Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll meet a bakery owner who has put pictures of Pope Leo XIV on cookies. We’ll also get details on a warning from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy about possible air travel delays as summer vacation season approaches.
Like everyone else, Maria Notaro had to wait. She had to wait for the white smoke. She had to wait for the announcement. Only then could she get to work.
She downloaded a photo of Pope Leo XIV waving from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where he had just been presented to the world. She ran it through a machine that transfers images onto icing for cakes and cookies. Then she and the bakers at her pastry shop in Queens put the first batch of portraits on top of squarish shortbread cookies.
Just like that, the edible pope.
The elevation last week of Leo, who was born Robert Francis Prevost and grew up in Chicago, has inspired merchandise makers across the U.S. A restaurant chain in the new pope’s hometown has added a sandwich named for him to its menu, and a bakery in Milwaukee has created cookies with a statuette — a figure holding an American flag, with a miter above its head. The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame Museum, also in Milwaukee, is selling dolls of Francis and Leo in white robes.
Leo is not the first pope to get the cookie treatment from Notaro, whose bakery, La Guli, has been in the same place in Astoria for 88 years, a few doors from the church she attends. She made cookies with an image of Pope Francis when he visited New York almost a decade ago. She said she considered Francis “special,” a pope who looked out for marginalized people.
On his trip to New York, Francis rode through Central Park in the Popemobile and visited a school in Harlem. But the appetite for Francis cookies faded after he returned to Rome, and Notaro made what she assumed would be her last batch.
Then, last year, Francis visited an Italian prison where he said he had been sad to learn that some inmates had taken their own lives. He urged inmates to “talk to God about our pain and help each other carry it.” He also implored “those who can take action in this area” to work “for the improvement of prison life.” (Francis demonstrated a concern for prisoners until the end. Less than a month after a 38-day hospitalization, he visited another prison on Holy Thursday and donated 200,000 euros, about $225,000, to prisoners, according to accounts that quoted the auxiliary bishop who runs the Vatican’s Office for Prison Care. Francis died four days later.)
In Queens, someone told Notaro about a Mass at Rikers Island that was being planned and asked if she would like to be involved. The location alone was a challenge, she said: “I never even wanted to drive by” the bridge to the troubled prison complex, roughly a mile and a half from the pastry shop. “It made me sad,” she added. “I don’t think everyone there is a criminal. Some people just made a mistake.”
But she thought about Francis and the example he had set. “He tried to rehabilitate people, giving people a second chance,” she said. “I said, ‘OK, maybe if it helps rehabilitate one person — just one — that would be something.” She handed out 100 cookies at the Mass. The Tablet, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brooklyn, reported that some inmates had “said the cookies were too beautiful to eat.”
But Notaro did more than pass out cookies. She said she had told the chaplain to pass the word that anyone who needed a job should “come look me up” after being released — “if they’re really serious about getting their life together.”
She made another batch of Francis cookies after he was hospitalized in February for respiratory infections and bronchitis that developed into bilateral pneumonia. Her brother lives in Rome, “but he couldn’t get close to the hospital,” she said. “So I figured, ship them. I don’t know whether they made it.”
Notaro said she was “shocked” that the new pope was an American. “Never in my lifetime,” she said, her voice trailing off.
“I was hoping for Cardinal Dolan,” she said a moment later, referring to Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, who was elevated by Pope Benedict XVI and attended the conclave that elected Francis in 2013.
She found Leo’s first public messages, which promised to continue Francis’ mission, and his call to “build bridges” reassuring. “As he said,” Notaro said, “we need to bridge everyone together.”
Weather
Expect sunny skies with a high in the mid-70s. In the evening, there will be rain with a low of 61 degrees.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day).
The latest metro news
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A career high: For years, Isaac Wright found that scaling bridges and buildings, and taking photos at the top, helped curb his PTSD. But the police thought he was a menace, not an artist, and at one point he faced decades behind bars. Now he has a gallery show in Manhattan.
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The house that healed an artist: A street artist had to depend on patrons to help him buy a 19th-century house in Esopus, N.Y. He had to depend on himself to restore it.
Transportation secretary warns of more flight disruptions
Will travelers have to cope with more headaches — more delays or canceled flights — during the summer travel season? Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned in a television interview yesterday that more U.S. airports might face disruptions.
Duffy’s warning comes as Newark Liberty International Airport is struggling with technological issues and staffing shortages. On April 28, dozens of flights had to be diverted after air traffic controllers lost communication with planes for roughly 30 seconds. Another brief break in radar communications early Friday delayed flights to and from Newark. And yesterday, another air traffic equipment problem led to a ground stop of about 45 minutes for arriving flights, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Duffy said that he wanted to reduce flights at Newark. He said he would meet with officials from major airlines on Wednesday to discuss scaling back schedules.
When asked whether it remained safe to fly out of Newark, Duffy said that “we are the safest airspace,” and added that he and his family regularly traveled through the airport.
Still, he said that the country and Congress had not paid enough attention to the “antiquated systems” at major airports. He described the issues at Newark as a consequence of “stress on an old network.”
“What you see in Newark is going to happen in other places across the country,” he said in the interview, on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “It has to be fixed.” He also said he was “concerned about the whole airspace.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Initiation
Dear Diary:
It was the early 2000s. I had been resisting my friends’ invitations to join them in a night of dancing at one of those only-in-New-York, late-night parties held in the kind of dark, crowded clubs that were tucked into quiet streets along the Hudson River at the time.
Intense, sweat-soaked group experiences like that didn’t appeal to me.
At some point, I gave in and spent six hours one night dancing as hard as I possibly could. It was magic. I had found my tribe.
As the early spring morning broke over Manhattan, seven of us left the club together, footsore, sweaty, exhilarated and exhausted, and then settled in for breakfast at a nearby diner.
I felt as if I had been initiated, let into the heavy rites of a secret fraternity. I was now one of those guys.
A world-wise waitress came to the table and scoped out the group.
“Oh, puppy!” she said. “Puppy! What happened to you? Did you get off the porch and play with the big dogs?”
I nodded.
“Don’t say a word,” she said. “I know just what you need.”
She took the other six orders and went to the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later, bringing me a mound of scrambled eggs, several strips of bacon, a toasted bagel and a big glass of cranberry juice.
It was best breakfast of my life.
— Gary Clinton
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions 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.
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.
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