The 21 Club opened on New Year’s Eve 1930 at 21 West 52nd Street as a speakeasy and restaurant. Legend has it that when powerful gossip columnist Walter Winchell was banned from the club, he ran an item wondering why the 21 Club had not yet been raided by Prohibition agents. (Winchell, of course, was the inspiration for the character of J.J. Hunsecker in The Sweet Smell of Success, which features several scenes at 21.)......

"New York City in the 1970s was the setting for Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, and Saturday Night Fever, the nightmare playground for Son of Sam and The Warriors, the proving grounds for graffiti, punk, hip-hop, and all manner of other public spectacle. Musicians, artists, and writers could subsist even in Manhattan, while immigrants from the world over were reinventing the city in their own image." Brian Berger, historian Marshall Berman and a troupe of contributers......

Sometimes for critics of critics, there's a desire for the critical to set aside the sniping and actually make something. Film critics and bloggers Andrew Grant of Like Anna Karina's Sweater and Aaron Hillis, a writer for The Village Voice, Premiere, and IFC News [pictured right to left] are doing something like that with the creation of their DVD distribution company Benten Films and the release of their first title, LOL on Aug. 28. As......

In December the Hudson River Trust announced two new pieces of art being installed at an (also new) northern Chelsea park (at Pier 66), one being a giant waterwheel. The wheel is currently installed at the end of Pier 66 near 25th Street and was inaugurated at a ceremony yesterday. It uses the river's changing tide to power an odometer which has been functioning since April. Paul Rimirez Jonas is the mastermind behind the......

Has Andy Warhol's estate been dominating the market for the artist's work? One owner of a silkscreen by Warhol says that it has, and yesterday filed a $20 million lawsuit in the U.S. District Court. Filmmaker Joe Simon-Whelan's Warhol original was marked as a fake by the estate who he says has conspired for 20 years to control the market and create an artificial scarcity of original works. The board does this with the authority......

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg traveled back to his Massachusetts roots and gave the commencement speech at Tufts University. Bloomberg, who grew up in Medford, name checked various haunts in the hood, tried to seem with it by mentioning Busta Rhymes, Ali G, and Salma Hayek, and reminded kids to call their mother. He also discussed free speech, in what the Sun called a nod to the Minutemen incident at Columbia: The fourth lesson is, in......

We knew holiday tips were trouble! The former doorman to a Sutton Place apartment building on East 52nd Street is suing his former employers for $2 million. Viorel Cincu says that he was unfairly fired after 17 years of service, after a videotape showed him allegedly stealing a colleague's $400 tip. In December 2005, residents Raffi and Stephanie Asadorian left a $400 (!) holiday tip for their baby-sitter at the front door. Apparently they had......

On March 13, 1967 Channel 5 launched the first prime time newscast in the tri-state area, just a few months after sister station WTTG in Washington D.C. became the first station in the United States with one. Since then, a lot has changed but there are still a few constants like the seemingly eternal question, “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” In 1967, channel 5, then called WNEW-TV, had been......

You're in town for the weekend. You've seen the Statue of Liberty, eaten pizza at Lombardi's, and taken in the view from the Empire State Building? What else is there do to in New York? Why, see the KFC/Taco Bell rats of course! What could be a better Big Apple experience? In a story that just keeps giving, the Times reports on how the rat-infested Sixth Avenue fast-food joint is drawing onlookers from near......

Mayor Bloomberg was in London yesterday, meeting with Sir Callum McCarthy of the Financial Services Authority. Last month, the Mayor, along with Governor Spitzer and Senator Schumer, declared that NYC's status as the world's number one financial center was slipping. One reason they cited that global business was shifting to places like London was because London only has on regulatory body - the FSA. The Mayor said, "The FSA is an example of the......

Today, there's a fascinating Op-Ed by Robert Sullivan about the state of NYC streets. Titled, "The City That Never Walks," Sullivan describes how NYC has "lost [its] golden pedestrian touch." ...yet, here in New York, we even have the debate over bicycle traffic backwards. We focus on drivers’ complaints about the bicycle commuter who races through red lights, rather than on the concerns of the mother biking her child around organic-food delivery trucks that......

There's a sobering article in the NY Times about the effectiveness of "safe haven laws". Safe haven laws allow babies to be abandoned at police stations, fire houses, and hospitals with no questions asked, instead of unwanted babies being killed by parents who are scared and worried. In 2006, six dead babies were found due to abandonment, which is twice as many as last year; one of the more notable cases was the dead newborn......

Yesterday morning, two teens were stabbed on West 58th Street. The Post reports that two girls had gotten "into a beef on Wednesday and told their boyfriends, who got together to rumble yesterday." The NY Times says that two boys were attacked by 11 other teens. The fight occurred outside 220 West 58th Street, where Landmark High School and Coalition School for Social Change share a building. Shopkeepers locked their stores; one told the Post,......

Anya Kamenetz, Author, Generation Debt: Why Now Is A Terrible Time To Be Young...

Gothamist Food's own Joe DeSalazar is in the New York Post this morning, in an article on the growth of dining clubs in the city. Joe's very own dining club, Foodie, garners the Post's praise: Other people just want to eat. And for them, Foodie is nirvana. This gourmet club was started by Joe DeSalazar, 28, a former ad exec with an incurable desire to cook. In December 2002, he created a dinner club for......