Friday’s Headlines: Pete, We Hardly Knew Ye Edition
Pete Hamill was honored with a ceremonial street co-naming on Seventh Avenue in the writer’s native Park Slope on Thursday. Everyone covered it, because, indeed, Hamill wrote for every paper at one point or another (NYDN, NY Post). Our old man editor was also on hand, but mostly to schmooze all his old Post, News and various Brooklyn colleagues.
The real story of yesterday’s Hamill event was the bike ride Borough President (and maybe Mayor-elect?) Eric Adams took from Borough Hall to Park Slope. Streetsblog’s Dave Colon was in the saddle to grill Adams on his plans for better road safety (no surprise that Adams supports serious bike infrastructure — he’s a daily cyclist). The Post’s Nolan Hicks broadened his coverage to portray Adams as a throwback to the days when mayors walked among us as real people. The Times didn’t come on the ride, but the paper did do a story about the kind of mayor Adams says he’ll be (so did amNY). (The Paper of Record also looked at Brad Lander’s seeming come-from-ahead win over Corey Johnson for comptroller.)
In other news:
- Gothamist crunched the numbers on Adams’s seeming win.
- An unlicensed pickup truck driver struck and killed a grandmother and injured her 18-month granddaughter in a crash in Whitestone. (NYDN, NY Post)
- Another person was left in critical condition after a hit-and-run in East Flatbush. (NY Post)
- And a cyclist was critically wounded after being run down by the driver of a Hyundai. But here’s the thing: The Post covered the story, but for some reason didn’t bother to run the plates on the Hyundai, despite printing clear-as-day images of the car: It turns out that the car has been slapped with six school-zone camera speeding tickets in two years. So let’s stop pretending that these things are just “accidents.”
- The city announced (through the Wall Street Journal) that it would unveil the first of 100 neighborhood electric vehicle fueling stations on Friday. Some papers covered (NY Post), and we were there, too. But we want to take a little time to analyze this almost entirely unvetted pilot program to encourage electric car ownership, which will do nothing to solve congestion or road violence. We’ll have more reporting next week.
- Revel rebels: The would-be electric taxi company told the city, basically, come and get us. (NY Post)
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