Painting in Central Park. Photo by Jeff French Segall.
April 26, 2021 Weather: Sunny, with a high of 60 degrees.
Notices:
Our calendar has local and virtual events.
OneBlock, an organization made up of volunteers who “adopt” one Upper West Side block to clean twice weekly, is partnering with Costello’s ACE Hardware to hold a “Grafitti CleanUp UWS” on Saturday May 1st at 10:00 AM. The rain date is Sunday May 2nd. Volunteers will clean grafitti off green and blue mailboxes, fire hydrants, parking meters and green traffic boxes. Bruce and Steven Stark, former owners of Beacon Hardware, along with Costello’s, will give out supplies to volunteers 10 AM on Columbus and 81st Street. All questions should be directed to Bruce Stark at 347-538-4050. If you would like to participate, sign up here. To donate click here.
News:
Reports that New York City’s luxury real estate market is booming seem to be substantiated by the sale of a penthouse at 200 Amsterdam Avenue (69th Street), the tallest and most litigated building in the neighborhood. Although there’s another appeal to take down the top 20 floors, odds are the new buyers will move into their 47th-floor abode — and they may not be alone. “We have been seeing tremendous interest in the building, which aligns with the surge that’s been happening at the top end of the market,” the broker for the building told Mansion Global. “In many cases, buyers now want a larger apartment than they were previously looking for…People today have a different relationship to their homes than they did 18 months ago.” The price and buyers of the apartment won’t be released until the deal is closed.
91-year-old Len Berk, Zabar’s most famous lox-slicer, is back after a yearlong hiatus amid the pandemic. He’s reconnected with customers — and more importantly with the fish. ““I found that slicing salmon is a very sensual experience,” he told the Post. “I slide my hands across the oily surface of the fish, and it’s so soothing and relaxing — it’s a very pleasant feeling.”
New Yorkers don’t grocery shop the way other people do, says the The Wall Street Journal. “Our typical customers don’t really do weekly or biweekly shopping,” said Oleg Shevlyagin, founder of 1520. “They wake up and realize they don’t have eggs for breakfast.” 1520 is a new “rapid grocery-delivery service,” covering the UWS, which promises to have a dozen there in 1520 (minutes.) “The rapid-delivery companies service select neighborhoods by working out of miniwarehouses, almost like bodegas without the customers, scattered throughout the city. These warehouses have a much smaller number of products than what can be found in a typical supermarket…” We first wrote about 1520’s UWS location here.
A statue was vandalized in Columbus Circle on Thursday night, but it wasn’t the one of Christopher Columbus. “Five people were arrested on various charges in Columbus Circle near the USS Maine National Monument, which was defaced with anti-police graffiti, cops told the New York Post. “’ACAB,” an acronym for “All cops are bastards,’ and ‘F–k 12,’ which means ‘F–k the police,’ were spray-painted on the monument. ‘Stonewall was a riot,’ was also written in pink spray paint…The crowd was part of the Stonewall Protests, which gathers weekly outside the iconic Greenwich Village bar. The group describes itself as ‘black queer and black trans activists centered on the acknowledgement of all black life’ on Instagram.”
New efforts to teach about racial justice in private school classrooms aren’t sitting well with some parents, contends columnist Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times. “…former newscaster Megyn Kelly announced on her podcast that she was pulling her sons out of their ‘woke’ Upper West Side school, which turned out to be Collegiate, serving the intellectually adept since 1628. The breaking point for her was a letter circulating within the community, written by an outside champion of racially progressive education, arguing that “there’s a killer cop sitting in every school where White children learn.” However hyperbolic, it was hard to miss the irony: there are almost certainly no future cops in the classrooms of Collegiate, only future cabinet members and managing directors at Citibank.”
And a weekend “open streets” event on 103rd street brought out some mayoral candidates:
.@AndrewYang running into @KGforNYC at the 103rd St. Open Streets Earth Day Celebration w/ @StreetopiaUWS pic.twitter.com/cvunDdtF7a
— jon lou (@jonchilou) April 24, 2021
Those”future cabinet members and managing directors at Citibank” might very well still have the mindset of a killer cop…and they definitely will have the power to enact harm. Good on that initial parent for making their point. The killer cop analogy is only half-literal. There is a killer cop in each of your workplaces, though their mechanism of power isn’t necessarily a gun.
Bellafonte’s article was childish and like something Fox News would air. While I agree with her that the letter she was responding to had some major flaws, her way of addressing it with nasty stereotypes and an unprofessional tone didn’t help.
Critical Race Theory takes the good idea of increasing diversity education and takes it to an extreme by white-shaming, which is counter-productive. Race relations are still a huge problem that need to be addressed, but this isn’t the way to do it. And her snarkiness doesn’t help.
Articles like Bellafonte’s will unfortunately hand the election to Trump in 2024.
Allow me to point out that Bellafonte’s son went to St. Ann’s in Brooklyn. People in glass houses…
I agree Leon. I thought her article was better suited for The Post. Her stereotypes and contempt for others was unprofessional.
I just went to read the article and I don’t see what you’re talking about. What did you find childish in it? Or particularly anti-Trump (or Trump-engendering)? She seems to be saying that schools don’t quite know what to do and sometimes acting clumsily, some people object and have acted childishly and self-aggrandizingly in making their points, and students are left in the middle wanting guidance as to how to act well but not getting it. Why would that be childish?
How about the following:
– calling him “very grumpy”
– referring to his business as “something called”
– and this phrase: “The roots of all this chaos extend, more or less, to late last summer, as parents from Chilmark to Amagansett laid down their tennis gear, poured their Negronis and banged out angry emails to administrators and trustees”
– and this “there are almost certainly no future cops in the classrooms of Collegiate, only future cabinet members and managing directors at Citibank.” (it might be largely true, but it is unnecessarily snarky).
Read the comments on the article. Many agree. And most of those who agree are Democrats.
Paul Rossi on the Fifth Column Podcast gave some pretty unsettling perspectives on wokeness at prestigious schools.
Bet you not one person defacing the USS Maine National Monument can even tell you one thing about it. Our youth are idiot drones.
OK, I’ll bite: Tell me one thing about the USS Maine and its Monument; here’s one thing I know: Spain did not sink the ship.
What is the lox-slicer’s name<
OOPS!
His name is Len Birk. Sorry! My blind spot.
BERK!
Oy, don’t print any of these. I need coffee.
You need a WSR T-shirt!