Good morning on this fine Tuesday.
The week began on a frightening note as a 5-year-old boy from the Bronx was tested for Ebola at Bellevue Hospital Center on Monday.
When a blood test came back negative in the evening, there was a collective sense of relief.
“Good news!” the Bronx borough president, Rubén Díaz Jr., wrote on Twitter.
This was the latest test case for how city residents might respond to the threat of the virus.
The Times reporter Vivian Yee described the scene for us around East 172nd Street in Soundview.
As the news spread, and city workers arrived with pamphlets on Ebola, she said, “There was a sense of real dismay.”
Despite the city’s message since last week — that the virus is hard to contract — there was fear.
“As the day went on,” Ms. Yee said, “you saw some younger men — possibly it was a joke — riding through wearing face masks.”
(There were reports that children in the Bronx were bullied because of Ebola on Monday, and two boys from Senegal were reportedly injured in an attack.)
Later, mothers arrived at the school where it was believed the boy was enrolled in kindergarten to pick up their children early, even though it seemed the boy had not been in school in recent days.
A neighbor said the boy’s family had been in Guinea for about two weeks. He said the mother was a hairdresser and the father was a driver.
The parents of the schoolchildren “were not waiting for the results of the test,” Ms. Yee said.
The school did not tell parents if the boy who was hospitalized was a student there, but “a couple of the little kids said they had made a get-well card because they were told he was in the hospital,” Ms. Yee said.
They did not know why.
Here’s what else is happening.
WEATHER
Who could ask for anything more. Sun-kissed with a high of 74.
COMING UP TODAY
• The mayor visits a fire station in East Harlem to thank firefighters for taking Dr. Craig Spencer, who has Ebola, to Bellevue last week. 12:30 p.m. …
• … And hosts a Halloween open house at Gracie Mansion, possibly in costume. 5:30 p.m.
• Rob Astorino, the Republican candidate for governor, appears on WPIX Morning News. 7:15 a.m. …
• … And accuses Governor Cuomo of using federal funds intended for Hurricane Sandy victims to pay for campaign ads. Federal Plaza. 9:30 a.m.
• Officials are expected to announce the cause of the deadly Metro-North derailment in the Bronx. Grand Central Station. 11 a.m.
• Representative Michael Grimm debates his Democratic challenger, Domenic M. Recchia Jr., at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. 7 p.m.
• Sting plays by the Queen Mary 2 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its maiden voyage, and thank a cruise line for paying for his musical. Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. 1:15 p.m.
• Mick Fleetwood tells stories from four decades on the road with Fleetwood Mac, at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue in Midtown. 1 p.m. [Free]
• Opening reception for “Picasso and the Camera,” an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. 6 p.m. [Free]
• What does a bagel have in common with some buried beads? The Times reporter Sam Roberts explores “A History of New York in 101 Objects,” at the Brooklyn Historical Society. 6:30 p.m. [Free]
• A documentary about how and why Leo Villareal is stringing 25,000 LED lights along San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, followed by a Q. and A. with the artist. BAM. 7:30 p.m. [$14]
• Islanders host Jets, 7 p.m. (MSG+). Devils at Penguins, 7 p.m. (MSG).
• For more events, see The New York Times Arts & Entertainment guide.
COMMUTE
• L.I.R.R., Metro-North, N.J. Transit, Amtrak
• Roads: Check traffic map or radio report on the 1s or the 8s.
• Alternate-side parking: in effect.
• Air travel: La Guardia, J.F.K., Newark.
IN THE NEWS
• Governor Cuomo and Governor Christie faced criticism of their mandatory quarantine policy from the White House, the United Nations secretary-general and civil liberties groups. [New York Times]
• The federal government announced its own guidelines for returning medical workers, but it cannot enforce them. [New York Times]
• Governor Christie released the nurse who had been quarantined in a tent in New Jersey, but he did not offer her an apology. [New York Times]
• Mayor de Blasio has emerged as a steady voice of reason amid the governors’ garbled messages about Ebola. [New York Times]
• The Correction Department’s top uniformed officer will step down amid criticism over underreporting of violence at Rikers Island. [New York Times]
• The Rev. Al Sharpton has gone from weighing 305 pounds to a shockingly unwhopping 129.6 pounds. [Daily News]
• Federal authorities accused city officials of defrauding Medicaid, exploiting loopholes with a contractor to collect tens of millions of dollars in reimbursements. [New York Times]
• The heads of Narco Freedom, “three-quarters houses” for recovering addicts in the Bronx, are accused of bilking Medicaid while housing residents in neglected buildings. [Aljazeera America]
• Since Hurricane Sandy, the M.T.A. has made two subway tunnels theoretically flood-proof. It still has seven other East River tunnels to secure. [WNYC]
• The M.T.A. appointed its first chief safety officer. [New York Post]
• A culinary map of Arthur Avenue includes a shop with more hanging salamis than most people will see in a lifetime. [The Infatuation]
• Scoreboard: Rangers tame Wild, 5-4.
• For a global look at the news, see Your Tuesday Briefing.
AND FINALLY …
Unprompted music, flickering lights, an apparition in a wedding dress.
The stuff of haunted houses is also standard fare at a restaurant in Brooklyn, employees say.
There have been a number of creepy encounters over the years at Sweetwater in Williamsburg, The Times reports.
But things got truly weird this month, when “workers unearthed a burial site containing a three-inch stone statue of the Madonna and child, a tiny gold ring, a pair of children’s brown Mary Jane shoes and bone fragments.”
After the discovery, glasses supposedly started breaking by the dozen.
The angry ghost is believed to be that of Anna Smith. Her family, who owned the building on North Sixth Street, once lived upstairs and operated a bar throughout the 1960s.
When the neighborhood hit on hard times, Ms. Smith refused to move away.
She died in a rest home in 2003, but, if you believe the stories, she never left at all.
Kenneth Rosen contributed reporting.
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