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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 'holidays'
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Howdy, Sailor! Edition Monday, May 18 - Monday, May 25, 2009
Hard to believe that next Monday, May 25, is Memorial Day. On Wednesday, Fleet Week begins and with it a multitude of events to welcome service members to New York. See the link for Fleet Week below for more information.• Monday, May 18. American B...
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Monday, April 6 - Sunday, April 12, 2009
Passover and Easter will be celebrated this week, and in New York, it's one of the richest times of the year, spiritually and culturally. The city starts springing to new steps. The culmination of the week is Easter Sunday, a delightful day of celebr...
Walking Into the Year of the Ox
Happy New Year, again! The year of the Ox is now upon us, and so with the first new moon of the year, a new administration and new beginnings, I took a walk to Mott and Canal Street in Chinatown this afternoon to enjoy the opening festivities for the...
WOTBA New York Cultural Events Calendar, with Events for the Chinese New Year Celebration: January 26- February 1, 2009
What's with the loud popping sounds downtown? Happy Year of the Ox! It's the Chinese New Year, and thus, festivities shift south this week to Mott Street, the Bowery, East Broadway, Bayard Street, Elizabeth Street and Pell Street for the lunar new ye...
Happy Holidays, One and All (and All Y'All)
Happy holidays! And a very special thank you to all the regular readers and subscribers. Walking Off the Big Apple is now on holiday break. I will return December 29 with new posts and a look back at memorable walks from 2008. Cheers! Keep on walkin...
How Not to Shop in the World's Largest Department Store
I decided to finish most all of my shopping for the holidays at Macy's in Herald Square. My logic was that I would probably find all the items on my list in this one enormous department store. Turns out I was right, and after a couple of hours, I hap...
At Bryant Park, A Lesson in Curling from the Canadians (A Slideshow)
The Canadians have been generous to New Yorkers this holiday, providing the amusement of Celsius, their temporary restaurant and bar in Bryant Park, with special Wednesday night events. Today, they brought us a lesson in curling, a sport that looks t...
O. Henry's Christmas Stories of New York's Working Poor
The writer William Sydney Porter, known as O. Henry, wrote several Christmas tales in addition to "The Gift of the Magi." A couple of the stories are set in rural areas of Texas and the American West, as Porter lived and worked on ranches as a young ...
A Walk for a New York Christmas: Part IV. Exploring Irving Place
When he lived at 55 Irving Place, O. Henry believed, like so many others, that Washington Irving once resided down the street. Irving was more of a downtown guy, and he probably never lived along in here, but that didn't stop a 19th-century real esta...
A Walk for a New York Christmas: Part III. O. Henry and "The Gift of the Magi"
"One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all."Sometime in 1905, in Pete's Tavern on the corner of Irving Place and E. 18th, short story writer O. Henry sat in his favorite booth, allegedly the second from the front, and quickly wrote "The Gift of...
A Walk for a New York Christmas: Part I. Clement Clarke Moore's Chelsea
In 1822, wealthy New York scholar and poet Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863), a resident of the Chelsea neighborhood, wrote the most famous Christmas poem of all time, "A Visit From St. Nicholas," known widely as "Twas the Night Before Christmas." The...
A Walk for a New York Christmas: From Clement Clarke Moore's Chelsea to O. Henry's Irving Place (Introduction)
Many of the ways we think of Christmas, in most of its secular and popular forms - the chubby Santa and his reindeer, the new fallen snow, the warm hearth donned with Christmas stockings, family and friends celebrating in cheer, can trace its roots t...
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...
Looking Back on Thanksgiving Week: Jones Street, Papabubble, New Museum, Star Trek Art, and More
Thanksgiving Week began for me on Monday when the sun came out after several days of rainy weather. Recovering from a cold and a sore knee, the result of wearing the wrong pair of glasses, misunderstanding the distance from the street to the sidewalk...
Selected List of Events for NYC Thanksgiving Week and Beyond: Balloon Inflation, Sondheim, Cindy Sherman, Zabar's, and more
Here's my To-Do list (and one Not-To-Do, I'll let you guess) for the upcoming holiday week in the big city. While I eagerly await the feast with friends and family on Thursday, I'm compiling here a list of city entertainments in and around the festiv...
Chasing the Demons Away in a Village Full of Ghosts - The Village Halloween Parade 2008
This past week seemed busier than usual, with a myriad of social events, job tasks (I have four wonderful part-time writing and editing gigs, counting this one), and household duties - hosting a houseguest, dinner out at Gemma, a night of drinks at ...
The New York Pumpkin and Jack-o'-lantern Patch: Some Smashing Links
Cleverly-carved Jack-o'-lanterns will soon be taking their places in many New York windows over the next week. Large field pumpkins make great decorations such as Jack-o'-lanterns, but many professional cooks think they're too stringy for making most...
Weekend Frivolities: Making a Mask for Halloween, Part Two - The Finished Project
In the previous post I explained the steps for making a Halloween mask in the Venetian method. Those who followed along may have found the process complicated. So it is. Creating a sculpture and then fashioning a plaster mold that will likely destroy...
Weekend Frivolities: Making a Mask for Halloween, Part One
Recently, I noticed a sizable bump in hits on the perennial favorite Walking Off the Big Apple post, Weekend Frivolities DIY Edition: Venetian Masks. Of course, now with Halloween approaching, some people are looking for time-honored ways to make a f...
How to Prepare for Halloween 2008 in New York, and Why
Just look around you. Everyone is spooked in New York these days, especially in the Financial District (scared of falling stocks), in the hotel lobbies (scared of falling tourism), and in retail establishments (scared of falling sales). Also, spooks ...
