Besides last night's citywide shopping spree for Fashion's Night Out, it turns out that New York City won't see a dime of the $17.2 million spent to secure space for the catwalk events of Fashion Week. Instead of the $2.6 million paid to the city to secure Bryant Park, IMG Fashion is paying Lincoln Center directly to use Damrosch Park for the next five years. Though it's a public park, Lincoln Center has a long-term contract to manage the park, and Bloomberg spokesman Andrew Brent said, "That includes the authority to manage and charge for events in those spaces." But not everyone is that laissez-faire. more ›

• Green lifestyle education including fitness and health topicsIt looks like green is the new black, with eco-fashions becoming more in style. The fest will also show some innovative designs which will be for sale (here are some shots from last year's fashion show). Kids, parents, fashionistas, gearheads, health nuts, artists...will all be coming together in the name of green, join them! more ›

On opening day of this season's Midsummer Night Swing, Lincoln Center has become a free WiFi hot spot. So if you're at Josie Robertson Plaza, in Damrosch Park, or on the North Plaza by the Reflecting Pool, your laptop, phone or PDA will be wired. more ›

THEATER: According to industry rag Variety, playwright Kristine Thatcher “has been deservedly attracting international attention. [Her] latest, Among Friends, is a whimsical and provocative deconstruction of hetero male bonding." The story goes like this: “Three old friends gather as often as possible to play poker. Matt is a struggling Sears appliance salesman; Will, a public school teacher; and Dan, a real-estate developer and award-winning humanitarian. But when Will discovers the lionized Dan cheating at cards, he decides to explore exactly how deeply the rot goes.” - John Del Signore more ›

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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.

">book about kabuki. Check out some sushi via Sushi NYC and NYC Sushi Finder. And Gothamist visited the Lincoln Center Festival last year with a trip on the Angel Project. more ›