Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a “food tour” celebrating the end of the MetroCard. We’ll also get details on a City Council measure that would help street vendors get on the right side of the law.
I have eaten my last MetroCard.
It was blue and yellow, with a dark horizontal stripe across the bottom and little white arrows indicating which way to slide it into the card reader at a turnstile in the subway or the farebox on a bus.
It tasted sugary and vaguely vanilla-y, like cake frosting, and not at all plastic-y.
It was a cookie. I bought it at Zabar’s, the Upper West Side specialty grocery store.
It is part of a celebration of the MetroCard’s demise. A demise doesn’t sound like something to celebrate, but to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, it is. An exhibition called “FAREwell, MetroCard” opened on Wednesday at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. And the M.T.A. worked with Zabar’s and five other food vendors to memorialize the MetroCard in a “food tour” with items like:
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The “M Tea A Drink” — get it? — at Gong Cha bubble tea shops. It’s made with green tea, Tapioca pearls, blue milk foam made with butterfly pea powder and chocolate powder for something approximating the M.T.A. logo.
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The MetroCard Flying Saucer at some Carvel shops. It has blue and yellow sprinkles in the soft-serve ice cream between the chocolate-flavored wafers. Brogan Davis, a spokesman for Carvel, said customers have enjoyed the “nostalgic, end-of-an-era vibes,” and the MetroCard Flying Saucers sometimes sell out. That was the case the first time I went to the Carvel shop on West 48th Street.
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The Metro, a pizza at the two Stitch Pizza shops in Manhattan. It might outlive the MetroCard: “It’s something we might end up keeping on the menu for longer than we anticipated,” Julia Goldish, a spokeswoman for Stitch Pizza, said.
The real MetroCard is facing retirement: Dec. 31 is its last day on sale, although the M.T.A. says you will still be able to use a MetroCard for a while in 2026. It has not said when the cutoff will come. But more than 90 percent of us are no longer swiping. We are tapping, according to the M.T.A.
Don Mawsey, who posts on TikTok, did the full food tour, visiting six places — I made it to only five — but Zabar’s didn’t have MetroCard cookies when he went by.
Stretch Pizza’s Metro is made with vodka sauce. Goldish told me that she loved “the little dollops of garlic pesto cream on top.”
When did she give up her MetroCard? Never, she said, explaining that she started with OMNY when she moved to New York two years ago: “I said farewell to the MetroCard without being a loyal user.”
Weather
Expect a rainy day with possible thunderstorms and temperatures around 42. Tonight will be partly cloudy with a low around 29. Wind advisory in effect.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Christmas).
The latest New York news
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Subway crime is down, Hochul says: Rebutting White House officials who disparage the subway as crime-ridden, Gov. Kathy Hochul said 2025 has been one of the system’s safest years, with major crime at its lowest level since 2009.
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U.S. accuses a Venezuelan of masterminding Tren de Aragua’s expansion: Federal prosecutors charged the reputed leader of the Venezuelan gang, a Trump administration nemesis, in a racketeering indictment. The defendant, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, is accused of orchestrating the group’s transformation into a global criminal organization. He remains at large.
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Can’t afford food, ineligible for benefits: The high cost of living has affected people far above the federal poverty line, according to a study by Columbia University and the anti-poverty group Robin Hood. Among them are the “missing middle” — people with full-time jobs who make too much to be eligible for food stamps, but not enough to afford groceries.
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Can Mamdani keep his promise of affordable housing? Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s team and allies are trying to stop the City Council from passing a series of bills that could make it more difficult to build 200,000 affordable homes.
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Mamdani appointee resigns: Catherine Almonte Da Costa, whom the mayor-elect had chosen to be the director of appointments, resigned after the Anti-Defamation League resurfaced antisemitic posts on social media that date to her teenage years.
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A community safety agency is proposed: Advancing a key element of Mamdani’s agenda, the City Council introduced a bill to create a Department of Community Safety. It would deploy mental health teams to respond to 911 calls.
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Who will oversee the city budget: Mamdani chose Sherif Soliman, the chief financial officer of the City University of New York, to lead the city’s Office of Management and Budget, with responsibility for a budget of more than $115 billion.
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A hotel-to-housing conversion: A Hilton Hotel near Kennedy Airport has been converted into affordable housing, with more than half of the units reserved for homeless families. Those who have been in shelters the longest get priority.
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A mysterious church and its antiques stores: Olde Good Things, with several antiques stores in New York, is operated by the Church of Bible Understanding. Much of its inventory, like a $120,000 chandelier from the Waldorf or a $340 sink from a Staten Island Ferry, comes from salvaging architectural treasures.
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What we’re watching: On “New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” Alissa Wilkinson, a New York Times film critic, reviews the year in movies, and Bill McDonald, the obituaries editor, looks at the lives of people who died in 2025. The program is broadcast on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
The City Council moves to give more permits to street vendors
The City Council approved a bill to help get street vendors on the right side of the law.
The measure lifted caps on permits and licenses that have kept vendors from getting the authorization they need to operate legally. Without the permits, they risk fines and run-ins with the police and the immigration authorities. The Immigration Research Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank, says that 75 percent of food vendors don’t have permits and 37 percent of merchandise sellers are unlicensed.
The measure would make 17,000 permits available for food vendors, roughly two and a half times the number available now, according to the Street Vendor Project, an advocacy group. Some 11,000 licenses for general vendors would be available by 2027, more than 12 times the 853 that exist now under a cap that has been in place for 46 years.
That bill and two others passed by the Council are the latest effort to reform a permitting system that has changed little as the number of vendors has grown. The Council also passed legislation in September to decriminalize vending without a license, making vendors subject only to fines rather than misdemeanor penalties.
METROPOLITAN diary
Sidewalk Snippet
Dear Diary:
It was a sunny fall afternoon, and I was walking up Eighth Avenue when I passed a flower stand opposite Abingdon Square.
Two women were talking on the sidewalk. One reached into a large white bucket. The other stopped her.
“You don’t want eucalyptus,” she said. “It is so overdone.”
— N. Scott Johnson
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 Monday. — 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 The MetroCard Cookie. The Pizza. The Carvel Treat. appeared first on New York Times.
