Monday Bulletin: Baseball Coach Who Reportedly Faced Down ICE on UWS Dies at 63; Vox Closer to Discovering New Insect Species; Neighboring CPW Buildings Make the News; Columbia’s Campus Closure Goes Against What Universities Stand For, Argues Architecture Critic

Today is Monday, August 24th, 2026

The forecast calls for a pleasant, sunny week, with highs in the upper 70s today and tomorrow, and the low 80s for the rest of the week. No rain in the forecast till Thursday, and then only a late-night thunder shower.

On this date in 2015, 1 billion people—or one in every seven people on the planet—logged into Facebook, according to an announcement by the social media platform’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

Notices

Our calendar has lots of local events. Click on the link or the lady in the upper righthand corner to check.

News Roundup

Compiled by Laura Muha

Youman Wilder, the baseball coach who allegedly stood up to ICE last summer after agents began questioning teenage players in Riverside Park, died last month at age 63, The New York Times reported. 

His brother, Derrick Wilder, told the Times that the cause was a heart attack.

Wilder first told the Rag, then many other news outlets, that he had been supervising 11 middle school and high school kids during a batting-cage practice in the park when United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents approached some of his players, all of whom were American-born, but were of African, South American, Central American, or Mexican ancestry.

“I go over quickly and the agents are asking the kids inappropriate things like where they are from, their country of origin, so I say, ‘whoa, whoa,’ and I tell the officers that their questions are inappropriate, and that I’m going to tell my kids not to answer them,” Wilder told the Rag.

An ICE spokesperson denied Wilder’s claim at the time, saying the organization had not conducted any enforcement activity in or near Riverside Park. But state Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, who represents the UWS, told the Times that she believed Wilder’s account, because both Lincoln Towers residents and a group of nannies who were often in the park with their charges told her they had seen what appeared to be ICE agents in the area around the time of the alleged incident.

Wilder grew up in Brooklyn, where he played baseball at Thomas Jefferson High School in the early 1980s. About 20 years ago, he founded a nonprofit baseball academy to help Black and Latino youth. He held a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from New England College, and a master’s degree in criminal justice from Grand Canyon University in Phoenix.

Read his full obituary — HERE.

In early June, we wrote about Vox’s attempt to discover a new insect species in the city.  Last week, the publication reported that they had “some exciting, albeit preliminary, results to share.”

In collaboration with the University of Guelph in Canada, Vox reported that they had trapped 12,000 insects in Central and Prospect parks during the month of June—the only period they’ve analyzed to date—and winnowed to 1,000 the number they wanted to look at more closely. The 1,000 fell into three groups: scuttle flies (which resemble fruit flies) and two types of wasps known as parasitoids, which lay eggs in other insects. “We’re focusing on these groups, because they’re considered “dark taxa,” meaning that most species within them are likely still undiscovered,” explained Vox reporter Benji Jones, the senior environmental correspondent who is one of the leaders of the project.

The university’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics sequenced a section of DNA–referred to in the field as a “barcode”–from each of the flies and wasps. Each organism has a unique barcode, but when it’s similar to that of another organism it means they’re likely to be the same species. Most of those tested did show similarities to others, meaning that they were unlikely to be new species.

“But there were striking exceptions: Our wasps and flies yielded more than two dozen barcode groups that are, according to a preliminary review … unlike anything that exists in the big genetic database,” wrote Jones.

“Now, following further analysis by taxonomists, we have a strong indication that at least a few of those barcode groups may, indeed, be new species. And this was after just one month of looking!”

However, more analysis will be necessary before that can be confirmed, Jones added.

Read the full story — HERE.

Neighboring buildings on Central Park West are in the news this week: One for its sale price, and the other for its design.

The former, in the Art Deco Century Condominium at 25 CPW, had been occupied by philanthropist Annaliese Soros, ex-wife of financier George Soros, who died at age 91 in September 2025, reported Crain’s New York Business. Her daughter, Andrea Soros Colombel, also a philanthropist, listed the apartment in May for $8 million, and sold it for $8.4 million, according to a deed appearing in the city register.

“Spanning nearly 4,000 square feet, the combined condo unit has four bedrooms and four bathrooms, a sunken great room with a wet bar and park views, and a library with built-in bookshelves,” Crain’s said. Although the buyers were not named in the paperwork, the apartment apparently will be their primary residence, exempting them from the city’s controversial new pied-a-terre tax, Crain’s said, noting that “[d]ocuments show that the buyer did not check off the box indicating the unit would be a “second home.”

Moving one block south, meanwhile, an apartment in 15 Central Park West was highlighted in the most recent issue of Vogue Australia. The owners, a French family who purchased the home because they travel frequently to New York, are what the magazine called “passionate collectors with a deep appreciation for contemporary art, design and craftsmanship,” and wanted an apartment that felt like a home rather than a showroom.

“They were very open to colour and to the idea that furniture could become part of the architectural and design project rather than simply occupy it,” Crina Arghirescu Rogard, the architect and interior designer who tackled the project, told Vogue.

Read more and see the results of her design — HERE. And read more about the Soros apartment — HERE.

Justin Davidson is New York Magazine’s architecture and classical-music critic — but he’s also a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s School of Architecture, and he recently turned his critical eye on the continued closure of the university’s campus to the community.

In an essay published on New York’s Curbed site, he pointed out that preventing the community from accessing the campus appears to violate a 1953 agreement between the university and the city, in which the one-block stretch of West 116th Street was converted to a campus walkway between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, with the understanding that it would remain open and accessible to the surrounding community (a point currently being argued in court). But perhaps more importantly, Davidson maintained, the closure also violates what universities stand for. “Students converge on Morningside Heights because the university distills — and instills — the ideals of an open, democratic, pluralistic nation,” he wrote.

The university began closing the gates intermittently in response to campus protests after the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas on Israel. They have been closed full-time since April 2024.

“That strictly enforced division between those who do and don’t have the right ID [to access campus] has remained in place long enough that the university is now betraying its own identity,” Davidson wrote. “The more Columbia asks who you are, the less it knows what it is.”

Read his full argument — HERE.

In Other UWS News

• The family of a teenager killed after being thrown from a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park has filed notices of intent to sue the city for $105 million in his death, alleging among other things that stray electrical voltage may have caused the horse to bolt. Read The New York Times’ coverage — HERE.
• The website YIMBY.com (short for “Yes in My Back Yard”) published an update on two residential projects under construction near the 72nd Street subway station, one at 2160 Broadway (at West 76th Street) and the other at 214 West 80th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue). Read the full story and see architectural renderings — 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.)

In Each Other’s Way: The Upper West Side’s Wild Side and Us

The Upper West Side’s Trash Walker is on a Mission

An UWS Guide to the 2026 US Open Tennis Championships (August 24 – September 13)

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