Yesterday Forbes magazine, in their annual ranking of the rich, declared New York City is no longer the billionaire capital of the world. Where have all the dollar signs gone? To Moscow, of course, who beat us out by 3 billionaires (they have 74 to our 71). Most of the big buck city dwellers are familiar names: Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($11.5 billion), publishing powerhouses Samuel Newhouse Jr. and Rupert Murdoch ($8.5 billion and $8.3 billion),......

New York magazine has an extraordinary cover story on the life of Brooke Astor, months after the "doyenne" of the city's social scene passed away. It is a sordid tale of jealousy, greed, enmity, conflicting agendas, and familial conflict worthy of the most outlandish soap opera. Her son Tony is now under i investigation by a grand jury and control of her estate has passed to Astor's friend Annette de la Renta. The litany of......

Coming up next Monday is a benefit event celebrating East New York Farms, an organization that seeks to remedy the dearth of good nutritional choices in the Brooklyn neighborhood by growing and distributing its own food, along the way inviting a wealth of community participation. “Our first season was one gardener out on the sidewalk with a table,” says Sarita Daftary, Project Director of East New York Farms! (the exclamation mark goes with the......

Up above you have Park Slope #17 and Carroll Gardens #13, respectively. Jennifer Loeber is bringing nude photography close to home with her series that show different Brooklynites in the flesh, in their apartments. They could even be your neighbors! And her inspiration? It came from a flasher on the subway, of course: "The idea to shoot nude portraits came about as I rode the NYC subway and pretended not to notice, across the......

John Catsimatidis is hoping to follow in Mayor Bloomberg's footsteps by becoming a Democrat who follows the path of least resistance into Gracie Mansion. The owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain has millions of dollars to burn and would like to become the Mayor of New York City. Even for a lifelong Democrat like Catsimatidis, the easiest road to City Hall is to bypass the scrum of party politics and simply get oneself elected as......

Two men were arraigned for trying to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from billionaire Mayor Bloomberg. Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau outlined the two schemes: Odalis Bostic forged two checks from Bloomberg's personal Bank of America account. One was for $190,000, the other was for $230,000, and both were "issued in the name of the mayor’s financial manager, Geller & Company," according to CityRoom. Bostic deposited them into two different bank accounts, but when Bank......

Presidential hopefuls can scurry around the country, choking down rubber chicken dinners and hustling for campaign cash, but Mayor Bloomberg knows that it's best to just sit back and let one's money work for you. He's certainly busy working for his $1-a-year salary, and even pays for his own travel when on jaunts to places like London where he's addressing another world capital. Still, our Mayor managed to more than double his wealth from last......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: an unusual trauma at Pennsylvania and Flatlands Aves. in Brooklyn, a church robbery on West 31st St. in Manhattan, and a found DOA on Furman St. at the piers in Brooklyn. State officials are now thinking that the best way to reincarnate the glory days of the old Penn Station is not to build two office towers on top of the Farley Post Office building. They've arrested the man......

The New York Times's City Section this past Sunday had a special focus on seventeen-year-old New Yorkers. According to the paper, more children were born in 1990 than at any point since the Baby Boom. Now they're on the cusp of adulthood and the Times has a series of oral histories that one can read or listen to online. It's an interesting project; here are a few of the teens:Neil Allicock lives in East New......

The New York Times describes a trend towards families with multiple children and a lot of money opting out of moving to large houses in the suburbs like Westchester. Instead, they are buying multiple adjacent residences in Manhattan highrises and shaping their own 4,000 to 8,500 square foot homes in the city. The Times dubs them Mansions in the Sky. The floorplan above is the "after" portion from the Times graphic of a man......

Mayor Bloomberg may be staunchly denying that he's running for president next year, but given the love New Yorkers seem to have for him, you can't blame him for high hopes. The latest Quinnipiac Poll says Bloomberg's approval rating is at 70%. This is down from his possible all-time approval ratings high of 75% at the start of the year, but it's still very high (back in 2003, his approval rating was around 33%). The......

Yesterday, the three men charged with first-degree murder of police officer Russel Timoshenko all pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn court. However, Dexter Bostick, Robert Ellis, and Lee Woods, who were also charged with a number of other crimes related to the July 9 traffic stop shooting, did not ask for bail. The Post and Daily News had the varying statements the men gave investigators:Woods, 29, told detectives "I ain't going to jail for something I......

SI Yankees 5 Batavia 3: Jose Gil hit his third homer of the year to power the Baby Bombers to victory. Highly touted prospect Delin Betances, a Brooklyn native, had a rocky start allowing two runs over four innings. Luckily, the Yankees can be patient with Betances because they have amassed a wealth of pitching prospects at Trenton. And Phil Hughes is on his way back. Jamestown 3 Brooklyn 2: The Cyclones were up 2-0......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: person under a bus at Park Ave. South and East 24th St., a shooting on Church Ave. in Brooklyn, and shots fired on East 169th St. and Tinton Ave. in the Bronx. As part of its 20th anniversary weekend, WFAN 660-AM will be airing four hours of old Imus shows, which used to be the morning anchor of the station. Queens and Brooklyn residents team up to protest eminent......

In an interesting yet somewhat crass article, The New York Times jumps the gun on 105-year-old Brooke Astor's impending death and pores over her last will and testament, examining the document to see who is getting what. It is almost fortunate that Astor's sufferering from reduced mental competency at this point, because we imagine the doyenne of New York's philanthropic scene might be embarrassed at her final personal requests and bequests being publicized in the......

Mayor Bloomberg made the most recent cover of Time Magazine with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as part of an article titled "Who Needs Washington?" It describes how both men have taken the lead on certain issues like the environment and education that the federal government is unwilling or unable to tackle. Time describes both Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg as self-made men who rose from middle class backgrounds to extreme wealth and socially liberal Republicanism. Some fun......

Trading Places & Coming to America (directed by John Landis) Norbit (directed by Brian Robbins) After Eddie Murphy's Oscar nomination for his supporting role in Dreamgirls last year, there was a long (and seemingly unauthorized) profile on Murphy's career in Entertainment Weekly. Looking at the whole span from the highs of his days on SNL to his mega-fame from 48 HRS and Beverly Hills Cop to the lows of Vampire in Brooklyn and that ill-conceived......

The New York Times has an interesting story today on Sion Misrahi and the Lower East Side he helped transform. If you've walked down Rivington St. a few times, you've probably noticed the Misrahi Realty storefront business. Its owner is Sion Misrahi, who sold pants for his father in the neighborhood when he was fourteen. When it began to gentrify, he worked to classify the old bargain-shopping district as a landmark area. Then he decided......

The owners of a controlling interest in Dow Jones & Company, Inc. may be considering a move to sell the company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. When the news that Rupert Murdoch was interested in acquiring The Wall Street Journal and adding all of Dow Jones to his News Corp. media empire, we wrote about the potential reluctance of the majority owners of the acquisition––the Bancroft family––and their longheld view that family ownership of a......

New York singer/songwriter Jesse Harris might be known for his songs performed by others, in 2003 he won the Grammy for Norah Jones’s “Don’t Know Why," and he's also written songs for Willie Nelson, Bright Eyes, Feist, M Ward, and many others. Tonight, however, he'll be belting out his own tunes at the Living Room. Come check him out, and get to know him a little bit first... What has your experience been like as......

THEATER: Listen up: The World Financial Center’s unique Word of Mouth Festival is going on through Saturday only. Taking inspiration from the festival’s location, The Women’s Project is presenting a series of short plays by women playwrights called Girls Just Wanna Have Fund$. They’re all site-specific works about the relationships between women and wealth (or lack thereof); audiences are escorted through various spots around the World Financial Center to watch each performance. (There's an article......

Alan Linn, ex-manager of English club Blacks, has partnered up with Steve Ruggi to open Norwood this summer. The two operate a Citizens Arts Club in London, and hope to draw a similar crowd to their new private club here in New York. The members-only establishment will be in a rowhouse at 241 West 14th Street (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues), just about two blocks from Soho House. The property was on the market in......

CNBC's Maria Bartiromo has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. Not only are there reports that Bartiromo, a 39 year-old native of Bay Ridge, has trademarked the phrase "Money Honey," but Bartiromo's name has come up in the firing of a Citigroup executive. In her filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Bartiromo lists several things that she plans to use "Money Honey" for: children's entertainment (TV, movies,......

It shouldn't be a shock to anyone to hear that an executive at Starbucks has a better work environment than a lowly barista. Other than higher pay and a far sweeter benies package, Gothamist imagines the Starbucks executive enjoys a quiter, less asshole-ridden workday (maybe). While to hear that there is a 2-class system for nursing moms on the job there is not surprising, it is still disturbing. Whereas the executive has a comfy and......

After last year's mess of an awards show and this year's joke of nominations (where is love for Lauren Graham, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences?), we were going to swear off this year's Emmys. But then we realized Conan O'Brien was hosting, so we must watch and liveblog. And there's the hope of a good Steve Carrell bit, not to mention awkward reaction shots of Candy and Tori Spelling during the Aaron Spelling tribute.......

Radical Cartography has launched another interesting comparative maps project called City Income Donuts: These maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the US (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal was to test the "donut" hypothesis — the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the "revitalized" downtown, and the......

There is a lot to be said about Warren Buffett's announcement that most of his billions-of-dollars fortune will be given to charities, with particular focus on giving about $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And we hope his actions, as well as those of the Gateses, reverbate through billionaire and millionaire circles, because giving back to the world that made them rich makes sense - tax incentives or no. For instance,......

Treehugger has been doing a series of posts on different cities, and today, the attention is turned on New York City:We want to know what are the good, and what are the bad things going on there. What is the general level of eco-consciousness in population? How is it for cyclists? How's public transportation? Suburban sprawl? Air quality? Recycling/composting? As time passes, are things getting better or worse? How are the policymakersThe comments so far......

Aurora--with an open, airy dining room, exposed brick walls, wooden tables, and a large, plant-filled garden--is named after one of owner and Roman native Gaspare Villa's favorites places in Italy. "Rustic" is the best word to describe both the food and atmosphere--like an urban farmhouse where chef Riccardo Buitoni makes sure you are both cozy and well-fed. Pastas, breads, and desserts are all made on premises with a special emphasis on seasonal ingredients, reflected......

This weekend, while you are nursing your Cinco de Mayo hangover, why not check out some art? We totally hear it works just as good as any hangover pill. An exhibit all about Chintown opens on May 6th, accurately called Chinatown (New York). Photographer Andrew Garn brings us a new view of the area by focusing in on the neighborhoods iconography. Bhudddas, sweat shops, garish neon lights hanging over the streets...it's all there. His......