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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 'walking'
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 ...
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...
25 Great Things to Do in New York City
Some favorite New York experiences, old and new, from Walking Off the Big Apple1. Take a tram to Roosevelt Island and walk south to see the Renwick Ruins."The Gothic Revival structure, granted the status of Landmark Site by the Landmarks Preservation...
American Cultural History on Walking Off the Big Apple: A Chronological Guide to a Selection of Posts From the Last Two Years
Over the course of the last two years writing Walking Off the Big Apple, and it's been two years this week, I realize that many posts situate themselves in a category that would best be described as American cultural history. While I spend most of my...
The Marx Brothers in New York: Interlude - On Groucho Walking
This special new series about the Marx Brothers in New York continues this week, following the brothers into a career in Broadway and into the movies, but first I would like to take a little time to discuss Groucho's peculiar way of walking. Sometime...
A Special Date Night in the Village: The First Couple Dines at Blue Hill
Those of us who gathered along Washington Square West at the intersection of Washington Place early Friday evening made our own fun as we stood patiently waiting for a glimpse of the special guests. After hearing a little earlier the helicopters fly ...
Into the Memorial Day Weekend
The time has come to start the summer, and a hot day today in New York serves as a sneak preview for coming attractions. Walking Off the Big Apple is taking the long Memorial Day weekend to see museum exhibitions, explore new vistas, and to map out e...
Opening Day at Washington Square Park: Thoughts and Images While Strolling
Around 8 a.m. on May 19, 2009, park workers started pulling down the chain fences surrounding the newly renovated sections of Washington Square Park, including its signature fountain, and early risers in the Village streamed in. Several were out on m...
Weekend Trifecta: A Park, A Bike, and A Dance
For those of us who frequent Washington Square Park, the first phase of the park's redesign, a subject of heated argument, looks like it's drawing to a close. The newly-designed northwest quadrant, along with the massive moving and reconfiguration of...
After Walking, A Place to Sit: Greenacre Park, E. 51st
Strolling may be the best way to see New York, but after shopping, walking, or other forms of exertion, it feels great to sit down. Sometimes, while out and about the city, it's absolutely necessary to find a quiet spot to take a time out, make a pho...
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...
Friday Night Lights, New York-Style, From the Village to the Hudson
In the opening chapter of Moby Dick, Herman Melville describes a common wanderlust among Manhattoes for the sea. Sometimes, however, for those of us raised among flatland and spread-out landscapes beyond New York, a walk to the river's edge comes not...
When the Cherry Blossoms Fall: A Walk through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
A walk through a spring garden in New York during cherry blossom season at just the right time can be an exquisite experience, but sometimes personal schedules and the weather can throw off a well-timed visit. If you're slightly late, you're still lu...
Back on the Boulevard: A Review of Bob Dylan's Together Through Life
Memory and forgetfulness...the varying international rhythms of an accordion, sometimes street French but often Mexican...chilly breezes and open streets...that gravely voice...here now are locked hearts, emptiness, but we find here too, among other ...
A Slide Show and Description of My Vacation in Tribeca: Three Nights at the Tribeca Grand Hotel
During the middle decades of the previous century, it was not an unusual practice for some travelers to take slides of their journey and then once back home bore their friends and neighborhoods by inviting them over to see a slide show of their adven...
Mapping Out the Tribeca Film Festival
The first question someone asked me yesterday during the course of covering the first full day of this year's Tribeca Film Festival was where to get good Italian food near Union Square. Thousands of film writers, producers, and directors have converg...
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...
Literary DUMBO: An Afternoon Walk Under the Bridges in Search of Books
Along with the possibilities of ice cream, chocolate, drinks at reBar, lying down on green grass and views of two bridges and Manhattan, this book-oriented walk has added perks. Throw in a beautiful day, and I can't think of a better quick escape tha...
Walking the Street, and the Rhythms of New York City
Dutch artist Piet Mondrian spent the last four years of his life in New York City, and several of his last paintings, like Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-1943) (inset), respond to the frenetic pace of the city and its danceable sounds. Boogie-woogie, a...
"You Got the Wrong Broadway, Mister:" Exploring the Other Broadways, East and West
In lower Manhattan, in order to trap visitors into staying longer and spending tourist dollars in our shops and cafes, we have added two additional streets called Broadway to confuse everyone. On several occasions I have seen a group of visitors stan...
A Lunchtime Concert at the World Financial Center (Diana Krall and Orchestra)
The word evidently got out about the free concert celebrating Diana Krall's new album, "Quiet Nights," the one today at 1 p.m. in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center downtown, because by the time I got there at 12:30 p.m. the place was fi...
Freewheelin' Jones Street
From Spring 2009I assume most of the civilized readers of these pages would be familiar with Bob Dylan's second studio album titled The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan from 1963. The covers features Dylan walkin' down the street with Suze Rotolo, his girlfrie...
Jacques Brel, Songs of the Street, and On Bleecker Street
Last month, Eric Blau passed away at the age of 87. A resident of Manhattan, the multi-talented Blau, a man of several careers, was best known as the creator, along with composer Mort Shuman, of the musical review, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and ...
A Morning Walk in SoHo: Two Roosters, the "Acting" Police, a Little Graffiti, Two Eggs and Some Home Fries
My walk this morning began with the sound of "Cockadoodledoo!" that you sometimes hear in Greenwich Village. No, not really, but last April 15, 2008 the neighborhood woke up to the same sounds. I don't know what's with the seasonal appearance of bar...
Walking Arcades of the Theater District: Minskoff Alley and Shubert Alley
Continuing a look at walking arcades, please find below a couple of images of two walking passages near Times Square - Minskoff Alley and the famous Shubert Alley. Not far from the arcades in Midtown in the fifties, these alley passages show off the ...
The Walking Arcades of Midtown
Those of us with a flâneur sensibility go into throws of sophisticated excitement at the very sight of an arcade. I'm not talking about a shoot 'em up palace of games, but the kinds of passageways first built in Paris in the 19th century. Here, let ...
Follow Your Money: The New York Financial Crisis & Recovery Walk
I think I've reached my bottom when it comes to bad financial news, a personal capitulation if you will, so I've devised a 10,000 step program to aid our road to recovery. Surveying the urban landscape of New York, the financial capital of the world,...
A Walk From Lincoln Center to Zabar's
If you happen to be attending a noon or matinee performance in Lincoln Center or otherwise happen to be hanging around there for whatever reason and find you've got some time, I recommend a stroll up Broadway to Zabar's, the famous Upper West Side fo...
A Stroll West Along Atlantic Avenue, and Finding My Way to Carroll Gardens
After a nice lunch with a friend at Cafe Lafayette in Brooklyn this afternoon, I felt like taking a walk. Though it was chilly, the sun was bright, and the insane winds had died down. I wanted to walk without too much over-determination (otherwise, a...
WOTBA New York Cultural Events Calendar: Monday, February 23 - Sunday, March 1, 2009
I don't know whether to be alarmed or excited that the month of March approaches, but I'll try to dispense with annoying February deadlines and look forward to a season of spring (but not hay) fever. I feel like dancing. So, it's good that I have Pau...
