The Bodies and the Blame Pile Up in BuffaloThe death toll from the Christmas storm is now at 37, and some residents are blaming the city for not issuing a travel ban earlier.
Rangers Lose; New Yorkers Shrug
The Rangers’ season ended yesterday afternoon with a 5-4 loss to Buffalo in the NHL’s Eastern Conference semifinals at Madison Square Garden. You may or may not know this; it being a hockey game, you may not care. Indeed, New Yorkers seem to care about this so little that our mayor couldn’t even be bothered to bet a Junior’s cheesecake on the series. And that’s exactly why, we realized as we sat in the last row of the Garden yesterday, watching a handful of exultant Sabres fans, we were almost happy for the other guys: We New Yorkers, that is just didn’t want it. We didn’t need it. In Buffalo, the Sabres are a point of civic pride, perhaps the point. Here, the Rangers are a perpetual second fiddle. There’s football in the fall, basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring. Today’s tabloids tell you all you need to know: a couple of inches on the back page for the Blueshirts; the rest of the back cover and most of the front for Roger Clemens. When yesterday’s buzzer sounded, Rangers fans sighed, moved on, and shifted their attention to baseball. But in Buffalo it’s not so easy. If the Sabres lose, that’s it till football season. And we know how that tends to work out. —Joe DeLessio
the morning line
Cabs, Gays, and Celeb Car Thefts
• The tabs are aghast at yesterday’s taxicab rate hike, with the Post using words like “adding insult to injury” and the Daily News predicting a ruined Christmas. Completely buried in populist outrage: The TLC will also cease requiring cabbies to be legal U.S. residents. [NYDN, NYP]
• The Times gets a take on New Jersey’s new gay-rights situation from the Gay American himself, the state’s former governor, Jim McGreevey. Would he tie the knot with his partner Mark O’Donnell? Yes! [NYT]
• In celebrity-crime-victim news, Jesse L. Martin’s SUV was broken into and burgled in his hometown of Buffalo — just as the police made a second arrest in the violent theft of Mayor Bloomberg’s car in New Jersey. [WNBC]
• The MTA says that free hand-distributed newspapers are a major cause of flooding on subways. (They clog the drains.) Earlier in the year, the same papers were blamed for the uptick of underground fires. amNew York to add twelve extra pages for the story’s comprehensive coverage. [amNY]
• Speaking of flooding: NASA has rigged a computer model to demonstrate how a 2050s New York City would deal with a major storm. Not very well, it turns out. Flooded areas include “the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, lower Manhattan, and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano Bridge.” Oh, no! Even Williamsburg, too! [Mongabay]
the morning line
‘Suicide in Buffalo Would Be Redundant’
• Blackouts, school closings, downed trees and power lines — and that’s just on the first day of snow! Bewildered Buffalo registers two feet of the white stuff, making for the snowiest October day on record. An auspicious beginning, that. [AP via NYT]
• Hey, you know what hasn’t happened on the Upper East Side in a while, if by “a while” you mean 48 hours? Raging flames and mass evacuations. Behold, then, a three-alarm fire in a historic — and thankfully unoccupied — townhouse on 70th and Park, six blocks from the Lidle crash and eight blocks from the Bartha place. Does God not like UES anymore? [AP via amNY]
• Istithmar, a Dubai-based investment firm, buys the W Hotel in Union Square, paying a per-room rate that beats the prices paid for the Plaza and the Essex House. The company already owns the Knickerbocker and Helmsley hotels and could well be the final bidders for Stuy Town. Cue the eighties-style the-foreigners-are-taking-over-New York hysteria. [NYS]
• Some Muslims are reportedly offended by the new Apple store on Fifth Avenue, finding its architecture too similar to the Ka’ba, the sacred edifice in Mecca. They should see the Rubik’s Cube. [ZDNet via Curbed]
• And Con Ed has released a “definitive,” 600-page report on the July blackout in Queens. We’ll only need six words to capture the gist. It was all someone else’s fault. The cited number of affected customers (6,800) also differs wildly from the city estimates (over 100,000). Damage control? On it. [WNBC]
