New York has never been much for cobblestone and colonnade, vistas seeping historical vernacular and cocooning inhabitants in fantasies of a past continuum. Famously amnesiac, its building stock chronically provisional, New York offers a past that comes at us in fits and starts--a sideways glimpse, a shimmering peripheral vision at best. Mostly, though, we rehash Read More
About 90 percent of all diamonds that enter the U.S. pass through New York's diamond district, though you'd never know it walking down West 47th Street, a warren of grimy aluminum and puffy-coated hawkers, the claustrophobic energy of deal-making, all of it crammed like carbon atoms into a one-block expanse.
But to Gary Barnett, diamond merchant-turned-real Read More
For a long-darkened building on Broadway, the Metro Theater still manages to incite sudden outbursts—impromptu manifestos, eager litanies of trivia, all but priestly intercessions—from its passersby. Stand too long gawking at its Deco lettering (one of its M's was recently felled by a snowdrift), and strangers will materialize out of the passing crowd to Read More
The naming of a neighborhood is always a somewhat elaborate tug of a war, but last year residents of Dumbo faced a rare quandary, when City Hall officialy named the area New York's Digital District. Though the neighborhood has been reborn with a new moniker roughly every half-century-Olympia, in keeping with the post-Revolutionary trend of Read More
The Internet, for most of us, is a fairy-dusted invisible terrain, a current through which we drift in and out with seamless ease. A cloud, we call it. A Web. Whatever it is, the Internet is very light.
It is this lightness that's difficult to square with the nuts-and-bolts hardware that powers our virtual worlds, Read More
Even to the locals who've watched it happen, the hyperkinetic transformation of Frederick Douglass Boulevard is still a one-two punch of baffled awe--part time-lapse metamorphosis, part coy erasure. The south Harlem throughway of brownstones and anonymous bodegas suddenly speckles with glass condos, blank-faced and steely purposed. It has yielded to the sort of eating and Read More
As hundreds of Bernie Madoff's personal belongings were auctioned off to bidders last week, the owners of the building that once housed the con artist's Potemkin trading floors, the so-called Lipstick Building, were preparing to declare bankruptcy.
In midtown, the Sheraton Hotel ballroom was transformed into a kind of government-run garage sale, part garish treasure Read More
In the early-morning hours, when most New Yorkers are sleeping, thousands of trucks thunder in and out of Hunts Point's industrial sprawl.
Roughly 60 percent of the city's produce is shuttled through the peninsula's food distribution center, the largest wholesale food market in the world and, since 2005, home of the historic Fulton Fish Market. Read More
Even in a seemingly dismal age for the printed word, the Manhattan mediascape--all but littered with the shells of publishing enterprises come and gone--at least offers comfort in its constancy, a kind of rapid-cycling eternal flux. Most departed periodicals find themselves entombed in the dusty corners of archives, but a few manage to wedge themselves Read More
It's hard to call New York's history a circular one--we build over our past too fervently for that--but nonetheless, certain corners of the city manage to accumulate something like odd rhymes and resonance with their pasts, perhaps a barely conscious tic of repetition.
At the turn of the last century, Washington Street in Lower Manhattan was Read More
At its western end, Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn veers past a strange and uneven terrain: cavernous structures the size of football fields, amorphous masses bulging with rust, roughly 300 acres jutting into a bend in the East River. For years, to most who passed it, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was a dreamscape of industrial decay, Read More
At its far western edge, 14th Street is the kind of time-lapsed parable of social transformation that quickens Manhattanites' pulses. Nights in the meatpacking district, once punctuated by the rhythms of carcasses being loaded into trucks, have become scenes of teetering stilettos and impossibly hip clubs that were over the minute you heard about them. Read More
The long-murmured auguries of demolition on Surf Avenue had all but taken on the air of ritual, each new summer washing up like a predictable reprise--the last last annual send-off of Coney Island As We Knew It.
But the long, protracted standoff between developer Joe Sitt and city officials finally came to an end last Read More
Amid Columbia University's ongoing border skirmishes--the result of its planned 17-acre expansion northward--even the name of the embattled neighborhood is contested.
Some favor Mahattanville, a moniker harking back to the 19th-century Quaker village that sprang up, as contemporary guidebooks put it, a whole "eight miles from New York." Others contend the area is simply an extension Read More
It didn't cause much of a stir, the pronouncement that the words branded across the front of 36 Cooper Square would have to go. Maybe because the building's tenant roster now reads more like an assemblage of techies and new-media ecclesiae than old-school publishers, or maybe because the letters themselves, righteous block typeface, had accumulated Read More
