Good morning. What a lovely weekend. That fabulous weather is going to stretch into Monday with a high of 82 degrees and low humidity. Enjoy…
On Wednesday evening there will be a candlelit vigil and rally for Julio Ramirez. Locals are demanding answers to the disappearance and death of the 25-year-old after a night out in Hell’s Kitchen. Read more…

The race to replace Assembly Member Dick Gottfried is hotting up — and the Penn Station redevelopment is a key agenda issue. Katie Honan from THE CITY reports on funding for one contender. W42ST will be offering the 4 candidates —Layla Law-Gisiko, Chris Lebron, Harrison Marks and Tony Simone — for the Democratic primary the chance to tell their West Side Story in the coming weeks. Read more…

What we’ve been reading
The 118 recommendations of New York’s “Small Business Forward” initiative are in — and this writer finds them “underwhelming”. (The Hill)
Will the deregulation of New York’s art auction market make it more opaque or more transparent? (The Art Newspaper)
A council member is seeking to eliminate 60,000 city-issued parking placards. (Crain’s)
The manhattan.com domain is up for sale — will you byte? It’ll cost ya… (EIN News)
Strawberry cheesecake flavor coffee, anyone? (Axios)
Freeze Frame

Thanks to Thomas Piercy for this picture from early this morning. He was up at 4:30am with his clarinet getting ready for his first rehearsal for “the little back dots” of Masatora Goya, Nerissa Campbell and Zhihua Hu. “Always an exciting, intimidating, hectic, sensitive moment. Am I ready; are the other performers ready; does the music ‘work’; is the composer ready; do all the right things fall into place; do the little black dots want to come to life?” he said on Instagram.
Happy birthday for yesterday to Hershey Miller, Catherine Ventura and Antigone Michaelides.