[Want to get New York Today by email? Here's the sign-up.]

It’s Friday. You want “bread-sliced bagels” in this town? “While the extremely hospitable folks who work at New York’s bagel shops seemed more or less willing to oblige, they weren’t exactly happy about it,” Grub Street reported.

Weather: The mercury may get into the 60s, but the wind chill may make it feel much colder. Cloudy on Saturday with a high near 70, showers likely on Sunday.

Alternate-side parking: In effect until April 18 (Holy Thursday).

The Times’s James Barron reports:

Sarah Charlop-Powers is preparing to defend the Bronx against invaders.

Ms. Charlop-Powers, the executive director of a Manhattan-based nonprofit called the Natural Areas Conservancy, knows their names: Japanese knotweed and incised fumewort, among others.

They are plants.

They are washing down the Bronx River “from people’s yards in Westchester or parkland in Westchester,” she said.

“The Bronx River only goes one way,” she added, “and it’s coming from them to us.”

They are a threat because they crowd out plants native to the 170 acres of forests in the Bronx. Yes, the Bronx has that much wooded acreage.

Invasive trees can create a canopy of foliage, depriving other species of sunlight. On the ground, the knotweed and incised fumewort “are so prolific and can carpet an area,” Helen Forgione, the conservancy’s senior ecologist, said.

“That becomes a huge issue for the wildlife there, because of the loss of wildflowers.” she said. Bees especially wouldn’t thrive on the “worthless green matter.”

The conservancy, working with several groups in the Bronx, plans to collect data on native plants and the soil, then coordinate with other groups to eliminate the invaders.

“It doesn’t make sense if the Botanical Garden is removing an invasive and just a few feet away in the Bronx Zoo, it’s not being addressed,” Ms. Charlop-Powers said. “We’re looking to make sure we’re all working effectively together.”

The effort is the latest step in managing the city’s forests. In 2017, the conservancy sent goats to Prospect Park in Brooklyn to do some weeding, which involved eating invasive species. Last year the conservancy worked with the Prospect Park Alliance to plant trees on Lookout Hill in the park.

The conservancy is beginning a separate partnership for Manhattan’s Riverside Park, where Daniel Garodnick, the former City Council member who became chief executive of the Riverside Park Conservancy last year, is also worried about invasive species.

The offenders there — Norway maples, white mulberries and porcelain berries — do not arrive on water. “A human brings seed from somewhere else into their own garden,” Mr. Garodnick said, “and then a bird or the wind will move it elsewhere.”

That can happen a lot, because Riverside Park is a rest stop for migratory birds.

“We want to allow different species to be able to survive and thrive in our park,” he said, noting that “we need to align our goals with the ecology of the rest of the city and region.”

Photo of the day

New York City is starkly different today from what it was 50 years ago. Yet one aspect has barely changed: Its public schools remain among the most segregated in the country.

In 1964, students carried picket signs as part of a citywide school boycott over segregation in the classroom. Yet last week only seven black students were offered slots at New York’s most selective high school, Stuyvesant.

[Learn more about segregation in New York schools from Eliza Shapiro, an education reporter for The Times.]

From The Times

New York will ban single-use plastic bags from retail sales, becoming the second state after California to do so.

Suing the Sacklers: New York laid out a sweeping legal case against the family that owns Purdue Pharma, maker of the opioid OxyContin.

Congestion pricing could generate billions of dollars, but now the suburbs want a piece.

“[Expletive] idiots” is how an aide to Governor Cuomo described three legislators who criticized the governor’s fund-raising.

Senator Cory Booker’s road from enforcer to reformer began with rocky oversight of the Newark Police Department.

[Want more news from New York and around the region? Check out our full coverage.]

The mini crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.

What we’re reading

Victoria Ruvolo, a Long Island woman who was nearly killed in 2004 when a teenager tossed a frozen turkey through her windshield, has died. [Daily News]

Pork Belly Cotton Candy is available at a pop-up restaurant in the East Village. [Gothamist]

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine wants permission to put a bronze-hued copper enclosure on its roof. [New York Yimby]

Will a car dealership scuttle efforts to make part of 78th Street in Jackson Heights car-free? [Queens Chronicle]

Pete Davidson, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member who has made fun of his home borough, Staten Island, will perform there on April 7. [Staten Island Advance]

Coming up this weekend

Friday:

A Brazilian and Spanish-infused jazz ensemble at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan. 6:30 p.m. [Free after 7 p.m.]

Women’s Raga Massive, a collective that blends experimental and Indian classical music, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan. 7 p.m. [$30]

Saturday:

Create field journals at Wave Hill House in the Bronx. 10 a.m. [Free]

A day of gardening, with face painting for children and pizza for all, at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Manhattan. 10 a.m. [Free]

A daxophone consort performs at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. 8 p.m. [$15]

Sunday:

Attend writing and self-defense workshops during the N.Y.C. Feminist Zinefest at Barnard College in Manhattan. Noon [Free]

Celebrate Holi, a Hindu festival that notes the beginning of spring, at the Queens Museum. 2:30 p.m. [Free]

— Elisha Brown

Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times’s culture pages.

And finally: 5-minute stories about walls

The biggest walls I saw as a child were along the Long Island Expressway, outside my house in Queens. A neighbor said “earth movers” had dug up the street to make room for the highway below.

In the mid-1980s, those walls were covered in graffiti. Colorful, funny and sometimes newsy. (Hey, Duel is back in town!) After awhile, adults had the walls painted dull yellow. That invited more graffiti. (Hey, Duel is back again!)

Eventually, the adults won by slabbing more and more paint on the walls.

As time passed, my tastes changed. I now prefer my walls clean and my art on a canvas. And at tonight’s Moth StorySlam at the Bronx Museum, people will share their own true stories about walls, in five minutes or less.

The museum says the wall stories can run the gamut, from “building them up or tearing them down, piece by piece,” “your Humpty Dumpty moment” or “getting sick of being ‘just another brick’” in, well, you know.

Devotees of the Moth, a group dedicated to storytelling, tend to excel at this art form.

The open-mic show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15.

It’s Friday — find a place without walls.

Metropolitan Diary: Little Help?

Dear Diary:

I was on the subway platform at Times Square at rush hour. I was trying to slip through a tight corridor between a staircase and the tracks when a man in front of me stopped and stooped over.

“What’s he doing?” I wondered, frustrated at having to pause.

I saw that he was reaching for a glove that couldn’t have been his: It was on the ground in front of him as he bent over.

I looked around, trying to figure out whom the glove belonged to and what the man was going do with it. I was intrigued, but mostly out of self-interest. If he started asking around about whose glove it was, I wouldn’t get as far down the platform as I wanted before my train arrived.

A man who looked like a construction worker started walking our way. The first man tossed the glove in his direction, like you would with a pal. The construction worker caught it, smiled, winked, turned around and walked away.

— Alexandra Svokos

New York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com.

We’re experimenting with the format of New York Today. What would you like to see more (or less) of? Post a comment or email us: [email protected].

Source: Read Full Article