Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll start the week with a lost-and-found story about a wedding ring valued at $7,700. We’ll also find out why some New Yorkers are warming to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to ban cars from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.
Things got messy for Molly Penn — who leads meetings to help leaders “make high-stakes decisions when the cost of indecision is too high,” as her LinkedIn page puts it — during a session for the nonprofit BronxWorks. It wasn’t the discussion that went wrong.
“The pen I was using to write with exploded in my hand and got ink all over me,” she said. “Black ink.”
She left her place at the front of the room where the meeting was being held and went looking for paper towels. She wiped off the ink and threw the towels into a garbage can in the back of the room, where there was a table with coffee and snacks.
Only later did she realize that she had thrown away more than the inky paper towels. Her wedding ring, valued at $7,700, had slipped off her finger and gone into the trash, too.
“I didn’t feel it come off,” she said.
The ring was an heirloom. It had been her mother’s; Penn had a jeweler remake it after her mother’s death. It had a sapphire in the center and diamonds around the gold band. Later in the day, when she noticed it wasn’t on her finger, she called BronxWorks. She also told her husband.
“He said, ‘Well, I guess we’re not married anymore,’” she said. ‘I said, ‘Oh, you don’t get out that easily.’ He laughed.” She said that he was “very understanding about the whole thing.”
In New York, it’s surprising how easily little things can disappear, and how many of them eventually turn up. Apartment building superintendents tell stories about fishing rings or bracelets from drains, but often the curved pipes under sinks help — they trap bling, preventing it from swimming on into a branch line, the building’s main drain pipe and into a sewer line. And harried airline passengers tell stories about forgetting to grab their keys and wallets when they collect their carry-ons from the bins that have just gone through airport security checkpoints, only to hear from a lost-and-found clerk later on.
Penn’s S.O.S. was relayed to the last person on the maintenance staff still in the building that evening — Obour Kwaku, a porter. “I got a call from the boss,” he said. The boss, Yusef Graves, recalled the urgency he conveyed to Kwaku: “I was like, ‘Listen, we’ve got to find this ring.’” He told Graves to start in the meeting room.
Graves said that Kwaku went there and saw that the trash was gone. Kwaku went outside, put on puncture-resistant gloves and started tearing open garbage bags — which, luckily, had not yet been picked up. Kwaku, who came to this country from Ghana in 2024, said he had worked in mines there, “so I know gold.”
“The moment you see things that are real good, you know,” he said.
Graves said that the building, the Jackson Avenue Family Residences, generates a lot of trash every day: Some 95 families live there, about 300 people. In a year and a half as a porter, Kwaku had painted units when one family moves out and another is about to move in, and he had assembled furniture. But he had never been assigned to go through the trash.
“You could have somebody that could say, ‘Hey, no, I didn’t find it,’ but they did find it,” Graves said. He expected Kwaku to resist the temptation, but it was there. “This wasn’t like some shabby ring, you know — a very nice, expensive ring,” Graves said, “so you’ve got to factor that in.”
Kwaku spotted the ring amid food, discarded paper and “a lot of coffee”; he turned it over to Graves, who locked it in a safe until Penn could pick it up. She said she sent Kwaku a box of brownies. “I thought about sending money, but it just felt crude,” she said. He said that BronxWorks gave him a gift card for $100 — and a new uniform.
“He definitely gets a good evaluation,” Graves said, before noting that all the porters at BronxWorks earn the same salary. “A raise, that’s a hard sell.”
Weather
Today, expect sunny skies with a chance of showers and temperatures near 53. Tonight, there will be clear skies and temperatures will drop near 36.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“He’s just not the same person.” — Alex Johnson, referring to Donald Trump. Johnson, who leads the Syracuse University chapter of College Republicans, once enthusiastically attended rallies for Trump. Now he is not happy about the conflict in Iran — or the president.
The latest New York news
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International manhunt: The F.B.I. is searching for a youth volleyball coach who the agency says used a series of jobs at various organizations across the New York City area to engage in sexual conduct with teenagers.
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Property tax proposal takes shape: As state leaders debate how much owners of high-priced pieds-à-terre in New York City should pay, they are also wrestling with how to handle limited liability companies and trusts that can mask ownership.
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The Martha Graham Dance Company at 100: Stars and luminaries honored the dance company’s anniversary with dinner, performances and a champagne toast at the New York Public Library.
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A New York character of cinematic scale: Paul Waldman, who abandoned bodybuilding to become an artist and later founded the International Bird Museum, on which he served as “chairman of the nest,” died at 89.
Neighbors consider the mayor’s plan to redesign Grand Army Plaza
Last week Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a plan to turn a stretch of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn into a pedestrian zone, banning cars from the road that separates the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch from Prospect Park.
What do people who go to the weekend farmers’ market there think about the changes?
Michael Eikim, who has lived in an apartment overlooking the plaza for 34 of his 93 years, said that traffic was like the “Wild West” in 1992, when he moved in. He said that he had been following “the extensive discussions from people in my building about the new plan and what it would do.” While he was apprehensive, he said, he was also optimistic.
Zara Kerr, selling pastries, said the plan might make expansion of the market possible. The market has been crammed into a small area in front of the entrance to Prospect Park.
Kerr said the changes “would bring more foot traffic.” But she also said that the plan would have to give the vendors’ trucks access to the market — a point echoed by Aida Marquez-Romero, who runs a food truck selling tamales and empanadas outside the nearby Brooklyn Public Library. She worried about not being able to get her truck through the new pedestrian area.
That matters, she said, because the market generates about 60 percent of her total sales.
METROPOLITAN diary
Where to?
Dear Diary:
In 1974, I was working for a company in Boston that was bought by a company in New York City, and I was asked to relocate. I was a young suburbanite and scared of big cities at the time, so I said no.
A year later, the Boston office closed and I was again asked to move to New York, and again I said no.
But I agreed to go there as a temporary assignment, with the company paying for my hotel, flights home on the weekends and other expenses. When I said I was afraid to walk the city’s streets, they agreed to pay for taxis to and from the office.
I stayed at the Bedford Hotel, on 40th Street between Park and Lexington. On the first day, I left work and got into a cab.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Foughtieth and Pahk,” I said in my thick Boston accent. He didn’t understand me.
Second day, same problem.
On the third day, I asked a colleague from the Bronx to coach me on how to say it with a New York accent.
“Say fortieth and pork,” he said. “Fortieth and pork.”
I tried it that day.
“Where to?” the driver asked when I got into his cab.
“Fortieth and pork,” I replied.
“Where?” the driver said.
“Fortieth and pork,” I repeated.
“Where?”
Finally, I gave up.
“Thirty-ninth and Lex,” I said.
Fifty years later, I’m still in New York.
— Jan Firstenberg
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.
Hannah Fidelman 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 Lost and Found in the Garbage: An Heirloom Wedding Ring appeared first on New York Times.
