The Statue of Liberty | blog

Next Thursday, September 10th, 2009 marks the beginning of the world-renowned New York Fashion Week. To commemorate this week, NYC & Company and the City of New York have partnered with Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) to create an unprecedented citywide initiative called Fashion’s Night Out, whose goals are to promote local retail stores, restore consumer confidence and celebrate fashion.

This initiative was announced this past May by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as the CEO of NYC & Company George Fertitta, Vogue Editor in Chief Anna Wintour and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Executive Director Steven Kolb, to support local retailers on the first night of Fashion Week.

By: sfbaystyle.typepad.com      Read more >>

Taxi driver Kone Mahamadou avoids walking the streets near his Harlem home at night, convinced violence threatens to reclaim the neighborhood - even if NYPD statistics say otherwise.

“If you walk these streets, especially at night, you know crime is definitely not down,” said Mahamadou, 44, who lives near Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. and W. 131st St.

“It’s not safe. I don’t know where they get these statistics.”

Crime is still plummeting across the five boroughs - including Harlem’s 32nd Precinct, where Mahamadou lives - continuing a trend that began 15 years ago, according to the NYPD.

Yet many residents worried about the nation’s battered economy think crime is actually surging - an impression that does not surprise experts.

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>>