A handful of New York residents and environmental activist groups are suing the City of New York, the Parks Department, and Lincoln Center over the use of Damrosch Park, a 2.44-acre park on the Upper West Side. The lawsuit claims that the city has effectively, but illegally, handed over management of the park to Lincoln Center, and that the events the performing arts center holds there — including the iconic Fashion Week — have taken over the space and rendered it unusable for the public.
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The New Yorker has taken the increasing economic segregation of our city and visualized it.
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Like so many people who come to New York, part of what attracted me was the spectacle of the city itself. I wanted to wander streets thick with history and creative currents, to watch and become part of the human drama just outside my door. That also describes my experience of Susan Wides’s stunning new project All the Worlds, a series of nine sensuous, panoramic photographs that capture the fluid beauty of New York City’s theatrum mundi. It is on these stages that Wides sees our very human need to align with the poetry of our collective spirits and to reclaim our humanity in the face of co-opting consumerist and political forces.
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The name Joseph J. Lhota may not be a household one (yet), but the current Republican mayoral candidate has done a lot in his time in New York City politics. Art worlders may remember him as the man who led the Giuliani administration’s push to bully the Brooklyn Museum into censoring an artwork from the Sensation exhibition.
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It’s amazing to watch slow-motion, high-definition video of a bird take flight. The feathers ruffle in succession like a ripple moving across waves, and the wings flap in an exaggerated but seemingly effortless motion. The whole display is fairly awe-inspiring and beautiful — even if the bird in question is a pigeon.
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The winners of a city-sponsored contest to redesign New York’s payphones have been announced, and it looks like the clunky yet iconic — and these days, often broken — booths of decades past will soon be replaced by slim, digital screens offering wifi, summaries of weather conditions, a chance to pay your parking tickets, and much more.
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I suspect everyone who’s wandered around New York — or any major city, really — has had the experience of walking past a payphone and wondering about its fate. Public phones often strike me as the ultimate objects in transition, relics from a pre-digital age dotting the cityscape. It may be a coincidental sign of the times that the vendor contracts for New York City’s more than 11,000 (!) payphones will expire next year.
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Like most people (I assume), I had heard about Humans of New York in passing, with a share on Facebook or a retweet on Twitter, but until recently, I wasn’t actually following the blog. Then I found myself looking at a portrait one day — I don’t remember which — and being overwhelmed by its simultaneous focus and tenderness. I realized I wanted these pictures to pop up in my Facebook and Twitter feeds all the time.
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Anonymous anti-Barclays street art appears at the newly coined Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center subway stop in Brooklyn.
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It only takes one look at the cover of the debut issue of Lucky Peach to realize that this isn’t your typical food ‘zine. No glossy photo of an impeccably styled dish here; instead, there’s a dead chicken being held unceremoniously upside down by its feet, its pale, thin, pocky skin in places taut and [...]
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