Both Katz’s deli and Shake Shack have
Both Katz’s deli and Shake Shack have had “Z” malfunctions on their signs. Something in the NYC water?
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kottke.org posts about nyc
Timelapse animated map of the NYC subway
Timelapse animated map of the NYC subway that shows the order of the subway lines being built. See also the history of the NYC subway, photos of the IRT’s first stations, and if you really don’t have anything else to do for the next hour or so, an extensive trove of historical NYC subway maps.
Change in a peer vacuum
On finding your true self in a peer vacuum:
To move to a city where you are not afraid to try something new because all the people that labeled who THEY think you are (parents, childhood friends) are not their to say “that’s not you” or “you’ve changed”. Well, maybe that person didn’t change but finally became who they really are.
Get Lost is a collection of maps
Get Lost is a collection of maps of downtown Manhattan drawn by a variety of artists.
Tickets for Helvetica’s multi-week run at the
Tickets for Helvetica’s multi-week run at the IFC Center in NYC are on sale now.
More Business Lessons From the Coffee and Donut Guy
A few years ago, I posted an entry about a Manhattan coffee and donut vendor who let his customers make their own change.
When an environment of trust is created, good things start happening. Ralph can serve twice as many customers. People get their coffee in half the time. Due to this time savings, people become regulars. Regulars provide Ralph’s business with stability, a good reputation, and with customers who have an interest in making correct change (to keep the line moving and keep Ralph in business). Lots of customers who make correct change increase Ralph’s profit margin. Etc. Etc. And what did Ralph have to pay for all this? A bit of change here and there.
I get my occasional donut in another part of town now, but I noticed something similar with my new guy. Last Friday, the woman in front of me didn’t order anything but threw down a $20, received a coffee with two sugars a moment after she’d stepped to the window, and no change. As they chatted, I learned that the woman pays for her coffee in advance. The coffee guy asked her if she was sure she owed today. “Yep,” she replied, “It’s payday today; I get paid, you get paid.” Handy little arrangement.
Where did that number come from?
Meg and I were getting ready to go out to breakfast at some obscenely early hour on Sunday morning. I retrieved a pair of jeans from the floor.
J: Hey, there’s some change in these pants.
M: Breakfast is on you, then.
J: Yeah, if we’re going to eat, like, 68 cents-worth of breakfast.
Then I reached into the pocket to find out how much was actually in there…from some purchase I don’t recall making. 68 cents exactly. In olden times, that would have been taken as a harbinger of something, that virgins would need to be sacrificed on mountaintops to appease the gods. Meg shrugs and says, “you should post that to your blog.”
Also, Grey Dog on University has the best hash browns I’ve ever eaten.
Legendary party Misshapes was held for the
Legendary party Misshapes was held for the last time on Saturday night in NYC, its overness punctuated by an article in the NY Times on the party’s conclusion. My own personal overness was punctuated by not knowing about the end of Misshapes until I read it in the Times. A Mr. Cobrasnake has photos of the final night.
Muji announces their NYC Soho location…it’ll
Muji announces their NYC Soho location…it’ll be on Broadway just south of Grand. The store opens in November 2007 and will carry furniture, appliances, clothes, and a bunch of other stuff (food?).
Update: No food and no cafes. (thx, armin)
Le Pain Quotidien uses stale bread for
Le Pain Quotidien uses stale bread for menu holders on their tables. Clever design.
The World Without Us
The World Without Us looks like an interesting read:
If a virulent virus — or even the Rapture — depopulated Earth overnight, how long before all trace of humankind vanished? […] Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan’s subways dry would fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start to crumble.
Here’s a similar article from New Scientist from late 2006. (via mr)
Quick iPhone review
- I’m kind of amazed that this thing lives up to the expectations I had for it. It’s an amazing device.
- To read RSS, just put a feed address into Safari and Apple redirects it through their iPhone feed reader. But it’s very much of an a la carte thing, one feed at a time. What’s needed is a proper newsreader with its own icon on home screen. Workarounds for now: Google Reader looks nice or you could make a collective feed that combines all the feeds you want to read on your iPhone and use that with the iPhone feed reader (Meg’s idea).
- I skipped the index finger and am right into the two thumb typing. With the software correction, it’s surprisingly easy. Or maybe I just have small lady thumbs.
- After fiddling with it for an hour, I know how to work the iPhone better than the Nokia I had for the past 2 years, even though the Nokia has far fewer capabilities.
- I could use the Google Maps app forever.
- When I go back to using my Macbook Pro, I want to fling stuff around the screen like on the iPhone. It’s an addictive way to interface with information.
- Finding Nemo looked really nice on the widescreen display.
- You can pinch and expand with two thumbs instead of your thumb and index finger.
- The camera is not what you would call great, but it’s as good as my old phone’s, which is about all I want out of it. The lack of video is a bit of a bummer.
- I Twittered from on line at the AT&T store that the line was moving slowly because they were doing in-store credit checks and contract sign-ups, contrary to what everyone had been told by Apple beforehand. That was not the case. They were just being super careful with everything…each phone and the bag that it went into had a bar code on it and they were scanning everything and running phones from the back of the store one at a time. The staff was helpful and courteous and it was a very smooth transaction, all things considered. I was on line for 2 hours before the store opened and then another 2 hours waiting to get into the store.
- The alert options (ringtones, vibrate options, messaging alerts, etc.) aren’t as fine-grained as I would like, but they’ll do for now.
- I have not tried the internet stuff on anything but my home WiFi network, so I don’t know about the EDGE network speed. Will try it out and about later.
- The Google Maps display shows the subway stops but not the full system map. Workaround: stick a JPG of the subway map in your iPhoto library and sync it up to the iPhone. Voila, zoomable, dragable NYC subway map.
- Wasn’t it only a year or two ago that everyone was oohing and aahing over Jeff Han’s touchscreen demos? And now there’s a mass-produced device that does similar stuff that fits it your pocket. We’re living in the future, folks…the iPhone is the hovercar we’ve all been waiting for.
Update:
- The iPhone is the first iPod with a speaker. Which means that in addition to using it as a speakerphone, you can listen to music, podcasts, YouTube videos, and movies without earphones. Which might seem a bit “eh”, but won’t once you have 15 people gathered around watching and listening to that funny bit from last night’s Colbert Report. You know, the Social.
- I’m getting my mail right off my server with IMAP, so when it gets to the phone, it hasn’t gone through Mail.app’s junk filters…which basically means that mail on the iPhone is useless for me. In the near future, I’m going to set things up to route through GMail prior to the phone to near-eliminate the spam.
- Tried the EDGE network while I was out and about. Seemed pretty speedy to me, not noticeably slower than my WiFi at home…which may say more about Time Warner’s cable modem speeds than EDGE.
- BTW, all of these first impressions are just that. You can’t judge a device or an interface without using it day to day for awhile. I’m curious to see how I and others are still liking the phone in two weeks.
- Everytime I connect the iPhone to my computer, Aperture launches. Do not want.
Regarding the food plagiarism business from yesterday,
Regarding the food plagiarism business from yesterday, Ed Levine reports that he visited both restaurants yesterday and has some further thoughts on the situation. I think he nails it with this observation: “He was her right-hand man for six years, with complete and unfettered access to her creativity, recipes, craftsmanship, and even the combination to her safe. Charles is a smart, fiercely independent, tough-minded chef and businessperson who misplaced her trust when she gave her chief lieutenant all that access. McFarland, bereft of his own ideas, decided to open what is, for all intents and purposes, a clone of Pearl.”
Peter Kaplan takes photographs from great heights,
Peter Kaplan takes photographs from great heights, sometimes even putting his camera on top of a 42-foot pole to get the right shot. A slideshow of some of his work includes several shots of iconic NYC buildings from unusual angles.
Food plagiarism
Rebecca Charles, owner of the Pearl Oyster Bar in NYC, a seafood place modeled after hundreds of similar restaurants in New England offering similar menus, is suing a former employee (of six years) for copying too closely her restaurant and menu in opening his new place, Ed’s Lobster Bar.
Many parallels here to the design/art/film world…what is mere inspiration versus outright theft? The key question in these kinds of cases for me is: does the person exercise creativity in the appropriation? Did they add something to it instead of just copying or superficially changing it? Clam shacks are everywhere in New England, but an upscale seafood establishment with a premium lobster roll is a unique creative twist on that concept brought to NYC by Charles. An upscale clam shack blocks away from a nearly identical restaurant at which the owner used to work for six years…that seems a bit lame to me, not the work of a creative restaurateur. Who knows how this stuff is going to play out legally; it’s a complex issue with lots of slippery slope potential.
Meg has more thoughts on the issue and Ed Levine weighs in over at Serious Eats with information not found in the NY Times article. It was Ed who first raised the issue about Ed’s Lobster Bar earlier in the month.
Update: I forgot to link to the menus above. Here’s the menu for Pearl Oyster Bar and here’s the menu for Ed’s Lobster Bar. For comparison, here are the menus for a couple of traditional clam shacks: the Clam Box in Ipswich, MA and Woodman’s in Essex, MA.
Remember the Splasher/graffiti/defacing business from
Remember the Splasher/graffiti/defacing business from last week? The group of people collectively know as the Splasher is back with a manifesto: “if we did it, this is how it would’ve happened”. Not the most succinct, these art school revolutionaries.
New publicly released data shows that some
New publicly released data shows that some NYC subway lines are exceeding maximum capacity, both in terms of the number of riders per car and the number of trains per track.
A hi-res photo from 1910 of the Flatiron
A hi-res photo from 1910 of the Flatiron Building in NYC. Still a lot of horse and trolley traffic in those days. (via NYC Snapshot)
NYC font fans rejoice…Helvetica (the movie)
NYC font fans rejoice…Helvetica (the movie) will be starting a run at the IFC Center on September 12. My short review of the film is here.
A fellow named the Splasher has been
A fellow named the Splasher has been splashing paint on street art around NYC over the past few months. Here’s some of his, er, work. Well-known street artist Shepard Fairey (the Splasher has targeted several of his pieces) opened a show last night in DUMBO and two guys tried to set off a homemade smoke bomb at the opening, leading to speculation that one (or both) of them was the Splasher. Gothamist has more. Jake Dobkin has photos from Fairey’s show, which looks pretty nice.
Update: The Brooklyn Paper is reporting that DJ 10 Fingers subdued the suspected Splasher before he could light his stink bomb. (No, seriously!) The would-be stink bomber is facing a possible 15 years in jail.
Regarding Eve Mosher’s project to draw a
Regarding Eve Mosher’s project to draw a flood line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, here are a couple of related projects. Ledia Carroll’s Restore Mission Lake Project outlined the shore of an historical lake which used to sit in the midst of San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood. Under The Level explores the possibility and consequences of Katrina-level flooding in NYC. (thx, kayte and dens)
Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary about Edward
Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary about Edward Burtynsky and the photos that he’s taken in China of the Three Gorges Dam, factories, and other vast industrial projects. Trailer is here and it’s available on DVD at Amazon. (thx, scott)
Update: Manufactured Landscapes is playing in NYC at Film Forum starting tonight through July 3.
NY Times on the rise of OpenTable,
NY Times on the rise of OpenTable, which wasn’t exactly an overnight success. To me, the thing that pushed OT over the edge toward acceptance wasn’t so much the public-facing business (let your customers make reservations online) but the software that the restaurants were provided to keep better track of their customers and their habits. It used to be a big deal that Four Seasons Hotels tracked the preferences of all their customers but now any restaurant with the OT system can easily do the same. “Doug Washington, a co-owner of Town Hall, said the notes were not just helpful, they are occasionally indispensable. Next to the name of one regular, who has a habit of bringing in women he is not married to, is an instruction to make sure the man’s wife has not booked a separate table for the same day.”
Short review of Taxi! A Social History
Short review of Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver from the NY Times Sunday Book Review. “When I was young, most of them had adopted a common strategy against loneliness: a fleeting intimacy with their passengers. This was the era of the cabby as philosopher or comedian, quick to make observations about life itself, or its subdivisions in politics and sports, or to crack wise about women and other mysteries. This form of performance art had two goals: human contact and better tips.”
Artist Eve Mosher is drawing a chalk
Artist Eve Mosher is drawing a chalk line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan that denotes the encroachment of the ocean if it were to rise 10 feet above the current sea level. There’s a web site for the project, including a progress blog. See also Flood Maps.
If you’re unfamiliar with the alternate side
If you’re unfamiliar with the alternate side parking shuffle that happens once or twice a week in most areas of NYC, Jen Bekman has a good description of it. I’m convinced the New Yorker would go out of business if it weren’t for the shuffle…a lot of 6,000 word articles get read waiting for the meter maid to come around.
Opening Friday, June 22 at jen bekman gallery
Opening Friday, June 22 at jen bekman gallery in NYC: A New American Portrait, “a group exhibition of photographs featuring artists at the vanguard of contemporary portraiture in America”. Curated by Jen Bekman and Joerg Colberg, one of my favorite bloggers on the topic of photography.
New York magazine has a great collection
New York magazine has a great collection of stories about how various NYC businesses go about making their money. They cover everyone from a taxi driver to a sex shop to Goldman Sachs to the MoMA.
Wiimbledon is a Wii Tennis tournament taking
Wiimbledon is a Wii Tennis tournament taking place in Brooklyn in late June. I’d come kick your ass, but I have plans that day.
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