New York City
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The tenth annual Open House New York weekend begins tomorrow. Sarah and I have bought tickets to several tours for both Saturday and Sunday. There will undoubtedly be a ton of photos that I will post here, but I’m looking forward to hopping around this city to see as much cool architecture as we can.
Here’s our schedule for the weekend:
We begin on Saturday with a tour of the Roosevelt House, a recently renovated townhouse in the east 60s that was home to Franklin D. and his family. That’s not the only former Roosevelt home open this weekend. There’s also Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace since it’s open from 10:30 – 4:00 on Saturday. I tried to go with my mom when she was here last summer, but it was closed for renovations
Later that afternoon, we shuffle to the west side for a walking tour of the public spaces around Lincoln Center. The tour will highlight works by many luminaries of modern architecture, ranging from Eero Saarinen to the very active firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
We have tickets for a tour of the Phillip Johnson–designed Four Season restaurant. We saw the inside of the Four Seasons back in February when we went on a [scavenger hunt of modern architecture][scavenger] sites in New York. The tour is on Saturday afternoon, which is challenging for me because that’s the same time as the Robots are playing in the third and deciding game of the McCarren Cup finals.
On Sunday, we have start with a demonstration of sound acoustics. at the Arup SoundLab in lower Manhattan.
At noon, we’re taking a tour of the last remaining segment of the old High Line that has not yet been developed as a park. The High Line at the Rail Yards is a last opportunity to see the abandoned rail line in its undeveloped state. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re due for rain on Sunday so I hope we can still see this before it becomes one of the city’s most popular parks.
After that, we’re heading to Queens for couple of tours that don’t require reservations. The first is a tour of the old TWA Flight Center at Kennedy Airport, a Eero Saarinen project that is inside of Terminal 5, currently the home of JetBlue’s hub at JFK. The terminal is exciting because it was constructed at the dawn of the jet age and shows the futuristic optimism of that era. While connecting to the AirTrain in Jamaica, we’ll make our way to the King Manor Museum in Jamaica. I first saw this when I was marking the route for the Ride to Montauk, and I’m glad that they are participating so I can finally see this place.
Chances are slim that I’ll be too busy to post updates throughout the weekend, but I’ll be posting photos to Flickr as soon as I can and then later on this website.
The bar formerly known as the Stoned Crow is back as the Formerly Crow.
After being at NYU longer than I’d like to admit, we finally receive the benefit of attending some of the city’s museums gratis.
Below is the list of museums, as of September 14, that we get to visit for free and receive discounts at the gift shops and cafés. The list published at NYU’s Museum Gateway.
Updated, February 2015: The Brooklyn Museum is no longer part of the gateway program.
Updated, February 2016: The New Museum has joined the gateway program.
| Museum |
Admission |
Discount |
Address |
Website |
| The Frick Collection |
Free admission for NYU students |
|
1 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021 |
http://frick.org |
| Grey Art Gallery |
Free admission for NYU students |
|
100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003 |
http://nyu.edu/greyart |
| The Jewish Museum |
Free admission for NYU students |
10% discount at museum shop |
1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128 |
http://thejewishmuseum.org |
| El Museo del Barrio |
Free admission for NYU students |
10% discount at La Tienda museum shop and at El Café |
1230 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10029 |
http://elmuseo.org |
| Museum of the City of New York |
Free admission for NYU students plus one guest |
10% discount at museum shop |
1220 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10029 |
http://mcny.org |
| Museum of Modern Art |
Free admission and film tickets for NYU students |
|
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019 |
http://moma.org |
| Museum of the Moving Image |
Free admission for NYU students |
15% discount in the Museum Café and the Moving Image Store |
36–01 35th Avenue, Queens, NY 11106 |
http://movingimage.us |
| The New Museum |
Free admission for NYU students |
|
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002 |
http://newmuseum.org |
| The New-York Historical Society |
Free admission for NYU students |
10% discount at Museum Store |
170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024 |
http://nyhistory.org |
| Rubin Museum of Art |
Free admission for NYU students |
|
150 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011 |
http://rmanyc.org |
| The Studio Museum in Harlem |
Free admission for NYU students |
10% discount at Museum Store |
144 West 125th Street, New York, NY 10027 |
http://studiomuseum.org |
| Whitney Museum of American Art |
Free admission for NYU students plus one guest |
20% discount on Whitney publications and select products at the Whitney Store
10% discount at Untitled, the Whitney’s new Danny Meyer restaurant |
The Whitney will reopen in Spring 2015 at 99 Gansevoort Street |
http://whitney.org |
Posted on Yelp for more to see.
Two of us did a take out order at dinner: a pork chop sandwich (extra spicy) and a shrimp vermicelli salad. Both dishes were excellent. There was a fair amount of spice, and believe me I love spicy foods, but it was nowhere near what one could get from a more “authentic” Vietnamese place.
If you like Tuk Tuk, which is comparatively bland compared to other Thai places in Jackson Heights or Los Angeles but still serve excellent food, then you’ll like this place. Otherwise, heed the advice of others and head to Elmhurst.
MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota said Wednesday the authority will consider eliminating the 7% discount riders receive for buying pay-per-ride MetroCards when fares go up next March.
As a pretty regular bike commuter, I only buy the pay-per-ride. If they still offered a one-day (or three-day) unlimited card, I would get those for days when I need to run a good number of errands.
When I first moved to New York in 2001, the bonus on the pay-per-ride was equivalent to 20%. You bought five rides at $1.50 each, you were credited with a free ride. That was a pretty good discount. I would often spend $15 to get the two rides. Ahh, the good ole days.
Currently, the stated discount is currently 7%, but it’s actually much worse than the old days. First, you have to spend at least $10 to get the discount, much more than the halcyon days of the early Bloomberg era. Second, in order to get a free ride, you have to spend $35.75. That amount, without the discount will buy you 15.89 rides. With the 7% bonus, you get a $2.50 added to your card, bringing up your Metrocard to $38.25 or 17 full-fare rides. I wonder how many New Yorkers know about the $35.75 magic number.
I imagine that many people abandon cards with small, random amounts on them because it’s too hard to figure out how much you need to add to your card to get a full number of rides. Thankfully, there’s a bonus calculator on the web and an app for the iPhone, but I doubt these get widespread usage.
(via MTA Weighs Eliminating Pay-Per-Ride MetroCard Discount – Metropolis – WSJ.)
Film Forum screens Port of Shadows beginning Friday, September 14.
We will be looking at the poetic realism in my Early Film class at Pratt this semester. Since we can only watch one film in class, I encourage students to watch this newly restored film at Film Forum to get a richer sense of the style and sensibility (and sense of doom) of poetic realist films.
The Bowery Boys, producers of one of my favorite podcasts, devote an episode to NYU. The release coincides with the beginning of the academic year (!) and with the release of their premium walking tour of Washington Square Park, the symbolic center of NYU.
Greg and Tom have been producing engaging podcasts and a great blog for years. The premium product is available through a variety of sources, including iTunes, and is their first attempt at earning some money, as far as I know. After all they’ve done for free, they certainly deserve to earn a little something from their great work. Kudos!
Last night around 11:00 PM, we noticed a strong but intermittent smell of burnt plastic. We couldn’t notice the smell when we went to the open window, thinking that the smell was coming from outside the apartment, so we determined that it was coming from inside the apartment.
It turned out that the smell was coming from the electrical circuit breaker box in the kitchen. As we observed the box, we also heard a buzzing noise emanating from the box. Using a silicon oven mitt, to protect myself from electrocuting or burning my hand, I opened the box and began flipping switches. The buzzing had stopped once I flipped the switches off and on, but I wondered whether there was any inordinate heat coming from the box. There was: my infrared food thermometer read the temperature on the left group of switches as high as 200°.
We called the landlord, who in turn called an electrician, and had us turn off the power box in the apartment and the basement. We spent the night in the dark, with no lights, no air conditioning, or any fans. We did have a good stockpile of flashlights and batteries preparing for Hurricane Irene last August. As far as staying comfortable, the open windows and occasional cross breeze kept us cool last night. (It actually wasn’t all that bad so I’ll stop complaining.)
This morning, an electrician came and in a matter of moments replaced the defective circuit breaker. You can see in the photo that the breaker had developed some warping around the imprinted “900”.
It was fortunate that we were both home and vigilant about identifying the scent of burnt plastic.
If you smell a burning smell from your electrical circuit breaker box, you should…
- immediately turn off the breaker box (ours is in the kitchen)
- immediately turn off the main power supply (ours is in the basement)
- call an electrician to fix the problem
If it’s a hot summer night and have to wait until morning, suck it up:
- take a shower
- drink a glass of cold water
- open a window
- put a towel on the bed (this really helps me)
Brooklyn’s Light Industry is paying tribute to Chris Marker, who passed away last month. As I wrote earlier on this site, you can see two of his best known films on Hulu Plus, but this retrospective is much richer. It begins at 10:00 AM on August 26, continuing throughout the day, and ending with a midnight screening of The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004).
