Friday’s Headlines: In Praise of Our Benefactors Edition

The first day of our December donation drive went swimmingly! According to our accounting department, 12 people used the widget on the right side of this page (or the bottom if you're on mobile) to send us more than $800!

That's the most successful first day in our donation drive history — and if we kept that up for every single day of the month, we'd have enough money to get Dave Colon a few new basketball jerseys for formal press conferences.

We kid.

But please, we hope you'll give from the heart. If you need a reminder of what we've been doing all year, click here.

And now, it's our tradition to honor yesterday's donors in this way: Thanks, Choresh! Thanks, Randy! Thanks, Carla! Thanks, Bridget! Thanks, Ross! Thanks, Pamela! Thanks, Cyrus! Thanks, Ron! Thanks, Sharon! Thanks, Kurt! Thanks, Thomas! Thanks, Stephanie!

Moving on. Here's our digest of yesterday's news:

• Like Streetsblog, Hell Gate covered yesterday's press conference by arrested (and cleared!) lawyer Adam White for "criminal mischief." White is planning a countersuit. Meanwhile, our editor, who has been chronicling his own one-man criminal mischief spreed, will be on NY1 at 7:30 a.m. to discuss his experiences, as well as the outrage of White being arrested for UN-defacing a plate. He posted another classic video yesterday:

I'll be on with @patkiernan on @NY1 at 7:30 am on Friday to talk about CRIMINAL MISCHIEF, so you can be sure that this is going to be topic 1: The complete disregard @NYPD84Pct has for the public: pic.twitter.com/G6Hn96zQL0

— Gersh Kuntzman (@GershKuntzman) December 1, 2022

• Looks like someone in the NYPD isn't too happy that cops are going to be involuntarily committing people in the subway! (NY Post)
• We all covered the Brooklyn bus redesign, but amNY and Gothamist played it straight, while we found an angle (and a picture of a pigeon).
• In a surprisingly sloppy story, the Tribeca Trib covered a discussion of a protected bike lane for Chambers Street by a Lower Manhattan community board. The story didn't even mention that congestion pricing will relieve Chambers of much of its traffic, but also didn't really mention why cyclists want the protection on Chambers: because it connects the hugely popular Brooklyn Bridge bike lane to the even more hugely popular Hudson River Greenway. Friend of Streetsblog Charles Komanoff had other quibbles.
• The Queens Chronicle took a different spin than we did on the DOT's announcement that Citi Bike is coming to Ridgewood and Maspeth in January. The paper seems to think opponents of Citi Bike won something, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
• Now this is criminal mischief. (NYDN)
• Our former colleague Angie Schmitt took a national-eye view at Vision Zero. (Bloomberg)
• Should people just paint their own damn crosswalks wherever they want them? (Bloomberg)
• Cars corrupt absolutely: For months after her resignation, former state Court of Appeals Chief Judge Janet DiFiore kept court officers working as her personal chauffeurs, Law360 reports.
• And, finally, social media exploded when someone again noticed that Tony Rosenthal's beloved statue, "Alamo" (which everyone just calls "The Cube") no longer rotates, thanks to poor work by the not-very-good-art-restorers at the Department of Transportation: