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Calvin Trillin, parallel parking expert, parks a self-parking car. “As you ease up gradually on the brake, the wheel turns on its own to make one reverse swoop into the spot. Watching the wheel turn by itself is a bit like watching a player piano, except in traffic.”
Photos by Bill Sullivan of people going through NYC subway turnstiles. I love the moments of recognition depicted here. (via dooce)
Ho. Ly. Shit! Muji is planning on opening “two Muji stores in New York between July and December”. Anyone have a sub to WWD…email me the text of this article? Got it, thanks Nixta! (via the cap’n)
For the Designing the City of the Future contest held by the History Channel, New York-based architecture firm ARO developed “a vision of New York recovering from massive flooding in low lying areas of New York as a result of global warming”. Photos of their entry are available on Flickr. “In order to co-exist with fluctuating sea levels, ARO proposed a new building type called a ‘vane.’ Part skyscraper, part viaduct, ‘vanes’ are built in, on, and over flooded streets, reconnecting to the classic street grid and making up for lost square footage.”
Photograph of every advertisement in Times Square. Somehow I thought there would be more.
Adam Gopnik on the current health of New York City. “This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.”
Notes from Apartment #5. “Dear Neighbor. When you arrive late every night, you are probably concentrating on your chores and don’t realize that this building, this street, the traffic, the people are all very still, very quiet.”
How the newspaper gets made: 1. The Washington Post runs an article on Dec 24, 2006 about how the New Yorker picks its cartoons, which article mentions in passing that several of the magazine’s cartoonists gather weekly at a Manhattan restaurant. 2. Three weeks go by. 3. The NY Times publishes a piece profiling said weekly gathering of the cartoonists at the Manhattan restaurant.
Profile of “radical chef” David Chang and his restaurants, Momofuku Noodle Bar (one of my favorite restaurants) and Momofuku Ssam Bar, an Asian version of Chipotle. After a vegetarian customer threatened to sue Chang for not offering vegetarian broth, he took all but one of the veggie options off the menu. “We added pork to just about everything[…] Fuck it, let’s just cook what we want.”
New York magazine tracked the media diets of 3 New Yorkers for a week. Lightweights. (via fimoculous)
Power Washing 188 Suffolk St., a photo depicting how dirty NYC is. (via eliot)
Wesley Autrey jumped in front of an oncoming subway train to save the life of a man who had fallen on the tracks. I read this before I left for work yesterday and imagined the scenario when my train pulled into the station. I’d hope I would do the same thing as Mr. Autrey did, but that train moves awfully fast…
Shopsin’s, who closed their beloved eatery in the West Village last month, has updated their web site with plans to open in a stall at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. (thx, janelle)
Faces of New York. Photographer Simon Hoegsberg asks people about their faces and then photographs them. “Essentially I would say I have made a drastic change the last three years. Age caught up with me. Good times caught up with me. Wild parties caught up with me. And what I see now is a truly aging woman. I no longer see the spontaneous, witty, charming…I see an elderly woman. And I find that difficult, but in a way very freeing.”
The Orthodox and other observant Jews living within this ‘home’ are permitted certain actions outside their literal homes — pushing a stroller to the synagogue, carrying keys, walking a dog on a leash — that would otherwise be forbidden on the Sabbath.
Scans of the New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual from 1970. (thx, jake)
Santas riding the NYC subway in 1987. Seeing graffiti on the subway always amazes me.
Quirky West Village eatery Shopsin’s finally closes for good. Once more, with feeling: the Shopsin’s menu and Calvin Trillin’s classic piece about the restaurant in the NYer.
Update: James Felder wrote a nice remembrance of eating at Shopsin’s on its final day for Serious Eats. (thx, adam)
Prewalking: walking down the subway platform so that when you board the train, you’ll be close to the exit or transfer point when the train reaches its destination.
Update: Photo of the Way Out -> tube map, which marks which side of the train to exit from and where exits/transfers are for each station. (thx, tom)
Update: Exit maps are available for the Toronto and Toyko subways. (thx, adam)
On a recent visit to New York, writer Will Self walked the 20 miles from JFK to his hotel in Manhattan…and this was after walking 26 miles to Heathrow to catch the plane to JFK. “There were not many pedestrians out at 11:30 in the morning, and dressed all in black and snapping pictures with a digital camera, Mr. Self was a sight sufficiently exotic that he was tailed for a while by a black S.U.V.”
The Shapes Project by Allen McCollum. “I’ve designed a new system to produce unique two-dimensional ‘shapes.’ This system allows me to make enough unique shapes for every person on the planet to have one of their own. It also allows me to keep track of the shapes, so as to insure that no two will ever be alike.” Part of McCollum’s project is on display at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in NYC. (thx, scott)
The best and worst restaurant trends in NYC for 2006. Among the worst, Mexican: “Zero progress on one of the most misunderstood and untapped cuisines in NYC.”
Event at the 92nd St. Y on Dec 4: The Art of the Book: Behind the Covers with Dave Eggers, Chip Kidd and Milton Glaser. Tickets are only $10 if you’re 35 or younger.
Craigslist desperately needs something like Listpic…simple pages of thumbnails from CL ads by category. Here’s the page for NYC furniture.
Ironic Sans has an interview with one of NYC’s quirkiest characters, Louis Klein, a man who has seen over 500 tapings of Saturday Night Live in person, including the very first show. “In the last 27 years I’ve missed 36 shows.”
Google Earth recently added some maps from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection to their software, so you can just click them on and off on the globe. Included are a US map from 1833, a 1680 map of Tokyo, Paris from 1716, and a world map from 1790. I spent some time exploring the map of New York from 1836. Here’s a screenshot of the southern tip of Manhattan with the present-day buildings turned on:
A larger version is available on Flickr. Google Earth continues to be a fantastic software product. It’s almost more of a game than an atlas or educational program…so much fun.
Related: I did a project using Google Earth called Manhattan Elsewhere and made a scrollable, zoomable version of Viele’s Map of Manhattan.
Item of note included in the announcement of Luke Hayman’s addition to the NYC Pentagram office: he and Paula Scher are completely redesigning Time magazine, due to launch in January 2007. Hayman was formerly design director at New York magazine.
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