At the Ethnic Market highlights international specialty foods and ingredients you're very unlikely to find at your local Gristedes. more ›

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Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston are putting it all on the line for Sunday's Super Bowl. After winning the awful bet from Green Bay, Bloomberg has a lot more riding on the line when the Giants face off against the Patriots this weekend. As is the custom when the playoffs roll around, the mayors of the teams participating decided on a friendly food wager. The stakes, or should we say steaks, are upped in this bet as the Vince Lombardy Trophy are on the line. more ›

Barack Obama won the South Carolina Democratic primary yesterday, taking 55% of the vote, winning by a greater margin than most pundits and recent polls had predicted. Hillary Clinton finished second with 27% and John Edwards came in third. The NY Times headline writes that he won by "forging a coalition of support among black and white voters in a contest that sets the stage for a state-by-state fight for the party’s presidential nomination." more ›

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 black and white spy thriller The 39 Steps has been given a vividly colorful stage adaptation by a troupe of four British actors who’ve brought their madcap show to Broadway after an award-winning run on the West End. Adapted from a 1915 novel by John Buchan, the movie concerns the dashing but vague Richard Hannay, who gets ensnared in a deadly game of cat and mouse after shots ring out at a London music hall. In the ensuing stampede, a woman bluntly asks to go home with him and, once there, reveals that she’s a spy trying to stop a plot to smuggle British military secrets out of the country. more ›

When we saw today’s edition of The New York Times we did a double take since it was in black and white above the fold. The black and white fifty year old photo of presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his father gave a classic retro look to the paper, making newsstands throughout the city look like there was a bit of a time warp among the stacks of newspapers. more ›

Haru: The Japanese mini-chain’s takeover of New York is proceeding according to plan with the opening of their latest location in the financial district. The elegant, bi-level space (pictured) is located in the landmark 1903 Beaver Building, which calls to mind a mini-Flatiron Building. This location features two floors of dining to accommodate 160 guests, a 17 seat sushi bar, a second “alcohol” bar and two private party rooms. Like the other Harus, the extensive... more ›

Sufjan Keeps it Local We really enjoyed Sufjan's BQE show last Friday at BAM. It was a great, refined, change of pace evening for the indie rock crowd. The evening was really a sum of it's parts, all told. The entire presentation of the BQE piece was far more engaging than the actual music itself. It was solid, but not up to Suf's lofty magical standards. But the little things...the gritty video clips of the... more ›

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: Hostages(!) on Geranium and Kissena Blvds. in Queens, a pedestrian struck at Stillwell and Mermaid Aves. in Brooklyn, and a bank robbery on Columbus Ave. and 72nd St. in Manhattan. Knicks coach Isiah Thomas says that the stress of lawsuits are no distraction. He can keep doing what he's doing regardless of legal problems. A boat full of gadget-minded men. There was a stop-off at Liberty Island; and slide... more ›

A look at some noteworthy television this week: more ›

Museum of the Moving Image, through Sept. 30 more ›

Film Forum more ›

Does Joe Torre, manager of the Yankees, treat black and white players differently? According to former Yankees outfielder Gary Sheffield, he does. In an interview that is scheduled to air Tuesday on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumble. Sheffield makes some shocking allegations in the interview with Andrea Kremer, saying that he wasn't the only black player that had issues with Torre. more ›

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Jose Reyes did all he could for the National League in Tuesday's All-Star Game in San Francisco, but his team was still undone by the American League's best. Reyes played eight innings, had three hits and a run scored, but that wasn't enough. Perhaps his best performance came when he pulled back his fist from Carlos Beltran and David Wright during the pregame introductions. more ›

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a stabbing on Knickerbocker Ave. in Brooklyn, a shooting on East 166th St. and College Ave. in the Bronx, and a chain saw accident at Crystal Ave. and Wade St. on Staten Island
• Neighbors in Forest Hills, Queens banded together in order to save four black and white kittens, as the alley the animals called home flooded in this week's torrential downpour. The accompanying photo is priceless.
• While his roommate was unconscious from a car accident that cost him a leg, Anthony Giordano stole the man's wallet and used it to steal his identity. He eventually ran up credit card bills totalling $22,000, blowing the cash on a 15-year-old car and strip clubs.
• A man from Syracuse aligned an array of corporate benefactors to treat his best friend since kindergarten to a weekend in NYC and a game at Yankee Stadium, where they will meet the friend's favorite Yankee: Don Mattingly. Michael Sayre is already blind in one eye and losing sight in the other. His best friend Michael Aiden wanted him to see Mattingly in person while there was still time.
• Two Brooklyn restaurant owners were arrested for attempting to bribe health inspectors to overlook code violations like uncovered raw meat and mouse droppings in their establishments.
• A stolen religious relic (a bone fragment of the church's patron saint) was returned to St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Queens this week, after it was stolen by a drug abuser who had been baptized in that very same church.
• Water attracts coins, and the Times looks at the man responsible for removing them from the fountains at The Metropolitan Museum.
• A father and son were discovered dead inside their Brooklyn apartment this afternoon, in what police suspect may have been a murder suicide.

A friend who emailed us a few weeks ago to inform us that the Beastie Boys were releasing a new album and that it was going to be all instrumental left us conflicted. We'll admit that the instrumental portion of their last shows at the Garden were great, but we wouldn't consider them highlights, and we generally judge their last tour a high-point of our concert-going existence. A week or so later, this same friend sent us a link to a video that the Beastie Boys released on their site. The video opens in black and white, with the band wearing dark suits and ties; an electric organ starts the song. "Oh no," one might be tempted to think, the Beastie Boys have suffered a middle-aged breakdown and are reincarnating themselves as a subdued Blues Brothers. Anyone concerned that "To the 5 Boroughs" was a farewell album and that the Beastie Boys performance at MSG was some type of NYC farewell address should take comfort in that the trio is not nearly ready to go silent into that good night. That we even hesitated to doubt the born-and-bred New Yorkers leaves us embarrassed. more ›

My producers and I all made up a dream list of our favorite performers. Then we sicced Jamie Hook, my uber-gregarious, vociferous and sometimes even frightening producer, on these people. Some were charmed and accepted, some turned and ran. It’s a system with many casualties, but it worked out eventually, splendidly. more ›

Videographer Kelly Loudenberg reports on a mysterious afternoon experience in the Bronx, courtesy Ars Subterranea:

Sunday Afternoon. Torrential rain. The Bronx Borough Courthouse, built between 1905 and 1914 and abandoned for more than 20 years stands beside other vacant and fire-damaged buildings. It's a desolate area of the Bronx that has recently seen some new development. The owners of the building would like to see the space turned into a library or school. They say it lends itself to public use. more ›

After yesterday's "shocking" revelation that his ancestors were slaves owned by ancestors of Senator Strom Thurmond, the Reverend Al Sharpton held a press conference to discuss the news. It turns out that a Daily News reporter asked Sharpton if he'd like research his family history with genealogy website Ancestry.com - the NY Times reports that Ancestry.com "approached the Daily News seeking to publicize its African-American ancestry database" and the ball got rolling from there. At the Daily News offices, Sharpton told reporters:

"It's important for America, because in the story of the Thurmonds and the Sharptons, there's the story of the shame and the glory of America. The shame is that people were owned as property, and the shame is that every time I write my name now, I will think about how I got that name. The shame is that I am the heir of those who were property to the Thurmond family. more ›

We're constantly amazed by the stuff that comes in on Gothamist Contribute. For instance, yesterday Allan Mohlo sent in a single black and white picture of a Richard Hambleton shadow-figure. Hambleton is a well-known streetartist from the 1980s, but we've seen relatively few photos of his pieces, so this one piqued our interest. We clicked through to Allan's Flickr stream, and lo-and-behold, found this amazing set of streetart shots. Check out a few of them: more ›

Imagine if Law & Order had a Christmas themed episode where instead of searching for killers they were searching for a Jesus statue that went missing from a church. We can only theorize that Detective Briscoe would say something like, “Great we’re now going to have to find Jesus.” more ›

Even though the weather isn't encouraging you to stay inside, there's still a whole host of new flicks to check out at the theaters. more ›

Yeesh, there sure are a lot of new movies out this weekend. Choose wisely and you will be well rewarded. more ›

The first time I saw Pete Holmes live was at the Doug Benson Interruption at the UCB, but most people's first experience with Pete probably comes from Best Week Ever, where he's a frequent panelist, or Comedy Central. Or it might be Cosmo Girl. more ›

The New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, and what a wonderful, strange trip its been. We've been to late '90s Britain, modern day Korea and the rural area outside Madrid, but still have yet to wing our way to pre-revolutionary France and fascist Spain. Thrilling, n'est pas? Here's a few thoughts on some of the films from the 44th annual that we've sampled. more ›

The National Fair Housing Alliance says that real estate brokerage Corcoran discriminates against black people and also tries to steer white people from black neighborhoods. The NFHA, which was following up discrimination claims in a 2000 Department of Housing and Urban Development report, put both black and white people, posing as potential buyers, in a Brooklyn Corcoran office. Though the black "buyers" were more qualified, the whites received extra information about financial incentives. Further, the white "buyers" were urged to look in certain neighborhoods. From the National Fair Housing Alliance's report:

Agents at the Corcoran Group Real Estate were also found to have engaged in racial steering. In this investigation’s most egregious incident of racial steering, one agent produced a map of Brooklyn and drew a red outline of the areas in which the White homeseeker should consider living. He pointed to the neighborhoods of Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights and parts of Carroll Gardens as attractive neighborhoods for the White homeseeker, and indicated with arrows the neighborhoods that were “changing.” The agent also noted the high quality of schools in these neighborhoods as further indication of their desirability to the White homeseeker. more ›

The last new Project Runway was practically two weeks ago, but thanks to Bravo rerunning it, we could relive it many times. It was full of twists: Two previously kicked-off winners got to reappear and fight for a place in the final four (well, besides Keith) and the outfit would have to be black-and-white and all the material had to be used - even scraps! It's debatable which spooked people more - Angela's "sad eyes," Vincent's "crazy eyes," or using all the fabric. Some of our thoughts: more ›

to find out. more ›

Jerome Hasenpflug with S.A. Prum Mosel, one of Gothamist’s favorite German wine producers, will be holding a seminar, tasting and dinner at The Mark next Monday, August 7th. Tickets are $90, but you get to wine and dine with Jerome (hear his plight) and swap secrets with Master Sommelier Richard Dean. Can you put a price tag on that kind of entertainment? Apparently you can. more ›