HotelChatter.com today notes that rates at Robert DeNiro's new Greenwich Hotel have dropped to $550 a night, and that seemed like a good enough excuse to see what other NYC hotels are currently offering for tonight.
The Plaza, despite the fact that some publications are still bantying-on about that $1,000-a-night rate, actually has rooms from $755 tonight. (While there, you can hit up the newly opened Rose Club restaurant for the likes of a $21 pomegranate and cucumber mojito, the $34 Angus beef burger and the $17 chocolate pot de creme. For more practical: there's a $45 prix fixe menu.)
Kimpton's Muse Hotel rates for tonight start at $539.
The bookophile-friendly Library Hotel has a bed from $489.
The once-budget Hotel QT has rooms just off Times Square from $339 tonight.
The normally-budget Pod Hotel has nothing less than $239 a night. (All hotel rates for this feature are what's listed on the hotel's own website, except for the Pod because the online reservation system won't accept bookings unless the arrival date is about a week out.)
Must-see list of NYC's newest important architecture
Historian, lecturer and architectural biographer of Manhattan and Brooklyn, Francis Morrone returns to NewYorkology today with a list of the most important newish buildings to see in New York City. See the Flickr photo set and map.
Nine recent New York buildings the visiting architecture buff will not want to miss:
LVMH Building
19 W. 57th St. between Fifth and Madison avenues
1996-99, Christian de Portzamparc
I once described Ely Jacques Kahn's great Bricken Textile Building (1929) on Broadway and 41st Street as having "a bias-cut effect, like a Vionnet gown." I wonder what Kahn would have done if he had had access to the media with which Christian de Portzamparc created this dazzling building, perhaps more Comme des Garçons than Vionnet.
IAC Building
West Street and 19th Street
2005-07, Frank Gehry
A billowing white sail, people like to call it. It's in the right place: a nondescript stretch of West Street where an object building does not do battle with its surroundings. I hate hate hate hate hate hate Gehry's plans for "Atlantic Yards" in Brooklyn, but it's good to have smaller-scale, appropriately sited buildings, like this one, by him. It is said to have major constructional flaws and I suspect building a Gehry building is never a straightforward proposition.
Carhart Mansion
3 E. 95th St.
2003-06, Zivkovic Associates with John Simpson & Partners
New York's own Zivkovic firm, with some small input from Britain's esteemed classicist Simpson (of Queen's Gallery fame), created this splendid limestone town house. Note the thick walls, the deep window reveals -- this is the real thing, not some plasterboard knockoff. Also note how reverently, yet without relinquishing its own singularity, it plays off of Horace Trumbauer's majestic Marion Carhart house next door.
15 Central Park West
Between 61st and 62nd streets
Completed 2007, Robert A.M. Stern Architects
The first apartment tower since -- when? -- with an all-over limestone coating. This is a very elegant building with a brilliant roofline and neighborly gestures all around, as only Stern, a master of both traditional and modernist idioms, can pull off, thus making hodge-podgey parts of cities into coherent wholes.
Westin Hotel
43rd Street and Eighth Avenue
2002, Arquitectonica
It is perfect for Times Square. It would be a nightmare anywhere else. I love that this totally go-to-hell building is two blocks from Renzo Piano's oh-so-elegant NY Times Building.
Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet and Kanga recently left the children's room in the Donnell Library Center, which will be torn down to make way for a luxury hotel/library.
The stuffed animals, loved up into a shabby, patched-up state, now reside in an elegant glass case in the Edna Barnes Salomon Room of the Humanities & Social Sciences Library.
They're actually easy to find -- head up the main stairs to the third floor as if you were headed to the main reading room. But at the top of the landing, instead of heading west into the reading room, head east toward Pooh.
The animals were given to Robin Milne (the inspiration for Christopher Robin) between 1920 and 1922. Pooh was originally acquired from Harrod's. They were brought to the United States in 1947 and found a home at Milne's U.S. publisher, who then gave them to the library in 1987.
Library entrance is of course free.
Picture credit: Pooh and Friends, taken by Don Hamerman. Image provided to NewYorkology by the NYPL.
The sixth annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party is set for June 7 and 8 at Madison Square Park and the Bubba Fast Passes are already on sale.
And here comes what will sound like a commercial: There are only 2,000 passes and you can only get them with American Express.
That doesn't mean AmEx cardholders merely get first dibs, like they often do with some theater and concert tickets -- they're the only ones getting dibs for fast-access to the ribs - and other 'cue.
That's the word NewYorkology received this morning via e-mail from BBQ organizers.
The $100 FastPass -- redeemable for food, beverage & merchandise at the festival -- "guarantees exclusive access to express lines for each FastPass holder and one guest to all food and beverage purveyors throughout the entire weekend." Everyone else will be stuck in the lines, which in past years have been as long as it takes an ornery, two-legged pig to walk a country mile.
Barbecue will be priced at $8 per plate. Sides and desserts will be $4 each.
Waldorf's lost train off-limits, other tunnels offer tours
Matt Lauer of the "Today" show this morning got rare access into one of New York's City's best hidden spaces -- the abandoned rail platfrm under the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
Most famously used by President Franklin Roosevelt to help hide the fact he was wheelchair-bound, the track allowed VIPs to enter Manhattan by train and take an elevator directly up to the luxury hotel without ever setting foot on the street.
In 2006, the Waldorf's general manager told NewYorkology that the hotel's entrance to the rail platform had been reconfigued and is no longer easy to access. He also debunked a few myths about who used the private entrance. Researchers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park also did some research on the matter for NewYorkology, making it clear that the abandoned rail car under the Waldorf isn't the polio-stricken president's famous Pullman car, the Ferdinand Magellan.
So unless you're Matt Lauer, you're probably not ever getting access to the train cars under the Waldorf. But you can get access to a couple other abandoned rail stations in NYC. The oldest option is in Brooklyn, directly under Atlantic Avenue as it leads out to the East River. Tours of the 1844 tunnel are offered about once a month by the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association. But be warned that you do enter the tunnel by crawling through a manhole in the middle of the street at the intersection of Atlantic and Court.
Your other option is to catch one of the rare tours the NY Transit Museum offers of the city's original subway station that opened in 1904 under City Hall in Lower Manhattan. The stunning station, with chandeliers, skylights and tiled, vaulted ceilings, is next open for tours on July 19.
Not quite as glamorous, but still cool, the old Knickerbocker Hotel on Times Square had its own stairs from the subway platform leading up to the hotel. See Forgotten NY for pictures. (In 2006, the Dubai royal family announced plans to convert the Knickerbocker back into a luxury hotel but the Post reported last week that instead they've decided to sell the landmark building which now houses offices and a Gap shop, streetview map.)
Also of note: Julia Solis' intriguing "New York Underground" recently came out in paperback.
Rockaways, Frying Pan to get Water Taxi on weekends
While the mayor made his big announcement today about new ferry commmuter service between the Rockaways and Manhattan, the more interesting news may lie in the New York Water Taxi's other plans for this summer, including weekend service to Rockaway Beach as well as the Frying Pan on the Hudson.
Service will also start to Red Hook's new Brooklyn Ikea starting June 18, but the Water Taxi has ditched all plans for Governors Island and the Mets Express this summer, a spokeswoman for the company told NewYorkology. (Governors Island will still be served by a free ferry from Lower Manhattan for the season, which starts May 31.)
Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City will officially reopen for the season on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, with Friday/Saturday/Sunday ferry service from E. 34th Street in Manhattan.
The NY Water Taxi is also ditching its weekday hop-on hop-off service which has been aimed at the tourist crowd. That service will remain on weekends (when ridership was higher and the boats won't be needed for the commuter routes.)
However, it will still run its evening sunset happy-hour cruises on most nights. And new this week, it's adding a TV and Movie cruise every Thursday. And once Olafur Eliasson's NYC Waterfalls art project starts flowing, the Water Taxi (along with Circle Line and NY Waterway) will start special waterfall cruises.
NY Water Taxi weekend service to the Rockaways -- at Riis Landing on National Park Service land -- is aiming to start weekend service in early summer. No pricing details are yet available (although the city-subsidised weekday commuter service on the same route will be $6 each way.)
Service to the Lightship "Frying Pan" would also start mid-summer, as a stop on the hop-on hop-off service. The "Frying Pan," which recently moved to Pier 66 from its longtime Pier 63 home on the Hudson River, hopes to reopen soon as a restaurant and bar -- the same facilities it offered in the old location, a spokeswoman told NewYorkology today.
Farther out on the horizon, the city is sinking $500,000 into a study on more routes, including LaGuardia Airport, Roosevelt Island, Coney Island, Riverdale, Camp St. Edward on Staten Island, W. 125th Street, Orchard Beach, Hunts Point, Sheepshead Bay, Bay Ridge, Astoria, and Manhattan's E. 20th , E. 75th, and E. 90th streets.
Sharpton: Protest to 'close this city down' Wednesday
To protest the acquittal of the three officers who shot Sean Bell as he was leaving his bachelor party in 2006, Rev. Al Sharpton has vowed to "close this city down" starting Wednesday at 3 p.m. with a series of civil disobedience actions.
Sharpton has called for protesters to gather in at least six locations to pray (and presumably stop all traffic in the area.) NewYorkology created a map for the announced locations:
125th Street and Third Avenue
60th Street and Third Avenue
34th Street and Park Avenue
Varick and Houston streets, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel
One Police Plaza, near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge
House of the Lord Church, 415 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn
In rendering the verdict April 25, the judge said the witnesses were unreliable and "at times, the testimony just didn't make sense."
While the judge said the actions of the three indicted NYPD officers did not rise to the level of criminal, "questions of carelessness and incompetence must be left to other forums," he said.
The police officers could still face federal charges over their actions, and after that determination, the NYPD will be allowed to determine its discipline for the trio. The stated aim of the upcoming protest is to persuade federal officials to "enforce laws to make police brutality illegal and prosecute officers that violate such laws.
Of special note to travelers to NYC, one of those 50 bullets fired by police was so off course that it sailed into a nearby AirTrain station. On the video, you can see suitcase-toting travelers ducking for cover.
The exhibition features paintings, videos, sculpture, photographs and installations -- including one made up of giant boobie bean bags -- from 20 Icelandic artists.
Eliasson's work here is made up of a series of photographs, the Green River series, (pictured, above) and a light installation called "Limbo Lamp for Petur," (video, top.)
The Icelandic Love Corporation take part as well, with "Nest," a mixed-media sculpture that includes black-licorice type tubing, a tire and shiny baubles all weaved into a home for a family of birds.
The exhibition, which runs until August 15, is free. It's open Tuesdays through Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. The Scandinavia House is located at 58 Park Ave., map.
Can't wait for fall to set foot up on the High Line when it will start opening to the public as a park? Then sign up for a High Line sketching class in May.
A section of the HIgh Line opened for (legal) tours during last year's Open House New York, but the sign-ups maxed out super fast. Currently, there are 34 spots available for the sketching spots.
The sketching classes will be taught by artist Ann DeVere. The price is $25 for High Line supporters or $50 otherwise -- and art supplies will be provided. Participants must be at least 18 years old. And apparently there's no prerequesite that your art skills have to be any good before you arrive.
The High Line -- an abandoned, elevated freight train tracks built in the 1920s and '30s -- is on schedule to open its first park section in fall from Gansevoort Street up to 20th Street. See construction pictures on the High Line's website.
Other upcoming (off-site) High Line events include a May 6 lecture with artist Spencer Finch who will discuss plans for the public art work he's creating for the High Line.
Picture credits: High Line above the Hudson Yards during the OHNY tours in October 2007. Amy Langfield/NewYorkology.
Bank of America offers free museum access for a year
Starting in May, Bank of America cardholders will get free admission during the first Saturday and Sunday of each month for the next year at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, New York Hall of Science, Jewish Museum, the Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium.
The bank's Museums on Us also offers free entrance to New Jersey's Liberty Science Center, Montclair Art Museum and the Newark Museum.
In past years, the bank's offerings were limited to May, but the Museums on Us website currently lists free weekend offerings through April 2009.
But if you don't have a Bank of America account, plenty of New York City's museums have free hours each week, and many are pay-what-you-wish, such as the Met Museum (which actually only costs a penny.)
Picture credit: Met Museum, Amy Langfield/NewYorkology.
