Bicyclists on their Battery Park route stopped to stare when they noticed something out of the ordinary last night: the Winter Garden was blanketed in white. White tables and chairs stood in neat rows. White cocktail dresses swarmed the plaza. White balloons floated up past the windows of the World Financial Center.
Over a thousand Read More
First came the reports of a 200-million-gallon leak caused by a fire at a Harlem sewage plant. Then came the musings on whether the two swimmers who died in the city triathlon had fallen victim to contaminated waters (they hadn’t). A few weeks ago, Riverkeeper released a long-term study demonstrating that for one and a half days out of every week, the Hudson is unsafe for swimming. Just days later, torrential downpours flooded the citywide sewer system by two billion gallons—on the heels of a revelation that a sewage pipe in Ossining had been spewing a million and a half gallons a day.
Something stinks.
But not according to the owners of permanent year-round slips at the 79th Street Boat Basin. Read More
On a recent Monday night, Camille Becerra wheeled a gigantic striped bass on a room service table into the dining room of the Gilt Hall hotel. Covered in a mountain of salt (to preserve the flavor, Becerra said), the fish was greeted with an eruption of cheers, and guests pulled out their phones to snap Read More
Roller skating is no laughing matter. Or so, at least, said Rick Casalino as he danced towards The Observer yesterday morning.
“It’s so important, and also increasingly difficult, to expose people to roller skating these days,” said Mr. Casalino, who has skated two or three times a week since 1988. “There are so few good Read More
Yesterday was “formal dress day” at the Museum of Modern Art, but you wouldn’t have guessed it if you had spent the day wandering the museum.
An open invitation on the museum’s website asked visitors to “come to the MoMA in your most formal and glamorous attire,” a call that was put out by the Read More
The New York City Opera chorus and orchestra broke out in song outside the Guggenheim Museum today to protest artistic director George Steel’s simultaneous announcement that the company will leave Lincoln Center, a decision that likely will cost them their jobs.
“We shall not, we shall not be moved,” sang the musicians, Read More
Preparing to watch the wizarding world’s final battle unfold, hundreds of muggle fans are engaging in a battle of their own. It may not be a fight of good versus evil, but that doesn’t make their struggle any less determined.
“We sleep in shifts,” said a fan who has camped for five days outside Lincoln Read More
In April 2002, police and immigration officers arrested Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti’s at his Queens apartment, launching a two-year legal saga that—according to Enemy Alien, a documentary about his case–saw him placed in solitary confinement for eight months, beaten, denied crucial thyroid medications, and threatened with deportation. Ordering his release in 2004, a judge called his treatment “Kafkaesque.”
The film, screened last night at Anthology Film Archives before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, chronicles the struggle of activists, friends, and lawyers to free Abdel-Muhti. It is part of an ongoing project by Third World Newsreel, which aims to bring attention to the mistreatment of minorities and immigrants in the wake of 9/11, and was shown following a series of related shorts. Read More
Three decades before his arrest and subsequent release last week by the Chinese government incited a media firestorm, Ai Weiwei worked as a Times Square street portraitist.
Enrolled at Parsons and living on the Lower East Side, he encountered drug dealers in abandoned buildings, a gritty underground arts scene, and police brutality at Tomkins Square Read More
USA Network set up a miniature football field in Times Square on Wednesday to promote its new original series Necessary Roughness about a Long Island psychotherapist who counsels star athletes and other high-profile clients.
As crowds of tourists milled around on the way to Broadway matinees, staff members in USA t-shirts ushered them into Read More
