New York travel guide
7B - a highly recommended East Village bar
When I first moved to New York City in 1990, my friends and I were a bit scared to walk into Alphabet City, and you really couldn’t blame us because out-in-the-open drug deals were some of the least frightening things about the neighborhood. Of course, through the 90s things changed drastically. Now it’s not only safe, but rents are far out of most of our price ranges as well.
But even back then the one place that would motivate us to run the gauntlet was simply known as 7B, since it’s on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue B. The real name of the place is Vazac’s Horseshoe Bar, but no one calls it that. The city’s easy-to-use grid system is made just that much easier by names like 7B, where even the dumbest or drunkest person knows exactly where they are.
Date: December 13th, 2007 |
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Time Out New York - just get it
The best advice I can give to anyone who is considering coming to New York City, especially for the first time, is to get at least one copy of the weekly entertainment and culture magazine - Time Out New York.
Actually, it’s well worth it to subscribe for a year, but we’ll get to that later. Time Out is a London-based publishing outfit that does weekly guides in over 20 cities worldwide, and they also churn out a reliable group of travel guidebooks. Time Out New York launched in 1995, and the city has never been the same.
Date: December 7th, 2007 |
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Celebrity spotting - with a delay
One of the few fun things about living in LA and one of the many fun things about living in New York City is that crossing paths with famous folks becomes a regular occurrence. Go ahead and act like it’s no big deal if you want, but when you are buying beer at a bodega standing right next to Parker Posey or John Krasinski, it can add a nice zing to your evening.
But of course these sightings are always totally random and unpredictable. You can drastically increase your chances by spending a lot of time in Downtown Manhattan, but still on any given day you won’t recognize anyone.
Those pretentious dropouts who run gawker.com are mostly useless, but a couple years ago they started an interesting webpage/service. It tracks celebrity sightings on a map, usually with attempted-humorous captions and sometimes interesting random photos. It’s gawkerstalker, and I’ve been following it since it debuted in 2005.
Date: December 10th, 2007 |
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