As Derek Jeter bade the old Yankee Stadium farewell with one last highlight, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record for most hits in the House that Ruth Built, Wall Street took a baseball bat to its own: Bankrupt Lehman Brothers was snapped up by Barclays for $1.75 billion; Merrill Lynch was swallowed whole by Bank of America; AIG got an $85 billion loan from the Fed, which now owns 80 percent of the insurance giant; and investors got a stomach-churning ride in the roller-coaster stock market. Senator Hillary Clinton excused herself from Monday’s anti-Iran rally at the United Nations (pegged to the visit of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) after hearing that Sarah Palin would be attending—but then Palin was uninvited when organizers got worried that the event would become a Republican rally. Congressman Charlie Rangel kept his seat as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee despite revelations of further financial shenanigans. Mayor Bloomberg’s personal fortune catapulted him to No. 8 on the Forbes 400. A sharp-eyed Staten Island Ferry captain spotted missing teacher Hannah Upp, barely alive, in the waters off Manhattan; deckhands reeled her in. New figures showed that the city handed out a record 39 million condoms in the year ending June 30. A dialysis center on West 61st Street was shut down for sharing hepatitis C with a client. Jean-Georges Vongerichten settled a lawsuit by waiters who claimed their tips had been ladled out to managers, agreeing to fork over $1.75 million. A mysteriously loose bull stalked Woodhaven before being apprehended by police. Google co-founder Sergey Brin bought an $8.5 million duplex in the West Village. MTV unplugged Times Square tween magnet Total Request Live. And the Mets maintained the drama in Flushing by trading first place with the Phillies.

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Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Mark Adams
• Table of Contents: Sep 29, 2008 issue of New York | Subscribe!