Volunteers gathered yesterday at St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church to peel, slice, sugar and flour the apples — more than 700 of them! — that will go into pies for Goddard Riverside’s Community Thanksgiving Dinner. The pies themselves — 100 fruit and 50 pumpkin — will be baked tomorrow. Volunteers also made 1,200 oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies, to supplement the 600 dozen pledged by friends and neighbors, organizer Charlene Floyd said. See notices (below) for information on the dinner. Photo by Ann Cooper.
Today is Monday, November 24th, 2025
Expect sunny and breezy weather today, with a high of 52. The forecast for the rest of the week is variable: early showers tomorrow and Wednesday, but warmer, hitting 60 on Wednesday; Thursday and Friday should be sunny, but temperatures will drop back into the mid-40s.
On this day in 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” laying the foundation for the field now known as evolutionary biology — and setting off an uproar that continues, at least in some corners, to the present day.
Notices
Our calendar has lots of local events. Click on the link or the lady in the upper righthand corner to check.
Goddard Riverside is serving its annual Community Thanksgiving Dinner from noon to 3 p.m. on Thursday at its Older Adult Community Center, 593 Columbus Avenue. Everyone is welcome; one meal per person. More information — HERE.
City Councilmember Gale Brewer is offering 150 free countertop compost bins to constituents on a first-come-first-served basis. The giveaway is being held to mark a milestone in the Department of Sanitation’s mandatory composting program, which hit a new record earlier this month, collecting 6,025,480 pounds of compostable food and yard waste. (The previous record was 5.9 million pounds.) The compost bins are available at Brewer’s district office at 563 Columbus Avenue. Because quantities are limited, you might want to call before heading over there, to make sure they haven’t all been given away. The number is 212-873-0282.
Brewer’s office is also collecting suggestions for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani via a Google form available — HERE. Her office plans to forward the suggestions to his transition team.
Community Board 7’s Business & Consumer Issues Committee is seeking community input on neighborhood priorities, to help guide future committee discussions on issues that affect residents, businesses, and Business Improvement Districts. The survey is available — HERE, with a deadline of next Wednesday, December 3rd.
News Roundup
Compiled by Laura Muha
Protestors disrupted a performance of “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, with at least one of them climbing onto the stage and denouncing David H. Koch, the late billionaire industrialist who poured money into right-wing causes and discrediting climate change, eyewitnesses told The New York Times.
The audience initially responded to the disturbance with confusion, with some attendees apparently wondering whether it was part of the performance and then, when it became clear that it wasn’t, with anger and shouts of “loser!” and “put them in jail!” the Times reported.
Police arrested three people, and the performance resumed about 15 minutes later.
Though eyewitnesses told the paper that the protestors shouted Koch’s name during their demonstration, Jen Luzzo, the press director for the Met, told the paper that “We don’t have all the information about what the protesters were protesting yet. It’s still a little hazy.”
This is not the first time a performance at the Met has been interrupted by protestors, according to Operawire.com. In 2023, climate protesters interrupted the opening night of “Tannhauser”; in 2015, an anti-Putin demonstration broke out during the curtain call of “Iolanta”. And in 2014, protestors interrupted the premiere of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” claiming the opera glorified terrorism and was anti-Semitic.
Read the full story — HERE and see video of the incident, posted on X by an audience member — HERE.
UWSer Olivia MacKinnon as the Dewdrop in George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker ™. Photo by Erin Baiano, courtesy of New York City Ballet.
Since we’re on the subject of Lincoln Center, here’s a happier story: Forbes magazine recently caught up with Nutcracker soloist Olivia MacKinnon, an Alabama native now living on the UWS, for a Q&A about the things she loves most about her adopted hometown.
MacKinnon, who joined the New York City Ballet in 2012 as an apprentice and was promoted to soloist in 2023, told Forbes she’s an “uptown girl at heart,” and that, while she also loves the Upper East Side, she finds the UWS to be “artistic, grounding, and where I call home.”
Among her favorite places: the 79th Street Greenmarket (“a wonderful way to support local farmers while stocking up on delicious, healthy ingredients and food for the week”); Two Boots Pizza (“My vote for the best pizza on the Upper West Side”); and Café Fiorello (“Fun fact: The restaurant posted a plaque with my name on it due to being such a devoted customer …!”)
MacKinnon, who has been dancing since she was 3, is a lead dancer in this year’s Nutcracker, which premiers Friday at Lincoln Center.
Read the full interview — HERE.
A sandwich from Pastrami Queen. Photo courtesy WSR archives.
6sqft.com recently did a deep-dive into the unexpectedly fascinating history of pastrami (it originally was made with goose — who knew?), followed by what it calls “the seven absolute best pastrami spots in NYC.”
It should be no surprise that the UWS’s own Pastrami Queen made that list; after all, on the day it opened in 2020, a Rag reporter counted more than 70 people waiting in a line that stretched from the shop’s entrance — mid-block on West 72nd Street — almost to Amsterdam Avenue.
The article also gives a bit of history for the shop and its Upper-East-Side counterpart; originally named Pastrami King when it was founded in Brooklyn in 1956, it served what the late chef Anthony Bourdain once described as “the real deal pastrami sandwich.” (He was referring to the sandwich made at the shop’s Upper East Side location, but, hey, at the time, Pastrami Queen hadn’t yet opened its UWS location!)
Originally known as “pastirma” or “pastrama” in Romania and other Eastern European countries, pastrami is believed to have made its way to New York with the estimated 75,000 Jews who emigrated from Romania to the Lower East Side between the 1880s and early 1900s. When they got here, they discovered goose was hard to come by, but beef brisket was not, reports 6ftsq, which is published by City Realty and focuses on real estate, lifestyle, and design. So the immigrants swapped meats and began dry-curing the brisket in salt and spices, then smoking and steaming it — and a New York classic was born.
Read the full story — HERE.
The iconic blue whale in AMNH’s Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. Photo courtesy WSR archives.
To wrap up this week’s Monday Bulletin, here’s a good-news story for those of us who weren’t at the American Museum of Natural History’s first sleepover since the pandemic, but wish we could have been.
The New York Times sent a reporter and photographer/videographer to capture the excitement of the children, who traveled last month from as far as Miami and as close by as Harlem to sleep — or not sleep, as the case may be — on cots set up beneath the famed blue whale in the museum’s Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life.
“After a brief safety lecture, in which a staffer congratulated the children on answering the call to adventure, guests were loosed among the museum’s halls, nearly all of which were open,” wrote Alexis Soloski, who covers culture for the paper. “Children ran, some of them in stocking feet, through the displays, with abandon. (Running had been discouraged in the safety lecture, but this did not dissuade a young boy who shouted ‘I have to look for the animals that will hunt us in the night’ as he sped on.)”
Read the full story and see the photos and videos — HERE.
ICYMI
Here are a few stories we think are worth a look if you missed them last week — or a second look if you saw them. (Note that our comments stay open for six days after publication, so you may not be able to comment on all of them.)
From 16 Pies to 10,000 Cookies: UWS Tradition Powers a Community Thanksgiving Feast
Why Residents of an UWS Building Are on a Rent Strike: ‘Only Negotiation Power We Had’
UWS Columbus Circle Train Station Escalators Reopen After More Than a Year
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