Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll find out about a basketball-themed mural and a basketball-centric school in the Bronx that is moving into its new building. We’ll also get details on a profit-sharing deal that calls for the city to invest $30 million in a quantum technology lab run by New York University. The city would get 15 percent of the proceeds from projects developed there.
In the brand-new gym of a charter school in the Bronx that is all about basketball is a mural designed to look like — what else? — a basketball.
Basketball royalty will be on hand when the mural is unveiled this morning — the school is named for Earl Monroe and is dedicating the $39.5 million building it has just moved into. Another Knicks legend, former Senator Bill Bradley, is scheduled to speak. So is Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner.
But not everyone on the guest list knows as much about basketball as they do. The artist who created the mural, Viktoriya Basina, told me that she has never been to an N.B.A. game.
It turned out that basketball proficiency was not a prerequisite for the project.
The mural was intended to reinforce the school’s motto, “a ball and a book can change the world,” coined by Silver’s predecessor, David Stern. The school wanted to showcase the covers of more than 50 books by authors who are trustees, donors, advisers or people the school considers friends. Among them are former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the television producer Lorne Michaels, the designer David Rockwell, the shock jock Howard Stern and several former basketball stars, including Bradley, Patrick Ewing and Walt Frazier.
Basina said that the school had contacted Groundswell, a longtime community arts organization in Brooklyn, which recommended her. She said she thought the idea for a basketball-centric school was “interesting” and the motto was “clever,” and she went to work on what became one of her larger works. It is 22 feet wide and 16 feet high.
Books and reading figure in the school’s narrative. Since it opened in rented space in 2021, the school, the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School, has worked to raise the literacy rate among students in the Bronx.
The school says that about half of its first class of ninth graders were reading at or below fourth-grade level when they arrived. The school brought in reading specialists for one-on-one or one-on-two sessions. By last year, when the school handed out its first diplomas, all 89 graduates were on their way to college.
‘It’s a legacy that will be here when I’m gone’
Monroe told my colleague David Waldstein several months ago that there are other challenges for a school that draws 75 percent of its students from single-parent homes and that says 15 percent live in homeless shelters. The school says it has no more than 18 students in a class, with two teachers in almost every classroom.
“It’s not just a school,” Monroe said. “It’s a legacy that will be here when I’m gone, and hopefully serve enough people who go on to do great things.”
Dan Klores, who met Monroe while working on documentaries like “Black Magic” and “Basketball: A Love Story,” had the idea for the school more than a decade ago. He had set up the New Renaissance Basketball Association, a basketball-focused nonprofit for students in grades three to 11 that became known as the Rens. In its first few years, more than 250 Rens players won college scholarships.
That prompted Klores and Monroe to think about preparing students for what the school now calls “ecosystem professions of basketball off the court” — careers that revolve around basketball but don’t involve shooting, passing or scoring. That explains the school’s range of subjects, which include everything from fashion to food service, physical therapy and sportswriting.
“I think this school gives hope to a lot of people,” Bradley told me. “I think it’s certainly appropriate that Earl is the means to generating this hope. He was a model for so many kids when he was with the Knicks and a remarkable human being as a teammate — very gentle and very competitive. You put those two things together, it’s unique.”
Weather
Expect a sunny day with temperatures near 64. Rain is expected tonight with a low around 57.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Nov. 1 (All Saints’ Day).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I always said this would be based on financial considerations only, not politics — that’s still my position.” — Mark Levine, the New York City comptroller. During last year’s campaign, he promised to buy bonds from Israel. He now says the quality of the bonds has deteriorated amid the conflicts in the Middle East.
The latest New York news
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Banning horse-drawn carriages: Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin have agreed on legislation that would eliminate the use of horse-drawn carriages in Central Park by 2028. Pressure to ban the rides escalated this summer when an 18-year-old tourist from India died in a fall from a carriage.
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Cornell’s president acknowledges missteps: The president, Michael Kotlikoff, said he learned that a student had reported being gang-raped at a fraternity party on campus shortly after she came forward in 2024. But he did not follow up with her and did not know that she had dropped out of Cornell until she filed a lawsuit last month.
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Hochul and Blakeman debate: In the only televised debate in the race for governor, the Democrat, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and her Republican challenger, Bruce Blakeman, clashed over issues that included data centers and immigration. Here are five takeaways.
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A hiatus for Eloise: The Plaza Hotel will close for four years starting in January to allow for a restoration of its landmark facade. The hotel, which has had at least half a dozen owners over its 119 years — including Donald Trump, who took it into bankruptcy in the 1990s — was partly converted into condominiums in the early 2000s and now has 282 hotel rooms and 181 condos.
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What we’re watching: This weekend The New York Times is hosting a journalism movie series at the Metrograph, at 7 Ludlow Street. Tickets are available here, and there’s also a discount for Times subscribers who sign up for Metrograph memberships.
A profit-sharing deal for the city and N.Y.U.
The first deal to emerge from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s reimagined Economic Development Corporation calls for a $30 million city investment in a quantum technology lab run by New York University. The deal calls for profit-sharing: The city would get 15 percent of the proceeds from intellectual property developed there using tools that the city helped pay for.
It’s unusual for government to take an equity stake in the private sector. Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice, said the tactic had never been used at this scale in the city. The strategy is more traditionally associated with leftist governments, but last year the Trump administration claimed an option for a stake in Westinghouse, which builds nuclear reactors.
“It’s less a model of the current federal administration than it is a model of a lot of democratic socialist governments across the world that have a strong sense of what the government can do to build public goods that benefit people,” she said.
The 15 percent stake in the lab, QFab, is not a “magic number,” she said. The quantum technology industry is expected to be valued in the trillions of dollars, but she said that it was too early to forecast how much revenue the deal could add to the city budget.
The new lab, to be located at 770 Broadway, is expected to open in 2030. N.Y.U. leased space in the building last year and said it would assume the leases of the office tenants while it converted vacant floors to labs and classrooms. N.Y.U. said at the time that the Wegmans store would remain. The building dates to the early 20th century and was originally the annex to a department store, with a 1,300-seat auditorium that was used as a television studio starting in the 1940s.
METROPOLITAN diary
Knicks spring
Dear Diary:
The sun had finally come out on the last afternoon of the Memorial Day weekend.
We took advantage, setting up our volleyball net in a dry spot between puddles at McCarren Park.
After one particularly hard spike, the ball rolled in front of four men decked out in Knicks gear, presumably on their way to watch the game.
One picked up the ball and threw it back.
“Go Knicks!” he yelled.
“Knicks in four!” I yelled back.
And just like that, everyone around us in the park began to chant: “Knicks in four! Knicks in four!”
— Elliot Warner
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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The post Why Basketball Legends Are Coming to the Bronx appeared first on New York Times.
