Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about urban neighbors you may think are spooky and scary. We’ll also get details on recommendations by a city commission on government efficiency that is not to be confused with the Elon Musk-led federal Department of Government Efficiency.
Some days you probably think that New Yorkers live to complain about living here. There’s the rent. The tortured, tortuous commute. The price of a bagel. The price of everything else. But some inhabitants — an increasing number, it seems — like it here. They don’t have to worry about paying for housing or food. And if they complain, we’ll never know. I’m talking about bats. They flit about up there somewhere, below where the jets, the helicopters and even the drones fly. Nine species of bats call Central Park home, and last year the Bronx Zoo reopened an exhibit that features vampire bats that are fed beef blood for breakfast. Bats are as busy in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn in late summer as in the rural Adirondacks. They ping their sonar off us, which is impressive, and they (or some of their relatives) can jam each other’s frequencies when they’re hungry, with the jammer seizing the advantage and getting the best meal. They have been eating spotted lanternflies since those pests were first observed in 2018. But as one commenter wrote on Facebook after The New York Times published this article last week, “Bats have received a bad rep from the ignorant and very bad Class B movies.” So here’s to the bats. It turns out that the city is something of a safe haven for them. My colleague Lauren Rosenfield writes that bats in urban areas appear to be less affected by a deadly disease called white-nose syndrome, which decimated bat populations in the Northeast beginning in the early 2000s. Still, finding a comfortable home in the city is a challenge for bats, just as it is for humans. So is finding food amid the city’s glass and steel towers. Bats have been recorded feeding on green roofs, like the one at the Javits Center, and in smaller green spaces like Madison Square Park. “Bats who have to go through urban areas of migration are more strategic than we give them credit for,” said Nic Comparato, a Rutgers University doctoral student who specializes in bats and bioacoustics, which involves studying how the bats transmit and receive sounds. The bats are “like chess players” with different moves to survive in different parts of the city, Comparato said. Not everything about bats is lovable, of course. They can carry rabies, though the State Department of Health says that most bats are healthy. Between 2014 and 2023, only slightly more than 3 percent of the bats sent for rabies testing in the state tested positive. But you can’t tell whether a bat is rabid by looking at it. The agency’s advice? Stay away from bats. Don’t handle them. But their presence can tell us something about where we live, according to Nancy Simmons, a bat zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History who has spent most of her career studying hundreds of bat species. The fact that bats coexist in the city means that “if suddenly tomorrow they’re all gone, that should be a wake-up call that something has changed, and it could be bad for people as well as for bats,” she said. For now, the bat population seems to be going up, not down. It’s possible that warmer temperatures in the Northeast may soon lead to a new resident bat species. In a study published last month in the journal American Museum Novitates, Angelo Soto-Centeno, an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, found subtropical Brazilian free-tailed bats in New Jersey. That’s the farthest north they’ve been seen on the East Coast. Apparently there’s no stopping them: Soto-Centeno said it was probably only a matter of time before that species crosses the Hudson River and finds a place in the city. WEATHER The day will start out cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms before becoming sunny, with a high around 85. Tonight will be partly cloudy, with a low around 65. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Thursday (Tisha B’Av). QUOTE OF THE DAY “Here, there’s nothing you can do but pray.” — Alain Denneulin, owner of the French bistro Felix in SoHo, on dealing with flooding from storms that are stronger and more frequent because of climate change. The latest Metro news
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The preliminary staff recommendations are in from the city commission with the deliberately mischievous name — the Commission on Government Efficiency. Its acronym rhymes with the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, which was led by Elon Musk and fell short of its promise of finding $1 trillion in savings. My colleague Emma Goldberg writes that the recommendations included cutting the city’s outdoor dining application process to four months, from eight; fast-tracking the creation of new bike and bus lanes; and speeding the contracting process for nonprofits. The changes, if approved by the commission, will appear on the ballot in November. For some of Mamdani’s critics, the commission is an encouraging sign of his approach to democratic socialist governance, which has emphasized making the public sector run more smoothly and effectively, and more like the private sector. Mamdani has promoted the idea in public appearances. Last week he climbed into a go-kart to draw attention to a push to make municipal technology run faster. The commission held seven public hearings and heard from 178 speakers. It received another 345 written submissions, along with recommendations from 92 city agencies. Patrick Gaspard, who chaired the commission, recalled being moved by testimony from a homeless woman and her child, who talked about forms that had to be refiled and information that got lost when agencies didn’t communicate with one another. METROPOLITAN DIARY On the radio
Dear Diary: My first time in New York City was in 1993, a life-changing year for me. I was from Atlanta and had real pride in my home town. But the saying “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere” has always been a thing, and at that point in my life I wanted to make it. I was 17, still in high school and part of a girl group called Xscape. We were starting our careers, excited to see the world, excited to have hit records. To get those hit records, we were told we had to be accepted in New York City. Jermaine Dupri had signed us to his label; our first single, “Just Kickin’ It,” was being released; and the label had decided that we should go to New York first to promote it. As a group, LaTocha, Tamika, Tiny and I were excited to make the trip. I knew nothing about New York except what I had seen in movies and on TV. The thing that stood out to me was the Manhattan traffic. So many cars, so many taxis, so many bike riders. And nobody cared about lanes. The four of us were split between two cars. As we were riding, the radio was set to Hot 97, I believe, one of the hottest radio stations in the country at the time. “Just Kickin’ It” came on. We screamed and had the two cars ride side-by-side with the windows down so we could scream to one another to make sure we all heard the song playing. It was our first time hearing our song on the radio, and it happened in New York City before our hometown stations even started playing it. It was like being welcomed with a warm hug. — Kandi Burruss Ms. Burruss, who appeared on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” is a singer, songwriter and actor. Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
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