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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}For many in New York and elsewhere, 2012 will forever be connected to a pair of devastating disasters: the widespread damage caused by Hurricane Sandy and the wrenching massacre of 26 people, including 20 children, at Sa ndy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Tragedy, of course, lays first claim to attention, and so Metropolitan's Year in Pictures is filled with images of the storm's aftermath, and of grief-stricken families in Connecticut.
Robert Caplin for The New York Times A man who goes by Adam Sandler was escorted from the park by police after an anti-Semitic tirade.But the year was not just one of sorrow. It was also a year in which the 126th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show was held, and the Barclays Center - and the Brooklyn Nets - arrived in Downtown Brooklyn. It was a year of weekends at the beach, the canceled marathon, an oddly temperate winter and an election-laden fall. It was a year in which one man (the mayor) banned the sale of sweetened drinks larger than 16 ounces, and another (in an Elmo costume) shocked crowds at the Central Park Zoo by preposterously spouting anti-Semitic insults.
In August, the police shot and killed a knife-wielding man named Darrius H. Kennedy as tourists in Times Square recorded cellphone video from the sidewalks. A month later, the police shot and killed a Bronx bodega worker, Reynaldo Cuevas, as he fled from a robbery.
Twelve police officers were shot this year, but all survived; the suspect in one shooting, Luis Ortiz, mugged gaptoothed for the media as he was hauled away in handcuffs.
Which one of these images might come to define the year? Only time and that calm and melancholy len s called perspective will tell.
Librado Romero/The New York Times McCarren Pool in Brooklyn reopened in June after 28 years.Follow @alanfeuer and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
