They had $19 million, a deal with Disney, and dreams of becoming the next Ben & Jerry’s. Then everything fell apart.

source: ML

The Pond and Plaza Hotel in 1933: https://www.oldnyc.org/#718363f-a

The three ins of web design: interesting and infuriatingly interactive.

source: DF

Despite the lawsuits and predictions of gridlock, restricting a single Manhattan street to buses has been a success. Why stop there?

And in SF: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Plan-to-remake-SF-s-Market-Street-without-car-14535887.php

Also: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191011-what-happens-when-a-city-bans-car-from-its-streets

source: HN

There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit’s popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true—or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when it created a new signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? What was chosen in its place? Why is Helvetica used now, and when did the changeover occur? To answer those questions this essay explores several important histories: of the New York City subway system, transportation signage in the 1960s, Unimark International and, of course, Helvetica. These four strands are woven together, over nine pages, to tell a story that ultimately transcends the simple issue of Helvetica and the subway.

source: E

By cross-referencing just one hour of footage from public webcams with stories taken in Times Square, BuzzFeed News confirmed the full identities of a half dozen people.

source: grugq

I’d never heard of “Haberman” before. The name of the neighborhood that people who live here would recognize is Maspeth (which you can see up-and-to-the-right of Haberman). Is Haberman even a real neighborhood? Why did Google put this giant Haberman label on the map?

source: HN

So began an unusual stay at the first luxury hotel to grow out of a cultish New York gym. Soon to follow would be other health-enhancing treats, including a deep-tissue massage with CBD oil and a flash freeze in a cryotherapy chamber at minus 100C (minus 150C, if you include wind-chill).

Unusual.

The New York passport office. Wow. Where to begin?

This may be equal parts hilarious and infuriating.

source: ML

Chestnut, a Northern Californian with a placid demeanor, also stars in “The Good, the Bad, the Hungry,” a new ESPN documentary about his surprisingly complex relationship with longtime rival Takeru Kobayashi. And the ESPN marketing machine had gone into overdrive to burnish the hot-dog champion’s image. They arranged to have Chestnut arrive at Citi Field with his sausage posse to throw out the first pitch and later hand out hot dogs — presumably the nonhuman kind.

Vintage technology has powered the innards of the NYC subway system for decades—and sometimes, it surfaces in interesting ways. This one’s for you, OS/2 fans.

Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoiding breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.

source: HN

Here Grows New York visually animates the development of this city’s street grid and infrastructure systems from 1609 to the present day, using geo-referenced road network data, historic maps, and geological surveys. The resulting short film presents a series of “cartographic snapshots” of the built-up area at intervals of every 20-30 years in the city’s history. This process highlights the organic spurts of growth and movement that typify New York’s and most cities’ development through time. The result is an abstract representation of urbanism.

source: K

I think I’ve read more than enough regarding amazon at this point, but this was a fun spicy read.

Furthermore, opposing Amazon was not even good politics, as the politicians have learned since Amazon pulled out. They are like the dog that caught the car. They are now desperately and incredibly trying to explain their actions.

The seventy percent of New Yorkers who supported Amazon and now vent their anger also bear responsibility and must learn that the silent majority should not be silent because they can lose to the vocalminority and self-interested politicians.

source: HN

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, New York City sent photographers to every building in every borough in an attempt to make property tax assessments fairer and more accurate. The result was more than 700,000 black-and-white snapshots of everything from fashionable apartment buildings in Manhattan to this out-of-the-way diner on Staten Island.

The city recently had the images digitized.

In the 1930s, the neighborhood around Broadway and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan was more raffish than respectable. “Stain Specialists,” read the sign outside a dry cleaner there. “Expert Removal of Blood, Ink, Nail Polish, Vomit.”

Like so many figures who come to be enshrined as “quintessentially New York,” Harold Ross, the founder and first editor of this magazine, was an outsider who arrived in the big city nursing an ambition.

Ross subsisted on nicotine, coffee, and nerves. The hours he kept were horrible, and his three marriages failed. But he fulfilled his dream. The New Yorker found its footing during the Depression. And although the magazine began to venture far beyond midtown with the start of the Second World War, the city remained an essential terra firma, a spirit and a home.

This week, while we digest one holiday and prepare for more, we’ve decided to open the archive and republish a sampling of New York stories, New York essays, New York poems, and New York drawings. There’s even a classic New York cover, by the Mexican artist Matías Santoyo. All the pieces you’ll find in this issue, fiction and nonfiction, are set in the city, and all are deeply personal.

On Sunday, the cinnamon-raisin bagel was the hole in the center of a debate that shook the political world, threatening for a moment to eclipse the tweets of another certain native New Yorker living in the White House.

The point, says Mr. Remes, is to leave the cinnamon-raisin bagel—with or without lox—alone. “People should get to eat everything they want to eat,” he says.

Politicians and their radical beliefs.

THE FLEECE ZIP-UP VEST, the capstone of a new corporate uniform, lurks in air-conditioned corporate cubicles across America. It covers the sweating backs of nervous interns ordering supersize coffees at Starbucks . It’s worn by silver-haired executives in the elevator, heading up to their corner suites. It appears in myriad shades of gray and blue, on men of all shapes and sizes who earn all kinds of salaries. It has become as ubiquitous as the take-out salad in humdrum workplaces, and is slowly supplanting the suit and tie as essential office wear.

The trend is so pervasive that an Instagram account with nearly 40,000 followers, The Midtown Uniform (@midtownuniform), has sprung up to savagely document these corporate clones in cities like New York, Toronto and Washington D.C. The anonymous account adds pithy captions to crowdsourced photos, riffing on the omnipresence of this particular outfit. “Money isn’t really yours unless you’re fully vested,” read a caption on a recent post showing two men in matching pink shirts and blue vests.

https://www.instagram.com/midtownuniform/

It built the city. Now, no matter the cost — at least $100 billion — the city must rebuild it to survive.

It was the arrival of the subway that transformed a seedy neighborhood called Longacre Square into Times Square, that helped turn a single square mile surrounding the Wall Street station into the center of global finance, that made Coney Island an amusement park for the masses. It was the subway that fueled the astonishing economic growth that built the city’s iconic skyscrapers. Other cities had subways, but none threaded through nearly as many neighborhoods as New York’s, enabling it to move large numbers of workers between Manhattan and the middle-class boroughs — a cycle that repeated itself every day, generating ever more wealth and drawing in ever more people.

We will run 8,477 one-way trips over the course of a day. We hope to have 8,477 on-time trains. We’re not going to do it today.

Some cool photos, too.