Tag: New York
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Tour Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s New York Studio
© THE ESTATE OF CHRISTO V. JAVACHEFF 
© THE ESTATE OF CHRISTO V. JAVACHEFF View more photos of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 48 Howard Street art studio in Manhattan at galeriemagazine.com.
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New York has been re-classified as a sub-tropical climate region
Measurable climate change has slowly been affecting the coastlines of the Americas for several years now. That’s no secret of course. Rising coastlines, ravaging seas, devastating hurricanes, and superstorms have been battering coastal cities and don’t seem to be letting up. Even, tourist island havens have been completely wiped off the Earth.
It doesn’t end there of course. Even the Southwestern regions are having trouble keeping up with extreme storm systems. We’re nearing hurricane season, and due to a weakened arctic jetstream, we may see more extreme weather phenomena as more “blocking” events become the norm. Think brutal heatwaves and more and more frequent intense winter storms.
All of that is separate from the larger story — year over year climate temperatures since 1972, has risen in steadily here New York. So, as a result, the region has now been reclassified as a sub-tropical climate region. As someone who grew up in Texas, it’s wild that NYC and the Lone Star State have climatological patterns in common. Granted, Texas experienced very long humid summers, while NYC’s summers a tad shorter. But that humidity, is particularly rough.
Here’s more climate types documented across the US:
Current as of February 2021 according to Wikipedia -
Houston is less affordable than New York City
Houston, infamous for it’s Viet-Cajun cuisine, the Johnson Space Center, the old Astrodome, and notably its sprawling highways and blacktops. For those who have never visited Houston, the marshes of Texas’ coasts can be unforgiving. The prairie regions surrounding the port of Houston had to be transformed to solidify its foothold as the energy export capital of Texas. City planners replaced natural creek-beds, prairie lands, and marshy ditches with concrete culverts and drain-ways — sealing Houston’s fate as a flood-prone metropolitan city forever.
Apart from the occasional hurricane, and the muggy summers, the cost of living in Houston used to be relatively inexpensive — at least until recent decades. The rising economic cost of flood damages, growing gridlock, gasoline prices, and maintaining a car during the era of tumultuous climate change has made it difficult for the middle class to thrive. In fact, it’s much worse than we thought.
According to reporting from Texas Monthly, Houston’s affordability has dried up along with its protective prairie lands:
Furthermore, when considering housing and transportation costs as a percentage of income, Houston (and Dallas–Fort Worth, for that matter) appear significantly less affordable than cities with much more expensive housing, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. The annual median household income in Houston was just under $61,000 in 2016, while in New York that same figure was just over $69,000. As a result, Houstonians spend just under 50 percent of their income on those combined costs, whereas New Yorkers spend just over 45 percent.
It may be a cheaper opportunity cost to move and to live in Houston. For example, buying a house in a Houston suburb is vastly cheaper than buying a home just about anywhere outside the Tri-State area in New York. But, transportation and environmental costs continue to mount in Houston.
Until Texas Central builds a high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas, I’m afraid that all Texas metropolitan areas will face the same fate. Cars and highways don’t scale well when the vast majority of city residents live in suburbia.
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How New York’s Bagel Boys fought and beat a mafia takeover
Pictured above is a bagel from Murrary’s Bagels. Easily my favorite place to grab a bagel in New York City. But, I love that The Times previously referred to a bagel as “an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis,” in a 1960’s article concerning the topic. But, the real meat of this story has to do with mafia and the bagel producing Union Local 338. Jason Turbow at GrubStreet writes:
Except that Willner’s weren’t the only mobbed-up bagels in town. In 1964, a shop called Bagel Boys had opened in the center of Jewish New York, on King’s Highway in Brooklyn. Among its principals was Thomas Eboli, otherwise known as Tommy Ryan, a capo in the Genovese crime family and a direct counter to Dio. Eboli was so powerful, in fact, that when Vito Genovese died a few years later, Eboli reigned for a time as the family boss. […]
Ultimately, the union handled the Mafia the same way that it handled nearly all extreme issues with management: full public confrontation. Nearly as soon as Bagel Boys opened its doors, Local 338 members showed up en masse to picket, distributing leaflets headlined, “PLEASE DON’T BUY,” with warnings that nonunion bagels “jeopardize the hard won standards of labor and inspection which the New York City public now enjoy.” Their most effective tactic in such situations was handing out free product in quantities sufficient to devastate business.
Ultimately, the strategy to confront the mafia in public worked. But the showdown was far from over. This entire story is rich in vivid detail. The rise of kitchen machinery, preservatives, and dough delivery networks — the battle for New York City’s penchant for bagel seemed insatiable. The spoils of war will go to the victor surely? Such a wild ground war between the familiar Jewish union bagel makers and the mafia is ripe for a movie if you ask me. This confectionary war was waged for nearly half-century came to a close in 1971 according to the author. Read the entire story here at GrubStreet.
But, there are other bagel battles to be fought across state lines, such as, what makes New York bagels so tasty? According to NPR, it’s likely due to the chemistry of New York’s tap water, and the steaming method which adds to the thin but chewy texture we’ve come to know and love. Whodathunk?
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Jim Shaugnessy’s 60-Year Odyssey Photographing the Evolution of the North American Railroad
Jim Shaughnessy, “Central Vermont local freight switches cars in wintry scene, Bethel, Vermont” (1955) (source: the artist and Thames & Hudson) Allison Meier at Hyperallergic:
“Always restless, even daring when he had to be, Shaughnessy worked hard to get in and around the railroad, in all conditions, in all settings,” writes Kevin P. Keefe, former editor-in-chief of Trains magazine, in a book essay. “If the life of a crossing watchman was important, then Shaughnessy shuddered through a subzero night until the perfect moment when his subject dashed back into the warmth of a shanty. If the guts of a steam locomotive were interesting, then he’d insert himself into the depths of roundhouses and sidle up next to the hostlers in order to record the oily intricacies of valve gear and side rods.”
Born in Troy, New York, in 1933, Shaughnessy published his first photograph in Trains in 1952. While the detailed captions in Essential Witness are those of a true rail enthusiast (the “Pennsylvania Railroad 11-class 2-10-0” is identified as chugging over an elevated bridge), his images have a broader appreciation for how people exist with the railroads in North America, and how these systems altered the landscape. The silhouette of a tunnel in Canaan, New York, in 1989 reveals its jagged edges, framing the train with this rock that was blasted through for progress. Sometimes the trains are tiny against the mountains or waterfalls, sometimes the focus is elsewhere, like a 1953 photograph that concentrates on the cows in a Vermont pasture, unperturbed by the freight train zooming behind.
Jim Shaughnessy, “Pennsylvania Railroad operator hoops up train orders to crew of a northbound coal train, Trout Run, Pennsylvania” (1956) (source: the artist and Thames & Hudson) I love this photo. Train orders, are largely obsolete here in North America. But sometimes, it still happens. Traditionally orders get hooped to the conductor at the front, and the operator(s) at the caboose. Nowadays, operations are radioed or even downloaded.
Locomotive transport is and continues to be one of the most important means of transporting goods across land. It’s fun to look back and understand where we’ve come from, and to see where we’re headed.
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Donald Judd’s Furniture
Donald Judd, was a truly wonderful artist. He was a Texan, a self-proclaimed minimalist (many attribute the term’s ubiquity and elevated definition to his contributions). He was a pioneer in fabrication methods, a prolific furniture designer, and finally an architect.
Judd once purchased a beautiful cast-iron, five-story building at 101 Spring Street, in New York City and it still stands today. It’s where his foundation is currently headquartered in New York. His work, (such as the one pictured below) is transcendent, stimulating ephemeral works. Often bold, they create little spaces and jettison outward from walls or floors with sharpness and arresting hues:
Untitled, 1991. Donald Judd. Photo via David Zwirner. While Judd died in 1994, tragically from lymphoma (fuck cancer), the Judd Foundation lives on. It is a non-profit, dedicated to preserving and maintaining the life and works of Donald Judd. The foundation also happens to offer scholastic programs and internships to practicing artists. They even have some of Judd’s furniture design fully fabricated for sale. Sales benefit the foundation’s mission and helps keep the lights on. Some pieces in particular are quite striking:
I don’t know about you, but most of these are just completely divine. I highly recommend visiting the shop here, and check out the rest of the catalog.
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Maxar’s Incredible Low-angle Photograph of NYC
The Maxar Worldview-3 satellite is a high-resolution commercial satellite armed with an impressive 31cm panchromatic resolution DSLR camera. Kottke shared this impressive low-angle shot the camera took of NYC:
Here’s a tighter crop which includes the Hudson river, East New Jersey, lower Manhattan, and Brooklyn (Prospect Park is huge!):
The Maxar Worldview-3 satellite is still in service today. It is not to be confused with the Maxar Worldview-4 satellite, which failed and ultimately lost control of the satellite mid-orbit earlier this year.
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David Harbour’s Cozy Reconstructed New York Loft
Juliet Izon for Architectural Digest writes:
Then, after about three years of searching, he came across a space in the Nolita neighborhood that he describes as an uncut gem. “It didn’t look like much,” he says of the building, which was once a wagon wheel factory. “The floors were uneven, there was crappy drywall. There were two bathroomhttps://stephen.nycd right next to each other that served no purpose other than to make it a two-bathroom. It was just a crazy space that clearly hadn’t been touched since the ’70s.” And, since it made a pretty terrible first impression, the price was right. Harbour also knew he would be shooting in Atlanta for nearly a year, which meant he had the time to complete a “soup to nuts” renovation and didn’t need to worry about where he would live in the interim.
This is a proper way to reconstruct a home. You go out, and buy a some under-appreciated piece of property, give it some love, and before you know it, you have your self a lovely cozy little next you can call home.
Kyle O’Donnell, of Gramercy Design was hired by Harbour (at the referral of his business manager it appears), and it does not disappoint. It’s stunningly beautiful. I highly recommend watching the video the magazine produces for the piece on David Harbour. It’s lovely, charming and the vintage NYC loft isn’t over-the-top. It’s simple, utilitarian, filled with greenery, cozy corners and candelabras (but they’re not always there):
And it has four taps. Everybody who always comes in here is always like, four taps? Why four taps? It’s like why not four taps? I don’t understand why everyone gets so — but you can, you know, turn them all on and it fills up very quickly. I love this bathroom. I think it’s great.
And I don’t want to throw Kyle under the bus, my architect designer, who’s fantastic and who designed this thing. I love him. We knew you guys were coming today. It was a lie when I pretended like I didn’t know that you were coming. We knew you were coming and so we art directed a little bit of the apartment, one of which is Kyle likes these candelabras. And we put these big candelabras [into the bathroom]. I don’t want you to think that I’m a big candelabra bathtub type guy.
Photography by Max Burkhalter for Architectural Digest. Visit Architectural Digest for the rest of the photography and video.
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Urban Rats are Evolving at Super Speed
Kristin Houser writes at The Byte:
Efforts to control urban rat populations rarely — if ever — result in the complete eradication of the pests. Most of the time, the goal is to simply reduce rodent numbers enough to minimize the spread of disease or damage to property.
But according to Jonathan Richardson, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Richmond, letting some rats slip through the cracks can cause a local population to swiftly evolve, leading to either of two long-term outcomes: sickly rats or “super” ones.
Rats are being artificially extinguished at a rate that catalyzes the evolutionary process known as natural selection. In large cities, such as NYC, or Brazil, pesky rodent populations are frequently targeted for extermination with warfarin. A an extremely deadly and potent poison which essentially causes liver failure in mammals. The chemical is so deadly, and so toxic in fact, it has been used to the target feral hog problem in parts of Texas (despite the lack of an EPA approval). Which is extraordinarily dangerous, because warfarin can bioaccumulate and kill grazing livestock and cattle, and could ultimately end up in your food.
As the breeding pairs of genetically diverse rats dwindles in these urban cities to a smaller and smaller pool, one of two scenarios will unfold for the rat populations:
Urban rat populations could become extremely weak, diseased and in-bred. In this scenario, it could lead to a total eradication of rats.
However, in an alternate scenario, it could lead to a super-fit rat population. Whose who survive extermination, pass on those survival traits to offspring and become super rats.
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5 True Tales of Manhattan
Lorri Cramer, is a New Yorker who re-habilitates turtles in her Upper West Side apartment. The last Cuban-Chinese restaurant (La Caridad 78) in Manhattan. The best Jazz in NYC can be heard in Marjorie Eliot’s apartment in Harlem every Sunday. New York can be a tough place for the birds — meet the city’s only bird clinic called the Wild Bird Fund. Lastly, NYC can be lonely, Mr. Jones Supper Club aims to solve that problem.
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Treasures in the Trash
New York has an entrenched and somewhat mystical entanglement with waste management over the course of its history. For the past 34 years, Nelson Molina, a former DSNY worker has collected and maintained an incredible (but unofficial) museum of 45,000 collected objects that were thrown out to the curb by New Yorkers. The short which follows Molina, offers us a glimpse of the collection. The short is titled, Treasures in the Trash and is directed by New York based filmmaker, Nicolas Heller.
My favorite line from Molina is so poetic:
Before you throw something out, think about. Everything can have a home.
Since the museum resides inside an active garage for the Department of Sanitation, it’s not open to the public. But, that could all change with your help! From the video’s description:
The collection is not open to the public since it is in an active garage, but our hope is to get a proper space with the help of this film. Please visit nycstrongest.org/future-museum to donate!
According to Atlas Obscura, you can also email tours@dsny.nyc.gov to schedule a private tour of the MANEAST11 garage’s collection.