Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about an unusual way to honor a well-known personality. We’ll also take a closer look at one year of congestion pricing.
More than 2,000 streets in New York City have been given additional names to pay tribute to notable people. Today, a business improvement district in Manhattan will pay tribute to the television personality Andy Cohen in a different way, by naming a garbage can for him.
“We get that this is not a typical way to honor someone,” said Samara Karasyk, the president and chief executive of the Hudson Square Business Improvement District.
But she said that Cohen, the Bravo host and “Real Housewives” executive producer, had embraced the idea and had agreed to appear at a ribbon-cutting event this afternoon. Cohen has worked out of a building on Hudson Street for more than 15 years.
“Andy Cohen has a very tongue-in-cheek, snarky humor, like we do here at the business improvement district,” she said. “He understands the humor behind having a trash can on what we’re making Andy Cohen’s Corner.”
Why a trash can?
Business improvement districts like Karasyk’s — public-private partnerships that typically work with city agencies on projects like trash containers and tree pits — can’t just tack up signs to honor people or popularize their neighborhoods.
“There are very tight regulations around what you can put on any sort of physical piece of New York City property,” she said. Only the city can “co-name” streets, as it has done for actors (Humphrey Bogart Place), musicians (Bob Marley Boulevard) and local officials (David Dinkins Drive). Co-naming requires City Council approval and is usually done posthumously.
But B.I.D.s “do have the ability to use our Bigbelly trash containers for messaging and branding in the neighborhood,” she said. She and her staff did some brainstorming and approached Cohen about celebrating him at the corner of Hudson and Vandam Streets — and installing one of the few types of signage a B.I.D. can put up, a poster on a trash can.
“Really, we have very limited opportunities” to promote personalities associated with Hudson Square — and create a sense of place in a place that she said many refer to as “West SoHo” or “that neighborhood over there on the West Side.”
‘A very New York thing to do’
She acknowledged that “this” — a tribute with a garbage can — “doesn’t work in every neighborhood.”
“It’s a very New York thing to do,” she said. “I don’t think Andy Cohen’s a trashy guy. I think he’s got a great sense of humor, from everything I’ve watched.”
Not everyone sees Cohen that way. After Cohen co-hosted the New Year’s Eve show on CNN, during which he referred to Eric Adams’s time in City Hall as “chaotic” and “horrible,” Adams wrote on X that “he should seek help.” Apparently referring to the Trump administration’s decision to drop federal corruption charges against Adams, Cohen also said: “Great, you got your pardons.” Then he said: “Go off into the sunset. We’ll fiddle with what we have, with what you’ve left us with.”
Adams, on X, called it “another sloppy drunken rant.” (Cohen also bashed Bill de Blasio as he left office four years ago.)
Karasyk said her B.I.D., working with Six+One, a branding and advertising agency whose office is on Hudson Street, hatched the idea for Andy Cohen’s Corner before New Year’s Eve. As for the garbage can ribbon-cutting event this afternoon, Karasyk said that she planned to present Cohen with a key to Hudson Square — a key, she said, that “opens absolutely nothing.”
Weather
Today will be mostly cloudy with a high near 41. Rain is expected tonight with temperatures around 39.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended (Three Kings’ Day).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It is hard enough to live in New York City without having to worry all the time about whether you’re being ripped off,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said as he announced measures to combat junk fees and to make it easier to cancel gym memberships and subscriptions.
The latest New York news
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Nicolás Maduro pleaded not guilty: The Venezuelan president appeared in a Manhattan courtroom two days after he was seized by Army Delta Force commandos in Caracas and transported to the U.S. He pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism charges and called himself a “prisoner of war.”
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New online safeguards for minors: In her State of the State address, Gov. Kathy Hochul will propose new privacy standards that would automatically bar strangers from viewing, tagging or messaging minors online. The proposals come after numerous reports of children facing enticement and exploitation from adults on platforms like Roblox and Discord.
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He helped create the Off Off Broadway theater scene: Robert Heide, who began his career as a playwright and ended it granting interviews to historians and becoming part of countless anecdotes in books and articles about the cultural life of downtown Manhattan, died at 91.
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How do you think Mamdani should improve New York? The Times’s architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, distilled a potential to-do list of ideas about the cityscape, including doing away with free parking on the streets, building housing on public golf courses and repairing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway before it collapses. Now Michael wants to hear from you. Go here to give each possibility a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
One year of congestion pricing
It has now been 366 days since drivers began paying $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street during peak travel times, and there are now:
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Fewer vehicles entering the congestion zone — about 73,000 fewer a day, which added up to about 27 million in the first year.
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Faster speeds, and not just in the congestion zone. But “faster” is a relative term: The average speed in the zone was 8.5 miles per hour in November 2025, up from about 8.25 in November 2024.
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More passengers on public transit, and more money for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The agency is expected to net about $550 million for the year, $50 million more than it originally estimated.
All those figures come from a New York Times review of city and state data and outside research, along with feedback from more than 600 readers. You can read a full account of The Times’s analysis here.
The first anniversary of congestion pricing served as the occasion for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first appearance with Gov. Kathy Hochul since he took office. They were all smiles, which could signal a different relationship between City Hall and Albany from the one that prevailed under Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams. He never appeared alongside the governor to defend congestion pricing.
But my colleagues Stefanos Chen and Winnie Hu note that the new mayor and the governor stopped short of discussing the more difficult issues that could cause tension between the city and the state in the weeks to come, including Mamdani’s campaign promise to make buses free, an idea that Hochul has been reluctant to support. She controls the M.T.A., which runs the buses in the city as well as the subways, the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad.
METROPOLITAN diary
Low tones
Dear Diary:
After hauling my bass trombone halfway across 23rd Street and riding a standing-room-only Q all the way to Brooklyn, I let go a big exhale when the train emptied out. I was finally able to give my feet and back a thoroughly well-deserved rest.
As I sat there, I saw a cellist board the train and occupy the spot where I had been standing. As the train began to move, I noticed that a man and woman sitting across from me were amused by something in my vicinity.
Two men sitting next to them joined in, and it was soon clear that, for some reason, all four of them were laughing at me and the cellist.
I removed my headphones, readying myself for public embarrassment.
The woman leaned forward.
“We also play cello and trombone,” she said. “Go bass clef! Where are you all coming from?”
I said I had just come from orchestra rehearsal and proudly produced a flier for our upcoming Dvorak concert, thinking that perhaps these amateurs might like some serious orchestral fare.
Then the cellist asked where our new friends were coming from.
“Oh, we all play in ‘Hadestown,’” my trombone counterpart said.
— Phil Mayer
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 ‘Very New York’ Kind of Honor appeared first on New York Times.
