estévez
Columbia University, Morningside Heights: “I captured these while making my way into Butler Library to stay warm and study for my rescheduled (and now impending) microbiology exam. The Alma Mater statue was completely blanketed in snow.” Photo: Ava Goldsmith
Fire escapes in Nomad. Photo: Liza Abraham
Playing in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Photo: Florencia Cavallo
The view in Astoria, Queens. Photo: Dana
Williamsburg: “I haven’t been able to leave my house, but have felt ensconced in layers of snow. The snow is trying to devour everything outside my windows, from the tree branches to the Citi Bikes to the cars. Now, over 24 hours of snow later, all I can hear is a singular snow plow against the world.” Photo: Chloe Xiang
Photo: Chloe Xiang
A buried car. Photo: David Haskell
“Uptown, New Yorkers clear streets, commute to the subway, and make snowmen during the blizzard.” Photo: Stella Ragas
South Slope, Brooklyn. Photo: Rachel Prince
South Slope, Brooklyn. Photo: Rachel Prince
“There is a specific kind of quietness that comes over Brooklyn during a snowstorm that I love, almost as if the coziness of a snow day extends to the streets outside. During my mid-morning photo walk, it felt like coldness of Crown Heights had given way to a homey warmth of a snow day. The very few people out on the street moved with a hush determination to get back inside, their footprints very quickly powdering over with a new layer of snow. It was a pretty and peaceful start to the day.” Photo: Marc J. Franklin
Photo: Marc J. Franklin
“We’re from Shanghai, China, and we’re visiting NYC to celebrate Chinese New Year. It’s our first time seeing such heavy snow! This photo was taken from our hotel, the Ace Hotel New York, by a photographer on the street. I love New York.” Photo: Evan and Luke
“Essential workers keep the city going. Photos from my commute to NYP hospital today.” Photo: Paula Castaño
“I want to share this fabulous view with you. It always calms me down, though it definitely freaks my daughter out when I open the window and stick my head out to take pictures!” Photo: Helena Brown
Taken from Riverdale, Bronx. View of the Hudson River. Photo: Erica Caparas
“I wanted to document the night as the blizzard intensified and then the next morning in my neighborhood of East Harlem. I grew up in Florida and never even saw snow until I moved to the city over 17 years ago. I love how it transforms New York — everything becomes eerie and surreal, the familiar turned totally alien.” Photo: Austin Ruffer
Photo: Austin Ruffer
Face-off in South Williamsburg. Photo: Thomas Richter
Solid shoveling in Jersey City Heights. Photo: Craig Wacks
A statue in the Financial District. Photo: Drew Kerr
A taxi in Jackson Heights. Photo: Crista Giuliani
A pile of shoveled snow in Staten Island. Photo: Bridgette Timmins
Sledding behind the Met. Photo: Laurence O’Keefe
City snow-removal efforts in midtown. Photo: Chris Mackley/Christopher Mackley
Photo: Chris Mackley/Christopher Mackley
“Our dog, Kirby, in Central Park this morning. He went into full-on goblin mode.” Photo: Jenny Lee
“Pigeons huddling together in their usual spot at the Prospect Park entrance in front of Grand Army Plaza at the height of the blizzard this morning.” Photo: Regan O’Connell
Hamilton Heights: “The Mourning Dove that my cat never chases away.” Photo: Regina Rizzo
Building a snow “character” in the Lower East Side Photo: Jacob Moscovitch
Long Island City, Queens: “I think the kids are alright.” Photo: Noreen Plabutong
The man who once claimed to own the New Yorker Hotel has something else in his pocket these days: a conviction.
Mickey Barreto pleaded guilty to a fraud charge last week, the Associated Press reported, confessing to forging property records to take ownership of the property at 481 Eighth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. The plea deal includes a prison sentence Barreto already served.
The wild story started in June 2018, when Barreto booked a room at the hotel for one night before asking the hotel for a lease of the room the following day, in accordance with an obscure part of New York’s rent stabilization law.
The hotel denied, but he filed a case in housing court for wrongful eviction and was granted possession of a single room, according to court documents.
In May 2019, Barreto uploaded fake documents into the city’s property records, including a deed transferring the hotel’s ownership from the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity to himself.
Barreto allegedly started demanding rent from tenants and tried accessing the hotel’s bank accounts, going so far as to demand Holy Spirit leave and contact Wyndham, the hotel’s franchise holder, about transferring the franchise to him.
But Holy Spirit went to civil court and won an order banning Barreto from presenting himself as the New Yorker’s owner. Barreto allegedly failed to abide by the order and filed more false documents, including a phony $400 million deed transferring ownership from himself to himself.
Two years ago, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office charged Barreto with 14 counts of offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree — a felony — and 10 counts of criminal contempt in the second degree. Barreto was also evicted from the hotel in 2024 and later deemed unfit to stand trial, mandated to undergo psychiatric treatment.
Barreto’s guilty plea carries a six-month prison sentence, which he’s already served. He will also be on probation for five years.
