In late 1929, Alfred E. Smith, the leader of a group of investors erecting the Empire State Building, announced that they were increasing the height of the building to 1,250 feet from 1,050. Mr. Smith, a past governor of New York, denied that competition with the 1,046-foot-high Chrysler Building was a factor. “We are measuring its rise by principles of economic investment rather than spectacular standards,” he told The New York Times.

The extra 200 feet, it was announced, was to serve as a mooring mast for dirigibles so that they could dock in Midtown, rather than out in Lakehurst, N.J., the station used by the German Graf Zeppelin. Mr. Smith said that at the Empire State Building, airships like the Graf, almost 800 feet long, would “swing in the breeze and the passengers go down a gangplank”; seven minutes later they would be on the street.

But the Germans, who dominated dirigible technology, had not asked for a docking station, and passenger traffic on dirigibles was still minuscule. The mast camouflaged the quest for boasting rights to the world’s tallest building, an ambition to which it seemed indecent to admit.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Lewis W. Hine, Welders on the Empire State Building, circa 1930 }

The performer-writer Ann Liv Young belongs to the movement in the arts that was labeled Sensation in the 1990s. She performed “Snow White” naked, apart from a Disney mask on her face, while heavily pregnant. Dildos and masturbation have been part of her theatrical fare. At MoMA P.S. 1 in February she insulted a fellow artist’s work (accompanied by urination and masturbation) until management turned the lights off on her. And on Friday and Saturday she performed a one-woman “Cinderella” at the Issue Project Room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. In this, she converses with members of the audience and also urinates and defecates onstage. (…)

Waiting 10 minutes for someone to defecate onstage is boring.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

unrelated { Upcoming free museum days in NYC }

illustration { Mathias Schweizer’s Malamerde }

I’m not going to gripe about the price of tickets or the price of concessions or the exclusive Heineken sponsorship that forced me to drink, well Heineken, or even the weather, as you had no control over that.
But a few questions:

1. Upon arriving at the stadium bag-free as per your security notes, I was told that e-readers were not allowed in the stadium. E-READERS! iPhones, BlackBerries, video cameras, real cameras, these things are all allowed. On these things one can take pictures, video, talk, blog, surf the web. On an e-reader, one can … read. Why does the USTA hate literacy? By the way, I went to another entrance and snuck mine in, so take THAT!

{ Ken Wheaton | Continue reading }

{ Blue Six, You Play Too Rough, 2010 }

{ The Knife, N.Y. Hotel, 2001 }

{ Over the weekend, 9/11 memorials were held across the nation. In New York, one such memorial was held at City Hall Park. Organized by inventors Steven Brandstetter and James Devlin of J&S Gaming, the event featured the pair’s Lottery Ball Characters which were turned into life sized costumes to represent the likeness of a police officer and a fireman. | adrants via copyranter }

The First 9/11 Movie Musical: Clear Blue Tuesday.

“Ground Zero Mosque” protesters driving around a rented, decommissioned missile.

Top Models Named for Fashion’s Night Out Show: Naomi Campbells…

“Whoever at Curbed decided the actual address and floor plan was necessary to get those page views, I hope they die in a fire.” Rachel Maddow isn’t happy about Curbed publishing the floor plans and address of the West Village apartment she’s moving into.

Lady Gaga Dresses as (Nearly Naked) Statue of Liberty. Plus: Official Lady Gaga Halloween Costumes. Related: Lady Gaga’s Healthy Diet: Tofu, Turkey and Hummus.

Tropical Storm Warnings For Long Island & Jersey Shores. More: Long Island officials are opening shelters and making other emergency plans in case Hurricane Earl hits the Hamptons this week.

Camping in a Brooklyn Wilderness.

Oyster festivals set for September, October in NY.

‘We’re Getting The Hell Out Of This Sewer,’ Entire Populace Reports. 8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live.

Former Lower East Side hipster owes IRS $172 million in back taxes.

A Bronx judge has thrown out a summons issued against a Bronx man for wearing saggy pants, finding that “the Constitution still leaves some opportunity for people to be foolish if they so desire.”

Police in New York say a woman had a sneezing fit that caused her to drive off a road, crash into several trees and plow through a fence.

One couple who left their car parked in a long-term lot near Kennedy Airport during a trip to California is trying to figure out what their car has been doing without them.

The owners of the Empire State Building and their supporters say their tower’s international status and New York City’s skyline are in mortal danger of an assault from a “monstrosity.” Their rival: a proposed tower on Seventh Avenue, two blocks to the west, that, according to its developers, will help the city grow and prosper, provide thousands of jobs and improve the quality of life for tens of thousands of New Yorkers. [Read more]

MTA says the cost of unlimited cards would soar to $130 next month.

NY bicycle news roundup: bike share, Unicycle Fest, new path.

NYC subway, late 70s.

Why is New York called the Big Apple?

[$12 a pack] It’s been six weeks since New York’s state government raised the cigarette tax to $4.35 a pack, and guess what? Cigarette sales have fallen by 35 percent. (…)

The crazy-high price of cigarettes here is sending New Yorkers over the state border to, say, Pennsylvania, where a pack of cigarettes can be obtained for around $5, or Jersey, where they’re $7ish. People are also heading to Indian reservations, where, according to a friend who does exactly this, you can get a carton for $22, and where sales have apparently gone up a whopping 300%.

{ Village Voice | Continue reading }

photo { Petra Collins }

It’s hot outside.

But there is hot and then, to use the scientific term, there is hot. There is also hot as we experience it today, of course, in our super-chilled buildings and ventilated apartments, and hot as it was felt a century ago when an indoor breeze meant your cousin was blowing on your belly.

Take, for example, July 3, 1901, when 200 deaths and 300 cases of heat prostration were caused in New York City as the temperatures reached — and one could be excused for adding “only” here — 99 degrees.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Fort Tilden State Park feels like the city’s best-kept secret—an unspoiled island oasis, tantalizingly close to Manhattan. Even on a weekend at the height of summer, you’ll get a 50-yard stretch of beach to yourself. }

“Yoga is a good thing, so you tend to push further than you would in a sport where you are actually more attuned to injury and afraid of injuries,” said Dr. Michelle Carlson, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan who specializes in arms and hands. She said she recently “saw four women in a row in my office with hand injuries from yoga.”

Nobody seems to keep careful track of the numbers. The most recent estimate comes from the United States Product Safety Commission, which tracks sports injuries: it listed 4,450 reported yoga injuries in 2006, up from 3,760 in 2004. But Dr. Carlson and several others said they had seen large increases lately, as yoga became more popular. “I have been doing this for 20 years, and I didn’t see yoga injuries 20 years ago,” Dr. Carlson said. “I can see a couple of injuries a week.”

Training for yoga teachers can vary, and classes are so large in some studios that instructors do not pay enough attention to everybody. In New York, many people approach yoga with a no-pain, no-gain mind-set, with predictable results.

Then there is the age factor: you see a fair share of middle-aged people twisting and bending and lunging, and I know from experience that a 40-something body is temperamental.

Back injuries are quite common. Positions like upward dog and cobra, requiring backbends, can aggravate the spine. Others that call for elongating the back, like seated forward bend, can wreak havoc on discs. Rotator cuffs and wrists can get battered during plank poses and chaturangas, which are like push-ups, while knees are susceptible to the lotus position, hero’s pose and the warrior positions.

The headstand — a more advanced move — is an equal opportunity offender. If done improperly, it can roil your back, neck, shoulders and wrists.

Then there are the freak injuries. A woman in crow pose fell over and broke her nose.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Anthony Suau }

{ A Lamborghini BLEW UP on Rodney Street, which serves as the off-ramp for the BQE’s Metropolitan Avenue exit. | New York Shitty | via Copyranter }

unrelated { unrelated: For the last two years of his life, after an attempted suicide, Schumann was confined to a mental institution at his own request. }

{ The Social Art Collective is proud to present Heroin Stamp Project, an exhibition focusing on the branding of heroin in New York City. At once beautiful and unsettling, the images in the exhibit illustrate a complex narrative around public health and preventable consequences of injection drug use. | White Box, 329 Broome Street, NYC | June 23rd - June 29th, 2010 | Thanks Ser Gee! }

NY man’s kidney transplant gave him woman’s cancer.

Long Island couple staged their own kidnapping to get money from one of their parents.

Tobacco companies contest NY anti-smoking signs.

Map shows how to avoid tourists in New York.

This electric unicab is one of the submissions for NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission’s search for the next green cab.

The price is about $8,000, but an insider said Leibovitz got a big discount because the chairs were on sale.

The $1 million-a-day heroin empire of a notorious Harlem druglord was brought down by his flashy fur coat, the kingpin says.

Most of New York City’s darker charms have been bought, sold and put “on the grid”, but in the relative desolation of Gowanus lies the Observatory, an offbeat little museum specializing in all things eccentric, occult, and downright morbid.

Inside New York’s Art World: Interview with James Rosenquist and Leo Castelli, 1976.

The Andy Warhol Film Project began in the 1980s when the Whitney Museum and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) agreed to collaborate on the largest archival research project in the history of American avant-garde cinema: to catalogue Warhol’s massive film collection, investigate its history, and preserve and re-release all of the films in conjunction with a program of scholarly research and publication.

video disclosure { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC is involved in the co-production of Spacer:One. | Related: DJ Cash Money (USA), DMC World DJ Champion 1988 | Calla me a sucka boy you’re pushin a broom starts at 3:15 minute mark. }

bonus:

{ Design by Jeff Baxter adapted from a photograph by David Heald | Guggenheim and YouTube Launch Search for the World’s Most Creative Video }

{ Apexart, 291 Church Street, NYC }

{ Ray Sawhill }

{ Honeybees exposed to cellphone radiation appear to lose the ability to return to their hives and queen bees produce a lower number of eggs. Bees pollinate some 80 per cent of commercial crops —apples, melons, sunflower, mustard, cucumbers and radish, she said. “A massive loss of bees could cause loss of production of such crops,” Kumar added. | Telegraph India | Continue reading | Images: Bee Swarm Takes Over Wall Street | Watch the video | Thanks Douglas! }

{ The Shape of Manhattan in Subway Maps. Manhattan dominates in the new design, its girth growing by 31 percent over the current map.The island is depicted 83 percent wider than its actual proportions. | MTA will unveil a resized, recolored and simplified edition of the NY Subway map, its first overhaul in more than a decade. | NY Times |More }

{ Scott Musgrove at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, until June 12, 2010 }

This weekend, the sun will set in perfect alignment with primary sections of the Manhattan street grid. Manhattanhenge 2010: May 30/31 and July 11/12.

Gino, an Italian restaurant which opened in 1945 on Lexington Avenue near Sixty-first Street, will close after Saturday night’s dinner on May 29th. All the items on the menu appear on a single plastic-covered page and were handwritten in ink sixty-five years ago by the restaurant’s founder, Gino Circiello.

The first time he went to Sardi’s, he believes, was in 1933, six years after it opened at its current location, on West 44th Street. The last time was Tuesday afternoon, when Mr. Herz, 93, a retired theatrical jack-of-all-trades, ate a crabmeat sandwich.

Like so many of the city’s legendary nightspots, the Lion disappeared, replaced by a series of other restaurants on the ground floor of a brownstone on Ninth Street. It reopened last week, as a tavern and restaurant whose owners have labored to restore the spirit of its early-1960s heyday. A Vision of the City as It Once Was.

9/11 attacks linked to increased male baby miscarriages.

Times Square Set for Colorful Makeover Before Summer’s Tourist Rush. [eek!]

Claude Monet’s nympheas at Gagosian Gallery, until June 26, 2010.

The exhibition titled “Salt Rises above the Sky — 25 Years of unique salt artworks by Bettina Werner, 49th floor of 7 World Trade Center, NYC, thru June 10th, 2010.

From Wednesday, May 26 at 12 am through Friday, May 28 at 11:59 pm, the Whitney Museum will remain open for three consecutive days as part of 2010 artist Michael Asher’s Biennial project.

One of the reasons New Yorkers pay $100 a day to be here.