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Tag: cityscape

Visiting the Visitors: Photographs at the 9/11 Memorial

A visitor takes pictures of the North Pool at the National 9/11 Memorial. Photo: Shaughn and John On the day of the attacks, twenty years ago, we were all counseled to stay away from downtown. Among so many other shocking moments that day, that one sticks out in my mind: when the official advice came over the TV to “evacuate Lower Manhattan.” (How would you even do that, I wondered.) Over the next days, civic resources were strained well past their limits, and officials admonished us: If you don’t need to be downtown, let the first responders do their work. Don’t come to gawk....

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Scenes from Ida’s Chaotic, Tragic Night in New York City

Photo: Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock There were some warnings yesterday afternoon about the storm headed to New York: the sky turned steel-gray, emails from utility providers alerted people of possible outages, and amber illuminated signs over the freeways and bridges warned of rain and flooding. But after a summer of record rainfalls, no one seemed to be on high alert. Hurricane Henri had come and gone — what was another tropical storm? But at 9 p.m., phones across the city lit up with a flash-flood warning — the first ever for New York City. Then the deluge: more than...

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Those Flooded Basement Apartments are a Deadly Part of the Housing Crisis

Deborah Torres, right, talks to police officers in Queens, where three people died after their basement apartment flooded. Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP/Shutterstock Eight of the nine people who died during the Hurricane Ida floods last night were exactly where emergency alerts told them was the safest place to be: their homes. Specifically, they were in their own basement apartments in Queens and in one case, Brooklyn. Only one of the buildings, at 61–20 Grand Central Parkway, was located in an area that was a “special flood hazard area,” according to Department of Buildings records,...

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Hochul’s First Big Win Is a New Eviction Moratorium

Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images In a pair of rulings last month, the U.S. Supreme Court all but gutted New York State’s moratorium on evictions and overturned the CDC ban. Despite the spike in COVID-19 cases across the country and unemployment benefits ending in a few days, the true nightmare for the six conservative justices was one in which the CDC could “mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or vulnerable” or “require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to work from home,” as they wrote in their decision. At the opposite...

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The U.S. Open’s Longest-Tenured Ball Boys

Top row (from left): Harry Villareal, Sal Chan, Jasmina Djukanovic, Danielle Minch, Jeremy Klapper, and Santiago Murillo. Bottom row: Andrew Glass, Kyra Whitelaw, Rebecca Klapper, Arthur Chen, and Alexander Chiu. Photo: Victor Llorente In 1989, when Harry Villareal was 14, he got a letter in the mail: He had been selected as a ball person for the U.S. Open. “I was like, Oh, this isn’t too hard,” he remembers thinking. “It’s just sort of, Run, get the ball.” This week, as Villareal returns to Flushing to work his 33rd consecutive Open, he knows that there’s far more to the job....

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When the Office Is a Fly-Fishing Motel

Michael Ray (left) and Rachael Yaeger (right) moved their creative agency to a Catskills motel. Photo: DeSean McClinton-Holland Summer days start early at the Roscoe Motel. Anglers suited in chest waders emerge from their rooms while the morning air is still cool and the sun is starting to inch over the surrounding hills. After a quick stop at the reception office for a hot cup of coffee, it’s off to their favorite fly-fishing spots on the Beaverkill River, which runs right behind the red-and-white building, or to Junction Pool, just south of the mid-century roadside motel, where,...

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Democratic Party Promoter

Photo: Ryan McGinley; Styled by Brandon Tan ‘Holy shit we’re in the lead,” tweeted Chi Ossé, a City Council candidate for the 36th District, on the evening of June 22. He was responding to the early returns from the Democratic primary, which showed that voters from his swath of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant had placed him ahead of four opponents. A few days later, it looked even more likely that the first-time candidate would win. “I’m still like, ‘What happened?’” Ossé told Curbed on that Friday afternoon. He looked relaxed, dressed in shorts and sneakers, perched on...

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Receptionist? Maître d’? Now You’re Also a Vaxx Bouncer

Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images The city’s restaurant hosts, gym receptionists, baristas, and bartenders got a second job last week: They’re all vaccine bouncers now too. With an inoculation mandate in effect for most places that serve food or drink or have entertainment, these employees now have the added responsibility of verifying proof of vaccination. The change comes as new COVID-19 cases have climbed to an average of more than 1,800 a day — up from about 250 in early July. The city will begin enforcing the new rule on September 13, and businesses that don’t comply will be...

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The Renegade Skate-Ramp Builders of New York

Pat Smith mixing concrete for a quarter-pipe at Mosquito Beach while Max Lockhart, a skater, looks on. Photo: Daniel Karel On a balmy July evening, Pat Smith, a professional carpenter and the owner of CODA Skateboards, was loading up his jet-black Ram ProMaster cargo van in the driveway of a Greenpoint fabrication shop. Inside the van, he’d hoisted around eight dusty bags of concrete, a stack of dirty buckets, two crusty shovels, a generator, and a portable concrete mixer. Smith, 50, was on his way to work on a public secret in the city’s skateboarding scene: an elaborate, unsanctioned...

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Some Tree Buffs in D.C. Took It Upon Themselves to Help Rebuild Notre-Dame

Ben Witman wields a goosewing ax. Photo: Greg Kahn/GRAIN “I started getting calls as soon as the fire was put out,” said Rick Brown, standing on the lawn at Catholic University the other day. Brown and his wife, Laura, are the co-founders of Handshouse Studio, an educational nonprofit that replicates large historical objects using the precise techniques with which they were built. In 2011, he led a trip to Poland to rebuild by hand the Gwo?dziec synagogue, raised in the 17th century and then razed by the Nazis. This time, the calls were about a much bigger house of worship: the...

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