If the person in the apartment upstairs doesn't stop doing jumping jacks, having sex, running their illegal washing machine, or whatever it is that's making that horrible thumping, I'm going to go crazy. It's been going on for two hours.
Newspaper and magazines are maybe dying because they are simply not as awesome as they used to be. The American Antiquarian Society has put together a book called The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, and those sporting male weeklies make our modern-day tabloids and lad mags look like they're put together by a bunch of kittens and marketed to little girls. They are called The Flash Press after The Flash, a weekly founded by a drunk Bostonian named William Snelling. He wrote a poem about how much he hated all the other poets in the nation, then moved to New York to spend more time at brothels. Eventually he founded that four-page weekly paper, dedicated to "Awful Developments, Dreadful Accidents and Unexpected Exposures." Was he the original blogger?!
Seriously, what's up with cranes collapsing in NYC? Are corners being cut left and right? Does capitalism and speed trump safety? Of course! A construction workers explains it all, noting that just because city inspectors have badges, doesn't mean they know anything about cranes.
Twice a year, the sun sets in line with the Manhattan grid, turning the streets red from one side of the island to the other. This evening is one of those occasions. For the best view, head to Greenpoint in Brooklyn or look down from Top of the Rock.
The star of Just Imagine was the thirties movie's elaborate miniature of the city imagined fifty years in the future. It owes a lot to then prevailing principle of urban planning, the separation of people from the proliferating automobile, a tenet which was still being applied decades later by reviled city planner Robert Moses. "The city of the future should be a pedestrian's paradise with foot bridges crossing the traffic at each corner," wrote Modern Mechanics in a review of the scale model.
We got all riled up with today's earlier news, the imminent closing of classic Meatpacking eatery/hangout Florent. Longing for a golden age that never existed is just a trick that our elders use to make themselves think that the time they came up in was the one of true authenticity. But we can't help but notice the sheer volume of New York City institutions—from bars to oddities to restaurants to vice emporiums—that have closed over a short amount of time. Here's a gallery featuring as many as we could think of—and if we missed any that you think are important, let us know!
Intrepid Jennifer 8. Lee has defied Google's blackout on photographs of the lego sculptures at its offices in New York's Chelsea. The New York Times reporter, stymied by Google's publicists, obtained images from a brave insider-who will no doubt soon be sweeping the floors at one of the internet monolith's server farms.
Billionaire sex-perv Jeffrey Epstein enjoys sex with underage girls, that much we know. But before we all knew this, he was a very popular financier with many important and famous friends. He went to a lot of parties! He flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa for some reason! We can only imagine what the on-flight entertainment was. Now he's apparently getting ready to plea guilty to all sorts of things involving prostitution, and some ladies are suing him for making them his sex slaves when they were underage, so he doesn't quite go out on the town that much. Except sometimes he does! And, to answer our own question, it's because uber-publicist Peggy Siegal is still happy to stand by her 14-year-old raping friend Jeffrey.
New York City: It is surrounded by New York state. This is the key message that state officials are hoping to communicate to you, the public, with their new and improved "I Love NY" campaign [NYT]. "There are a lot of beautiful pictures of serene mountains and lakes. How do you make your mountains and lakes different?" asked an ad exec. By polluting them with dioxin and a plethora of prescription drugs? No, it turns out the answer is to suggest that "we have the pulsating heart and soul of New York City in everything we do." In fact, it looks like the whole campaign is an attempt to slingshot some tourists out of the city for little jaunts upstate. Which will be hard, because New York state pretty much sucks.
Last night, Ryan trailed Gawker's latest research project: the ultimate guide to New York's modern eccentrics. Thanks for all your suggestions in the comments; here are the nominations, 23 of the city's most obviously bizarre characters-including "Elegant" Eliot Offen, the Green Lady, Mr. Purple and the Earth Angel, but not counting the socialites and proto-celebrities who usually clog up these pages. We'll do some digging for photographs over the weekend. Any pointers-names, further description, links or images-would be much appreciated.
New York's subway map is a monstrosity, the worst of all possible graphical worlds, neither visually legible nor geographically accurate. For his 1972 map of the system, Massimo Vignelli at least made a clear choice: he sacrificed scale to space out the stations and the lines and present a diagram that commuters could at least read, something along the lines of London's famous tube map. Vignelli has been commissioned to update his long-lost design-for Men's Vogue, of all places, which displays the full map. (Writes Jonathan: "I'm going to print it out and then make a show of obsessively checking it on the train. People will think I'm a tourist. Then they will see it, and know I'm a time traveler.")
Every city has its special weirdos. Santa Cruz, California has Pinky Valentino, who wears clown makeup and carries a tin-foil umbrella. Detroit has a bearded older guy in a jean jacket called Papa Smurf. And Seattle has so many local characters, like a would-be green elf from Legend of Zelda and the "original hipster" in a large-brimmed black hat, that someone created a site called Seattle Notables, modeled on Gawker Stalker, to track them all. Shamefully, there's no such central clearinghouse for eccentrics New York, which must content itself with individual sites, like the one dedicated to chronicling the shirtless, brawny heroics of a guy called "He-Man. To get the fameball rolling, we've assembled a handful of key Gotham characters after the jump. Add to this surely-incomplete list in the comments, or via tips@gawker.com. Because there's no way Seattle should be allowed to out-weird New York. On to the freakshow:
In the harbor of Grand Theft Auto's Liberty City, there's a statue. It differs from the Statue of Liberty in New York in two respects: the landmark's name is the Statue of Happiness; and it contains at its heart... a beating heart, chained to the exterior walls. The makers of Rockstar's hit game are twisted-and brilliant. (More pictures at Games Radar.)
Shocking fact: in New York City, "arrests for marijuana possession began skyrocketing in the late 1990s during the Giuliani administration." Oh, and that's "a trend that continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg," the responsible soft-spoken billionaire who's continued many of the grossest aspects of Giulinai's reign of terror, just without the blustery hardman talk. And thanks to their team effort, New York now leads the world in marijuana arrests! But you probably don't need to worry, stoner—the vast majority of these arrests were of poor black people, because when they "decriminialized" possession of small stashes in the '70s they only meant it for like college grads and other responsible types. [WCBS]
Here on day two of the Roger Clemens Infidelity Scandal And Schadenfreude Festival Of '08, it's becoming more clear that the brawny former Yankees ace pitcher and full time jerk did in fact cheat on his wife with the wild country singer Mindy McCready. Because now she's admitted it! McCready said the two did have an ongoing affair, although the sex didn't start until she was of legal age. They first met when she was only 15, (Miley Cyrus joke). But the most entertaining aspect of this scandal is how Clemens—heroic, honored, self-righteous, dismissive of critics, a King of New York—is turning into an uncanny baseball version of another recently fallen hero: Eliot Spitzer.
This fictional ad for the "Steinway Beer Garden" in "Dukes" is maybe supposed to be the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden in Astoria. Oh, and it's from the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto IV. Warm Beer and Misogyny! What New York—and video games—are all about.
While adolescents and adolescent-at-heart adults across the nation anticipate Grand Theft Auto IV and its slightly skewed New York, we pause to remember the richly detailed and intriguingly off-kilter New York of the 1984 Activision classic Ghostbusters. A New York where Park Avenue runs alongside Church St, and they both go crosstown. A New York where Zuul may be found on the corner of Union and 3rd (3rd Ave? Street? Who knows!). More intriguing video game visions of New York, courtesy The Bowery Boys, below.
"It's a first for mass transit in the United States. NYPD officers, armed with rifles, submachine guns, body armor and bomb-sniffing dogs will begin patrolling the city's subway system thanks to a 50 percent increase in a homeland security grant." Well, good thing we're putting that to good use! Turning an already problematic police force into a paramilitary organization? What could go wrong! If there's any of that grant money left we should use it to create androids that subdue anyone attempting to dance at a non-licensed bar. With a force as restrained and well-trained and not-roided out of their power-corrupted minds as the NYPD armed to the fucking teeth, what could go wrong? Should we be grateful it's just a ceremonial show of force, like those speeding cop car motorcades that wailed through midtown after the bicycle bombing? Or should we be worried!
