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Maybe it was the glorious spring weather that had me swooning, or the fact that the flowers and trees were all in full, spectular boom, but I must say that Orly Genger's massive new art installation in Madison Square Park, titled Red, Yellow, and Blue, could be the best yet to grace the lawns of this Flatiron District oasis.
Brooklyn attractions are many but for my money, one of the most fun things to do in Brooklyn on the weekend is experiencing Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg. For the past few years, the great Brooklyn Flea and its also-great foodie spin-off Smorgasburg have become something of an institution in New York City. Open now and running every Saturday and Sunday from now through Thanksgiving in three Brooklyn locations–all equally appealing for different reasons–Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg make for a guaranteed pleasant weekend outing with friends, kids, a sweetheart, or just rolling solo.
The Lobster Place is one of the original tenants of the great Chelsea Market, and they clearly know a thing or three about fresh fish. The place is always packed, both with locals buying, say, a couple of tuna steaks or tilapia fillets to bring home and cook for dinner, as well as plenty of tourists (and, again, locals) digging in to, for example, one of The Lobster Place's signature, freshly-steamed pound-a-half crustaceans. Heck, we've spotted folks eating these monstrous, meaty lobsters several blocks up on the High Line!
In 2009, both of New York City's beloved/hated (depending) baseball teams started their seasons in spanking-new stadiums. Citi Field replaced the 45-year-old Shea Stadium as home to the Amazin' Mets, and when I went for the first time last year I was pretty blown away by what is clearly the new trend in sports entertainment, where ballparks have to be quasi family resorts as much as sporting venues.
Claes Oldenburg, whom the New York Times recently called "one of the last surviving giants of Pop Art", has made a career of creating true showstoppers.
Ok, so it's a bit of a misnomer, "Old School vs. New Style", My name for the burger battle I embarked upon last week, where I pit NYC dinosaur P.J. Clarke's (the Third Avenue restaurant that's been around since 1884!) against the company's fast-food-ish offshoot Clarke's Standard, just opened on Lexington and 54th.
Chef Wylie Dufresne, he of the innovative, Michelin-starred wd-50 on Clinton Street, is a good guy: amiable, grounded, a native New Yorker. The kind of person you wish was your buddy, and not just for his chops in the kitchen.
One of the most important unwritten rules of living in this magnificent, packed-like-sardines city is that, even in the most crowded of our public spaces (which is all of them), we don't intrude upon each other's privacy. We don't make eye contact for too long on the subway, or stare into each other's windows. For too long.
The title of the International Center of Photography's excellent, career-long retrospective of the great photographer Roman Vishniac, "Rediscovered", is a bit puzzling at first. After all, Vishniac's A Vanished World, published in 1983, has been one of the bestselling photography books of all time, its record of Jewish life in Eastern Europe on the eve of World War II as invaluable as it is heartbreaking.
