This week’s New York Magazine cover story drops over 5,500 words on the “slightly illicit-sounding” Brownstoner, a blog that for several years has chronicled the steamy vicissitudes of gentrifying Brooklyn. Or rather, the article looks at Brooklyn’s turbulence through the prism of the blog’s commenters – specifically a derisive doomsday prophet who calls himself The What. 5,500 words, one commenter. Up next, a sprawling New Yorker profile on Alex Balk’s Tumblr imitator. Adam Sternbergh, the......

A judge has finally ruled on a long-simmering dispute between a restaurant and its deliverymen. Last March deliverymen at the popular Vietnamese restaurant Saigon Grill, which has locations in Greenwich Village and on the Upper West Side, demanded a raise from owners Simon and Michelle Nget. The deliverymen reasoned that since the chain was pulling in more than $2 million a month, they ought to earn more than $120 for a 75-hour week. They were......

Lindsay Lohan by Bert Stern. In 1962, photographer Bert Stern shot a series of photos (2,571 in all) of Marilyn Monroe at the Hotel Bel-Air that are collectively known as “The Last Sitting.” The 36-year-old Monroe was in the darkest period of her life, having weathered two recent divorces, gallbladder surgery and sickness during production of the romantic comedy Something’s Got to Give, from which she was fired and rehired. Six weeks after the Stern......

The reviews are in for the $180 million production of The Golden Compass, and they’re lackluster at best, which is a pity not just for fans of the novel from which it’s adapted but for New Line Cinema, which was banking on another Lord of the Rings cash cow. Times critic Manohla Dargis calls it flawed and cluttered, although her description of Nicole Kidman ought to sway any dudes reluctant to see a movie starring......

It's been a busy month for NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. After tackling Jean Nouvel's skyscraper, Renzo Piano's Times building and the West Side Rail Yards designs, today he turns to the feverishly celebrated New Museum, previewed yesterday by Gothamist. Designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Japan-based SANAA, the highly refined seven-story, 174-foot building succeeds, says Ouroussoff, on a "spectacular range of levels: as a hypnotic urban object, as a subtle......

Insert obligatory phoenix metaphor here: Brooklyn’s Freebird, the used book and corn dogs mecca that closed earlier this year, is set to re-emerge a little later this week from The Embers of Gentrification. While the NY Magazine article linked in that last sentence is about the real estate debacle of Red Hook, the shuttered Freebird, which is technically in Cobble Hill, is sometimes considered (with restaurants like Alma) to be an extension of that troubled......

With September at a near close, we hereby pronounce it the month of 40 Bond. While stories on hotelier Ian Schrager's second foray into residential development started appearing in 2006, interest ratcheted up this month with a slew of closings (Ricky Martin's moving in). Then this week, NY Magazine and The New York Sun devoted even more ink to it. 40 Bond reinforces Schrager's knack for reinvention. In a city where glass condos are the......

Reach out and touch someone - and get fired for it, possibly even if you didn't do the reaching out and touching. The nutty voicemail message left for Bernard Spitzer, father of Governor Spitzer, is reassuring everyone that it's just politics as usual in Albany. The elder Spitzer's lawyers believe that the call was made by GOP consultant Roger Stone, who was recently hired at $20,000/month by NY State Republican (he was consulting with Spitzer's......

After Attorney General Cuomo found that Governor Spitzer's staffers were using state police records to attack rival Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, everyone agrees on one thing: It's very bad for Governor Spitzer. In a nutshell, Spitzer's aides, including communications director Darren Dopp, leaked information about possible misuse of state aircraft by Bruno to the Albany paper, the Times Union. Spitzers' aides later claimed that they were investigating Bruno's use of state aircraft because......

We know July 4th is around the corner when we hear about the police seizing caches of illegal fireworks. Yesterday, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced "one of the largest fireworks seizures" in city history: 9,000 pounds of fireworks were found in Sheepshead Bay. Newsday reports that the fireworks included "mortar shells typically used in professional displays, as well as something called the 800-Shot Grand Finale Saturn Missile Battery, which is as big as a small......

At around 11pm we got a text message from a friend at the Shepard Fairey opening in DUMBO, saying that the "Splasher got caught at the show tonight". So far the information we're hearing is that two guys attempted to set off a stink bomb at the show, but were stopped by security. It remains to be seen if the stink-bombers are the same guys who set off a stink bomb at the Faile......

He made his name in London, Paris, Madrid, and Tokyo, and now he's making his mark on New York, too, with four major projects in development. Richard Rogers, one of Britain's handful of architect-knights, has just been awarded the 2007 Pritzker Prize, architecture's top honor. For many people, Rogers' most iconic project is still the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he completed in 1977 while partners with Renzo Piano. The inside-out building lasciviously exposed......

Workers at Vietnamese restaurant Saigon Grill have gone on strike - and have also been locked out by the owners - for over two weeks. Now, the workers have filed a lawsuit against Saigon Grill for a wide range of labor violations. According to the Justice Will Be Served, the group that is working with the workers: "The owners demanded workers sign an illegal contract, stating that they have received minimum wage, even though......

New York Magazine decides to look at the city in the year 2016 in terms of architecture and real estate development - and how that'll impact New Yorkers. It's a great look at how drastically the city could change in ten years, which is all overwhelming, exciting, and kind of scary, because for every rendering of glassy buildings, what does that mean for the neighborhoods? Are they plans for more affordable housing to meet......

- NY Magazine interviews Bill Weld about his NY gubernatorial dreams - The NYPD's Organized Theft and Identity Theft Task Force is going strong - A victim's mother is suing the the NYPD detectives who turned mob hitmen for $150 million - Love for Gawker from Conan O'Brien and Will Arnett - The Village Voice on Melvin Van Peebles - Awesome truck photographs from lucky dog on Flickr More pix of the tanker-fire smoke......

Gothamist is interested in reading, Doormen, after reading the New Yorker Talk of the Town article about how this study of NYC doormen was conducted. Sociology professor Peter Bearman arrived at Columbia to find "his new colleagues unusually arrogant and difficult" and thought his doormen caused this (but he decided that was wrong). The book is subtitled "Fieldwork and Discoveries," and though a Publishers Weekly review says it's a little dry (perhaps as it's the......

Yesterday morning, a four-alarm fire broke out in Astoria, damaging a few stores on Ditmars Boulevard and 31st Street and suspending subway service temporarily. Dan Dickinson has some photos showing that among the damaged stores is the restaurant Thirty One (here's NY Magazine's mention of its opening). The Daily News says that Twin Donut employees noticed smoke coming from Thirty One. As it happens, City Councilman Peter Vallone has an office across the street;......

We knew that 80s icon Cyndi Lauper lived on the Upper West Side, but Gothamist didn't realize she was trying to only pay $508 in her rent! Lauper, who sublets an apartment at the Apthorp, the apartment building that takes up Broadway to West End Avenue, 78th to 79th Streets, is suing the owners of the building because they had been paying $3,250 a month for many years, while the previous owner had paid only......

Gothamist spotted this sign the other day while walking down Thompson Street between West 3rd and Bleecker. Now you may remember that, a while back, Pluck U. served up its buffalo wings around the corner on West 3rd, in addition to its other two locations: 3rd Avenue between 10th & 11th and 124 Nassau Street between Beekman & Ann. Granted, we haven't eaten at Pluck U. since those days, but it's likely that we......

It's that time of the year again: NY Magazine's Best of New York issue is out. This is when already fans of certain establishments must put up with the hordes of people trying to get in on the action. For instance, restaurant Ici in Fort Greene will never be under the radar again. But it is helpful knowing that G+G Cleaners on Grand Street is a great cheap place for alterations and that Simadi Salon......

Yes, yes, we know. Everyone else wrote about it already. But Gothamist was at the opening night party at Plate NYC too, so we wanted to throw in our two cents, and let you know that it's open for business. Unfortunately, we only had time for a quick stop-by, but the tease we got was enough to make us want to come back for a real visit very soon. We were excited even before we......

A U.S. District judge denied the city's attempt to make riders of Critical Mass, the monthly bike ride to encourage more biking and less driving, have permits. While Judge William Pauley said the issue should be decided in state court, Judge Pauley pointed out that the police "had not required permits for nearly a decade and had even aided the rallies by blocking cross-town intersections and letting cyclists run red lights." In other words, City......

We never realized how "on the cutting edge" we were (or possibly over the hill) until this week, when we were about to do a review for Bar Tonno. We went there Saturday night before we knew this was the cool week to review it, we swear! But, given the fact that we have a day job to hold down, we had to wait until now to review it. And despite the fact that, this......

In a throwback to the past that Gothamist loves, the Daily News gives Chelsea restaurant, The Biltmore Room, props for its lush, private cellphone room where people can talk on the cellphone in soundproof comfort. In the space that used to be the dumbwaiter, The Biltmore Room management decided to create a leather cushion walled sanctum for Chatty Cathies and Kens - with cellphone antennae built into the masonry. Gothamist hasn't been to the Biltmore......

Brooklyn is buzzing over rumors that Caroline Kennedy, husband Edwin Schlossberg, and their kids are moving to Park Slope from the Upper East Side. While there's "no comment" from the family, Brooklyn's biggest booster, Borough President Marty Markowitz, had some:Brooklyn, home to everyone from everywhere, is proud to be the new home of the Kennedys. Park Slope: It ain't Cape Cod, but it's starting to look a lot like Camelot.Park Slope residents are used to......

NY Magazine gets city coroner Jonathan Hayes to write about the latest CSI spinoff, CSI: NY, set in our great city. Now, Gothamist is predisposed to the reigning cop-and-lawyer show in town, Law & Order, especially since it actually shoots its episodes in NY, but we won't mind seeing CSI:NY in reruns or on Spike TV at some point. Gothamist did like Hayes's insights about being a coroner:There�s a forensic saying that �there is......

Watching the Olympics made Gothamist hanker for a messy souvlaki dripping in hot sauce. Luckily, Greek delights are just a train ride away. The Daily News looked at restaurants in Astoria that will bring you to the Meditarranean, if only just through a taste. Chowhound looked at the state of Greek restaurants in Astoria (part one, part two), and Citysearch has a section on Astoria. And if you're too lazy to take the N from......

Gothamist Cooks (Kind of) by the Book About Gothamist Cooks (Kind of) by the Book is a weekly column written by Girlynyc, featuring a tasty, easy-to-make recipe featured in a New York-related cookbook. This week features New York Cooks: The 100 Best Recipes from New York Magazine, by Gillian Duffy (Primedia, 2003). Gillian Duffy raided fifteen years of back issues of New York Magazine for its best recipes, so you can throw out all those......

July 4th is three days away, but some of you might be unplugging and getting away for the weekend, so Gothamist has some information for you, in case you change your mind and want to stick around for the weekend. July 4th is one of the best times to be in the city, one of the top reasons being the Macy's July 4th Spectacular. This year, there will fireworks over the East River on the......

Since she's not in a play these days where her baked goods are sold as refreshment, you can try cupcakes made by Amy Sedaris at Joe in Greenwich Village (141 Waverly Place, 212-924-6750). NY Magazine reports that even though Sedaris is admittedly diva-ish when it comes to her baking style, that was no problem for owner Jonathan Rubenstein: �I was like, �I don�t know when I�ll bring them in, never call me at home, I......