Today is Monday, March 9, 2026
Today will be warm (high in the 60s) and sunny, and there’s similar weather on tap through Wednesday. After that, weather predictions look a bit like a kid playing with a yo-yo: still hanging on at a high of 60 on Wednesday, down into 50s and 40s Thursday and Friday, back up a bit Saturday, cooler Sunday … and so on. We’re in that in-between period when winter is fading but spring hasn’t exactly sprung (its official start is March 20). Maybe hold on to your winter coat a few more days before sending it off to the cleaners.
On this day in 1959, Barbie made her debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York. It’s estimated that over one billion Barbie dolls have been sold around the world since then.
Notices
Our calendar has lots of local events. Click on the link or the lady in the upper righthand corner to check.
Community Board 7’s new Public Safety Task Force wants to hear your concerns about public safety issues. You can fill out their survey — HERE. The survey is anonymous and should take no more than five minutes to complete.
City Councilmember Gale Brewer’s office is looking for volunteers to help with a West Side Street Light Survey, to be conducted March 12-19. Volunteers will be asked to walk some neighborhood streets to record where lights are burned out, damaged, or missing.
And today is your LAST CHANCE to enter West Side Rag’s t-shirt contest. To join the competition, suggest a name for New Absolute Bagels, which replaced Absolute Bagels, but last week hung up a new banner renaming itself 2788 Bagels (after the owner of the original Absolute threatened legal action). To record your name suggestion, go HERE and write in the comments at the bottom of the article. We’ll consider all entries recorded by the end of today.
News Roundup
Compiled by Ann Cooper
In 1967, Upper West Sider Ronnie Eldridge invited into her brownstone home on West 93rd Street a group of prominent local Democrats opposed to the war in Vietnam. The gathering was a strategy session with the goal of defeating President Lyndon B. Johnson – a fellow Democrat, but also the man overseeing America’s ongoing war effort. The meeting spawned a movement that led to serious primary challenges to Johnson and ultimately caused him to withdraw from the presidential race.
“That was all organized in my living room,” Eldridge later recalled, according to The New York Times, which recounted the story in its obituary last week announcing Eldridge’s death, at age 95, on March 4.
Eldridge worked for prominent Democrats at national, state, and local levels, and for a dozen years she was the UWS’s representative on the New York City Council. In 2002, when term limits prevented her from running again, Gale Brewer, the neighborhood’s current city councilmember, succeeded her. “Her shoes were very big shoes to fill,” Brewer wrote in a remembrance last week. “She always stood up for progressive principles, and practical ones.” (On the practical side, Brewer noted the city council bill requiring cameras in bank lobbies with ATMs, something Eldridge proposed after being mugged at an ATM.)
The Forward’s obituary called Eldridge “one of NYC’s toughest political minds” and said that as an antiwar activist in the 1960s she “made mountains move on the national level.” The Times said she liked to tell people she was “born political” because her birthday was the same as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. “I used to send birthday cards to the White House, and the White House used to send birthday cards to me,” The Times quoted her as saying.
Eldridge embraced feminism, was an advocate for gay rights, and in 1969 temporarily left the Democratic Party to help Mayor John V. Lindsay’s reelection (Lindsay, a liberal Republican, lost his party’s primary that year but won reelection by running as an independent and Liberal Party candidate).
“Within the Lindsay administration, she was a trusted sounding board and troubleshooter who pursued her policy agenda relentlessly but disarmingly,” the Times wrote in its obituary. The paper quoted an unnamed Lindsay aide, who said in 1970 that Eldridge “has a very nice way of leaning on you to get something done. She’ll come back each day to ask, ‘Have you done it?’ She’ll smile, and you couldn’t get mad, but she’ll never let go.”
A memorial for Eldridge is scheduled for Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. at the New York Ethical Culture Society, 2 West 64th Street.
Read more about Eldridge’s political career and life on the UWS with her husband, longtime New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin – HERE and HERE.
Quick, what film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2023? Maybe you guessed “Upside Down Anyways,” the (nonexistent) film a customer tried to buy a ticket for that year at the UWS’s Film at Lincoln Center. Daniel Welch, working in the box office, eventually realized the customer wanted to see “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” A ticket was sold, and then Welch entered the customer’s initial request in a Google doc maintained by the Lincoln Center film staff: “WRONG MOVIE TITLES.”
That three-year-old document is now 27 pages long, according to The New York Times, which spoke to Welch and other Film at Lincoln Center box office staff, who keep a running record of “the delightfully incorrect movie titles given by theatergoers.”
There’s the Lincoln Center customer who asked for a ticket to “An Economy of a Murder,” but was actually trying to see “Anatomy of a Fall.” A request for “Wallace and Hermit” was probably pretty easy to translate to the real movie title: “Wallace and Gromit.” But “Familiar Touch” may have taken more time to decipher as a ticket request for “Velvet Fabric.” And then there was the mangling of dictators by a customer who wanted to see “The Death of Stalin” but requested a ticket for “Hitler.”
The Lincoln Center staff didn’t originate the idea of preserving wrong movie titles; Welch brought it with him from a Massachusetts theater where he had worked previously. A clipboard kept in the box office there contained such errors as “Bend Over Pac-Man,” from a customer trying to buy a ticket for “Bend it Like Beckham.”
According to the Film at Lincoln Center staff, the titles most likely to be mangled by theatergoers are long, wordy ones (think “Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and those with unusual names – like last year’s Best Picture winner, Anora. So far, the “wrong titles” list has over 30 mispronunciations of that one: “Anita,” “Andora,” Ansara,” Enola,” “Eleanor…” You get the idea.
Read the full story – HERE.
As the Jewish holiday of Purim began last week, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams paid a visit to three Upper West Side kosher bakeries on a “hamantashen crawl.” It was a culinary journey interspersed occasionally with some political messaging.
“We…wanted to visit and uplift Jewish owned businesses that very often only get visited in moments of crisis, if they’re subjected to vandalism, antisemitic attacks,” said Jewish Community Relations Council CEO Mark Treyger, who escorted Williams, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).
The bakery visits focused on hamantashen (also spelled hamentashen), the triangle-shaped, filled cookies that commemorate the Purim story of the thwarting of a plot to eradicate ancient Persia’s Jews; the cookies are said to mimic the shape of the Persian villain Haman’s ear, or perhaps his three-cornered hat.
First stop on the hamantashen crawl was gluten- and dairy-free By the Way Bakery at 2440 Broadway, between West 90th and 91st streets, followed by Patis at 676 Amsterdam near West 93rd Street. Though traditional fillings generally involve raspberries, prunes, or other fruit, at Patis “an enormous Dubai chocolate-style, pistachio cream puff pastry hamentash was the center of attention,” JTA reported. More traditional versions were on offer at the final stop: Six60One, a kosher grocery store at 661 Amsterdam between West 92nd and 93rd streets.
Along the way, Treyger told JTA that good hamantashen could be compared with New York. “The dough has to be crumbly but still resilient,” he said. Then there’s the ample dough-to-filling ratio, which should be “bold, like New York.”
“And number three, we don’t fold under pressure,” he said. “When you bite into it, it cannot fall apart.”
If there was a favorite, Williams wasn’t going to name it publicly, according to JTA’s account.
“Listen, I’ve had three of the best hamantashen in the city at these three spots,” Williams said. “They’re made a little differently, just like New York City, but they all taste great.”
Read the full story – HERE.
In Other UWS News
- CNN interviewed Jack Schlossberg, grandson of President John F. Kennedy and current candidate for the congressional seat being vacated by Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who has represented the UWS for more than three decades. Much of the interview focuses on Schlossberg’s family, the recent death of his sister, and his energetic social media presence. Watch it — HERE.
- There were still ice chunks in the Hudson River last week when a paddleboarder was spotted making his way downriver, wearing a backpack but no wetsuit. Hudson water temperature that day was 31 degrees. More — HERE.
- In a brief recording that ran on the New York Times site last week, Publisher A.G. Sulzberger spoke about the difficulties facing journalism today, including the Times. He encouraged listeners to support “any news organization that’s dedicated to original reporting.” Listen — HERE.
ICYMI
Here are a few stories we think are worth a look if you missed them last week — or a second look if you saw them. (Note that our comments stay open for six days after publication, so you may not be able to comment on all of them.)
City Halts Plan To Close Upper West Side Middle School: ‘Our Focus Must be on Healing’
New Absolute Bagels Changes its Name After Threat of Legal Action, Manager Says
The Secret to Rat Control on the Upper West Side? ‘It’s All About Food Availability’
Subscribe to WSR’s free email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.
The WSR really should cover the hysterical and incorrect Brad Hoylman-sigal accusing “white christian nationalists” that were actually peacefully protesting of throwing a bomb when it was Islamic extremists. He then refused to condemn the Islamists by name as he had done with the other group. This man represented the west side for years and is now boro president and it is important to document this so that his incompetent “leadership” is documented
Just read this — https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2026/03/its-time-to-play-right-wing.html — and inevitably thought of you, Bill. (Janet should have have a look!)
“white christian nationalists” that were actually peacefully protesting”
Except: “According to police accounts, tensions escalated between the two groups just after noon as a protester from Lang’s group pepper-sprayed counterprotesters and was later arrested.” That’s when things went south: AFTER someone from the gang of Edward Jacob “Jake” Lang — Jan. 6 insurrectionist, white christian nationalist, enthusiastic N*zi and proud Republican — initiated the violence.
and the good guy then, in the fit of rage, quickly assembled an Improvised Explosive Devise . Nice try!
Yup, the oppressed muslim terrorists shut off their ISIS videos, left their mansions in PA and drove to NYC with a couple of bombs just in case someone pepper sprayed them.
you mean this protest right?
The protest was organized by Jake Lang, a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter, and was called “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City. Stop New York City Public Muslim Prayer.”
what exactly do you find incompetent in his response?
obviously you are unaware of what actually happened. Try and keep up.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Mamdani’s response was no different:
https://www.thefp.com/p/terror-on-the-upper-east-side?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2030704552765263946
A few relevant Mamdani quotations from https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/what-we-know-nyc-gracie-mansion-protest-bombing-attempt.html:
“Anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the one million or so Muslim New Yorkers who know this city as our home. While I found this protest appalling, I will not waver in my belief that it should be allowed to happen. Ours is a free society where the right to peaceful protest is sacred. It does not belong only to those we agree with. It belongs to everyone.” […] “I will defend that right every day that I am mayor, even when those protesting say things that I abhor.”
From the Mayor’s statement:
“What followed was even more disturbing. Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.”
What part of this did you miss?
Although Mr. Mamdani basically had NYPD Commissioner Tisch talk about the violent aspects of the protest – including the homemade IEDs – and did not feel it necessary to repeat what she had already said.
And yet, he DID address it, even according to the links YOU provided.
Do you even read what you post?
Able Bagel
I note the old Food Emporium/Bed Bath space on 90th/Bway seems to now be divided into two. A small space on the corner in which construction is going on, and a larger empty space toward the center of the block. Any idea what is going in there?
Well, me being a cynic and all, I think first of how Eldridge’s movement against Johnson resulted in our getting Nixon and eventually a kinda sorta but not good end to the Vietnam War. Whaddaya gonna do. At least now Vietnam seems to be chugging along as a country.
And ironically, Vietnam “chugs along” today as one of five remaining Communist countries in the world. Preventing that Communist outcome was the main goal of the Vietnam War. A relevant reminder in today’s world…
I was just in Vietnam. They are Communist in name only–Capitalist/Communist. Interestingly, they don’t seem to hate Americans. However, they are not very fond of the French.
If you had read the article you mentioned about the stand-up paddleboarder, and taken one look at the comments, you’d have realized that she was fully dressed in a drysuit (no one would be in a wetsuit with 31-degree water, it has to be a drysuit), neoprene boots, hood, and gloves, and a PFD (AKA lifejacket), not a backpack. Also carrying a marine radio and other appropriate safety gear. Her name is Stefanie Jackenthal and she’s been paddling on the Hudson for decades.
You go, girl!!!
That paddleboarder was in fact wearing ” a fully sealed Gortex drysuit (to prevent from hypothermia, should I fall in) and a PFD (lifejacket), not a backpack,” according to a comment she left on the NY Post article. Kayakers ply the Hudson throughout the winter, too—generally with all the requisite safety gear and training.
A day or two before Thanksgiving about 30 years ago I noticed the overflowing shopping cart of the woman in front of me at Fairway. In friendly West Side fashion I commented to her that she must be having a terrific Thanksgiving gathering. She said indeed she was having an open house parade watching party at her CPW apartment and invited my family to join in. Thank you, Ronnie Eldridge for the invitation. It was memorable. Peace to all her family and friends.
I’m surprised that the piece on Ms. Eldridge does not even include a reference to her 35-year marriage to legendary journalist and author Jimmy Breslin. I knew Ronnie pretty well, and never attended a meeting at her home at which Mr. Breslin was not also in attendance.
The two of them were a true “power couple,” and often worked “together” (though perhaps not “deliberately” so) on various issues of the time; she on the political side, he on the journalistic side.
I lived in their building. They were both very friendly and sociable.
Hammentaschen: Where oh where can I find the pastry dough variety? Not the hard little cookies. For years I made a pilgrimage to GerteL’s on the LES, bought a supply and froze and savored them for months. Then spotted them in a bakery in Queens. No more, no more — both closed
That’s a nice image of a goose couple at the Central Park Reservoir. When the ice melts and the goose couple builds its nest on the side of the reservoir, the female will lay eggs, sitting not eating for weeks to protect them. Then, in the middle of one night so the public isn’t there to watch, the Department of Environmental Protection will arrive and depredate the eggs. Distraught and mourning, the parents will stand by the empty nest for days.
No mention of the Hungarian Pastry Shop?!?!
Well, I was considering voting for Micah Lasher until he dissed the classic and utterly delicious prune hamantasch. Too bad he never tasted my bubba’s, with their thick, tart-sweet lemony prune filling. I can hear her shouting from her grave “Strawberry? His taste is in his tochas!”
If pastry preferences aren’t a sound basis for choosing a candidate for office then gosh, it’s hard to imagine what is. Are there any out there who fancy Erin McKenna’s Bakery or Cinnamon Snail? If so, you have my vote (maybe).
“In a brief recording that ran on the New York Times site last week, Publisher A.G. Sulzberger spoke about the difficulties facing journalism today, including the Times. He encouraged listeners to support “any news organization that’s dedicated to original reporting.” ”
Irony, given how much corporate and government (especially Pentagon) stenography the NY Times does.
And some of what the NYT counts as original reporting is reporting in fact just rereporting from other new sources.
I especially “like” the NY Times’s reporting on medical insurance in the USA.
Then there’s the rampaging elephant in the room.
My new suggestion for absolutely not Absolute Bagels is:
BAGELICIOUS!