Tag: Featured

Vendor, Vidi, Vici?

The City Council has enacted a bill, sponsored by Margaret Chin, which will expand the zone surrounding the World Trade Center that is off limits to street vendors. The original catchment, in effect since 2004, barred food vendors and souvenir hawkers from a district bounded by Liberty, Vesey, and West Streets, and Broadway. The larger...
Food carts (like these, shown in Zuccotti Park) have been banned from the area surrounding the World Trade Center since 2004, but will soon be pushed outside of expanded boundaries, as a result of security concerns.

Chin Rails about Jail

City Council member Margaret Chin is raising a broad range of concerns related to the plan, currently being pushed by the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, to build a new, 40-story prison in Lower Manhattan. In a letter sent to City Hall on Monday, Ms. Chin objects first to what she sees as a...

‘Egrets, We’ve Had a Few…’

Downtown dweller Patrick Sheldon was the first of several readers to report on Lower Manhattan’s newest celebrity resident: an as-yet-unnamed Great Egret. Spotted for the first time at a paddle-board race at North Cove Marina on September 25, this majestic creature was seen stalking a mouse. (Egrets, like all herons, subsist on fish, frogs, and...
Egret spotted in Gateway Plaza photo: Alison Simko

Where the Population Is Rising Faster Than the Sea Level

Developers have filed permits with City agencies to create another 813 apartments in the Financial District, in the twelve-month period ending July 1, 2018, according to a new analysis by Localize.city, an online database that uses artificial intelligence to provide buyers and renters with critical insights for every New York City address. This marks FiDi...

Wildlife in Lower Manhattan

Downtown resident Patrick Sheldon reports a sighting: Meet the Great Egret. That long neck is pulled in when he flies and those wings appeared to be more than four feet across in the air. The egret can have four- to five-foot wingspans. He appeared the day of the paddleboard races (September 25th) and there were...

Tales of Derring-Do During Spy Week

Nestled in the heart of the Financial District lies Fraunces Tavern Museum, where familiar words and traces of forgotten history are illuminated. On the ground floor at 54 Pearl Street, a jazzy tune drifts out of the roped-off bar to the left, and clinking plates and chattering tourists and Wall Street workers are reminders that this tavern has...