Happy Tuesday in a dispensary-dotted and marijuana-friendly New York City, where thousands are still recovering from yesterday’s 4/20-themed festivities.
April 20 — the high holy day for marijuana culture — has expanded over the decades from an inside joke among a small group of San Francisco stoners to a quasi-national holiday celebrated by young and old alike. It’s almost impossible to miss in the streets of NYC, where the clouds of skunk-scented smoke can flow uninterrupted for a mile or more.
Over the last few years, crowds of pot smokers descended upon certain Manhattan parks on 4/20, where thousands may gather at a time to share joints and good vibes. This year, the NYPD made a concerted effort to contain them.
In Washington Square Park, NYPD officers set up a police barricade around the park’s perimeter — shutting off all but one entrance — and searched everyone’s bags as they entered. Unlicensed vendors and artists, year-round staples around the Washington Square Arch, were told to pack it up. One vendor, Lou Olmeda, was even forbidden from distributing water bottles.
To some of the celebrants, this year’s draconian measures were an act of retribution. “This is payback. You know what this is for, all the checking the bags and all of that, because the cops getting hit in the head with snowballs,” Olmeda told Gothamist, referring to an incident in February when police officers were pelted with snowballs during a blizzard.
Officers proved not so successful at Tompkins Square Park. Police rolled in around 2:00 p.m. to contain the growing crowd, many of whom had come from Washington Square Park, but the response was too little too late.
“You might be able to stop vending, but people are going to show up to smoke,” another vendor told Hell Gate. “People can’t be stopped from doing that on 4/20. This is a global event.”
Ultimately, the only thing officers achieved at Thompkins Square Park was a pretty sick contact high.
The City Council’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism holds its first meeting, “Reporting on Antisemitic Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents in New York City,” this Wednesday at noon.
A former Polly-O string cheese heir filed a lawsuit in Brooklyn federal court demanding $1.5 billion from three major food companies, claiming his family was never compensated for the branding rights.
Senior Olivia Conne-Perkins of Brooklyn’s Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts was accepted into Brown University — the first Ivy League admission in the campus’s short history.
Late mob boss John Gotti’s reality-TV-star grandson was sentenced Monday to 15 months in prison for pocketing $1.1 million in loans from a federal program meant to help small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
New York City sues a Brooklyn landlord for allegedly running a fraudulent Airbnb scheme worth $1.3 million across two Brooklyn addresses.
Our World In Photos
Photo: Hussein Malla/AP
BEIRUT — Colorful umbrella and smile belie war zone conditions: A girl passes in front of a destroyed building, following a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Monday, April 20, 2026.
For more pictures like this, see Our World in Photos.
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Surviving climate change by listening to nature: Landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson’s vision for Brooklyn
Eric Sanderson’s forthcoming book, “Before New York,” explores the rich landscape of Brooklyn before colonization. Photo: John McCarten/Brooklyn Eagle.
To look toward New York City’s future, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson argues, you first have to look back. “Eric Sanderson on Brooklyn’s Lost and Future Waterfront,” a free event that packed the Center for Brooklyn History, took place on Thursday, April 16.
Sanderson took the rapt audience on a journey back through 500 million years of the city’s ecological history. He paused in 1609, just before European colonizers began to develop what would become New York City, a landscape he reconstructed for his new book, “Before New York: The Natural Geography of the City.” The book will come out this fall.
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Cartoon Sketchbook
By John Darkow
For the Road
Make room: Clad only in her signature corsetry that binds the flesh, Michaela Stark stood in the midst of a circle as the cameras captured all angles of her body, simultaneously — part of an intricate process known as photogrammetry. The goal: to scan her body and build a mannequin — three, actually — for display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mannequins, and others based on real-life models like Stark, will be featured in “Costume Art,” the upcoming spring exhibit at the museum’s Costume Institute, launched by the Met Gala. It’s part of an effort
to add an element of body positivity to a show that examines the dressed body in art over the centuries, says curator Andrew Bolton. Learn more about how diverse body shapes and sizes were included in this year’s exhibition.
Happy Birthday to “Taxi” star Tony Danza, who was born in Brooklyn in 1951!
On This Day in 1926, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “The Duke and Duchess of York are the proud possessors of a girl baby. The little Princess made her advent into the world at 2:40 o’clock this morning in the childhood bedroom of the Duchess in the town house of her father, the Earl of Strathmore. […] A message also was telegraphed to the Prince of Wales, who is on the Continent. He is the eldest uncle of the little Princess and has high regard for the Duchess, whom he calls ‘Queen Elizabeth.’”
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