N.Y. / Region

With a midnight deadline looming for more than 10,000 ground zero workers to opt into a multimillion-dollar settlement with the city and its contractors, a federal judge said it would take days to determine whether 95 percent of the workers had accepted the settlement — the threshold required for it to take effect. If ratified, the settlement, which would pay up to $712.5 million, would officially end the lawsuits by firefighters, police officers and others. Read about the settlement deadline on the Green blog.

Photographs by Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times The film critic Jeffrey Lyons addressed his neighbors at the Osborne’s 125th anniversary party on Sunday.

The film historian Robert Osborne could not have been happier that the crowd sang, “Happy birthday, dear Osborne” on Sunday night, not “dear Mr. Osborne” or “dear Bob.” It was not his birthday.

He and his neighbors were celebrating the 125th anniversary of their apartment building, diagonally across West 57th Street from Carnegie Hall. The one in which Leonard Bernstein wrote “West Side Story.” The one where pianists like Van Cliburn and Bobby Short lived.

The Osborne.

“I don’t own the building,” Mr. Osborne had joked earlier in the evening, “but I’ve told people I do.” Read more…

The morning began with idle chatter about sleet before quickly moving to the weightiest subject of life and death.

Between those alternately chilly and chilling poles, there was much else to blog about on this cold November day.

For example, while the city was distracted by the summer scourge of bedbugs, we lost sight of the fact that there are roaches everywhere, as Animal notes. Perhaps it’s a function of preferring the devil we know to the one we don’t, but there seems to have been little fuss made over the city roach map.

Speaking of things that are everywhere, Wal-Mart still has its sights set on the city and is now working with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s former campaign manager to make its dream happen, Crain’s New York reports. “This is aggressive now,”  Read more…

The sun had barely risen Sunday morning as thousands of New Yorkers in four patient lines sipped coffee on a cold and quiet Harlem block. The group, Guinean expatriates about to vote in their country’s first democratic presidential election, clutched their voting cards with anticipation. Read more…

For Sunday’s Metropolitan section, Carmen Peláez, wrote a Sweat column describing her soul-wrenching decision to run the New York City Marathon in the face of monumental self-doubt. “I may not have a runner’s body, but I have a runner’s heart,” she wrote. Here’s what happened Sunday.

The day started off smoothly. I had spent most of the night in a staring contest with my clock, but my adrenaline was high and I was ready to run. My sister, who I’d trained with, had dropped back a few thousand people so that she could start with me. We squirreled our way as far ahead in our corral as we could and wished each other luck as we crossed the start line together.

Running down the middle of the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge, I looked over at the city skyline and took a deep breath as the task at hand dawned on me. Early in Brooklyn I saw the slow bus, which picks up straggling runners to clear the course, waiting to head out. But I stared straight ahead thinking, “Not this time.” My 15:20/mile pace was cake. I focused on taking it all in. There were thousands of people out in Brooklyn. Each neighborhood had its own soundtrack and they all cheered us on, beautifully. Surrounded by runners and race fans, I could not stop smiling. Friends jumped out and ran a few feet with me, coaches high-fived me, hipsters offered me lollipops. This race was a breeze.

Then I hit mile 9. Read more…

Courtesy Landmarks Preservation Commission The new marker at the site of the thousands of reinterred remains dug up around City Hall.

Over the past 17 years, thousands of pieces of human remains dating back to the 18th century have been unearthed in the course of construction projects in and around City Hall.

In a quiet ceremony on Sunday afternoon presided over by Christian, Jewish and Islamic clerics, city officials reburied them and unveiled a marker in their remembrance, near a grove of ginkgo trees at the northeast corner of City Hall Park.

The fragments, ranging in size from half an inch to nearly two feet long and including bits of just about every bone in the human body, turned up during the renovations of City Hall itself, City Hall Park and the Tweed Courthouse.

They had been stored at Brooklyn College, which conducted an analysis of a sample of them and said they came from men and women of all ages. Most were too small to determine gender, age, health or ancestry. Read more…

New York Police DepartmentEarl Barranco faces extradition to New York from North Carolina.

The only suspect in the recent fatal shooting at a West 14th Street diner has been apprehended in North Carolina, the authorities said.

The suspect, Earl Barranco, 24, was arrested at a Charlotte Bobcats game on Saturday night and will face extradition to New York, investigators said. Charges were pending on Monday.

The New York City police, after identifying Mr. Barranco as a suspect, obtained information about his whereabouts and passed it along to their counterparts in Charlotte, according to a spokesman. Read more…

Daniel Barry for The New York Times A vacant street-level store at the subway station at Roosevelt Avenue and 74th Street in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Queens has the highest retail vacancy rate in New York City — at 13.7 percent, it is nearly double the rate that Manhattan had in the second quarter of this year. But if there’s one spot where empty storefronts are a rare commodity, it is on Roosevelt Avenue, between roughly 72nd Street and 84th Street, a bustling commercial district on the edge of Jackson Heights.

Bustling, except for two commercial spaces at the Roosevelt Avenue public transportation hub on 74th Street, which just happens to house the fifth-busiest subway station in the city. The spaces have never been occupied.

Miguel E. Silva, a real estate broker at Ocean Y. Realty, which overlooks the empty stores, called the spaces “the filet mignon of Roosevelt Avenue” because of the hundreds of thousands of potential customers who walk past them every week. Read more…

Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times A platonic example of the genre: 69 Powers Street in Williamsburg.

Some people think it’s a scourge on neighborhoods. Bloggers devote Web sites to mocking its worst examples. While vinyl siding may seem like a material that simply protects homes from the elements, it draws every element of opinion about its appearance and presence in neighborhoods.

This week’s Appraisal column explores the fans and critics of vinyl siding. I spoke to one Williamsburg real estate broker who has worked with buyers about keeping it, saying it preserves the flavor of a neighborhood. He kept vinyl siding on his own home. Then in Greenpoint, we meet a homeowner who wrapped his vinyl siding in stainless steel — kind of like wrapping a chicken drumstick in tin foil on Thanksgiving. Read more…

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times The stars shining down from the Grand Central ceiling on Monday.

Amateur astronomers in this city don’t have it easy. The brightest lights in New York’s nighttime burn from Broadway marquees and skyscraper windows, obscuring Orion, Gemini and the Dippers from their rightful place in our sky.

There is one spot, however, where anyone can enjoy an unclouded view of the zodiac: the magisterial ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, where, 125 feet above the marble concourse, wintertime constellations have twinkled in suspended animation for 98 years.

Well, almost 98 years. The constellations have spent long stretches of the terminal’s history literally in the dark, victims of burned-out bulbs and, more recently, a fiber optic system that has gradually dimmed. Read more…

Updated, 11:21 p.m. |The mini-spike in murders that has pushed the homicide rate up 15 percent so far this year continued with three more killings this morning, following four on Saturday night and Sunday. Through Sunday, there were 459 murders this year, compared with 399 at this time last year, the police said this morning. Here are the seven new killings:

• Saturday, 10:45 p.m.: Matthew Gray, 27, of Brooklyn was found shot in the head outside 227-13 109th Avenue in Queens Village after a loud dispute in the driveway. No one has been arrested. Read more…

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said his younger daughter, Georgina, was faring reasonably well Monday after being injured on Friday when she fell off the horse she was riding during an equestrian tournament in Syracuse.

Ms. Bloomberg, who was participating in a tournament, was riding a horse over a fence when, in midleap, the saddle came loose and Ms. Bloomberg fell to the ground. Read more…

Spencer Platt/Getty Images Emphatic hand gestures help keep the health commissioner in racing form even off the road.

Practicing what he preaches, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, New York City’s health commissioner, finished Sunday’s marathon in 3 hours 18 minutes 28 seconds — very respectable for a 54-year-old man, though a full three minutes slower than his own prediction.

Dr. Farley said he started out a little too strong. “The scene and the crowds across the Verrazano and through Brooklyn were so exciting that I started out too fast,” he recounted in an e-mail message Monday morning.

“I kept telling myself to slow down, but I just couldn’t do it. Then I really struggled the last few miles. Still, I matched my time from 2007, on a course that was much more difficult, so I crossed the finish line a very happy man indeed.”

This was the 16th marathon in 34 years for Dr. Farley, who is 6-foot-2 and thin and willowy as a blade of grass. He began running cross-country in high school, when he found himself sitting on the bench in soccer, and the running coach pointed out that he had the perfect physique for distance. Read more…

Andy Newman/
The New York TimesA veritable mini-blizzard.

Let it be known that at 9:19 Monday morning, as bitter gusts blew in from the northwest and temperatures hovered in the low 40s, the light rain spattering the south side of West 42nd Street between Broadway and Avenue of the Americas was briefly mixed with sleet.

Our hopes that this was the earliest non-hail frozen precipitation in city history were immediately dashed by a call to a freelance weather nerd, Stephen Fybish. Read more…

In retrospect, it probably was not such a good idea to confide in Rupert Murdoch. Billionaires, it turns out, can be just as indiscreet as the rest of us.

On Friday, in an interview with an Australian newspaper, Mr. Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, divulged that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had described President Obama as the most “arrogant man” he had ever met after playing his first and presumably last round of golf with the commander in chief.

Suffice it to say, the Bloomberg administration was mortified. The blogosphere lit up with posts. Damage control ensued. Read more…