Alternate-Side Breakfast

Dear Diary:

It’s 8 a.m. on a Monday, and I am part of the alternate-side ritual, sitting in my car for 90 minutes until the street sweeper and the ticket cops have done their jobs. My street of choice is Riverside Boulevard over in Trumpville.

Three cars ahead of me is a black Lincoln S.U.V. Directly behind me is a black Mitsubishi S.U.V. I am speed-dating the Monday crossword when I catch, out of the corner of my eye, a bicycle riding past me. It slows down as it approaches the Lincoln. From behind me I hear a car horn honk. At which point the bicycle stops, turns toward the horn, and reverses direction.

Through the window of the Mitsubishi an exchange takes place. In goes a plastic bag and, in return, money is passed out. Breakfast has been delivered.

I later learn that the Mitsubishi driver has several menus on his front seat from local coffee shops who will deliver anywhere, including to parked cars. Clearly it is important to be very specific when describing the car to be delivered to. Sort of like an apartment number.

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Opponents Sue to Block New York Public Library Renovation Plan

Some opponents of the New York Public Library’s plan to renovate its Fifth Avenue headquarters, which will involve removing its research stacks, filed a lawsuit Wednesday in New York State Supreme Court to stop the project.

The suit, filed by the nonprofit group Advocates for Justice on behalf of five preservationists and scholars who include the historian David Levering Lewis, accuses the library of violating its charter and the state’s constitution by dismantling seven floors of stacks and removing books from the site. It also says the library failed to conduct an environmental impact review.

“Irreparable harm is imminent,” the suit states. “If the stacks are destroyed, the books â€" the unique and distinguishing asset of the NYPL â€" can never be returned to their rightful place under the Rose Main Reading Room.”

The library recently applied for building permits from the city but has said they are for “preliminary” work and that a final design has not been completed.

A library spokesman could not be reached for comment. Officials have defended the renovation as necessary to replace the Mid-Manhattan branch, a lending library that has been described as “physically failing.” Space for users of that branch is included in the renovation.

The city is one of the defendants named in the suit, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal, because it is putting up $150 million toward the cost of the project. The renovation had a preliminary estimate of $300 million but library officials have said the estimate, like the design, could change as the project is further defined.

Anatomy of a Scene Video: ‘The Way, Way Back’

The writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who won an Academy Award for their work on the screenplay for “The Descendants,” have made their feature directorial debut with a coming-of-age comedy “The Way, Way Back.” In this video, they discuss elements of a scene that introduces some of the film’s large ensemble cast.

Design Is Chosen for Hong Kong Museum

The Pritzker Prize-winning architectural team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron has been chosen to design a $642 million museum for modern and contemporary art known as M+ in Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg News.

The design, a 646,00-square-foot, upside-down T-shape, would be more than twice the size of the Tate Museum in London, a previous project of Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron’s. The museum, scheduled for completion in 2017, is envisioned as a centerpiece of a cultural district in West Kowloon that is to eventually include 17 arts venues. Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron, who worked with the artist Ai Weiwei in designing the Bird’s Nest Stadium for the Beijing Olympics, beat out competitors that included Renzo Piano and Toyo Ito.

The horizontal section of the T-shape will offer 183,000 square feet of exhibition space, while the vertical bar, devoted to offices, storage and education, is to have an LED lighting system that can showcase artwork. The museum has already received a donation of 1,463 works from Uli Sigg, the Swiss businessman and collector of Chinese art.

One of the Earliest European Paintings of America Sold to Rijksmuseum

Jan Mostaert’s “Discovery of America,” also known as “Episode From the Conquest of America.”

AMSTERDAM - The Rijksmuseum here has acquired one of the earliest known depictions of America painted in the history of Western art, Jan Mostaert’s “Discovery of America.” Painted some time between 1525 and 1540, it is an imagined scene of conquest, depicting Spanish invaders in military garb aiming cannons and rifles at a naked indigenous population, who fight back with bows and arrows.

The work, also known as “Episode From the Conquest of America,” was among 202 paintings that were returned to Marei von Saher, the heir of Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish Dutch art dealer between the wars whose collection was looted by the Nazis. After the war, the painting was hung in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, until legal action by Goudstikker’s heirs forced them to return it to the family in 2006.

Ms. von Saher was approached by the Rijksmuseum about buying the painting earlier this year, said Hugo Nathan of the Simon Dickinson Gallery in New York and London, which handled the sale. It brought the work to the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht in March, with an asking price of $14 million.

“It’s a picture that a lot of people were interested in both in North and South America because of it being such an important historical picture,” said Mr. Nathan, “but Mostaert is arguably the most important early Dutch painter, as opposed to being a Flemish master, and the Rijksmuseum was always hopping to secure it for the Dutch nation.”

Preserving History, and Uncovering Secrets, at Green-Wood Cemetery

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Volunteers spend one day a month trolling through the many files at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn as part of a project to preserve documents and create a searchable database.

Until they put on their cotton gloves, they are a tango dancer, a former labor-management specialist with the Internal Revenue Service, a retired grade-school teacher, a graduate student. Then they become history detectives, but without the cameras from a certain PBS program.

They â€" and 15 to 20 other volunteers â€" gather one Saturday a month to pan for historical gold in the massive files of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, files that contain thousands of faded, yellowing letters, telegrams, sketches and blueprints. The records go back 175 years, to Green-Wood’s founding as a rural cemetery.

The volunteers dream of discovering evidence that will unravel some of Green-Wood’s mysteries, as they did in 2010, when they came across two small handwritten cards that explained the demise of a statue atop the tomb of the 19th century composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The cards said the statue had been vandalized in 1959 â€" not that long ago in historical terms. But the incident had been forgotten, leaving Gottschalk’s fans puzzled.

After four years of sorting through the cemetery’s archives, the volunteers are accustomed to deciphering fancy handwriting and decoding orotund sentences. A note from an executor instructing the cemetery to prepare a certain plot for the burial of a widow next to her late husband can seem as involved as a paragraph from Henry James or Edith Wharton.

They are also accustomed to seeing the flourishes of old signatures, perhaps not as elaborate as John Hancock’s, but still notable. They have amassed a collection of signatures of early baseball pioneers interred at Green-Wood, including James F. Wenman, a founder of the Cotton Exchange and the shortstop of the Knickerbocker Club’s baseball team, the first in the city. Another signature they have discovered and preserved was that of DeWitt Hopper, the actor famous for reciting the poem “Casey at the Bat.”

Anthony M. Cucchiara, the amateur boxer who is Green-Wood’s archivist, said the volunteers’ main goal was to “stabilize paper material by opening and placing it in acid-free folders.” They have been instructed to remove “damaging metal clips and rubber bands,” he said.

“It’s tremendously labor intensive,” he said, adding that the volunteers had gone through about a third of the cemetery’s burial orders. Green-Wood expects to complete the first phase of its archive project later in the year with the creation of a searchable bibliographic database.

If the archive project provides a look at the day-to-day business of running a cemetery, it also provides look at a particular slice of New York history. Sara Fetherolf, a volunteer who has a minor in archival studies from Brooklyn College, said it was “ordinary-people history, not who-was-mayor history.”

“You find yourself constructing stories in your mind,” she said. “You piece together a whole story of a family. You get a little of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ from it â€" who died young, who lived to be 85.”

The tango dancer in the group, Jeff Blustein, is also a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and an expert in medical ethics. He said he volunteered for the Green-Wood project because he recognized the importance of preserving memory. “I was looking for a way to put that interest into practice,” he said.

He called the archive project “daunting.”

“The vast majority of it is of no historic interest, but it gives a picture of the time. And if we find something important, something from some important figure, we all jump up and say, “Wow, this is great.’ It doesn’t happen that often that you find something like that attached to Louis Comfort Tiffany or the Roosevelts or the Schermerhorns.”

He opened a folder. The first document inside was a telegram from 1953 ordering a family’s grave reopened for the burial of a woman whose husband had been buried there 19 years before. Their names did not ring any bells.

“I personally haven’t found anybody famous,” he said. “I still am hopeful.”

Preserving History, and Uncovering Secrets, at Green-Wood Cemetery

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Volunteers spend one day a month trolling through the many files at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn as part of a project to preserve documents and create a searchable database.

Until they put on their cotton gloves, they are a tango dancer, a former labor-management specialist with the Internal Revenue Service, a retired grade-school teacher, a graduate student. Then they become history detectives, but without the cameras from a certain PBS program.

They â€" and 15 to 20 other volunteers â€" gather one Saturday a month to pan for historical gold in the massive files of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, files that contain thousands of faded, yellowing letters, telegrams, sketches and blueprints. The records go back 175 years, to Green-Wood’s founding as a rural cemetery.

The volunteers dream of discovering evidence that will unravel some of Green-Wood’s mysteries, as they did in 2010, when they came across two small handwritten cards that explained the demise of a statue atop the tomb of the 19th century composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The cards said the statue had been vandalized in 1959 â€" not that long ago in historical terms. But the incident had been forgotten, leaving Gottschalk’s fans puzzled.

After four years of sorting through the cemetery’s archives, the volunteers are accustomed to deciphering fancy handwriting and decoding orotund sentences. A note from an executor instructing the cemetery to prepare a certain plot for the burial of a widow next to her late husband can seem as involved as a paragraph from Henry James or Edith Wharton.

They are also accustomed to seeing the flourishes of old signatures, perhaps not as elaborate as John Hancock’s, but still notable. They have amassed a collection of signatures of early baseball pioneers interred at Green-Wood, including James F. Wenman, a founder of the Cotton Exchange and the shortstop of the Knickerbocker Club’s baseball team, the first in the city. Another signature they have discovered and preserved was that of DeWitt Hopper, the actor famous for reciting the poem “Casey at the Bat.”

Anthony M. Cucchiara, the amateur boxer who is Green-Wood’s archivist, said the volunteers’ main goal was to “stabilize paper material by opening and placing it in acid-free folders.” They have been instructed to remove “damaging metal clips and rubber bands,” he said.

“It’s tremendously labor intensive,” he said, adding that the volunteers had gone through about a third of the cemetery’s burial orders. Green-Wood expects to complete the first phase of its archive project later in the year with the creation of a searchable bibliographic database.

If the archive project provides a look at the day-to-day business of running a cemetery, it also provides look at a particular slice of New York history. Sara Fetherolf, a volunteer who has a minor in archival studies from Brooklyn College, said it was “ordinary-people history, not who-was-mayor history.”

“You find yourself constructing stories in your mind,” she said. “You piece together a whole story of a family. You get a little of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ from it â€" who died young, who lived to be 85.”

The tango dancer in the group, Jeff Blustein, is also a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center and an expert in medical ethics. He said he volunteered for the Green-Wood project because he recognized the importance of preserving memory. “I was looking for a way to put that interest into practice,” he said.

He called the archive project “daunting.”

“The vast majority of it is of no historic interest, but it gives a picture of the time. And if we find something important, something from some important figure, we all jump up and say, “Wow, this is great.’ It doesn’t happen that often that you find something like that attached to Louis Comfort Tiffany or the Roosevelts or the Schermerhorns.”

He opened a folder. The first document inside was a telegram from 1953 ordering a family’s grave reopened for the burial of a woman whose husband had been buried there 19 years before. Their names did not ring any bells.

“I personally haven’t found anybody famous,” he said. “I still am hopeful.”

July 4: Where the Candidates Are Today

Planned events for the mayoral candidates, according to the campaigns and organizations they are affiliated with. Times are listed as scheduled but frequently change.

Joseph Burgess and Nicholas Wells contributed reporting.

Event information is listed as provided at the time of publication. Details for many of Ms. Quinn events are not released for publication.

Events by candidate

Carrión

Lhota

Quinn

Weiner

Group event

John A. Catsimatidis
Republican

12 p.m.
Marches with State Senator Andrew Lanza and Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis in Staten Island’s 103rd Fourth of July parade in Travis, beginning at P.S. 26.

Joseph J. Lhota
Republican

10:15 a.m.
Attends Fourth of July at Coney Island festivities including the annual Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest, where two dozen “competitive eaters,” like Joey Chestnut, Tim (Eater X) Janus and Sonya (The Black Widow) Thomas, down several dozen hot dogs and buns apiece in 10 minutes in an event televised live on ESPN, on Surf Avenue.

12 p.m.
Marches in Staten Island’s 103rd Fourth of July parade in Travis, beginning at P.S. 26.

3 p.m.
Attends the sixth annual Greater Bay Ridge Fourth of July picnic, at the 82nd Street Field at Shore Road.

Christine C. Quinn
Democrat

10:30 a.m.
Attends the reopening of the Statue of Liberty, where Mayor Bloomberg will be speaking to mark the completion of restoration work from Hurricane Sandy, at Liberty Island.

Some of Ms. Quinn’s events may not be shown because the campaign declines to release her advance schedule for publication.

Anthony D. Weiner
Democrat

1 p.m.
Speaks at the Muslims for Peace Fourth of July celebration, at Bait-Uz-Zafar in Queens.

2:30 p.m.
Speaks at the Bronx Arts Ensemble Summer Music Concert, at Rockwood Drive Circle in Van Cortlandt Park.

Adolfo Carrión Jr.
Independent

10 a.m.
Attends Fourth of July at Coney Island festivities including the annual Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest, where two dozen “competitive eaters,” like Joey Chestnut, Tim (Eater X) Janus and Sonya (The Black Widow) Thomas, down several dozen hot dogs and buns apiece in 10 minutes in an event televised live on ESPN, on Surf Avenue.

12:30 p.m.
Explores Orchard Beach, along the boardwalk.

1:45 p.m.
Meets voters, at Pelham Bay Park.