Welcome To Turtle Bay, 'Radar' Staffers
Radar recently moved to new offices in Turtle Bay: 216 E. 45th Street, 6th Floor. The mag's staff of consumers and thinkers and arbiters must adapt to their new home quickly if they are to do their best work. Lucky for them, Turtle Bay is full of places to contemplate the friability of human endeavor, the likely impermanence of one's employment, and how one might have gone from studying Joyce at Sarah Lawrence to writing about codpieces. Here's a helpful guide!
We recommend the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza Park, near the UN, a block-long park with plenty of benches and green spaces and, yes, even a Holocaust Memorial. But if contemplation of the sterile promontory is a real downer for you, let us recommend the Greenacre Park on 51st Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.
If there's one thing we know Radar head Maer Roshan likes to do, it's eat a lot and then throw it up. Kidding! Still, luckily for him, Midtown East has a surprisingly large selection of not-so-bad places. Among the least-bad places are the much-lauded sushi place, Sushi Yasuda at 204 E. 43rd. (A good place for exec editor Aaron Gell to bribe freelancers!) Also worthy of mention, the UN Delegates Dining Room, Tom Colicchio's quickee 'wichcraft (a couple blocks west on 5th Ave) and, of course, Bill's Gay 90's.
Probably the arena in which Radar staff might least need guidance is in locating alcohol. Unfortunately, Turtle Bay technically qualifies as hell on earth, so when evaluating watering holes, price is pretty much the determining factor. Three bars in the area stand out above the rest. First of all, a few blocks away, the Campbell Apartment above Grand Central Station is a speakeasyish bar housed in a former tycoon's office, Waterfront Ale House, a few blocks south, has some of the best BBQ in New York and a huge selection of beers and finally, there's the greenhouse room in the back of Blackstone's.
Oh yeah, and Roshan, don't forget the Buttercup Bake Shop which has a large selection of pies. Those come in handy sometimes.