Photo by Judy Marcovitch in Central Park.
August 28, 2017 Weather: Partly cloudy with a high of 74 degrees.
Notices:
Bernie Sanders speaks at Riverside Church and more local events are on our calendar.
The Houston Chronicle has a list of ways to help people impacted by the hurricane in Texas.
News:
Amazon just completed its deal to buy Whole Foods and starting today they’ll be cutting prices on all sorts of things. Can they shake the “Whole Paycheck” nickname?
Someone wrote the word “racist” on the statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims in Central Park. Sims’ statue will be among the statues reviewed by a mayoral commission for possible removal. “In addition to marking up the back of the statue, the vandal covered its eyes and neck in red paint.”
The Spectrum strike, which has included picketing on the Upper West Side, has now gone on for almost five months. “On Friday, union workers remained embroiled in a contract dispute with Charter Communications, which offers cable, internet and telephone services under the name Spectrum. The strike has drawn the attention of the mayor’s office, which has begun a formal audit into Charter’s practice of hiring contractors from outside New York to serve its customers during the strike.”
Shake Shack raised $6,000 for the Public Theater by selling a “Shakes-peare Shake,” a strawberry and rose shake topped with whipped cream and “fairy dust sprinkles”.
And speaking of Shakespeare…A high school student investigated why Central Park’s Shakespeare Garden’s Whisper Bench is dedicated to a man named Charles Stover.
Mayor de Blasio and Sal Albanese debated at Symphony Space last week ahead of the Democratic mayoral primary next month. And here are interviews with the three candidates who were not included in the debate.
And a couple featured in the New York Times wedding section had a fun story about how they met: “The couple met in June 2014, shortly after both were jogging in Central Park and stopped, along with a group of others, to gaze high up at a tree, where a hawk had been spotted.” Forget Tinder, just go hawk-spotting!
Anyone who destroys property is a thug. Let he/she show his/her face, if they’re so proud of what they’ve done. Don’t hide.
Since I THINK this is a free country, allow me too, to voice my opinion. I can voice my opinion without destroying property.
I’m confused. There’s a statue of someone who experimented (without anesthesia) on black slave women and you’re upset that it was defaced? Would you feel that way if it was another doctor (who will go unnamed) who infamously experimented on another select group of people?
It deserved to be defaced, we are an outspoken city and we’ve always brought it to the public when it comes to outrage. There’s a reason graffiti originated from New York City, it’s as unique to here as checkered cabs and Art Deco sky scrapers.
Hey, Mary, I’m as much a New York chauvinist as anybody, but you’re off by several millennia. Graffiti writing goes back to the ancients: Rome, Greece, Egypt.
I think all Statues need to be removed. We could find fault in all of them. Can we start with the Statue of Liberty because I find it repulsive, demeaning and hurtful, hope its on the chopping block.
Actually, I do not think that they should be defaced, even if they are statues of Goering and Hitler – or Sims. Not because of respect for the people pictured, but because the process of discussing which ones should be removed, and why, is part of the process of bringing the community forward. There may come a time when unilateral action is the only way, but we are far from that point now. There is a value to respecting the right of other people to disagree, even if you think their views are repugnant, and you are far more likely to bring them over to your perspective if you respect their right to think before agreeing with you.
I share the repugnance for Sims; I hadn’t heard of him until recently, and then I heard only of his great contributions to gynecological surgery; and only then did I hear of the horrific way in which he gained his expertise. That should be more widely known. Destroying the statue puts the focus on the act of destroying property. Protesting, posting signs, writing petitions, talking about it will let people know just why this man was a despicable sadist and should be removed.