Sewer Treasure Hunters Arrested, Two Trucks of Chickens in Brooklyn, Kooky MTA Rules and a Dolly Parton Day

Vinnie clocks four fresh New York scenes from the week of September 21–27, 2026, under a nor'easter that killed the city's biggest free concert while forty thousand runners went out in it anyway. The city made its first arrests in the sewer-diving mystery that has been running since May. Two abandoned trucks in Brooklyn held nearly three hundred live chickens. The MTA called its own work rules "kooky." And Manhattan gave Dolly Parton a day.

The nor'easter hit from Friday, September 25 through the weekend, bringing heavy rain, high wind and coastal flooding. The Global Citizen Festival, due on Central Park's Great Lawn on Saturday, September 26, was canceled — the first cancellation in the organization's fourteen years — and the All Things Go festival at Forest Hills Stadium was washed out with it. 1 The annual Tunnel to Towers 5K ran anyway on Sunday, September 27, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, with some 40,000 participants expected; runners followed fallen firefighter Stephen Siller's route through the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, and this year a procession led by two horses carried a steel beam from the South Tower through the streets. 2 A New York City Housing Authority worker picking up an extra shift was killed by a falling tree in a parking lot at the Cypress Hills Houses in East New York, Brooklyn, on Saturday. 3

About 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday, September 23, the NYPD took a 911 call from someone who believed a crime was in progress: three men were seen climbing out of a manhole near 535 Park Avenue, by East 61st Street on the Upper East Side, then getting into two cars. The men had gone down just after 1:30 and came back up about three hours later, and the Department of Environmental Protection confirmed it knew about "individuals illegally entering the sewer system at this location." 4 By Friday, two of them — Samuel Reveron, 25, and Kevin Rodriguez, 26 — had been arraigned, each charged with two counts of criminal trespassing. Automatic license-plate readers caught their cars' plates and VINs as the two vehicles crossed the Queensboro Bridge, and police were still looking for at least one other person seen leaving the same manhole. Police said the case, known as "drain diving," has no connection to the UN General Assembly or to any terror plot, and a lawyer for Reveron said the allegations amount to "not much of a case." 5 Both men told authorities they went in to look for valuables washed into the storm drains, the same motive police gave for a run of sewer entries going back to May. Three more men were seen coming out of a Brooklyn manhole around 4:30 a.m. Friday, at Bay Ridge Parkway and 17th Avenue in Bensonhurst — the latest in what police describe as a string of citywide sewer-diving incidents. 67

Police, animal advocates and humane-group volunteers rescued nearly 300 live chickens from two abandoned U-Haul trucks in Brooklyn over the weekend of September 18–19, and took them to an undisclosed sanctuary. At Winthrop Avenue in Flatbush on September 18, hundreds of birds were already dead and 83 were severely injured; on Saturday night police went to 910 St. Johns Place in Crown Heights and found more chickens in inhumane conditions. The discoveries came during Kaporos season, when, by the estimate of Humane Long Island's John Di Leonardo, about 100,000 chickens are killed in Brooklyn in a week. Rina Deych, who leads the Kaporos Compassion Project and has campaigned against the ritual for three decades, and Di Leonardo both aimed their demands at whoever left the trucks there: Di Leonardo called for "a full investigation, and the arrest of those responsible for abandoning these animals." 8

On Tuesday, September 22, MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber told a Citizens Budget Commission breakfast in Midtown that the authority wants changes to work rules and higher health-insurance contributions from Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents nearly 40,000 New York City Transit workers and whose contract expired in mid-May. Lieber on the rules: "once a work rule is in the book, as they say, you can't get it out except by agreement, no matter how kooky it is." Roughly 1,400 transit workers are on the job 160 days or less out of the 260 workdays in a year, he said, and the MTA wants employees' health-insurance share raised from 5% to something closer to the 11% they paid under the 2005 deal. Local 100 president John Chiarello answered that the agency is flush with casino-license and congestion-pricing money and should look elsewhere to cut costs. 9

Friday, September 25 was Dolly Parton Appreciation Day in Manhattan, proclaimed by Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigel in a hall at Vanderbilt University–NYC, less than a month after Parton died. Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels read from her picture book "Coat of Many Colors" to a class of kindergarteners from P.S. 11; his mother-in-law is Ellen Cassedy, co-founder of 9to5 and the inspiration for the film "9 to 5." Parton's Imagination Library has given away more than 300 million books to children in five countries, and she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt's COVID-19 vaccine research. 10