Results tagged “timesselect”

After two years in service and almost as long as media gossip fodder, Times Select, NYTimes.com's service that offered access to the rich archives of the New York Times through a paid subscription modeled, is officially dead. The service put certain current online content behind the Times Select wall, such as columns by Op-Ed writers, and there was much criticism, even from within the Times, about restricting access the paper.

Yesterday, MTA CEO and executive director Lee Sander took the case for subway and bus fare hikes to the people by standing at the Grand Central shuttle platform yesterday morning. The MTA has argued that with looming billion-dollar deficits, fare hikes, as well as agency cuts, are the only way for the MTA to stay afloat without trimming service. According to the NY Times, very few people stopped to talk to Sander who was handing out a leaflet called "The Fare Facts" which cited "growing pension and debt service costs" as why fares should go up.

There's a story in today's Times that should be a reminder to everyone that shredding documents is not a chore but a duty. An "About New York" column by Jim Dwyer tackles the tale of a man accused of being a deadbeat dad (it's Times Select, so maybe grab the Metro section from somewhere or use your college email).

On November 23, 1990 a bouncer outside of the Palladium nightclub (now an NYU dorm on 14th St.) was shot and killed when a fistfight escalated to gunplay. A year later, David Lemus and Olmedo Hidalgo were convicted of the killing and sent to prison, despite their defense that they were not even at the Palladium that night. Hidalgo's conviction was later overturned and Lemus was released from prison after 14 years, only to face a retrial by New York prosecutors. The New York Times is now reporting, however, that a former prosecutor for the city who was arguing for that retrial had serious doubts about the man's guilt even as he argued for his prosecution.

Two weeks ago, Post announced that it was raising its price from 25 cents to 50 cents, with the change going into effect this week. Gawker noticed that a camera crew was filming the new price change for the paper, but NY1 found that the Daily News lowered its price to 25 cents for the week! So sneaky - we almost expect Rupert Murdoch (whose News Corp owns the Post) to visit Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman with a sock full of quarters!

- Let’s try to start the year on the right foot.

We think there is still free access to Times Select articles today, so we urge you to read Dan Barry's column about the NY State Pavilion from the 1964 World's Fair. Here's the opening:

Once there were elevators gliding up the sides of the towers to reveal a city unfolding; now they are rusted in mid-rise. Once there were stairwells winding within those towers; now they are rotted through. The call for a better tomorrow, for “Peace Through Understanding,” is answered by the flutter and coo of its hidden inhabitants.

Continue reading "Pity the New York State Pavilion"

“The guy never even came over to see what had happened,” Ms. Kelly said in a near-whisper. “He got out of his truck and walked away.” As she pleaded for someone to call 911, the driver and some of his colleagues “just stood off and watched,” she said. “Nobody offered anything, nothing like, ‘Can I help?’ That all came from other bikers who came upon the scene.”

One Koran in the toilet is bad. A second Koran in the toilet, you got problems. Or a rash of copy cats Koran dunkings. At Pace University's downtown location, a Koran was found in a toilet at the library's bathrooom - the second Koran-in-the-toilet incident in recent weeks and the fourth hate incident spanning the NYC and Westchester campuses. Pace is investigating the incident, but the Council on American-Islamic Relations' NY chapter issued a statement saying, "We once again call on Pace University to take concrete measures to help educate the student population about Islamophobic bigotry and its negative impact on ordinary Muslims and on American society."

This time of the year, crops with long growth cycles are coming into the local markets in abundance. This late, late summer leaning into fall is a perfect time to enjoy the variety of melons now riding each morning on farmers' trucks.

- Burger tips for the summer, posted pre-Memorial Day by A Hamburger Today

On Sunday afternoons, when we're getting slightly upset about the weekend coming to a close and not getting nearly enough done, we find solace in watching Lidia's Family Table on Channel 13. It is, by far, one of the best cooking shows, and that's because Lidia Bastianich is our secret Italian grandmother - and that's not just because she makes a mean beef short ribs braised in red wine. A good part of it is probably kitchen envy - she has a big, bright kitchen (she lives in Douglaston Manor, Queens) filled with all sorts of pots and pans and beautiful Italian dishware to plate the food - but Lidia has a very calm, soothing voice (no fingernails-on-chalkboard Rachael Ray screeching here) and demeanor that makes us believe everything will be all better. And when she talks about food bringing families together, you believe her, since she usually involves her family in the show - there are apperances by her restaurateur son Joe and grandchildren, but the best is when her 84 year old mother Erminia comes in to show Lidia how to cook something. It's just a lovely, escapist yet possibly attainable, hunger-inducing half hour on Sunday afternoons, and after watching one episode, if you're not inspired to cook something yourself, you'll probably be inspired to appreciate what you have more.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly decided to put a rest to many leaks and give the news himself: Blood found on ties that were in binding the hands of murdered graduate student Imette St. Guillen matches the DNA of Falls bouncer Darryl Littlejohn. The Brooklyn DA's office is going for a grand jury indictment this week, and Littlejohn has been in police custody for almost a week for parole violation, which is why the NYPD hasn't pressed charges against him yet - he's "not going anywhere." St. Guillen's family, though, isn't commenting until Littlejohn is formally charged.

Last week Gothamist was greatly saddened to learn that Grampa Munster, the actor, restauranteur, green politician, and classic New York personality also known as Al Lewis, had passed on. In writing his death up in an Extra, Extra, we followed the lead of other obits and reported that Lewis was 95. Later that week we saw a few reports trickle in that in fact Lewis was 82. The discrepancy of 13 years seemed a bit odd, but we quickly forgot about it. Until today that is, when we opened up our copy of the Times.

"If you can't beat 'em, psych 'em out" seems to be the tactic of the Brooklyn bagel shop that incited the ire of the MTA when it used MTA symbols. The shop, the former "F Line Bagels," was hit with a cease and desist from the MTA last March and eight month laters, fined and forced to remove the various subway signage the owners bought from the MTA. Deciding that a new sign would only be good if it could capture some of that F line goodness, the owners are installing a backwards-F sign, with one owner saying, "People can pronounce it any way they want. It'll be kind of like Toys 'R' Us." Ooh, that's a good idea - maybe they should sell toys, too, with a giraffe hawking them.

And it's not over the warfare-like atmosphere on the weekends! It's because she was beaten by guards when they thought she had shoplifted some items. According to the Post, Newtown teacher Kimberlee Bent says that on June 2, 2001, she was kept in a basement room where she was allegedly "held down, repeatedly punched and spat upon and even ridiculed about her weight" while detained by Century 21 guards. So, some of the lawsuit's $63 million damages must be for that, plus the fact that she had to spend a full day in jail on later-dropped shoplifting charges. Bent's lawyer thinks Century 21 is pulling a fast one over the case, as the discount department store says that surveillance tapes that would have recorded the assault were "mistakenly thrown out" when the store cleaned up after September 11, 2001. Gothamist has never had run-ins with security at Century 21...surly employees who have mountains of inventory to stock, sure, but who wouldn't, given the traffic the Broadway/Church location gets. We wonder what made guards think Bent shoplifted - at Century 21, it's like a firesale, with people grabbing anything and everything, leaving merchandise looking picked-off and a little grungy. But, hey, it's a last-season-Behnaz Sarafpour dress marked down 70%!

Uh-oh! Does anyone have a feeling that the free, ad-supported version of the New York Times might soon go the way of the dodo? Check out this article from Editor and Publisher:

Last weekend's New York Times piece about Bob Diamond's Red Hook streetcar project has sadly dropped behind the Times Select paywall, but the article inspired us to walk over to Red Hook and snap the little photo essay below. For more information on the streetcars (for free!) check out this Forgotten-NY page.

The bigger, new-fangled bagels: "an oversized mass of sweetened dough, with a pale exterior soft as a feather pillow."Some NYC customers expect huge bagels, even though they really weren't meant to be that way. Apparently bagels got bigger to feed "whitebread" tastes, and some bagel makers use a scary sounding "dough conditioner" that gives bagels their "product softness ('Reddi-Sponge' some old-timers call it) and extend shelf life." Good God! Gothamist always assumed big bagels represented the bounty of the city, and during our carb-conscious consciousness, we've opted for bialys - or scooped out the white flesh from the big bagels. But now we know!

or maybe even in 2005, when the Times decided to get around to digging them up from the archives).

Titled "Our Changing City," a 20-part series of articles in The New York Times painted a largely optimistic panorama of the century's second half. It envisioned a sprawling cultural center and Fordham campus on the squalid West Side, a civic plaza in Downtown Brooklyn that Robert Moses promised would rival the Piazza San Marco in Venice, a grand development over the Sunnyside railroad yards in Queens, and a Palace of Progress devoted to world trade atop a reconstructed Pennsylvania Station.

Continue reading "1955 Dreams of New York City"

Bob Sheppard, the legendary voice of both the Giants and the Yankees has decided to call it quits (Times Select or summary on NY1) - just for the Giants. The 95 year-old public address announcer has been with the Giants since 1956, ever since the Giants moved to Yankee Stadium from the Polo Grounds. The reason for stepping aside? He just couldn't deal with the traffic. When we initially read that, Gothamist was thinking, "what is a 95 year-old doing behind the wheel," but it seems like a friend drives Sheppard to and from games.

- A building facade collapse in the Lower East Side caused the MTA to reroute the F and V trains; Curbed reports that it was the LoSide diner

- And finally, we were going to link to a cute Times fluff piece on where the umbrellas that suddenly appear on the street come from because it leads with a rare actually kinda sweet West Side Story reference ("Umbrella. Say it fast, as one peddler did in Times Square – umbrella-umbrella-umbrella – and there's music playing. Say it soft, as another peddler did at Herald Square - ummm-brell-laa - and it's almost like praying. Umbrella. Umbrella. Will we ever stop saying, Umbrella?") but the article is apparently a "Times Select" article. So to hell with that.

- Junior Gotti gets a mistrial! What is going on with the criminal justice system?

Well, it's apparently many things, but for Gothamist, it's an opportunity to plunder the NY Times of 100 archive articles each month! For $49.95 a year, the potential to have 100 archived articles for free (they retail for $3.95) is the best money-making scheme we've heard of in a long time. Just think: Get your $395 worth of old articles for free and then sell them on the street! Even if you're selling them for 50 cents each, you're making money! That said, Gothamist welcomes Times Select with open arms because this is clearly a reward for home delivery and suffering with newsprinty hands and annoying inserts (no, Gothamist does not care that the new Richard Meier building has apartment available for more than $5 million!). And also because we've always wanted to see a little orange icon littered across the screen.

The WSJWE has landed. People have been rumbling about it for months now. Dow Jones employees have been upset about the extra hours and extra employees it requires. The New York Times has been reorganizing itself to make way for its arrival (can't you hear the Grey Lady thinking "hmmm, why don't I move Maureen to Saturday, then they'll buy us too. And Times Select, let's do that the same weekend, that'll steal their thunder."). And now today it's here. The Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition has its first edition this weekend and it is, on first inspection... eh. To be fair though, we're not generally Journal readers and there are a few interesting pieces in the paper (the Pearl Jam chef who has been helping tsunami victims, the companies who outsource their company sports leagues) but still. The big new section, "Pursuits," seems like any other lifestyle section to us (which might be nice for other people, but we're just sick to death of lifestyle sections). Further, we'll be curious to see how many of the advertisers bulking up this first edition will still be around in two weeks (our guess, about half). But again, we're just not Journal people. What about you, did you pick up the weekend edition? What did you think of it?