Results tagged “castleclinton”

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 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 high spirited show featuring songs off all their albums, including the soon to be released, Challengers. Sure, it's a little strange celebrating America's independence with a Canadian band, but they seemed to embrace the irony and kick out the jams to the waterlogged faithful. Nobody can pass up a free show (no matter how many hoops one has to jump through to get a ticket...) and the concert was well covered. Read more about it at Pop Tarts, Stereogum and Music Snobbery. (pic via Muzicspy's flickr.)

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.

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 collapsed at 2:40 p.m. yesterday afternoon.

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.

We here at the Gothamist Arts & Entertainment World Headquarters may disagree on what to think about Patrick Wolf, but there is a solidifying consensus that his performance at Hiro last night (his first NYC appearance in 4 years) was not too great. Our growing frustration with Hiro Ballroom is only magnified by how impressive their booking has been of late. For the first three quarters of the short set, the sound was grating. Nothing mixed together, vocals either came in too strong or not at all, and the intricate instrumentation on stage was impossible to decipher. It wasn't until the final song of the set, The Magic Position, where everything came together correctly, but by then the damage has been done. One of the saddest side effects of the closings of the many different downtown rock clubs is that the acts that should normally be playing in them are now getting gobbled up by larger, non-music venues where the concert attendee is considered an afterthought. Every time we have to suffer through a set at a place like Hiro, Annex or R&R, our anticipated longing for places like Sin-e and Tonic grows more and more.

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 lonely feeling being buried in soild with your teeth knocked out."

-- Tomorrow is One Web Day, and to celebrate, Cardozo is sponsoring a panel with Craig Newmark and Scott Heiferman at Castle Clinton in Battery Park. It starts at 12pm, and just like (most of) Craigslist, it's free!

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.

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 one of the limited number available there. - Mallory Jensen

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.

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:

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 40 feet by 7 feet, made out of mortared stone. A statement from City Hall says the wall may be part of a gun battery, which makes sense given that Castle Clinton is there - one needs to protect the coastline and all. Also found near the wall: Delft pottery, a coin from 1744, and pipe stems.

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 headlining bill at Bowery Ballroom on Wednesday, and Mr. Ward is playing a free show at Castle Clinton in Battery Park on Thursday. Keren's album is called Nolita and you can listen to some of it here. M. Ward's album is called Transistor Radio and Merge has some songs you can stream. Andrew Bird's album is the Mysterious Production of Eggs and NPR has some songs and a review. M. Ward is also at Maxwell's on Friday.

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 VIP tents. So go and report back to us on how the other half lives.

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 strikes me as the best of this week's events:

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 knees and everyone happily conformed.

Tonight the Knitting Factory and the Onion are having a listening party for Wilco's . 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 you're there, there will be a band called Kash playing at the Tap Bar. Kash features Kelli Scar of the band Moonraker. She has an incredible voice and is well worth checking out.

Forgotten NY's NYC streetlamp page and a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece with Forgotten NY's Kevin Walsh about street lamps and the competition: "A proper familiarity with the street lamps of New York requires a sustained interest beginning at an early, pre-self-conscious age—long before the native disdain for tourists kicks in and, with it, the automatic, jaded lowering of the eyes, the tunnel vision."