It’s started raining, and it’s not about to stop until Monday—Brooklyn is Portland!—thanks to the arrival of Hurricane Irene off the East Coast. Hopefully, like Tuesday’s Earthquake, New York won’t be getting it too bad, but just in case, the Bloomberg administration has been preparing the city for possible problems, the greatest of which would be flooding. The mayor’s office just released a map of hurricane zones, to keep New Yorkers aware of where things could be bad.

Not surprisingly, Battery Park City, the Lower East Side, Redhook and Coney Island are all flashpoints, but so too are large swathes of Staten Island and the Upper East Side. The mayor took time out to put the city’s mind at ease with a few jokes in today’s announcement of the preparations: Read More