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As it gets closer to Thanksgiving, some of us look forward to the public spectacle of giant balloons floating through NYC streets that is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
This vintage shot from the 1940 parade shows a simpler balloon version of the Man of Steel taking his place in the parade. Boy, parade balloons sure have come a long way!
Did
Occupy Wall Street cause gun crimes to jump higher in New York City? That's
what the NYPD is sayin':
Four high-ranking cops point the finger at Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying their rallies pull special crime-fighting units away from the hot zones where they’re needed.
Since Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park on Sept. 17, the NYPD has relied heavily on its borough task forces, the department’s go-to teams for rowdy crowds.
But such protest duty takes the special units away from their regular jobs -- patrolling public housing and problem spots and staking out nightclubs plagued by violence, supervisors said.
“Normally, the task force is used in high-crime neighborhoods where you have a lot of shootings and robberies,” said one source.
“They are always used when there are spikes in crime as a quick fix. But instead of being sent to Jamaica, Brownsville and the South Bronx, they are in Wall Street.”
Link (Photo: David Shankbone/Wikipedia)
Ahh NYC, the sprawling metropolis that inspired Metropolis, a gritty gothic landscape that inspired Gotham City, the home of X-Men, Ninja Turtles and Futurama’s Planet Express.
In honor of the New York Comic Con taking place this weekend, here’s a geeky tour guide’s dream map of the city, showing where things would, should and might someday be located, complete with color coded genre so you can tell whether the location is from a comic book, movie, tv show or video game.
Now go forth and see the mundane real life counterparts of these fantastic locations for yourself!
This collage of 200 street portraits, taken by photographer Brandon Stanton, is combined with the song “Empire State of Mind” to create a love note to the city.
The Humans of New York Project is an effort to create a photographic census of New York City. The project seeks to collect 10,000 street portraits, and plot them geographically on an interactive map.
Stanton has taken over 2,000 portraits so far. Find out more about the project, and read some of the stories of the people behind the portraits, at the Humans of New York website. Link -via Everlasting Blort
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Yutaka Sone, an artist originally trained in architecture, carved a nine-foot long model of Manhattan into a block of marble. To gather information for the project, he used photos, Google Earth, and a few helicopter rides over the city. If you’re in New York City, you can see it at his solo show starting on September 20 at the David Zwirner gallery.
Link | Photo: David Zwirner
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Feast your eyes on some fantastic old architecture in New York City. The Trinity Building was built in 1904-1907. It is flanked by the U.S. Realty Building, constructed at the same time (making them the original “twin towers”) and the older Trinity Church, rebuilt in 1800. The Trinity Building has classic Art Deco detailing that gives it a timeless look. The three buildings have all been photographed extensively over the last 100 years, which you can see at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
Comments Off What do cats that live in New York bodegas do all day? Oh, the usual-scratch stuff, hole up in a secret nest made out of a shipping box, and occasionally offer to help the customers with their milk. For more on the subject, check out the vid created by Internets Celebrities, who discover how kitties make the interwebs go round.
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Pomander Walk is a little neighborhood on Manhattan that was designed to look like an London street composed of Tudor-era houses. Inspired by a popular 1910 play called Pomander Walk, it was built by a somewhat eccentric nightclub owner in 1921:
Named Pomander Walk (of course!), this little alley way goes unnoticed by most everyone not previously aware of its location. From the main street (see the 94th Street view here and the 95th Street view here), most passersby would walk by without ever thinking that this picturesque little mini-village exists in the Big Apple.
The houses are tiny. Each is divided into two one-floor apartments; each apartment measures roughly 700 square feet. By necessity, some have kitchenettes (instead of full kitchens), using a closet to house the refrigerator. And some of the houses have external dumbwaiters, designed (most likely) as makeshift garbage chutes.
Link | Photo by Curbed used under Creative Commons license
It’s like you can’t walk through Manhattan without tripping over a superhero. I guess you New Yorkers are pretty lucky that way, though you do end up attracting a lot of supervillains, too.
At the link, you can view more details about the locations of eight of these heroes (not Stan Lee).
Link via Comics Alliance | Image: Owen Parsons
Say goodbye to the bland Ford Crown Victoria taxi and meet the future New York cab, a minivan by Nissan called the NV200, which won "The Taxi of Tomorrow" competition:
… the announcement by Mayor Bloomberg that within the next few years, all new taxis in New York will be a special model, manufactured by Nissan, called the NV200. Nissan won an official city competition to design a new prototype to replace the Ford Crown Victoria, the banal, inefficient, and uncomfortable sedan that for the last decade or more has been the vehicle of choice for most taxi-fleet owners.
Imagine a fancy luncheon -served on a subway train! That’s exactly what happened in New York City on Sunday, aboard the L train bound for Brooklyn. The guests only knew they were there for an “underground dining experience.” What they got was an experience, all right.
The event was the work of several supper clubs, and the menu they devised was luxurious: caviar, foie gras and filet mignon, and for dessert, a pyramid of chocolate panna cotta, dusted with gold leaf. All of it was accessible with a MetroCard swipe (Michele handed out single-ride passes) and orchestrated with clockwork precision. The six-course extravaganza took only a half-hour.
It wasn’t rush hour, so seating was easy. The tables (lap-width black planks, with holes cut to fit water glasses) were tied to the subway railings with twine. Tucking in behind them felt something like being buckled into a roller coaster. At 1:30 p.m., a few minutes ahead of schedule, the train lurched off.
It was a lovely meal, but it was, after all, illegal.
Paul Smith, a CUNY professor, encountered the meal on his way home to the East Village and was invited to join. “I had this fantastic lunch,” he said, “very exquisite. And then I thought, am I going to get arrested?”
There was no sign of the police or even a conductor, but officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, reached on Monday, were not amused. “A dinner party on the L train?” said Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for the authority. “No. Subway trains are for riding, not for holding parties.”
In deference to the authority’s rules, the hosts did not offer alcohol. This did not assuage Mr. Seaton. “No beverages at all with open containers,” he said.
After clean-up, the organizers called it a job well done. They had spent over $1600 on the stunt, but the publicity for pulling it off was well worth it. Link -Thanks, Bill!
(Image credit: Yana Paskova for The New York Times)
Felice Cohen lives in a Manhattan “microstudio” that measures 12′ x7′. My home office on the back porch is twice that! She pays $700 a month rent and considers it a bargain. That’s because the average apartment rent in this Upper West Side neighborhood is $3,600. Link -via Metafilter
I’ve found myself watching a lot of Law & Order reruns lately, mostly because you can find it most hours of the day on various TV channels. Now we have statistics that track the outcomes of the cases in each season. Not only that, but they are compared with what was actually going on in New York City at the time -the NYC murder rate and the politics of municipal law enforcement. Some of the changes in the show over time reflect the real world, and other changes were made for the TV audience. Read the analysis at, appropriately enough, Overthinking It. Link -via Metafilter
Not a euphemism, like “blowing up the spot.” I’m saying that taxis are exploding – like spontaneously combusting – in the snow-covered streets of New York City. So while we’re all cursing the cold and wishing for some heat, maybe let’s not wish quite so hard, since, that taxi blowing up in the video below? It’s not the only cab that went up in flames yesterday. Amazingly, nobody has been injured yet, but suffice it to say this is a bigger problem than the occasional aromatic cabbie or that super-annoying “Taxi TV.”
Click play or watch on YouTube
Link via Daily Intel
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How can an island in the East River in New York City be forgotten? Ah, because it’s a protected nesting area, and therefore off-limits to the public. Still, this particular island has quite a history.
Of all the forgotten and mysterious places in the Five Boroughs of New York City, few have histories as rich and interesting as that of North Brother Island. Situated in the Hell Gate, a particularly treacherous stretch of the East River, North Brother was home to the quarantine hospital that housed Typhoid Mary, was the final destination of the General Slocum during its tragic final voyage, and was the site of an experimental drug treatment program which failed due to corruption. Riverside Hospital, the name of the facility on the island throughout its various incarnations, treated everything from smallpox and leprosy to venereal disease and heroin addiction; after the Second World War, it housed soldiers who were studying under the GI bill. The entirety of the island has been abandoned since 1963; over a dozen buildings remain, in various states of disrepair.
The Kingston Lounge not only has more on the history of the island, but lots of pictures of the buildings in their process of decay. Link -via Breakfast Links
New York City held a design contest for new taxi cabs and have winnowed the finalists down to three designs, none of which are very exciting, but could make the manufacturer of the eventual winner rather wealthy. However, the city reserves the right to reject all three and start the competition over. Enter Neatorama’s own Steven M. Johnson, who quickly supplied several ideas of his own. The taxi pictured is designed to allow bikes to pass easily, without changing lanes! See more of Johnson’s taxis in The New York Times. Link to article. Link to slide show.
Do you remember what stood at the site in New York City before the World Trade Center was built? It was the Hudson Terminal Building, a massive office building covering two city blocks. This century-old picture of the Hudson Terminal Building is part of a wonderful collection of pictures called Vintage New York at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
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New York City got such a snowfall that it even accumulated underground -in the subway stations! Link -via Fark
(Image credits: @dwag29 and @caro)
Yumiko Matsui, the papercraft artist extraordinaire who created the Neatobot papercraft, has new series of artwork inspired by New York City. My favorite is the Coney Island papercraft, which involves a fantastically intricate roller coaster:
Link – Thanks Inco! (photo: Jeff Goldberg/Esto Photographics)
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Italian sculptor Franco Recchia builds models of cities from components of old computers. Pictured above is a representation of Central Park in New York City made from circuit boards. At the link, you can view other sculptures of New York City, Boston, and Pittsburgh.
Link via Dude Craft | Photo: Agora Gallery
If you want to go to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, you’ll have to board the train at Platform 9 3/4. Some prankster decided that New York City’s subway system should offer service to Hogwarts, and so put up a sticker for that platform on a sign at the 14th Street Union Square station:
The number is visible on the south side of 14th St., just around the corner from the Regal Cinemas Union Square 14, which shows the seventh installment of the wizard films based on author J.K. Rowling’s books, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1,” at least 16 times daily.
The charmed sticker is slapped in the slot that featured a “W” until June when that line went out of service. The design mimics standard Metropolitan Transportation Authority signage and at first glance could pass for a relic from the defunct No. 9 line.
It’s such a close match, in fact, it might lead wizard fans to suspect an inside job. An MTA spokesperson said the agency had no ties to the subtle Potter promotion. More likely, it was the work of a design savvy fan.
Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Johnson/New York Daily News
The City Hall subway station in New York City was built to be beautiful, as a showcase for the entire train system. But it was closed in 1945. However, passengers on the 6 train can see it if they don’t disembark on the last stop -the train turns around in the closed station. If you’re not in New York, you can see it in pictures at Jalopnik. Link -via Evil Mad Linkblog
(Image credit: John-Paul Palescandolo, Fred Guenther)
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The Dutch have reclaimed land from the sea. Why can’t New Yorkers do the same thing? That was the plan of Dr T. Kennard Thomson as described in his 1916 article in Popular Science called “A Really Greater New York.” Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps writes:
Hence Dr Thomson’s radical, but ultimately indispensible plan: “I propose to add, by a series of engineering projects, fifty square miles to Greater New York’s area and port foothold. At the same time this will mean an addition of one hundred miles of new water-front. New York’s City Hall would become the center of a really greater New York, having a radius of twenty-five miles, and within that circle there would be ample room for a population of twenty-five millions, the entire project to be carried out within a few years. Many have said ‘It can’t be done.’ The majority of engineers, however, have acknowledged the possibility, and I have received hundreds of letters of encouragement.”
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.
Link via io9 | Image: Joe Buggy
The Denver Post photo blog has a wonderful collection of aerial photographs of New York City. I had trouble selecting just one to tease you with. Link -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)
Photo: The National Archives
The photo above, from the bustling Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1900, shows that rush hour existed well before the age of the automobile. From a blog post about pre-1950 American cities over at The Denver Post’s Photo Blog: Link – via The Presurfer
On Tuesday, workers digging a new level for a vehicle security center at the World Trade Center site ran into a set of evenly-spaced wooden beams. Had someone been building a boat in a basement?
“They were so perfectly contoured that they were clearly part of a ship,” said A. Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist with the firm AKRF, which is working for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to document historical material uncovered during construction.
By Wednesday, the outlines made it plain: a 30-foot length of a wood-hulled vessel had been discovered about 20 to 30 feet below street level on the World Trade Center site, the first such large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront since 1982, when an 18th-century cargo ship came to light at 175 Water Street.
The ground where the boat was found had been undisturbed for 200 years. Back then, the site was much nearer the Hudson River. Link -via reddit
(Image credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Graffiti can be useful! Someone has been painting compasses on the sidewalks of New York City at subway exits. If you’ve ever ridden a subway beneath a city, you know how helpful this can be when you re-emerge and have to get your bearings on the street level. The question is: why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Actually, they have.
Using sidewalk compasses is an idea that has been tried before by both official and unofficial sources. In 2006, a blogger snapped a photo of a compass on the sidewalk at the 8th Street L station; someone else caught one on Bleecker. The City of New York’s Department of Transportation got in on the act in 2007, installing compass decals in the ground at selected stations around midtown, in a pilot program that doesn’t seem to have been continued.
Maybe this time, the idea will stick around. Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Paolo Mastrangelo/NYC The Blog)
Many of us are familiar with American artist Edward Hopper’s evocative painting of folks hanging out at a diner in New York City. It has been speculated that the location of this cafe is Multry Square. Jeremiah Moss seeks to solve the mystery of Hopper’s diner.
The gas station turns up in photos as late as 1940. Nighthawks is dated 1942. So perhaps the gas station was demolished and replaced with a diner in 1941. The city’s taxmen photographed the corner again in 1980. In that photo, there is still no diner and no remnants of it, though the Esso station buildings were still standing there, graffitied and abandoned beneath a painted advertisement for London’s Hard Rock Cafe.
Link - Via Violins and Starships
For over 70 years, an historic building at 5 Beekman Street has been shuttered from the public. The beautiful brick and terra cotta building, built in 1882, sports twin towers and a nine-story atrium with wrought iron ceilings and balconies. Scouting NY takes a rare tour of this strangely empty building in an area where every square foot of business or living space brings astronomical prices.
From the Upcoming 
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I’ve heard more than one New Yorker wish that tourists on sidewalks would either speed up or get out of the way. Improv Everywhere ran with this idea and spray painted actual traffic lanes marked “New Yorkers” and “Tourists” on a section of sidewalk. Then the pranksters tried to enforce them.
It took four days for municipal maintenance workers to remove the lanes.
New Yorkers, would you like to see carried out officially?
via Urlesque | Official Website
Previous Improv Everywhere Pranks:
Food Court Musical
Ghostbusters in New York Public Library
Frozen in Grand Central Station
Mobile Desktop Prank
