Photo of bouncy man by Ed Yourdon on 107th Street, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive.
Below, we’ve compiled some stories published about the neighborhood in other media outlets over the past week.
Alexander Walsh, a heroic employee at More & More Antiques on 79th street, chased after a gunman who had held employees up at gunpoint on Monday. Police arrested Brooklynite Israel Mincey for the crime. “The tough-as-nails Walsh chased Mincey out onto Amsterdam Avenue, then pursued him west on 78th Street to Broadway, then north to 79th Street, sources said. The two ran down 79th Street into Riverside Park, then went south to 75th Street, where they dashed onto West End Avenue and finally ended up on 73rd Street, sources said. Fed up, Mincey spun around and tossed the bag of baubles at Walsh, along with a knapsack, sources said. (NY Post)
The dual-language program at PS 87 will be saved after DOE budget cuts were reversed. (DNAinfo)
Mayoral candidates are spending lots of time at Upper West Side subway stops. “Candidates campaign at subway stops and concerts around the city, but nowhere as often as the 72nd Street and 96th Street express stops, which sit in a neighborhood with more Democratic primary voters than almost any other place in the city. And they tend to be opinionated, informed and liberal.” Also of note in the article: Upper West Siders may not be that liberal: they were more likely than the average city voter to have supported Bloomberg’s third term. (Wall Street Journal)
A City Council bill would make people pay 10 cents for plastic or paper bags at supermarkets. People will…start using a lot less bags that they don’t need,’ says City Councilman Brad Lander. Businesses would keep the fee. Gale Brewer supports it. (Daily News)
Speaking of Gale Brewer, she got an endorsement from the New York Times for Manhattan Borough President. “Ms. Brewer is too rare a public official to retire.” (NY Times)
A 911 operator had trouble at first directing police to an incident in Central Park where a man appeared to be threatening workers (in the end, the man walked away). (NY Post)
Z’Baby on 72nd street sells bikinis for babies. “But some people say babies don’t belong in bikinis.” (Fox NY)
Disposable bags represent a sanitation breakthrough as any freshman biology lab student can attest to. The disgusting filth of mold and mildew promoting moist canvas eco-bags is especially hazardous for the infants and seniors who dominate the UWS. The astonishingly small amount of plastic in a bag is dwarfed by a thousand times for each and every plastic container that goes into them. The same policy makers banned naturally antibiotic wood cutting boards in favor of neutral plastic ones. Policy based not on detailed science but on superstition also teaches kids that it’s unkind to think clearly, since real science is nowadays forbidden.
-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in chemistry (Columbia)
I, too, am a plastic bag fan, since we re-use them for a variety of purposes.
Three cheers for the heroic employee. We need more citizens who’ll stand up to scumbags who terrorize people with guns.
And, yes, babies don’t belong in bikinis. That kind of depresses me.
I save plastic grocery/shopping bags and reuse them as trash bags. If stores begin charging 10 cents per bag, I suspect it will be cheaper to buy a box of trash bags for a couple of bucks. Either way, plastic bags are ending up in the trash–isn’t it better to REUSE a bag than to buy a new one made specifically for this purpose?
I agree with the other comments re. the plastic bags. We re-use almost every plastic bag at least once. Also, if stores wanted to raise extra money to compensate themselves for giving away plastic bags (as an aside: as if that isn’t already factored into the prices the store charges for its goods… genius!) they could do so explicitly themselves. They don’t need a government overseer doing the same. If the city wanted to raise revenue with a plastic bag tax, I’d be annoyed but it wouldn’t be life altering. However, re-using canvas bags that get moldy and full of bacteria is just a bad idea.
Re: “…Also of note in the article: Upper West Siders may not be that liberal: they were more likely than the average city voter to have supported Bloomberg’s third term.”
Hmmm…perhaps because many of us do NOT subscribe to the knee-jerk anti-capitalism that is so au courant following the wacko juvenile Occupy Wall Street flash-in-the-pan (cf. candidate DeBlasio’s faux populist ‘tax-the-rich’ nonsense and read Sunday’s New York Times endorsement of Chris Quinn to see why his idea will never work).
Perhaps we respect a SELF-MADE billionaire (unlike Trump or Spitzer, he did NOT inherit his wealth) who sincerely believes he is doing good for the city.
Sure, he is the furthest thing from “warm and fuzzy” … but so was Giuliani, whose nastiness level was at 11.9.
But Mayor Mike gave us 311, public piazzas (something every European city has but which New York, because of the 1811 Grid, always lacked), and, despite the howls of the neanderthals who prefer 5-storey walk-ups, a GORGEOUS and still-developing skyline.
Oh, people are priced out of Manhattan? Get over it! Read some history (Wallace and Burrows “Gotham” or anything by Kenneth Jackson would be a good place to start), b/c Manhattan was ALWAYS a mix of wealth and poverty. That’s part of its diversity. And the Outer Boroughs ARE lovely this time of year!
Typical.
They couldn’t find me for 45 minutes after I had to ward off a Pit bull in Riverside Park. When they FINALLY showed up, they screamed at me for “endangering their officers”.
I am devastated by recent behavior of Police Dept.
when I’ve tried to get help.
Plastic bags from grocery stores = trash bin liners. Those never go to waste in my apartment.
Seems like a silly overreach of legislation that is better left up to individual store policy. Whole foods has the reverse policy where they refund $0.10 for bringing your own bag to encourage the use of reusable bags, which makes more sense.
It is one thing to live in an owned-automobile environment where you can toss your half dozen “permanent” type grocery bags into the car and go shopping and maybe hose them out in the back yard when you get home. In Manhattan, where we carry everything in our hands while walking from store to store – the concept of carrying empty reusable bags with us is impractical if not absurd. Then – the bag with the dirt from the sidewalk (yup – dried dog poo), bus and subway on the bottom of the bad and the rotting chicken blood inside is supposed to be folded up, put in a closet and then reused to hold more fresh food. I don’t think so. Brad Lander, Gale Brewer – are ya listening? Hope so – you just lost my vote.
I don’t get the plastic bag thing. Don’t most of us keep them and use them in place of garbage bags…which we’ll now be using more of?
Side note: the way the title of this post was written makes it sound like there is a very busy “heroic employee” out there attending to a wide range of issues. 🙂