Good morning and happy Thursday. The working day is being bookended by rain, so keep an umbrella handy for the morning commute and again around 5pm when more showers are expected. There should still be some sunshine in between, with afternoon temperatures reaching 67 degrees.
Chai Samosa is bringing authentic Indian comfort food, chai and samosa chaat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to the former Subway storefront on W45th Street. Read more…
David Mills is back with Art Seen Manhattan (his second column). Check out faceless public sculptures, a haunting Drawing Center discovery and what NYC art reveals about empathy. Read more…
What We’ve Been Reading
* Stories marked with a 🎁 are gift links — so you can read for free
NYPD will have more cops on the beat this summer. (Streetsblog)
Landlords are finding loopholes in the Good Cause eviction law. (THE CITY)
A New Yorker’s memory of life before AIDS hit the gay bathhouse scene has gone viral. (Queerty)
Hudson Yard’s expansion is good for NYC, according to Related’s boss. (Crain’s 🎁)
A replica of David Hasselhoff’s car from Knight Rider was recently issued a speeding ticket in Brooklyn — but it hasn’t left the Illinois museum that owns it in years. (AP News)
Freeze Frame
Gwen and I somehow found ourselves making the pages of The Westmorland Gazette during our recent trip back to the UK — after a mystery in Grange-over-Sands turned into a reminder that sometimes people beat technology.
I’d spent more than 60 years looking at an old honeymoon photograph of my mum and dad, Elsie and Paul O’Brien, taken in August 1957, always wondering exactly where it was shot. My parents met while working at the Liverpool Echo in the 1950s, so perhaps it’s no surprise that a newspaper eventually became part of the story too — ink is clearly in the blood.
After our wedding last August in NYC and a celebration with friends and family in Liverpool earlier this month, Gwen and I headed to the Lake District for a mini-moon and tried to track down the location ourselves. AI confidently sent us to three different hotels — all wrong — before a wonderful receptionist called Rachael posted the photo into a local Facebook group and solved the mystery within hours.
On our way home we visited Berners Close Hotel, now apartments, where a resident called Ken walked us right to the exact spot where my parents had stood nearly 70 years earlier and took a new version of the photo with Gwen and me. A huge thank you to everyone in Grange who helped us piece together a little bit of family history.
Happy birthday to David Porter and Joanne Lotsko.
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