Dear Mr. Mayor:
We’re pleased that you and your planning department are working to ensure New York remains pleasantly habitable in the year 2030. But we think it’d be pretty great if you worked to ensure New York is pleasantly habitable in 2007, too. And you know what might help that? Not sending heavy machinery to tear up streets in residential neighborhoods in the middle of the night, at hours when normal people — like, say, those who have to get up early in the morning to edit Websites for well-respected city magazines — are trying to sleep. (Crazy, right?) We know what you’ll say. You’ll say you do these things overnight so as not to interfere with traffic. But explain this: Why do you expect traffic to successfully navigate itself around yet another Italian-sausage-and-cheap-socks mid-afternoon street fair but not around this? Or, at least, can’t you notify residents that the work will be coming, so we can perhaps make plans to sleep elsewhere? Because it certainly isn’t fun to find the above scene — be sure to note the two men with jackhammers — 50 feet outside your bedroom window at around 11:30 at night.
That’s all, Mr. Mayor. Hope you slept well.
Best,
Daily Intel
