If you haven’t booked a table yet for Summer Restaurant Week 2018, no problem. This summer the twice-yearly prix fixe meal deal runs through August 17, making it more of a restaurant month than week.
If you, like me, were saddened to learn about the demolition of the iconic Main Building of the Hotel Okura in 2015, there’s intriguing news. Tokyo’s Ashai Shimbun reports that the building’s midcentury lobby, widely hailed as a masterpiece of Japanese modernist architecture, is to be faithfully reproduced in the towering new Okura hotel that’s […]
Bastille Day is right around the corner (Saturday, July 14 to be precise). And France is in the World Cup finals on Sunday. Do you need any more reasons to dig into French Restaurant Week 2018 in New York? This year 22 restaurants around town encourage you to Eat Drink and Be French with three-course lunches […]
We’ll take the works! Macy’s unleashes their patented July 4 ode to the rockets’ red glare, aka the Macy’s Fireworks Show, tonight from a fleet of barges floating in the East River between 22nd and 42nd streets. That make Fireworks 2018 a three-borough spectacular, with viewing opportunities throughout much of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, provided there’s […]
What happens when you check into a hotel that’s next to a construction site? I thought about this when I walked by the Franklin Hotel, an Upper East Side boutique, on a recent spring day. I hadn’t been by the hotel in a while and was astounded by what I saw. A futuristic 19-story glass-front […]
Everyone knows artist Grant Wood (1891-1942) for his iconic depiction of a deadpan Iowa farmer, pitchfork in hand, standing beside a stern, yellow-haired woman wearing an apron. But did you know that in 1932, just two years after he painted “American Gothic,” Wood created a series of murals portraying Iowa farm life for a hotel […]
If all goes as expected, The Plaza Hotel — overnight home to Christian Dior, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Beatles, backdrop to movies like North by Northwest and Crocodile Dundee and playground for the impish Eloise — is about to change hands once again for an eye-popping $600 million. It’s just not clear who the […]
With Earth Day on our mind, it’s time for a quick check of the greenest hotels in New York City. The super-greens are hotels that have earned LEED certification, third party proof of adherence to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards set by the U.S Green Building Council.
And to think they were destined for the dumpster. On Thursday night, an auction was held for 52 original doors from the Hotel Chelsea that were discarded when renovation began in 2012 and harvested by a resourceful former homeless man. And prices shot through the proverbial roof. To wild applause from bidders and onlookers in […]
At the stroke of midnight on July 31, 2011, the Hotel Chelsea, the outrageous, art-filled property that checked in legendary guests like Tennessee Williams, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Madonna, closed its doors for a renovation that was supposed to last one year, an estimate that proved wildly optimistic. Nearly seven years on, the 1885 […]