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☆ The B.Q.E. Wasn’t Built for Delivery Trucks. Its Cracks Are Showing.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-23 | by ( Ginia Bellafante | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In 1982, the city of Boston embarked on a plan for the most ambitious and expensive highway project in the country’s history, one that replaced a crumbling, six-lane elevated artery of Interstate 93 with a tunnel and two bridges crossing the Charles River. Known as the Big Dig, the project resulted, at various phases, in charges of bad design, shoddy workmanship, fraud and death; it ran more than five times over budget and took a quarter century to complete, missing its deadline by almost a decade. What can this history teach us about the future of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway? Studied and debated for years with virtually no progress to speak of, the B.Q.E. is considered an even more complicated undertaking.

Persons: Charles River Organizations: Brooklyn - Queens Locations: Boston, Brooklyn

☆ Upstart News Site Has Youth on Its Side, and Albany in Its Sights
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-09 | by ( Ginia Bellafante | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Out of these and other revelations came the notion for New York Focus, a nonprofit news site. But it would distinguish itself by concentrating on the way that power is exercised in Albany and how it filters down and affects almost everything. The order would have also prevented Mr. Lennon and writers like him from getting paid. A day after the New York Focus piece appeared, the corrections department rescinded the directive. In November New York Focus, with the Intercept as a partner, published the results of a yearlong investigation into allegations of physical and sexual abuse at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County.

Persons: Mehta’s, Sam Mellins, Lee Harris, John J, Lennon, sodomizing Organizations: York, state’s Department of Corrections, Community Supervision, Sullivan Correctional, New York, New York Times Magazine, New, PEN America, Shawangunk Locations: City, Hell, New York City, Albany, Chicago, York, New York, Ulster County

☆ She Attacked Israel and the N.Y.P.D. It Made Her Law School a Target.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-02 | by ( Ginia Bellafante | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Each year, the law school graduates elect a member of their class to deliver a speech, and this year they chose Ms. Mohammed, an activist devoted to the Palestinian cause. Although her remarks would later be presented as a lightning bolt of antisemitism, she began uncontroversially, talking about the pain and loss of Covid and how it shaped her cohort’s first semesters in law school. “Let us remember that Gaza, just this week, has been bombed with the world watching,” she said at one point. But it was the fierceness she brought to her denunciation of “Israeli settler colonialism” and CUNY’s collaboration with “the fascist N.Y.P.D.” that especially inflamed the political class, even if her own audience, including the law school dean, seemed receptive. (“Imagine being so crazed by hatred for Israel as a Jewish State that you make it the subject of your commencement speech,” Mr. Torres wrote on Twitter last week.

Persons: Mohammed, ”, “, —, Mohammed’s, “ Stark, Ritchie Torres, Ted Cruz, Mr, Torres, Israel derangement Organizations: CUNY, New York Post, Fox, Democratic, Bronx, Republican, Jewish, Twitter Locations: Gaza, Rikers, Israel, Jewish State

☆ Mayor Adams Improvises His Way Through an Impossible Crisis
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-20 | by ( Ginia Bellafante | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Last weekend, several Brooklyn principals were told that their schools would immediately be sheltering hundreds of asylum seekers, by way of mayoral fiat. The schools themselves were not in affluent neighborhoods but rather served working-class families of color, who were now livid. Parents, many immigrants themselves, were concerned about safety and felt cheated that their children would be denied gym in schools that were hardly abundant with amenities. They began lining up as early as 3 in the morning on Tuesday in protest; some brought their children, others refused to send them to school at all. By the next day, after frantic meetings between administrators and parents, Mayor Eric Adams seemed to have reversed course, removing asylum seekers from a school gym in Coney Island and sending them to a vacant office in Midtown.

☆ Build in the Suburbs, Solve the Housing Crisis
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-12 | by ( Ginia Bellafante | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Unlike the Levittowns of 1957, these early suburbs were not as homogeneous, because the wealthy people who lived there were so reliant on domestic labor. The more vaporous claim that density threatens a certain “way of life” requires us to ask: What way? In 1960, during the high period of the ranch house, 44 percent of American households were made up of married couples with children. During the same period, the proportion of households containing only a single individual more than doubled, to 28 percent. In 2010, the population of Nassau County was 66 percent white; now it is 57 percent white.

☆ Why E. Jean Carroll Will Always Tell You She Is ‘Fine, Fabulous’
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Ginia Bellafante | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Taking the witness stand, she recalled that Ms. Carroll had phoned her immediately after the alleged incident with Mr. Trump “breathless, hyperventilating, emotional,” but that the subject did not come up between them again for another quarter century. Carroll is a very up person; she is not a victim,” Ms. Birnbach said. In the mid-1990s, decades after the sexual revolution, nearing the declining days of the AIDS crisis and the heyday of elite media, New York seemed to belong to women like E. Jean Carroll. A pair of big media personalities — Ms. Carroll was a well-known advice columnist by then — meeting so unexpectedly to do something vaguely conspiratorial. At the outset, the story seemed so paradigmatically “New York,” Ms. Carroll explained in her testimony.

☆ When a Walkable City Becomes a Death Trap
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Ginia Bellafante | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Last year saw 257 traffic fatalities in the city; just one fewer than there had been nine years ago, when Vision Zero began. The pandemic managed both to confirm and undermine New York’s reputation as the most walkable city in the country. Speeding and reckless driving were the leading causes of traffic deaths, and in 2021 they reached their highest point in the Vision Zero era. Nationally, there were more pedestrian deaths in 2021 than there had been in 40 years. Under Vision Zero, the Department of Transportation was tasked with identifying “priority corridors” — those stretches where pedestrian deaths and serious injuries are most concentrated.

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