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!

Link

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!

Link

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

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

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

(YouTube Link)

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.

Link

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.

Link

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

Click play or watch on YouTube

Link via Daily Intel

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

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)

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

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)

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)

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

“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)

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)

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.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by protonpack3.

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

Ladner debuted this lofty lasagne a few months ago on his $500 Collezione menu, a lavish, one-party-per-service immersion into the full Del Posto experience (wine included), in which the 6-foot-4 chef serves each of the nine savory courses himself. For the lasagne course, he carries a sizeable hunk into the dining room on a silver tray, places it on a gueridon, and proceeds to carve the thing tableside. That’s right, he carves the lasagne tableside, a technique perhaps never before performed on Garfield’s favorite foodstuff.

You can also get the 100-layer lasagne for lunch the next day, fried with tomato sauce. Link -via J-Walk Blog

(Image credit: Hannah Whitaker)

Though Pearl’s official biography claims that she was born in Van Cortlandt Park, she was actually conceived and executed by Adam Koford, an illustrator and cartoonist who lives in Utah and works for Disney Interactive there. She began life as Curtis the Squirrel, but switched genders at the suggestion of, depending on whom you ask, either parks staff members or Mr. Koford’s 8-year-old son, Damon.

Mr. Koford, noting Pearl’s open stance and perky tail, said she was “designed to be sort of a welcoming presence -– something that conveys the fact that the parks are a fun environment.” [...]

Mr. Koford credited his children with Pearl’s existence (he had three children at the time, and has added one more).

“It was the kids’ decision to do a squirrel,” he said. “We almost went with an owl, or one of the hawks that live alongside Central Park, but the squirrel was a bit funner to draw.”

Congrats! Link – Thanks Amy Koford!

The Sandpit is a video composed of 35,000 tilt-shift photographs taken in New York City. Director Sam O’Hare wrote about this project:

I have always loved time-lapse footage, and films like Koyaanisqatsi especially, which allow you to look at human spaces in different ways, and draw comparisons between patterns at differing scales. I also really liked the tilt-shift look of making large scenes feel small, and wanted to make a film using this technique with New York as its subject.

via Bits & Pieces | About the Film

Here’s what doodling on a school desk with erasable marker will get you: a perp walk in cuffs!

Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.

"I love my friends Abby and Faith," the girl wrote, adding the phrases "Lex was here. 2/1/10" and a smiley face.

But instead of simply cleaning off the doodles after class, Alexa landed in some adult-sized trouble for using her lime-green magic marker.

She was led out of school in cuffs and walked to the precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours, she and her mother said.

Another hardened criminal off the street! Good job, New York. Good job. Link

Foolishly Seeking True Love from Jarrett Lee Conaway on Vimeo.

A short, sweet film from Jarrett Lee Conaway about Handsome and Belle, two people that “just might fall in love, if fate doesn’t get in the way first.”  With a little help from an omnipresent narrator, they just might.

The couple wakes up every morning in their queen-size bed, which takes up one-third of the living space.

They then walk five feet toward the tiny kitchen, where they pull out their workout clothes, which are folded neatly in two cabinets above the sink. A third cabinet holds several containers of espresso for their only kitchen appliance, a cappuccino maker.

To keep the floor clean, the couple uses a Roomba. More pictures at the link.

Link via Jammie Wearing Fool | Photo: Angel Chevrbstt

Mr. Burns from ‘The Simpsons’ notched 25 write-in votes on Election Day for New York mayor. The Simpsons favorite character to hate, Homer Simpson’s billionaire boss, collected the most write-in votes for NYC Mayor.

More good stuff from Gotham’s mayoral election and the angry voters trying to make a point, according to the New York Daily News, "Rodney Dangerfield, who died in 2004, received a write-in vote."

Mad Magazine icon Alfred E. Newman, Fantastic Four arch-villain Victor Von Doom, Mickey Mouse, and Sleeping Beauty also received write-in.

Link

Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. Alex Creamer, a student at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, came up with this brilliant idea of a New-York centric packaging for spaghetti:

"I created this spaghetti packaging for a university project last year. The brief was to package one of 5 difficult items i.e. eggs, a rose, custard powder, spaghetti or marbles. I chose spaghetti. The spaghetti sits on a 3d model of the chrysler building that was modelled on CAD by my friend Ben Thorpe. And then modelled out of high density foam at uni. Creating a spaghetti model of the Chrysler building!"

Link

Photo: KMO Studio

This item has already sold on Etsy, but you can still see images of KMO Studio’s enormous and detailed cut paper maps of all five boroughs of New York City. When the four sections are put together, the map measures six by eight feet.

Link via Make | Artist’s Etsy Shop

Image: Sophie Blackall

Sophie Blackall is a Brooklyn-based artist who is fascinated by the Missed Connections postings on Craigslist. She finds them to be bite-sized insights into the human experience. Jenna Wortham writes in The New York Times:

Currently, Ms. Blackall is only putting her spin on listings from New York City, where she says “people are colliding with each other constantly, criss-crossing paths all day, every day and yet the interactions are so fleeting and transient. It’s really just an un-choreographed mess of colliding stories.” Eventually, she says, she might branch out to other cities. “It would be interesting to see how the listings differ in California, for example.”

Link via Fast Company | Artist’s Etsy Shop | New York Times Post

A time-lapse video of the Manhattan Bridge in New York City shows the how the bridge bounces as traffic flows over it.

WPIX News asked the NY Department of Transportation what’s up with the wiggles, and got this response:

"The bridge has moved this way for the last 100 years – exactly the way it was designed to  – and it can move up to 16 inches daily with normal traffic conditions.  The long-span suspension bridge flexibility by design allows the bridge to manage the weight of the traffic and subway cars it carries and the temperature shifts that occur throughout the year."

The Manhattan Bridge spans the East River from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn.  It opened in December, 1909, and has been renovated during the past 20 years.

You may have seen the bridge in such films as "Ghostbusters," and "Independence Day," and "I Am Legend."

Videography by Kevin Vertrees

– via wpix

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

Think that websites and blogs are so laden with ads? Well, the virtual page is nothing compared to the physical space when it comes to ads – take Times Square, for instance. Back in 2007, David Friedman of Ironic Sans blog decided to take a photo of every single ad in Times Square. It took him 20 minutes, and he came up with 183 ads total.

Link [Flickr] | David’s post: Every ad in Times Square

Lest you think that this ad business is a recent invention, check out this photo of Times Square back at the turn of the century:

Photo via The Dust Congress

The Hard Hat riot

It was four days after four students were fatally shot at Kent State and the country was in a state of unrest. In New York, several hundred protesters gathered at Broad and Wall Street to hold a vigil for the slain students. By noon, more than 1,000 people had gathered and the vigil had escalated to a rally, and about 200 construction workers had had enough. They made signs reading things like “America, Love it or Leave it” and got right up against the police line that separated them from the students. They obeyed it for a few minutes, but the tension got to be too much and the construction workers started chasing the students through the street, beating some of them severely with fists, clubs and crowbars. The construction worker mob fought their way into City Hall and demanded that the flag be raised to full mast again – it had been lowered to half mast to honor the dead at Kent State. Fearful of further damage from the mob, the Deputy Mayor ordered the flag to be raised. The riot eventually fizzled out on its own. Six arrests were made and more than 70 people were injured. When mayor John Lindsay accused the police of standing idly by and letting the riot happen, thousands and thousands (some reports claim up to 150,000 while others say only 60,000) of construction works and other blue-collar workers peacefully protested by marching through Manhattan on May 20. Photo via Five Feet of Fury

The Flour Riot of 1837

Picture the outrage that people experience every time the price of a barrel of gas goes up, then throw in extreme poverty and unemployment – up to a third of the working population was jobless. That’s basically what happened in 1837 when the cost of flour went up from $5.62 a barrel to a whopping $12 a barrel. The price of everything was skyrocketing and it was sending people to the poorhouse. People organized and decided to meet at City Hall to rally against people who were price-gouging – everyone, they said, from landlords to flour merchants. Then someone started naming names – Eli Hart was allegedly hoarding flour, and the crowd was in the mood to do something about it. Hundreds of people stormed down Broadway to Washington Street and forced their way into the building. Attempts to control the mob were completely useless and the mayor ended up fleeing while the crowd tossed barrels of flour out of the windows so people could scoop it up in boxes and pails. The flour, it is said, was nearly a foot deep in the street. The riot only died out when backup police and militia arrived. By this time, Hart’s flour had been cleaned out and the crowd had started to loot other flour dealers.

The Tompkins Square Riot

Apparently things weren’t much better even 40 years later. On January 13, 1874, thousands of unemployed immigrant workers and Socialist obtained a permit to have a mass meeting in Tompkins Square. They wanted the mayor to establish a program that would create jobs. Despite having all of the legal papers necessary to hold the demonstration, the city decided that having thousands of upset people meet to discuss the mayor maybe wasn’t the best idea and revoked the permit. It didn’t matter: more than 7,000 people showed up the next day anyway. Police didn’t give them a chance to have a peaceable meeting; they immediately dispersed the crowd by beating people with clubs. Samuel Gompers recorded the events and said that police on horseback were attacking anyone they could reach, even women and children. He called it “an orgy of brutality.” Photo by R. Wampers

Tompkins Square Riot, Part Deux

More than 100 years later, there was more unrest in the East Village. Apparently Tompkins Square Park had become a haven for the homeless and “rowdy youth” and neighborhood residents were sick of it. The Community Board eventually decided that it would enact a 1 a.m. curfew to try to curb some of the late-night gatherings that were going on in the park. Some people definitely didn’t support this decision, including anarchists who were protesting in defense of the homeless and some citizens who felt that the police were trying to take the park away from the public. A rally was organized for July 31, but the police were tipped off and a small riot occurred, resulting in four arrests and injuries to at least 10. Another rally was planned for August 6, and the police showed up in droves this time. A bloody riot ensured; a New York Times reporter referred to the place as a “bloody war zone.” By dawn, more than 38 people were injured, nine people were arrested and six complaints of police brutality had been filed. Rightly so, it seems: it was later determined that the police charged the crowd unjustly. Allen Ginsberg said the police were beating up bystanders who weren’t even involved and another witness said he saw a couple who merely came out of a grocery store get clubbed down for no apparent reason. One man trying simply to hail a taxi was beaten by an officer and the whole thing was caught on tape. Photo via Blog Blabbin

Harlem Riot of 1935

On March 19, 1935, a 16-year-old Puerto Rican kid was caught shoplifting a penknife worth 10 cents from a five-and-dime store across from the Apollo. He was caught by an employee at the store who threatened to take the kid down to the basement and “beat the hell out of him,” so the kid bit the employee in the hand. The police were called and an ambulance showed up to treat the bite (which must have been a heck of a bite). Thanks to a woman who had witnessed the threat on the shoplifter, a crowd gathered outside of the building and assumed that the ambulance was for the shoplifter. When, by coincidence, a hearse parked outside of the store, the rumor started to swirl that the kid had been beaten to death. And thus started the first recorded race riot in Harlem’s history. Things escalated so that by the early evening of the same day, the front window of the five-and-dime store had been shattered by rocks and looting started to happen in stores surrounding it. Stores in the area started to post signs stating that they employed all races, hoping to deflect some destruction. The rioting continued into the early morning, when the shoplifter was photographed standing next to a policeman so his picture could be circulated to convince the rioters that he was totally fine. Photo via BlackPast.org

Hello, everybody! After writing about 100 articles for Neatorama in the past couple of years, I can't bear to write another Top 10 article - at least for a while (other Neatorama authors undoubtedly will pick up the slack). So, please let me try something new. In what I hope will be a regular feature, I'm going to take a regular object and try find the neatest nuggets of knowledge about it.

Let's start with the letter A ... say, apple. So without any further ado, here is Neatolicious Fun Facts: Apple.

1. The Wild Ancestor of All Apples: Malus sieversii

Today, there are some 7,500 different cultivars of apples that are derived from a single wild ancestor from Central Asia: Malus sieversii. In fact, that species still grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Xinjiang, China.

Photo: Malus sieversii, as collected by the 1996 Kazakhstan Apple Collection Mission of the USDA Agricultural Research Service

2. Apple: The Forbidden Fruit?

From The Fall of Man by Titian (c. 1570)

In the Bible, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. When they eat the fruit anyway, Adam and Even are expelled from the Garden of Eden.

But why apple? The Book of Genesis never mentioned the fruit as apple - in fact, early interpretations pointed to fig, grapes, citron (a lemonlike fruit), carob, and pomegranate (the most likely culprit), but never apple.

The bad rap for apple began when Christians translated the Bible into Latin. Malus, the Latin word for bad or evil is very similar to the word for apple (malum). It seems like the assignation of apple as the forbidden fruit was the result of a pun. Source

3. "An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away"

The first version of the proverb is actually from Pembrokeshire, Wales. The first recorded use was in the February 1866 edition of Notes and Queries magazine: "Eat an apple on going to bed, and you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread." (Source)

It became popular, however, when fruit specialist J.T. Stinson used it in his speech at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

Apples do have a lot of good nutrients and pythochemicals that may help reduce the risk of heart disease, colon cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, and even tooth decay. But don't eat the seeds; they are mildly poisonous.

4. The Big Apple

Why is New York City called The Big Apple? Parking ticket judge by day and amateur etymologist by night Barry Popik tracked down the first use of the term "The Big Apple" back to the 1920s by journalist John J. Fitz Gerald, a horse racing reporter for the New York Morning Telegraph.

Fitz Gerald overheard stable hands in New Orleans racetrack talk about the "Big Apple" racing circuit, meaning "the big time" where a lot of money could be won (Horses love apples, by the way). He liked the term, and wrote a column called "Around the Big Apple" on February 18, 1924:

The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There's only one Big Apple. That's New York. (Source)

5. Bobbing for Apples

The game bobbing for apples comes from Celtic festival of Samhain, the precursor of Halloween. As apple is associated with love or fertility, the winner of the game - the person who catch an apple with his or her teeth first - is supposed to be the first to marry. (Photo: calebdzahnd [Flickr])

On February 19, 2008, Ahrita Furman of Brooklyn, New York - who has set 216 official Guinness records - set the world record for bobbing for apples: He bobbed 33 apples in a minute.

Oh, and remember that tradition of throwing rice at weddings? Well, that came from the tradition of throwing apples at newlyweds (yikes!)

6. Record-Breaking Apples

In 2005, Chisato Iwasaki of Hirosaki City, Japan, grew the world's heaviest apple. At 4 lb 1 oz (1.849 kg), it's the size of a small pumpkin!

The world's longest single continuous apple peel was created in 1976 by Kathy Wafler Madison at the tender age of 16. It measured 172 feet, 4 inches long. Kathy grew up to run her own apple tree nursery!

7. Newton's Apple

Legend has it that Isaac Newton was inspired to formulate his theory of universal gravitation when an apple fell on his head. Though that was apocryphal, the part that the physicist was inspired by the apple was actually real. Newton himself wrote that he witnessed the falling apple while staring out the window of his house at Woolsthorpe Manor.

Purported offspring of the Newton’s Apple Tree in Woolsthorpe Manor (Image Source: Mathematical Association of America)

What happened to the apple tree? Various places claim that they have the tree. The King's School in Grantham claims that they bought the tree, uprooted it and transported it to the headmaster's garden. The staff of Woolsthorpe Manor, of course, disagreed: they claim that the tree is still present in their garden. Trinity College in Cambridge claimed that they have a descendant of the original tree growing outside the room Newton lived when he studied there.

Oh, and what kind of apple was it? It's a green cooking apple called the Flower of Kent: a pear-shaped, mealy, and generally of poor quality of an apple by today's standard.

See also: Neatorama's 10 Strange Facts About Newton

8. How Did Apple the Computer Company Get Its Name?

Steve Jobs worked summer jobs at an apple farm and liked the Beatles' record label, Apple. So, when he and Steve Wozniak was trying to figure out a name for their new computer company, they decided that if they couldn't think of a better name, they'd name it Apple. Apparently, they couldn't! (Source)

... and talking about Newton, would you know it that Apple's first logo was of Sir Isaac sitting underneath an apple tree?

See also: Neatorama's Evolution of Tech Logos

Do you know more apple fun facts? Please add them to the comment ... and while you're at it, what should we do for "B"?

Obviously upset about the proposed budget cuts to New York City’s zoos, Staten Island Chuck let Mayor Michael Bloomberg know exactly how he feels.

As reported by the Staten Island Advance, the mayor tried several times to lure the petite prognosticator out of his home, tempting him with delicious ears of corn. This resulted in Chuck grabbing the corn, and hastily returning to his den. At some point in their back and forth, Chuck bared his wood-cutting teeth and went to work on the mayor’s finger.

Personally, I would be upset too if some strange guy tried to pull me out of bed at 7am.

Thankfully the Mayor was not badly bit and Chuck was still able to perform his prediction duties: No shadow, early spring!

“His hand was nicked,” a Bloomberg spokesman said. The mayor is up to date on his Tetanus shot, so he simply washed his wounded finger and put on a bandage.
…
The bite happened just before Chuck made his prediction that spring is coming, as the mayor bravely reached into the groundhog’s cottage, and tried to coax him out with some of his favorite snacks.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by TheKeyLime.

You can check out previous years’ pantless rides and other great pranks on ImprovEverywhere’s YouTube channel.

[YouTube]

I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing the streets for interesting and unique locations for feature films. In my travels, I often stumble across some pretty incredible sights, most of which are ignored every day by thousands of New Yorkers in too much of a rush to pay attention.

As it happens, it’s my job to pay attention, and I’ve started this blog to keep a record of what I see.

Not only does he record interesting locations in photographs, he also researches the architecture and other details for your edification and enjoyment. One post has several closeups of this building, which features gargoyles and other embellishments that are not visible from the ground. Link -via Metafilter