The Cattle Branding of Times Square
Karrie Jacobs wrote a decade ago that Times Square was the only place in New York to “explore the marriage of architecture and electronic technology, of form and image, that is emerging as the defining...
View ArticleArts Education Debate Continues
Two and a half years ago, Sharon Dunn, the newly installed head of arts education at the Department of Education, sat in front of the City Council unable to offer an idea of how many schools offer arts...
View ArticleIllegal Advertisers Off the Hook?
Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe drives around with bolt cutters to cut it down from park fences. Its appearance on construction scaffoldings throughout the city led to a billboard-sized controversy....
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Waterfalls Flip the Switch
Photo by nydiscovery and used via Creative Commons. It was taken on June 20. On a soggy morning who would have thought the city needed even more water? Well, we got just that. This morning, Mayor...
View ArticleHip Hop and Condoms
Hip hop has been blamed for contributing to urban ills for years. It is said to promote violence, misogyny, and homophobia. And with songs like the late Old Dirty Bastard’s ode to unprotected sex, one...
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311 Gets Dance Therapy
At noon and 1:30 p.m. today uninitiated passersby might have been startled by the group of red and black-clad dancers jumping off the Municipal Building columns and silently strutting and sashaying in...
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'Emotionalizing' Global Warming
Turning off the lights in office buildings after hours might seem like an obvious way to save energy and cut back on carbon emissions. But one creative team has another idea – leave some of them on....
View ArticleMail Order Homes
Although there’s no word on the exhibition of the winners from the Office of Emergency Management’s post-disaster housing design competition, the Museum of Modern Art has got its own display of...
View ArticleMoney in the Mist
Love it or loathe it, Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls apparently provided a boost to the city in these tough economic times. According to a report issued by the city yesterday, the...
View ArticleGraffiti as Devil on the Shoulder
Keeping quality-of-life crimes in check is viewed by many as a means of sandbagging against the possibility of a crime wave resulting from the economic downturn. Julia Vitullo-Martin told AMNY last...
View ArticleLandmark Problems
Looking for an upside to the recession? (No snide comments abut hedge fund managers, please.) The current downturn could be good for the city’s architectural heritage, according to Julia...
View ArticleWhat If Your Office was a Park?
Technology has enabled workers to collaborate from the far corners of the earth, but face-to-face collaboration is still a necessity. So how can we best facilitate that, and make the experience as...
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New York Media Arts Map
To help media artists, funders, exhibitors and others find each other, the state and two non profit organization created an interactive map that organizes media arts groups by location. Users can hover...
View ArticleAfter Gehry
So what effect will Bruce Ratner’s decision to drop Frank Gehry’s much-touted design for the basketball arena mean to the future of Atlantic Yards? For one thing, the massive complex when — or more...
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Art at City Hall Angers Avella
Include councilmember and mayoral candidate Tony Avella in the list of City Hall goers that find the new public art installation unsightly. The police vestibules were converted to red and white, faux...
View ArticleUrban Grime as History
Incorporating the aesthetics of the natural reclamation of urban abandonment was part of the intent of the High Line park that snakes its way above the streets of the Meat Packing district. But street...
View ArticleEnvisioning a New Sidewalk Shed
The city-sponsored design competition to improve the ubiquitous royal blue sidewalk shed has been narrowed down to three finalists out of 164 submissions. Jurists in the urbanSHED competition selected...
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Signature Theatre Finds a Home
After years of struggling to get on stage somewhere near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, the Signature Theatre Company has found a home in Hell’s Kitchen just mere blocks from Broadway, Mayor Michael...
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End of an Era (UPDATE)
NBC announced today that it had canceled Law and Order — the city’s longest running primetime series. Photo (cc) Det.Logan Here is Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s statement on the show’s cancellation: Over...
View ArticleAn Eyesore Growns in Brooklyn
Barclays Center may never host an NBA champion but it already has a distinction: novelist and urban expert James Howard Kunstler has named it the eyesore of the month (for October; sorry we caught up...
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