Approximately 60 Occupy Wall Street protesters massed at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan just before midnight last night, where Law & Order: SVU had built a TV set that mimicked the encampment in Zuccotti Park before its eviction last month. Tarps, tents, handpainted signs bearing slogans of "We Are The 99%" and "Goldman $ucks," as well as a mock kitchen and People's Library made the fake camp very convincing. Protesters dashed through the park, defacing signs, complimenting the choice of tents and helping themselves to the food in the "kitchen." In short: it was a bizarre scene, and within the hour at least 50 NYPD officers showed up to rescind the show's permit, force the protesters from the park and order the production crew to dismantle the set. Here's video: more ›

Happy Father's Day! For those of you who have dads, are dads, or know dads, this one's for you, from all of us at the Gothamist network." more ›

A psychiatrist who treated Peter Braunstein at Bellevue after the police arrested him for the October 21, 2005 sexual assault and kidnapping of a former colleague testified in court yesterday. Dr. Li-Wen Lee said that Braunstein, who is on trial for assault, kidnapping, said she believed he was exaggerating his symptoms. Lee also said that Braunstein has bipolar mood swings and a narcissistic personality disorder - not paranoid schizophrenia as a defense witness said - and that he stockpiled pills for a suicide attempt. more ›

Workers crammed into small spaces and contending with oppressive heat on the Lower East Side. Thank goodness for the labor movement of the early 20th Century. Or are the very people who commemorate those days enduring the same conditions? The Villager reports that workers at The Lower East Side Tenemant Museum are taking a page out of their own history books and forming a union. Their complaints include extreme temperatures and cramped workspaces. They want improved working conditions, better pay, and benefits. Irony is alive and well on Orchard St. more ›

Everybody wants to be a rock star, perhaps none more ardently than theater folk, some of whom have been prodding the form toward rock since the sixties. Sam Shepard famously insisted that he wanted to be a rock and roll star, not a playwright; recently the likes of theater company Les Freres Corbusier and playwright Adam Rapp (who moonlights in a band) have expressed a sensible desire to tap into the Bowery Ballroom demographic. more ›

I really liked the idea of writing from the perspective of a child who was physically different from everyone around him in a very obvious way. I think children are constantly trying to figure out where they fit into their world—how to define themselves—and I wanted to explore what this struggle would be like for someone whose existence seemed to be pretty well defined from the get-go. more ›

Mitzi, by Raymond. Tag yours "gothamist" on Flickr if you want us to use them. more ›

Try to Burn This One, by Melon Bee. more ›

We're really digging Dalton Rooney's "Hello My Name Is.." project-- he's making these stickers of various Brooklyn landmarks, and then photographing them right in front of the landmarks. So deliciously meta! more ›

Let’s start with some birth announcements. more ›

THEATER: A.R. Gurney’s new meta-play, Post Mortem, takes place in a future tyrannical America where a college student discovers a lost “masterpiece” by the largely forgotten playwright A.R. Gurney. In Post Mortem's cowardly new world, many believe Dick Cheney to be responsible for Gurney’s death, and the discovery of an unpublished memoir reveals Gurney affairs with Cameron Diaz, Katherine Hepburn and Katrina Kerns. (Okay, that last one's from our own meta-memoir.) The student’s willingness to defy the government by producing the banned play wins him both a shot at the Nobel Peace Prize and his hot professor’s affection. - John Del Signore more ›

: An Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, A Novel by Dave Eggers? more ›

Moonlight Graham isn't open yet - perhaps Friday - but when we peeked in, we saw lots of retro Mets gear to take advantage of Mr. Met enthusiasts. And "modern vintage" seems to mean pricey, if the prices on the website are any indication ($40 Mr. Met shirt!), but the display makes us happy. more ›

We'll be keeping a running list of nominees for this year's most inappropriate morning coverage of the fifth anniversary of 9/11-- around noon we'll crown a winner. more ›

READINGS: Jennifer Paddock will be at the Borders to read from her sophomore novel, , which follows a young writer, Caroline, as she leaves her MFA program and seeks out stories in the devastated wake of Hurricane Ivan. Paddock combines her story with Caroline's writing, which is an interesting technique, if not a little meta. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras more ›

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. more ›

In theater, as in television, summer is an opportunity for producers and creative teams to try ideas that may be a little wackier than main-season fare – off- and off-off Broadway, that’s what all the play festivals that are currently on and coming up are about. But the theater world also has its version of summer TV’s ubiquitous reruns, only there we like to think the phenomenon of show extensions and brief revivals is weighted more toward being a chance to see things you didn’t see previously, rather than being an expression of laziness or lack of better things to show. more ›

ART: On the Couch: Cartoons From the New Yorker is a collection of cartoons from the magazine which Bob Mankoff (the cartoon editor) says focuses on “the shrink and the shrunk, the practitioner and the practiced upon.” So we're sure you'll all be able to relate, somehow. more ›

- And click the Food Fund for Animals button and money will be donated for needy animals more ›

In Team's final exhibition at their Chelsea gallery space (before relocating to SoHo), Dawn Mellor's takes a small sidestep from her brashly acidic, satirical portrayals of celebrity-dom to inject vitriolic political and social anger into a messy amalgam of abstract allegory. The resulting paintings avoid easy interpretation, but ooze rebellious punktitude, landing somewhere in between a sophisticated painterly take on topical issues and an adolescent outpouring of teen angst at a world gone terribly wrong. more ›

American Theatre of Actors // 314 W. 54th St. // Through May 28, Tues.-Sat. 8pm, Sat.-Sun. 3pm, Sun. 7pm // Tickets via Theatermania more ›

On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author. more ›

There are tons of meta-property maps these days that pull results from all the local real estate companies, but Trulia has a really nice looking interface, so it's definitely worth checking out. The site also has some cool features, like an email notification for properties that meet your specifications, and a great NYC fact sheet chock full of data links. Also worth a looksie: Trulia Brooklyn! more ›

Baby, it's cold outside. Though Gothamist thinks it's always a good time to go to the movies, this time of year is particularly perfect for cozying up at the cineplex. Hot cocoa goes great with popcorn. more ›

Like you, we assumed that the Lazy Sunday meme died about two weeks ago, but it turns out it was just waiting for us to look away, and then SNACK ATTACK, M0TH3RFCUCKER! It simply doesn't get any more meta-licious and web-overloaded than Andy Baio's niece and nephew performing their own version of the Lazy Sunday rap (direct link to MP3 here.) This proves there's no such thing as jumping the shark. Lazy Sunday will live on forever! more ›

Speaking of vomit-inducing real estate prices (aren't we always talking about those these days?), check out the StreetEasy real estate mashup-- another meta-search of the city's broker sites. Anyone have $12.945 million to lend us?
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Unbelievably, it's the last week of the year! How time flies! We'll be assembling our own Best of 2005 lists (Most Interesting News Stories, Best Shots of Pandas, Most Poorly Thought Out Gothamist Posts, etc. etc.) But until we can get the Gothamist supercomputer to spit those out, here are some lists from our friends (and one enemy!) in and around the city: more ›

Our pals over at Curbed have been pretty good at rounding up all the Real Estate mashups-- yesterday that pointed out the Real Estate Advisor Map and Natefind. And then there is the granddaddy of this type of map: HousingMaps (select NYC in the dropdown), with results from Craigslist. There's also Oodle Housing-- which gloms from a bunch of services. Maybe someone should do a meta-meta-mashup of all of these maps! That would be a lot of meta! more ›

Here we go: it's a huge weekend for year-end Oscar-bait and questions abound. Will audiences flock to see the "forbidden" love of ? (No.) Is it any good? (It's OK.) Will people be turned off by the heavy (and occasionally heavy-handed) allusions to Christian imagery? (Possibly, but we were moved more by Aslan's humiliation and sacrifice than Jesus' in Mel Gibson's biblical slasher film) more ›

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