Finally, NYU students are getting some return for their enormous investment: free ice and every-other-day maid service. Too bad there’s a catch.
The Port Authority Bus Terminal is the grubbiest, least hospitable public space in Manhattan, and its bathrooms are the worst of the worst—if you can ignore the ominous patch of grime on the ceiling and focus on the task at hand for long enough to squeeze out a few drops, you should consider yourself lucky. So cops: Let's afford these bus station pissers some dignity, shall we?
Which comes first—wanting to commit adultery, or a taste for the cold butter, cumbersome menus, and slippery leather seating of overpriced midtown restaurants? Who is to know if one prompted the other, but the two are related.
Imagine going to work in a Midtown office tower, trudging your way to a job you don't really like anymore, and while getting into the elevator as it shoots up in the air, crushing you against the ceiling, splitting your body in half, and killing you. Hell of a way to go.
Along with giant flower broaches and nauseating cupcakes, another thing Carrie Bradshaw made famous was Fleet Week, the annual onslaught of horny sailors into Manhattan. Want to go about getting a man in uniform of your very own? Here's how!
New York City's economy must really be on the mend. Mercedes is planning to construct a ginormous 333,000-square-foot flagship on 11th Avenue, which it's hoping will set "the style standard for all other Mercedes dealers around the country." Alas, Jay-Z and Beyoncé will have to wait a bit before they can head to the futuristic, glassy showroom to pick up their next Maybach: It won't open its doors until the beginning of 2011. [NYT]
Hello, the very latest made-up trend you must know about unless you are some sort of plebe is the simple fact that Midtown is back. According to everybody.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter tells the New York Observer that Midtown is back. You know who agrees with him? Catherine Malandrino, and restaurateur Gherardo Guarducci, and Waris Ahluwalia, "the turbaned jewelry designer and fixture in Wes Anderson films," and nightlife photographer Patrick McMullan, and socialite Ann Dexter-Jones, and socialite Bettina Zilkha, and socialite Lisa Anastos, and socialite Derek Blasberg, and fashion designer Prabal Gurung, and Le Caprice owner Richard Caring, and designer Devi Kroell, and gallery owner Neal Grayson.
Midtown is really, really happening these days, have you heard? At least that's what the owners of restaurants that recently opened in—yes, you guessed it—Midtown are saying! And you can give all the credit to Monkey Bar co-owner and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter since he "arguably foresaw and guaranteed the reinvigoration of the longtime social wasteland between 30th and 60th streets." Now he just has to find a way to reinvigorate that other project he spends time working on every so often! [NYO]
Window washers cleaning the glass skin of a skyscraper on 56th Street in Midtown Manhattan just had a terrifying scare. The cable slipped and left their basket at an angle of 45 degrees—and hundreds of feet from the ground.
Ever wonder why the CEO at your company has a $10,000 telescope parked in the corner of his office? It's not to admire the birds. Or even to peek at the woman in the neighboring office building who changes her blouse at precisely half past five. It's to look in the offices of other CEOs, obviously.
As of 6:30 this morning, the 4/5/6 line was running at "slower speeds" because of "water on the tracks." Congratulations, New York, we're finally a third world country! If we were terrorists we'd just sit back and let the weather take care of things. Anyway, we weren't the only one with problems. Big trouble up at the Time Warner Center, the Mordor that marks the northern border of Midtown.
In the same cavernous space that held the inappropriately named English is Italian (turns out English is the New Failure), Jeffrey Chodorow's newest restaurant Wild Salmon opens to the public today, Good Friday. Last night, So-So Thursday, we tried it out. It seems to be a Chodorow signature these days to have weird whatnots hanging from the ceiling. Instead of Kobe Club's swords, Wild Salmon features a school of 249 copper injection-mold salmon hanging by fishing line from the ceiling. Caught in the wild race upstream, the mildly abstracted fish bring to mind gilded spermatazoa. One is surprised not to find a giant ovum on one end of the restaurant.
The newly opened West 55th Street restaurant Amalia recently unveiled its downstairs lounge, D'Or, a cavernous stab at downtown cool. Let's visit the upstairs first. Owned by Vikram Chakral of the OTT Dream Hotel and Greg Brier, Amalia is glorious midtown chic, an 8,000 square-foot hyperbolic dining "experience" complete with a portrait gallery (with framed paintings on the ceiling—CEILING!) and a black chandelier (black!).
