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Walking Off the Big Apple
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New York walking journal, neighborhood guides, maps, lists of affordable hotels, and art reviews with entertaining commentary on the cultural life of the city.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'architecture'
An Unofficial Guide to Macy\'s New Thanksgiving Day Parade Route
After 82 years, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday, November 26, 2009 will be following a new route through Manhattan. A major reason for the change has to do with the city's recent experiments along Broadway to make the thoroughfare more...
A Cultural Guide to West 57th Street: A Walk and a Map
It began in 1891 with the opening of Carnegie Hall, the symbol of music world success that Andrew Carnegie paid people to construct on 7th Avenue between West 57th and West 56th Streets. A year later, the Art Students League moved into the new Americ...
Bye Bye Penn Station: Mad Men Takes on an Epic Battle
In Season 3, Episode 2 of AMC's Mad Men, titled "Love Among the Ruins," Pete Campbell, the Co-Head of Accounts for Sterling Cooper, the fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency at the center of the series set in the early 1960s, chairs an office m...
Some Serious Wi-Fi: The Edna Barnes Salomon Room at the New York Public Library
Needing a change of work space other than my own living room, one with more gravitas than a place where dogs bring me squeaky toys, I went uptown to the main branch of the New York Public Library this afternoon. I mainly wanted to try out the new wi-...
Cooper Union's Architectural Advancement
Visitors to Astor Place, the Bowery, or the East Village may find themselves stopped in their tracks these days, confronted for the first time with the Cooper Union's new, although unfinished, academic building on Cooper Square between 6th and 7th St...
Architectural Highlights Along NYC's Summer Streets: A Guide and a Map
For three consecutive Saturday mornings in August (in 2009 - August 8, 15, & 22), the city of New York shuts down major north-south thoroughfares to vehicular traffic so that residents and visitors alike may enjoy the streets without the presence...
A Visit to Audubon Terrace and Environs
Though far from the state of dilapidated ruin that would excite the fantasy of the modern romantic, the worn facades of the monumental museums that make up Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights look sufficiently weathered to induce a civic form of me...
French Lessons: Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art's New American Wing, and Paris Photographs from the Second Empire
The New American Wing, the second phase of the renovation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American collection, has opened to the public, including the Charles Engelhard Court and the period rooms of decorative arts. In spite of the name, the wing...
New York's Theater District: The Legacy of the Golden Age, A Walk and a Map
Even without a ticket to a Broadway play, a walk around New York's theater district can reveal the story of the American theater. In this relatively small piece of real estate, landmark plays and musicals unfolded on the stage and enriched individual...
Aernout Mik at MoMA: Something is Happening Here, But I Don't Know What It Is
Last weekend, when I stood for two hours with a crowd behind barricades watching the Secret Service and police accompany the First Couple's motorcade to the restaurant on Washington Place for date night, I thought about the video installations I had ...
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Kick Off Your Shoes Edition Monday, May 11 - Monday, May 18, 2009
While some people are sadly out of work and many more subsist on freelance wages, with the latter now said to make up 26% of the U.S. workforce, New York is still a workaholic city full of people with incredible drive. One subset of the city, however...
A Stroll Through the East 60s
The walk on the Upper East Side this past Saturday, the one in which I retraced Walker Evans and his photographs of a block on E. 61st in 1938, took me on a longer stroll. Thanks to the picture-perfect weather, I also walked through the small but lov...
Walker Evans, a Block on E. 61st Street in 1938, and a Visit in April of 2009
Walker Evans (1903-1975), a documentary photographer best known for his depictions of southern sharecroppers during the Great Depression, store signs and street signs in cities and towns, and the whole of American vernacular, spent a morning in the s...
WOTBA New York Cultural Events Calendar: Monday, March 23 - Sunday, March 29, 2009
A chilly start to this week, but looks like it will gradually warm up by the end. I'm ready for Springtime. What follows is a handful of literary, musical, and artistic events for this lovely Spring week in New York.• LITERARY TRIVIA. Monday, March...
The New York Hotel That Looks Like It's in Miami
From Spring 2009I've walked by the Doubletree Metropolitan Hotel in Midtown on Lexington several times, and I always say to myself something like "Kinda wild. Kinda groovy. Très tropicale!" I would prefer to sound like Baudelaire in my head, but the...
Shhh, Don't Tell: Quiet Modernist Escapes in Midtown Manhattan
Midtown Manhattan can seem overwhelming at times. The density created by the tall buildings, the crowds flocking to Rockefeller Center and Radio City, the flagship stores along Fifth Avenue, and the general mayhem that ensues on a day with parades or...
Recent Books on New York City Life and Art: A List for Spring Reading
All I want is a week to browse through bookstores, and although I don't see that week in my near future, I have found time this weekend to scout out some relatively new and interesting New York-oriented books. A few of them deal with the city's every...
A Three-Mile Walk Through Fort Greene and Clinton Hill
I set out on Tuesday afternoon just to view the Tree Huggers Project on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn (previous post), but the attractive architecture and street life kept me going much farther. As I mentioned in the last post, I started out near downtow...
Lessons from the Days of the "Empty State Building"
Back in the days of the booming 1920s, the phenomenon of skyscrapers excited the popular imagination. The main proponents of the soaring buildings - the builders, architects, civic boosters, and financiers, argued that they were the symbols of busine...
The Strolling Year in Review 2008: Favorite Places
While reviewing my walks in 2008, I decided to identify those places in New York I most enjoyed exploring or where I looked forward to returning many times. Now that I've compiled such as list, I now see that the natural world and the built environme...
Inside 590 Madison Avenue Last Week: A Curious Convergence of Pop Art, Stock Cars, and Cheese
From Walking Off the Big AppleWhile out strolling along the Fifth Avenue store windows last week, I wandered into the Trump Tower atrium for a bit to look around, and then I walked into the adjacent atrium of 590 Madison Avenue (formerly known as the...
Sing, Choir of New Yorkers: A Selection of Holiday Music Events in New York City, December 2008
With such a large number of talented musicians living in the city, it shouldn't be surprising that holiday music in New York is unparalleled. The following constitutes just a small selection of a long list of concerts about town. The sounds of the se...
Rainy Day New York: Places to Go in the City When the Weather Turns Frightful
When bad weather hits, I find it hard to leave the apartment. But, sometimes you get sick of staying at home and need to be somewhere else. Fortunately, New York City has many great places to spend a day indoors. The hard part is getting motivated to...
10 New Books of Interest for the New York State of Mind: On Modernism, Landmarks, the Brooklyn Genius, Pancakes, Pre-Punk History, and more
• New York Dolls: Photographs by Bob Gruen (Hardcover)by Bob Gruen (Photographer), Legs McNeil (Commentary), Morrissey (Afterword)Abrams Image. September 1, 2008.The New York Dolls paved the way for many of the Punk, Glam and New Wavers in the cit...
The Making of the Monumental Metropolis: New York and the École des Beaux Arts
My mission in writing about New York in the late nineteenth century has been to underscore the changes wrought in Old New York with the arrival of the 20th century and the radical remaking of its built environment, and to wonder, of course, about the...
More Curiosities from Nooks and Corners of Old New York (1899)
Continuing with a look at Charles Hemstreet's Nooks and Corners of Old New York, published in 1899, I would like to point out several additional passages of interest.• Many commemorative tablets described in the book are no longer in place. One exc...
Charles Hemstreet's Nooks and Corners of Old New York: Lessons in Mortality
Charles Hemstreet's book, Nooks and Corners of Old New York, illustrated by E. C. Peixotto, makes for a curious walking guide to Manhattan, largely because it was published fairly long ago, namely 1899. A few things have obviously changed with the pa...
Living Now in the New York of the Gilded Age: Inheriting the Built Environment of the Nineteenth Century
Possibly the worst painter I've ever met in my life lived in a gorgeous house built in the thirteenth century in a beautiful town in Northern Italy. It was a cave-like structure with small rooms that spilled into the next, a sequence of charming vign...
Harvey Wiley Corbett and the E. 8th Street Apartments
When the scaffolding in front of the apartment buildings along E. 8th and University Place (4-26 East 8th Street) was removed recently, the restoration revealed a structure very different from the styles of other buildings around it. Standing out fro...
