The Statue of Liberty | blog

Seven score and four years ago, as Lincoln lay dying in a boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theater, his myth was already being born. A good part of that myth is owed to Lincoln’s appearance on postage stamps. The first one, a black 15-cent stamp, was issued in 1866, a year after his death.

In their exquisite, miniature engravings, these early stamps began the reincarnation of Lincoln: the little images of his almost saintly visage, gazing serenely past the viewer in three-quarter profile, became part of our public consciousness. Borne on letters overseas, stamps also carried the consciousness of Lincoln around the world.

By: nytimes.com    Read more >>

The Dalai Lama’s nephew walked into Manhattan on Saturday, ending a 900-mile trek that began in Indiana to support Tibetan independence.

“I lost a lot of my toenails, I lost feeling in one of my toes, and I have a lot of blisters – blisters upon blisters,” Jigme Norbu said as he arrived at the Chinese Consulate on W. 42nd St.

“It’s all mental, though. It’s not physical,” Norbu said. “If you have the determination to fight for your country’s independence it helps you accomplish the goal.”

Norbu began his walk 40 days ago, on March 10, in Indianapolis and it took him through Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Washington, Pennsylvania and finally New York.

By: nydailynews.com     Read more >>

The Freedom Tower will be topped by New York City’s highest restaurant, a 34,000-square-foot space on the 100th and 101st floors that the Port Authority, which owns the tower, yesterday offered up to entice interest among potential operators.

The Port Authority says it is hoping to create “one of the best-located and most well known dining establishments in the world,” and the available space would appear, at least on paper, to have all the desired trappings sought by an ambitious restaurant or event space owner. There is the 360-degree view of New York City and the Hudson and East rivers on two separate floors, one of which is located adjacent to the public observation deck. There are five express elevators and the state of the art facilities that the Freedom Tower will offer when completed. Lower Manhattan has gone through a recent economic boom, with the average salary of residents there at almost twice the median of the typical New York City resident.

By The New York Sun    Read more>>

The artwork contains a variety of images and writing executed in spray paint, grease pencil, magic marker and whatever else was at hand _ in silver, gold, pink and red. There are cartoon-like pictures of a bomber airplane, images of a heart and a cake, and several references to Quaaludes, a popular 1970s party drug.

The mural was found in the eighth-floor loft owned by art critic Edit deAk in the late 1970s and ’80s _ a time when much of fringe art, including graffiti, was being validated. The wall is nearly intact, with the exception of gaps where a dishwasher and plumbing were installed years later. (ULA ILNYTZKY)

By Newsday.com    Read more>>

Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo’s “Tres Personajes” a 1970 painting vibrating with reds, yellows and purples, may fetch as much as $1 million at a Sotheby’s auction on Nov. 20, the work’s first public viewing since Elizabeth Gibson spied it in a mound of garbage on a Manhattan sidewalk.

Gibson, a tall, blond 53-year-old resident of the Upper West Side, went out for a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning in 2003. She spotted a large painting poking out from among the garbage bags left on the sidewalk on West 72nd Street. In her pre-caffeinated haze, she kept walking.

By Bloomberg.com    Read more>>

There’s an ease and an affection between Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony that makes their performances even more appealing together than they are separately.

Whatever the case, their duets — the ballad “Por Arriesgarnos” and the salsafied “No Me Ames” — were the best moments in the duo’s show at Madison Square Garden Sunday night, part of Lopez’s first national tour.

By Newsday.com    Read more>>