Bill de Blasio's COVID carnival gets worse

 

NY Post

 A giant Ferris wheel is coming to Times Square — and the idea is to roll out a welcome for tourists as the city looks to bounce back from the pandemic.

The massive amusement ride — which will stretch 110 feet high, the equivalent of 11 stories — will start getting assembled as soon as Thursday and be ready to hoist passengers high above the Crossroads of the World beginning early next week, The Post has learned.

The outsize attraction will be located just west of Duffy Square on Broadway between West 47th and West 48th Streets for about a 22 days, according to Vito Bruno, who heads up the Brooklyn-based entertainment company that’s behind the project.

“The city needs something fun, happy and nostalgic that brings you back to your childhood,” Bruno told The Post.

He added that he approached the Times Square Alliance about the idea several months ago, “and it’s been a sprint ever since,” with a myriad of permits, inspections and signoffs from multiple city agencies.

The hope is that the wheel will give Times Square a boost while area businesses and restaurants wait for Broadway shows to reopen in September. Foot traffic has been steadily returning and is nearly two-thirds of what it was pre-pandemic, according to the Times Square Alliance.

The Ferris wheel “fits perfectly into the mayor’s overarching summer of fun campaign which includes the five borough concerts and Five Boro Bike Tour,” Alliance president Tom Harris told The Post. “We want to give people that ‘wow’ moment to show them Times Square is back.”

de Blasio's Times Square vac site screws up

 NY Post

 This is not the “experience” New Yorkers want.

The operator of the pop-up COVID vaccination site in the former “NFL Experience” building in Times Square sent out an emergency notice informing 899 patients that it erroneously injected them with expired Pfizer doses.

The patients were told by ATC Vaccination Services that they need to get another shot because the firm “cannot guarantee the effectiveness” of the doses they received.

“We are contacting you concerning the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine you received at Times Square – NFL Experience vaccination site on June 5 to June 10, 2021. It was recognized after the vaccine was administered, that it had been in the freezer beyond the approved time frame prior to it being administered,” David Savitsky said in an email to patients.

A dad of two teen daughters who were given the faulty shots last week was left fuming after getting the email and a phone call from ATC Vaccination Services about the mix up.

“The guy who called wasn’t even a doctor,” the dad said.

Two women and a little girl got shot in Times Square in broad daylight

 

Impunity City

Seems like bad old days again in the new Times Square…

Why wait for Broadway to re-open and spend a grand on Hamilton when you can see a duel between two shitty gunmen on the street?

 NY Daily News

Three people — two women and a four-year-old girl — where hit by stray bullets when a gunman took aim at another man in Times Square on Saturday afternoon, police said.

Police were called to the area near W. 44th St. and Seventh Ave. around 4:55 p.m.

The victims were rushed to local hospitals. Two victims taken to Bellevue Hospital, including the little girl, did not suffer life-threatening wounds, said police.

None of the three victims were known to each other, law enforcement sources said. One of the injured woman is 23 years old, and the other is 42 years old.

The mayhem began when two men on a street corner started arguing, and one of them pulled a gun, said police sources.

The Blaz and The Brad flaunt pandemic protocols by partaking in events banished to their constituents

This is #deBlastopia

This is also the ultimate elitist statement and blatant display by a man and woman who treat the city like they own it. https://t.co/fG7QGzen9i

— JQ LLC: Good Troublemaker/Impunity City (@jqllc) January 2, 2021

We’re ready for you, 2021! pic.twitter.com/PfzkZmV9Rm

— Brad Lander (@bradlander) January 1, 2021

The original polar bears cancelled the plunge this year.

After being opaque about the cause of Saturday's blackout, Con Ed is being glib about potential blackouts

NY Post


Con Edison warned Monday that New Yorkers may have to endure another blackout this weekend, when the temperature is expected to reach a sweltering 97 degrees — and feel like 106.

“We expect that there could be service outages — those things happen during heat waves,” company spokesman Mike Clendenin said.

Later in the day, Con Ed further fueled fears of a potential power outage when it completely backtracked and blamed a fault in a 13,000-volt power cable that caught fire for triggering Saturday’s blackout.

On Sunday, company President Timothy Cawley had called the idea of tying the incident to the failed cable “sort of a non-starter.”

AccuWeather predicted four straight days of 90-plus degree temperatures beginning Friday, with a 97-degree peak on Saturday, when humidity and other factors will make it feel even worse.

Surely, these things happen and will continue to happen when you have energy devouring billboards like the new ones in Times Square that are about 3, 5 and 20 stories and are a block wide. And also deriving from massive tower development by the Hudson, particularly the brand new Hudson Yards.

How is Con Ed going to handle Google's expansion and Disney's new studios on Soho's west side?

Maybe this is why they are being glib. Con Ed's VP for "government relations" used to work for the city's Economic Development Coporation. (Thanks to Kristin Theodos)

Worker dies in "completely preventable" accident

From the Daily News:

A city hardhat plummeted 18 feet to his death Wednesday in what city officials called a “completely preventable” construction accident in Times Square.

Jose Cruz, 59, of Sunset Park, was helping remove part of a steel deck from a slab at 1604 Broadway, near W. 49th St., at about 11:05 a.m., when he fell from an I-beam near the second floor, officials said.

He died at Mount Sinai West.

“We think it was completely preventable,” said city Buildings Commissioner Rick Chandler.

“There should have been tie offs with his personal protection equipment, which he was wearing.”

In March 2016, the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) hit Streamline USA with seven violations dubbed "serious" after its inspectors responded to a complaint about unsafe job conditions at the 1604 Broadway site. The agency hit the company with $19,200 in fines which Streamline is contesting.

This week's de Blasio leadership summary

He's giving up on banning horse carriages.

He's removing pedestrian plazas in Times Square to prevent bad behavior (but the one on Northern Blvd is still apparently a go).

He's sending Willets Point back to the drawing board. (Which is kinda interesting, because as public advocate, he thought the plan was just fine.)

What do you think of these decisions? Good? Bad? Spineless? Is he learning when to hold em, fold em, walk away and run?

De Blasio declares war on painted ladies

“This situation is going to change, this is what I’ll guarantee you,” Mr. de Blasio continued. “I’m not going to tolerate it, we’re going to change things. I think we have just begun to recognize all the tools available here. But, you know, this is a situation that I don’t accept, and we will deal with very aggressively.”

If you were hoping he was talking about putting an end to illegal conversions, filthy parks or something criminal, you'd be wrong. The enemy here is women in Times Square with paint on their breasts. Because a crackdown on them will make life better for all New Yorkers.

Redbird may fly in a better location

DNA Info suggests 5 better places for the redbird tourism center than borough hall:

Long Island City, JFK, LaGuardia, Times Square and the Flushing Library

Beware of the fake monks

From the NY Times:

In Times Square, amid the dozens of Elmos, Mickey Mouses and superheroes who work the crowds for loose bills, new costumed characters have come to seek their fortunes.

They are mostly men of Chinese descent, with shaved heads, beatific smiles and flowing robes of orange, but sometimes brown or gray. They follow a similar script: Offering wishes of peace and a shiny amulet, they solicit donations from passers-by, often reinforcing their pitch by showing a picture of a temple for which the money seems to be intended. Then they open a notebook filled with the names of previous donors and the amounts given.

The men appear to be Buddhist monks; a smaller number of similarly dressed women say they are Taoist nuns.

No one seems to know who they really are or where they come from. The police have taken no official stance, stepping in only when the monks become aggressive. Various Buddhists have confronted the men, asking about their affiliation or quizzing them about the religion’s precepts. The men remain silent or simply walk away.

They have become ubiquitous — so much so that the Naked Cowboy, the Times Square performer whose real name is Robert Burck, now simply refers to them as “co-workers.”

“They’re littered all over,” he said.

Even in New York, where people soliciting money are practically a tourist attraction, these monks tend to stand out, both for their attire and for their sense of entitlement. They offer the amulet and, in some cases, a bracelet; if they are not satisfied with the donation, they unabashedly demand $20 or more.

This year, the police have arrested at least nine people who have presented themselves as monks, mostly on charges of aggressive begging or unlicensed vending.

But merely begging in the streets is not against the law. The police have largely left these men alone, to the consternation of Buddhist leaders in New York’s Chinese neighborhoods, who portray them as nothing more than beggars who undermine Buddhists’ credibility.

The history of One Times Square

From the New Yorker:

The home of the New Year’s Eve ball — One Times Square — started out as the headquarters of the Times; it displayed early illuminated billboards and the famous news ticker. New Yorker staffers have made numerous trips to the building. A 1961 Talk of the Town story reported that “there was a time when a speakeasy was going full blast in one of the basements … and when the F.B.I. — this was during the Second World War — was holding pistol practice in a basement and using a seventh floor office to trap German spies.”

The building, eventually sold to Jamestown Properties, is now mostly unoccupied. The abandoned floors are littered with graffiti and the remnants of old signs. On New Year’s Eve, around a million people are expected to pack Times Square and fix their eyes on the ball. When it comes down, though, it will land above a building that has been empty for years.

Scaffold collapse hurts 3 people

From DNA Info:

Three people were hurt when wind blew down scaffolding near Times Square Friday morning, the FDNY said.

A strong gust blew down pieces of plywood and the frames supporting them near Seventh Avenue and West 40th Street about 10 a.m., an FDNY chief at the scene said.

They were not seriously injured, the FDNY said.

Officials with the Department of Buildings said that the structure was assembled improperly and issued a stop-work order at that address. The building owner 151 West Associates LLC was cited for construction not incompliance of approved plans and safety violations.

A complaint for unsafe scaffolding was reported for the work site, 561 Seventh Ave., last year, but investigators did not issue a violation because the structure was being dismantled when they arrived, according to DOB records.

Roosevelt Avenue underworld

From the Times Ledger:

Trafficking happens all around the city and the country, but the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights, Corona and Flushing have been identified as key centers for the crime. City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras (D-East Elmhurst) said with the cleanup of Times Square in the 1980s and 1990s, the criminal element moved down the No. 7 line into Queens. In these neighborhoods, johns have access to prostituted women not only from houses set up for the purpose, but from the back of vans and at bars that advertise $2 dances.

In recent years, Queens lawmakers have pushed legislation and conducted campaigns to combat sex trafficking. When asked, advocates do not have numbers for how prevalent it is in the borough, but Ferreras said she has heard often from constituents at Council hearings, at community meetings and in her daily life of sex trafficking going on in her district, especially around Roosevelt Avenue.

She said girls can be trafficked from as young as 12 and boys from as young as 10.

“It’s here. It’s a problem,” she said in an interview. “I think it happens behind closed doors. It happens in small areas of the community.”

Leticia Brown, of Girls Education and Mentoring Services, an organization aimed at helping victims, said during a panel at the Long Island University-C.W. Post in Brookville, L.I., earlier this year that the girls who are trafficked are often minorities and low-income, if not homeless or runaways.

“The girls, women I work with are deemed ‘less than’ in our society,” Brown said.

People are trafficked into the city both domestically and internationally, with victims coming into Queens from as close by as Brooklyn to as far away as Latin America and Asia via John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports. Advocates say the pimps offer their victims the promise of a better life: an opportunity for work, a green card, a boyfriend.

Nassau County Police Detective John Birbiglia said pimps often set themselves up as a girl’s father, giving them gifts of clothes and jewelry or dinner before demanding they earn these gifts by sleeping with men for money of which they never see a dime. Once the pimps have the girls, they can keep them intimidated either through rape, physical abuse or threats to themselves or their families.

Some women who have been trapped in the lifestyle for years also grow up to become “top girls” who run prostitution rings, Ferreras said.

“You think this must be the movies,” Ferreras said. “This is someone’s reality.”

Happy New Year from Queens Crap!

Here are the city's funding priorities

From Crains:

In an effort to revive the stalled construction of a public park at Willoughby Square in downtown Brooklyn, local developers and elected officials are raising millions of dollars to make up for a funding cut by the city's Economic Development Corp., which has overseen and largely bankrolled the project.

The one-acre green space is intended to sit atop a 694-space underground garage, and has long been viewed by the city and the surrounding business community as a centerpiece of downtown Brooklyn's revitalization.

In fact, the city has already shelled out $40 million on acquisition, relocation, demolition and design costs for the $70 million project, whose price tag doesn't include the cost of actually constructing the garage, which is being borne by private companies.

From Eyewitness News:

Times Square's pedestrian plazas will be getting a sleek redesign.

The Times Square Alliance says it's intended to simplify and de-clutter - and create a unified identity for the heart of Times Square.

The $27 million plan is heading for final approval and is expected to be completed in 2014.

Mocker calls out Bloomberg for caring more about tourists than Queensfolk

Mocker went to a press conference recently that the Mayor, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and get this - former president Bill Clinton - held in order to brag about how much air quality has improved in Times Square with the installation of the pedestrian plaza there. (Pretty bogus since the pollution didn't disappear, it just was diverted to other streets.) Then Mocker compared that initiative to how Bloomberg has ignored the 5-year plea for parkland in Maspeth. The City is about to dump yet another bus depot on the community, but continues to stall in converting the St. Saviour's site into a park, even though the elected officials have had the money raised for its acquisition for just about a year. Apparently, Bloomie and company would rather make nice with the owner than start the acquisition process. Forget PlaNYC 2030...Developers and tourists rule!

Lie to the Feds, get free trip home

From the NY Post/AP:

A Pakistani man arrested in Massachusetts during the investigation into the failed Times Square bombing is willing to admit he lied to federal agents and be deported under a plea deal.

The Boston Globe reports that according to court papers, Aftab Ali Khan would plead guilty, be sentenced to time served while awaiting trial, and be deported to Pakistan.

Khan has been in federal custody since last May when he, his uncle and a man in Maine were arrested in connection with the failed attempt to bomb Times Square in New York City on May 1, 2010.

Authorities say Khan unwittingly supplied $4,900 to Faisal Shahzad of Bridgeport, Conn., who was later convicted in the attempt. Khan was not accused of knowing about or participating in the plot.

Bike lanes cleared of snow before Queens streets

From the NY Post:

It was a breeze getting through the snow from Columbus Circle to Times Square yesterday -- all you needed was a bicycle.

While most of Broadway from 48th to 58th streets remained impassable to cars and buses in the blizzard's wake, the city was rolling out the red carpet for Mayor Bloomberg's favorite class of commuters: maniacs and deliverymen on two wheels.

Astoundingly, it diverted precious, strained resources to plow the wide but little-used Midtown Broadway bike lane Tuesday night, even as streets all over town were still waiting to be dug out.

Yesterday, while cars and trucks inched their way south, cyclists had a clear field for 10 blocks. Except for a few windblown traces, they were as snow-cleansed as the East 79th Street block that Bloomberg calls home.

Not that many riders took advantage: We counted three in a 15-minute stroll along the bike path, which runs parallel with an equally underutilized asphalt "pedestrian mall."

But Broadway below Columbus Circle remained slow for motorists even after finally being cleared. Vehicles squeezed into a single lane at many points, thanks to wayward drifts, cars parked at the sidewalk and others parked in the mid-avenue buffer lane designed to shield the bike lane from moving traffic.

Is there any better evidence of the warped priorities of Bloomberg and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan?

The Broadway bike route is one of many installed throughout the five boroughs by the DOT over objections by residents, store owners, business advocates and community boards.

With the mayor's backing, Sadik-Khan rides roughshod over the public will despite repeated promises to heed their complaints.

Asked to justify the waste of plows, a Sanitation Department rep bafflingly said bike lanes are cleared "once primary, secondary and tertiary routes are complete" -- which, of course, was nowhere near to being done -- and "cleared by the truck plow on the route where the bike lane is. The department starts cleaning bike lanes when we clear crosswalks and bus stops."

Bloomberg actually denied this happened.

"Isn't it nice to know that the NYWaterTaxi serving East River luxury condos and Wall Street was running fine yesterday morning?

Image attached is of one at Schaefer Landing, from the Williamsburg Bridge. Note the TWO waiting commuters." - Kurt

And the buses are still not running properly.

Top photo from LTVSquad

DOT chooses tsunami design for Times Square

From 1010WINS:

New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan Sunday announced the winning design for the temporary treatments that will refresh and revive the streetscape design currently in place at the Times Square pedestrian plazas while the agency moves forward with the separate design process for the area's permanent capital reconstruction project. Submitted by Brooklyn-based artist Molly Dilworth, the selected design is composed of a graphical representation of NASA's infrared satellite data of Manhattan. Titled "Cool Water, Hot Island," the artist's concept focuses on the urban heat-island effect, where cities tend to experience warmer temperatures than rural settings. The proposed design's color palette of striking blues and light hues reflects more sunlight and absorbs less heat-improving the look of these popular pedestrian plazas while making them more comfortable places to sit. The colors and patterns evoke water, suggesting a river flowing through the center of Times Square, and they also provide a compelling visual counterpoint to the reds, oranges and yellows of the area's signature marquees and billboards.

The new design is scheduled to be installed by mid-July. The Alliance will monitor and maintain the temporary treatments for up to 18 months as the agency initiates plans for the design and construction of permanent plazas under the Department of Design and Construction's Design and Construction Excellence program. As part of the longer-term project, DOT and DDC are working with a team of experts-from landscape professionals to architects to engineers-to design world-class plazas with ample seating, new paving and underground infrastructure able to accommodate and enhance the signature events that are staged at Times Square throughout the year. The project will also completely reconstruct the roadways in Times Square, which have not been structurally repaired in decades. An announcement is expected later this summer. Construction on the permanent plazas is expected in 2012.

Who needs mass transit anyway?

From the NY Times:

Riders trying to get downtown through the Times Square area have experienced longer travel times on four out of five affected bus routes, according to a report from New York City Transit, which operates the city’s bus system.

In the worst case, the M6 bus took more than 10 minutes longer to complete its route from Central Park to Union Square in the evening rush, meaning riders had to spend about 25 percent more time to finish the trip.

The report attributed the slower rides to increased congestion, longer routes and new turns required by the closing of several blocks of Broadway. It also said that the rerouting of buses and other traffic onto Seventh Avenue “appears to have caused congestion,” an assertion that the Bloomberg administration rejected.

Buses that travel north on Avenue of the Americas were not rerouted. They benefited from the city’s simplification of the intersection at Herald Square, shaving an average of 14 percent, or 90 seconds, off their travel times between 14th and 34th Streets, the report said.

The bus data was collected by New York City Transit in October and provided to the city’s Transportation Department. The report was not made public until this week, after repeated requests from The New York Times.