to move up and down
Anything NYC
All I know is that I’ve been to a lot of places and I will always prefer New York City.
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Street toy merchant,Union Square area, circa 1903 Photo from the Library of Congress.
Free Summer Concerts in NYC
Starting now through August, you can hear live music of all kinds across the City ranging from punk on Staten Island, rock on the Manhattan waterfront and world music at SummerStage. For a full list of concerts and festivals visit ow.ly/l8OaH.
NYC artist’s photos of unknowing subjects raise privacy concerns
(Photo: Bebeto Matthews / AP)
To the well-known photographer who shot them with a telephoto lens, the pictures of people going about their daily lives in the building across the street constitute art.
Are you ready?
Camera: Canon PowerShot SX280HS
A week ago I was given a Canon SX280 HS for shooting my NYC experience. One of the many amazing features this camera has is a WiFi connection that allows me to post my images wherever I’am.
I’m completely drawn into it and enjoying my everyday images like never before. If you want to try it, me to take a picture of you or just have fun get out today and meet me at the Canon #PowerShotBeReady event at the South Street Seaport in New York City (2pm). Are you ready? #canon #camera #powershot #NYC #US
(via flavorpill)
(Source: newyork)
Today Mayor Bloomberg and Speaker Quinn announced the launch of an expanded, free Red Hook Summer Ferry service starting Memorial Day Saturday and running weekends throughout the summer!
The expanded service will run from Pier 11 in Manhattan to a new stop at Van Brunt Street and then to IKEA, both in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Free transfers will be available between the Red Hook Ferry and the northbound East River Ferry, which reaches a ridership of two million later this week! Get more details on NYCEDC’s blog.
Said Mayor Bloomberg:
“Hurricane Sandy hit the Red Hook community hard, and that’s why we’re making it easier than ever for New Yorkers to get to small businesses in the area in order to help the community continue to recover.
By expanding the already successful free IKEA ferry to another stop in the heart of Red Hook, and by connecting it to the East River Ferry that is celebrating its two millionth ride this week, the free Red Hook summer ferry will help boost the local economy. I look forward to the Red Hook Ferry’s opening this Memorial Day and encourage all New Yorkers to try it.”
See you on the Red Hook ferry this summer!
Photo credit: Retrofresh! via Flickr
(via nycgov)
Does the very geography of Manhattan make it more inviting to immigrants and other newcomers?
The idea came up during a long walk I took down Broadway with Becky Cooper, the author of “Mapping Manhattan,” and Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, who wrote the introduction.
“Mapping Manhattan” is a crowdsourcing project that uncovers the intense emotional associations New Yorkers have with the island. Becky wandered about the city, handing out blank maps to people on the street and asking them to scrawl away. She also roped in celebrity contributors, like Yoko Ono and Australian supermodel Nicole Trunfio.
Love came up, as did sex, hate, prostitution, death, and Patricia Marx’s lost gloves.
But on our walk, we kept returning to geography, and the street grid that defines Manhattan.
“The grid plan that makes New York so distinct is one that in a certain sense cancels personality,” said Gopnik. “Whereas Paris and London are both, in a certain sense, organic cities, they’ve grown up over a long period of time. The irrationality of their structure is a reflection of that long history, that’s why you need to take 2 years to learn how to become a taxi driver in London. New York has a super impersonal plan. But it takes on a private impress. That corner on the absolutely rectilinear grid, of 23rd and Broadway, becomes your corner.”
“I feel like the grid pattern actually invites personality,” said Cooper, “because of how non-specific it is. Because the second you come here you feel you own a part of it. There isn’t this barrier to entry, there isn’t this exclusivity of the person who’s grown up here.”
Rich New Yorkers hire disabled "guides" to Disney World in order to skip lines (according to NY Post, anyway) - Boing Boing
The (awful and not usually very trustworthy) New York Post reports that rich New Yorkers pay thousands of dollars to an Orlando area service that rents out disabled people to accompany them to Walt Disney World in order to jump the lines. The article says that there’s a word-of-mouth underground in New York’s priciest private schools, in which parents pass on the details of the service, which is allegedly called Dream Tours Florida:
Passing around the rogue guide service’s phone number recently became a shameless ritual among Manhattan’s private-school set during spring break. The service asks who referred you before they even take your call.
“It’s insider knowledge that very few have and share carefully,” said social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, who caught wind of the underground network while doing research for her upcoming book “Primates of Park Avenue.”
“Who wants a speed pass when you can use your black-market handicapped guide to circumvent the lines all together?” she said.
“So when you’re doing it, you’re affirming that you are one of the privileged insiders who has and shares this information.”
(Source: bobbycaputo)
Who Protects New Yorkers from the NYPD?
Nicholas Heyward is a haunted man. He is one of many New Yorkers who have lost loved ones to the police. Nineteen years ago, Heyward’s son was playing with a toy gun in the stairwell of a Boerum Hill housing project in Brooklyn, New York, when he was fatally shot by an NYPD officer. Nicholas Jr. was 13 years old when he was killed.
“I heard Nick say, ‘We’re playing,’ and then I heard a boom,” Katrell Fowler, a friend of Nick Jr.’s told the New York Times shortly after the incident. Yet blame was placed on the boy’s toy rifle, instead of officer Brian George, who fired his very real revolver into the child’s abdomen.
The tragedy Heyward suffered has turned him into an activist. These days he spends much of his time calling for the Justice Department to review cases of alleged abuse committed by the NYPD, including that of his son’s. Heyward claims he had a deposition taken by his attorney in which officer George contradicts reasons cited by Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes—currently up for reelection and the subject of a new reality show on CBS—for closing the case.
“Hynes said the stairwell was dimly lit, it was not. Hynes said George was responding to a 911 call, he was not.” Heyward has written several letters to Hynes over the years, he said, without receiving a response. In 2001, he was granted a meeting with the Brooklyn DA, after confronting him at a press conference. Heyward pleaded his case in Hynes’s office but nothing came of it. The DA’s office declined to comment on Heyward’s allegations when I called them yesterday, saying that since the case is more than ten years old, the office did not have the case’s file on hand. But for Heyward, the the pain of the slaying of his 13-year-old boy are still very fresh.
“I want the officer who murdered my son to go to jail,” he said to me, dressed all in black and holding a school-portrait photograph of his son over his heart at a protest last Friday in front of the Federal Court building in Manhattan’s Foley Square to demand the Justice Department appoint an independent prosecutor to scrutinize the death of his son and those of other’s killed by the NYPD.
Heyward is not alone in his suspicion of foul play in Hynes executions of justice. The DA has recently come under great scrutiny for spending years refusing to review convictions that he and his predecessor obtained through working with a homicide detective of such dubious repute. Last week, the Hynes office was forced to reopen 50 cases in which NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella was involved, after the Times uncovered that he obtained false confessions, lied, and relied on testimony from a single, crack-addicted prostitute to obtain a number of convictions. While families of those convicted through Scarlla’s police plan to start bird-dogging Hynes, others, like Heyward, have vowed to win justice for those they will never see again.
