Sunday, August 9, 2026 · No. 7
Good morning, Yorkville. A note before the news: our last three editions went out as raw wire feeds with no editor's pass on them — a scheduling failure on our end, not a change in what this paper is. It's fixed, and the explanation is at the bottom. Today we catch up on the week you should have gotten: a Third Avenue dig past its deadline, the city saying the money for Upper East Side flood protection is gone, a long-running Lenox Hill boutique closing, and the mayor turning up for Sri Lankan food.
The Lead
A Third Avenue dig past its deadline
A years-long street construction project along Third Avenue has neighbors and nearby workers worn down, and the immediate holdup is a single new manhole that has sat unfinished for months. Per Upper East Site, the city agency running the job is waiting on Con Edison to deal with underground electrical infrastructure, and the utility has blown past an earlier projected completion date; the report gives no new one. Third Avenue is our western border, and we're still pinning down which blocks the work covers.
via Upper East Site · Aug 8
Around the Neighborhood
City says there's no money left for Upper East Side flood protection
The city's Economic Development Corporation says it no longer has the funds to protect a portion of the Upper East Side from flooding — a claim that lands after roughly $200 million went into a Midtown East waterfront walkway which, per Upper East Site, does not itself protect against coastal flooding or rising seas. Our eastern edge is the river; this is the budget line to watch.
via Upper East Site · Aug 7
Openings & Closings
Pesca Boutique is closing after decades in Lenox Hill
The swimwear boutique at 244 East 60th Street — a mother-and-daughter shop known for fitting customers in person — is winding down with a final blowout sale. Upper East Site puts the run at 55 years; Pesca's own website dates the shop to 1979 and describes over 47 years in business, so we're giving the founding year rather than the round number. The shop sits nearly twenty blocks below our southern line, but it's the kind of long-run family business the East Side keeps shedding.
via Upper East Site · Aug 8
Talk of the Neighborhood
The mayor turned up for Sri Lankan in Lenox Hill
Mayor Zohran Mamdani ate at Lungi, the South Indian and Sri Lankan restaurant at 1136 First Avenue in Lenox Hill — south of our southern line — and the restaurant's manager walked Upper East Site through the meal. Michelin named Lungi a Bib Gourmand on its 2024 New York list and carries it as a Bib Gourmand again in 2025.
via Upper East Site · Aug 8
Nearby on the East Side
Harlem families sue the city over Legionnaires' — a different outbreak from ours
More than 50 Harlem residents are suing New York City, its health agencies and several contractors over last summer's Legionnaires' outbreak in that neighborhood, which the city recorded at 118 cases and seven deaths. The suits — filed by attorney Ben Crump with co-counsel, and reported by Gothamist, NY1 and NBC New York — allege the city failed to properly test, treat and maintain cooling towers and failed to warn the public. To be precise, because the timing invites confusion: this litigation concerns the 2025 Harlem outbreak, not the Upper East Side cluster we've been following. Ours remains separate, and no building has been publicly linked to it.
via Gothamist · Aug 7
A note on the last three editions
What happened to Thursday, Friday and Saturday
Our automated wire runs every morning and drops raw headlines into a draft; an editor session is then supposed to check the facts, cut what isn't ours, and write the paper you read. From August 7 through 9 the editor never started — the scheduled job failed silently each morning, for reasons we are still working out, so the unedited draft published on its own. Three days of wire copy ran under our name with summaries we didn't write, and we have to correct something we'd rather not: it wasn't all harmless. Friday's edition credited amNY for a story that Gay City News published and that we linked to — the wrong publisher on the byline. And our 'Nearby on the East Side' heading sat over items that weren't: a Lower East Side assault case on Friday, and this morning, before this edition replaced it, a citywide ASPCA seizure and the Russian Tea Room's centennial, which is on West 57th Street. The heading made a claim those stories didn't support. The scheduling fault is fixed, today's edition had an editor on it, and we're logging all of this here rather than quietly backdating those files.
via The Yorkville Ledger · Aug 9
Corrections from August 6
Also correcting the record, and overdue because the two days that should have carried it had no editor: our August 6 lead was revised after publication to stop grouping 300 E 83rd Street and the Caldwell at 1520 York Avenue with the cooling towers that screened positive — those buildings were cited in the city's compliance sweep, which is not the same thing. The same day we removed a line from our Marx Brothers history note that presented a paraphrase as a direct quote from Harpo's memoir.
via The Yorkville Ledger · Aug 9
Yorkville, Remembered
Papaya King's hot dogs were an afterthought
Papaya King opened at the corner of 86th Street and Third Avenue in 1932 as 'Hawaiian Tropical Drinks,' a juice stand where Greek immigrant Gus Poulos sold papaya, pineapple and coconut drinks — a health fad he'd picked up on vacation. Papaya was so unfamiliar to New Yorkers that Poulos hired women in hula skirts to hand out free samples. The frankfurters came later: Poulos fell for a German-American woman and, surrounded by Yorkville's German delis and beer halls, started selling hot dogs alongside the juice.
source: Friends of the Upper East Side
One more thing: it's Sunday, so the Ruppert Park greenmarket is on Second Avenue between 90th and 91st, and John Jay's outdoor pool is free and open daily through early September — two blocks below our southern line, and we claim it anyway. Back tomorrow morning, on schedule this time.