Modern Mechanix has an old National Geographic from 1965 with a huge spread on the World's Fair in New York. Step back to the atomic era and see the now-endangered Tent of Tomorrow in its glory days. Not many of these structures and rides exist today, at least not in New York; the giant tire is alive and well in Detroit, and of course, the Walt Disney-created ride, "It's a Small World" is still going......

ART: In 2002 Hamburger Eyes xeroxed some pamphlets for what became the first of the crew's photography magazine. Since then "Hamburger Eyes has become an elegant yet underground periodical combining the documentary approach of National Geographic with the hit-‘em-hard sensibility of a late-night tagger." Tonight, in conjunction with the Spring 2008 release of their first book, The powerHouse Arena will display a selection of photographs (one of which is pictured) by the magazine's masterminds......

The February edition of the MTA’s monthly television show, Transit Transit (Saturdays, 3:30 p.m., WNYE 25) , has a segment about Marvin Franklin, the NYC Transit Authority track inspector who was killed last year in an on the job accident in Brooklyn. The piece talks with some artists who knew Franklin and his co-workers and covers the opening of an exhibition of his work at the New York City Transit Museum in December. In case......

A look at some of this week's noteworthy television: Desperate Housewives (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., WABC 7) A homosexual male couple moves into Wisteria Lane and wackiness ensues. Masterpiece Theatre: The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., WNET 13) In this 6 part series, Jane Horrocks plays a British supermarket manager who is dissatisfied with the political hacks who are gunning to be Prime Minister and decides to mount her own campaign. BBC 1 aired it......

Adam Moss, editor-in-chief of New York magazine may have one of the most dangerous-looking offices in publishing this morning, as it is probably crowded with a number of large sharp-edged and -angled Ellies, or National Magazine Awards. New York was nominated for seven awards and its capture of five of them added an air of upset to the proceedings. MediaBistro's FishbowlNY live-blogged the event last night from Lincoln Center:9:16PM: The magic night for Adam ("I'm......

Puppy Bowl III (Sunday, 3:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m. Animal Planet) Puppies from shelters drink water, pee, and play for three hours is someone's idea of something to go up against the Super Bowl. Broadway: The American Musical (Sunday, 5:00 p.m. WLIW 21) Counter programming the Super Bowl, WLIW shows this 2004 documentary that chronicles the history of American musicals. Super Bowl XLI: Chicago Bears vs. Indianapolis Colts (Sunday, 6:30 p.m. WCBS 2) Three......

It's been a long time since we've visited with our black-and-white (and a little dirty brown) friends, the panda. National Geographic's cover story this month is Panda, Inc., the million dollar industry behind having pandas on U.S. soil. It focuses mostly on Tai Shan, the adorable, nearly year old scamp in DC, and has many cute pictures and video. Of course, Gothamist hopes that panda leasing prices come down (China charges $2 million now),......

Malcolm Gladwell profiles Cesar Millan, the "Dog Whisperer," in the New Yorker this week (the article is not online, but this Q&A Gladwell did with Ben Greenman about Millan is), and Gothamist cannot wait to get our issue from the mailbox. If you don't know who Cesar Millan is (like, you watched the South Park episode and thought he was made up), he's a total phenomenon. He communes with dogs, is able to walk huge......

Tsk tsk. It seems that young Americans are more Americentric (self-absorbed) than we thought. A report in National Geographic shows that 63% of Americans aged 18-24 could could not correctly locate Iraq on a map of the Middle East. Other stunning facts revealed in the report: · 70% couldn’t find Israel on a Middle Eastern map. · 90% couldn’t spot Afghanistan on a map of Asia. · 75% couldn’t place Indonesia. · 74% believed English......

Listen up! Just because Gothamist is about to be stuck in a two-hour meeting doesn't mean you have to be inside. Get out and enjoy the beautiful weather. Daffodils, forsythia and magnolias are all in bloom. Today will be oh so nice and slightly warmer than yesterday, with highs around 70. A cold front is bringing rain our way tomorrow. We can expect showers, and possibly thundershowers, off and on for much of Saturday. The......

Ixtayul has an insane set of construction pictures over at Metroplus today-- "Remove a few layers of black top, concrete and a little soil and you get some idea of what it takes to service the Wall street area with electricity, gas, water, sewer and communications." Jesus-- it looks like a game of pickup sticks. Related: National Geographic diagram of street layers, informative Gotham Gazette article on the sewers (large pipes seen above), The......

People didn't really seem to like yesterday's cute so much, so today we ditched our original idea (pigeon chickie!) and instead went with this widdle meerkat. Don't ya'll just want to feed the little bugger? Photograph by Mattias Klum for the National Geographic Society.......

We can't get enough of this short time lapse video of Grand Central-- check out the tiny woman standing still at the center of the frame. Good work, DiHard! [Related: did anyone else catch the National Geographic two-hour documentary about Grand Central? It's been playing all week, and trust us-- it's well worth checking out.]......

When we hear things like, "and there...a city lies within a city" we get pretty excited. When the city within the city is Grand Central Terminal, we set the DVR right away. Tonight on the National Geographic Channel, Inside Grand Central airs at 8pm. When we used to commute through GCT everyday for a few years, we always knew there was more to it than we were seeing. Tonight's show will bring us beyond the......

We've been obsessed with Con Edison's NYC steam system ever since we discovered that National Geographic diagram last month and Evan sent in that informative email. We decided to do some more research, and stumbled across this great article on steam power from the Gotham Gazette: If steam is an easier concept to grasp than, say, fiber optics, producing it on this scale is nowhere as simple as turning on a giant teakettle. Some......

On Sundays, Gothamist runs opinion pieces on issues relevant to life in New York. The views expressed below are solely those of the author-- really, Gothamist couldn't care less. I get a lot of email each week. Most of it is spam (best subject line of the last 24 hours: "Your dog can be the best learner you've ever had.") Occasionally, however, I get an email that's actually worth reading, and every so often, I'm......

National Geographic has the most informative New York diagram that we've seen in lo these many years we've been working on Gothamist. It shows what is under the city streets-- both in a compressed, annotated form, and in a full-scale version (who knew the water tunnel was so deep underground? Stop lying, you totally didn't!) Definitely click around the diagram-- there's lots of delicious NYC facts embedded in the descriptions. For instance:Consolidated Edison has......

White truffle season is upon us, so get our your wallets. It may not look like much more than an unappetizing lump, but according to National Geographic, "During the peak of the white truffle season, which typically runs from late October to early December, the tubers can fetch U.S. $1,200 to $2,300 a pound." Yes, they're expensive, but if you like black truffles, you'll absolutely flip over the white ones. Their earthy flavor permeates throughout......

A special panel of magazine editors have decided the top 40 magazine covers of the past four years, and the selections are a mix of shock and artistry. Here's the top ten:1. Rolling Stone – Jan. 22, 1981 – John Lennon and Yoko Ono laying in bed 2. Vanity Fair – Aug. 1991 – Nude pregnant Demi Moore 3. Esquire – April 1968 – “The Passion of Muhammad Ali”: Ali with arrows in his body......

On Wednesday, the polar bear Gus and Ida at the Central Park Zoo held a press conference, with some help from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The point was to announce that the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace would take legal action against the government for further endangering the already-endangered polar bears: Global warming is leading to polar bears' natural habitats to melt out. And the press conference's location was to drive home......

There are days when we feel bad for the city kitties we know, stuck in the apartment, without a window to a yard with squirrels and birds to peer out of - all they get are the noises from construction sites. But then a friend sent us a photograph of his cats, Oliver and Dodger, enraptured with the "Kitty Goes Hunting" DVD. Apparently Oliver and Dodger will sit on the couch for an hour and......

Thank you, NY Times photographer Suzanne Dechillo, for your amazing picture of the little harp seal that's hanging out downtown. Gothamist loves how the harp seal is waving - we have goosebumps! The photograph was for a story about how this harp seal has been hanging out on a "floating dock" near Battery Park for a few days (they usually are up North, in the Arctic or Canada). The seal seems to be okay,......

Alexis Rockman, Painter...

How much money would you have to be paid to agree to smuggle eight dangerous snakes into the country? And would you be strapping the snakes to your legs? According to Reuters, a Swedish man was http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=1&u=/nm/20030924/od_nm/environment_australia_snakes_dc">charged after smuggling snakes - strapped to his legs - to Australia. Four of the snakes were deadly king cobras, who were dead by the time the man got to Australia. Ew, but they were "found dead in......

Panda Passion Play
Yesterday, Gothamist decided to see what the National Zoo pandas were up to......

National Geographic has gone into the business of providing digital images for use in websites and media stuff: NG Image Collection: Search Results......