Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out why some of the markers commemorating ticker tape parades have been removed. We’ll also get details on fallout from the release of the Epstein files.
More than a dozen of the 200 markers in the sidewalk on Lower Broadway have been removed. One celebrated the dedication of the Statue of Liberty — and the city’s first ticker tape parade, in 1886.
Another commemorated a round-the-world flight by the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes in 1938. Yet another celebrated the brand-new New York Mets, who had already lost their first game in that dreadful first season. Still another marker carried the name of Pierre Laval, a former prime minister of France.
All but the Laval marker were casualties of the recent snowstorm.
The pavement shifted and became uneven as it froze, thawed a bit and froze again, said Andrew Breslau of the Alliance for Downtown New York, the nonprofit that manages the business improvement district south of Chambers Street and began installing the markers in 2004. The storm “really did a number on sidewalks,” he said. The concern was that people could stumble and fall, and the group removed the markers.
The Laval marker was taken out in November. It had become a “tripping hazard” where the pavement had popped up, Breslau said. Three others were taken away in 2025 because of sidewalk problems or construction. And a check last week found 25 more in places where the snowstorm had done damage.
The alliance plans to put them all back eventually.
Menachem Rosensaft, the general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, contends that the marker for Laval should not be among them. He says a second marker should also be removed — the one for another former French leader, Henri Philippe Pétain, who was widely considered France’s greatest military hero after World War I.
The city gave them ticker tape parades in October 1931, and Time magazine named Laval its Man of the Year for his handling of the French economy as the Depression deepened. But history does not see Pétain or Laval as heroes anymore. In World War II, they led the Vichy government, which collaborated with Nazi Germany to send more than 75,000 Jews to their deaths.
Removing the markers has come up before. In 2017, after violence over the removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville, Va., Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote on Twitter that “the commemoration for Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain in the Canyon of Heroes will be one of the first we remove.”
De Blasio appointed a commission to conduct a review of all “symbols of hate” in parks and on streets to see which should be eliminated. The panel eventually called for relocating only one statue. At the time, there were suggestions that plaques could be placed near monuments with complicated histories to provide context.
“It’s one thing to contextualize Charles Lindbergh, who was an antisemite and pro-Nazi and part of the America First movement of the 1930s,” Rosensaft told me. Lindbergh had been given a parade after his trans-Atlantic flight in 1927.
“Pétain and Laval are in another category altogether,” Rosensaft said. “They are convicted war criminals who were responsible for the deportation and murder of Jews during the Holocaust. That’s a difference.”
The alliance says the markers in the sidewalk are a record of the ticker tape parades. Breslau said some of them honored people with “deeply divisive legacies,” including Fascist Italian leaders (Dino Grandi, the minister of foreign affairs, was given a parade a month after the ones for Pétain and Laval) and the Shah of Iran (who was given a parade in 1949).
“Trying to render history free of mistakes, free of contradictions and horror, risks sanitizing our past and perhaps makes us more likely to repeat those mistakes,” Breslau said.
“We don’t want to belittle the gravity of the horrors that Pétain and Laval and Italian Fascists and the Shah of Iran were party to,” he added. “There is no equivalent to the Holocaust. Pétain and Laval stand out as being handmaidens to the Holocaust, but the Western world lionized them for a time.”
Yes, but they were murderers, Rosensaft countered when I spoke with him. “I understand the concerns about the historical integrity of the ticker tape parades,” he said, “but there is also moral integrity.”
Weather
Today will be sunny, with a high near 30. Tonight, expect partly cloudy conditions and temperatures around 16.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended for snow removal.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I’m not a protester, but I am insistent on the First Amendment. That is the bedrock of our democracy, and without the First Amendment nothing else stands.” — The former CNN anchor Don Lemon, addressing an audience in Manhattan about his arrest after he covered a protest in a Minnesota church last week.
The latest New York news
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Complaints about a child-care center: New York City health officials have moved to shut down a Bright Horizons Child Care center in Manhattan where workers were charged with child abuse. Bright Horizons, which has more than 30 centers in the city, faced nearly four dozen complaints from July 2024 to July 2025.
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The first all-female major-party ticket in New York State: Gov. Kathy Hochul chose Adrienne Adams, the former speaker of the New York City Council, as her running mate in Hochul’s campaign for a second term.
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A new mission for a pro-business agency: Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to remake the powerful Economic Development Corporation — which helped build the High Line project and the new Yankee Stadium — to address affordability and workers’ rights.
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A routine drug bust turned deadly: In a Bronx courtroom, detectives and other witnesses have described how an undercover drug operation in 2023 led to the death of a 30-year-old Uber delivery man and the criminal trial of a police sergeant. A verdict is expected later this week.
Fallout from the Epstein files
Messages in the latest release of Epstein files showed that Jeffrey Epstein helped connect Woody Allen’s daughter with the president of the college she was applying to. And the former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, who exchanged more than 60 emails with Epstein, resigned from his post at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
Allen’s daughter and her college application
Epstein connected Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, with the president of Bard College. Epstein and the president of Bard, Leon Botstein, were longtime acquaintances, and Botstein agreed to help coordinate a visit. The couple’s daughter Bechet Allen ended up attending Bard and graduated in 2021, according to her LinkedIn account.
“I can’t thank you enough for getting Bechet into Bard,” a message to Epstein dated Jan. 11, 2017, said. The message was sent from Allen’s account but appeared to have been written by Previn because it mentioned Allen: “Woody said when Bechet sets fire to the school they’ll have you to thank.”
The email also indicated that Bechet Allen did not know that her parents had interceded.
The former director of the Whitney
In one exchange in 2009, Epstein told the former director of the Whitney, David Ross, that he was considering funding an art exhibition that would showcase underage models dressed to look older than they were. The tentative title was “Statutory.”
In response to the idea, Ross told Epstein, “You are incredible.”
Ross said in a statement to The New York Times that he regretted having been “taken in” by Epstein’s story. He said he had been introduced to Epstein when he was director of the Whitney in the mid-90s.
He said that he had sent Epstein an email in 2008, after Epstein had been arrested and jailed on solicitation charges in Florida, “to find out what the story was because this did not seem like the person I thought I knew.” Ross said he had also emailed Epstein when he was released from jail. “He told me that he had been the subject of a political frame-up because of his support of former President Clinton,” Ross wrote. “At the time, I believed he was telling me the truth.”
METROPOLITAN diary
At the movies
Dear Diary:
My friend Lyndie and I went to see “Hamnet” on the Upper West Side. After finding our seats, I went to get popcorn.
When I returned with a large container, Lyndie said she wouldn’t be having any.
Wow, I said, all this for me?
Suddenly, the woman sitting next to me reached over and held out a small plastic cup she had pulled from her purse. She looked at me with a sweet expression, and I understood that she wanted me to share.
I dug the cup into the container and handed her a scoop of popcorn. A few minutes later, I did it again.
— Michael Zorek
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.
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 Should Nazi Sympathizers Be Honored on City Sidewalks? appeared first on New York Times.
