Monday’s Headlines: Empire State Shill-ding Edition

We were so bowled over by the late Chiefs-Bengals game that we’ll get right to the news … except to point out that the Post and the News were right to be pissed off at the hue on the Empire State Building last night.

Philadelphia is not the Sixth Borough.

In other news:

• On Sunday, we covered the latest theft of public space by cops at the 88th Precinct, who apparently didn’t want their personal vehicles on the street in the event of a protest against police brutality. So they stole a playground from kids instead.
• Another reckless driver sheered his car into multiple pieces speeding on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island (NYDN, NY Post). The Daily News and the Post had the requisite hearts and flowers follow-up.
• A Queens pedestrian was killed by a driver who was not charged. (NYDN)
• And here it is, folks, more proof that sending LIRR trains to the $12-billion Grand Central Madison doesn’t really save Long Island commuters any time (Gothamist). Meanwhile, the Post hates transit so much that it took Grand Central Madison to task in an editorial. The paper also took the opposite angle on ridership numbers than the one we took a few weeks ago. Fortunately, retired former federal transit man Larry Penner provided some ancient historical context (Mass Transit).
• Longtime Brooklyn political insider Kristina Naplatarski says in a Brooklyn Paper op-ed the city better to a good job fixing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
• Our editor got the Jalopnik treatment on his “criminal mischief” campaign, with the car mag demeaning him as a “narc.” Meanwhile, the same article was translated into some language and then retranslated back into English with hilarious consequences in Businessland.
• Also over the weekend, NBC Nightly News did a segment on the growing problem of ghost plates. They had interviewed Editor Gersh Kuntzman twice, but opted not to use anything from his “criminal mischief” campaign — except for a subtle two-second excerpt from his hit song with Jimmy and The Jaywalkers, “Criminal Mischief” (hear it on Spotify!). Here’s the NBC segment:

• People don’t like noise (but really helicopters are the worst because no one is doing anything about it)! (NY Post)
• Subway crime is down. (Crain’s)
• On Sunday, amNY followed us and the Times on the Adams administration’s Brooklyn Bridge skate park plan.
• The MTA has quietly gotten rid of the WiFi on buses, mostly because no one used it. (Gothamist, then amNY)
• The Daily News had a story about a car driver who burned to death inside his car. The paper didn’t bother to run the plates, which would have at least heightened the made-for-tabloid mystery: 27 speed camera and one red-light ticket in less than two years.
• In case you missed it, Ginia Bellafante’s column this weekend was about how a parking lot near the South Street Seaport remarkably retains its status as a historic landmark, despite New York’s crushing need for housing. (NY Times)
• Finally, the New York Post lost transportation reporter David Meyer to Streetsblog — where he’ll become deputy editor on Feb. 6 — and suddenly the paper decided it didn’t need a full-time reporter on the beat, according to Nolan Hicks’s late Friday tweet: