Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at whether today will be the day when rain eases the drought. We’ll also get details on a 20th-anniversary retrospective of “The Gates,” the art installation that fluttered and flapped in Central Park.
“I always say that I’m the only New Yorker who’s happy when it rains,” Dave Kahng said.
Today Kahng, who designs and sells high-end umbrellas, probably won’t be alone, assuming the forecast holds.
With a drought warning in effect, the city needs a soaking. And with reservoir levels well below normal, so do the areas upstate where the city’s water comes from.
But today is shaping up as one of those good news-bad news days. The good news was summed up by one forecast: “Rain, finally.”
The bad news: It won’t be enough.
“Not a drought buster, but it will help,” the National Weather Service wrote on the X platform, predicting at least an inch of precipitation in the city. Some forecasts said there could be some wet snow tomorrow, which is expected to be a brisk and cold day.
Rain became a distant memory in New York as summer gave way to fall: More than 90 days went by without meaningful rainfall in the region. Since Oct. 1, the New York City area has received only about a quarter-inch. The city’s reservoirs, which would typically be close to 80 percent capacity at this time of the year, have receded to about 60 percent. In central New Jersey, a reservoir that serves over a million residents is more than half-empty.
Seen-it-all New Yorkers have had to adjust to the idea of wildfires, which have burned through green spaces from Brooklyn to Upper Manhattan and left a smoky haze on the skyline. From Nov. 1 to Nov. 14, the Fire Department dispatched firefighters to 271 brush fires, the most in any two weeks in the city’s history, according to City Hall. On Sunday, the department said it was setting up a brush fire task force that will send up drones for “pre-fire surveillance” to identify potential fires and provide tactical support to track where fires are spreading to keep firefighters safe.
The city has not imposed mandatory limitations on water use yet. “We’re hoping we won’t have to declare an emergency” — the next and highest level in the city’s three-step system — “because that’s going to come with a great deal of restrictions,” Mayor Eric Adams said during a television interview on Tuesday.
He urged water conservation at home, by “not running the water while brushing your teeth or shaving, or not having a shower run for a long period of time.” Shower heads typically send out 2.5 gallons of water a minute, so, as my colleague Alyce McFadden noted, even a slightly shorter shower will save water.
Because of climate change, droughts are more likely — and are becoming more severe, scientists say. The weather extremes caused by global warming have helped spark wildfires across the Northeast, like the 5,300-acre Jennings Creek fire on the New York-New Jersey border. That blaze is now mostly contained.
Those extremes whipsawed the city. “We started the year with the wettest conditions in 40-plus years, which made for a lot of lush vegetation,” said Bill Kirk, the chief executive of Weathertrends360, a company that provides long-term weather forecasts. But since June, he said, the region has been the driest it has been in more than four decades. He predicted that dry conditions in the Northeast would continue into 2025.
But today is at long last a day for umbrellas. Kahng said that his sales double on a rainy day, to as many as 800 umbrellas. “Luckily,” he said, the drought has overlapped with the holiday season. “Our particular umbrellas are good for rain and gift giving, so we have a backup,” he said.
His company, Davek New York, sells online and in upscale stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Allen Edmonds. Davek’s “flagship umbrella” costs $115, and its most expensive model costs $350. But less expensive umbrellas have been sitting on the racks during the city’s long dry spell.
“October, nothing,” said Pedro Suarez, who owns a shoe repair shop on the Upper West Side where umbrella prices range from $8 to $25, when I asked how many umbrellas he had sold since the long dry streak began.
Weather
Expect showers and possible thunderstorms during the day, with some storms producing heavy rainfall and strong wind gusts. The temperature will peak in the low 50s. This evening, showers and strong winds will persist as temperatures fall to the 30s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving Day).
The latest New York news
A new police commissioner: Jessica Tisch, a member of a prominent New York family who has held several positions in city government, most recently sanitation commissioner, will take over the nation’s largest police department.
Fatal shooting: Police officers in Queens fatally shot an armed man who had shot an officer in the leg, officials said. The exchange of gunfire injured one bystander and left nearby business owners shaken.
Other news
A terror sentence: Christopher Brown, who was arrested in Penn Station days after he bought a gun to “shoot up a synagogue,” was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to possessing a weapon as a crime of terrorism.
Defiant in defense of Giuliani: Rudy Giuliani has missed several deadlines to turn over his apartment and other items to the two Georgia election workers he defamed in 2020. His new lawyer, Joseph Cammarata, called the $148 million judgment against Giuliani “astronomical, unconstitutional and un-American.”
An app for ‘The Gates,’ 20 years later
The phrase “there’s an app for that” had not come into use when an art installation called “The Gates” went up in Central Park in February 2005. But there will be an app for “The Gates” as part of a 20th-anniversary retrospective.
The app, with augmented reality, will let people walk through the park and see where the gates were. The installation’s orange curtains will float and flap from their orange portals, but this time only on cellphones using Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and culture app from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization of Michael Bloomberg, the mayor when “The Gates” went up.
“When you hold up your phone” in the part of the park where the augmented reality feature is active, “you will see gates placed where they were,” said Kate Levin, who oversees the arts program at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “It will give people a window into what the show was like. For some people, it will be a recollection reconstruction. For some people it will be a new experience.”
There will also be a free exhibition at the Shed in Hudson Yards with drawings and scale models by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists who conceived “The Gates.” Also on display will be plans for large-scale works that they proposed but that never came into being. One would have wrapped the Whitney Museum of American Art (when it was on Madison Avenue). Another would have built a wall of oil drums in the Museum of Modern Art.
“The timing of ‘The Gates’ came at a moment when the reputation of the city was in a particular place,” said Levin, who was the commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs at the time and was involved in the arrangements for the installation.
“It’s hard to go back and remember what it was like in those years after 9/11 and how tentative so many things felt,” she said. “Mike” — the former mayor — “has always been of the opinion that this was one of those pivot moments when the city was featured around the world not in news coverage that was about death or heartbreak or money but about these artists working to create a kind of collective delight.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Quite a Day
Dear Diary:
It was 1945. We wanted to be married. I was 19. I saw a picture of a bride in a wedding gown. I wanted to do that.
We had one week. He was on furlough. His father’s office had phones. We used them to invite guests. We were married with 100 family and friends and a fancy dinner at the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue.
He was in uniform. I was in a bridal gown that a salesperson had grabbed from someone else’s future order.
It was Aug. 12, 1945. The wedding festivities were winding down when the ballroom doors burst open. People crowded in, shouting, crying, laughing, whispering: The war was over.
The band started playing again. Drinks were on the house. People were kissing and hugging. Some were praying.
The war was over.
— Beverly Cannold
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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