City Room notes a small blast, believed to come from an improvised explosive device, at the recruiting station in Times Square at 3:43 AM this morning.

(Image: © The Daily Gotham)

New York City police officers and firefighters cordoned off much of Times Square for more than two hours after a small explosion — set off, the authorities said, by an “improvised explosive device” — damaged the front of the Armed Forces Career Center on the traffic island bounded by 43rd and 44th Streets, Seventh Avenue and Broadway at 3:43 a.m., officials said. No one was injured, and after a temporary interruption, subway service was restored.

Most traffic around Times Square was allowed to pass by 6:45 a.m., after vehicles had been diverted for more than two hours. City officials confirmed that police had initially blocked off the area as a precaution to ensure that there was no secondary device or other threat; the officials emphasized that they did not believe anyone was in danger.

Police officers at the scene said the explosion blew a hole through the front door of the recruiting station, which is at the northern end of the structure.

Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the large Police Department and F.B.I. unit that investigates terrorism, were at the scene of the blast, supporting the Police Department’s Bomb Squad, which along with other police detectives likely will take the lead role in investigating the incident, an F.B.I. official said. The official said that in today’s attack, a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt was seen leaving the scene on a bicycle.

What's interesting, obviously, is the blog reaction on the right; it's gleeful.

Oy vey.

In what is likely the first poll taken of New York City Democrats about the 2009 mayoral election - aside: this permanent campaign business really is tiring - results show an unlikely frontrunner: Brooklyn Borough President, Marty Markowitz.

No, seriously.

Markowitz was the top choice for mayor of 18% of Democratic voters, followed by 13% for Rep.Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn, Queens) and 11% for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan), a new Marist College/WNBC poll shows.

City Controller William Thompson and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum each snagged 9% of the vote, and City Councilman Tony Avella (D-Queens) trailed at 4%.

Even Markowitz's wife was incredulous. "Is this serious?" asked Jamie Markowitz after The News informed her of the results. "This is all over New York City, right?"

2009 is going to be an absolutely glorious food fight, our own version of a thousand flowers blooming. The term limits on the City Council alone will see to that. With Marty being as well positioned as he seems to be, certainly, the sheer entertainment value of the whole exercise seems guaranteed.

New York City Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey had a meeting with Bronx County GOP Leader Joseph J. Savino on January 27, 2006. This meeting occurred while Kevin Sheekey was on city payroll time as listed on his schedule that was just FOILed by members of the press. The purpose of this meeting was for Mr. Savino to get the endorsement of Mayor Bloomberg for Mr. Savino to run later in 2006 for the state senate seat in the 34th district against incumbent State Senator Jeff Klein in which Savino lost in. A New York City employee cannot do any sort of political campaigning on city payroll time. Mr. Savino did get the endorsement from Mayor Bloomberg. Mr. Savino is also currently the target of a criminal probe being conducted by the New York City Department of Investigation. Some of Joseph J. Savino’s close friends and political associates are also being investigated for political campaigning on city payroll time. Inside sources have told me that Mr. Savino has confirmed that he did have a meeting with NYC Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey on January 27, 2006 at City Hall to discuss the political endorsement of Mayor Bloomberg for Mr.

In your State of the City speech that you made this past week. You said that you are going to reform the New York City Board of Elections. Click on hyperlink:

http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.c0935b9a57bb4ef3daf2f1c70...

You mentioned in the State of the City speech that 2008 is the 130th anniversary of the death of Boss Tweed. Let's also make it the year we finally put to rest his style of politics.

So Mayor Bloomberg click on this hyper link and read this article:

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0624,robbins,73514,5.html

My question to you is when is this going to happen. At this point my advice to you, Mayor Bloomberg is “ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS” You have been talking about this since 2004. Certain employees at the Board of Elections are abusing the integrity of our electoral process. Click on hyperlink:

http://www.nycivic.org/MediaArchive/BloombergSpeech041110.html

Congratulations are in order for Marcus Cederqvist from Manhattan GOP, who was just appointed the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections by a landslide vote today. In a second vote today for the position of general counsel for the Republican commissioners. Jay Savino lost the vote by 6-4. 3 out of the 5 NYC GOP political clubs that he is in charge of as vice chairman of the NYS Republican committee voted against him not getting this position. Plus Jay Savino is not a resident of the Bronx, he is a resident of Rockland County, and he has to be a resident of NYC to be an employee to work at the Board of Elections. What excuse did Jay Savino use this time??> He stated that he is separated from his wife. As many of you remember when he ran in the 2006 34th state senate campaign, he was saying that he was a lifelong resident of the 34th state senate district, but he was not, so the excuse he used then was that his wife had pregnancy problems so that is why he had to move his wife to her mothers house in Rockland County. Now Mr.

My name is Seth Pearce. I am a senior at LaGuardia High School and a member of the NYC Student Union (http://nycstudents.org), a citywide, student-run and created, education advocacy organization. I am writing to you to express both my support for your new school Progress Report program and my criticism of some of its parts.

At last week's NYC Student Union meeting, students from schools around the City discussed the Progress Reports. Some students supported them and others didn't. There was, however, a general agreement on the need for accountability in our schools.

It's been an ongoing refrain for a while now, largely unchallenged by the media and sung by prominent politicians of either party: New York City is losing, will lose, may perhaps already have lost, its leading position as the center of global finance. The blame for this is universally placed on Sarbanes-Oxley, the law passed after the Enron and Worldcom scandals that institutes rigid standards of transparency and accountability on corporate entities and their top management.

It's an interesting meme and one worth discussing, certainly as it ties in with the larger Things Are Going Wrong story that currently shapes the national conversation. It does, however, appear to be overstated.

Witness this, by one Matthew Lynn, writing for Bloomberg:

Whenever the media pick up on a trend in financial markets, it is usually much too late.

This month, the New York Times ran a long article explaining how New York had surrendered its status as the world's financial center to London.

Right on schedule, the very opposite appears to be true.

After at least five years during which London pulled ahead as a finance hub, several catastrophic mistakes by the British capital are about to put that into reverse.

London has blown its lead. The way is now clear for New York to stage a recovery.

What's clear is this: with one scandal after another arising in this era of unchecked corporate excess, greed, and well-connected malfeasance, legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley fulfills a prime public need. Politicians, dependent as they are on campaign donations, are not going to be as vigilant as they need to be in securing the public interest. That leaves shareholders to step into that gap.

While researching yesterday's post on global warming and the metropolitan area, I came across a map of projected inundation levels should New York be struck by a category 3 hurricane.

Mind you, category 3 is not Katrina-strength; Katrina was a category 5. Category 3 is defined as follows:

Winds 111-130 mph (96-113 kt or 178-209 km/hr). Storm surge generally 9-12 ft above normal. Some structural damage to small residences and utility buildings with a minor amount of curtainwall failures. Damage to shrubbery and trees with foliage blown off trees and large trees blown down. Mobile homes and poorly constructed signs are destroyed. Low-lying escape routes are cut by rising water 3-5 hours before arrival of the center of the hurricane. Flooding near the coast destroys smaller structures with larger structures damaged by battering from floating debris. Terrain continuously lower than 5 ft above mean sea level may be flooded inland 8 miles (13 km) or more. Evacuation of low-lying residences with several blocks of the shoreline may be required. Hurricanes Jeanne and Ivan of 2004 were Category Three hurricanes when they made landfall in Florida and in Alabama, respectively.

Here is that map, showing a projection of how far inland water could reach in the event of such a hurricane directly hitting the City. Six category 3 hurricanes hit the Northeast in the twentieth century, the most recent, hurricane Gloria, in 1985.

Today's New York Times reports that homeowners in the metropolitan area are already losing their insurance coverage due to heightened insurance company concerns following Katrina.

Today is Blog Action Day. Here's the basic idea:

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Arguably the top environmental issue is global warming, thanks in part to newly minted Nobel laureate Al Gore. So what would global warming look like here in the five boroughs?

Senator Liz Krueger, further down this page, notes our "regional population and business density, as well as our geographic vulnerability to the impacts of global warming".

CNN, in a posting dated April 7, 1998, forecasts three scenarios for New York.

Global warming and resulting rising sea levels have the potential to put much of New York City and other low-lying areas at risk of severe flooding, according to a study conducted by Columbia University researchers.

Subways, airports and low-lying coastal areas could experience flooding if global warming produces more violent storms and higher sea levels, as expected, said Vivien Gornitz, associate research scientist at Columbia's Center for Climate Systems Research.

Local temperatures could rise by as much as four degrees Fahrenheit, and sea levels could increase by up to eight inches by 2030 and by as much as four feet by 2100 under the most extreme scenarios, she said.

Gornitz's study is part of a series of studies being funded by the federal government to assess regional vulnerability to climate change. The results, with reports from 18 other regions, will be presented to Congress and the president by 2000.

Gornitz presented three potential scenarios for the period 1995 to 2030: a low-change scenario based on current trends without any greenhouse-induced warming; a middle ground, based on simulations from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University; and a high-change scenario developed at the Goddard Institute, called Business as Usual, that assumes greenhouse warming takes place without any mitigating efforts.

Although none of the models find significant increase in precipitation, temperatures are expected to increase by one to four degrees, according to all three models.

Also, all the scenarios show local sea-level increases, ranging from four to eight inches by 2030, and maximum coastal flood heights of nearly six feet, an increase of nearly a foot from current levels.

That means that any area below six feet above sea level would be vulnerable to flooding, including most of the lower Manhattan shoreline, coastal and island areas of Jamaica Bay, much of downtown Hoboken and Jersey City and south shore beaches in Staten Island and the Rockaways.

A more recent article from 2006, also quoting Vivien Gornitz and sourced to NASA research, confirms the dangers facing a global metropolis on the shores of the Atlantic:

If you've read Corinne's liveblog of yesterday's Marketplace of Ideas Event on fighting against predatory mortgage lending then you know there was some really interesting discussion.

Now you can watch video clips from it too.

Senator Schumer announces his new lending bill:

and Councilman James Sander's responds to Mayor Bloomberg's assertion that the government can not address the mortgage loan crisis: