The Royal Tenenbaums’ House
The Onion’s A.V. Club takes a field trip to see the Harlem house where the exteriors (and many of the interiors) were shot for The Royal Tenenbaums.
(via devour)
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kottke.org posts about NYC
Fastest driven lap around Manhattan
This guy drove the entire way around Manhattan (24 miles) in just 26 minutes, averaging 56 miles/hour and topping out at 111 miles/hour.
Someone left this typically New York comment:
I am an NYC cab driver and I promise I could beat this record in my crown Victoria. Simple factors that are unaware to the civilian driver the cabby knows. This cabby knows to drive sunday night when theres no construction work being done, this cabby knows what speed to maintain to time the lights on the westside highway and this cabby knows the quickest way from the FDR to the West side highway.
(via ★fakeisthenewreal)
1982 street views of NYC
A bunch of street level panoramas of midtown Manhattan from 1982. 1982 has never seemed so long ago. This link has been up and down for the past two weeks so it may not be available, so bookmark it for later checking-out.
NYC summer movies
Today’s service journalism: here’s a simple one-page list of outdoor movie screenings in NYC this summer. The lineup includes Rosemary’s Baby, Airplane!, and Spiderman. (thx, matthew)
Fellowship of the Ring back in theaters tonight
A bunch of theaters in NYC (and around the US I would assume) are showing the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring at 7pm tonight.
The event will include a personal introduction from director Peter Jackson captured from the set of his current film and “Lord of the Rings” prequel “The Hobbit,” immediately followed by the feature presentation.
The same thing will happen with Two Towers on June 21 and Return of the King on June 28. Can’t believe Fellowship came out 10 years ago already.
Brooklyn in pictures, 1974
No idea what these have to do with business or being inside business or whatever, but Business Insider has a nice selection of photos by Danny Lyon of Brooklyn in 1974.
The dangerous three-way dance at NYC street intersections
3-Way Street is a fascinating video by Ron Gabriel that highlights bad interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection.
There are lots of ways to show these interactions…the overhead view and highlighting are particularly effective design choices. Well done. (thx, janelle)
Subway waltz
Two NYC subway trains dancing down the tunnels…what a charming little video.
(via ★leela)
What song are you listening to?
Tyler Cullen went out on the streets of NYC and asked random passers-by what song they were listening to on their headphones.
Turned out to be more interesting than I expected.
NYC groceries cheaper than in rest of the US
It seems that item for item, food in New York City is actually cheaper than in many other parts of the country.
Using data from the ACNielsen HomeScan database, which employed bar-code scanners to track every purchase made by roughly 33,000 U.S. households in 2005, the two economists compared identical products sold in cities big and small, both at high-end grocery stores and discount retailers. In nearly every case, New York products were cheaper than in places such as Memphis, Indianapolis and Milwaukee.
(via stellar)
NYC subway exits into buildings
Noah Brier (and his commenters) are collecting NYC subway stations that open into buildings…like the BC stop that exits right into the Museum of Natural History.
Cory Arcangel exhibition at The Whitney
Cory Arcangel has a solo exhibition coming up at The Whitney.
Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, an exhibition of new work, revolves around the concept of “product demonstrations.” All of the works featured in the exhibition — ranging from video games, single channel video, kinetic sculpture, and prints, to pen plotter drawings — have been created by means of technological tools with an emphasis on the mixing and matching of both professional and amateur technologies, as well as the vernaculars these technologies encourage within culture at large.
Opens May 26 and runs through September. Interview Magazine has a recent profile and interview.
The Frick Collection’s secrets
I love this “bowling saloon” in the basement of The Frick Collection museum in NYC.
Gothamist has a bunch more photos of the Frick’s secret places.
Graffiti is a crime
From the NYC transit authority, a 1988 video about the consequences of painting graffiti in the subway.
Intense! (via ★vuokko)
Solitude among millions
Melissa Febos writes about crying in public in NYC…as well as other private things that people do in public here.
One afternoon, I was riding a Brooklyn-bound Q train with my mother, who was visiting from Cape Cod, when our conversation lulled. We each glanced around the subway car at the other passengers, their heads bobbing in unison, the eyes of the man across from us doing a creepy back-and-forth twitch as he watched a train whizzing by in the opposite direction behind us. Some people read, or pushed buttons on their smart phones, but most just stared without expression at the floor or the garish overhead posters for Dr. Zizmor’s cosmetic dermatology. My mother (who is, notably, a psychotherapist) leaned into my shoulder and whispered, “Everyone on this train looks depressed.”
I snorted, whispering back: “No, Mom, they just have their train-faces on.” In a place where we are so rarely alone, we find privacy in public.
The “privacy in public” thing is essential in understanding New York.
The mafia and NYC pizza cheese
Why can’t you get a slice of pizza at John’s on Bleecker or Patsy’s? Allegedly because of Al Capone:
In his 1981 book on the mob called Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace, the late Jonathan Kwitny detailed how Al Capone — who owned a string of dairy farms near Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin — forced New York pizzerias to use his rubbery mob cheese, so different from the real mozzarella produced here in New York City since the first immigrants from Naples arrived in Brooklyn around 1900.
As the story goes, the only places permitted to use good mozzarella made locally were the old-fashioned pizza parlors like Lombardi’s, Patsy’s, and John’s, who could continue doing so only if they promised to never serve slices. According to Kwitny, this is why John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street still has the warning “No Slices” on its awning today.
(via ★kathryn)
The stores, they are a’changin’
Great series of photos of a Harlem store front, taken every 2-5 years from 1977 to 2004. (via ★vuokko)
Update: These photos were taken by Camilo Jose Vergara; there are many more like them at his web site. (thx, andrew)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams at IFC
Starting April 29, the IFC Center in NYC will start showing Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D. A refresher on the film:
The visionary director of Grizzly Man leads us on an unforgettable journey 32,000 years back in time to explore the earliest known images made by human hands. Discovered in 1994, France’s Chauvet caves contain the rarest of the world’s historic treasures, restricted to only a handful of researchers. Granted once-in-a-lifetime access and filming in 3D, Herzog captures the beauty of a truly awe-inspiring place, while musing in his inimitable fashion about its original inhabitants, the birth of art and the curious people surrounding the caves today.
Herzog first heard of the Chauvet caves from this Judith Thurman piece in the New Yorker.
Cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
The cherry blossoms are starting to bloom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden!
The Space Shuttle takes Manhattan
NYC is getting a Space Shuttle! It’s never actually been in space, but hey!
With the Discovery headed to the Smithsonian, the museum will no longer have need for the Enterprise, the shuttle that has been on display there since 2004. The Enterprise, which was used for early glide tests but was never sent into orbit, will now go the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan.
How Manhattan got its grid
The NY Times has an interactive look at how the Manhattan grid came to be.
In 1811, John Randel created a proposed street grid of Manhattan. Compare his map, along with other historic information, to modern-day Manhattan.
This article has more about the map. (via ★raul)
400-year-old king signs autographs at the Met
For their latest mission, Improv Everywhere got someone who looked very much like King Philip IV of Spain to sign autographs in front of a Velázquez painting of the monarch.
Every building in NYC
James Gulliver Hancock is attempting to draw every building in NYC. Here are a few buildings on Rivington:
See also Every Person In New York.
LCD Soundsystem ticket debacle
So, LCD Soundsystem is retiring and to see off their fans, they decided to perform one last show at Madison Square Garden. Except that they didn’t think they’d sell the place out and didn’t pay too much attention to how the tickets were being sold. When the tickets went on sale last week, they sold out immediately. Many fans didn’t get tickets, the band’s family and friends didn’t get tickets, and even some of the band didn’t get tickets. Scalpers bought thousands upon thousands of tickets and the band is hopping mad. So they’re adding four more NYC shows right before the MSG gig to give their fans a chance to see them and to screw the scalpers by increasing the supply (and therefore lowering demand and prices).
oh-and a small thing to scalpers: “it’s legal” is what people say when they don’t have ethics. the law is there to set the limit of what is punishable (aka where the state needs to intervene) but we are supposed to have ethics, and that should be the primary guiding force in our actions, you fucking fuck.
It would be fun if all those scalpers got stuck with thousands of unsellable MSG tickets.
Musical subway map
Alexander Chen made a version of the NYC subway map that plays music as the trains intersect routes.
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.
Check out the full version; there are more details here. See also Isle of Tune. (via about 20 people on Twitter just now)
Amazingly detailed map of Central Park
This illustrated map of Central Park individually depicts, labels, and categories by species every single significant tree in the park. All 19,630 of them.
Central Park Entire, The Definitive Illustrated Map is the most detailed map of any urban park in the world. I spent over two years creating it, walking more than 500 miles as I documented over 170 different kinds of trees and shrubs. Central Park contains over 58 miles of paved paths and many more miles of obscure woodland trails. I hiked along every one of them multiple times in order to identify and pinpoint each major tree. There are 19,630 trees drawn and placed in position on this map. There are no filler trees, no fluff. Every tree symbol represents a real tree in the Park, and you can identify its genus or species with the accompanying tree legend.
If you’ve got a subscription to the New Yorker, you can read about the map in this week’s issue. (thx, @bamstutz)
Bill Cunningham film
Looks like Bill Cunningham New York will be showing around the US starting with New York on March 16th. (Film Forum!) And hark, a trailer.
If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.
1770 map of NYC
The Brooklyn Historical Society recently restored a 1770 map of New York City, one of a handful of “Ratzer maps” that have survived to the present day.
A British Army officer in America, Lieutenant Ratzer was a surveyor and draftsman, and his map was immediately praised as a step forward from those of his predecessors. For his trouble, his name was misspelled on initial versions of his maps, called the “Ratzen plan.”
The map included a detailed rendering of the island’s slips and shores and streets in Lower Manhattan, the familiar mixing with the long gone. Pearl, Broad, Grand and Prince lay beside Fair and Crown and the “Fresh Water” pond.
“Manhattan, at least the part shown here, was mapped as precisely as any spot on the Earth at the time,” said Robert T. Augustyn, co-author of “Manhattan in Maps: 1527-1995”. “There was no more beautiful or revealing a map of New York City ever done.”
The side-by-side comparison of the restored map with the pre-restored map is worth a look. And compare with the Viele map of Manhattan made in 1865.
Temporary restaurant
Chef John Fraser’s new NYC restaurant will be designed to be open for only nine months…until the building it’s in is demolished. Some other unusual things about the restaurant: diners set their own tables, chairs are from eBay, and it’s funded in part via Kickstarter.
With little more than two weeks before the planned opening, he was still formulating the initial menu and pricing. For one appetizer he envisioned a Gruyere, leek and potato veloute; for another, Arctic char in aspic. For entrees he was mulling a pork cheek, a veal shank, Dover sole for two. These would probably be served as part of a three-course prix fixe for $58, he said.
Nothing too unconventional there. But beyond the plate, he said, anything goes. Although he’ll take reservations, he’s bypassing the Web service Open Table (too cumbersome). And he’s curious about having a marching band stomp through some night. Obligatory resourcefulness has given way to revolutionary thoughts.
The carless streets of Manhattan
Bruce McCall imagines the Manhattan street with no room for cars…but there’s a baby stroller lane, a Segway/skateboarding lane, and a runner/jogger lane. (via @bldgblog)
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