How awesome is New York? So awesome that it has 98 nicknames. Wow, that's so awesome! I don't know about you, but whenever I leave the city, I'm amazed at how fat and poorly dressed the rest of the country is, and I think to myself, I can't wait to be back in "The Greatest All-Year Round Vacation City." Or "The Modern Gomorrah." Or "The University of Telephony." Full list after the jump via The Big Apple. Add your own!
Except for dry cleaners, almost everyone likes the New York City cigarette ban. People smell better, smokers have an excuse to leave a bad conversation and non-smokers feel left out, as they should. But oh no: we're getting fat without our cigs! From 2002, when the law was enacted, through 2004, New Yorkers gained 10 million pounds collectively. Imagine how fat we are now! The island will surely sink if we can't smoke indoors. Manhattan will become a post-apocalyptic wasteland inhabited only by Will Smith and roving hordes of zombie fatties, unless you give us back our cigarettes. What's a little cancer compared with looking good in skinny jeans? [NY Sun]
Last Saturday was the third annual New York City Pillow Fight in Union Square. Hooray for the relentless twee-ification of New York! Improv Everywhere is to blame for this, somehow. Anyhow, Gawker Videographer Alex Goldberg attended, and filmed the melee. If, like us, you wondered why you saw fresh-faced youngsters clutching pillows out and about in Manhattan on Saturday night, this should clear things up.
Last in this week's series of gloomy New York panoramas, this image is a still from Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, a movie remarkable (only) for its painstaking special effects. The spire of Empire State Building, now festooned with communications antennae, was originally designed with a docking port for dirigibles, a fantastic conceit only realized in Sky Captain's alternate New York.
Oh! the night that I struck New York,
I went out for a quiet walk;
Folks who are "on to" the city say,
Better by far that I took Broadway;
But I was out to enjoy the sights,
There was the Bow'ry ablaze with lights;
I had one of the devil's own nights!
I'll never go there anymore.
[From Charles Hoyt's lyrics for A Trip to Chinatown, 1892, via The New York Sun]
High dynamic range imaging, a technique which amplifies the tonal range in a photograph, is particularly effective in capturing cityscapes. This panorama, New York City at Night, by Paulo Barcellos, gives the midtown skyscrapers an ambience that looks borrowed from the computer generated imagery of the Batman movies. Click the image to enlarge.
To think that New York was once the compulsory destination for that dying breed, ambitious magazine entrepreneur. Conde Nast, which has absorbed no significant new magazine since Wired in 1999, is reportedly in discussions to buy Dwell, the trendiest of the shelter titles. Both magazines started in San Francisco.
No matter how scandalous the situations that public figures find themselves in, it seems that there will always be some people willing to rise to their defense. Groups have sprung up to save the careers of both scandalized hooker patron/ Governor Eliot Spitzer, and disgraced former Food Network celebrity chef Robert Irvine, who was outed as a big fat liar and subsequently fired. Both those guys can use all the help they can get. Unfortunately for them, the types of people who form ad hoc online groups in support of fallen idols always seem to be non-influential nutcases (like Democrats!).
How much chaos can two knucklehead filmmaking students (can anyone confirm NYU? It's a hunch we have.) cause on a quiet Tuesday afternoon? Plenty if they're on top of Kate Hudson's house with "sniper rifles" for some reason! Police helicopters hovered over King and Varick in the Village and terrified office-workers emailed us. Even after Us Weekly reported the arrest of these three idiotic future Uwe Bolls your tales of bravery continued to roll in. Like this one, from an architecture firm, with a subject line simply reading "BEWARE":
With Eliot Spitzer's announcement today that he was a client of a recently busted prostitution ring, and the speculation on his resignation flying, it's probably safe to say that his Governorship will not, in the end, be remembered as the glorious flowering of a new and reformed Albany. How the hell did it ever come to this? And, uh, are we the only ones who think he shouldn't resign?
Village Voice Media owes the San Francisco Bay-Guardian $15.6 million damages for predatory probing. Trying to put another company out of business is apparently illegal in San Francisco! We're just forced to wonder how this will affect the VV's smug billboard campaign on the Bowery about how New York is played out because there aren't junkies anymore and also its most respected lefty alt-weekly is owned by some libertarian assholes in Phoenix. [MaggieShnayerson.com]
An Improvised Explosive Device went off in Times Square at 3:43 this morning, according to a statement released just a few minutes ago by the NYPD. In other, less sensationalistic words, a small homemade bomb went off just in front of the Army recruiting station. No injuries. The Mayor is expected to give a press conference a half-hour ago, "but he's running late." We'll update if he says anything interesting. (Update: He didn't.) The cops are looking into whether this bomb was anything like the ones that went off outside the Mexican and British Consulates in 2007 and 2005, respectively. Those crude devices were toy grenades filled with gunpowder, making the term I.E.D. sound even more generous. But hey, terror. Update: Cops say a witness saw a guy on a bike, with a backpack, and a hood. Which matches the description of the mysterious guy spotted outside the consulate attacks. This madman must be stopped before he inexplicably blows up a tiny bomb well outside another building at an hour when it will hurt no one. (CNN clip, regarding this mad bombing suspect, after the jump.) [NYT]
Every time I get down about skyrocketing rent and service changes to the F train, I turn to New York magazine. It just reminds me that I live in the greatest city of all time, ever, and if I ever moved to a place with fresh air, I would die from lack of exposure to fusion cuisine. This week, it's The Best of The Greatest City of All Time, Ever, Issue. To ensure that New York magazine could fully illustrate just how great New York City is, the magazine commissioned designs for 25 covers. And then, because the spirit of New York and New York lies in wasteful, reckless spending, they only used two. I got the one on the right, but I'm thinking about going out to newsstands to buy the other one for commemorative purposes. That's just how awesome New York is. [Folio]
It turns out that Beatrice Inn—that beloved Village hotspot and home to so many Page Six characters—is nothing but a common coke den! A stalker reports: "Josh Hartnett came into Beatrice around 1:30am with a blonde girl and two attractive guys. Literally went to the bathroom four times within one half hour, always with one of his delegates (one time with two of them). Also, none of the security guys were letting anyone smoke until he lit up a cigarette and suddenly the No Smoking signs were ignored by everyone. Plus, dude is TALL and gorgeous, even with the Pedro 'stache."
All service in and out of Grand Central station and the whole Metro-North Railroad were disrupted for hours today—because of New York Observer owner Jared Kushner! A vacant building at 124th St. and Park Avenue collapsed just before noon, threatening the stability of a neighboring vacant building. Both properties are owned by Kusher Companies, according to the New York Times. Kushner's spokesman claims the company planned to demolish both buildings tomorrow, conveniently. (HOW awesome would it be if he blew it up for the insurance money!) (Not that we are even insinuating that, obv.) Of course, things fall off of buildings all the time in New York, and sometimes our manhole covers electrocute people, but rarely do buildings owned by budding media magnates actually completely fall over onto commuter trains. And this, as they say, is the least of his current building-related problems.
"Photographer Brian Finke infiltrates various hipster-hating A-crowds (i.e. frat boys and cheerleaders) for a hilariously poetic look at social hierarchies and, in this case, alcohol tolerance. His solo exhibition is currently up at Chelsea's ClampArt." Related: New Yorkers continue to be amazed by and terrified of the rest of the nation. Also everyone at the show will surely be making the exact same original and knowing and CONTROVERSIAL remarks about repressed homosexuality, and then they will go home and jerk off. [NYM]
Washington D.C.'s transit authority thinks they're so much better than NYC, taking a cheap shot at our subway rats and showing a picture of a rat asking, "You gonna eat that?" City Room reports on the prissy D.C. Metro ads urging passengers not to eat or drink on the train: "Unlike some subway systems (which will remain nameless), you don't see rats the size of house cats roaming the Metro. Why not? Because we are so strict about eating and drinking in the system. So help us keep the critters away. Please don't eat or drink on the Metro." Hey, youse try cramming 8 million people into a city and see if you can do any better! [City Room]
