Author Archives: admin

Another brick in the wall (of course, of course).

In a very small victory for SoHo preservationists this week, an agreement was finally hammered out, resolving a five-year old dispute at 599 Broadway. The building, located strategically at Broadway and Houston, was finally awarded the right to install advertising via billboards to be located a street level, though they will be forced to reinstall […]
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Barely/There.

Oh, hello. Sorry, I didn’t see you standing over there. Not many people come through any more. Excuse me? The large table over there, with the tarp? The dusty one? No, no, there’s not much under there. I can pull it off if you like. It’s just a bunch of outrage; it used to be […]
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Spies Like Us.

It’s not been a good two weeks for law enforcement. The worst of it came first, with the murder of two auxiliary police officers (a quick aside — I know there a myriad reasons for that qualification, but I rankle at its consistent appearance; they died doing police work under the guise of a uniform […]
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‘Not So Bad’ is the New Black.

In a fit of journalistic coming of age, amNY broke real news this week. Well, it wasn’t that newsworthy — probably just a trumped up press released fired in the opening salvo of Community Board hearings intended to garner a variance, if the follow-on Curbed note is accurate. The upshot is that the Rouse Company, […]
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People say I’m extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?*

The rich aren’t like you and me. They have better views, and they don’t defecate. Or so you would think, given their hyper-aversion to refuse. Who can blame them? With private sanitation trucks running down pedestrians every time they turn a corner, and bugaboo still a couple years away from producing a stroller than can […]
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Is that a terrorist threat in your pocket, or are you just glad to be watching an ‘edgy’ cartoon?

This is a tale about a local boy making it big, perhaps too big for his liking. Meet Sam Ewen, who, right now, is probably having a Very Bad Day. Not a Jean Charles de Menezes sort of Bad Day, but I’m sure in his self-inflated head, he thinks it so. Sam is a “guerrilla […]
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The moment of vertigo.

Why do people live in New York? There is no relationship between them. Except for an inner electricity which results from the simple fact of their being crowded together. A magical sensation of contiguity and attraction for an artificial centrality. This is what makes it a self-attracting universe, which there is no reason to leave. […]
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MoMentous.

There is a growing pile of correspondence from Glenn Lowry on my desk. Well, not just him, but also various important persons in the membership department at MoMA. I’m very important to them these past few weeks, unlike the rest of the year. It’s that time again. Well, actually it passed last week, but doing […]
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Inevitable Year-end Roundup.

This is when everyone is supposed to do year end round ups and/or make predictions. Certainly on the one on everyone’s lips today will be competing reports from major brokerages finally admitting that real estate in the city is cooling (nooo!), but the landing is soft (big surprise) and next year will be better (yay!). […]
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Spring is sprung.

So what I wanna know is: did anyone tag 11 Spring last night? That would cause all manner of hue and cry, I expect. And be funny. That’s because there are very complex rules that I can never get my head around regarding that worst of misnomers: ‘street art’. Something about the primacy of marking […]
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