Carnegie Hall in New York

2 September 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, New York City, Opera Houses, Theaters, Libraries Reading Time:  11 minutes

© Martin Dürrschnabel/cc-by-sa-2.5

© Martin Dürrschnabel/cc-by-sa-2.5

Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park. Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill and built by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1891, it is one of the most prestigious venues in the world for both classical music and popular music. Carnegie Hall has its own artistic programming, development, and marketing departments, and presents about 250 performances each season. It is also rented out to performing groups. The hall has not had a resident company since 1962, when the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center‘s Philharmonic Hall (renamed Avery Fisher Hall in 1973 and David Geffen Hall in 2015). Carnegie Hall has 3,671 seats, divided among its three auditoriums.   read more…

Diamond District in New York City

24 August 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, New York City, Shopping Reading Time:  7 minutes

© ChrisRuvolo/cc-by-sa-4.0

© ChrisRuvolo/cc-by-sa-4.0

47th Street is an east-west running street between First Avenue and the West Side Highway in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Traffic runs one way along the street, from east to west, starting at the headquarters of the United Nations. The street features the Diamond District in a single block (where the street is also known as Diamond Jewelry Way) and also courses through Times Square. The portion of 47th Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue is known as the Diamond District and Diamond Jewelry Way, which hosts a kosher cafe, the IDT Megabite Café. The district was created when dealers moved north to Midtown Manhattan from an earlier district in Lower Manhattan near Canal Street and the Bowery that was created in the 1920s, and from a second district located in the Financial District, near the intersection of Fulton and Nassau Streets, which started in 1931, and also at Maiden Lane, which had existed since the 18th century.   read more…

World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York City

1 August 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Architecture, House of the Month, New York City Reading Time:  8 minutes

© flickr.com - massmatt/cc-by-2.0

© flickr.com – massmatt/cc-by-2.0

World Trade Center is a terminal station in Lower Manhattan for PATH rail service. It was originally opened on July 19, 1909, as Hudson Terminal, but was torn down, rebuilt as World Trade Center, and re-opened July 6, 1971. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, a temporary station opened in 2003. This station serves as the terminus for the Newark – World Trade Center and Hoboken – World Trade Center routes. The main station house, the Oculus, opened on March 4, 2016, and the terminal was renamed the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, or World Trade Center for short.   read more…

Portrait: Steinway & Sons, manufacturer of grand pianos and pianos

29 July 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: Hamburg, New York City, Portrait Reading Time:  14 minutes

© Steinway & Sons

© Steinway & Sons

Steinway & Sons, also known as Steinway, is an American and German piano company, founded in 1853 in Manhattan, New York City, by German immigrant Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg (later known as Henry E. Steinway). The company’s growth led to the opening of a factory in Queens, New York City, and a factory in Hamburg, Germany. The factory in Queens supplies the Americas and the factory in Hamburg supplies the rest of the world. Steinway has been described as a prominent piano company, known for making pianos of high quality and for inventions within the area of piano development. Steinway has been granted 126 patents in piano making; the first in 1857. The company’s share of the high-end grand piano market consistently exceeds 80 percent. The company’s dominant position in the high-end piano market has been criticized, with some musicians and writers arguing that it has blocked innovation and led to a homogenization of the sound favored by pianists.   read more…

Theme Week New York City – Brooklyn

22 July 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, New York City Reading Time:  18 minutes

Brooklyn Borough Hall © Jim.henderson

Brooklyn Borough Hall © Jim.henderson

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City‘s five boroughs, with a Census-estimated 2,6 million residents in 2015. It is geographically adjacent to the borough of Queens at the southwestern end of Long Island. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, the most populous county in the U.S. state of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, after the county of New York (which is coextensive with the borough of Manhattan). With a land area of 71 square miles (180 km2) and water area of 26 square miles (67 km2), Kings County is New York’s fourth-smallest county by land area and third-smallest by total area, though it is the second-largest among the city’s five boroughs. Today, if it were an independent city, Brooklyn would rank as the fourth most populous city in the U.S., behind only the other boroughs of New York City combined, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The history of European settlement in Brooklyn spans more than 350 years. The settlement began in the 17th century as the small Dutch-founded town of “Breuckelen” on the East River shore of Long Island, grew to be a sizable city in the 19th century, and was consolidated in 1898 with New York City (then confined to Manhattan and part of the Bronx), the remaining rural areas of Kings County, and the largely rural areas of Queens and Staten Island, to form the modern City of New York. In the first decades of the 21st century, Brooklyn has experienced a renaissance as an avant garde destination for hipsters, with concomitant gentrification, dramatic house price increases, and a decrease in housing affordability. Since 2010, Brooklyn has evolved into a thriving hub of entrepreneurship and high technology startup firms, and of postmodern art and design. The borough continues, however, to maintain a distinct culture. Many Brooklyn neighborhoods are ethnic enclaves. Brooklyn’s official motto, displayed on the Borough seal and flag, is Eendraght Maeckt Maght, which translates from early modern Dutch to “Unity makes strength“.   read more…

The Bowery in Manhattan

20 June 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, New York City Reading Time:  13 minutes

Houston Street © David Shankbone/cc-by-sa-3.0

Houston Street © David Shankbone/cc-by-sa-3.0

The Bowery is a street and neighborhood in the southern portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th Street in the north, while the neighborhood’s boundaries are roughly East 4th Street and the East Village to the north; Canal Street and Chinatown to the south; Allen Street and the Lower East Side to the east; and Little Italy to the west. A New York City Subway station named Bowery, serving the BMT Nassau Street Line (J / Z trains), is located close to the Bowery’s intersection with Delancey and Kenmare Streets. There is a tunnel under the Bowery once intended for use by proposed but never built New York City Subway services, including the Second Avenue Subway.   read more…

Manhattanhenge in New York City

11 May 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, New York City Reading Time:  4 minutes

© Hhawk/cc-by-3.0

© Hhawk/cc-by-3.0

Manhattanhenge — sometimes referred to as the Manhattan Solstice — is an event during which the setting sun is aligned with the east–west streets of the main street grid of Manhattan in New York City. This occurs twice a year, on dates evenly spaced around the summer solstice. The first Manhattanhenge occurs around May 28, while the second occurs around July 12. The dates on which sunrise aligns with the streets on the Manhattan grid are evenly spaced around the winter solstice, and correspond approximately to December 5 and January 8.   read more…

The Meatpacking District in New York

6 April 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, New York City Reading Time:  9 minutes

Meatpacking District © Gryffindor/cc-by-sa-3.0

Meatpacking District © Gryffindor/cc-by-sa-3.0

The Meatpacking District is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan that runs roughly from West 14th Street south to Gansevoort Street, and from the Hudson River east to Hudson Street, although recently it is sometimes considered to have extended north to West 16th Street and east beyond Hudson Street.   read more…

The American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side in Manhattan

29 February 2016 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Museums, Exhibitions, New York City Reading Time:  9 minutes

American Museum of Natural History with Theodore Roosevelt monument © Ingfbruno/cc-by-sa-3.0

American Museum of Natural History with Theodore Roosevelt monument © Ingfbruno/cc-by-sa-3.0

The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH), located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, is one of the largest museums in the world. Located in park-like grounds across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 27 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain over 32 million specimens of plants, humans, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, and human cultural artifacts, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time, and occupies 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2). The museum averages about five million visits annually.   read more…

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