New York Today: Another Slippery Commute

Joshua Bright for The New York Times Watch your step.

Updated 10:14 a.m.

Good Monday morning.

The mercury is stuck in the low 20s, and this dingy city is wearing a fresh white coat.

It’s just a measly inch or two of snow, and we’re used to it by now â€" this is the 13th measurable snowfall of the season.

Things could be a lot worse. Still, it might be a bit dicey getting around this morning. “Many secondary roads remain snow covered and slick,” the National Weather Service warned at 5:30 a.m.

The city issued a travel advisory for today.

Alternate-side parking is suspended for the seventh straight weekday.

A few New Jersey school districts are opening late.

Snowfall totals: 1.2 inches in Central Park, 2.5 in eastern Queens and Bay Shore in Suffolk County.

Temperatures might touch 30 today, under mostly sunny skies.

It will get down to the teens tonight and stay cold through Wednesday.

Then comes another storm. If it dumps snow, it could bring 10 inches. If it’s rain, it could be the most we’ve had since December. If it’s something in between, it will be a huge drag.

Here’s what else is happening.

STATE OF THE CITY

This afternoon, Mayor de Blasio will speak to New Yorkers about something other than snow removal.

He will give his first State of the City address, at noon. You can watch it live.

We asked Kate Taylor of The Times’s City Hall bureau what to expect.

Look for the mayor to keep pressing the case for his tax increase on the rich to pay for pre-K, she said, despite Governor Cuomo’s outflanking offer to finance it.

And with labor negotiations looming, Mr. de Blasio will try to recalibrate the expectations of the unions he has courted so ardently.

“He may warn that there is not enough money to give the unions everything that they’re asking for in terms of retroactive raises,” she said. “But he will have a pro-union tone.”

Also, Ms. Taylor said, the mayor “could tell us how he plans to achieve his goal of building and preserving 200,000 affordable housing units.”

COMMUTE
Subways: Check latest status.

Rails: Check L.I.R.R., Metro-North or N.J. Transit status.

Roads: Check traffic map or radio report on the 1s or the 8s.

COMING UP TODAY

- Release the hounds: The 138th Westminster Kennel Club dog show opens at the Hudson River piers on West 55th Street at 8 a.m. [$25]

- PETA will protest the implicit racism of purebred dog standards at 5 p.m. outside Madison Square Garden, where the dog show’s evening events are held.

- Fashion Week continues. Our colleagues at the On the Runway blog have the scoop.

- Last day for the Kandinsky show at Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side. [$20]

- Go for a night run in Prospect Park with Shape Up NYC. 7 p.m. [Free]

- Before the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, Boston and New York vied to build the nation’s first subway system. Doug Most, author of “The Race Underground,” talks at Barnes & Noble on West 82nd Street. 7 p.m. [Free]

- The New York Theater Ballet dances the “Nuevo Tango” at the Dance Gallery on East 31st Street. 7:30 p.m. [$10 suggested]

- For more events, see The New York Times Arts & Entertainment guide.

IN THE NEWS

- A statewide cockfighting crackdown yielded a slew of arrests and the seizing of thousands of birds in Queens, Brooklyn and Ulster County, N.Y. [New York Times]

- Only 8 percent of New York City cabbies are born in the United States. [New York Times]

- Another vanishing breed: stand-alone diners. There are five left in Manhattan, according to Scouting New York.

- Con Ed rates have increased because of winter demand for electricity â€" up as much as 83 percent from this time last year. [New York Post]

- A 32-year-old New Yorker vanished on a motorcycle trip in Mexico. [Daily News]

- Scoreboard: Thunder roll past Knicks, 112-100. Nets net Pelicans, 93-81.

AND FINALLY …

Make as much fun as you want of New Yorkers’ willingness to stand on line for hours for a Cronut.

At least they’re not standing in line for day-old New York City bagels.

San Franciscans are.

On Saturday, the queue in the rain stretched on for two hours outside a restaurant called Dear Mom, the blog Uptown Almanac reported.

The prize: A bagel flown in from Russ & Daughters, artfully festooned with cream cheese, for $6. Bagel sandwiches were $12.

By 4 p.m., the offerings were sold out.

Joseph Burgess contributed reporting.

New York Today is a morning roundup that stays live from 6 a.m. till late morning.

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Falling in Love at Duane Reade

Victor Kerlow

Dear Diary:

The week before he left, he woke me up every day with the words, “There’s an angel in my bed.” Though my pillow-mussed hair and yesterday’s makeup left me feeling anything but divine, it was easy to see his small, messy apartment on 83rd Street as a paradise.

All things dreary overtook the day of his flight; it was raining, and slate-colored slush flooded the streets of the Upper West Side.

Can you realize you love someone inside a Duane Reade? I might have. No fireworks, no music, no angels, just me â€" crouched on the floor, trying to figure out what type of Gold Bond he needed me to pick up for his trip. Faced with a row of foot powders and antifungals, I thought it might be love, because otherwise what would I be doing here on this cold, wet Sunday, in ruined boots, helping to pack him up and send him thousands of miles away from me?

Back at his apartment, he jingled his keys in my direction and tossed them to me. “You sure?” I asked him. He was, and I think I am, too.

He got into the cab and sped up Broadway. I walked to the train, squeezing his keys in my hands, leaving small pink ridges that looked like stars indented in my palm.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via email diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Remembering a Hip-Hop Harbinger in the Bronx

Todd Heisler/The New York Times Visitors signed the guest book at a wake for Lemoin Thompson III, a.k.a. Buddy Esquire.

via Boo-Hooray Gallery From 1977 to 1982, Lemoin Thompson III handcrafted some 300 hip-hop party handbills in his scruffy one-bedroom apartment.

On a recent Friday night, in a funeral home on the corner of East 165th Street and Prospect Avenue in the Bronx, some hip-hop pioneers gathered.

The occasion: the wake of Lemoin Thompson III, a.k.a. Buddy Esquire.

From 1977 to 1982, as the hip-hop genre began to emerge in parks, recreation centers and lounges like the long-gone Ecstasy Garage Disco, Mr. Thompson handcrafted some 300 hip-hop party handbills, on a small drawing board in a scruffy one-bedroom Bronx apartment.

Hence his nickname, the “Flyer King.”

On Jan. 31, Mr. Thomson set some chicken to boil in the kitchen of the apartment where he lived alone. He dozed off, and, overcome by the smoke billowing from the stove, died. He was 55.

Among those wandering in and out of the small funeral home were Afrika Bambaataa, the D.J.; Charlie Ahearn, the film director; and Theodore Livingston, better known as Grandwizzard Theodore, who is said to have invented scratching.

“A flier either made you want to tell everyone about the party, or not go at all,” said Mr. Livingston, 50, who huddled with former graffiti artists in the back of the funeral home, swapping stories about Mr. Thompson. In the spirit of hip-hop braggadocio, he shut down debate over whether Phase 2, Mr. Thompson’s competitor, may have been better. “Buddy. No question,” Mr. Livingston insisted.

Near the entrance, Martin Williams, 56, a comic book illustrator and close friend of Mr. Thompson’s, spoke of his fascination with comics and his foray into graffiti art, which he abandoned after a police chase in 1976 that forced Mr. Thompson to flee across the train tracks.

Mr. Thompson made his first flier for a block party in 1977, he recalled in a 2010 interview. He would go on to refine his self-described, “neo-deco” style, which drew on influences as varied as Art Deco movie theater facades, disco-era fonts and the work of the artist Vaughn Bodé.

“It’s absolutely masterful design,” Johan Kugelberg, 48, an archivist and friend, said of Mr. Thompson fliers, usually created a day before they were printed and distributed at bus stops, restaurants and high schools in the Bronx.

In 2011 Mr. Kugelberg realized that the fliers, which detailed who was performing, and where and when, could be seen as a crucial piece of hip-hop history. He purchased Mr. Thompson’s personal archive after learning that Mr. Thompson, a U.P.S. driver until his death, could no longer afford to store the materials.

“In hip-hop, the ephemeral remains of the movement are almost solely in the memories of the pioneering participants,” said Mr. Kugelberg. “10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, really messes up your memory of events.”

Mr. Thompson’s trove of fliers add an important element to the historical record of early hip-hop, a period when little was documented. The works of the photographer Joe Conzo are one of the few exceptions.

Up until Mr. Thompson’s death, Mr. Kugelberg, who had previously donated a selection of Mr. Thompson’s fliers to be preserved in the Cornell Hip-Hop Collection in Ithaca, N.Y., had been working with Mr. Thompson on a book celebrating his life’s work, with exhibitions in New York and Tokyo lined up.

“It’s doubly sad now,” he said, noting that many pioneers go unrecognized, let alone unpaid, by what is now a multibillion dollar industry. “Buddy knew how great he was; he was aware that his artwork and influence would live on for a long, long time.”

via Cornell University Hip Hop Collection A flier designed by Buddy Esquire.

A version of this article appears in print on 02/10/2014, on page A16 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Remembering a Hip-Hop Harbinger.