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hurricane sandy

By Drew Grant 11/02/12 3:50pm

hurricane sandy

(Photo credit: Sanctuary Hotel)

Hotelier Brandon Freid Offering ‘Sanctuary’ to Employees at Midtown Locale

With most hotels in New York currently so crowded with resident refugees that they’re turning down pre-booked marathoners from out of state, it’d be hard for even Mayor Bloomberg to blame you for checking out the listings on AirBandB.com. But the year-old Midtown hotel Sanctuary is bending over backward to provide accomdations, according to owner Brandon Freid, going so far as to keep all the employees sleeping in the 111-unit building in order to provide 24-hour service. Read More

By Drew Grant 11/02/12 1:41pm

hurricane sandy

snooki

Jersey Shore Stars Are Real Heroes After Sandy … No, Seriously

As the last several day’s headlines have been about the devastation of New Jersey–and more specifically, its shoreline–in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, it was inevitable that some cynics among us would eventually get around to making Jersey Shore jokes. For example, one very funny person tweeted on Wednesday: “Snooki is a lot like Hurricane #Sandy. They’re both heading to The Jersey Shore with intentions to blow everyone within a 50 mile radius.” (You can tell this person is very good and funny on Twitter because he or she got 1,346 retweets from that zinger.) Read More

By Daniel D'Addario 11/01/12 3:50pm

hurricane sandy

Kaufman Astoria Studios

UPDATE: 666 Park Sets Damaged; Kaufman Astoria Studios President: ‘We’re Ready To Go’; 30 Rock, Smash Announce Post-Storm Plans

Though the city has disallowed exterior shooting until Friday at the earliest in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, at least one studio is back open. Kaufman Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens, is planning to welcome the crews of Showtime’s Nurse Jackie and Netflix’s Orange is the New Black tomorrow, though the studio was open today as well. Read More

By Drew Grant 10/31/12 1:25pm

hurricane sandy

Will this little tiger get to go trick-or-treating this year? (Flickr via ankatank)

Halloween Post-Sandy: Parents Think Outside the Box for Tricks and Treats

John Carney, a senior editor at CNBC.com, is getting ready for Halloween. The Park Slope resident will be putting on a Tin Man outfit later this afternoon, while his wife–the director of legal hiring at a law firm, currently on maternity leave–will be the Scarecrow. And at around 4:30 this afternoon, they are taking their two small children (one 3 years old and going as Dorothy, one 3 weeks old and going as Toto) up and down the avenues of the Slope for trick-or-treating.

Ironically, the Frankenstorm is actually preferable to last year’s freezing temperatures. “This will be our first year,” Mr. Carney told The Observer. “Last year, snow killed it. The weather wasn’t right to drag a then-2-year-old through the streets.” Read More

By Drew Grant 10/30/12 5:51pm

hurricane sandy

Tinsley Mortimer: Unfazed by hurricane (Getty)

How Tinsley Dealt With Sandy

Storms are the great equalizer, and none more so than last night’s Hurricane Sandy. The devastating gales and high tides did not take into account summer homes in the Hampton, $4,300+ apartments in the West Village, or anyone living near Tribeca. Okay, so it did look like certain parts of Queens, Brooklyn, LES, and all the hospitals got it worse than say, the Upper East Side, but that’s based on weather patterns, not net worth or number of listings in the society pages.

That being said, here is how Tinsley Mortimer weathered the storm. Read More

By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 10/30/12 4:29pm

hurricane sandy

Not the best location for a server.

Nick Denton Calls Gawker Media ‘The Indestructible Cockroaches of The Media World’

Gawker Media sites and BuzzFeed went down last night during the worst of the winds and rain, but they are up and running again–although Gawker is in a slightly different format. Both have servers at Datagram–which, incidentally, is in lower Manhattan and was heavily impacted by the storm.

Gawker sites went down around 7 pm last night. Late this morning, Gawker Media started posting on more spare-looking tumblr sites that were set up when the sites failed. Now, Nick Denton just wants to get the word out.

“If we’re the indestructible cockroaches of the media world, now’s the time to show it,” Mr. Denton wrote in an staff email (full text below).  Read More

By Drew Grant 10/30/12 3:34pm

hurricane sandy

Letterman and Fallon: Braving the storm (NBC, CBS)

David Letterman And Jimmy Fallon: When a Lack of an Audience is a Good Thing (Video)

While Anderson Cooper was learning about his afternoon talk show being cancelled–no, not just for Hurricane Sandy, but forever–two late night hosts made the brave decision to continue their shows at NBC and CBS as if a giant storm wasn’t ranging outside.

The only problem? Neither Jimmy Fallon nor David Letterman had a live audience–a first, in both their histories–to laugh at their jokes. But what could have turned into that creepy David Lynch episode of Louie was actually an amazing bit of performance art as the two jokesters performed to the dead silence of a mostly-empty room. *Yanks collar* “Tough crowd!” Read More