From the This Must Be the Place series, a lovely short film about the Prime Burger Restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant opened in 1938 and one of the servers, Artie, has been there since 1952.
For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home -- some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn't been altered since the early '60s, and it looks all the better for it. Here the waiters and workers of Prime Burger discuss their views on their chosen profession, and the unique nature of the place itself.
So why the need to order right? Because to keep up with the fast food chains, the DiMicelis started par-broiling their burgers. Par-broiling produces a less juicy burger. So when you order at Prime Burger specify you want your burger ($5.25 for a hamburger, $5.95 for a cheeseburger) made from scratch, and that you're willing to wait the extra few minutes.
Economist Jason Barr and his colleagues measured the bedrock depth in Manhattan and correlated it with building height. In doing so, they busted the long-held belief that there were no skyscrapers between Midtown and the Financial District because of insufficient bedrock.
What the economists found was that some of the tallest buildings of their day were built around City Hall, where the bedrock reaches its deepest point in the city, about 45 meters down, between there and Canal Street, at which point the bedrock begins to rise again toward the middle of the island. Indeed, Joseph Pullitzer built his record-setting New York World Building, a 349-foot colossus, at 99 Park Row, near the nadir, as did Frank Woolworth a decade later.
The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I'm talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open plan offices, in which no one has "a room of one's own." During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.
The new offices of Foursquare and Buzzfeed (where I work from) are a perfect example of the New Groupthink Cain refers to....rows and rows of people sitting next to each other in open spaces. Much of this is because of NYC's insane rental market, but Fog Creek's offices are a nice counterexample:
Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).
As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile, and onto the darkened station platform, a sinking sense of fear gripped me. I grew alert, and looked around to see who might be standing by, waiting to attack. The subway was dangerous at any time of the day or night, and everyone who rode it knew this and was on guard at all times; a day didn't go by without the newspapers reporting yet another hideous subway crime. Passengers on the platform looked at me, with my expensive camera around my neck, in a way that made me feel like a tourist-or a deranged person.
Starting today and continuing for the next four weeks, IFC Center in NYC is showing a "comprehensive retrospective" of films (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro) made by Studio Ghibli. Most of the films are new 35mm prints and some will be screened in dubbed and subtitled Japanese versions.
During our visit, Paul Rosenblatt told us that he aims to ripen fruit in five days at 62 degrees, but, to schedule fruit readiness in accordance with supply and demand, he can push a room in four days at 64 degrees, or extend the process to seven days at 58 degrees.
"The energy coming off a box of ripening bananas could heat a small apartment," Rosenblatt explains, which means that heavy-duty refrigeration is required to keep each room temperature-controlled to within a half a degree. In the past, Banana Distributors of New York has even experimented with heating parts of the building on captured heat from the ripening process.
To add to the complexity, customers can choose from different degrees of ripeness, ranging from 1 (all green) to 7 (all yellow with brown sugar spots). Banana Distributors of New York proudly promise that they have "Every Color, Every Day," although Rosenblatt gets nervous if he has more than 2000 boxes of any particular shade.
Occupy Wall Street went up to protest at Lincoln Center last night during a performance of Philip Glass' opera Satyagraha. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross was there and captured the protest on video, which included Glass himself reading the closing lines from the opera, amplified to the crowd by the people's mic. It is an amazing scene.
When the Satyagraha listeners emerged from the Met, police directed them to leave via side exits, but protesters began encouraging them to disregard the police, walk down the steps, and listen to Glass speak. Hesitantly at first, then in a wave, they did so. The composer proceeded to recite the closing lines of Satyagraha, which come from the Bhagavad-Gita (after 3:00 in the video above): "When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again." True to form, he said it several times, with the "human microphone" repeating after him. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were in attendance, and at one point Reed helped someone crawl over the barricade that had been set up along the sidewalk.
Girl Walk // All Day is a feature-length dance music video set in NYC...the soundtrack is Girl Talk's All Day. Kickstarter is hosting a premiere for the film (+ dance party) on December 8 at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple...and it's free (you just need to RSVP). Here's the trailer:
Famed pizzeria Grimaldi's is being forced out of their space under the Brooklyn Bridge and is moving up the block...without their coveted coal oven. But now comes word that Patsy Grimaldi, former owner of Grimaldi's, is moving into the old space with a new restaurant called Juliana's. If I recall correctly, about half of the Grimaldi's menu is devoted to a telling of the Patsy's/Grimaldi's feud...looks like they're gonna need another page or two.
Over the weekend we had a chance to visit the long-abandoned Waldorf-Astoria train platform, which allowed VIPs to enter the hotel in a more private manner -- most famously it was used by Franklin D. Roosevelt, possibly to hide the fact that he was in a wheelchair suffering from polio. The mysterious track, known as Track 61, still houses the train car and private elevator, which were both large enough for FDR's armor-plated Pierce Arrow car. Legend has it that the car would drive off the train, onto the platform and straight into the elevator, which would lead to the hotel's garage.
Pairs nicely with Melissa Gould's Neu-York, "an obsessively detailed alternate-history map, imagining how Manhattan might have looked had the Nazis conquered it in World War II".
The distance between the metal bands holding the cylindrical structure together decreases from top to bottom because the pressure the water exerts increases with depth. The top band only needs to fight against the water at the very top of the tower but the bottom bands have to hold the entire volume from bursting out.
A couple years ago, I pointed to a 10-minute clip of a longer documentary called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Some kind soul has put the whole thing up on YouTube:
This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don't. Beginning at New York's Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.
This one is absolutely vital -- don't interfere with others' privacy. New York is a very crowded place. The way people deal with it is to create their own space. Thus, what outsiders often see as aloofness and isolation is, in fact, a sign of community; there is a shared ethos that everyone respects others' privacy and expects others to respect his own. This is chiefly communicated through eye contact. If you stare at someone on the subway: if you linger in looking out your window into someone else's bedroom; if you react to or interrupt a celebrity; or if you seem to be intentionally listening in to another's conversation, you are violating one of New York's most sacred unwritten rules. Keep yourself to yourself, buddy, and let others do the same.
Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary film about the unassuming king of street fashion photography, is out on DVD today.
"We all get dressed for Bill," says Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The Bill in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends he spots emerging from Manhattan sidewalks and high society charity soirees for his beloved Style section columns On The Street and Evening Hours.
Cunningham's enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. The range of people he snaps uptown fixtures like Wintour, Brooke Astor, Tom Wolfe and Annette de la Renta (who appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between reveals a delirious and delicious romp through New York. But rarely has anyone embodied contradictions as happily and harmoniously as Bill, who lived a monk-like existence in the same Carnegie Hall studio at for fifty years, never eats in restaurants and gets around solely on bike number 29 (28 having been stolen).
The former cop sprang from his chair and rushed toward me, and before I could step back, the stocky arms of the ex-boxer were curled around my shoulders. To my left, I saw a crowd of faces; to my right, a place setting. One knife, one fork, and one dull spoon wrapped in a white cloth napkin -- not much help if he started strangling me. The arms tightened, and then the high-pitched, soft-spoken voice I recognized from the witness stand whispered, "Thank you."
My chest sank with a long exhale, and a whirlwind of high-powered suits and smiles rose from their glasses of Cabernet. They floated toward me with outstretched hands and watery eyes, the aroma of freshly baked focaccia robiolas mixing with their cologne. One floor below, diners in this Murray Hill Italian restaurant chattered away ignorant of the strange encounter at the top of the back staircase. The man hugging me was supposed to be the monster I had spent seven weeks analyzing and seven days judging. This was Kenneth Moreno, Rape Cop.
I haven't read the piece but The Awl's Choire Sicha has:
It's a fascinating read, and I mean that in a very honest sense. In large part it's about how unbelievably important jury service is in America, and about how we treat those accused of crimes. Whether you like the verdict or not, or whether you like the case presented by prosecutors or not (SIGH), this view into the thinking and process of the jurors is really valuable.
Lose yourself in Philip Glass's powerful music for the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi: A Life Out Of Balance, performed live by the Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, as the landmark film is projected on a huge screen above the Avery Fisher Hall stage.
There will be two performances, Nov 2 and Nov 3 at 7:30pm at Avery Fisher Hall. There are still tons of great seats available, but get 'em while you can. Excited!
One thing you might not be familiar with is the fact that some NYC pizzerias use anthracite coal to cook their pizzas. (Then again, I know that Brooklyn-based Grimaldi's has made inroads into Texas, so maybe you do know coal-fired pizza.) Pizza geeks have long been into coal-fired pizzas. The ovens cook at a hot-enough temperature that a skilled pizzamaker can create an amazing crust that is both crisp and chewy at the same time and that is not dried out and tough. Also, the way that most of these old-school coal-oven places make the pizza, they just sort of know how to make a nice balanced pie, one that doesn't go too heavy on the sauce or pile on too much cheese.
Take five minutes to read this and you'll be talking NYC pizza like an expert.
The New Yorker took their awesome Goings On magazine section and crammed it into an iPhone (and Android) app. More details here.
In addition to collecting the magazine's listings for theatre, art, night life, classical music, dance, movies, restaurants, and more, the app has exclusive new features. More than a dozen of the magazine's artists and writers have contributed entries to the My New York section, which showcases their personal cultural enthusiasms: Alex Ross introduces readers to Max Neuhaus's Electronic Sound Installation in midtown; Susan Orlean revisits the Temple of Dendur, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Roz Chast drops by the Tiny Doll House, a unique Upper West Side shop. Critics also lead readers on audio tours created specifically for the app: Peter Schjeldahl tours the Frick Collection; Paul Goldberger walks the High Line; Calvin Trillin shares his favorite downtown food; and Patricia Marx goes in search of vintage clothing.
A handful of New York Times articles from the same month describe attempts to wipe out the "flavor bug," which tastes "fishy to some palates and like cucumbers to others," and "may even have tonic properties" despite its unpalatability. City officials began their efforts by building a bypass to cut out the Kensico reservoir at Valhalla from the New York water supply system. However, as the Times laments later in the month, "that Synura taste again taints water," with a newly discovered colony in the Ashokan reservoir producing the "most pungent fish-and-cucumber flavor" yet recorded.
Dr. Munshi-South and his colleagues have been analyzing the DNA of the mice. He's been surprised to find that the populations of mice in each park are genetically distinct from the mice in others. "The amount of differences you see among populations of mice in the same borough is similar to what you'd see across the whole southeastern United States," he said.
This guy drove the entire way around Manhattan (24 miles) in just 26 minutes, averaging 56 miles/hour and topping out at 111 miles/hour.
Someone left this typically New York comment:
I am an NYC cab driver and I promise I could beat this record in my crown Victoria. Simple factors that are unaware to the civilian driver the cabby knows. This cabby knows to drive sunday night when theres no construction work being done, this cabby knows what speed to maintain to time the lights on the westside highway and this cabby knows the quickest way from the FDR to the West side highway.
A bunch of theaters in NYC (and around the US I would assume) are showing the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring at 7pm tonight.
The event will include a personal introduction from director Peter Jackson captured from the set of his current film and "Lord of the Rings" prequel "The Hobbit," immediately followed by the feature presentation.
The same thing will happen with Two Towers on June 21 and Return of the King on June 28. Can't believe Fellowship came out 10 years ago already.
3-Way Street is a fascinating video by Ron Gabriel that highlights bad interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection.
There are lots of ways to show these interactions...the overhead view and highlighting are particularly effective design choices. Well done. (thx, janelle)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
But the service also helps city leaders detect patterns that might otherwise have escaped notice. After the first survey of 311 complaints ranked excessive noise as the number one source of irritation among residents, the Bloomberg administration instituted a series of noise-abatement programs, going after the offenders whom callers complained about most often (that means you, Mister Softee). Similarly, clusters of public-drinking complaints in certain neighborhoods have led to crackdowns on illegal social clubs. Some of the discoveries have been subtle but brilliant. For example, officials now know that the first warm day of spring will bring a surge in use of the city's chlorofluorocarbon recycling programs. The connection is logical once you think about it: The hot weather inspires people to upgrade their air conditioners, and they don't want to just leave the old, Freon-filled units out on the street.
The 311 system has proved useful not just at detecting reliable patterns but also at providing insights when the normal patterns are disrupted. Clusters of calls about food-borne illness or sanitary problems from the same restaurant now trigger a rapid response from the city's health department.
Not discussed in the article is an assertion by my pal David that exclusive access to 311 data gives incumbent politicians -- like, say, Michael Bloomberg -- a distinct advantage when it comes to getting reelected. For instance, when campaigning on a neighborhood level, the incumbent can look at the 311 data for each neighborhood and tailor their message appropriately, e.g. promising to help combat noise in a neighborhood with lots of noise complaints or fix the streets in a neighborhood with lots of calls about potholes.
I'm going to use Mayor Maker tomorrow during the NYC Marathon to auto check me in to every mile marker as I run past them. I'll be running w/ my iPhone in my pocket (with GPS turned on). Every time I run over a mile checkpoint, Mayor Maker will send that checkin to foursquare and foursquare will send it back out to Facebook and Twitter. Cool, right?
New York, the documentary film by Ric Burns, contains a great segment on the Empire State Building that is available on YouTube in three parts.
The first two parts are particularly interesting, especially the construction stuff that starts around the five minute mark of part one. Oh, and don't miss the steelworkers throwing red hot rivets around to each other...that starts right near the end of part one and continues into part two. Some other highlights:
- The original Waldorf-Astoria hotel was torn down (with no small amount of glee from the ESB's developers) to make room for the new skyscraper. The hotel was built by William Waldorf Astor, heir to the forture created by his father and grandfather (John Jacob Astor & John Jacob Astor III), on the site of his father's mansion. WW Astor's cousin, John Jacob Astor IV, went down on the Titanic and the Senate hearings into the disaster were held at the hotel.
- The steel beams were custom forged in Pittsburgh and shipped immediately to the building site...some arrived still hot to the touch from the furnaces.
- At the peak of construction, the workers were adding 4-5 stories a week. During one 22-day stretch, 22 new floors were erected. From start to finish, the entire building took an astonishing 13 months to build, about the same amount of time recently taken by the MTA to fix the right side of the stairs of the Christopher St subway station entrance.
- The building didn't become profitable until 1950.
An interesting interview with the anthropologist-in-residence of the NYC Department of Sanitation.
The money set aside for street cleaning was going into the pockets of the Tweed and Tammany politicians. Eventually, it got to be that it was so dirty for so long, no one thought that it could be any different. Imagine, on your own block, that you can't cross the street, even at the corner, without paying a street kid with a broom to clear a path for you, because the streets were layered in this sludge of manure, rotting vegetables, ash, broken up furniture, debris of all kind. It was called "corporation pudding" after the city government. And it was deep -- in some cases knee-deep.
As a diverse city that supports countless industries and maverick interests, New York excels at creating those eclectic networks. Subcultures and small businesses generate ideas and skills that inevitably diffuse through society, influencing other groups. As the sociologist Claude Fischer put it in an influential essay on subcultures published in 1975, "The larger the town, the more likely it is to contain, in meaningful numbers and unity, drug addicts, radicals, intellectuals, 'swingers', health-food faddists, or whatever; and the more likely they are to influence (as well as offend) the conventional center of the society."
In 1916, Kennard Thomson, consulting engineer and urban planner for New York City, wrote an article for Popular Mechanics in which he advocated (among other things) filling in the East River to merge Manhattan with Brooklyn.
By Dr Thomson's estimates, enlarging New York according to his plans would cost more than digging the Panama Canal - but the returns would quickly repay the debt incurred and make New York the richest city in the world. He then goes on to describe how he would reclaim all that land. The plan's larger outlines: move the East River east, and build coffer dams from the Battery at Manhattan's southern tip to within a mile of Staten Island, on the other side of the Upper Bay, and the area in between them filled up with sand. This would enlarge Manhattan to an island several times its present size.
Proximity and easy access to the new Battery would increase the total land value of Staten Island from $50 million to $500 million. "This would help pay the expenses of the project," Dr Thomson suggests.
The project would also add large areas of land to Staten Island itself, to Sandy Hook on the Jersey shore just south of there and create a new island somewhere in between. The East River, separating Manhattan from Queens and Brooklyn, would be filled and replaced by a new canal east of there, slicing through Long Island from Flushing to Jamaica Bays.
The Paris vs New York blog presents a series of illustrated comparisons between the two cities: macaroons vs. cupcakes, baguette vs bagel, and espresso vs American coffee:
I can't figure out how old anyone is. I can't figure out how gay anyone is. On silent subway morning commutes there are no tells. The brogues, desert boots and quickstrike high-tops not only have me manic-fantasy-banging every well-dressed dude on the F BECAUSE IT IS ALL SO GODDAMN GOOD but the fact that so many are suddenly well shod plus the prevalence of hard-bottoms straight CRIPPLES my ability to tell how rich anyone is. And that is fucking my game up major. Aaaaaaaaaand everyone's watch is now the old timey Timex from J.Crew for $150 so yeah, 360 IDK. Plus, also, seriously, there must have been some clandestine colloquium workshop situation where all the dudes in all the land shucked to skivvies and got sized for their perfect pair of Uniqlo jeans and nobody said "no homo," not even one time, because, Hi, y'all all look fantastic FUCK YOU.
DesigNYC connects non-profits with designers; they've just announced their second call for project submissions and designers:
We're proud to announce the second call for submissions for project ideas and design collaborators. DesigNYC will select the most compelling projects and match them with design leaders across the fields of architectural, landscape, interior, lighting, and communication design.
Our projects focus on the themes of well-being and sustainable communities -- creating solutions that address a range of social and environmental issues impacting the city, including affordable housing, sustainable development, social justice, human health, green space, urban farming, local food systems, youth leadership, and more.
The limitations that we have are, I think, severe. We don't have a freezer, anywhere. We don't have ice cream or sorbet, we don't have anything that needs to be frozen, it's all fresh, fresh, fresh. We've got refrigerators touching each other over there. We've got ten burners, two ovens, a fryer and a salamander. That's what most people have as a prep kitchen. It's really impressive when I look at how we've got five seafood entrees, five meat entrees, thirteen appetizers, all done with these varying, beautiful techniques and preparations. I tip my hat to everything that Jim and the team in the kitchen have been able to pull off.
It took awhile for my wife and I to warm up to it, but Joe Leo is our go-to neighborhood restaurant now. On our one child-free night out a week, we generally end up there.
- a three-dimensional map of the lower Manhattan skyline made of a Jell-O-like material by Liz Hickok
- a "Loneliness Map" from Craigslist's Missed Connections by Ingrid Burrington
- personal maps created from a call for submissions by the Hand Drawn Map Association
- Bill Rankin's maps of Not In My Back Yard-isms showcasing various geographies of community and exclusion
- a scratch-and-sniff map of New Yorkers' smell preferences by Nicola Twilley
THE THEME OF THIS PARTICULAR PROGRAM is "JOCKS vs. NERDS," the culture war of our time, and a subject that you know I have been thinking about for some time now, and also talking about with the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
IN THIS CASE, the "NERD" shall be played by me, John Hodgman, and the "JOCK" shall be played by the New York Jet, NICK MANGOLD, as I confront all of my deepest fears (humiliation/being punched/Nick Mangold) and attempted to learn from him the virtues of jock culture and the rules of football.
And YOU are invited: September 28th in NYC. Tickets are free and they have an unlimited supply because they are filming it in some sort of massive rocket ship hanger. All you Little Hobos (that's what Hodgman calls all his fans) click through for details on how to get your tickets.
It was after 5 P.M., so I ducked in for a drink a few doors down at the Whiskey Trader bar, where the weekend was noisily under way. Downstairs, by the rest rooms, was a door with a sign warning "Siren Will Sound." But siren didn't sound. In the adjacent basement were a mop and a bucket, odds and dead ends-and a stairwell, leading up. On the landing I eased open a fire door... into a gleaming lobby off Fifty-sixth. Ha!
Updike only made it to Rockefeller Center. You may remember a similar effort from last year. Who will take up Friend's mantle and stretch this down to 14th Street? And would Broadway be allowed? (I think not.)
As part of a two-person team, the incumbent of this position is responsible for the design and timely updating of NYCT's printed and online map products, including the extensive service schedule panels on the reverse side of all "pocket" bus maps; researching and responding to map design and information issues; identifying, researching, recommending, and adapting evolving map drawing and production technologies; adapting Transit's map products to the agency website and providing modified products for third party publications; advising on or producing custom maps for major agency initiatives and proposals; advising and assisting on other product design, graphics technology procurements and related staff training for all graphics services in Marketing and Service Information.
This has to be some kottke.org reader's dream job...go get it!
Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And -- of course, duh -- they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it's the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom follow nearly all the rules, most cyclists seem to treat the rules of the road as strictly optional. They're still in the human-powered mindset of pedestrians, who feel pretty much completely unconstrained by rules.
The result is decidedly suboptimal for all concerned, but mostly for the bicyclists themselves. New York needs to make a collective quantum leap, from treating bicyclists like pedestrians to treating bicyclists like motorists. And unless and until it does, bike relations will continue to be marked by hostility and mistrust.
This car/pedestrian duality in the manner in which bicyclists behave is also why the City's Summer Streets initiative is becoming almost unusable by pedestrians. We tried walking on the last Summer Streets weekend, but the cyclists were going way too fast, were routinely weaving in and out of pedestrians, pretty much refused to stay in their lanes, and there were just too many for the width of the street. We bailed out after several blocks. There will likely be even more bikes next year because the word's getting out: it's just too dangerous for walking.
Life in Manhattan is like living inside a gigantic Twitter stream. What you get to know about people you don't know simply by accidental adjacency is astonishing.
The only reason I ever go to MoMA anymore is so that my son can see the helicopter and whatever motor vehicles are on display in the design collection, but if I get a chance to sneak away soon, I'm definitely making use of the MoMA's new iPhone app: tours, a catalog of thousands of works, events calendar, etc.
While I felt that it was important to show certain shapes aboveground, I also felt that it was important to leave out certain pieces of belowground information. There are several places where the subway tunnels cross and overlap each other beneath the surface. This may be important information for city workers or utility companies trying to make repairs, but for the average commuter, showing these interactions just creates visual noise. I tried to reduce that noise by cleanly separating the lines on the map so they don't overlap. Consider the different depictions of the 4 line and the 5 line in the Bronx; sure, the MTA's paths may be accurate, but they're also confusing, and riders don't really need to see those particular details to understand where they're going.
These images are from a set of 1,075 photographs -- shot over five days last year for the book and exhibition, "Contraband" -- of items detained or seized from passengers or express mail entering the United States from abroad at the New York airport. The miscellany of prohibited objects -- from the everyday to the illegal to the just plain odd -- attests to a growing worldwide traffic in counterfeit goods and natural exotica and offers a snapshot of the United States as seen through its illicit material needs and desires.
The Brand New Conference is a one-day event organized by UnderConsideration, focusing on the practice of corporate and brand identity -- a direct extension of the popular blog, Brand New. The conference consists of eight sessions offering a broad range of points of view with speakers from around the world practicing in different environments, from global consultancies, to in-house groups, to small firms.
Speakers include boldface names Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, and Erik Spiekermann. Surprisingly, tickets are still available.
The Library of Congress has uploaded a whole bunch of early film footage of NYC to their YouTube account. Like this 1905 pararama from the top of the Times Building in Times Square:
Last year, the New Yorker ran a story on NYC's Rubber Rooms, the common name for the rooms which house NYC schoolteachers accused of classroom misconduct.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day -- which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school -- typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city's contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved -- the process is often endless -- they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
Yesterday, the Rubber Rooms were finally closed down. It seems like a purely cosmetic move; the real problems outlined in the NYer article remain unaddressed. Shouldn't the Times article at least mention that?
A new Subway has recently opened in Manhattan...hanging on the outside of the 27th floor of the skeleton of 1 World Trade Center. The Subway will move upwards as the building is constructed and it is hoped that construction workers will dine there instead of heading off-site for long lunches via a slow hoist.
"I don't think the veggies will be a big seller," said Mr. Schragger, who owns four other Subways in Manhattan. "I imagine most of the guys will want protein. Philly Cheesesteaks and the Feast."
Philly Cheesesteaks and the Feast would be a great name for a band.
I've only had a few of these...I am clearly not exercising my sandwich muscles enough these days. (Although the Brazilian sandwich at Project Sandwich has been treating me well lately.)
In an attempt to eliminate Manhattan's travel inefficiencies and encourage more use of public transportation, Charles Komanoff spent three years creating an Excel spreadsheet (you can download it here) that details "the economic and environmental impact of every single car, bus, truck, taxi, train, subway, bicycle, and pedestrian moving around New York City". Based on that research, he's come up with a plan for changing how transportation is paid for in Manhattan below 60th St. (the CBD or central business district).
It would charge $3 to cars entering the CBD on weekday nights, $6 for most of the day, and $9 during rush hour. The subway fare also varies, but is always less than the $2.25 it is today: $1 at night, rising to $1.50 as day breaks, and peaking at $2 during weekday rush hours. Buses are always free, because the time saved when passengers aren't fumbling for change more than makes up for the lost fare revenue. Komanoff's plan also imposes a 33 percent surcharge on every taxi ride, 10 percent of which would go to the cab driver and the rest to the city.
Komanoff's plan is vastly more sophisticated than a simple bridge toll. Instead of merely punishing drivers, he has built a delicate system of incentives and revenue streams. Just as a musical fugue weaves several melodic lines into a complex yet harmonious whole, Komanoff's policy assembles all the various modes of transportation into a coherent, integrated traffic system.
The new subway map makes Manhattan even bigger, reduces Staten Island and continues to buck the trend of the angular maps once used here and still preferred in many other major cities. Detailed information on bus connections that was added in 1998 has been considerably shortened.
Manhattan will be shown on the map as nearly twice as wide as in real life. Cut back on the chili-cheese fries, my friend!
When asked if he was proud of his actions, he said: "Of course, man. I'm a veteran. What do you think?" The vendor said that he had served during the Vietnam War and had been selling wares on the street for about 20 years. "I don't have too much of a choice, nobody's giving me a job," he said.
The Bloomberg administration is considering splitting 34th Street into three parts: an westbound-only section from the Hudson to 6th Ave, an eastbound-only section from 5th Ave to the East River, and a pedestrian-only section from 5th to 6th Aves.
Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier. [...] A city study showed that only one in 10 people travel along 34th Street by car, including taxis; the rest walk or use mass transit. Faster buses would benefit "the majority of the people who are actually using the street".
Eddie Feibusch opened his Manhattan zipper store on December 7, 1941 and is still plying his trade there, even after most of his competition has decamped for cheaper overseas locations.
How great are zippers? Don't even get Mr. Feibusch started. They are watertight for deep-sea divers, airtight for NASA. "Nothing replaces a zipper," he said. Buttons? He made a face. "A button is unpleasant," he said.
Feibusch will even sell you a 30-foot-long zipper for $100...to wrap your hot-air balloon up. (via girlhacker)
Does anyone know which corner this is? (Here's another view.) I poked around on Google Maps for a bit trying to find it, but I fear that building is long gone...Canal St, particularly the western part, is much changed since the 1940s.
I believe Michelangelo painted it in 1506, two years before he started on the Sistine ceiling. It was already in my brain in 1971, the year after it was bought. When the Metropolitan showed it in 1971, I wrote for an exhibition called 'Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries' that the second panel recalled the figures in the Sistine Chapel. As years went by, it firmed up. I had long believed it to be by Michelangelo, but exactly when I don't know. There wasn't a moment when I suddenly said, 'This is absolutely by Michelangelo.' It was a gradual recognition.
One the clues Fahy used to make his determination involves the rocks in the painting; they resemble the quarry at which Michelangelo spent several months in 1497. The painting can be viewed larger on the Met's website.
"Hello, my name is Chris Walken," he said. "This is very nice of you. When I was little, I used to have my diaper changed on the kitchen table here." He stayed in the kitchen, a polite house guest. After a minute, he said, "Well, this was very interesting. God bless and good luck!" ("This sounds silly," he said later, "but the first thing that I can remember I was on my back, on that kitchen table, and the window facing the street was open. I remember this marvellous warm breeze coming in, so it was around June, and I was a couple of months old. And I turned my head and right next to me was a white plate with scrambled eggs on it. I can still see it.")
The state would be ruined, though (imagine a Brooklyn-like sprawl of that size), but the rest of the country would be green and pleasantly devoid of people!
If you used Manhattan's population density, Dense US would shrink to more than half that size, roughly the area of Teton County in Wyoming. Manila, the capital of the Philippines, has the highest population density of any city in the world (111,000 people per square mile)...if the US was that dense, the population would fit into any number of tiny Alaskan islands you've never heard of or a square 52 miles on a side.
NYC's Board of Health has lifted the ban on keeping bees in the city.
The unanimous vote amends the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Beekeepers will be required to register with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and to adhere to appropriate practices. That means they must be able to control bee swarms and ensure that the hives do not interfere with pedestrians or neighbors.
Ten dollars says my wife utters the following words to me tonight: "we should raise some bees on the roof!"
Do yourself a favor: take the next five minutes and watch this tilt-shift video of NYC in fullscreen HD. The construction stuff that starts about a minute in is just great.
Whereas Koyaanisqatsi made NYC look big and busy, The Sandpit turns the city into something you can hold in your hands or put in your pocket. The making of is worth a read...all the tilt-shift effects were done in post. (via quips)
Showing at MoMA next month, a documentary based on the NY Times' relentless and intrepid street photographer Bill Cunningham. From the press release:
The opening night feature of this year's New Directors/New Films is the world premiere of Bill Cunningham New York (USA, 2010) on Wednesday, March 24, at 7:00 p.m. at MoMA. Director Richard Press' documentary is a heartfelt and honest film about the inimitable New York Times photographer, who has for decades lovingly captured the unexpected trends, events, and people of Manhattan for the Styles section of the newspaper. The film shows Cunningham, an octogenarian, riding his Schwinn bicycle to cover benefits, galas, and fashion shows around Manhattan, and illustrates how his camera has captured the looks that have defined generations.
I couldn't really find any other information online about this film. They should at least get a trailer up on YouTube or something.
Do you ever get time to visit museums? I used to go a lot with my kids. Donald Trump is a great friend, and he has four or five Picassos on his plane. And that's where I would look at them. One time, I was at a museum and tried touching a Picasso. You break it, you buy it, they said. I was told it would cost $2 million.
The free afternoon program will consist of four panel discussions: "Zoning Diet," about the hidden corsetry of policy, access, and economics that gives shape to urban food distribution; "Culinary Cartography," a look at the kinds of things we can learn about New York City when we map its food types and behaviours; "Edible Archaeology," about the socio-economic forces, technical innovations, and events that have shaped New York food history, in the context of the present; and "Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios," an opportunity to collaboratively speculate on changes to the edible landscape of New York in both the near and distant future.
The event takes place in NYC on Feb 27th; it's free and the entire thing will be available online as well.
The interactive map on the NYC govt site has hi-resolution aerial photos from 1924 (click the camera and move the slider to 1924). Check out all the piers, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the old baseball stadiums, the LES (and everywhere else they built housing projects), Penn Station, and the skyscraperless Midtown. This is hours of fun.
Update:The NYC Oasis map features a satellite view from 1996 and an imagined sat view from 1609. (thx, steve)
Someone sent this to me ages ago and I forgot to post it but luckily I ran across it again this morning: A Failed Entertainment is a show at The LeRoy Neiman Gallery featuring the films of James Incandenza...you know, the ones from the 8-page footnote in Infinite Jest.
Included as a footnote in Wallace's novel is the Complete filmography of James O. Incandenza, a detailed list of over 70 industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, and non-dramatic commercial works. The LeRoy Neiman Gallery has commissioned artists and filmmakers to re-create seminal works from Incandenza's filmography.
No word on whether any of the filmmakers made JOI's Infinite Jest...I guess we'll find out if anyone emerges from the opening reception tonight.
At a laundromat in Brooklyn, a revolving cast of characters conduct business, people-watch, sell, argue, flirt, and gossip. Oh, and do their laundry.
Every other Saturday, Carlene James climbs into bed at 10 and sets her alarm for 2:30 a.m. She rises without rousing her husband and four kids. By 3, she is at the Clean Rite. She chooses this moment to do her linens. She requires three super-giant washers, and there are exactly three. At this ungodly hour, competition is zero.
She is 36, a school office manager. Her apartment building has its own laundry room, but it's too slow there. "I'm very fussy with my clothes," she said. "I put soap in during both cycles. I'm always here when they're done so no one touches my clothes. I once got in an argument with a guy who said I was taking too many dryers. That's why it's good to come at 3 a.m."
For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs -- and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA's retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson's entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books.
After MoMA, the exhibition will visit Chicago, SF, and Atlanta. Quite excited for this one.
Call it overrated if you'd like, but Ssam Bar is still the only place in NYC (or perhaps the world) where you can eat, using chopsticks, German-inspired cuisine served to you by a native Spanish speaker while drinking a glass of sparkling red wine and listening to 90s hip-hop in a restaurant conceived by an American junior golf champion from Virginia whose parents were from Korea.
Fascinating map of Netflix rental patterns for NYC, Atlanta, Miami, and nine other US cities. I wonder if you could predict voting patterns according to where people rent Paul Blart: Mall Cop or Frost/Nixon. I wonder what the map for Napoleon Dynamite looks like?
Most of the interesting trends occurred on a local scale -- stark differences between the South Bronx and Lower Manhattan, for example, or the east and west sides of D.C. -- and weren't particularly telling at a national scale. (We actually generated U.S. maps in PDF form that showed all 35,000 or so ZIPs, but when we flipped through them, with a few exceptions, we found the nationwide patterns weren't nearly as interesting as the close-in views.)
If I had to choose my all-time favorite restaurant dishes, the smoked haddock chowder from The Spotted Pig would definitely be on there, possibly in the top five. Years after I asked Ed Levine of Serious Eats if he could get the recipe, he finally posts the recipe for me.
When infusing the haddock, think of making a cup of tea. You want to pull all the smoky flavors out into the cream. This will result in a deeply rich soup. Once you make this you will never go back to another chowder.
Thank you Ed and April! (I'm really holding back on the exclamation points here; I'm almost irrationally excited to cook this for dinner tomorrow night...if I can find smoked haddock somewhere in NYC...)
"A hamburger stand is a very democratizing amenity," he said. "We hope that each new Shake Shack can become both a citizen of, and mirror of, their communities."
But it's not what you think. At Le Bernardin, one of the highest calibre restaurants in NYC, Eric Ripert and his chefs use "cheap, fake Swiss cheese full of artificial flavors" as a baseline to normalize everyone's palates so that sauces can be judged fairly in the kitchen.
In terms of flavor, that cheese tastes identical all year long...so it give us a reference, and we can judge fairly.
Scenes from several movies that depict New York being destroyed (Day After Tomorrow, Ghostbusters, Independence Day, etc.) accompanied by George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which famously accompanies a similar but less violent montage at the beginning of Woody Allen's Manhattan.
For the first time ever, a Michelin Guide reviewer knowingly sits down to a meal with a journalist, New Yorker writer John Colapinto. The resulting article is pretty interesting; here's my favorite bit:
Le Bernardin was one of only four restaurants in New York (along with Jean Georges, Thomas Keller's Per Se, and the now defunct Alain Ducasse at the Essex House) that earned three stars in the debut issue of the Michelin guide, and it has held on to its three stars ever since. Ripert estimates that revenues increased by eighteen per cent when the first guide came out, but the pressure to hold on to his stars has also escalated.
An 18% increase? Assuming that Le Bernardin was already booked solid before the guide came out and expenses remained constant, that means that the same number of diners generated that increase...presumably Michelin Guide readers spend more on dining than even Le Bernardin regulars do. Margins on Manhattan restaurants, even the fancy ones, generally aren't that large...an 18% increase is insane.
Update: A slight clarification. I fudged the 18% revenue increase into an 18% increase in profits...which isn't the case. But since I'm assuming that the revenue increased was generated by the about same number of customers and that most of the expenses (rent, staff, etc.) stayed the same, the profit margin had to increase by some significant amount (for a Manhattan restaurant). And if those new customers ordered more tasting menus or more expensive bottles of wine, I would assume that the profit margin on those items are higher than average as well. So, my guess is that if you asked Eric Ripert if Le Bernardin's profit margin increased after the Michelin Guide came out, he would answer in the affirmative...but it wouldn't be an 18% increase.
I was all fired up to make eight from-scratch servings of ramen last night after looking through the Momofuku book, but ulitmately the book is a Trojan horse for enticing people into the restaurants. As in: "Konbu? 5 pounds of meaty pork bones? Fuck that, let's just go to Noodle Bar."
This was my present to my nephew for his 3rd birthday. He loves, loves, loves the subway so my sister asked me if I could make a custom map with all the places that mean something to him on the poster.
Upon tasting it, my immediate thoughts are mayo, ketchup, a little yellow mustard, a hint of garlic and paprika, perhaps a touch of cayenne pepper, and an elusive sour quality that I can't quite pinpoint. It's definitely not just vinegar or lemon juice, nor is does it have the cloying sweetness of relish. Pickle juice? Cornichon? Some other type of vinegar? I can't figure it out. This was going to take a little more effort.
Totally doing this for dinner one of these nights. We'll probably cheat on the ground beef...we've got some Pat LaFrieda patties stockpiled in the freezer.
In 1954, New York City forcibly evacuated a town on Governors Island and, for whatever reason, buried under several feet of dirt. Recently, while building a park, the buried town was discovered and now they are excavating it.
According to one of the archaeologists that was on site to answer questions, there was a single factory in town during the 1900's, which manufactured snow (remember, it was the 1950's, and year-round snow was difficult to come by back then).
Update: Oh, poop. This is some sort of art thing or something. I should not be posting things at 10:45pm. Calling it a night.
Fuck, it's worth a watch even if you have seen it ten times. Eisenberg's, Manganaro Foods, Keens, Le Veau d'Or, this show is like my NYC gastro-playbook. Watch it, love it, live it.
Nice fluffy towels
Believing in yourself
Finding a lost twenty in your coat pocket
Prince Edward Island
Coming home after being away for a while
Submarines
Supermodels
A kiss in the rain
He doesn't like paying rent, but he does like living in Manhattan. So what does he do? He lives in a van down by the river, literally. I spent a few hours with Jimmy and let him speak his mind.
A truly maddening article about the NYC school system and its interactions with government and the teacher's union.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city's five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day -- which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school -- typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city's contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved -- the process is often endless -- they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.
It is actually pretty amazing how well the oven works. The first thing we made after pizza was a roasted chicken. I just can't describe how amazing it was. Not to mention the pizzas. They cook in about 90 seconds, and when I pulled the first one out of the oven, and the backyard smelled like a pizzeria, we knew all the work was worth it.
Mark and I work in the same office and it's nice to hear that his daily phone conversations about stucco, stucco suppliers, stucco styles, and stucco application techniques have resulted in success.
After a lengthy stare down, the maitre d' shows you to your table. Once seated, you must adhere to two conditions: you will cook your own meal with your own ingredients, and no photography. If you refuse these terms, you will be warned that a crushing defeat will soon be brought down upon your soul. Don't give in, though; stick to your guns (to coin a phrase), and ask calmly for a menu. But don't press your luck by asking for water. This is very important.
Friday, August 14th at 1pm marked the opening event of the Midtown Games: Olympics, and was attended primarily by the city's punch-drunk, heat-stroked interns. With the blare of a foghorn the crowd closed in like a shield, trumpets sang out "Eye of the Tiger" and five swimmers in Speedos and caps leapt into the burbly water of a decorative fountain to swim its 50 metres or so in elegant racing style.
In Lower Manhattan, my computer screen fizzled and the air conditioner cut off. While walking back to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge I heard the following rumors: 1) The power's out in the entire country; 2) The power's out in the entire country and all of Canada; 3) There was an explosion and somebody's definitely behind this but I don't know who. (The last one was from a cop.)
I reach 18th Street. Some shops are open, most are not. The ice cream shop is doing good business. The owner of a bodega has barricaded the door with shelves of food and stands watch with his employees.
Serious Eats made a short documentary (~9 min.) about the Union Square Greenmarket and one of the farmers who brings his goods to the market every week.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of moving walkways was in vogue. After successes in Paris and Chicago, plans were drawn up for a three-speed moving sidewalk across the Brooklyn Bridge to alleviate traffic on the crowded bridge.
With the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, Schmidt upped the ante. This time he envisaged a loop system at each end of the bridge, with a series of four ever-faster walkways. Passengers moved from one to another until finally taking a seat on the benches aboard the fastest, which whisked them across the bridge at 16 km/h [~10 mph]. Because the system ran constantly, there would be no waiting and little momentum lost on stops and starts.
At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.
Kinda puts the subway in perspective, doesn't it? And don't miss the map at the bottom that shows the size of the parking lots needed for all those cars.
Of Wrestling with Moses, the story of how Jane Jacobs took on Robert Moses and his plans for two Manhattan freeways, Tyler Cowen says:
The parts of this book about Jacobs are splendid. The parts about Moses are good, though they were more familiar to me. I believe there has otherwise never been much biographical material on Jacobs's life.
Writing about the city remained her passion. She often went up to the rooftop of her apartment building and watched the garbage trucks as they made their way through the city streets, picking the sidewalks clean. She would think, "What a complicated great place this is, and all these pieces of it that make it work." The more she investigated and explored neighborhoods, infrastructure, and business districts for her stories, the more she began to see the city as a living, breathing thing -- complex, wondrous, and self-perpetuating.
The NY Times has named their replacement for outgoing restaurant critic Frank Bruni: current Times editor Sam Sifton. This is good news for me...I look a bit like Sifton; if I'm mistaken for him and incur favorable treatment at restaurants because of it, I won't complain.
This is a documentary about vogueing, and the extremely refined and detailed aesthetic sensibilities it reflects, shot in New York City around Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, and Harlem in the mid- to late-80s. The city has changed in dramatic ways since then, to say the least. The characters of the film are complete outsiders with, at the same time, a deep understanding of the world they are outside of.
Manhattan is the national capital of disparate subcultures of the skinny: Aspiring models. Nightclubbing hipsters. Gay men with the time and money to chisel their physiques at the gym. Park Avenue society matrons who remain preternaturally slender into their 70s, the "social X-rays" satirized by Tom Wolfe.
When 2/3 of the American population is considered outside the normal range when it comes to their BMI, how long will it be before the standards are modified to reflect the new norms?
Gothamist's Jake Dobkin attended a public discussion of "Rules for City Issued Press Credentials" in NYC today and took some good notes. The proposed new rules address some inconsistencies in the city's issuing process...in particularly the denial of press passes to bloggers and other online publications.
Restrictions limiting press passes to certain mediums will be removed -- in the future, online, offline, on-air, etc. will all be treated equally. To qualify for a press pass, the journalist or journalism organization will need to provide six clips from the last 24 months showing news-gathering activity that would merit a press card -- that would include live reportage from police and fire scenes, public assemblies, government press conferences, or similar events.
Public dollars helped create Central Park in the 1850s. And public responsibility dictates that we transform this underutilized asset into something we so desperately need today. Manhattan Airport will prove New York City no longer allows it's vestigial prewar cityscape to languish in irrelevance but instead reinvents these spaces with a daring and inspired bravado truly befitting one of the world's great cities. The moment is now.
And about those special Central Park landmarks?
Under the current plan the Imagine mosaic and Strawberry Fields will be preserved however they will be located indoors within the main terminal concourse. Tavern on the Green will be given the option of applying for a franchisee lease in the concourse food court.
GVSHP first proposed the street co-naming in 2006 shortly after Jacobs' death; the proposal was approved by the local community board and the City Council, and then sat in limbo for 2 1/2 years.
Also, the townhouse that Jacobs lived in on the street is for sale. (thx, meg)
Exit Strategy NYC is an iPhone app that tells you where to get on the subway train so as to be in an optimal position when you get off.
Taking the 1 train uptown to 28th street? Get on right behind the middle conductor. Need to transfer to the L at Union Square from the N downtown? Ride in the 1st car. Detailed diagrams eliminate the guesswork and frustration from your ride, making your subway trip easier and faster.
There will also be one large meal, a free picnic in Central Park where eight chefs will each contribute a dish to what Luc Dubanchet, the founder of Omnivore, calls a "bento box performance." Then there will be a series of demonstrations at the Alliance Francaise, master classes held by an impressive roster of French and American chefs (the final program is still being decided).
The MTA is trying to sell the naming rights to the Atlantic Ave subway stop in Brooklyn to Barclays, a London bank. If approved, other rights may be sold as well. Yes, let's make the NYC subway even more confusing than it already is, although I'm sure the MTA will come up with some reason that cramming "Domino's® Breadbowl Pasta™ Station" onto a map makes more sense than "23rd Street".
On the other hand, a casual study of the NYC subway map reveals the following brand names already in use:
Rockefeller Center
Columbia University
JFK Airport
Museum of Natural History
Lincoln Center
Hunter College
Yankee Stadium
Aqueduct Racetrack
Times Square
Herald Square
NY Aquarium
World Trade Center
Brooklyn Museum
Mets
But, without exception, station names are derived from nearby landmarks: streets, airports, schools, stadiums, squares, parks, etc.
A pair of related articles from the New Yorker last week. The first is a Talk of the Town piece on a water-pistol ambush game played by the students at a New York City private school.
Willis Cohen was finally killed through no fault of his own. He woke up one day and, as usual, hopped a neighbor's fence and exited through another house. He caught a livery cab on Amity Street and headed north to the Heights. He knew he was in trouble when his driver refused to raise the windows. A member of the Gaisford team shot him in the chest through the cab's passenger-side window as he pulled up to the school.
The second is a piece by John Seabrook is about David Kennedy and his approach to reducing gang-related murder through a combination of community support and "one strike and everyone's out" policy.
At the initial call-in, Victor Garcia was the first to speak. He told the young men that he loved them, that they had value to their community, and that he knew they were better than their violent actions implied. Afterward, Chief Steicher addressed them, thanking them for coming, and making it clear that "this is nothing personal." He then delivered the message: "We know who you are, we know who your friends are, and we know what you're doing. If your boys don't stop shooting people right now, we're coming after everyone in your group."
Without too much trouble, you could imagine either of these excerpts appearing in either article. A curious editorial decision to run them in the same issue.
Geeking Out sounds interesting, but I can't go. Perhaps you'd like to?
This month, we'll be discussing the interaction between science and religion with speakers including: astrophysicist and Is God a Mathematician? author Mario Livio; psychologist Paul Bloom, the author of Descartes' Baby; and The GOD Part of the Brain author Matthew Alper, one of the founders of the field of neurotheology. The work of local artists will be on display as well.
Geeking Out will be held Thursday, June 18th, at 7:30 pm (doors open at 7:00 pm) at the JLA Studios art gallery on 63 Pearl St in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. Admission is FREE. Drinks will be available. Please spread the word and bring your friends.
While many organic dairy farmers who supply big producers have been suffering in the recession, Mr. Hesse says demand for their milk and cream has been growing and that they'd like to start selling in more markets. He's also thinking about producing yogurt and ice cream.
The minimum investment is $1000 and the notes offer 5-7% interest.
The reception was an incredibly fun time. We had planned to stage the mission for more than one couple, but Frank and Raff were just too perfect. They stayed for over an hour and completely yes-anded everything we threw at them. There were moments where it felt like we actually did all know each other and you sort of forgot you were "acting."
But for some New Yorkers, a vegetable-filled rooftop is far more conceivable and practical than moving to the country. Novak agrees. "When these farmers go in and lecture these inner city kids about dairy farming in upstate New York, it's in one ear and out the other. But I can tell them, I have two farms in the city," and they can take the subway and come help on the weekends.
The New York Transit Museum has developed an extensive online version of their The Future Beneath Us exhibit, featuring eight NYC-area underground projects that are currently under development. The exhibit is on display in two Midtown locations until July 5. (thx, michael)
The Hudson's main current has, for all of recorded history, clung to lower Manhattan's edge, skimming along the West Side. Battery Park City, built in the seventies, juts out into that flow, and since then, the current has been cutting a new channel, out toward the center of the river. That current is scraping mud off the top of the Lincoln Tunnel where it never did before; the underwater traffic tubes have lost 25 percent of their soil coverage in some spots. If the tubes ever became exposed, they would be at risk for shifting, cracking, and terrorist threats.
In addition to greater safety and access for pedestrians and cyclists, the project hopes to improve car traffic flow through the areas.
- Traffic lights with up to 66% more green time - Significant travel time improvements on Sixth and Seventh Avenues - Faster bus speeds for 70,000 daily riders
Here's a rendition of how Times Square will look after the work is completed in August.
Hopefully this change will become permanent and the city can plant some trees there as well. Imagine, trees in Times Square! Lots more information is available on the DOT site.
I really like the subway travel time heatmaps on Triptrop NYC.
Put in an address and you get a map of how far away everything is using the subway. 15 minutes, forty minutes, two hours -- all set up with nice little colors. That's pretty easy, I think. Triptrop can help you find a convenient place to live. It's also a nice way to tell your friend to stop inviting you to the purple part of the Bronx, or to prove that the G isn't actually that bad.
In his spare time, between aerobic eating and the requisite gym time to burn it all off, he has managed to produce a memoir of his lifelong, complicated relationship with food. Recognizing that the book is certain to seriously compromise his ability to be a spy in the land of food, Frank picked this as a natural time to move on. He will be turning in his restaurant-critic credentials when his memoir, "Born Round: the Secret History of a Full-Time Eater," is published in late August.
Sad to see him go...I liked Bruni as a reviewer. But how long can the Times continue to expect their critics to remain anonymous? Savvy restaurateurs often knew when Bruni was in the house and it remains unclear whether a known reviewer is a biased reviewer.
Option 1: Two tickets to Tuesday night, June 30, Mariners at Yanks, cost for just the tickets, $5,000.
Option 2: Two round-trip airline tickets to Seattle, Friday, Aug. 14, return Sunday the 16th, rental car for three days, two-night double occupancy stay in four-star hotel, two top tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday Yanks-Mariners games, two best-restaurant-in-town dinners for two. Total cost, $2,800. Plus-frequent flyer miles.
The result, after much whacking, is, I think, compelling, but you'll have to see for yourself. The general idea it that the history of subway ridership tells a story about the history of a neighborhood that is much richer than the overall trend. An example, below, shows the wild comeback of inner Williamsburg, and how the growth decays at each successive stop away from Manhattan on the L train.
The CBC has a clip of Jane Jacobs talking about Toronto and Montreal from 1969. In it, she makes the distinction between the two urban organizational forces at work in Toronto, a sort of "civil schizophrenia": the vernacular spirit ("full of fun") and the official spirit ("stamp out fun"). I also found a video on YouTube about Robert Moses and his difficulties with Ms. Jacobs which concludes with a cheeky update of Arnold Newman's iconic photo of Moses.
This is a little bit brilliant. Here and There are a pair of maps of Manhattan that start from an on-the-street viewpoint and curl up as you gaze uptown or downtown until you see the rest of the island from a traditional "flat map" view.
As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer's local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.
Prints are available. This is like a 3-D version of the spider maps for London buses, in which a local street grid relays information about the immediate vicinity while the surrounding schematic shows connections to the rest of the system.
Update: Ooh, these science illustrations from NISE use a similar technique to simultaneously show the internal and external structure of their subjects.
These illustrations show familiar objects across ten orders of magnitude-from familiar aspects down to the level of their constituent atoms. Vast scale differences are usually shown through separate images (e.g., the Eames' Powers of Ten). This illustration employs the artistic convention of perspective-typically used by landscape painters-to show multiple scales in one frame.
It's one thing to become a New Yorker; it's so much weirder to become a New Yorker that all the other New Yorkers know.
Lauren Hutton wasn't going to stay in NYC at all:
I was supposed to meet a friend in New York, and we were going to take a tramp steamer to Tangier. It was going to cost $140. Once I got there, my plan was to take a bus for ten cents to the outskirts of town and see elephants and rhinoceroses and giraffes. I was as ignorant as a telephone pole.
The first night I moved here, I met Madonna. She walked up to me at the opening of Club USA with a lollipop and a beer, and she was like, "Hmmm, you look cute." And I was like, "You're Madonna!" I'm like, This is New York. Wow.
Danny Meyer eventually realized he should be in the food business:
I entertained all the time, hosting lovely brunches where I would go out and source the best cheeses and pates I could find, which was a big deal for a 22-year-old back then.
Nick Denton moved here from San Francisco:
I finally decided to come here after 9/11. The foreign press was full of love letters to New York. Writers like Martin Amis were waking up and thinking, "Oh my God, we almost lost it!" I know it sounds sentimental, but no one would ever write a love letter to San Francisco.
My wife and I decided to move here after a visit in early 2002, which visit was influenced by some of the same writing Nick refers to. All these people writing so passionately about a place, it must be pretty special. We decided to check it out. But more specifically, we moved here so that Meg could start a company with Nick.
While the company didn't work out so well, moving here was one of the best decisions we've ever made. We picked the smallest apartment on the fifth floor of the crappiest building on one of the best blocks in NYC. I sporadically freelanced for Gawker and a few other companies but didn't find a full-time job until about 6 months in. But a pleasant walk home down tree-lined streets, good light into our small bedroom, an apartment layout suited perfectly to our furniture, and the intense immensity of the city made all the difference.
Everything was still new and exciting to us. Your first year in New York is great because there's so much you think you and your friends discovered, like "a great little burger place called Corner Bistro" or "the best corn in the world at this place Cafe Habana."
Ha! Meg and I discovered "these great cupcakes at this place called The Magnolia Bakery" shortly after moving here.
I met one of Ricky's partners, Zach Klein, through Nick Denton (him again!); we had brunch together one Satuday morning shortly before their New Yorker piece ran. The meal probably couldn't have gone much worse. I'd just had all four of my wisdom teeth pulled the day before, so I was all bloody and jacked up on Vicodin, trying to eat salad even though I don't care for it very much and wasn't that hungry anyway, and wondering why in the hell Nick wanted me to meet this guy who ran a joke and boobs site for college kids. After recovering my health and senses, I eventually met Ricky, Josh, and Jakob and got to go to a couple of those fantastic parties. The cabinet of crystal was indeed weird. (thx, andy)
It will be high, it will be long, and it will be outdoors in a very recognizable location that he does not want revealed quite yet -- arrangements are not final.
Also, the New Yorker has a story in this week's issue (subscribers only) about Alain Robert, another Frenchman with a thing for tall buildings.
Robert is a vertical tourist. He has traversed the planet on a dogged, gutsy tour of the world's high-rises and, then, its jail cells and holding pens. Of the world's ten tallest buildings, he has climbed five. Most of the remaining half are in China, which he has been banned from entering since 2007, when he climbed the Jin Mao Tower.
Banh Mi Saigon Bakery, one of my favorite places to get my lunch on, gets a shout-out in the NY Times. The bread is really fantastic. I'm intrigued by the sandwich at Silent H called the Greenpoint:
Elsewhere in Brooklyn, where authenticity is not as strictly enforced, Vinh Nguyen has created a succulent banh mi at Silent H called the Greenpoint: a tribute to the area's many traditional Polish butcher shops. Instead of cha lua, smooth pork terrine, he lays on Krakowska kielbasa, a smoked sausage. "That smokiness and pepperiness makes perfect sense on a banh mi," he said. "I would be a fool to ignore these great traditional products being made in my neighborhood."
In 1879, Brooklyn papermaker Robert Gair developed a process for mass producing foldable cardboard boxes. One of the paper-folding machines in his factory malfunctioned and sliced through the paper, leading Gair to the realization that cutting, creasing, and folding in the same series of steps could transform a flat piece of cardboard into a box.
Gair's box, a cheap, light alternative to wood, became "the swaddling clothes of our metropolitan civilization," Lewis Mumford wrote. Eventually, the National Biscuit Compnay introduced its first crackers that stayed crispy in a sealed paper box, and an avalanche of manufacturers followed. Gair expanded to ten buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront. Massive migration from Europe to the United States created a manufacturing workforce in Brooklyn, to curn out ale, coffee, soap, and Brillo pads -- and Gair made boxes right beside them.
Gair's concentrated collection of buildings eventually led the area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges to be called Gairville. That area is now known as Dumbo and, in addition to tons of residential space, the neighborhood is home not to manufacturing but to architecture firms, web companies, and other creative industries.
The Gair Company's most iconic building was also its last: the Clocktower Building, also known as Gair Building No. 7. I tracked down several of the other Gair buildings and put them on this Google Map.
