A 22-year old Manhattan deli clerk that took the late shift on New Year's Eve lucked out when he bought himself a winning scratch-off ticket. While everyone else was welcoming 2008 with friends and family, the Yemen native's wife and baby were still living a world away, so Waleed Alsaidi bought himself a little present at his family's deli in Harlem to pass time on the lonely shift. The NY Post reports on the feel-good......

Porn on the 4th of July The theme to this summer's outdoor concert season seem to be coming up with new ways to deal with rain. While Manu Chao embraced it and Cheeseburger/Oxford Collapse had to cancel because of it, the New Pornographers just kind of went on despite it. First, indie one-hit wonder Midlake opened with a perfectly serviceable set. After came out the newly bearded A.C. Newman and the gang to play a......

How hot does titanium get? And is it too hot for children to scamper on? Is corrugated cardboard sturdy enough after many rains? These are the questions that came to mind when we heard that Frank Gehry will design a playground for the Battery. At the Battery Conservancy's gala last night, Mayor Bloomberg and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe announced that Gehry would design his first playground in Manhattan. Benepe said, "It is fitting that the......

A construction area collapse in Brooklyn yesterday cost a worker his life. The man was waterproofing the foundation of the Leif Ericson Day School in Dyker Heights while standing aside a trench dug next to the building. According to WCBS news, the trench was said to measure two to three feet wide, 15 feet long and eight feet deep. The construction worker, who hasn't been named, appears to have fallen into the trench as it......

This Saturday a sea of people wearing all blue will flood the streets of lower Manhattan. This will happen because Sea of People have organized a rally partly in the form of human installation. Thousands of participants dressed in blue will stretch through the streets and become a visual for the projected 10-foot waterlines that may redefine lower Manhattan under the ten-foot sea level rise scenario. If you would like to be a part of......

River to River Booked! One of our favorite things to do in the city once the weather gets nice is to head down to the South Street Seaport after work on Friday to watch one of our favorite bands play for free as the sun goes down. Its an infinitely enjoyable experience. The River to River Festival is responsible for this and a whole bunch of other free concerts around Lower Manhattan every summer, and......

Remember the old wall, some of which is now on display at Castle Clinton, the MTA found while excavating for the new South Ferry terminal? One of the archaeologists hired to document the seawall fractured her pelvis, lost two teeth and broke a toe when the trench collapsed, burying most of her in soil. The archaeologist, Alison Boles, filed a lawsuit against the MTA last week. The Post quotes her as saying "It's a very......

-- $252/night for the Gowanus Holiday Inn? Bananas! -- Viral marketing goons are accosting people on the subway to promote ABC's Six Degrees teleivision show. -- Doesn't the 1977 WPIX logo looks like it was drawn during a bad acid trip? -- Here's something you don't see everyday at the West 4th Street ballcourts: eight scantily clad Knicks dancers. -- Gary at RunsBrooklyn has jogged 25% of the approximately 1750 miles of streets in......

Preserving preservation history? The concept made us a little nervous, too, but, when we heard about the New York Preservation Archive Project's plan for an online database, we knew we'd have to overcome our fear of all things meta. Like a Who's Who in Preservation, the digital database, still a work in progress, draws attention to the pols, housewives, planners, architects, lawyers and others who fought to save some of the city's most unusual......

THEATER: Though some might balk at an outdoor performance in this muggy, thunderstormy weather, The Drilling CompaNY's version of As You Like It, the next installment of Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot (directed by Jesse Ontiveros), is bound to exude enough cool to counteract the waves of heat rising from the asphalt. It also helps if you show up with your own chair so you don't have to exert yourself in a scuffle to nab......

MOVIES: DUMBO's weekly evening film event, Movies with a View, begins tonight with The Wizard of Oz. Bring your iPod and play "Dark Side of the Moon" while the movie plays, it'll, like, totally synch up if you press play during the 3rd lion roar. Halcyon DJs provide music before the film and there is free valet bike parking. And there will be snacks, there will. 6pm, Film at sundown // Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park,......

Looking for a list of free summer shows in the city this summer? Check out Prefixmag's guide to free concerts. There's a lot to take in, here's what we'll be heading to: June 16 Charlier Hunter & Bobby Previte with special guests Elliott Sharp as Groundtruther, Matthew Shipp, Nils Petter Molvaer, and Sex Mob: Central Park Summerstage, 7pm. June 25 Feist, Buck 65, and Jason Collett: Central Park Summerstage, 3pm. * July 4 Belle and......

Gothamist LOVES the story about the wall from the 1700s, possibly the 1600s, (probably from Dutch colonial times!) being found as the MTA was trying to excavate for a new subway tunnel. The MTA now has to wait for for archaelogists to examine the wall and the area around it, to determine how old it might be, which means the expanded station for South Ferry may have to wait even longer. The wall is......

Andrew Bird and M. Ward not only released two of our favorite albums this year, they both put on a perfect live show. Keren Ann is another one of our favorite people to see live. Over the past past few months we've paid to see Keren Ann, M. Ward, and Andrew Bird headline shows in NYC. For that reason we couldn't be more excited that Andrew & Keren are teaming up for a double......

Gothamist loves a free outdoor summer show, and tonight Clem Snide performs one at Castle Clinton in Battery Park. The show starts at 7pm and Gothamist wants to give you two VIP passes. Well, aren't we nice. Imagine it: no waiting in line, no pushing your way through crowds to get a good spot, no getting soaked if it starts to rain. That's right, we hear it's a good life back there in the......

Frankly, this is not the best stretch for live music NYC has ever seen. Randall's Island is using the weekend between last weekend's Curiosa Festival and next weekend's garage rock blowout to host the Warped Tour...but Coolfer won't recommend an all-ages punk show to Gothamist readers. There seems to be a slight lull. Maybe everybody is heading out for a long weekend at their summer homes? Hard to say. It's okay I guess. Here's what......

Swedish rock sensations Soundtrack of Our Lives return to New York for hopefully a rain-free evening at Castle Clinton. They put on a great live show (we caught them a while back at the Bowery Ballroom) and their music takes cues from The Who and seventies psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd and Yes. Lead singer, Ebbot Lundberg, has a Viking-like presence and in the performance we saw, he commanded the audience take to their......

Tonight the Knitting Factory and the Onion are having a listening party for Wilco's A Ghost Is Born. Of course, you could have been downloading the album off the Internet for the last three months, and the band's website was streaming the entire album well before its release. But...if you haven't heard it or just want to show up to get a handful of flyers and a free button, the event starts at 7pm. While......

The City has announced finalists for its City Lights Design Competition, which began in January in an effort to find "new ideas for public street lighting." The finalists are: Tim G. Culbert of Atelier Imrey Culbert; Ross B. Wimer of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Chicago; and Thomas M. Phifer of his own firm in NY. Phifer worked on Castle Clinton in some capacity. Forgotten NY's NYC streetlamp page and a New Yorker Talk of the......