Around 9AM, Tropical Storm Irene made landfall on Coney Island, in Brooklyn. The eye of the storm had collapsed some time before, but there was a remarkable brightening of the sky as the ex-hurricane passed over the city, together with an eerie, charged stillness in the air. Nothing quite like this has happened in anyone's lifetime, not even Elliott Carter's; the last such storm to hit New York directly was the hurricane of 1893.
