Results tagged “belvederecastle”

Sometimes the forecast doesn't quite work out as expected. More accurately, sometimes the forecast sucks. Of the big three major forecast outfits, AccuWeather started the "big storm" drumbeat Friday night, the Weather Service joined in yesterday, while the Weather Channel, to its credit, never really got on the bandwagon. Gothamist had to laugh early this morning when an AccuWeather forecaster on 880 WCBS blamed the storm for "fizzling out" rather than accept responsiblity for a bad forecast. Way to be a mensch! The storm itself didn't fizzle out, either, dude. Eastern Massachussetts and points northward are getting whomped with up to ten inches of snow today.

MOVIE: MoMA is currently running a retrospective on Joan Blondell, titled The Bombshell from Ninety-first Street. Trace the metamorphosis of the Manhattan-born actress from a young blonde bombshell to...a blonde bombshell in more mature roles! Tonight you can catch her in Blondie Johnson (1933) and Nightmare Alley (1947).

Did you see the snow this morning? Light snow, drizzle and fog were in the mix at Central Park for several hours this morning. More intriguing, between nine and ten this morning the Weather Service reported "unknown precipitation" as falling on Belvedere Castle. Very mysterious! Not enough snow fell in the city to actually be measured but places to the north and west reported up to three inches of snowfall. Aside from the momentary snow...

October is starting off with a continuation of September's trend of quiet weather. Central Park was 2.8 degrees warmer than normal last month. Rainfall at Belvedere Castle was less than half of the normal 4.23 inches. Don't worry, rainfall upstate was closer to average and the reservoir levels are only slightly lower than they typically are at this time of year.

Google turns five this month, five months old since opening its new building on 15th and 9th Avenue in October 2006. To celebrate, Gothamist went on an official tour, complete with watching a game of ping-pong, getting a sneak peak at the famous lunch, and waving at scooter riders whizzing down the hallways, making it by far one of the coolest places to work in Manhattan.

The Central Park Conservancy, the private, non-profit organization that manages the park, let us know about some new signs that will be appearing soon. It's a call to action for park goers to help out: Fifteen signs are being installed with "before" photographs showing how far the park has come since the 1970s and 1980s, with the words "What would we do without your donations?" on them. This is a rendering of the sign that'll go in front of the Belvedere Castle, which certainly doesn't look like that anymore.

After a mostly pleasant weekend the heat and humidity are back! This is a one day, and one day only, appearance. Before the humidity disappears we are going to have a few showers, if not a thunderstorm as a trough of low pressure scoots through town. Sometime after midnight a cold front, currently straddling Lakes Erie and Ontario, will chase the moisture away. It won't be much cooler tomorrow, making it two weeks in a row with above normal temperatures, but the air will be considerably drier. Sunny, warm and dry will be the weather theme through Thursday. Well, Gothamist may be lying a little about Thursday being dry as humidity is likely to increase in advance of another cold front. That cold front might actually bring us a few days of cooler than normal air.

Yesterday saw a weather double-triple. High temperatures reached 100 degrees at LaGuardia and Newark airports, both records. JFK also set a record high, albeit only 97 degrees. The cool spot was Central Park as the thermometer at Belvedere Castle only got up to 95. Hot as it was yesterday, today looks to be a little bit warmer. Yes, warmer. It barely cooled off last night –this morning's low in Central Park was 87– so it won't take much heating to surpass yesterday's temperatures. We are likely to score a quadruple-triple, with all four official local observation spots reaching the century mark. It should be hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. If you decide to make a sidewalk omelet, take a picture and submit it to Gothamist Contribute.

The NY Sun has a great article about a few of NYC's open performances spaces by critic Francis Morrone. Most people love outdoor venues unconditionally, but the article is thought-provoking in terms of how these spaces should work with their environments. Various bandshells are mentioned, such as Seuffert Bandshell in Queens and the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, but one Central Park institution gets a serious dressing-down.

The problem with many of our city's outdoor performance venues is that they've been dumped into inappropriate settings — and have been designed with little or no sensitivity to those settings. A prime example is the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which is home to "Shakespeare in the Park." Originally, this series was begun by Joseph Papp, not in Central Park, but in East River Park on the Lower East Side. Like Naumburg, the book publisher George T. Delacorte thought he was doing something good for the city he loved when he made a series of benefactions to Central Park: the Delacorte Clock, the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, and the Delacorte Theater. Fine though each of these is individually, none has anything to do with the park. The theater was built in 1962, and was intended to be temporary, but instead was renovated in 1976. It is unfortunately infelicitous in its setting. Who thought that a modern theater could play nice with Vaux's enchanting Belvedere Castle? No one thought about that.The park was viewed as a big empty place just crying to have things like bandshells and theaters dumped in it. That such things are popular cannot be denied. A city, after all, gets what it deserves.

Tomorrow's record high temperature is 60 degrees, last reached in 1951. The Weather Service is predicting we will get into the upper 50s. Can we sneak in a couple of extra degrees for our first record-breaking temperature of 2006? We can if Gothamist remembers to bring our flame thrower to Belvedere Castle tomorrow afternoon.

An extreme and inexplicable heat wave hit the Upper West Side yesterday afternoon. Gothamist noticed it was getting very warm as we walked uptown from Lincoln Center. Stopping to take off our coat we spied the thermometer above the Rice Bowl on Broadway near 72nd Street. The 114 degrees unofficially smashes the city's all-time temperature record, breaking the 106 degree heat measured in Central Park on July 9th, 1936. Curiously, yesterday's official high temperature at Belvedere Castle only reached 51 degrees.

Central Park! Belvedere Castle received 7.5 inches of snow from last night's storm, the highest recorded snowfall of any location within the city. The snowfall totals were within the Weather Service's prediction of 5-9 inches for the city. To see what happens when people perceive the snowfall as being less than predicted, see CapitalWeather. Newark wins the metropolitan area sweepstakes with 9.4 inches.

More about bicycle advocacy from Transportation Alternatives and NY Magazine's end-of-the-year piece on Critical Mass rides.

All this talk about heat made us wonder, how hot has it actually gotten here really? After all, it looks as if this week is going to have the mercury rising at a steady pace almost topping out at 90. Yay. While the record high for the state was recorded at 110 in Troy, NY, according to the local Upton office (which is located pretty much smack in the middle of Long Island if you were curious), the all time record high temperature recorded in Central Park is 106 on July 9, 1936. As Gothamist Weather Joe reported, the temperature is recorded at Belvedere Castle and has been since 1920. Before that readings were taken at the Arsenal Building on 5th Ave between 63rd & 64th.

Did you ever wonder where in Central Park the current weather conditions were being observed? Most National Weather Service measurements are made at airports or universities, but here in New York the observations are taken at a castle! Belvedere Castle, which is just south of the Great Lawn near the Delacorte Theater, has been an official observing station since 1920. Wind speed and direction are taken from the roof of the castle. Other measurements are taken at a fenced-in area just south of the castle. While there on Saturday Gothamist was excited to see an aspirated hygrothermometer, a precipitation identification sensor, a cloud height laser ceilometer, a visibility sensor, and a tipping bucket rain gauge. Measurements from those instruments are sent to the NWS forecast office at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and transmitted back to the castle, where you can see the current conditions via an amber monochrome monitor, the likes of which Gothamist hasn’t used since Ed Koch was mayor.