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It’s Tuesday.

Weather: Clear, bright and warmish, with a high that could reach 60.

Alternate-side parking: In effect until Thursday (Thanksgiving).

To prepare for his presidential run, Michael R. Bloomberg visited a predominantly black church in Brooklyn recently to try to erase a stain from his tenure as mayor of New York City.

“I was wrong, and I am sorry,” Mr. Bloomberg, 77, said of his longstanding and controversial support for “stop-and-frisk” policing, which allowed officers to detain someone for search and questioning.

Mr. Bloomberg’s abrupt reversal on stop-and-frisk — a policy that studies have shown disproportionately affected blacks and Latinos, and that a federal judge ruled unconstitutional in 2013 — drew criticism. And for Mr. Bloomberg, who declared his candidacy on Sunday morning, the issue of stop-and-frisk has already raised the questions about how his mayoral record will be regarded by American voters.

Shane Goldmacher, my colleague on The Times’s Politics desk, called Mr. Bloomberg’s $30 million purchase of television ads this week — including $1.6 million worth in New York City — a sign that he is hoping to define himself as a strong leader.

Speaking by phone from Iowa — where Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was campaigning, and had already accused Mr. Bloomberg of trying to buy the Democratic nomination — Mr. Goldmacher said Mr. Bloomberg’s time as mayor will be scrutinized if he gains in the polls.

“But for now,” he said, “most of his opponents would rather talk about him being rich.”

Mr. Goldmacher said he wasn’t surprised about Mr. Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk reversal because “African-American voters have represented a decisive voting bloc in Democratic primaries.”

During his three terms as mayor — spanning the dozen years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — Mr. Bloomberg tried to portray himself as a business-minded manager whose Wall Street background had groomed him for wonky financial issues like protecting the long-term finances of the city. He presided over a steady decline in crime and an increase in tourism and development.

But stop-and-frisk, one of Mr. Bloomberg’s signature policies as mayor, may be what comes up most often on the presidential campaign trail. (That is, if he becomes a prominent enough candidate to merit criticism from his opponents.)

Mayor de Blasio also briefly made a bid for the Democratic nomination but dropped out in September. Mr. Goldmacher noted that though Mr. Bloomberg is a very different candidate from the current mayor, he has the same problem Mr. de Blasio did: dead-low polling numbers.

“You wonder if there’s something about being mayor of New York City that somehow turns off large swaths of Democratic voters in a party that wants to like its candidates,” Mr. Goldmacher said.

Want more news? Check out our full coverage.

The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.

What we’re reading

The Police Department’s high-tech fingerprint database crashed because of a computer virus. [N.Y. Post]

David Pecker, the head of The National Enquirer’s parent company, is speaking with prosecutors in New York about payments made to women who claimed to have affairs with President Trump. [CNN]

Governor Cuomo’s office claims it has no records of the extensive 2018 negotiations to get Amazon to move to Queens. [Wall Street Journal]

Coming up today

Join a discussion about the Digital Library of the Middle East’s visualization projects in Peter Herdrich: The Battle for Our Shared Cultural Heritage, at the National Arts Club in Manhattan. 6:30 p.m. [Free with R.S.V.P.]

See paintings of local mom-and-pop shops in Donna Napoli’s “Staten Island Treasures” exhibition at Conference House Park. 1-5 p.m. [Free]

Explore the galaxy in Astronomy Live: Traveling the Neighborhood at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. 7 p.m. [$15]

— Melissa Guerrero

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: A beloved West Village bookstore endures

Every morning when its doors open, “customers rush into Three Lives as if for a fix of a singularly restorative oxygen.”

So writes Reggie Nadelson in T Magazine about Three Lives & Company, a beloved bookshop that has for nearly 40 years been on the corner of Waverly Place and West 10th Street in the West Village.

The article is part of a series in which Ms. Nadelson examines New York institutions that define cool.

The shop’s name refers to the three women who founded the bookstore in 1978 on Seventh Avenue before moving it in 1983 to its current location. It was a time when the Village was full of bookshops.

Those days are over. Last summer it seemed like Three Lives was running out of lives, much to the consternation of its many fans.

Happily, it turned out that the building — which the artist Edward Hopper immortalized in a painting in 1927 — was merely undergoing structural work.

The shop reopened after a month. Devotees were soon flooding back in to enjoy what Ms. Nadelson describes as the store’s “honey-color wooden floors and bookshelves.”

It’s Tuesday — visit a bookstore.

Metropolitan Diary: Bumpy start

Dear Diary:

I was sitting on the R train on my way to work in Manhattan one morning. I started to sneeze and I couldn’t stop. After I had sneezed eight or nine times, I began coughing for a while.

When I finished coughing, I started to get up because I was getting off at the next stop. But I was stuck. The belt to my raincoat had gotten caught on the seat.

The train stopped and the doors opened. After working the belt free, I rushed to get off before the doors closed. As I did, I heard a man shout after me.

“I really hope your day gets better,” he said.

Standing on the platform, I started to laugh.

— Barbara Noone

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