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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 'new york'
Alicia Keys and Empire State of Mind, Part II
Thanks largely to the popularity of Jay-Z's now ubiquitous New York-loving anthem "Empire State of Mind," the top song on Billboard's Hot 100 chart this week and on which she sings the chorus and gets credit as a co-writer, Alicia Keys is on a roll t...
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...
Night Falls on the City: The View from the Brooklyn Bridge
During those liminal moments after the sun sets but before the night has muted the clarity of day, the landscape veers off into abstraction. It's the golden hour, a mystical time favored by visual artists. Familiar sights gradually lose detail, givin...
An Early Morning Walk in the East Village
Sometimes it's not about where to walk but when. Certain hours of the day carry with them their own qualities, and strange as it may sound, I am fond of the quiet mystery of the early morning. Just before sunrise the day has not yet lost its patina o...
A Literary Holiday Gift Guide: Best New Books on New York, New York
Not surprisingly, New York as a subject generates a lot of books. Each year the shelves in the New York section of bookstores become overcrowded with new books about the city, each one adding something different to a vast body of city literature. Thi...
Shopping for Dinner at the Union Square Greenmarket: A Slideshow of Seasonal Bounty
Walking through the Union Square Greenmarket, I often feel like such an amateur. Dumfounded by the varieties of potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, squash, or heirloom tomatoes on display and what to do with them, I often beat a retreat to the bakery stand...
A Walk to See Carl Jung\'s Red Book: A Journey Into the Psyche
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (July 1875 – June 1961) embarked on an extraordinary journey in the years before World War I, a dangerous adventure that took him inward to the deepest recesses of his psyche. At the time he embarked on the journey he h...
A New York Yankees State of Mind
Hundreds of thousands of New York Yankees fans in the city got the chance to applaud their hometown World Series heroes for the parade and ceremony in lower Manhattan on Friday, November 6, celebrating along the Canyon of Heroes on Broadway and on th...
20 Short Walks between New York Landmarks
Favorable weather may encourage long walks through the New York cityscape, but sometimes a short walk of a mile or less may be just the ticket for some serious New York sightseeing. Perfect for brisk autumn weather, these suggested walks pair two ne...
Chatting with the Dead, A Steampunk Haunted House, the Village Halloween Parade and Other Events For Halloween Week in New York
From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century many prominent scholars and writers professed a faith in spiritualism, the idea that one could communicate with departed spirits through a gifted "medium." Arthur Conan Doyle, the creato...
E. L. Doctorow\'s Homer & Langley
Homer & Langley, the sweet, funny and often heartbreaking novel by E. L. Doctorow, is inspired by the true story of the famous Collyer Brothers, Homer & Langley, reclusive siblings shuttered behind the doors of their Fifth Avenue mansion in ...
"I love this dirty town": J.J. Hunsecker and the New York of Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Sweet Smell of Success is one of the great and final dramatic noir films set and filmed in an alluringly dangerous New York. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick with a brilliant script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, the 1957 classic, shot in glor...
Gumshoes: A Partial Lineup of New York Detectives in American Crime Fiction
The word gumshoe can be used as an intransitive verb, meaning to work as a detective, but more commonly gumshoe refers to the investigators themselves. While the etymology is a little murky, the term most likely refers to the new soft-soled gum that...
A Month of New York Mysteries, Ghosts, Detectives, Gothic Tales and Noir
Thursday afternoon, the first real chilly day of the season with strong west winds, I visited two bookstores that specialize in mysteries. The chilly day, coupled with the passing of dark clouds, signaled the advent of many beloved autumn pleasures ...
James Weldon Johnson's New York and Four Stops in Central Harlem
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), influential writer, activist, and diplomat, settled into life in Central Harlem in an attractive red Romanesque building near the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in 1925. He lived in the building, designat...
Walking for Peace in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
When the leaders of the world convene in New York for the opening of the General Assembly at the United Nations, tying up traffic on the east side of Manhattan with their heavily armed motorcades, regular New Yorkers, many of them born in other parts...
An Art Walk in Chelsea for a Weekday Afternoon, and Places to Stay for the Night
Walking along W. 22nd Street yesterday, on my way to the galleries on the west side of Chelsea, I realized I had often walked this way before. Looking at the familiar houses and recognizing several stoops, I recalled the series I wrote last December ...
Old New York Gets a New Amsterdam Market
Are there really vineyards on Long Island? Yes. Where did the cocoa in the chocolate come from? Ecuador. What is in the Halve Maen pie? Mincemeat. Where can I normally buy this cheese? At Fairway. You really make handmade corn tortillas? Yes. Such we...
My One-Night Stand With Fashion
I've never developed a long-term passion for fashion. As a child in Texas, my mother often took me to Neiman Marcus to dress me in pretty little Florence Eisemans, but my inner little cowgirl mapped out her own future in denim. Relieved to be sent to...
In New Amsterdam, the Half Moon Drops Anchor at the Battery, and Other Events of NY400 Week
From Fall 2009NY400 Week, a celebration of Holland on the Hudson, continues through September 13, Harbor Day.• SHIPS: The Half Moon (above), a replica of Henry Hudson's ship and operated by The New Netherland Museum, docked at the Battery yesterday...
My Augmented New York Unreality: Google Street View's Eerie Portrait of a New York Past
I'm experiencing a surreal and eerie flashback, because the images of Google Maps' Street View of my Greenwich Village neighborhood have become fascinatingly out of date. While opening Google maps the other day to update one of the self-guided walks ...
Fall Fashion 2009 Edition: Walking By the Yard in New York's Garment District, Crimes of Fashion, and Fall Fashion Trends
While no longer a bustling center of manufacturing, New York's Garment District between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second Streets and Fifth to Ninth Avenues still hums with fabric stores, machine shops, specialty notion stores, and showrooms catering to...
Art Trips Up the Hudson: Day Excursions From New York City to Museums and Historic Sites, with a List of Special Exhibitions for the Quadricentennial
With cool weather returning, September and October are popular months to explore day trips north of the city, especially through sites along the Hudson River Valley. Fall foliage, mountain scenery and a rich artistic and literary heritage contribute ...
Art and Spectacle in Nineteenth Century New York
In the spring of 1857, artist Frederic Church (1826-1900) traveled throughout Ecuador, making sketches of the country's mountainous landscapes. Two years later, working in his studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, he painted a large...
The Tenth Street Studio Building and a Walk to the Hudson River
The Tenth Street Studio Building at 51 W. 10th Street was demolished in 1956 to make way for an apartment building. Though not as high profile as the destruction of McKim, Mead, and White's Penn Station, the Greenwich Village building nevertheless he...
An Unconventional Summer in New York: When Geography, Nature and the Weather Dominated the Conversation
The summer is not technically over until September 22, 2009 at 5:18 p.m. (for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere), the date of the autumnal equinox, but with the nearness of Labor Day (Monday, September 7) and the subsequent start of the school...
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...
The Educated Artist: A Guide to Continuing Education Classes and Workshops in the Fine Arts in New York City, Fall 2009
Living in a city with so much art, it's not surprising that so many people who are not professional artists occasionally like to draw, paint, sculpt, and take pictures. So it shouldn't be surprising that many area arts schools, colleges, and other in...
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...
