13 good things that happened in NYC this year

You don’t need us to help you ruminate on all the brutally awful stuff that happened in 2024 at the national and global levels. Nor do you need us to sugarcoat it by pivoting into some kind of 2020-era "good vibes only!!” outlet. However! If you look at the local angle, there was actually some pretty great stuff that went down this year? Stuff we might even dare to say we’re grateful for? 

In the spirit of the holiday — and since we blew all our turkey jokes very, very prematurely last year — we’re taking this week to revisit some of the sincerely high New York City highs of 2024:

New York City sports were fun!

Fans of almost every professional sports team in New York got to experience real joy in 2024, which doesn’t happen very often. The Mets went on a truly unexpected five-month heater with a team that embraced going out and “sucking together” in the memorable words of designated hitter J.D. Martinez. The Rangers had the best regular season in the history of the franchise and made some very cool postseason memories even though they fell short of the Stanley Cup. The Knicks won 50 games for the first time in a decade and the people running the team continued drawing rave reviews for a level of competence not seen at MSG in the 21st century. The Yankees made the World Series and then won fewer playoff games against the Dodgers than the Mets. And of course, the Liberty lived up to their superteam billing and won that elusive championship in a thrilling WNBA Finals. New York-area football fans, well … the Jets and Giants have delivered consistent laughs at least.
-Dave

Congestion pricing didn’t die

In a world with better political leadership, the subhed for this moment of positivity and appreciation would be “congestion pricing started.” But here we are, in the real world where Governor Hochul panicked at the last minute and tried to kill congestion pricing, only to find she had no better ideas and no powerful friends who wanted to join her suidice pact. Still, focused advocacy kept the toll on the table and kept anyone else from yanking their support for congestion pricing, and it’s supposed to start, for real this time, on Jan. 5. Just pray to Hutzalcoatl, god of legal shenanigans, that a temporary restraining order doesn’t stop the MTA from finally turning this thing on.
-Dave

The City of Yes got a (sort of) yes 

In both a rare and a major policy victory for Eric Adams, all three portions of his City of Yes legislation plan have now moved forward, albeit with politically-forced carve outs such as “retaining parking mandates to please suburban officials.” In its ideal form, the plan will mean swifter adoption of green technology like solar panels and EV charging, changing empty office buildings into badly-needed housing and getting common sense approvals on the books such as legalizing basement apartments. It’s not a panacea but it’s a big step in the direction of things this city desperately needs. We’ll take a net positive where we can get one.
-Virginia

Good Cause Eviction and The ERA both passed, too

Both Good Cause Eviction and the New York Equal Rights Amendment managed to get passed this year, meaning it’s now much harder for your landlord to evict you for no reason, and it’s harder for some yahoo future politician to overturn your reproductive or civil rights here in the Empire State. Not bad, not bad.
-Virginia

Brokers fees went broke 

Not only did Good Cause Eviction on the state level make it harder for landlords to force you out to turn your home into a Tribeca Pediatrics, the City Council also took the bold step of banning landlords from forcing tenants to pay broker fees. That potentially saves you from paying thousands of dollars to someone who just uses a key to open a door when you sign a lease, and makes life even harder for landlords to play god with your living situation. 
-Tim 

Trash is coming off the streets 

Every mayor, even the very tall, even the most aggressively corrupt, can still come through with a major policy shift that could define their legacy. Bill de Blasio did it with universal pre-K; Mayor Eric Adams hopes to do it with City of Yes, but that is still cooking. But the mayor’s real legacy might be trash, and we’re glad for it. 

Eric Adams has done what no other mayor has had the courage to do: drag our city into the 19th century by putting our trash in receptacles instead of giant, leaky, rat-feeding piles on the street. Businesses were required to containerize their trash in March, and all apartment buildings with nine or fewer units were required to do so earlier this month. It resulted in the most patriotic use of “Empire State of Mind” in a decade. Now, we just need to stop creating so much trash overall. 
-Tim

Some potentially not-terrible people are running for mayor next year 

Looks like everyone is running to the left of Eric Adams for June’s mayoral primary, and there’s not a former cop with a weird relationship to veganism among them! 
-Tim 

Broadway’s hottest tickets were very weird and very gay

Look, we're well aware that New York’s status as a haven for theater — and specifically queer theater — is not exactly a new phenomenon we just discovered. That said, in a Broadway landscape littered with middling jukebox musicals, middling reimaginings of existing movies, and something or other about Harry Potter, we got a little thrill out of watching Oh, Mary!’s meteoric rise from off-broadway phenomenon to the hottest ticket in town — Zoe Kravitz took Channing Tatum twice before they broke up! Michelle Obama was recently spotted in the audience! All to see Cole Escola freakily live out the imagined cabaret singer dreams of Mary Todd Lincoln, married to a floridly gay Abraham Lincoln. 

And one of the second-hottest tickets in town was the wildly entertaining ballroom reimagining of Cats! starring Andre De Shields as a glorious Old Deuteronomy. (Say what you will about Michael Bloomberg, but he did tell Vanity Fair that Cats: The Jellicle Ball was the best show he saw in 2024, clarifying, “Not the regular Cats. The Gay Cats!”) Let’s bring more of this energy into next year’s theater season, please.
-Virginia

The dumb Robocop stuff they tried to pull was a failure

The NYPD gets $10 billion a year and still wants to offload their jobs to robots, but the robots don’t want to work either. You might remember the NYPD piloted a Knightscope “security robot” in Times Square, a big dumb hunk of metal that needed a chaperone, couldn’t go up stairs and weighed 420 (nice) pounds. That pilot program ended in February, and it doesn’t look like it’s coming back anytime soon. The city made another effort to use technology to police the subways by installing weapon detectors at certain stations; those detectors found no guns but 118 false positives, and don't seem like they’ll be coming back. 
-Tim 

We laughed off an earthquake

Hey, remember that earthquake back in the spring? That cutie little shakeup that made Twitter good for at least a day, gave everyone a solid week’s worth of small talk, and caused no notable damages, injuries, or deaths? That was pretty fun! May all future seismic and/or weather events be this enjoyable and unserious.
-Virginia 

A pinball heaven returned from purgatory 

The city is full of trendy speakeasies these days. and we can argue forever about whether you can call something a “speakeasy” when it has a TikTok account full of baby skinned influencers (you can’t). The only speakeasy-ish place I’ve ever cared about is the pinball bar in the back of Sunshine Laundromat, a wonderland of clanging, banging, sparkling pinball machines that you access through a dryer door on the back wall. The place was crammed to the walls with more than two dozen pinball games at one point … until a quirk in the zoning law forced it to shut down. When it finally reopened last year, the bar only had a measly four games, a paltry offering befitting a bowling alley. But earlier this year, they reopened at nearly full strength, packing the room with loads of silverball along with Skee-ball and other games. We heard part of the reason they were able to reopen was due to the City of Yes commercial changes. The Table of Success was a pinball table all along??
-Tim 

Rudy Giuliani is having a bad time

This is one of those things that could change next year. But for now, let’s revel in the fact that the guy who used to delight in humiliating the people who he was prosecuting or who his NYPD shot in the street is now absolutely losing it in his effort to not pay off what he owes a pair of Georgia poll workers he defamed in 2020, showing up in courtroom sketches looking deranged and getting called “a bum” outside of court.
-Dave

You all kept reading The Groove

We can all type and send emails ‘til we’re blue in the face, but this whole operation runs on you, our readers and members, who’ve kept this thing not just afloat, but growing all the time. To all of you who open the emails every week, share the stories, give us tips, tell your friends to subscribe, and show up to our parties, here’s a big, earnest thank you from Team Groove.

We appreciate each and everyone of you, ya turkeys.