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:
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
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. 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 nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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