Asked if he’d be interested in making it 16 years at City Hall, Bloomberg responded, “The law does not permit it.”

. . .

Later Thursday, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser pointed out that the mayor in June said he won’t seek a fourth term — “period.”

The branch was four inches thick and fell 20 feet on Wednesday morning, putting a gash in the man’s skull, damaging his upper vertebrae and causing a partial lung collapse. The man, Sasha J. Blair-Goldensohn, 33, began to show preliminary signs of consciousness on Thursday, responding to verbal commands, said his mother, Gwenda Blair, in a phone interview.

. . .

People passing by the site of the accident, near the entrance at Central Park West and 63rd Street, gave a fairly consistent interpretation of the previous day’s events: One in a million accidents are a fact of life in a city of more than eight million people. Plummeting tree branches, most added, are somewhere near the bottom of their daily worries, below falling construction cranes and rogue pedicabs, not to mention the more mundane concerns of everyday life.

“It wouldn’t keep me out of the park,” said Katina Zachmanoglow, 52, as she sat in the shade of a large oak. “It’s too isolated of an incident to be concerned.”

“I’d probably be more concerned about a pigeon doing something to me,” she added.

“What the heck was that?” David Moreno, 29, asked his girlfriend when he first saw the animals gliding high above the Parade Ground. Tracking their movements, he eventually realized what he was seeing. “Hon, I think those are bats. Could there be bats in the Bronx?”

• Allow stores that currently sell beer (supermarkets, convenience stores, etc.) to also sell wine and liquor.
• Replace the State Liquor Authority’s licensing system with medallions that could be sold to another operator if a business closes.
• Allow liquor stores to sell “complementary” items including snacks, mixers, etc.
• Permit liquor stores to open as early as 8 a.m. and close as late as 3 a.m. (9 p.m on Sundays).