A Taxi Ride to Celebrate Ramadan

By JONATHAN ALTSHULER

Dear Diary:

Despite growing up in the New York City area and studying Middle East politics and culture for four years throughout college, I failed to realize why there were so few taxis picking up passengers from La Guardia Airport on a recent Sunday night.

Shamefully I became aware only when, after an hour of waiting in line and finally stepping into a taxi, the driver told me that tonight was Eid, the culmination of the month of Ramadan, or “our Christmas,” as he put it.

Of course! The Muslim population of New York would be celebrating the end of Ramadan this evening. But not my driver, who despite being Muslim and working an already grueling schedule, had resolved that he could not afford to enjoy the holiday with his family this year. A native of Afghanistan who came to New York in 1981, he has driven a taxi since 1986 (before I was even born). His 5 children and 22 grandchildren are spread between K andahar and Flushing. And he spent his holiday with me.

So we chatted and I told him I had just returned from visiting my own grandparents in Florida. After our ride I wished him “Eid Mubarak,” which elicited a surprised smile, and he bid me good night, as he drove on to find his next passenger with whom he would celebrate.

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Photo Released for Suspect in 13-Year-Old\'s Killing

By ANDY NEWMAN

Three days after a 13-year-old boy was killed in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the police released a photo on Monday of a 17-year-old who they say they believe is the gunman.

The killing appears to be gang-related, the police said. The victim, Ronald Wallace, was walking with about 10 other teenagers just after midnight on Friday when they came across a group of about 20 youths at Tapscott Street and Blake Avenue, a police spokesman said.

The groups exchanged words, and Ronald was shot in the back, the police said. and was pronounced dead on arrival at Brookdale Medical Center.

A photo of the suspect, Akbar Johns, was picked out of a photo lineup by a witness to the shooting, the police said. People with information about Mr. Johns are asked to contact the Police Department's Crime Stoppers unit online or by calling (800) 577-8477, or text tips to 274637 and entering TIP577.

As Singer Tours, City Gives His Well-Stocked Van a New Life

By JAMES C. MCKINLEY JR.

If you need proof that New York City is serious about parking tickets, talk to Joseph Arthur, the singer-songwriter and painter. The city towed Mr. Arthur's van from outside a Brooklyn garage where it was being repaired, because he said he had failed to pay $361 in parking tickets from earlier this year.

That would be a big headache in and of itself. But there was a failure of communication between Mr. Arthur, who was traveling, and his manager in Canada about whether the tickets had been paid and whether the car had been returned to the garage. So when Mr. Arthur returned from a trip to Mexico, he discovered the city had sold his car at auction. Inside were several vintage amplifiers he uses, a number of paintings he had done onstage, a hand-drawn set of tarot cards he was working on and merchandise.

“My manager was Canadian and didn't understand the seriousness of the situation,” Mr. Arthur said Monday. â €œIf I could turn back time I would, man.”

The city marshal who seized the vehicle, Robert F. Solimine of Brooklyn, has declined to identify the buyer of the van, a white 2003 Dodge Ram. This has caused Mr. Arthur no small amount of grief, but Ronald L. Kuby, the civil rights lawyer, has agreed to help him. Mr. Kuby said the city apparently followed the letter of the law in taking custody of the vehicle (the trigger for seizure is $350), so the only recourse is to beg city officials to reveal the buyer and hope that person will take pity on Mr. Arthur.

“I am hoping whoever bought it - at a good deal - has a soft spot in his or her heart for art and artists,” Mr. Kuby said. “Maybe he or she wants to do good in addition to doing well.”

Mr. Arthur was to play a gig with rented equipment on Monday night. “Hopefully we will find the new owner and just be able to buy it back,” he said.

Mr. Solimine did not re turn a call seeking comment. The van was seized on July 26 outside Brooklyn Auto Collision and was sold at auction on Thursday.

“I have never sent the city do anything this fast,” Mr. Kuby said. “We have people wait longer to go to trial for coke sales.”

Woman, 29, Found Fatally Slashed on Lower East Side

By ANDY NEWMAN

A 29-year-old woman was found with her neck fatally slashed in a stairwell on the Lower East Side on Monday, the police said. The woman, Carlisle Brigham, was bleeding heavily from the neck when she was found inside 191 Orchard Street around 11 a.m., the police said, and was pronounced dead at Beth Israel Medical Center. Someone she knew lives in the building, the police said.

Whether Ms. Brigham's death was a murder, a suicide or an accident is still being investigated; the medical examiner's office said that autopsy results would not be available until at least Tuesday.

Ms. Brigham was married last year and also used her married name, Carlisle Champalimaud. She worked at the American Museum of Natural History and was the daughter of a former New York City budget director, James R. Brigham Jr.

M.T.A. Seeks $65 Million for Cost of Tropical Storm Irene Last Year

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said Monday that it had submitted claims to recover $65 million in losses resulting from Tropical Storm Irene, which a year ago felled trees onto the tracks of its commuter rails, flooded train yards and prompted an unprecedented pre-emptive shutdown of the subway system.

The claims include $27.7 million already approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the authority said. Most of the additional claims are to insurers, which have already paid the authority $5 million.

“M.T.A. employees in the field worked tirelessly, both to minimize damage in preparing for the storm and to make the repairs needed to restore service as quickly as possible,” Joseph J. Lhota, the authority's chairman, said in a statement. “Then their unsung administrative counterparts stayed on top of the myriad paperwork in order to expedite our reimbursement. Completing this massive task in less than a year is a testament to their dedication.”

The authority claimed $14 million in lost revenue as a result of suspending service on New York City Transit for the first time; another $8 million was claimed to account for overtime costs during preparations for the storm, which hit Aug 27, 2011.

Metro-North Railroad was the hardest hit of the authority's transit arms, suffering “catastrophic washouts” on the Port Jervis Line and a series of mudslides on the Hudson Line, the authority said. On the Port Jervis Line, the Ramapo River flooded miles of track and “left some dangling in mid-air when it receded,” the authority said.

Metro-North is claiming about $27 million in losses.

The authority also claimed nearly $9 million in losses from its bridges and tunnels division, citing a steep drop in traffic across all services, among other factors. Tolls were also suspended periodically “to assist residents w ho were ordered or chose to evacuate,” the authority said.

Long Island Rail Road suffered $5.7 million in damages, the authority said, including revenue lost from its systemwide shutdown.

At Souvenir Stands, Selling Tourists on Ending Stop-and-Search

By COREY KILGANNON

Last week, a 37-year-old artist from Oakland, Calif., named Aaron Gach joined the crowds of tourists swarming the sidewalk souvenir stands set up around the perimeter of Battery Park in Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Gach was not looking to buy anything. Rather, he carried a backpack full of the classic “I Love New York” T-shirts, but with the heart in the phrase replaced by a stop-sign logo emblazoned with the word “Frisk.”

The shirts show Mr. Gach's disdain for the New York Police Department's policy of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking people they consider suspicious.

So Mr. Gach has spent a week in Manhattan asking sidewalk vendors to take a single T-shirt from him, not to sell, but simply to display next to their merchandise of hats and shirts and other New York souvenirs.

It is part of his “public art project,” he said, to “provoke a discussion” between the vendors and the tourists who tend to flock to these souvenir tables but know nothing about the controversial stop-and-frisk issue. On Thursday afternoon, he approached some vendors with the request to display his shirt, and checked in with others who had agreed in previous days to do so.

A vendor just outside Battery Park near Broadway, Kendall Otway, 55, of Woodhaven, Queens, said a number of visitors had asked about the shirt and, once informed about the stop-and-frisk policy, seemed surprised that the police in New York City were so intent on searching for guns.

Mr. Otway, a Navy veteran, said he opposed the policy. “It chips away at our Constitution, which says you're not supposed to be searching anyone without a warrant,” he said.

A vendor at an adjacent stand, Rachiq Yassine, 32, from Brooklyn, also displayed Mr. Gach's T-shirt.

Mr. Yassine said he was a Moroccan immigrant who enlisted in the United States Army after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and served three tours in Iraq. After returning home to Brooklyn from his military service, he said, he was approached once by police officers in a patrol car.

“They said, ‘Pull up your hoodie and turn around,'” to see if I had a gun, he recalled. “Being from an Arab country, I take it more personally, especially after my service.”

Mr. Gach told Mr. Yassine he wanted him to display one of his T-shirts because, as vendors, “you're on the front lines, as cultural ambassadors of New York, and a lot of tourists respect your opinions of the city.”

Mr. Gach walked to another stand near Battery Park, this one located strategically near lines of tourists waiting at a tour-bus stop. The vendor, Kader Abdul, 26, of the Bronx, said many tourists asked to purchase the shirt after learning its message.

Mr. Abdul's partner at the stand, Lex Booker, 56, an Army veteran from Staten Island, added, “Tourists don't know what stop-and-frisk is, because tourists don't get stopped and frisked.”

Sebastian Torres and his teenage son Thomas, who were visiting from Argentina, stopped and looked at Mr. Gach's shirt.

They had not heard of the practice, and had never heard of it being used back in their city. Posadas. Mr. Torres seemed divided on the issue.

“People have their rights, but the safety of everyone is important, too,” he said.

Mr. Gach, a founder of the Center for Tactical Magic, an Oakland-based arts group that advocates “positive social transformation,” said he hoped the shirts functioned both as protest signs and as props to generate conversation between tourists and vendors, “many of whom reside in communities directly impacted by aggressive policing.”

He said he had gotten dozens of vendors to display the shirt, often next to items bearing the Police Department's logo.

The stop-and-frisk tactic in New York City has come under fire from civil rights groups a nd many minority community leaders, who claim that it unfairly targets black and Hispanic young men and has not led to enough arrests to justify its use.

“This issue is no longer local to New York,” Mr. Gach said. “Other American cities are looking to New York City to set the policy on this. If we can get it stopped in New York, we can effectively get it stopped in other cities.”

Mr. Gach said he was especially interested in approaching vendors around Battery Park because many seemed to be military veterans who also happened to live in rougher neighborhoods in New York where stop-and-frisk is employed more frequently than in Manhattan.

He also wanted his T-shirts displayed by vendors near the Statue of Liberty ferry because tourists waiting for the ferry “are contemplating the narrative of freedom that the statue represents, and I want them to see something that confronts that narrative.”

On Thursday, he approached a vendor near the ferry terminal, Malik Asghal, 40, a Pakistani immigrant, who said he had already seen Mr. Gach's T-shirt displayed by other vendors. He refused a shirt from Mr. Gach, explaining that he would have to check with his boss before displaying it.

He asked Mr. Gach how the project was working, and Mr. Gach responded, “Tourists are asking what it's about, and that's already a mark of success, for me.”

When the Vice Presidency Was a Job for New Yorkers

By JAMES BARRON

If Virginia used to be the mother of presidents, as schoolchildren there were taught for generations, New York used to be the mother of vice presidents. But what happened in the 20th century? There has not been an elected vice president from New York in nearly 100 years: 99 years, 9 months and 29 days, to be exact.

Those decidedly New York-centric thoughts came to mind as the Republican National Convention prepared to make Mitt Romney's choice of a running mate official this week by nominating Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin.

New York has produced 11 vice presidents, and two figure in important footnotes: Nelson Rockefeller, a former governor of New York, was vice president for 25 months in the 1970s - but he was appointed, not elected. And in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro, a congresswoman from Queens, became the first woman to run for vice president. She and Walter Mondale, the Democrat ic nominee for president, lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide.

Here is another footnote: The last New Yorker before Ms. Ferraro to seek the office also lost big. That was William E. Miller, a congressman from upstate New York who was Barry Goldwater's running mate in 1964.

All those footnotes demand another: Ms. Ferraro was not the last New Yorker to run for vice president. Jack F. Kemp, a former congressman from western New York, ran on the Republican ticket headed by Senator Bob Dole in 1996.

Aside from Rockefeller, the last New Yorker who was actually a heartbeat away was James S. Sherman, elected vice president under William Howard Taft in 1909. But Sherman died in office, less than a month before the election of 1912. (Yet another footnote: If Taft had won the three-way race against Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, New York might have held onto the vice presidency. The Republican Party designated Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbi a University, as the candidate to receive Sherman's votes in the Electoral College.)

Has New York been in a kind of vice-presidential eclipse since then? Some historians say that as other states grew and political power shifted toward the south, New York's importance waned.

“In the 19th century, New York was especially attractive because upstate New York was the Silicon Valley of America,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University. “It was the heartland of industrial America. The great American companies were located along the tier where General Electric was, and Carrier and Kodak. And upstate New York was an incubator for Republican nominees in the 19th century. Teddy Roosevelt was the last vice president who was born and raised in New York City.”

And then there are those who wonder why anyone would want to be No. 2. In the beginning, vice presidents were candidates who wanted to be No. 1 but lost. The vice presidency w as, according to the vice-presidential historian Steve W. Tally, “a consolation prize” And the first New Yorker to win it was Aaron Burr, who lost to Thomas Jefferson in 1801.

David O. Stewart, in his biography of Burr, “American Emperor,” argued that Burr had too little to do as vice president. That may or may not explain why he went to Weehawken, N.J., one morning in the summer of 1804 and shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel that all but ended Burr's political career. (Burr's problems continued after he left office in 1805. He was tried for treason in 1807 but was acquitted.)

George Clinton, who had been a governor of New York, followed Burr as vice president. Clinton was the first vice president elected under the 12th Amendment, which separated the mandate for president and vice president. “The vice presidency became a second-rate office, something to which only second-rate men would aspire,” Mr. Tally wrote in “Bland Ambition: From Adams to Quayle ,” and he said that Clinton led the parade of mediocrity.

New York also gave the nation one vice president who was a drunkard with financial problems and another who, according to Mr. Tally, was so out of touch with the Gilded Age that he lacked “any conspicuous connections to the railroad robber barons.” Yet another New Yorker pounded the ceremonial first rivet into the Statue of Liberty. And Mr. Tally quotes Woodrow Wilson describing still another New York vice president, Chester A. Arthur, as “a nonentity with side-whiskers.” (The nonentity moved into the White House, side whiskers and all, after President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881.)

The New Yorkers who served as No. 2 all followed Clinton, who served during Jefferson's second term and again in James Madison's first term.

Clinton, according to the historians Evan Cornog and Richard Whelan, “had been one of the national leaders of opposition to the Constitution in 1788.” By the time Madison was elected 20 years later, Clinton had been on the political stage for so long, he felt he deserved high office. “Clinton didn't want elected officials,” Mr. Tally wrote. “As the most powerful man in the most powerful state of the original 13, Clinton hoped that New York would become its own country - and, of course, he would be king.”

When that did not happen, Mr. Tally wrote, “impending senility and failing health didn't mean that he should quit politics.” And so Clinton became vice president.

He did not like the job and was renominated even though he did not want to be, so he voted against renewing the Bank of the United States. “As a result of this final fit of pique,” Mr. Tally wrote, “the United States had no means to finance the War of 1812.”

Clinton did not live to see the rockets' red glare. He died in office before the war began. And the bank debacle contributed to the problems that engulfed the next New Yorker t o serve as vice president, Daniel D. Tompkins, the Scarsdale-born vice president under James Monroe. Tompkins had raised money for the war - some $4 million, by Mr. Tally's tally.

When bankers were reluctant to extend any more credit to the government, Tompkins guaranteed the loans himself. And when that was still not enough, Tompkins self-financed the war: “He mixed his own funds into the pot,” Mr. Tally wrote.

Monroe's “era of good feelings” was not that good for Tompkins. He was uncomfortable in Washington and was often preoccupied with straightening out his financial headaches. That, among other troubles, kept him in New York so much that some historians refer to him as an absentee vice president.

As for his money troubles, the State Assembly - led by Martin Van Buren, himself a future vice president - eventually approved what would now be called a reimbursement package. Tompkins said it was not enough. Congress eventually voted a more generous settlement. Tompkins got $95,000, equivalent to roughly $1.79 million in today's dollars.