The jury’s still out on ranked choice voting but what we know for certain is that the NYC Board of Elections really screwed up—they announced the results of the Democratic Primary’s first ranked tally on Tuesday, only to have to then walk that back last night because they accidentally included test ballot results. Plus they haven’t even tallied absentee votes yet, which count for 13% of all votes cast. As of now, Maya Wiley is officially out and Eric Adams has a small lead over Kathryn Garcia.
God’s Love We Deliver, one of the best charities in the entire country as well as our neighbor at Spring and Sixth Ave, urgently needs more volunteers—can you help? They’ve introduced four new kitchen prep shifts on Friday (1-4 p.m. and 4-7 p.m.) and Saturday (10a-1 p.m. and 1:30 p.m.), and are also looking for people to ride as passengers in our delivery van and assist their staff in delivering meals.
Governor Cuomo‘s office recently announced that trees in Tribeca’s Rockefeller Park will be cut down and 3,000 sfq of lawn will be removed in order to build a monument to essential workers, and our neighbors down there are in full revolt: they built a tent city and slept there overnight—in this heat!—to keep construction workers from taking the trees down. They’re also throwing a block party there today from 2 to 6.
Brick Underground reports that not only are rents finally rising again, but that there are now actually bidding wars in the most popular neighborhoods, including ours. This mess is partly due to people returning to the city post-pandemic (and hopefully post-vaccination)—some of them families so desperate to be in the same good school district that they’re signing leases now and paying for apartments they won’t even occupy till September when school starts. We stayed put and are still traumatized by the tale of the Upper West Sider who gave up her rent-stabilized apartment right after lockdown and moved to Vermont, only to start looking for an apartment in her old neighborhood after just a month of rural life.
Last but not least: if you grew up playing with Lego or have kids that love it, not only did Lego finally open their Legoland New York Resort in Goshen last month just 60 miles from NYC, making it the first new major theme park in the entire Northeast in over forty years, but they also just opened their new two story flagship store at Rockefeller Center, with twice the space and even more attractions than their Flatiron store. It’s a straight shot on the B train!
