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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 
ueue, submitted by 
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
Mark Ladner makes lasagne (that’s how the article spells it) in pans that hold 80 potions portions each, using 50 layers of paper-thin pasta and 50 layers of three sauces. It’s part of a nine-course meal at the New York restaurant Del Posto.
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)
One of our favorite illustrators and fellow Neatoramanaut Adam "Ape Lad" Koford has just scored a huge win: his cartoon creation of a squirrel named Pearl has just been picked as New York City Parks and Recreation as its first official mascot. W00t!
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
Having solved all serious crimes, New York City Department of Education focused its might to quash the scourge of doodling in today’s school.
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.
Zaarath and Christopher Prokop and their two cats live in the smallest apartment in New York City — just 175 square feet. For its size, it’s reasonably well-equipped with a shower, sink, toilet, refrigerator, and hotplate. In The New York Post, Angela Montefinise writes:
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
Not happy with the current candidates for mayor? Why not write-in your choice? The National Ledger has a list of the top write-in vote getters for the New York City mayoral election … and the winner is:
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.
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!"
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
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
On May 8, 1970, construction workers clashed with students and anti-war protesters in New York in what became known as the Hard Hat riot. But it’s far from the only riot to ever happen in New York City (as I’m sure residents can attest to). Here are a few of them big enough to get their own titles.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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