Rupert Murdoch Is Happy, Can’t You Tell?
Not that we’d pretend to understand how Rupert Murdoch thinks, but a question: If you’re leaving the board meeting of your global media behemoth at which the board has just voted to approve your deal to buy a company you’ve aggressively pursued, if you’re successfully buying the company after you didn’t budge an inch from your initial offer a few months ago while all the people who’d publicly said they hated you eventually came around and sold their family company to you, if you’ve said for years, even decades, that you wanted to buy this company, and if you’ve intentionally left the window of your SUV open so that photogs could get a good shot of you reveling in your victory, well, shouldn’t you at least try to look excited? Just asking.
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Cabs of the Future Are Kind Of Nifty
So we’ve actually been a little troubled by this whole electronic-doohickey-thingy they’re planning to install in cabs, the one that the cabbies group is threatening to strike over. We’re not sure we like the idea of a GPS system tracking us, either, and there’s nothing more obnoxious than a cheery video playing in the back of a taxi (didn’t they try that a few years ago? To universal disdain?). Either way, it’ll really be a bitch if the cabbies go on strike. Then yesterday we hopped in a cab and discovered one of the gizmos already installed. (Apparently there are already something like 700 in use, the TLC told us, and more are going in every day. Which would seem to us to sort of moot a September strike, but what do we know?) And we were pleasantly surprised to discover the things are actually pretty cool.
in other news
President Bush and His Toy Car
The front page of yesterday’s Times offered a photo of President Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown merrily golf-carting around Camp David. We glanced at the shot, amused by the cowboy president’s attempt to do his squinty-eyed tough-guy look while piloting a conveyance most often used on the manicured fairways of Shinnecock or in the retirement communities of Boca. We were about to flip the page when we noticed something: A placard on the front of the vehicle labels it “Golf Cart One.” We chuckled to ourselves, and we thought that it’s sort of the perfect presidential vehicle for this particular commander-in- chief, for his underpowered golf cart of a presidency. Then we got worried; were we being unfair? Perhaps this isn’t Bush obnoxious frat-boy humor (“I’m the president, and it’s my golf cart, so it’s Golf Cart One. Heh heh heh.”) but rather a longstanding tradition. So we asked President Clinton’s spokesman. Did that administration, too, call the presidential scooter “Golf Cart One”? The e-mailed reply came late in the day: “Nope.” Good.
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Summer in the City
You know what’s wrong with society today? This: Even the dude photographed in Central Park for a New Yorkers–are–relaxing–on–a-sunny–summer–Friday beauty shot is busy working on his cell phone and laptop. Well, that and the Bush administration.
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Stocks Fall, Photos Disappoint
So it turns out the biggest problem with the New York Stock Exchange moving increasingly to electronic trading isn’t the end of jobs for specialists, or ruining the Big Board’s uniqueness, or any of those other things the traditionalists have argued. It’s that on a day when the Dow drops 311.50 points and there are big, worried headlines on all the news site, the classic frenzy-on-the-trading-floor news photo should look a hell of a lot more, well, frenzied than this. Boo.
in other news
Nicholas Bartha, Arne Jacobsen, and High-End Real-Estate FlippingRemember Dr. Nicholas Bartha, the psychotic Upper East Side doctor who blew up his townhouse with himself in it rather than sell the thing to pay his ex-wife the divorce settlement she was owed? Yeah, well, the Times has a profile today of Janna Bullock, the Russian-born developer who bought the now-empty lot for $8.3 million, plans to build “a Modernist-style house with a green roof and an underground pool” on it, and then, she says, sell the thing, in one to four years, for $30 to $40 million. (A place on East 67th she bought for $10.5 million is now on the market for $35 million.) Our friends at Curbed (we think we’re still friends with them, yes?) are moderately in awe of her flipping talents but even more in awe of her publicity-shot locale: Yes, that’s her, photographed in the empty lot that was once the Bartha house. Us? We’re even more impressed by her photo styling. The dilapidated Arne Jacobsen egg chair she’s sitting in? On the dilapidated lot on which she plans to build a modernist icon? Genius.
Buy High, Sell Higher [NYT via Curbed]
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An Underground Railroad
Did you know there’s a 150-year-old, defunct subway tunnel under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn? It runs from Boerum Place to Hicks Street, was built in seven months around the time of the Civil War, and was lost until 1981, when a dude named Bob Diamond found it. He gives tours of the thing, and the blogger behind McBrooklyn went spelunking with him yesterday. There are some more pics at McBrooklyn, plus a (frankly sort of boring) video. Neat, huh?
Brooklyn Spelunking: Atlantic Avenue Tunnel Tours Return [McBrooklyn]
Little Britain: Peace in Our Time!
This is what we came home last night to find waiting with our doorman. (We have never, for the record, mentioned our name to the Tea & Sympathy people, nor said exactly where we live.) It was tasty, we were charmed, and now, we confess, we think we’ve reached acceptance. We’re Daily Intel, and we live in Little Britain. God save the queen!
Earlier: Daily Intel’s coverage of Little Britain
party lines
Models, Breasts, and a ‘Marie Claire’ Charity AuctionMarie Claire threw a party at Milk Gallery in Chelsea last night in honor of supermodel- cum-photographer Helena Christensen’s photo spread in the mag’s August issue. Christensen’s photographs of “Super Role Models” (supermodels who are role models, get it? Ha!) were silently auctioned for charity to the hipper-than-thou crowd, which seemed more into the free booze and their accessories than the art. Oh, and breasts. They were also into breasts: Christensen’s shot of a breast-baring Naomi Campbell (you could see her nipple!) was the night’s star attraction. How does a model feel when her nip slips out? Naomi wasn’t there for us to ask — and we might not have asked her such a probing question, either, at least not without taking away her cell phone first — but up-and-coming young model Chanel Iman was, and she recalled her own breast’s inadvertent runway debut. “I saw the video,” she recalled of a fashion show two years ago, “and I saw my nipple just jiggling, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ And at the time I was really young, you know, so I wasn’t that mature.” Now a worldly 16-year-old, she got over such petty humiliations long ago. “It’s just a breast,” she said, sagely. We hope Campbell feels likewise. —Haven Thompson
Find out what Helena Christensen, Amy Sacco, Rachel Roy, and others had to say in our Interactive Party Lines.
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It Came From the Steam Tunnels!
Last night’s explosion was an impressive display in itself. But equally impressive was the way it tied up seemingly the entire East Side, with trains not running and people everywhere gawking. This is our favorite picture of the gawkers — the crowd massed in front of the iconic Public Library building, all stopped and looking in the same direction. If this were a still from some fifties-era cheesy sci-fi film, that’s exactly what everyone would look like as they watched the flying saucers land.
Earlier: Grand Central Explosion Kills One, Wounds 30, Inconveniences Thousands
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Ceci N’est Pas un Sac en Plastique
We have no idea why people would line up outside a grocery store — in the rain! — to buy a fancy shopping bag. (Which, mind you, back in our day used to be something you got for free, in your choice of paper or plastic.) But people did, inexplicably. And, just so you know, this is what the things look like.
Related: Welcome to Whole Foods Market Bowery [WholeFoodsMarket.com]
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99 Cents? Feh! For You, 50 Cents
Idly flipping though Flickr photos of New York this afternoon, we happened across this one in Zlatko Unger’s photostream, and it made us smile. It’s a mashup of icons: B&H Photo, clearly, as if shot by Andreas Gursky.
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Good-bye, My Coney Island Baby
We have no idea why Getty Images decided this was the right weekend to mark Astroland’s final summer with a package of wistful photos of Coney Island. But we’re not complaining: They’re pretty. A few more after the jump.
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Ring in Summer!
If it’s not quite summer for you without a little bit of Wagner to go with your fruity cocktails and pastel shirts, you’re in luck. Lincoln Center Festival and the Met are presenting the Ring Cycle, performed by the Kirov Opera. It kicks off at 8 p.m. tonight, and — though we know virtually nothing about opera — we can assure you the performance includes a singing women inside what looks like an oversize spun-sugar dessert. At least yesterday’s dress rehearsal did.
Kirov Ring Cycle 2007 [MetOpera.org]
party lines
Patrick McMullan Wants to Know Who You Are
Patrick McMullan, the city’s best-known photog-about-town, provides a pictorial record of just about every New York party worth mentioning. (In what might shock those who’ve followed his career since the days of Studio 54, McMullan himself isn’t omnipresent; he long ago set up a stable of young men — they’re all young men — who help him make a showing at all those events each night.) Usually, the photos end up on his Website, PatrickMcMullan.com, and in all sorts of magazines, including New York. But now they’re being displayed in a gallery-ish exhibition. Over the past few weeks, he and curator Gavin Brown have picked photos from the PatrickMcMullan.com archives and dry-mounted them on the walls of the Chelsea bar Passerby, which loses its lease in September. That the whole enterprise may soon be torn down makes the whole thing even more artistic to McMullan, who — in great meta form — snapped photos of people looking at photos through the opening party the other night. Between snaps, he told us the secrets to his success.
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Oil and Water
One advantage of that flooding that’s bound to overtake New York? Deeper waters will presumably make it all the more difficult for oil tankers to run aground off Coney Island, as this one, the White Sea, did this morning. (Reportedly no oil was spilled.) See, a benefit to global warming: It’ll make it easier to import oil. Perfect!
Oil Tanker Runs Aground Off Coney Island [AP via Crain’s]
Don’t Poke the Driver
And, every now and then, as you pull up alongside, a truck’s erratic Manhattan driving suddenly makes sense.
GillianLeigh’s Photostream [Flickr]
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She Was Not a Figment of Your Imagination
We’re not entirely sure what the Figment Festival, held yesterday on Governors Island, was (seems like a very mini, East Coast version of Burning Man), and we disagree with the Gothamists, who place this photo on the quasi-abandoned island (what with the high-rise and the tunnel and the traffic, we’re going with lower Manhattan). But, still, cool picture, and interesting-sounding event, and, well, we really do need to get ourselves out there one of these days. It’s open to the public each weekend through Labor Day.
Welcome to the Week [Gothamist]
Related: Arts Festival Awakens Sleepy Governors Island [Metro NY]
Visit the Island [GovIsland.com]
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Seeing the Sights
The Department of Consumer Affairs proposed earlier this week to cap the number of pedicabs in New York to 325. We find that limit way too high, as we object to the damned things on any number of levels, not least the incessant jingle-jingle that seems to follow you through midtown these days. All that said, were we forced to ride in one, like these chicks photographed at Fifth and 57th yesterday afternoon, we’d totally take some pictures of the driver’s ass, too.
Related: Agency Proposes Limit on Number of Pedicabs [amNY]
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Not Drizzle, Not Humidity, Not Dark of Night…
Flickr is, unsurprisingly, filled today with a few thousand shots of the Macy’s fireworks on the East River. Our favorites, we think, are by Flickr user JBParker, who snapped this smoke-and-color-filled shot — but, truth is, the show looks better in nearly all of them than we remember it looking to us last night. Of course, that might be because now we’re not getting drizzled on.
New York City Fireworks [Flickr]
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On a Clear Day
We don’t know what prompted Agence France-Presse to charter a helicopter Sunday and send one of their photogs to take a bunch of aerial shots of the city, and we don’t know what prompted Getty Images to distribute those shots in the middle of the week, but we’re glad they both did. It’s a pretty town on a pretty day, eh? More gratuitous urban-beauty shots after the jump.
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So This Is Christmas
“X-Mas Came Early This Year” says the sign on the Christmas tree planted in front of the Soho Apple store. Being of the more Hanukkish persuasion, we’re not entirely up on every last Christmas tradition. But somehow we’ve always imagined snowy lawns, warm beds, and roaring fires — not steamy sidewalks, sleeping in chairs, and occasional pouring rain. Did we misunderstand something?
Earlier: Daily Intel’s we-realize-we’re-just-as-bad-as- they-are ongoing iPhone coverage.
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Countdown to iPhone: Someone Left the Line Out in the Rain
You know what’s tons of fun? Sleeping out for three days to get an overpriced cell phone! You know what’s even more fun? Sleeping out in the pouring rain for an overpriced cell phone!
Patrick and Ryan Brave the First Storm [Flickr via Gridskipper]
Earlier: Daily Intel’s team coverage of the iPhone.
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Ed Koch Is Doing Poorly
Flickrer Boss Tweed sent in this perfectly captioned photo from yesterday: “Former Mayor Ed Koch not happy at the gay pride parade 2007.” Indeed. And why’s Ol’ Ed not happy? Because someone threw something on his shirt, staining it. Otherwise, of course, Koch was just full of gay pride. As always.
[Snap a Photo Op–worthy shot? Send it to us at [email protected].]
Gay Pride Parade 2007 NYC [Boss Tweed’s Flickr]
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License to Spam
The International Licensing Expo opened at the Javits Center yesterday, and apparently the event requires great quantities of Spam. We do know not if this is because its makers wish to license the meatish product or because they wish to serve it. Either way, we’re mildly repulsed.
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Our Bodies, Our Storage
We spotted this latest installment in Manhattan Mini-Storage’s inarticulate we’re-trying-to-show-we- share-your-politics-but-we-fail-at-it ad campaign (has anyone actually ever figured out that Cheney ad?) on our way down the West Side Highway Sunday night, and we were as confused by it as the Copyranter is today. Our best guess at its message: Once Alito & Co. overturn Roe, at least a storage locker will be preferable to an alley! And you know how we all love decreasing-civil- liberties humor.
Better interpretation? Let us know.
Back Alley Advertising [Copyranter]
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Also, Did You Know It’s for Sale?
Our favorite thing about this Brooklyn Bridge–on–a– beautiful day pic, which we just spotted on Flickr? It’s slugged simply “Another NYC bridge.” Oh, God bless you, tourists.
Another NYC Bridge [BrentMid’s Flickr]
party lines
Muhammad Ali’s Daughter Is CrazyWhat do you learn as Muhammad Ali’s daughter? That it pays to be crazy. That’s what Maryum Ali told us last night at the opening of an exhibit she curated of Magnum photos of her father. “My dad always told me — he told me this as a little kid — act crazy,” she said. “Because I said, ‘Daddy, how did you beat Sonny Liston when the whole world said you were going to lose?’ He said, ‘I acted crazy! I had him scared!’” It’s a lesson that came in handy in the mid-eighties, when Maryum was living with her dad in L.A., and the champ, she said, was always a nice guy and would let anyone into the house. “This one guy he let into his house, this weirdo guy, the guy started stalking me,” she recalled. “So I got a gun. I told the guy, I said, ‘Look, it’s me or you, and it’s gonna be you. I’m not going to put on no gloves, I got a .38, so keep messing with me! I’m just as crazy.’ In any situation where I’m face-to-face with somebody crazy, I’m crazier. And they just leave me the hell alone.” Being a fighter’s kid probably doesn’t hurt, either. —Bennett Marcus
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Yanks Win, Monochromatically
The Yankees beat the Diamondbacks last night to bring their winning streak to seven and — finally! — put the team at a .500 record. Plus Getty Images apparently started taking some nifty black-and-white sports photos. Cool all around, eh?
Yanks Get Even As Bobby Socks [NYDN]
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Smile!
Any of you spend much time in suburban Essex County, New Jersey, in, say, the last quarter-century? So you know Don’s, the big restaurant on South Orange Avenue in Short Hills with the decent hamburgers and the pickle bar and the sticky buns? Remember in what must have been the early-mid-eighties, when they renovated the place with all those head shots of customers happily eating and smiling, which they plastered all over the walls and on the menus? Yeah, well, apparently they’re now projecting basically the same thing on the side of the GE Building, as this summer’s public-art exhibit at Rockefeller Center. “Monument to Smile,” by Agnes Winter, launched last night.
What’s Up With Those Smiles? [NYT, second item]
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Sunrise, Sunset
Yesterday was Manhattanhenge, and we didn’t even realize it till too late. Manhattanhenge, named after — what else? — Stonehenge, is one of the two days a year on which the setting sun aligns with Manhattan’s street grid, allowing sunset photos like this one, shot last night across 57th Street. Mark your calendars: The next one, we think, is July 11.
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She’d Rather Go Naked
Is it wrong that we often find PETA protests — like this one yesterday against the Burberry store on 57th Street, where it seems they’re selling things made of fur — to be entertaining and amusing? Because we do.
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Michael Wants That Back
Desperate to ogle some obsolete technology? You’re out of luck, unless you want to fly to Las Vegas. Guernsey’s auction house will be selling thousands of Jackson Five items tomorrow and Thursday at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, but Friday some of the highlights were displayed at the auctioneer’s Upper East Side headquarters in Manhattan. Behold, the microphone Michael used in the seventies.
The Jacksons [Guernseys.com]
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The Crossroads of Something
This afternoon in Times Square: Top, U.S. Navy sailors in town for Fleet Week cavort with the Knicks City Dancers; below, 32 women dressed in black and the Virginia Tech colors lie down on the sidewalk to commemorate the shooting rampage and protest “easy guns.”
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The Fleet Is In
The USS Wasp passing the Statue of Liberty earlier today. We’ll spare you the obvious joke about our being down by the piers if you need us.
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Takin’ Care of Business
We can’t decide if this dude — photographed by dedicated Daily Intel reader Simon Curtis last night at Broadway and West 55th Street — is actually, really, legitimately working from his car (which would be kind of cool), making some sort of statement on America’s automobile culture or the high rents in midtown Manhattan (which would be less cool but still sort of interesting), or simply engaging in a PR stunt (in which case we’ve been suckered). It was a nice night for it, at least.
[Snap a Photo Op–worthy shot? Send it to us at [email protected].]
announcements
Introducing ‘New York Look’ (and an Apology)We’re introducing a new magazine! As you may have read in Women’s Wear Daily this morning, the biannual New York Look will launch in November; it’ll take nohib.com’s coverage of the New York and European fashion shows and reverse-engineer all that online analysis, trend-spotting, and photography into a real-life mag you can have and own and hold. One thing about that photography, though: It won’t include the David Sims shot on the cover of the prototype, which appeared in WWD today. That was our mistake: That mockup was made for internal tests, and we hadn’t obtained the rights to publish the photo because we didn’t intend to publish it at all. Wires were crossed, internal prototypes were provided to Women’s Wear, and the fashion trade published Sims’s photo as our cover. In other words, we screwed up. And we deeply apologize to Sims. And now you’ll just have to wait till November to see what the thing really looks like.
Memo Pad [WWD]
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If They Don’t Win, It’s a Shame
As we write this, the sun is shining, the birds outside the window are chirping, and last night, on six and a third solid innings from Chien-Ming Wang, the Yanks beat the Sox, 6-2. It’s a good day to be a New Yorker.*
* The whole nine-and-a-half-games-back thing notwithstanding.
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Avant le Déluge
Looking north up Madison Avenue at 4 p.m. yesterday afternoon, avant le déluge. Ominous!
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Everything Was Beautiful at Lincoln Center
Pressure to get your kid into the right preschool not quite intense enough for you? Good news! The School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center, the nation’s premier ballet school, has lowered its admission age from 8 years old to 6. Kate Walsh was among the first group of 6-year-olds to audition yesterday. But don’t worry, stage parents: There’s another date later this month, plus one in September.
show and talk
Costume Institute Celebrates Freedom, Almost LiterallyThe Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art held its annual gala last night, celebrating the Institute’s new exhibit, “Poiret: King of Fashion.” The theme for the night? Freedom, as Paul Poiret famously released women from the confines of corsets. And perhaps in his honor, or at least continuing in his tradition, Jessica Simpson nearly busted out of her Roberto Cavalli dress, while the usually well-dressed Julianne Moore was thisclose to having a nip slip in her white tuxedo blazer. Kate Moss, America Ferrera, and Cameron Diaz, however, all looked stunning. But the big winner was Sandra Bullock — yep, Sandra Bullock! — who looked drop-dead gorgeous. There are pics of all of them, plus many, many more, in our Costume Institute slideshow.
Pictures From the Costume Institute Gala [NYM]
Earlier: 21 Questions: Harold Koda [NYM]
Yay, Immigrants!
It’s now a May Day tradition: nationwide rallies for immigrants’ rights. In New York, fewer marchers were expected today than last year, but Washington Square Park this afternoon still drew a significant crowd. Gothamist says the action was focused on the park, with a prayer service at Judson Memorial Church kicking things off, a rally, and then a march to Union Square. Flickr photographer Boss Tweed caught the scene in the park, where protesters were focusing on the impact strict immigration laws have on families.
Boss Tweed’s Photos [Flickr]
Related: Immigration Rally and March Today [Gothamist]
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Truth in City-Mandated Bathroom Signage
We hadn’t been to Commonwealth bar, in Park Slope, for quite some time till this weekend. But we were reminded that we always liked the sensibility there. We suspect the bar staff might feel otherwise.
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Second Avenue Subway: Actual, Real Work Begins, Almost
Never mind announcements and plans and ceremonial ground-breakings and wall-tappings; construction on the Second Avenue Subway is now, finally, actually, really here. Two lanes of Second Avenue in the Nineties will be closed to allow the MTA to drop the massive tunnel-boring down to subway level, and, as our compatriots at Curbed noted yesterday, work on the hole is beginning. In the above Curbed photo, what that low-Nineties stretch of Second is going to look like for the next decade or so. Fun!
Second Avenue Subway Scene: Barriers, Fences, Dismay [Curbed]
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Springtime, Finally
This Flickr photo, shot yesterday by Pawalek P., is slugged simply “Spring in Central Park.” To which we can only add: We get to leave the office soon, right?
Spring in Central Park [Pawalek P.’s Flickr]
in the magazine
Inside Norwood, New York’s Forthcoming New Faux London Club
Another London-style for-profit club is coming to the lower West Side, and, as Geoffrey Gray reports in this week’s New York, the new entry will be Norwood, located in an 1845 townhouse on West 14th Street. According to the prospectus, there will be a “buzzing and spacious Grand Hotel-like bar” on the parlor floor, a private dining area and reception space on the garden floor, dining rooms on the second floor, “a less formal salon with lounging areas of decadent grandeur” on the third floor, and up on the fourth floor a “penthouse” space for meetings, screenings, and special events. What will it all look like? As yet unknown. But the brochure provides photos of what the townhouse looked like as the previous owner had furnished it. Above, the front entrance and main stairs. More pix after the jump.
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Who’ll Stop the Rain?
A sock-soaking 7.46 inches of rain fell in Central Park yesterday, making it the second wettest single day on record. Weather.com predicts rain all day today, most of the night tonight, all day tomorrow, and again for part of the day on Thursday. And we’re counting on some really nice May flowers.
East Coast Storm Breaks Rainfall Records [NYT]
10022 [Weather.com]