Subway waltz
Two NYC subway trains dancing down the tunnels…what a charming little video.
(via ★leela)
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kottke.org posts about nyc
What song are you listening to?
Tyler Cullen went out on the streets of NYC and asked random passers-by what song they were listening to on their headphones.
Turned out to be more interesting than I expected.
NYC groceries cheaper than in rest of the US
It seems that item for item, food in New York City is actually cheaper than in many other parts of the country.
Using data from the ACNielsen HomeScan database, which employed bar-code scanners to track every purchase made by roughly 33,000 U.S. households in 2005, the two economists compared identical products sold in cities big and small, both at high-end grocery stores and discount retailers. In nearly every case, New York products were cheaper than in places such as Memphis, Indianapolis and Milwaukee.
(via stellar)
NYC subway exits into buildings
Noah Brier (and his commenters) are collecting NYC subway stations that open into buildings…like the BC stop that exits right into the Museum of Natural History.
Cory Arcangel exhibition at The Whitney
Cory Arcangel has a solo exhibition coming up at The Whitney.
Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, an exhibition of new work, revolves around the concept of “product demonstrations.” All of the works featured in the exhibition — ranging from video games, single channel video, kinetic sculpture, and prints, to pen plotter drawings — have been created by means of technological tools with an emphasis on the mixing and matching of both professional and amateur technologies, as well as the vernaculars these technologies encourage within culture at large.
Opens May 26 and runs through September. Interview Magazine has a recent profile and interview.
The Frick Collection’s secrets
I love this “bowling saloon” in the basement of The Frick Collection museum in NYC.
Gothamist has a bunch more photos of the Frick’s secret places.
Graffiti is a crime
From the NYC transit authority, a 1988 video about the consequences of painting graffiti in the subway.
Intense! (via ★vuokko)
Solitude among millions
Melissa Febos writes about crying in public in NYC…as well as other private things that people do in public here.
One afternoon, I was riding a Brooklyn-bound Q train with my mother, who was visiting from Cape Cod, when our conversation lulled. We each glanced around the subway car at the other passengers, their heads bobbing in unison, the eyes of the man across from us doing a creepy back-and-forth twitch as he watched a train whizzing by in the opposite direction behind us. Some people read, or pushed buttons on their smart phones, but most just stared without expression at the floor or the garish overhead posters for Dr. Zizmor’s cosmetic dermatology. My mother (who is, notably, a psychotherapist) leaned into my shoulder and whispered, “Everyone on this train looks depressed.”
I snorted, whispering back: “No, Mom, they just have their train-faces on.” In a place where we are so rarely alone, we find privacy in public.
The “privacy in public” thing is essential in understanding New York.
The mafia and NYC pizza cheese
Why can’t you get a slice of pizza at John’s on Bleecker or Patsy’s? Allegedly because of Al Capone:
In his 1981 book on the mob called Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace, the late Jonathan Kwitny detailed how Al Capone — who owned a string of dairy farms near Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin — forced New York pizzerias to use his rubbery mob cheese, so different from the real mozzarella produced here in New York City since the first immigrants from Naples arrived in Brooklyn around 1900.
As the story goes, the only places permitted to use good mozzarella made locally were the old-fashioned pizza parlors like Lombardi’s, Patsy’s, and John’s, who could continue doing so only if they promised to never serve slices. According to Kwitny, this is why John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street still has the warning “No Slices” on its awning today.
(via ★kathryn)
The stores, they are a’changin’
Great series of photos of a Harlem store front, taken every 2-5 years from 1977 to 2004. (via ★vuokko)
Update: These photos were taken by Camilo Jose Vergara; there are many more like them at his web site. (thx, andrew)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams at IFC
Starting April 29, the IFC Center in NYC will start showing Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D. A refresher on the film:
The visionary director of Grizzly Man leads us on an unforgettable journey 32,000 years back in time to explore the earliest known images made by human hands. Discovered in 1994, France’s Chauvet caves contain the rarest of the world’s historic treasures, restricted to only a handful of researchers. Granted once-in-a-lifetime access and filming in 3D, Herzog captures the beauty of a truly awe-inspiring place, while musing in his inimitable fashion about its original inhabitants, the birth of art and the curious people surrounding the caves today.
Herzog first heard of the Chauvet caves from this Judith Thurman piece in the New Yorker.
Cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
The cherry blossoms are starting to bloom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden!
The Space Shuttle takes Manhattan
NYC is getting a Space Shuttle! It’s never actually been in space, but hey!
With the Discovery headed to the Smithsonian, the museum will no longer have need for the Enterprise, the shuttle that has been on display there since 2004. The Enterprise, which was used for early glide tests but was never sent into orbit, will now go the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.
How Manhattan got its grid
The NY Times has an interactive look at how the Manhattan grid came to be.
In 1811, John Randel created a proposed street grid of Manhattan. Compare his map, along with other historic information, to modern-day Manhattan.
This article has more about the map. (via ★raul)
400-year-old king signs autographs at the Met
For their latest mission, Improv Everywhere got someone who looked very much like King Philip IV of Spain to sign autographs in front of a Velázquez painting of the monarch.
Every building in NYC
James Gulliver Hancock is attempting to draw every building in NYC. Here are a few buildings on Rivington:
See also Every Person In New York.
LCD Soundsystem ticket debacle
So, LCD Soundsystem is retiring and to see off their fans, they decided to perform one last show at Madison Square Garden. Except that they didn’t think they’d sell the place out and didn’t pay too much attention to how the tickets were being sold. When the tickets went on sale last week, they sold out immediately. Many fans didn’t get tickets, the band’s family and friends didn’t get tickets, and even some of the band didn’t get tickets. Scalpers bought thousands upon thousands of tickets and the band is hopping mad. So they’re adding four more NYC shows right before the MSG gig to give their fans a chance to see them and to screw the scalpers by increasing the supply (and therefore lowering demand and prices).
oh-and a small thing to scalpers: “it’s legal” is what people say when they don’t have ethics. the law is there to set the limit of what is punishable (aka where the state needs to intervene) but we are supposed to have ethics, and that should be the primary guiding force in our actions, you fucking fuck.
It would be fun if all those scalpers got stuck with thousands of unsellable MSG tickets.
Musical subway map
Alexander Chen made a version of the NYC subway map that plays music as the trains intersect routes.
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.
Check out the full version; there are more details here. See also Isle of Tune. (via about 20 people on Twitter just now)
Amazingly detailed map of Central Park
This illustrated map of Central Park individually depicts, labels, and categories by species every single significant tree in the park. All 19,630 of them.
Central Park Entire, The Definitive Illustrated Map is the most detailed map of any urban park in the world. I spent over two years creating it, walking more than 500 miles as I documented over 170 different kinds of trees and shrubs. Central Park contains over 58 miles of paved paths and many more miles of obscure woodland trails. I hiked along every one of them multiple times in order to identify and pinpoint each major tree. There are 19,630 trees drawn and placed in position on this map. There are no filler trees, no fluff. Every tree symbol represents a real tree in the Park, and you can identify its genus or species with the accompanying tree legend.
If you’ve got a subscription to the New Yorker, you can read about the map in this week’s issue. (thx, @bamstutz)
Bill Cunningham film
Looks like Bill Cunningham New York will be showing around the US starting with New York on March 16th. (Film Forum!) And hark, a trailer.
If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.
1770 map of NYC
The Brooklyn Historical Society recently restored a 1770 map of New York City, one of a handful of “Ratzer maps” that have survived to the present day.
A British Army officer in America, Lieutenant Ratzer was a surveyor and draftsman, and his map was immediately praised as a step forward from those of his predecessors. For his trouble, his name was misspelled on initial versions of his maps, called the “Ratzen plan.”
The map included a detailed rendering of the island’s slips and shores and streets in Lower Manhattan, the familiar mixing with the long gone. Pearl, Broad, Grand and Prince lay beside Fair and Crown and the “Fresh Water” pond.
“Manhattan, at least the part shown here, was mapped as precisely as any spot on the Earth at the time,” said Robert T. Augustyn, co-author of “Manhattan in Maps: 1527-1995”. “There was no more beautiful or revealing a map of New York City ever done.”
The side-by-side comparison of the restored map with the pre-restored map is worth a look. And compare with the Viele map of Manhattan made in 1865.
Temporary restaurant
Chef John Fraser’s new NYC restaurant will be designed to be open for only nine months…until the building it’s in is demolished. Some other unusual things about the restaurant: diners set their own tables, chairs are from eBay, and it’s funded in part via Kickstarter.
With little more than two weeks before the planned opening, he was still formulating the initial menu and pricing. For one appetizer he envisioned a Gruyere, leek and potato veloute; for another, Arctic char in aspic. For entrees he was mulling a pork cheek, a veal shank, Dover sole for two. These would probably be served as part of a three-course prix fixe for $58, he said.
Nothing too unconventional there. But beyond the plate, he said, anything goes. Although he’ll take reservations, he’s bypassing the Web service Open Table (too cumbersome). And he’s curious about having a marching band stomp through some night. Obligatory resourcefulness has given way to revolutionary thoughts.
The carless streets of Manhattan
Bruce McCall imagines the Manhattan street with no room for cars…but there’s a baby stroller lane, a Segway/skateboarding lane, and a runner/jogger lane. (via @bldgblog)
Old photos of New York City
The Museum of the City of New York has put a sizable chunk of their photography collection up on their web site. The interface is a little hinky, but it’s worth wading through. This is 220 Spring St from 1932, from right near Sixth Avenue:
Photo credit: 220 Spring Street by Charles Von Urban. From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York. (thx, @bamstutz)
You know what they call a Quarter Pounder in the Czech Republic?
McDonald’s in the Czech Republic has introduced a line of NYC-themed hamburgers, including the Wall Street Beef and SoHo Grande:
Grilled beef, spicy salami pepperoni, cheese, crisp, with cheese sauce and salsa mexico-tion in the bun, cheese.
Mmmm?
Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is an account of the author’s daily walk to work from his Greenwich Village home to a Tribeca studio. From reaktionbooks:
Over the course of more than fifteen years, architect and critic Michael Sorkin has taken an almost daily twenty-minute walk from his apartment near Washington Square in New York’s Greenwich Village to his architecture studio further downtown in Tribeca. This walk has afforded abundant opportunities for Sorkin to reflect on the ongoing transformation of the neighbourhoods through which he passes. Inspired by events both mundane and monumental, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan unearths a network of relationships between the physical and the social city.
Here’s a chapter listing:
The Stairs
The Stoop
The Block
Washington Square
LaGuardia Place
Soho
Canal Street
Tribeca
145 Hudson Street
Alternative Routes
Espri d’Escalier
Robert Campbell, the architecture critic for the Boston Globe, says of the book:
Not since the great Jane Jacobs has there been a book this good about the day-to-day life of New York. Sorkin writes like an American Montaigne, riffing freely off his personal experience (sometimes happy, sometimes frustrating) to arrive at general insights about New York and about cities everywhere.
Sounds great!
“Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless”
From the New Yorker a week or two ago, John Cassidy has an article about the social value of what Wall Street and investment banking. It’s not a pretty picture.
Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain’s top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has described much of what happens on Wall Street and in other financial centers as “socially useless activity” — a comment that suggests it could be eliminated without doing any damage to the economy. In a recent article titled “What Do Banks Do?,” which appeared in a collection of essays devoted to the future of finance, Turner pointed out that although certain financial activities were genuinely valuable, others generated revenues and profits without delivering anything of real worth — payments that economists refer to as rents. “It is possible for financial activity to extract rents from the real economy rather than to deliver economic value,” Turner wrote. “Financial innovation…may in some ways and under some circumstances foster economic value creation, but that needs to be illustrated at the level of specific effects: it cannot be asserted a priori.”
Turner’s viewpoint caused consternation in the City of London, the world’s largest financial market. A clear implication of his argument is that many people in the City and on Wall Street are the financial equivalent of slumlords or toll collectors in pin-striped suits. If they retired to their beach houses en masse, the rest of the economy would be fine, or perhaps even healthier.
I particularly enjoyed the characterization of banking as a utility:
Most people on Wall Street, not surprisingly, believe that they earn their keep, but at least one influential financier vehemently disagrees: Paul Woolley, a seventy-one-year-old Englishman who has set up an institute at the London School of Economics called the Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality. “Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?” Woolley said to me when I met with him in London. “It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.”
p.s. Thanks to Typekit, the New Yorker’s web site now uses the same familiar typefaces that you find in the magazine. Looks great.
TGI Friday’s, the first singles bar
Over at Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley has a fascinating interview with Alan Stillman, the founder of TGI Friday’s and Smith & Wollensky. Stillman started Friday’s because, essentially, he was interested in meeting girls.
I wanted T.G.I. Friday’s to feel like a neighbourhood, corner bar, where you could get a good hamburger, good french fries, and feel comfortable. At the time, it was a sophisticated hamburger and french fry place — apparently, I invented the idea of serving burgers on a toasted English muffin — but the principle involved was to make people feel that they were going to someone’s apartment for a cocktail party.
The food eventually played a larger role than I imagined it would, because a lot of the girls didn’t have enough money to stretch from one paycheque to the other, so I became the purveyor of free hamburgers at the end of the month.
I don’t think there was anything else like it at the time. Before T.G.I. Friday’s, four single twenty-five year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people’s apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody’s birthday, but they weren’t going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.
The subway announcement lady
A profile of the woman who does the announcements — the ones you can actually understand — for the NYC subway. Since becoming “the voice”, she hasn’t actually ridden the subway.
On the telephone, her voice does not have quite as much oomph as it does on the subway. “My husband says he doesn’t hear the nice voice as often as he’d like,” she said.
But the nice voice cannot be disobeyed. Before 9/11, when they lived in Louisville, Ky., he drove to the airport to pick up her. He was early. He parked right in front of the terminal. He could hear her on the public-address system, saying no one was supposed to park there.
A traffic officer came along and said he had to follow the voice’s orders.
Her husband said, “I don’t listen to that voice at home; I’m not going to listen to it here.”
Downtown from behind
If you crossed The Sartorialist with The Selby and put the whole thing on a bike, you’d get Downtown From Behind, a collection of photographs of creative people biking the streets of downtown Manhattan, shot from behind.
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