Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at why this will be a weekend to love or to hate, depending on where you are going and how you plan to get there. We’ll also get details on a request to delay Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan.
If you love parades or you are a runner, this weekend is shaping up as one to enjoy. Two fairly sunny days with temperatures in the high 50s. Two days for marching, running or spectating.
If you have somewhere to go and plan to drive and the trip involves Manhattan, your experience will probably be different. You may find yourself snarling about snarled traffic.
Why? Because it is a weekend with what Sarah Kaufman, the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, called “a confluence.”
Tomorrow, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade starts up Fifth Avenue at 11 a.m.
On Sunday, the New York City Half Marathon will work its way from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Mile 11 of the 13.1-mile course starts in Times Square. Race officials say it will be the only time other than New Year’s Eve when Times Square is closed to traffic.
No wonder the “weekend traffic advisory,” the city Transportation Department’s list of streets that will be closed at times between now and Monday, is 16 pages long.
“This is a weekend to not even think of taking your car if you’re going to Manhattan,” said Samuel Schwartz, who was the city traffic commissioner in the 1980s and is now a consultant. “Stay on your own two feet or stay underground.”
He, of course, means walk or take the subway, which are often the fastest ways around the city anyway.
The detours this weekend may affect pedestrians and cyclists, too. More than 20 streets in Manhattan will be off limits to traffic on Saturday or Sunday while cranes do work at construction sites that cannot be done on a weekday.
The Transportation Department says that street closings, even those that are scheduled, happen at the Police Department’s discretion. The police said it would have “an adequate security overlay deployed” on Saturday and Sunday., but a spokesman for the department would not discuss specific arrangements.
St. Patrick’s Day Parade
It will take place a day before the holiday this year, as is the custom when March 17 is a Sunday. The organizers expect 150,000 marchers and two million spectators. State and local officials, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams, will take part.
Schwartz said the parade would complicate getting across Manhattan.
“It’s a block from Radio City and two blocks from the theater district,” Schwartz said. “The theaters have matinees going. People trying to get there from the east, driving from Brooklyn and Queens, will have to cross the parade unless Waze tells them to go around the horn, up the F.D.R. and down the West Side Highway, because there’s effectively a wall at Fifth Avenue. Occasionally the police let some traffic through, but it’s pretty hard going for anybody on the cross streets.”
NYC Half Marathon
Going “around the horn,” as Schwartz suggested — north on Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive from Lower Manhattan — will not be an option for several hours on Sunday. The F.D.R. will serve as the track for the runners in the half-marathon from the Manhattan Bridge to West 42nd Street, where they will make a left turn and head toward Times Square.
The race will begin on Washington Avenue near the Brooklyn Museum, with the first group scheduled to head out at 7 a.m. From there, participants will thread their way through Prospect Park on the way to Manhattan. After reaching Times Square, they will head north on Seventh Avenue, turn onto Central Park South and loop their way through Central Park. The finish line will be on the west side of the park, near Tavern on the Green.
There will also be the Times Square Kids Run, on a one-mile out-and-back course, beginning at 7:35 a.m.
The event organizer, the New York Road Runners, says the entrants will include Jacob Kiplimo, the Ugandan runner who won last year’s half-marathon in the men’s open division in 1 hour 1 minute 31 seconds, and Hellen Obiri, the Kenyan runner who set a record in the women’s open division last year by finishing in 1:07:21.
The Road Runners also said the field would include Tiki Barber, a former New York Giants running back, and two reality television figures, Andi Dorfman (from “The Bachelorette” in 2022) and Peter Weber (from “The Bachelor” in 2020).
And on Staten Island
Adams’s office announced last month that Staten Island, the city’s most conservative borough, would have two St. Patrick’s Day parades. The second, the Forest Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade, will begin at noon on Sunday and will be open to L.G.B.T.Q. groups. The other parade, the only one in the city that still does not allow L.G.B.T.Q. organizations to take part, was held on March 3. Adams, a Democrat, has boycotted the Staten Island parade in past years; a spokeswoman for the mayor said last month that he would attend the Forest Avenue event.
Weather
Prepare for a chance of showers, persisting through the evening, with temperatures in the mid-60s. At night, temperatures will drop to the high 40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 24 (Purim).
The latest Metro news
Manhattan prosecutors propose delaying Trump’s criminal trial
The prosecutors who accused Donald Trump of covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign proposed delaying the trial by as many as 30 days.
They were responding to Trump’s request for a 90-day delay. He wanted time for his lawyers go through records that the prosecutors, from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, only recently received from the federal prosecutors who had investigated the hush-money payment that the case revolves around.
The office of the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, had asked for the records more than a year ago. Bragg’s office said it expected to receive additional material next week.
Bragg said in a court filing that his prosecutors were prepared to begin the trial on March 25, as scheduled. But he said that they would not oppose a 30-day delay “out of an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials.”
Judge Juan Merchan, who would have to agree to postpone the trial, has made a point of pushing the case along. It is not clear how soon he might rule on a delay, and until he does it is uncertain how Trump’s other cases might be affected. A separate criminal case in Washington was supposed to go to trial this month but has been delayed while Trump’s lawyers appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Manhattan case arose from a $130,000 payment to the porn actress Stormy Daniels. Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, paid her to squelch her story of a sexual encounter with Trump. Prosecutors say that when Trump repaid Cohen, Trump’s family business falsely listed the reimbursements as “legal expenses,” thus withholding potentially damaging information from voters shortly before the election.
METROPOLITAN diary
Tangled up
Dear Diary:
I was walking past Zabar’s on a sunny spring day when I got tangled up in a small dog’s leash.
The owner apologized profusely, although she needn’t have worried. It only took a moment for me to free myself.
“What has happened to the Upper West Side?” the woman said, making small talk. “I haven’t been here in years. It’s so different than I remember it.”
“Oh,” I said, “where are you from?”
“The Upper East Side,” she said.
— Peggy Lamb
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
