3 Sue Over Pepper-Spraying by Police at Fall Occupy Wall St. Protest

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Three people who said they were pepper-sprayed by police officers during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in September filed lawsuits on Tuesday against the City of New York, the Police Department and several officers.

The plaintiffs, Kelly Hanlin, Damien Crisp and Julie Lawler, said that they were assaulted and that their constitutional rights were violated when they were sprayed with chemicals after a few hundred people participated in a raucous march from Zuccotti Park to Union Square on Sept. 24.

None of the plaintiffs were arrested.

Mr. Crisp and Ms. Lawler said they were on a sidewalk on East 12th Street, corralled by officers holding a length of orange netting, when Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna aimed the spray in their direction from three to five feet away.

“Inspector Bologna's pepper spray went directly into Mr. Crisp's right eye,” Mr. Crisp's lawsuit said. “The pepper spray went into Mr. Crisp's lungs and burned the skin on his face, arms and hands.”

Mr. Crisp had an abnormal heartbeat and difficulty breathing, the suit said, and his eyes burned and were swollen for an hour.

The suit said that he had difficulty focusing his vision and suffered from an inflamed sty for about two weeks and missed three days of work while receiving steroid treatment at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.

“Ms. Lawler felt a searing, burning sensation in and around her eyes and face, like a hot iron, causing her to drop to the ground,” her suit said, adding that she was blinded for several minutes, with the effects of the spray exacerbated by the fact that she was wearing contact lenses.

Several videos on YouTube that showed Inspector Bologna directing a stream of chemicals at those on the sidewalk, then walking away, went viral within hours of the event, drawing additional attention to the protest movement and gene rating strong criticism of the police response.

About a month later, Inspector Bologna was disciplined with the loss of 10 vacation days after investigators determined that he had violated rules for the use of the spray.
Department policy states that pepper spray is intended to help officers subdue someone who is resisting arrest, fleeing or behaving in a way that could harm others.

In addition to monetary damages, the lawsuits seek an order that the city establish and maintain a policy regarding the use of force during demonstrations and conforming with federal standards.

A spokesman for the city's Law Department said the lawsuits would be reviewed once they were received.

Mr. Hanlin, his lawsuit said, was not trapped behind orange netting but was nearby on East 12th Street when he saw what he thought was an excessively rough arrest. He reached for a cellphone and raised it to document what was happening, the suit said, when an officer turned w ithout warning and pepper-sprayed him in the face.

The suit said the pepper spraying was “in both direct retaliation for his participation in Occupy Wall Street and for videotaping unlawful police conduct occurring in public.”

Brownsville Residents Say Gun Violence Is All Too Common

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The shooting of six young people on Sunday night, including two children, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was the latest in a series of shootings across the city in which children have been struck by stray bullets.

There were no fatalities in the Brownsville shootings, which occurred about 7 p.m. on Riverdale Avenue, just west of Rockaway Avenue, but many local residents called the gun violence an all-too-common occurrence in the neighborhood. They blamed it on the prevalence of gangs and guns and a lack of community unity to find a solution.

The police have not yet made an arrest in the shooting. They said a gunman began firing from a white sedan and struck a 2-year-old girl, a 13-year-old boy and four others ages 17 to 27.

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Answers to Questions About Boating, Part I

Roland Lewis, the president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, answers City Room readers' questions about boating in New York waterways.

Unlimited or Pay-Per-Ride? Doing the MetroCard Math

By CLYDE HABERMAN

A New Yorker of our acquaintance plans to go on vacation in mid-August, and this is taxing his arithmetic skills. There are serious calculations to be made about which type of MetroCard will best get him through the next few weeks.

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

Life would have been easier if the card providing 14 days of unlimited rides still existed. That would have carried him to his departure date. Alas, the 14-day unlimited card was terminated with the last fare increase, some 19 months ago. Its mourners are presumably few. Judging from Metropolitan Transportation Authority statistics, it accounted for a meager 2 percent of all cards used, as measured by numbers of swipes.

But what to do in its absence? Buy a couple of 7-day unlimited cards? Or maybe go for a 30-day unlimited card, sinc e part of the vacation will be spent in the city? That requires jumping through mental hoops to guess how often he is likely to ride on subways and buses. For a 30-day pass to be worth his while at $104, this fellow would have to make at least 47 trips. Otherwise, he might do better, not to mention save a few brain cells, by going with a pay-per-ride card.

It turns out that he is not alone in performing these kinds of gymnastics. The rhythms of New Yorkers are, in many cases, reflected in their MetroCards.

During the summer, their fare-paying patterns change perceptibly, with a shift away from the 30-day card toward the 7-day and pay-per-ride varieties. A similar change can be detected in December, another season when many people take off from work for long stretches.

The adjustments are not huge: a couple of a percentage points, the transportation authority says. Throughout 2011, the market share for the 30-day card average d 31 percent. But in August of that year, it dipped to 29 percent. In December, it sagged lower still, to 28.5 percent. When you sell millions of those bits of plastic, any disturbance in the force involves real money.

In case you were wondering - and we're sure you were dying to learn all this - the most popular type of MetroCard is the pay-per-ride that comes with a bonus. This is the one that requires you to put at least $10 on it. Figures from May, the latest available, show that it accounts for 37.7 percent of all the cards that are used.

Here's a breakdown of the other types. We're sure you were dying to know all this as well:

The 30-day card is next in popularity, at 30.4 percent. It is followed by the 7-day card, at 17.5 percent; the pay-per-ride card without the bonus, at 10.1 percent; cash payments on buses - remember cash? - at 3.1 percent; and single-ride tickets on subways at 1.2 percent.

If you mix the various discounts in a stati stical blender, as the transportation authority does, the average fare paid by all subway and bus riders is put at $1.63, or 62 cents below the base fare of $2.25. This is a point that may be kept in mind for the next time fares are raised, probably in early 2013.

After the 14-day card disappeared, its devotees seemed to drift to the pay-per-ride kinds. Their percentages have risen over the last year and a half. At the same time, the popularity of the 30-day card declined by a few percentage points.

There's something odd about that monthly pass. Just ask Gene Russianoff, who is staff attorney for the riders' advocacy group known as the Straphangers Campaign and a man who studies transit reports the way a Talmudic scholar pores over ancient commentaries. He came across this “interesting factoid” in one report: about 25 percent of those who buy 30-day cards “don't use them often enough to get their discount value.” They'd do better with pay-per-ride disco unt cards.

What gives with these people? Mr. Russianoff suggested several possibilities. It could be that they don't care about the discount and simply find the 30-day card convenient. Perhaps they go through spells when they don't use mass transit. Or maybe, he said, they're just “bad mathematicians.”

On that score, we can sympathize. Doing the math to settle on the right card is no snap during a period when work and vacation overlap. It's almost enough to induce the fear of all sums.

Bailing Out Pinky

By RENEE RAKELLE

Dear Diary:
It was my birthday and I got myself a new bike, Pinky: a small, hot pink, Ross bike. Pinky came to me by way of Craigslist for $60.

While walking out of my apartment building in one of New York City's safest ZIP codes, I found Pinky absent from both spots where I usually park her: the bike rack and the old parking meter cemented into the ground.

Then, I crossed the street to - the parking meter? Where WAS the parking meter?

The old cemented not-in-use parking meter that suddenly did not even have an actual meter attached on top of its steel pole? Ridiculous!

I called 311 and was instructed to speak with my local precinct and pick up a voucher, go into Brooklyn, then walk 30 minutes from the G train to a huge warehouse where rows and rows of bikes rested in stasis.

At the warehouse, as I bailed out Pinky, I asked the warehouse officer if I could theoretic ally swap bikes, since it seemed no one else would ever go to the same lengths as me. The answer was, “No,” because these bikes, collected by the City of New York for various reasons, are sold on a Web site similar to eBay. All I could do was nod like a bobblehead.

I'm proud to say that Pinky escaped the block; she is now safely locked up with a proper lock on a proper bike rack and reunited with her proper owner who now knows where NOT to park her bike. New York City may be one parking meter less, but it sure won't be one bike more.

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Levinsohn Confirms That He\'s Leaving Yahoo

5:44 p.m. | Updated Ross Levinsohn, the executive who served as Yahoo‘s interim chief, confirmed on Monday that he was leaving the tech company after being passed over to fill the spot permanently.

The departure of Mr. Levinsohn was not surprising, after Yahoo named former Google executive Marissa Mayer as its new leader.

In an e-mail to friends reviewed by DealBook, Mr. Levinsohn did not disclose his next steps. But he praised the company as having an “amazing brand” and described his short tenure as interim chief executive as “one of the best experiences of my career.”

His departure comes just two weeks after Ms. Mayer stepped into the role that Mr. Levinsohn assumed would be his own. Mr. Levinsohn ran Yahoo's media, business development and sales operations and assumed the role of interim chief after Scott Thompson, Yahoo's last chief executive, left in May amid questions that he had embellished academ ic credentials on his resume.

As recently as mid-June, Mr. Levinsohn was interviewing candidates for senior positions at Yahoo and telling them that the role of chief executive would be his, according to one person who was interviewed by Mr. Levinsohn but declined to be named because they still work with their current employer.

Mr. Levinsohn had already brought on a few senior hires, including Michael Barrett, a former Google executive who was named as Yahoo's top advertising revenue manager.

He had also successfully brokered a settlement with Facebook over a patent fight that began under Mr. Thompson, an agreement that included an expanded content partnership.

Yahoo employees had been hoping that Mr. Levinsohn would stay with the company and help run Yahoo in tandem with Ms. Mayer.

“That would have been the best case scenario - Ross is great at running businesses and delivering value to shareholders and Marissa is a product visionaryâ€" toget her those two could be a powerful combination,” said one employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Here's a note that Mr. Levinsohn e-mailed to friends:

I wanted to let you know that my time at Yahoo has come to an end. It has been an incredible journey for me and I could not be prouder of what we accomplished over the past few years helping define Yahoo as a leader in digital media and advertising. Yahoo is an amazing brand and company, and I leave knowing we did all we could to help inform and entertain more than 700 million users each month. Leading this company has been one of the best experiences of my career, but it is time for me to look for the next challenge.

Azam Ahmed contributed reporting.

Apple Got Special Deal for Grand Central Terminal Store, State Audit Says

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had given Apple the inside track to place one of its retail stores in Grand Central Terminal by creating a bidding process that made it nearly impossible for anyone but Apple to be awarded the space, according to a report released Monday by the New York State comptroller's office.

The report said the authority began discussions with Apple about the space more than two years before issuing a request for proposals, and agreed to specific terms with the previous tenant that afforded Apple an unfair advantage.

“The competitive process that was undertaken was not a level playing field, was not fair to all potential bidders and was significantly slanted in Apple's favor,” the report said.

In a statement Monday, Joseph J. Lhota, the authority's chairman, strongly defended the agency's conduct, and accused the comptroller's office of “overt bias against the M.T.A. and Apple.”

“The comptroller's audit staff clearly has no understanding of how high-profile commercial real estate works, given the shockingly inaccurate and clearly biased audit they issued,” Mr. Lhota said. “The M.T.A.'s lease process with Apple was open, transparent, and followed both the spirit and letter of the law.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the report, which was reported in The New York Post on Monday, the authority and Apple discussed a potential lease as early as November 2008. In July 2009, the report said, the previous tenant, the restaurant Metrazur, approached Apple about a possible buyout of its space, which the restaurant was under contract to lease through 2019.

Apple and Metrazur reached a $5 million lease buyout agreement, the report said. On May 19, 2011, the transportation authority signed an agreement with Metrazur stipulating that the restaurant wou ld be paid $5 million to terminate its lease.

Four days later, the transportation authority advertised a request for proposals for the east balcony space in Grand Central Terminal. It included the requirement that the winning tenant paid $5 million for the buyout of Metrazur's lease. Responses were due a little more than a month later, and only Apple provided one.

“At a minimum, Apple had both an informational and time advantage spanning many months,” the report said, “whereas other vendors were afforded approximately one month to determine if the space was practical and the price feasible for them.”

The report cited one vendor who told the transportation authority that “the upfront cost of $5 million was too great of an investment and precluded the vendor from submitting a formal bid on the space.”

The authority acknowledged on Monday that the $5 million threshold might have been prohibitive for many companies. But the authority said that prenegotiations with Apple and Metrazur were necessary given the restaurant's long-term occupancy agreement.

In a response included with the comptroller's findings, Jeffrey B. Rosen, the authority's director of real estate, said that while “discussions with a potential proposer” were not common, “no buyout of Metrazur's lease would have been possible without such discussions and agreements.”

Mr. Rosen said the authority was “disappointed” that only Apple responded to the request for proposals.

Since the Apple store opened in December, officials at the authority have lauded its impact on the terminal. In his response to the report, Mr. Rosen said that in addition to the rent that Apple pays directly, the store “can be expected to generate significant new traffic” that will benefit the terminal's other tenants.

For the stores that were open during the first quarter of both 2011 and 2012, gross sales increased 6.5 percent this year, Mr. Rosen said.

“We can't say precisely how much of that is due to Apple,” he wrote. “But we do think the number speaks for itself.”

At a Queens Badminton Club, Hoping a Malaysian\'s Olympic Whoosh Brings Gold

By CHRIS PALMER

The sounds came in rapid-fire succession:

Whack! Whoosh! Whack! And eventually, a scream or slap of a high-five.

Inside the jam-packed the CP Badminton Club in College Point, Queens, on Saturday, 28 players spread across seven courts lunged, dived, stabbed and slammed at shuttlecocks, sending them back and forth in spirited doubles matches.

About a dozen people sat in a waiting gallery, regripping rackets, gulping down bottled water or stretching their legs before rotating back into play.

And in a corner, four men huddled around an iPad, speaking in a blend of Cantonese and Hokkien, watching one of the first badminton matches of the Olympics.

The men, all Malaysian immigrants, expressed casual interest in the contest, as Jing Yi Tee, a female Malaysian player, battled Yeon-Ju Bae, from South Korea. Ms. Bae won.

But they were fervently excited about the prospects of a nother Malaysian: Lee Chong Wei, one of the world's best players and a top contender for a gold medal in London.

“I really hope he wins,” said Leon Liond, 60, who lives in Corona, Queens, taking a break from watching on the iPad. “I hope he gets the gold medal for Malaysia.”

The badminton club's manager, Dennis Ng, 39, also originally from Malaysia, put it in more stark terms while standing in the club pro shop.

Mr. Chong Wei, he said, “is the only hope we have right now” for Olympic glory.

If that sentiment sounds melodramatic, consider that Malaysia, a badminton-crazed nation of more than 28 million, has never won a gold medal in any Olympic competition.

Malaysian competitors, in fact, have won only four medals in Olympic history: two bronze and two silver, all in badminton, a sport traditionally dominated by China, South Korea, Indonesia and, to a lesser extent, Denmark.

Mr. Chong Wei is the country's most recent medal winne r, claiming silver in Beijing in 2008. That performance earned him the designation “national hero” from the country's deputy prime minister.

And the stakes are higher this year: a gold mine owner who owns a badminton club in Kuala Lumpur has said he will give a 27.5-pound gold bar worth more than $600,000 to any Malaysian badminton player who brings home a gold medal, and a furniture store in the country and a sports organization are both offering rewards of 1 million ringgit (about $315,000) to any Malaysian gold medalist, regardless of sport.

Mr. Chong Wei is playing his first match on Monday.

“When he is on the court, people will get around a big TV and watch,” said Jimmy Tan, 50, who was standing near the entrance to the badminton club's pro shop with his 10-year-old son. “We're pretty excited.”

Mr. Ng, who began playing badminton as a child in Malaysia, opened this badminton club about three years ago, believing there was a lack of s ites in the city for the sport.

Several clubs â€" including the New York City Badminton Club, which has locations in Manhattan and Queens, and the Brooklyn Bensonhurst Badminton Club â€" host games in high school gyms. But the lighting in those gyms, Mr. Ng said, can make it difficult to track a flying shuttlecock, and the hardwood floors are not a traditional badminton surface.

Also, he said, he had discovered a subculture of badminton players in the city, and they wanted to be able to play every day.

“We love the sport,” he said.

So in the summer of 2008, he found a warehouse to rent in College Point. Then he imported what he said were tens of thousands of dollars' worth of floor mats, nets and overhead lights. Several corporate sponsors helped him with the initial financing, he said.

Today, Mr. Ng, who left his job in information technology  to run the club full time, estimates he has more than 400 active members, about one-fourth of wh om are Malaysian.

But, he said, his membership roll is eclectic. On Saturday, there were players from Burma, China, Jamaica and, yes, New York on the courts.

Malaysians, however, are an inevitably large part of the club, he said, since badminton is essentially the country's national sport.

“You hardly find anyone in Malaysia who doesn't play badminton,” he said.

And their zeal for the game was on full display on Saturday, as they took to the court, doing their best imitation of their Olympic idol, Mr. Chong Wei.

The only thing that seemed to dampen their spirits was discussing the chief obstacle Mr. Chong Wei faces in his quest for gold: Lin Dan, the Chinese player who currently sits atop the world rankings, and who defeated Mr. Chong Wei in the 2008 Olympic final.

The two are widely expected to meet again in the gold medal match on Sunday. And if that happens, said James Chong, sitting courtside between matches, there's only one outco me that will satisfy.

“If Lin Dan wins, I'll only watch the match once,” he said gravely, holding up his index finger.

Then he smiled.

“But if Lee Chong Wei wins,” he said, “I'll watch and watch and watch.”

Seeking a Gender-Neutral Stamp

By CAITLIN O'TOOLE

Dear Diary:
The Chelsea post office on 23rd and 10th is so full of dysfunction, I couldn't possibly write down every quip I overhear there.

But one woman's recent outburst caught me completely off-guard. She went to the window and asked one of the station's trademark surly tellers what kind of stamps they had.

“Well, we have Black History Month stamps, Disney stamps, Georgia O'Keeffe flowers - ”

“No,” the lady said. “Don't you have any ‘gender neutral' stamps?”

Gender neutral?

Everyone in the line started to chime in.

“Come on, lady, stop conversating!” an older woman said.

“Gender neutral? What does that mean? Like, a rock?” the teller asked the customer.

“No, a rock is too male,” a hip young man with a shaggy '80s mullet said. “A neutered cat? A flower?”

“Too vaginal,” I said.

The lady literally spen t 10 minutes at the window, debating about which stamps were the most “gender neutral.”

Finally, in a huff, she asked for a book of flags.

“You sure about those flags?” the mullet guy joked.

And the lady stomped off.

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Raising a Big Stick in the Name of Tolerance

By CLYDE HABERMAN

As everyone knows, no people on this and possibly any other planet are more open-minded than New Yorkers. Who can compare to us in tolerating unpopular opinions, in understanding that the best response to bad speech - nay, the only response - is better speech?

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

Unless, perhaps, the articulated thoughts disturb powerful officeholders. Then trouble can set in.

It has begun once again with an attempt by the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, to have a chicken-sandwich purveyor called Chick-fil-A kicked out of New York. Ms. Quinn is mightily displeased with the company's president, Dan T. Cathy, for putting millions of his dollars behind his belief that same-sex marriage violates “the biblical definition of the family unit” and is “inviting God's judgme nt on our nation.”

We have seen comparable situations many times, a point noted in this space just a week ago in a different context.

Over the years, people have at times rented billboards to take positions falling far from New York's political center of gravity. They've included messages challenging abortion rights, speaking skeptically about immigration and quoting biblical condemnations of homosexuality. Time after time, influential politicians showed their muscles and got the signs pulled down.

Now it's the turn of Ms. Quinn, who happens to be gay, newly married and hoping to become the next mayor. Chick-fil-A is not welcome in this city, she announced after fresh controversy erupted over Mr. Cathy's enthusiastic support of groups seeking to defeat same-sex marriage initiatives around the country.

Mayors and other officials in Boston and Chicago had similarly made clear that Chick-fil-A deserved no place in their cities. A Chicago alderman went so far as to point out that he could easily bottle up land-use legislation the company would need to open a new restaurant.

On Friday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg condemned that sort of litmus test for businesses. Ms. Quinn, joined politically at the hip with the mayor most days, parted company with him this time. She made clear that she wanted Chick-fil-A banished.

Not that the company has exactly taken New York by storm. It has only one outlet here, in a food court at New York University, and it's not open in the summer. Still, on Saturday the Council speaker sent a letter to the college's president, John Sexton, calling on him to send the chicken sellers packing altogether.

A university spokesman, John H. Beckman, said in response that it would be left to the University Senate - a body made up of students, faculty members and administrators - to recommend in the fall what action, if any, to take. One component of the sen ate, the Student Senators Council, has already weighed in. Nothing less than free speech is at stake, it said last spring. If people wish to boycott Chick-fil-A, that's their right, said the council's chairman, Albert Cotugno, but “to ban any entity from campus for ideological reasons is, in most every case, to limit freedom of expression.”

A reasonable position, many would say.

Ms. Quinn herself says there is no evidence that Chick-fil-A violates city laws by refusing to serve or to hire gays. Nor, she acknowledges, would she be on solid ground if she followed the Chicago alderman's lead and used her office to deny a permit just because someone's politics offended her.

(Nor, by the way, is it likely that Chick-fil-A stands alone on same-sex marriage. No doubt, plenty of New York businesses are run by socially conservative Christians, Jews and Muslims whose religious beliefs match Mr. Cathy's on this score, yet they escaped the speaker's opprobrium.)

“I fully understand that Mr. Cathy has the right to say and donate to anything he wants,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview on Sunday. But, she said, “I have the right to use my voice just as much as he does.”

That she does, agreed Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It's important to differentiate between government action and the views of policy makers,” Ms. Lieberman said. But at the same time, she added, care must be taken that an official's opinions do not “translate into actions that go over the line.”

Does trying to shut down a business perhaps go over that line?

Back to Ms. Quinn. “When people speak who hold a significant stature in society - which for better or worse corporate C.E.O.'s do - when they speak out in a homophobic or discriminatory way, it has an effect,” she said. She added, “It affirms that being discriminatory is O.K., and I think we ought to speak out against it .”

A Council speaker has significant stature, too. What she or he says also has an effect.

One chilling effect, felt repeatedly in this city, is on the expression of unpopular opinions and, equally important, on the ability to make oneself heard. Sure, major public officials have as much right as anyone else to mix it up in the marketplace of ideas. But all too often in New York, they're not content just to enter the market. They have a history of taking control of it and putting their thumbs heavily on the scales to tip the balance their way.

Preserving the Fading Pages of a Walking Encyclopedia of Jazz

By COREY KILGANNON

The jazz legend Charlie Parker was born on Aug. 29, 1920 - a Sunday. The saxophonist Lester Young was born on Aug. 27, 1909, a Friday. The trumpeter Jabbo Smith died on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 1991.

These may seem like petty pieces of jazz trivia to some people, but they are nearly articles of faith to Phil Schaap, the loquaciously edifying elder statesman of WKCR-FM (89.9), the Columbia University radio station, who during his 42 years on the air has emerged as one of the planet's more knowledgeable jazz historians.

But lately, Mr. Schaap's recall has begun to slip, his living archive of birthdays, career itineraries and who played what on which session showing some wear and tear.

“I get it all the time. People will say, ‘Phil Schaap forgot something,'” Mr. Schaap, 61, said recently at the station after “Bird Flight,” his 70-minute weekday morning show built around the musi c of Charlie Parker. “I'm not remembering as much and people are amused by it.”

Mr. Schaap is medically fine. It's more like late middle age is taking its normal course.

So, while he still can, he has decided to set down some of his vast storehouse of knowledge in book form.

He has signed with Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he curates the Swing University education program, to write two history books â€" only to find that the process of sorting through millions of factoids to determine which ones warrant commitment to paper has caused even more information to fall out of the overstuffed box of his brain.

“Maybe it's because I'm prioritizing,” he said.

If this is the cost of setting down the lessons he learned from the jazz greats, Mr. Schaap said, so be it, because after he is gone, “There isn't going to be a physical entity that remembers this stuff.”

Mr. Schaap was born to jazz buffs who raised him in Hollis, Queens, in an are a thick with jazz musicians in the 1950s. By age 5, he was buying records and knocking on the doors of every musician he could find, from Buck Clayton to Milt Hinton.

He met Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. He was friends with the likes of Roy Eldridge, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and the drummer Jo Jones. He said Mr. Jones told him to take his knowledge and “pass it on,” to keep jazz going.

Mr. Schaap had always been able to perform feats of memory on demand, whether listing American vice presidents or rosters of 1960s professional hockey teams. But now â€" take, for example, the cabinet of President Warren G. Harding. Mr. Schaap used to be able to cite all the members and the details of their lives.

“Now I couldn't do it,” he said.

The drummer Max Roach once said Mr. Schaap “knows more about us than we know about ourselves,” and musicians have themselves come to depend on his memory.

For example, Sun Ra, the bandleader, who claimed to be from Saturn, used to corner Mr. Schaap and ask for a refresher on important dates in his career, including what Sun Ra called “Earth arrival date.”

Mr. Schaap would inform Sun Ra that according to his union application â€" filed Dec. 15, 1934 â€" he arrived in Birmingham, Ala., on May 22, 1914. Recently, Mr. Schaap called this a Saturday, but quickly corrected himself: it was a Friday.

He does not have some automatic plug-in formula for figuring out what day of the week a given date falls on. Rather, he refers to other dates that he knows solidly, close to the date in question.

For Sun Ra's birthday, he said, he recalled that his own father, Walter Schaap, was born Sept. 9, 1917 (a Sunday), and he worked his way back mentally from there.

Mr. Schaap even knew Sun Ra's favorite ice cream flavor: banana-strawberry from Baskin-Robbins â€" or was it bananas and raspberries? Ah, now Mr. Schaap wavered for a moment before standing firm on b anana-strawberry.

With a laugh, he excused the lapse. “I got a lot on my mind.”

How eBay Worked a Comeback

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

John Donahoe has led a revival of eBay. “Our multiyear effort is paying off,” he said.

Remember Myspace, Friendster, eToys, Webvan, Urban Fetch, Pets.com? Like meteors, they burned with dazzling brilliance before turning shareholder dollars to ash. EBay, Yahoo and AOL, the dominant Internet triumvirate circa 2004, seemed destined for a similar fate. The conventional wisdom has been that once decline sets in at an Internet company, it's irreversible.

But that was before 's latest earnings surprise, which sent its stock soaring and had analysts scrambling to raise their projections. “Can Internet companies ever turn around? The answer has been no,” Ken Sena, Internet analyst at Evercore, told me this week. “But now, there's eBay. The answer may turn out to be yes.”

If so, eBay's success has big implications for struggling companies like Yahoo and AOL, not to mention more recent sensations that have already lost some luster, like Zynga, Groupon and even Facebook, whose shares tumbled this week after its first earnings report as a public company disappointed investors. “EBay has demonstrated that it's possible to turn the corner even against long odds,” said David Spitz, president and chief operating officer of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce consulting company.

EBay shares hit a peak of over $58 in 2004 and made its chief executive, Meg Whitman, a Silicon Valley celebrity. But by November 2007, when she stepped down to enter politics, the telltale signs of decline had set in. Its stock was slumping. Its dominant online auction business had matured, and growth had slowed. Sellers complained about higher fees and poor support. That year, eBay wrote off $1.4 billion on its poorly conceived $2.5 billion acquisition of the calling service Skype, recording its first loss as a public company. Analysts worried that eBay had lost its quirky soul, and was abandoning the flea market auction model that had made it distinctive and dominant in online auctions. By early 2009, its stock was barely over $10, down over 80 percent from its peak.

Ms. Whitman was succeeded by a former Bain & Company managing director, John Donahoe. “One of the unique things about the Internet is a company can be a white-hot success and become a global brand and reach global scale in just a few years - that's the good news,” he told me this week. “But then somebody can turn around and do it to you. There's constant disruption. One of the first things I had to do here was face reality. EBay was getting disrupted.”

Little more than four years after taking charge, a buoyant Mr. Donahoe sounded like the chief executive of a surging start-up when he announced eBay's latest results on July 18. So thoroughly has eBay been transformed that he didn't even mention its traditional auction business. “Our multiyear effort is paying off,” he said. Profit more than doubled and revenue jumped 23 percent. “EBay is revitalized. We believe the best is yet to come.” In a stock market struggling with recession fears and the , eBay stock this week hit a six-year high.

How has eBay done it when so many others have failed?

Excitement about eBay's prospects has little to do with its traditional auction business, or even its core e-commerce operations, although its marketplace division posted solid results and had its best quarter since 2006, the company said. Most of its growth came from mobile retailing and its PayPal online payments division, a business it acquired in 2002 for what now looks like a bargain $1.5 billion.

As consumers embrace shopping on their smartphones, “mobile continues to be a game-changer,” Mr. Donahoe said. He noted that 90 million users had downloaded eBay's mobile app and that 600,000 customers made their first mobile purchase during the most recent quarter. “A woman's handbag is purchased on eBay mobile every 30 seconds,” he said. “Mobile is revolutionizing how people shop and pay.”

“It's hard to think of many companies that benefit from mobile,” Mr. Sena said. “Usually it means more competition. But clearly, eBay is one of them. EBay is offering a one-click payment solution. You don't have to type in a credit card number or PIN. It's just one click on your mobile phone.”

Mr. Spitz said he was recently stopped at a traffic light and the sun was bothering his eyes. By the time the light turned green, he had used his phone to order and pay for sunglasses. “This is what commerce anytime, anywhere means,” he said. “It's here.”

It\'s Hard to Like a Digital Exercise Monitor

EARLIER this month, I found myself obsessing over a digital pet as demanding as the Tamagotchi toys I collected as a child. Those virtual creatures lived on the screens of egg-shaped key chains and needed constant feeding and petting, which was accomplished with the press of a button.

My latest fixation wasn't an ersatz animal. It was the Nike FuelBand, a slim, black bracelet that has the mission of tracking the daily of anyone who wears it.

From the moment I wrapped the band around my wrist, I was enamored with the idea of a device that could help me collect data about my habits and behavior, so that I could try to improve them. The only trouble was that the device didn't seem to work very well.

The FuelBand, which awards virtual points for various forms of exercise, doled out rewards with little apparent rationale. One lazy Sunday, I lounged around my apartment with my and an endless pot of coffee, barely moving. But the band delivered a cheery message: I'd hit my goal for the day. Huh?

Others have noticed this inconsistency, too. Casey Chan, a writer at Gizmodo, found that the band awarded more points for eating a slice of pizza than for walking up a flight of stairs.

Joseph Teegardin, a Nike spokesman, said last week that the company assigned points to a range of behaviors. To tally those points, the accelerometers in the wristband monitor activity and match movement patterns to a Nike proprietary index. He added that the device worked best with activities involving wrist movement - dancing and basketball, for example.

The device's inconsistency was frustrating. After a few days, though, I forgot about my newfound pet altogether, leaving it in a public restroom and then, after retrieving it, putting it in my back pocket and later accidentally sitting on it. Until then, the wristband had certainly been affecting my behavior. I felt Fuelshamed, embarrassed each time I glanced at the band's dull surface and found it illuminated by a lonely red dot, a signal that I wasn't active enough to appease the machine.

The FuelBand is part of a new, ambitious breed of fitness tracking devices and apps that promise to transform their owners into personal data collectors, able to analyze and improve the minutiae of their daily lives - where they go, what they eat and how much they move.

These gadgets and software have attracted legions of fans who want to know how far they run on a jog or how many they burn on their way to work. The FuelBand, however, is trying to move into new territory by creating its own index for awarding points, called NikeFuel, based on a variety of activities and then calculating a daily total. It's meant to give its users a generic goal, but it can also lead to confusion, given the ambiguity of the metrics.

THE and guilt I experienced as my FuelBand honeymoon wore off is not uncommon, according to people who study behavioral science. The collected data is often interesting, but it is hard to analyze and use in a way that spurs change.

“It doesn't trigger you to do anything habitually,” said Michael Kim, who runs Kairos Labs, a Seattle-based company specializing in designing social software to influence behavior. “Habits are based on cues that happen every day, which leads to a routine and then a reward or achievement, which could just be something as general as an endorphin rush.”

Of the FuelBand, he said, “You just see a pretty number that isn't always enough to be a trigger.” The FuelBand connects with smartphones and a Web-based interface, which shows users a cute animation of a dancing alien as a reward for reaching a goal. But Mr. Kim, whose résumé includes a stint as director of Xbox Live, the online gaming system created by Microsoft, said the gamelike mechanisms of the Nike device and others like it were “not enough” for the average user. “Points and badges do not lead to behavior change,” he said.

The FuelBand and its counterparts also allow users to announce their achievements on various social networks. But frequent updates could annoy the friends who see them. “Does anyone really want to see how many miles you ran, what you weigh, along with what the weather is where you are and the songs you're listening to?” said B. J. Fogg, who directs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford and has conducted research tests with the FuelBand and other forms of wearable technology.

But Mr. Fogg said he believed that the FuelBand might be useful in another way. Simply donning it can work as a fancier version of a string tied around your finger: a reminder to complete a task or errand, he said. It could be the nudge you need, for example, to get off the subway a few stops early and walk the rest of the way home, or to jog a few extra laps around the track.

“You aren't going to be any less active than you already are by wearing it,” he said.

But its benefits, such as they are, may not be sustainable. “The biggest problem people have is losing the device,” Mr. Fogg said with a laugh. “Is it reasonable to expect someone to wear it every day for the rest of their life?”

It isn't for me. My once-beloved FuelBand now lives on a crowded dresser, surrounded by jewelry I've grown tired of wearing.

Of course, these monitoring devices could be miniaturized further, and could develop more impressive capabilities. Steven Dean, who organizes gatherings in New York for self-trackers - people who collect data about everything from their caffeine intake to their number of smiles - said we were in the early stages of information gathering and analysis. He compared it to documenting a rash on his skin, photographing it and keeping a record of its response to various allergy creams.

“I may not know what to make of the information I've collected, but at least I have it,” Mr. Dean said. “I could show the dermatologist what I looked like two weeks ago rather than guess.”

EVENTUALLY, wearable devices will help people understand more of their bodies' behaviors and find ways to tweak them. Already, personal data streams can be exported to smartphones or computers for use in digital weight scales and heart and blood-sugar monitors. Future devices could nudge their owners in real time, letting them know if they were near a gym and hadn't worked out in a few days. Or they could warn patients to stay away from ice cream shops.

“This is just the start in terms of pure data capture,” Mr. Dean said.

In a Brooklyn Neighborhood, Disbelief Over a Shooting

By AARON EDWARDS

Late Friday, a waitress in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was taking a cigarette break at the corner of Bedford Avenue and North Ninth Street as the usual night crawlers of the fashionable neighborhood hustled by. Then came an unfamiliar sound.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.

“It was like someone dropping a big metal can,” said the waitress, Laurel Medlinger, 24. No one budged on the busy street, she said. No one took cover.

The five (or, by some counts, three) pops, which came in rapid succession, were gunshots that hit a man just steps from a bar called Trix, where Ms. Medlinger works.

The man, whose name was not released, was found by the police shortly before 11 p.m. facedown on the pavement in a pool of his own blood after a 911 call was made.

The police said the man was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center and was expected to survive. No arrests had been made as of Saturday night.< /p>

For New York neighborhoods where gun violence is common, news of a shooting like this might be greeted with resigned shrugs and shaking heads. But on Bedford Avenue on Saturday, the reaction was more of disbelief and confusion. Narratives of “this would never happen here” have slowly begun to creep up in an area widely regarded as a center for young hipsters, new families and artist types.

The part of Williamsburg where the shooting occurred is in the 94th Precinct and had 1 murder, 3 rapes, 129 robberies and 93 assaults in 2011, according to police records. That is compared with 17 murders, 30 rapes, 446 robberies and 359 assaults in the adjacent 83rd Precinct, which encompasses much of Bushwick.

Some residents of Williamsburg and nearby Greenpoint say there is a sense that because both areas have been transformed by gentrification and a much younger and more affluent crowd moving in, crimes of this nature are unusual â€" but the shock is eclipsed by a pervasive, festive atmosphere.

“Down here it's always a party, and I think people are particularly unguarded,” said Kiley Bates-Brennan, 37, who used to live in Williamsburg but now lives in Greenpoint with her husband and newborn.

“I don't think that they're concerned about something like this happening. There are enough people partying and walking around at 4 a.m. totally plastered not thinking about how they're going to get home.”

Ms. Bates-Brennan added that she hoped the neighborhood would not feel too threatened by the shooting. Others did not have such a positive outlook.

“The thing is with this neighborhood is that everyone thinks it's getting all gentrified and all the people who may have been like, ‘Oh I don't go to Brooklyn,' all those people are coming here now. I hope this scares them back into Manhattan,” said Jacob Liddell, 28, who lives off Bedford Avenue.

Marzena Witkowska, 29, said she frequently visited her gran dmother, who helps take care of her children in an apartment a few buildings away from the site of the shooting. She said she heard gunshots from the apartment at around 10:45 p.m. Ms. Witkowska, who is from Poland, said she had hopped from neighborhood to neighborhood since coming to New York City 12 years ago.

“The neighborhood lives 24 hours, 7 days a week. You can go out whenever because there are always a lot of people,” she said. “It's getting pretty hippie and artistic, but I've always felt safe here. Now, I feel goosebumps.”

Apple Said to Consider Stake in Twitter

, which has stumbled in its efforts to get into social media, has talked with in recent months about making a strategic investment in it, according to people briefed on the matter.

While Apple has been hugely successful in selling phones and tablets, it has little traction in social networking, which has become a major engine of activity on the Web and on mobile devices. Social media are increasingly influencing how people spend their time and money - an important consideration for Apple, which also sells applications, games, music and movies.

Apple has considered an investment in the hundreds of millions of dollars, one that could value Twitter at more than $10 billion, up from an $8.4 billion valuation last year, these people said. They declined to be named because the discussions were private.

There is no guarantee that the two companies, which are not in negotiations at the moment, will come to an agreement. But the earlier talks are a sign that they may form a stronger partnership amid intensifying competition from the likes of Google and .

Apple has not made many friends in social media. Its relationship with Facebook, for example, has been strained since a deal to build Facebook features into Ping, Apple's music-centric social network, fell apart. Facebook is also aligned with Microsoft, which owns a small stake in it. And Google, an Apple rival in the phone market, has been pushing its own social network, Google Plus.

“Apple doesn't have to own a social network,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, said at a recent technology conference. “But does Apple need to be social? Yes.”

Twitter and Apple have already been working together. Recently, Apple has tightly sewn Twitter features into its software for phones, tablets and computers, while, behind the scenes, Twitter has put more resources into managing its relationship with Apple.

Though an investment in Twitter would not be a big financial move for Apple by any stretch - it has $117 billion in liquid investments, and it quietly agreed to buy a mobile security company for $356 million on Friday - it would be one of Mr. Cook's most important strategic decisions as chief executive. And it would be an uncommon arrangement for Apple, which tends to buy small start-ups that are then absorbed into the company.

But such a deal would give Apple more access to Twitter's deep understanding of the social Web, and pave the way for closer Twitter integration into Apple's products.

Twitter has grown quickly, amassing more than 140 million monthly active users who generate a vast stream of short messages about their lives, the news and everything else. An Apple investment would give it the glow of a close relationship with a technology icon, and would instantly bolster its valuation, which, like that of other start-ups, has languished in the wake of Facebook's lackluster market debut. In fact, word of the talks comes at a time when some are asking whether expectations for the potential of social media companies have gotten out of hand, and shares of Facebook, Zynga and other companies have wilted.

But Twitter does not need Apple's cash. Earlier this year, Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive, said the company had “truckloads of money in the bank.”

The truckloads, according to people familiar with the matter, add up to more than $600 million in cash on hand. This comes from the $1 billion in financing it has raised over the years and, more recently, from a healthy flow of advertising revenue.

Regardless, Twitter is widely expected to pursue a public offering within the next couple of years, whether or not it agrees to deals with investors like Apple.

Apple and Twitter are logical partners in some ways. Unlike Facebook or Google, Twitter has no plans to compete with Apple in the phone business or elsewhere. And as Apple has found, social is just not in its DNA.

“Those guys are a great partner,” Mr. Costolo said of Apple in a recent interview. “We think of them as a company that our company looks up to.” Mr. Costolo would not discuss any potential investments or anything else related to the company's relationship with Apple.

Spokesmen for both Apple and Twitter said on Friday that their companies did not comment on rumors.

As Facebook and Zynga Drop, Some See a Shift in Silicon Valley

SAN FRANCISCO - Another couple of days like this and the great tech bubble of 2012 might recede into history.

Several companies that were supposed to be the foundation of a new Internet era plummeted this week as analysts and investors downgraded their dreams. There were instant echoes of the crash of 2000, when the money stopped flowing, the dot-coms crumbled and Silicon Valley devolved into recriminations and lawsuits.

Shares of stumbled to a new low Friday after its first earnings report revealed a murky path to any profit that would justify its lofty valuation. The heavily promoted $100 billion company on the eve of its May debut is now a $65 billion company and persistently headed south.

, the social games company that uses Facebook as a platform, was battered even worse on Thursday, leaving its value at less than a quarter of its peak last winter. Netflix, which is trying to move from physical discs to streaming video, and the coupon company Groupon have also been under severe pressure, leaving them at a fraction of their recent worth.

Feelings of disillusionment are far from universal, and came even as The New York Times reported that , the most successful tech company, had been discussing an investment in . Social media is flourishing; a billion Facebook and 500 million Twitter users would vouch for that. But as just about every Internet company is grappling with the transition to a mobile world, turning groups of people into cash-generating customers on a hand-held device is clearly an immense task.

Nick Zaharias, an independent consultant who advises institutional investors, said his clients were “infinitely more skeptical.”

“For future deals that are pitched as social deals,” he explained, “they're not going to pay up. The multiples are going to be far, far lower.”

The issues facing each tumbling company are slightly different. But they all have the problem of selling something - imaginary tractors, Internet films, discount deals or, in Facebook's case, someone “liking” a product - that is not quite real and perhaps less than essential.

“The gleam has come off the word ‘social,' ” said Ben Schachter, an Internet analyst with the Macquarie Group. “The ground is now shifting underneath these companies' feet at a speed that we didn't see even in the late 1990s.”

Groupon and Netflix have been in the investor doghouse for a while, while with Facebook there seems simple regret that its grandest ambitions might not be reached (“The jury is in: Facebook is not and will not be a second ,” the research group IDC said).

With Zynga, however, there was a sudden sense that building a blue-chip business from virtual goods might be virtually impossible.

“Shocking,” Mr. Schachter wrote in his report after Zynga revealed in its earnings report on Wednesday that it might make less than half of what it had hoped to earn this year from its more obsessive players who pay actual money for virtual goods like tractors - its only real source of income. Increasingly, gamers want to play on the run, and Zynga's mobile games are not a runaway success.

For all the pain that stockholders of Zynga and the other companies must feel, it is not yet March 2000, when all tech stocks went into free fall. The old-line companies, including Google, and Apple, are doing fine.

But the questions about whether the chief executives and other early investors in some once-hot companies might have been a little too eager to cash in are already beginning, just as they did 12 years ago.

Early investors in Facebook increased their participation in the public offering at the last minute by more than 80 million shares, netting them nearly a billion dollars more than the shares would have fetched Friday on the open market. (Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, was not among those increasing their allotment.) Zynga's founder, Mark Pincus, sold 16 million shares in an unusual secondary offering four months after the December public offering. He and other executives got $12 a share in those more optimistic times, four times the price on Friday.

Mr. Pincus was asked about those sales on Wednesday during the analyst conference call by the BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield. “I wanted to see whether he felt bad about it,” Mr. Greenfield said later. Mr. Pincus did not address the point.

If investors were battered and Wall Street was alarmed, Silicon Valley was unfazed.

The downward slide in public valuations would have an effect on private valuations, venture capitalists said, but it would be manageable.

Outside City Hall, Ministers Call on Churches to Do More to Fight Gun Violence

By VIVIAN YEE

Five days after a 4-year-old boy was shot and killed in a Bronx playground, a coalition of clergy members and politicians gathered at City Hall on Friday to call on city churches to play a larger role in preventing gun violence in their neighborhoods.

The clergy members, all leaders of black or Hispanic churches, pledged to build personal relationships with local police officers, to use their pulpits to speak out against carrying guns and to steer local youth away from gangs through mentoring.

“We're asking them to not just have their activities on Sunday mornings,” said the Rev. Joseph Mattera, the senior pastor of Resurrection Church in Brooklyn, standing in front of a crowd that held up signs with anti-gun slogans. “We're encouraging them to be more holistic to serve their communities.”

He and the other speakers pinpointed family problems and the lack of jobs for young peopl e as root causes for the violence - issues that community leaders could work to address, they said. Mr. Mattera said he hoped clergy members could persuade local business owners to hire young people to keep them busy and off the streets.

But most important, they said, clergy members could use their influence to draw awareness to the issue and serve as intermediaries between the police and youth, turning churches into safe spaces where people could turn in guns or report gun possession. Others suggested using churches as places where those convicted of misdemeanors could perform their community service.

“There is power in the pulpit,” said the Rev. Michael Faulkner, the pastor of New Horizon Church in Harlem. “That power has to be used to bring stability and security to our community.”

Several of the clergy members spoke about the gun violence that has broken out across the city this summer, like the gunfight on Sunday that killed the 4-year-old, Llo yd Morgan.

State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, a Democrat from Queens, who is pushing for state legislation that would prohibit people with certain mental health issues from buying guns, said the city's shootings were reminiscent of the crime that gripped the city in the 1980s. “We won't go back, and we can't go back to the way things were,” he said.

Week in Pictures for July 27

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Big Ticket | Sold for $27,376,940.03

By ROBIN FINN

An urban version of the traditional rambling family compound, a seven-bedroom nine-and-a-half-bath apartment that occupies all 8,360 square feet of the 16th floor at 995 Fifth Avenue, a condop building formerly known as the Stanhope Hotel, was the biggest sale of the week, according to city records.

With a recorded price of $27,376,940.03, it was arguably the most fiscally exacting transaction of the week as well. But people familiar with the deal said the unit actually sold for more than what was noted in the city records, quite close to its $30 million asking price.

The building's developer, the Extell Development Company, had listed the property with two other brokerages, the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group and Gumley Haft Kleier, before finding marketing nirvana with Nikki Field of Sotheby's International Realty for the final sponsor unit in the 1926 Rosario Candela-designed building. < /p>

Ms. Field took on the listing in November on the condition that Extell, which had converted the hotel, near 81st Street, into 26 private residences in 2008, embark on a significant face-lift of the unit, 16TH, before its relisting in March. Although it had never been lived in, after being on and off the market at various price points for the last five years, she said the space had grown “a bit tired and the layout was in need of becoming a more attractive property to the 2012 buyer.”

The apartment first came on the market at $35 million in 2007, was a featured property on the HGTV series “Selling New York” in 2010, and had been listed at $27.5 million before Ms. Field entered the picture. Walls were torn down to emphasize the Central Park views, the layout was rejiggered, and finishes were updated. Ms. Field confirmed that, much to her surprise, the buyers are a family from New York City rather than people from the money-to-burn-on-a-pied-à-terre interna tional market.

“This New York family came in and fell in love with it instantly,” she said. “How many families are big enough to need 8,360 square feet? Well, this one is. So, bingo, it was a nice transaction.” She said they also bought an 1,100-square-foot ground-floor unit to use either as staff quarters or for out-of-town visitors.

Because of a confidentiality agreement, Ms. Field would not disclose the name of the buyers, identified only as 995 LLC, nor did the pair of Prudential Douglas Elliman agents who represented the buyers wish to be identified.

Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.

City Rolls Out a Rocky Welcome Mat for Mussels

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Now don't start chopping shallots, but we thought you'd be interested to know that an artificial mussel bed - believed to be the first of its kind along the city shoreline - is under construction on the East River.

The habitat, two submerged V-shaped concrete troughs studded with about 340 rocks, is part of a new “eco-park” in the East River Waterfront Esplanade. The $165 million esplanade project, by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, extends about a mile and a half from Pier 35 down to the Battery Maritime Building. The corporation would not break out the cost of the mussel bed, whose home will be at Pier 35, near Rutgers Slip.

The park will open to the public next year. It already is open to any mussel daring enough to thread its way through a construction zone and hitch its beard to a chunk of granite atop a steel dowel embedded in concrete.

On July 1, work ers for the Hunter Roberts Construction Group began installing 30 big concrete blocks, weighing 11 to 59 tons each, that compose the mussel bed. The job will continue through August. The blocks were fabricated in Schuylerville, N.Y.; then taken by barge to Newark, where the rocks were attached; then barged again to Pier 35. They are made especially heavy to keep them weighted down in place.

David Kane, the executive vice president for capital programs at the Economic Development Corporation, said creating the marine habitat allowed officials to piggyback an educational and environmental feature on infrastructural work that had to be done in any case: the reconstruction of a deteriorated storm sewer outfall pipe at the foot of Pier 35. The mussel bed is being installed on top of the outfall.

At best, the 65-foot-long habitat will attract colonies of blue mussels and ribbed mussels. An environmental consulting firm, Great Ecology, determined that a mussel bed would be feasible in this location, city officials said.

East River water quality has improved considerably since the 1970s. One critical yardstick, the level of fecal coliform bacteria in 100 millileters of water (about 6.7 tablespoons) has dropped to 118 from 160,000. But city officials do not anticipate that the mussels will be fit for human consumption, especially since the bed sits so close to a sewer outfall.

Though unusual in its scope, the mussel bed is not unique among efforts to provide such habitats in New York waterways. For example, artificial reefs known as reef balls have been installed at Hunts Point Landing in the Bronx.

Even if the bed at Pier 35 fails to attract mussels, officials envision it as an unusual abstract sculpture that can be used to study the extent and effect of tides. A little bridge will cross over the mouth of the habitat, which occupies a small cove. At high tide, the structure will be almost entirely under water. At low tide, it will be almost completely exposed. Maritime grasses will border it at one edge.

Neither state nor federal regulatory agencies required such a habitat, Mr. Kane said, adding, “This was about doing something new.”

The “eco-park” and walkway on Pier 35 will be screened from the adjoining Sanitation Department shed on Pier 36 by an inclined vine-covered wall. The lead project manager for the Economic Development Corporation is Terri Bahr. The designers of the esplanade are SHoP Architects and Ken Smith Landscape Architect; engineering is by a joint venture between HDR and Arup. Ocean and Coastal Consultants served as structural marine engineer for the mussel bed.

All this expertise and it will still be up to the mussels themselves to decide whether it was worth the effort. How will we know if they start moving in?

Get ready for Mussel Cam 2013. (But please put the shallots away.)

Software, \'Plain and Simple,\' Still to Blame for Bike-Share Delay

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

To those seeking further explanation for the delays in the city's much anticipated bike-share program, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered a bemused rejoinder Friday: There's nothing to report.

Speaking on WOR Radio on Friday morning, Mr. Bloomberg attributed the delay, as he did last week, to “software, plain and simple.”

“The company that's managing it changed vendors to have new software,” he said, referring to Alta Bicycle Share, which is operating the program. “And it just doesn't work yet.”

No new start date has been set for the program, which was supposed to begin in July. A program overseen by Alta in Chattanooga, Tenn., began this week after experiencing software-related delays.

Some riders and elected officials have called on the city to provide greater details on the program's possible start date and the reasons for the delay.

Mr. Bloomberg sug gested he was communicating as much information as he could.

“One newspaper wrote a story, ‘You're not telling us enough,'” he said in his radio interview. “There's nothing.”

He expressed amusement, as he has in the past, at some New Yorkers' recent zeal for the program.

“Everybody was screaming, ‘We do not want bicycles,'” he said. “Now everybody's screaming, ‘We can't get them fast enough,' You've got to love New York.”

New York Census Data, Centuries Old, Is Now Online

By SAM ROBERTS

What was Al Capone's address? Where did Jonas Salk live? What did John D. Rockefeller list as his occupation? Whom did Franklin D. Roosevelt list as the head of his household in 1925?

The New York State Archives and Library has collaborated with Ancestry.com to provide searchable versions of the recently released 1940 United States census; New York State censuses from 1892, 1915 and 1925; and marriage, draft and other records dating to the 17th century.

Todd Godfrey, senior director of United States content acquisition for Ancestry.com, a paid subscription service on family history, said the images and searchable database were compiled from microfilm and paper copies belonging to the state.
“Our role is to provide digitization, and we usually provide it at no cost,” he said.

The federal census data includes over 13 million resident names and details including age, birthplace, street address and residence i n 1935. The state census data supplements that, Mr. Godfrey said, with information about people who were living in the state between the decennial United States censuses.

For the record, Rockefeller listed no occupation (but a lot of servants). Roosevelt listed himself and his mother as heads of the household.

As for Capone and Salk? Capone lived at 48 Garfield Street in Brooklyn, while Salk lived at 853 Elsmere Place in the Bronx.

It Could Have Been Us

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

New York City describes in this video its bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Let\'s Hear It for the C Train

By ANTHONY DEJARNETTE

Dear Diary:

Waiting in the city's bowels
For numbers, consonants and vowels
Can rob a patient man of all his cool.

The A? No thanks, that ain't for me.
I only want to hear the C,
That “worst list”-topping, local-stopping jewel.

Though other lines may gleam and shine,
The C has soul beneath its grime,
With heart and grit and character to match.

You take the A, I'll gladly wait,
For what you might call second-rate
Is one train I would really love to catch.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Two Charged in Fatal Shooting of 4-Year-Old in the Bronx

By WENDY RUDERMAN

On Sunday afternoon, Courtney Kelly had brought together residents of a housing complex in the Bronx and others for a basketball tournament in honor of his younger sister, who was murdered in July 2010.

He also, according to the authorities, brought a gun, and by the end of the night a 4-year-old boy lay dead from a gunshot to the head as a panicked crowd scattered amid a shootout.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kelly, 26, who remains in a hospital recovering from a gunshot wound to the stomach, was charged with criminal gun possession, the police said. Investigators also arrested and charged a 17-year-old, Rondell Pinkerton, with murder and gun possession in connection with the shootout that killed the 4-year-old, Lloyd Morgan, who was playing in a playground near the Forest Houses with other children just after 9:30 p.m. Sunday. Another man, Christopher Forte, 21, was shot in the arm as he walked n ear the bleachers. Mr. Forte, who had surgery on his arm Tuesday afternoon, was at St. Barnabas Hospital in stable condition on Wednesday.

The boy's mother, Shianne Norman, said her son loved basketball and dreamed of playing in the National Basketball Association. “I really feel like this is senseless,'' Ms. Norman said through anguished sobs on Monday. “My son was 4 years old. He just turned 4 this May that just passed. He was going to school in September. He hasn't gotten to live his life yet.”

Investigators were still piecing together the details of what happened on Sunday night, and it is unclear what role Mr. Kelly played in the shootout. Additional charges against Mr. Kelly and others could be filed, the police said. At the time of the shooting, Mr. Kelly, who detectives believe is a member of the Bloods gang, was on parole for robbery. He had violated his parole and there was a warrant out for his arrest, the police said.

Investigators found s hell casings from three different caliber weapons near the playground and the basketball court where the tournament was held, and they believe at least two gunmen, possibly more, were exchanging fire.

Mr. Kelly, whose age the police had mistakenly listed as 27, organized the basketball tournament to honor his sister, Troynisha Harris, 18, who was stabbed to death in July 2010 as she sat outside the Forest Houses on East 165th Street.

Sabrina Kelly, the mother of Courtney Kelly and Troynisha Harris, attended a Monday night rally, where she, along with politicians and community leaders, called for an end to the violence in the neighborhood.

“You've got to take these guns off the street,” Ms. Kelly said during the rally.