Damon Winter/The New York TimesLillian Jacobs, who died on Sunday, lived on a small stretch of East 84th Street for 100 years.Lillian Jacobs, the 102-year-old Manhattan resident who had lived on the same short stretch of East 84th Street for a century, died on Sunday in her apartment at No. 351 East 84th.She had been in deteriorating health in recent months, her grandson, Larry Kamerman, said by phone, but she had been alert enough to be read an article last month in The New York Times that featured her life on that street, as well as the lives of other longtime residents.When Ms. Jacobs was 2, she moved from the Lower East Side to a tenement building at 500½ East 84th Street, where her parents, ... Continue reading →

“Today, I am thrilled to vote on the department’s latest sustainability initiative,” said Ms. Burden, the director of the New York City Planning Department, her clipped diction and sophisticated dress contrasting with the worn-out rug and metal chairs of her surroundings. Ms. Burden was referring to Zone Green, “the most comprehensive effort of any city in the nation,” she said, to use zoning to spur environmentally efficient building. It is the latest effort by Ms. Burden to transform the face of New York. Since 2002, when she was appointed to head City Planning, she has overseen the wholesale rezoning of the city, with 115 rezoning plans covering more than 10,300 blocks; by the end of her administration, the department is expected to have rezoned about ... Continue reading →

Dave Sanders for The New York Times IN QUEENS A woman aids a man propped against a meter, ultimately hailing him a cab. Late last year, the New York City health department unveiled the latest installment in a subway advertising campaign meant to illuminate the perils of heavy drinking. Featuring young people who would seem to have aggressively exceeded the city’s recommended limits for alcohol consumption — no more than one drink a day for women, no more than two for men — the posters depict the ugly consequences of a kind of night life that draws many 22-year-olds to the city in the first place. In one of the newer ads, a young man, face bruised, his neck in a brace, is being hauled ... Continue reading →

AMID the ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance.” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice ... Continue reading →

James Estrin/The New York Times The Drama Book Shop, at 250 West 40th Street, was incorporated as a Drama League-backed shop in 1923 and has been owned by the Seelen family since 1958. More Photos » AMID thousands of bound plays, signed first editions of matinee idol biographies and a wall of how-to tomes for actors, producers and the rest, there is one piece of theatrical memorabilia at the Drama Book Shop that isn’t for sale. Safely locked in a glass case next to a 31-volume, 1930 limited edition of the works of George Bernard Shaw, the store, in Midtown Manhattan, proudly displays its own Tony Award. James Estrin/The New York Times The store used to sell the plastic Shakespeare action figure, but unlike the ... Continue reading →

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IN seventh-grade English class, sun leaked in through the windows. Horns bleated outside. The assignment was for the arrayed students to identify a turning point in their lives. Was it positive or negative? They hunched over and wrote fervidly. Floriande Augustin, a first-year teacher at the school, invited students to share their choices. Hands waved for attention. One girl said it was when she got a cat, though she was unsure why. Another selected a car crash. A third brought up the time when her cousin got shot and “it was positive because he felt his life was crazy and he went to college so he couldn’t get shot anymore.” The lesson detoured into Martin Luther King Jr. and his turning points. Ms. Augustin listed ... Continue reading →

Benjamin Norman for The New York Times Beverly Fischer, smiling in the center, recently took her art students from Connecticut's Rham High School to the Brooklyn Art Library. Some of them submitted books to the Sketchbook Project. More Photos » SHE remembers crashing into the chicken coop and seeing feathers flying, one of her adventures growing up on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. There, she built lonely castles of sand, played hide-and-seek through cornfields and slept in a hammock hung by her grandfather. But it was not until Sheilla Sumayang, 28, went jogging through Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last fall that it occurred to her to document her childhood. Ducking into the Brooklyn Art Library one day — a storefront on North Third Street that ... Continue reading →

Many who opened last Sunday's New York Times probably were not too surprised to see the giant "Powers of New York" feature in the Metropolitan section.We are, after all, deluged with content like this: The top 50 or 20 or 500 or 100 "listicle" in pretty much any imaginable category is a staple of the present-day news culture. Crain's New York Business has probably cornered the local market, with nearly 50 annual lists—averaging out to one a week—that have been developed over decades. And seemingly no publication has been immune to producing them out of their news divisions.The listicle has also gained new prominence on the web with its possibilities for generating highly clickable (and thus pageview-enhancing) slideshows and other forms of presentation that can ... Continue reading →