Spotted on the Brooklyn Bridge this morning. Even our tourists are tough as nails. (Girl in the purple sweatshirt: “NYC, go hard or go home!”)
High-Speed Internet Gets a New Groove
New York City is working to make top-speed internet available to more homes and businesses and at the same time cut down on disruptive road-work and street closures.
City Sifts Debris for 9/11 Remains
The New York City medical examiner’s office will resume its search for human remains from the World Trade Center site. The office hopes advances in DNA identification technology may help identify all 2,753 people who died in the 9/11 attack in New York.
What’s Williamsburg to You?
n+1 contributor Kristin Dombek talks about her personal history with Williamsburg HERE. Are you still a punk rock squatter while everyone around you is a luxury condo dweller?
“My friend John and I got this a couple a years ago and restored it ourselves. Cause I used to drive one when I was a kid. My grandfather had a medallion and I drove it on weekends in college. We rent it out to movies and weddings, yeah. All the other cabbies give me the high sign because they remember, you know? Memories is important things.”
—The Checker Guy (parked outside our studios in Soho)
In Harm’s Way: Remembering the Life of Kimani Gray
It’s been nearly a week since 16-year-old Kimani Gray was shot by plainclothes officers in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Days of protest have followed with people in the community expressing anger as the city defended the officers’ use of deadly force. His mother, Carol Gray, has been struggling this week to separate the details of her son’s life with how he died.
Did you know? You can add the alternate side parking suspensions to your Google, Outlook, iCal and other calendars?
Two weeks before Sandy, engineers placed man-made dunes along the coast of Brooklyn. “If Sandy had happened three weeks before when it did, we would have lost the Belt Parkway.” READ MORE
Three months after Sandy hit, we’re interested in your feelings about the recovery. Are you optimistic? Pessimistic? Neutral? We’re collecting people’s thoughts, and are tracking them by zip code, to see where people fall on the spectrum — and whether geography plays a role in everyone’s perspective.
(via DataNews)
New Yorkers weren’t the only ones monitoring Sandy in the week before Halloween. A Georgia contractor was tracking the storm closely as it made its way north toward Lower Manhattan where his potential clients’ commercial buildings sat doomed to flood.
By the time Sandy was ready to hit the area on Oct. 29, Peter Hajjar and several of his employees at Reliable Restoration were parked outside Philadelphia waiting to move.
As soon as the storm passed they sped to the Financial District and began pumping out the flooded buildings.
In less than two months Hajjar and his Atlanta-based company, which specializes in repairing storm damage, billed commercial building owners for $4 million worth of work.
“Typically an area in a region when it’s hit with a storm this size, there are never enough resources or people or brainpower for management to run the jobs and so companies are called in from around the country to help out,” Hajjar said. “We were one of those companies.”
His experience highlights a simple economic fact: one person’s disaster is another’s opportunity. CONTINUED.
Follow along with Amy Pearl and Janet Babin as they make their way from Cape May to Montauk to check in on coastal communities three months after Sandy. At each stop, they’ll share photos and stories of people they meet.
