A water tower on West 77th Street glows in the late-afternoon sunlight. Photo by Laura Muha.
Monday, November 17th, 2025
Today’s forecast calls for partly sunny skies, with a high of 44. The rest of the week should be slightly warmer — highs in the upper 40s for the next several days, then approaching 60 on Friday — with a mix of sun and clouds. No rain in the forecast until Friday.
Notices
Our calendar has lots of local events. Click on the link or the lady in the upper right-hand corner to check.
The West 79th Street traffic circle is closed overnight through December 20th. Hours of closure are 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. weekdays, and 12:01 a.m. to 7 a.m. on Saturdays
City Councilmember Gale Brewer says she’s received dozens of ideas from District 6 constituents as to infrastructure projects they’d like to see covered by the district’s $1 million 2026-27 participatory budgeting allocation, but she’s looking for more. Submit ideas via the city’s idea collection map by Friday, November 28th, or stop by her district office at 563 Columbus Avenue between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. weekdays and fill out an idea card. For inspiration, check out last year’s funded projects — HERE.
News Roundup
Compiled by Laura Muha
The M79 bus lane. Photo courtesy WSR archives.
Let’s hear it for the M79, winner of the inaugural Mazel award for the city bus route with the most-improved service!
The virtual trophy (a bus with wings), went to the busy UWS line because the average speed along its route, which runs along 79th Street from Riverside Drive to East End Avenue, increased from 6.63 mph in May of last year to 7.25 mph in May of this year. The corridor was redesigned in 2017, adding a dedicated bus lane and SBS service.
The Mazel awards were bestowed by the Straphangers Campaign of the New York Public Interest Research Group and the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. For years, the groups have given out dubious-recognition awards they call the Pokey and the Schleppie (more on those in a minute, though the names probably speak for themselves) to the worst-performing city bus routes. But this year there was some good news as well.
“While some routes continue to crawl, others have shown meaningful improvements over the past year,” organizers wrote. “The inaugural ‘Mazel Award’ is awarded to both the standard and express bus routes that have improved their average speeds the most between May 2024 and May 2025.” The express bus award went to the SIM32, which averaged 17.14 mph on its Staten-Island-to-Manhattan route, up from 15.1 mph last year.
The Pokey is awarded to the slowest route, and this year it went to the M42, for “clocking in at an excruciating 5.25” mph, organizers said. (One day last week, a New York Post reporter walking at 2 mph beat beat it from its first stop on 12th Avenue to its sixth stop on Seventh Avenue.) Other buses on the list of the 15 slowest included several that serve parts of the UWS: the M104 (5.68 mph), the M7 (5.73 mph), the M4 (5.94 mph), and the M66 (5.98 mph).
Meanwhile, the Schleppie, which measures how long riders actually wait for a bus as compared to how long they’re supposed to have to wait, went to the Q8, which runs between Jamaica and Gateway Center Mall; its riders waited on average 3.62 minutes longer than they would have had to if the bus arrived on time. No UWS buses were contenders for that award.
Only high-ridership routes — defined as serving at least 5,000 passengers per day — qualified for any of the awards. The M79 carries 14,500 riders daily, according to nyc.gov.
Read the full story — HERE or HERE, and see the full Pokey/Schleppie report, including methodology — HERE.
Some of the spices used in Indian cooking. Photo courtesy Wikimedia.
Tariffs are driving up the price of the imported spices and basmati rice used in Indian cooking — and along with them, prices in the city’s Indian restaurants, according to a recent article in News India Times, a publication that covers the Indian and South Asian community in the United States.
Among the restaurateurs interviewed was Salil Mehta, founder of the Fungi Hospitality Group, which includes Kebab aur Sharab on West 72nd Street. He told the publication that the wholesale price of a 40-pound bag of basmati rice, which was $30 before the implementation of tariffs in July, is now $45, and a 500-gram pack of chili powder, which had been $7, is now $10.50.
Like the other restaurant operators interviewed, Mehta said he has had to put every dollar he spends under a microscope since the tariffs went into effect, and he’s been forced to raise the prices of some of his menu items to address the increased costs. He said his entrees have gone up by roughly $5, and appetizers are “a couple of dollars more here and there.” But, he added, “it still doesn’t cover us, it means the [restaurant’s] margins are even lower than they were.”
Other restaurateurs told the publication that money they once would have used for things like advertising or delivery is now going to cover the tariffs; to help make ends meet, they’ve also delayed hiring new employees and are working longer hours.
One reason the tariffs’ impact on Indian restaurants is a big issue, Mehta said, is that Indian food is perceived as a “cheap cuisine,” so raising prices to the level needed to cover the increased costs could drive customers away. “People don’t mind paying $35 for a cacio e pepe, for five ounces of pasta. But there’s a different perception that [Indian] food should be cheap already,” he said.
Read the full story — HERE.
Photo courtesy of WSR archives.
It was another busy week of back-and-forth between proponents and opponents of the proposed carriage-horse ban:
The union representing owners and drivers sued one of the organizations leading the charge against them.
A law that would have banned carriage horses stalled when a City Council committee voted against sending it to the full council.
And outgoing Mayor Eric Adams — who reversed his longstanding position and came out in favor of a ban in September — chastised councilmembers for, he said, supporting the union by voting down the measure. “The vast majority of New Yorkers — regardless of party or belief — agree that it’s time we ban horse carriages …” the mayor wrote on X. “It’s a shame that the City Council has once again refused to follow the will of our citizens.”
Proponents of the ban had been hopeful that the law — called Ryder’s Law after a carriage horse that collapsed and died in 2022 — would pass, initiating a phase-out of the carriages next year. Instead, after a contentious meeting on Friday, the council’s Health Committee declined to send the measure to the full council by a 1-4 vote, with two abstentions.
Meanwhile, the Transport Workers Union filed a suit in state Supreme Court against the nonprofit New Yorkers for Clean Livable and Safe Streets (NYCLASS for short), an organization that is a leading proponent of the carriage-horse ban. The suit claims NYCLASS “has used unlawful means, including, but not limited to, misrepresentation to the public and third parties, and/or acted with the purpose of harming the carriage drivers and their business, under the pretense of animal rights.” The union represents about 200 owners and drivers who operate horse-drawn carriages in Central Park.
NYCLASS vowed to keep fighting. “Our resolve is unbreakable. NYCLASS will continue fighting — relentlessly and unapologetically — until the cruelty ends, and New York City finally joins the many cities worldwide that have already moved beyond horse-drawn carriages,” the organization said on social media. “We are not going anywhere, and neither is this movement.”
Ryder’s Law could be resurrected in the City Council’s next term, but will need a new sponsor, since its original sponsor, Councilmember Robert Holden of Queens, is leaving office because of term limits.
Read the full story — HERE and HERE.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
During campaign stops, Zohran Mamdani often talked fondly about the UWS, his teenage stomping ground. He posted a photo taken outside Koronet Pizza on X (“Best slice in NYC?” he wrote), talked about attending middle school at Bank Street 112th, and reminisced about playing soccer in Riverside Park. “These are all the memories for me of what introduced me into life as a New Yorker, what it meant to be a New Yorker,” Mamdani told a crowd at Riverside Church last month.
Now that he’s mayor-elect, The Columbia Spectator decided to do a deeper dive into Mamdani’s connections to our neck of the woods, sending a reporter to talk to business owners and students from the institutions about which Mamdani waxed poetic.
Read what they had to say — HERE.
ICYMI
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