This weekend New Yorkers endured hours of high winds and heavy rains as Tropical Storm Irene crossed the islands and peninsulas that, it’s sometimes easy to forget, form this city. Serious stuff, though little along the lines that, as The New York Times colorfully put it this morning, “officials had once worried might turn turn Manhattan into Atlantis.”
Monday morning’s sunny skies bring Monday morning quarterbacking about whether the press—eager to raise public safety or narrative tension—hyped the weather’s threat. Gotham’s teeming media climate, goosed by America’s most, well, tabloidish tabloids, would seem to be well seeded for such hysteria.
So salutes are in order to the painter of these plywood window-coverings, spotted in Brooklyn’s low-lying Red Hook neighborhood, which pay tribute to one of the most memorable headlines in the city’s great tabloid history:
