The "Anime-Omicron Connection" Edition
How your neighbors voted, a pro/con list on dining indoors, a $15 million Brooklyn Heights townhouse, the Governors Island winter village, over the top festive bars, and more
Today - Low: 40˚ High: 44˚
Clear throughout the day.
This weekend - Low: 36˚ High: 49˚
The latest Covid-19 positivity rate is 2.1%. 77.1% of city residents have been vaccinated. (Source: The City’s Coronavirus tracker)
• Retired cop Kruythoff Forrester was arrested for menacing three young boys with a gun in East New York on Thanksgiving Eve. NYPD Community Affairs Bureau Chief Jeffrey Maddrey ordered the arrest to be voided. Forrester and Maddrey worked together over a decade ago. There is now an Internal Affairs Bureau investigation into the quick release. (Yoav Gonen for The City)
• NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea has filed for retirement as of January 1st, Eric Adams's first day in office. (Jake Offenhartz for Gothamist)
• Meisha Porter will step down as New York City schools chancellor on January 1st after stepping into the job in March. I'm starting to sense a trend. (Reema Amin for Chalkbeat)
• Map: See how your neighbors voted in the mayoral election. (Clifford Michel for The City)
• An attendee of the Anime NYC 2021 from November 19-21 at the Javits Center tested positive for the Omicron variant of Covid-19. The man is from Minnesota and has recovered. I scheduled my booster shot, have you? (Jake Offenhartz for Gothamist)
• A pro and con list of dining indoors in NYC right now. (Rachel Sugar for Grub Street)
• A list of restaurants with outdoor heat lamps. (Hannah Albertine and Nikko Duren for The Infatuation)
• With the spread of the Omicron variant dancing through our heads like sugar plum fairies, a look at the governor's emergency powers post-Cuomo. (Danny Lewis and Sean Carlson for Gothamist)
• The City got their hands on letters written by members of the clergy to get out the city's municipal employee vaccine mandate, as their headline says it's a "battle of faith vs science." (Reuven Blau for The City)
• Real Estate Lust: A $15 million Brooklyn Heights townhouse with six beds, nine baths, a gym basement and sauna, two terraces, a landscaped garden, mirrored elevator, a treehouse room on the top floor, and more. (Michelle Cohen for 6sqft)
• There's a lot of attention being given to a guerilla ad being put up at a bus stop in Crown Heights that appears to be anti-vaccination and pro-ivermectin. Curbed attempts to get to the bottom of it and seemed to find that whoever did it is somehow connected to a series of doctors in Texas. The ad was not purchased nor approved. (Valeria Ricciulli for Curbed)
• How long does it take to fix a bike path? This is kind of a trick question because we don't actually know the answer just yet. The Ocean Parkway bike path has been accumulating complaints of disrepair for a decade but the earliest the DOT might start work is in the spring of 2022 with a finish date sometime in mid-2023. (Dave Colon for Streetsblog)
• Arguing over which Hannukah menorah is actually the largest in the world between Manhattan and Brooklyn is an annual tradition? It depends on what you mean by tallest and by whose rules you're using. (Anna Rahmanan for Time Out)
• The Trader Joe’s on Kent Ave in Williamsburg will officially open next Friday but I don't think it'll have any impact on the line length at any of the city's other Trader Joe's. (Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner for Greenpointers)
• The winter village on Governors Island will open on December 17 with lights, a 5,000-square-foot ice rink, sled rentals, drinks, fire pits, and winter programming. (Shaye Weaver for Time Out)
• There's a new ice rink open to the public at Manhattan West, which is close enough to Hudson Yards to say it's in Hudson Yards. (Anna Rahmanan for Time Out)
• Photos: I will not make an "it's lit!" joke about the 2021 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting ceremony but indeed it is... illuminated. (Ben Yakas for Gothamist)
• Podcast: The history of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. (Greg Young for The Bowery Boys)
• The Coney Island New Year's Day polar bear plunge is back for 2022. It's time to finally make good on that promise you made to your friends after last year's plunge was canceled. (Devin Gannon for 6sqft)
• The city is ready to open its first supervised injection sites in East Harlem and Washington Heights after announcing the pilot program in 2018. (Carline Lewis for Gothamist)
• Listen closely enough and you'll find that "Somewhere" from West Side Story has always been heard somewhere in NYC for the last twenty-one years. (Ben Yakas for Gothamist)
• StreetEasy's list of 10 neighborhoods to watch in 2022 doesn't contain many surprises and includes the rezoning hot spots of Gowanus and Soho. (Nancy Wu for StreetEasy)
• Review: Named for the study of birds, built in an old carriage house, a jazz club, and with a completely vegan menu. Yes, Ornithology, the vegan Jazz club, is in Bushwick. How did you know? A glowing review, even if the place sounds like a parody. (Megan Paetzhold for Grub Street)
• A Zizmorcore gift guide. (Jenny Xie for Curbed)
• The 10 most over-the-top festive bars in NYC. (Devin Gannon for 6sqft)
Featured Pet: Java!
Thank you to reader Lizzy (@pikespeake) for sending in this photo of Java, who was adopted from Heidi Wrangles Cats and I am told loves to eat, sleep, and eat again, living life to the fullest.
Thank you to the two readers who made contributions to The Briefly since the last edition using the Ko-Fi link in the footer of this email. Your contributions have been such a wonderful surprise and I can’t tell you how thankful I am for your generosity.