2013 February

15 Tips to Be a New Yorker

February 25, 2013

…and if these don’t get you there, book a private tour!

1. The best people watching is to be done in Union Square not Times Square.

Times Square is what happens when you crawl into the TV in your living room on the commercial break – and with a lot less personal space.

2. If its free and sold out, go anyway.

Due to the fact that it’s impossible for more than 4 New Yorkers to coordinate their lives to show up in the right place at the right time, there’s almost always someone looking to get rid of a hot ticket at the last minute.

3. Dont get on the train car that mysteriously has no people on it.

Trust us.

4. The longer the line the faster it moves –

New Yorkers dont line up for just anything, just anywhere. If the line seems as if its not worth the wait, remember that if New Yorkers can manage to wait for something, so can you.

5. Always know where you’re going, except when in Central Park.

That’s right, go north of 72nd street and get lost. No really get lost. Its kind of the point.

6. Ask A New Yorker!

If the first person cannot answer your question, than the New Yorker eavesdropping will. Besides, we’re notoriously egotistical, so everyone will have a different answer.

7. If you leave New York without taking the subway, then you never went.

Think of it as a backstage pass to New York’s sidewalk performance.

8. Speak Up!

We’ve suffered some hearing loss in our incredibly loud city, so there’s no such thing as an “inside voice”.

9. Order it to the T.

You want your sandwich toasted? With egg whites? Honey dijonnaise? And turkey bacon!?! In the city of such exponential diversity, modifications of all kinds are expected and accommodated. Have it your way, our way.

10. Just because you’re eating pizza in New York, does not mean you’re eating New York pizza.

Ask us for a recommendation!

11. Neale Donald Walsch said: “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone”.

Remember, New York City is an adventure, not a vacation. Though with The Levys’ Unique New York!, it can be both! (Shameless plug.)

12. New Yorker hospitality is not an oxymoron.

But it is a language to be picked up very quickly.

13. BROOKLYN –

(suggested by Dan Schwartzman)

14. You cannot see the Empire State Building from the Empire State Building.

Think about it.

15. If the (theater-restaurant-bar-club-etc.) is a 10 block walk away, put down your smartphone and enjoy it.

No walk is long in the most visually stimulating city in the world.

-Dahlia Lopez Ramsay

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895,000 buildings and Robert Moses: the New York Panorama and the 6th Annual Panorama Challenge

February 18, 2013

In 1964, New York City hosted its second World’s Fair in 25 years –

and the fair had companies like US Steel contributing iconic structures, some of which became part of NY’s Outer Borough Skyline – like the 120 foot high stainless steel Unisphere. If you’ve ever traveled to or from Laguardia Airport or been to a US Open Tennis game, you’ve seen the famous sculpture.

So, if New York City was going BIG at the World’s Fair ’64,

they’d need to bring it big time or go home (well, they were home, but you get the drift…) Robert Moses, nearing the end of his career, was the man who fought to bring the fair back to NY. Perhaps he wanted a (not so) subtle way, to highlight all the ways he had changed the city.

Robert Moses –

was the city’s de facto master planner, involved in everything from building 13 bridges to laying down 416 miles of highways and planning over 2.5 million acres of parks. Moses is an intensely polarizing figure whom New Yorkers love AND hate in the same breath. His reach was all-encompassing even to this day and, no matter the tour group — private tour or high school band trip – LUNY! guides utter his name at least once.

So when Moses wanted to use the Fair to celebrate his accomplishments, he was definitely thinking big. Moses took the New York City Pavilion — the last building remaining from the 1939 Fair (and the temporary home of the United Nations from 1946-50) — and created a tribute to his accomplishments. It’s the size of half a football field. It included a simulated helicopter ride over a miniaturized New York City. It’s the largest architectural scale model… in the World. It’s the New York Panorama.

The Panorama was built by 100 craftsmen and included every single building in NYC – 895,000 of them, built to a scale of 1:100!

It not only celebrated Moses’ bridges and highways, but each and every home, factory, store, street and park in this fine metropolis. The New York Panorama shrunk the 300+ square miles of city to fit 9,335 square feet, reducing the Empire State Building to a 15 inch spire. Best of all, you can still see this amazing project today!

I consider it to be one of the city’s great hidden treasures. Nowadays, the New York Panorama is part of the wonderful Queens Museum of Art and accessible during museum hours (and sometimes after hours, but more on that later!).

My eight-year-old son loves it and I’ve brought private tours there. It’s a jaw-dropping experience. There’s plenty of room on the elevated ramps that surround it so you can even bring a entire class through. It’s (almost!) like taking a tour of the whole city in 20 minutes. In just a few steps you can walk from Yankee Stadium to Central Park and the Empire State Building.

The whole Panorama was updated in 1992 when many old buildings were removed and new structures were added. But, notably, the Twin Towers still stand. If you want to add a building, the QMA’s Adopt-a-Building program will happily let you fund an addition of a new skyscraper to the Panorama.

Back in 2007, something happened at the Panorama that would eventually lead to my frequent visits to that wonderful hall. The New York Times covered it in a piece called “Night of the Know-it-Alls.” Thus began the Panorama Challenge, inviting New York City history fans (aka GEEKS!) to the Panorama after hours for a geographical trivia based quiz night. Such Geo-Geeks would answer NYC questions assisted by laser pointers and audio clues.

This year is the 6th Panorama Challenge and I’m proud to say I’m the Head Quiz Writer this year (again!) and thought I’d end this story with a couple of challenges that you can answer without the benefit of a massive model of our metropolis. Answer in the comments, and if you do really well, come on by the Panorama on March 1, 2013 for the real Challenge. Maybe you can win your team name on the Panorama Challenge trophy!

By Jonathan Turer.

(photos 2-4 courtesy of Queens Museum of Art)

1) What ‘presidential’ island is home to a long-planned but newly-opened memorial designed by the late Louis I Kahn?

2) Head to Brooklyn’s Cumberland Street if you want to get the ‘low’ down on what ‘sweet’ package?

3) One of Laguardia Airport’s oldest buildings is decorated with images of flying fish. Why?

4) Which ‘slice’ of Breezy Point was devastated by fire during Superstorm Sandy?

5) Before hipsters and before the bridge, this neighborhood was once its own city.

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A Clocktower Landmark in New York

February 10, 2013

Gordon Matta Clark was the first on the scene in a seminal and clever 1974 video entitled “Clockshower”. Woody Allen considered it for a location, Amy Grant shot a music video up there and if you’ve seen 9 and ½ Weeks you may recognize it from the steamy love scene (skip to 1:30) between Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke (according to Marvin, a crack in one of the windows was caused by an overly passionate Basinger during the film shoot).

If you’ve ever had to go to Summons Court in New York City for unpaid parking tickets or an open container violation, you’ve been to 346 Broadway. You’ve slunk to the Leonard street entrance, passed through metal detectors and ascended a grand staircase that feels like it’s out of some Parisian hotel lobby. You then probably had to wait on line for three hours just to get your summons dismissed.

But if you had continued up from the semi-circular elevator bank to the 12^th floor, entered through the odd red door to your left and climbed a flight of stairs, you would’ve stumbled into the Clocktower Gallery. Founded by Alanna Heiss in 1972 (who also started PS1 a year earlier) the Clocktower Gallery is a wondrous home for art in an unlikely location. Home to Art on Air Radio, an Internet radio station that does what it sounds like, as well residency programs for studio artists that work with everything from large-scale sculpture installation to experimental music to DNA replication.

Now, if you continued up another flight of stairs to the upper gallery, you’d find an installation by Puerto Rican artist Papo Colo. BUT if you come early in the morning and on the right day, you’ll ascend the spiral staircase to the top of the building’s 20-foot tall tower and, with the help of Clockmaster Marvin Schneider, you can check out, up close and personal, the original 1897 clock that gives the gallery its name.

If you took our architecture tour, you’d know all about Stanford White, the pre-eminent architect of the 20^th century who designed 108 Leonard Street as the HQ of the New York Life Insurance Company. The engineers for the building figured a way for the master clock to command a hundred smaller clocks throughout the building with a system of weights and wires. The building and its gorgeous clock fell into disrepair in the mid-20^th century but Marvin gained access to it in the 1980’s and, with permission from the city, started to tinker with it.

Marvin has been taking care of this clock as well as many others around the city ever since. Needless to say, he has a passion for antiquated systems and a penchant for history. In fact, he and his apprentice Forrest are currently hunting down a historic New York mystery involving the building. Before 1948, a magnificent, huge statue of Atlas and his ubiquitous globe were erected on the east side of the building, and sometime between 1948 and 1952 it disappeared. How anyone could have absconded with a statue weighing a few tons is beyond me, but thats why its a mystery!

And as for the sad case of Ferd Rueter, a troubled young man who was found hanging from the spiral staircase a hundred years ago, the clock has its share of NYC ghost stories too.

The smaller clocks throughout the building are gone now, but the master clock ticks on. And its enormous bell tolls every hour on the hour. Come hear it during visiting hours, Tuesday through Friday from 12pm-5pm or at the open house events, which you can find at ARTonAIR.org

By Jonah Levy

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Fashion Week in New York

February 3, 2013

New York City and fashion go hand in foot like Sex in the City and Manolo Blahniks. Even as a teenager I knew this – especially because I went to the mecca of fashion, the High School of Art and Design. My first day of school I robbed a huge silk fawn-colored blouse with a giant bow out of my mother’s closet. I threw that together with jeans and high heeled brown pumps. Only fashionable outfits from then on! I guess it worked, because when Betsy Johnson came in as the guest designer for our HS Fashion Show, she INSISTED I was first on the runway.

Calvin Klein graduated from A&D and our Fashion Club received free bolts of fabric and accessories from famous designers like Halston and Daniel Hechter. My afterschool hangout was Bloomingdales and we would smoke cigarettes while watching breakdancers in Central Park. My fashion education included dancing at Studio 54, and I modeled a few times at Danceteria and Xenons, as well as hung out hung out with a few celebs back in the day, (shhhhh don’t tell Mom!) Then after school, I moved to Milan where I worked as a stylist and traveled back and forth for over 13 years! So I know a thing or two about fashion in NYC!

The history of fashion dates back to as far back as 600 BCE when Miss Cleopatra took it to the nines with bold shapes, colors, make-up, hair & accessories. From the ancient world to Medieval Ages, through Renaissance splendor, Baroque, Belle Epoque and Jazz Styles up to the 20th century, fashion has come a long way. Problem was, it had to become functional with women in the workplace. We swang into the sixties, which included an era of great art and high fashion photos by Scavullo and models like Ziggy and BOOM we hit the designer decade of the 80’s.

New York City’s Garment District always had sweatshops and factories because NYC has always been a hotbed for cheap labor. Pre-Civil War, we made clothing for slaves working on Southern plantations. After the abolishment of slavery in 1827, we manufactured uniforms for American soldiers headed to War. With the invention of the sewing machine in 1850, NYC started to produce material big-time. Add this to the endless supply of young, working class immigrant women who knew how to sew and soon enough, garment production became the 4th largest business in NYC. By the close of the 19th century, the US produced 70% of women’s wear and 40% of menswear in NYC, but not no more.

What once was the Garment District is now proudly the Fashion District! FashionWeek in New York, sponsored by Mercedes Benz, runs Feb 7 – 14th. 3 years ago, all the runways and tents were smack in the middle of Bryant Park, but now they’re held in Lincoln Center. During the old days, The Bryant Park Hotel, (formerly the American Radiator Building) was the top of the crop. Scandalous stories happened here (starring Naomi Campbell for most of them) and the hotel’s neighbors complained that they were sick of being accosted for a full month (before, during AND after the shows) for two weeks every September AND February. So, Ladies and Gentleman ya gotta go UPTOWN to catch all the high fashion society.

For places to go and things to do in the fashion world, it’s all about being seen. Mandatory stops include The Gramercy Park Hotel rooftop bar and The Meatpacking District. Diane Von Furstenburg and other big name designers have changed the face of those cobblestones streets. Have a drink at the Standard Hotel’s Biergarten, and chat up models at The Boom Boom Room around the corner. There’s also The Gansevoort Hotel, made popular by The Kardashians. Other neighborhoods like Soho and the Lower East side become bumper to bumper taxi traffic on a simple Sunday night. Some fashion shows are run down there at The New Museum on The Bowery.

Fashion week in New York is NOT the time of year to be looking for sales or discount shopping but on my fashion tour I always make a stop at MOOD Fabrics on 39th St. Two full warehouse-size floors with bolts of fabric as far as the eye can see. This is the place where Project Runway sends their competitors to shop. The shop closes for 1 hour on Thursdays when they’re filming with Judge Tim Gunn.

I can tell you that the fashion trends for 2013 are bold colors and beautiful prints and the permanently proven New York classic BLACK & WHITE. From Paris to Milan, arriving in New York this February is the new trend of laser-printed fabrics. Designers can now take whatever images they dream up and transfer them directly to fabric!

Stylists can make or break any trend and thats why they sit front row at shows like Donna Karan and Alexander Wang. So although I might hang out at a party or two, it’s difficult to get hot tickets for FashionWeek. But you have to know where you came from if you know where you’re going!

By Kristin Singleton
New York Fashion Week