Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out about the new Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, who will be installed less than a month after Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is inaugurated. We’ll also get details on a $50 million land deal to keep the city’s drinking water safe.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won’t be the only one who is new to a high-profile job in New York next year. Last week Pope Leo XIV named Bishop Ronald Hicks to be the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, a position with clout and influence far beyond St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
When Hicks — who grew up in Chicago and for the last five years has been the bishop of Joliet, Ill. — was introduced at a news conference, he said that he “always loved the energy of New York.” But his appointment seemed to signal that Rome wanted a different kind of energy in the city, which Pope John Paul II once called the “archbishop capital of the world.”
Even the first 40 or so words that Hicks spoke were notable: They were in Spanish.
“Central America formed him,” said David Gibson, the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. Hicks ran a home for orphaned and abandoned children in El Salvador from 2005 to 2010 after a decade in parish assignments and seminary leadership in the Chicago area, Gibson noted.
“He’s got big city experience, but he’s also got the migrant experience,” Gibson said. “Those are the two things that are key for the New York of today.”
Another appointment last week may have provided a more direct indication of the Vatican’s thinking under Pope Leo, particularly when some Catholic leaders have been critical of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. The day after announcing Hicks’s appointment, the pope named the Rev. Manuel de Jesús Rodríguez, of a predominantly Hispanic congregation in Corona, Queens, to be the bishop of the Florida diocese in which President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is located.
Hicks’s appointment seemed to be more in keeping with Pope Leo’s often disarmingly low-key approach. For New York, that would be a contrast from Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s style: The cardinal called for church leaders to become more politically involved, and he championed conservative causes. Mathew Schmalz, the founding editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism and a professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, said Dolan’s views reflected “a kind of Catholic traditionalism that resonates with many Catholics.”
“You can mourn Charlie Kirk’s loss, say it was wrong what happened to him, but you don’t have to describe him as a new St. Paul,” Schmalz said, referring to Dolan’s remarks on the Fox News program “Fox & Friends” after the conservative activist’s assassination in September.
Schmalz said he expected Hicks to “shift the gravity of the conversation” without saying “overly provocative things.”
But his impact may depend on how media-savvy he is, Schmalz said. “He’s going to have to get with the flow of the media in New York in the way in which Dolan did — and that’s going to be a challenge, I think.”
Younger but not the youngest
Hicks, 58, is eight months younger than Dolan was when he was appointed. But he won’t be the youngest archbishop in the last 100 years: Cardinal Terence Cooke was 47 when he was chosen in 1968. He was eight months older than John Lindsay, the mayor at the time.
The new archbishop was 24 when Mamdani was born.
“Hicks is older, obviously,” Gibson said. “But they have a shared agenda in a way that Dolan did not have with Eric Adams or Bill de Blasio. Affordability, economic justice and migrants, these are things that Hicks has really stressed and Mamdani has really stressed. There’s an opportunity there for collaboration.”
Weather
Expect a sunny day with temperatures near 39. Tonight will be mostly cloudy with a chance of snow and temperatures around 33.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Christmas).
The latest New York news
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Mamdani’s Broadway block party: After taking the formal oath of office on Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani will hold a public swearing-in ceremony at City Hall and a party along seven blocks of Broadway in Lower Manhattan.
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Is Mangione’s backpack admissible? Lawyers for Luigi Mangione, accused of killing a health care executive in Midtown Manhattan, have been sparring with prosecutors over whether items from the backpack he was carrying when he was arrested can be presented as evidence at his state trial. Justice Gregory Carro will decide.
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The perils of holiday markets: With millions of visitors every year, seasonal markets bring in a significant share of vendors’ yearly revenue. But the hours are long and cold, the booths are expensive, and the returns aren’t guaranteed.
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A hard-to-get dinner reservation: Eddy Cruz started a supper club called Nine26, serving Dominican cuisine to strangers in his South Bronx apartment. Now almost 4,500 people are on the waiting list.
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A frenzy over handbags: At an open-air market on the Upper West Side, shoppers vie for a chance to buy a handbag made by Francis Pierre Laborde, a designer in Harlem.
Buying land to keep water safe
The city just bought another 50 acres of land to keep its drinking water safe.
Officials say that creating a protective buffer around reservoirs is cheaper than spending billions on filtration systems.
The city has spent more than $636 million since the early 2000s to buy more than 125,000 acres of reservoir-adjacent land. The purchases kept the property around the 19 reservoirs, in mostly rural counties north of the city, from being developed.
The latest purchase was a 50-acre parcel in Westchester County for $12.5 million. The deal signaled a shift for the city agency that manages the reservoirs, the Department of Environmental Protection. It plans to refocus land investments away from the rural Catskills region — a mountainous area west of the Hudson River where six reservoirs provide 90 percent of the city’s drinking water.
Now the department will look to a more suburban zone east of the river, where one reservoir stores all of the Catskills water before it reaches the city.
The new acreage is an undeveloped hillside that empties into the Kensico Reservoir, an artificial lake that holds about a month’s worth of water from the Catskills. The new parcel will serve as a natural filter, making local surface water cleaner before it trickles in.
METROPOLITAN diary
Geometry regents
Dear Diary:
It was June 1966. I was 15 and on my way to school in Bensonhurst to take the Geometry Regents, the test I dreaded the most of all because it required rote memorization of several theorems. No deviation.
I was desperate to memorize these theorems, which I was supposed to have learned by then. First on the Seventh Avenue bus and then on the F train, I glued my eyes to my review book. I always did my most intense studying on the transit system.
About a half-hour after I settled into my subway seat, I looked up from my book. The car was empty, and the train was moving fast. Out the windows I saw nothing but darkness.
Panicked, I jumped up, screaming for help. I ran through the cars until I reached the conductor’s booth. I pounded on the door.
The conductor slid the door open, surprised and then annoyed.
“What are you doing on this train?” he asked. “Did you not hear the ‘everybody off’ announcement?”
“I was studying,” I said, starting to cry. “I’m taking the Geometry Regents in half an hour.”
The conductor, clearly unhappy, rubbed his eyes and announced over his walkie-talkie that he was turning the train around.
“Sit. Down,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, as the train rumbled in the other direction. “Thank you. Thank you.”
I made it to the test just in time and, in a reversal of bad luck, two of the three theorems I had focused on were on the exam. I got a 90.
— Marilyn Horan
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post A New Man in Town in the ‘Archbishop Capital of the World’ appeared first on New York Times.
