What Does It Mean to Save a Neighborhood?
The New York Times
Nine years after Hurricane Sandy, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to rising seas. The fight over a plan to protect them reveals why progress on our most critical challenges is so hard.
To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
The day after the storm swallowed her neighborhood, Nancy Ortiz woke before dawn to buy ice. It was 2012, and Hurricane Sandy had reclaimed Lower Manhattan for Mother Nature. Making landfall near Atlantic City, it swept north, ravaging the New Jersey coast, destroying thousands of homes and inundating New York City with waves as high as 14 feet.
Sandy shuttered Wall Street, rattling global markets, and for a moment the storm restored Manhattan’s early 17th-century coastline. A brackish murk of waist-high water submerged all the landfill that humans had dredged, salvaged and shipped to widen the island, and that now supported the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. It also swamped a large cluster of public housing developments and a beloved but bedraggled ribbon of greenery built by Robert Moses during the 1930s called East River Park.
The powerful storm, fueled by a whirling mass of cold air originating from the Arctic, was expected to leave much of the southern United States in the low-teens or single-digit degrees.
In New York, private restaurants in luxury towers are a popular amenity. The public cannot eat there, and residents only drop in occasionally.
President Trump’s executive actions on immigration were the leading edge of an effort to upend the United States’ role as a sanctuary for refugees and immigrants. Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, explains what Trump has done so far.
President Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship is already facing lawsuits, but that has been little comfort to women who expect to give birth after the order goes into effect.
The plan, which rezones parts of the Manhattan neighborhood, aims to address the city’s housing shortage and the area’s beleaguered commercial sector.
Officials said the agent was shot on Interstate 91, which was closed for several hours near the border with Canada.
Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, a Democrat, declined to say anything negative about Donald J. Trump’s early executive orders, saying he would bring any concerns directly to the president.
“So many of you have never seen an event like this,” Louisiana’s state climatologist warned, with New Orleans facing possibly the most snow it has ever seen.
Former presidents, members of Congress, and tech C.E.O.s were among those present to witness Mr. Trump take the oath of office.
“We’re not leaving the fight,” he told supporters and members of his staff as he prepared to leave Washington.
Gov. Phil Murphy wrote a letter to the president saying that the surcharge on drivers entering Manhattan’s busiest area was a “disaster” for commuters and residents in his state.
For many residents, a set of wheels is an extension of their home, a key to their income or a source of priceless memories.
Some evacuees from the Eaton fire have been allowed back into their homes, only to find that smoke and ash have made living there impossible for now.
The dual celebrations of a second Trump inauguration and the civil rights leader’s birth raise profound questions about Black leadership and progress toward the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.
The incoming president has told allies he wants to seize momentum and avoid the missteps of his first administration.
A lawyer for Mayor Eric Adams argued in court documents that Damian Williams, the former federal prosecutor who charged the mayor with bribery, had brought the case for his own political benefit.
Peter Forrest was the charismatic lead singer of 24-7 Spyz, which did shows with Jane’s Addiction. Last week, Mr. Forrest, 64, was found beaten to death in the ambulette he drove for a living.
As Donald J. Trump prepares to take the oath of office for a second time, much of the world seems to be bowing down to him and demoralized opponents are rethinking the future.