Inspired by @davidjroth.bsky.social and @drewmagary.bsky.social to share the first TV feature I ever produced. If you never got to see low-major college basketball played beneath a gilded rococo ceiling, on a floor under which lived a Wurlitzer pipe organ you missed out.

I feel I’ve been waiting all my life to be commissioned to write this feature about Space:1999 for today’s Telegraph.. www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/c7afbc1...

Archaeology division of New York Public Library (aka defunct payphone stand)

Weather app has thrown up its hands & given up

Brooklyn Heights last night just before a 3-fer of thundersnow flashes and booms

Moonstruck house in Brooklyn after midnight during the blizzard…right before 2nd clap of thundersnow

Thundersnow!

Every melting snow pile like a receding glacier leaving a tiny moraine as a goodbye

Sisyphean job: updating the prewritten obits for ongoing flow of current events

East River ice back for an encore

❤️

The clinking and shushing of ice floes, as they fill up the East River on their ride in from New York Harbor and points north…10/10, highly recommend

Live shot of this morning’s single-digit temps & icy crosswalks in Brooklyn

Probably one of the best road safety adverts from TfL. If you've never seen it before - I can guarantee you will watch it twice.

Fun fact: in Spanish the open space in the middle of the staircase is an eye (ojo de escalera).but in Italian it's a trumpet (tromba delle scale)

I've received many messages about this over the last two weeks — people still read, reference, and link to these stories WRITTEN BY REAL REPORTERS who knew their cities better than anyone else. I figured a fix might have been delayed due to holiday breaks but this needs to be remedied immediately!

TIL you can ride the subway for free by tapping an empty OMNY card * * depends on how long ago was last paid tap…and at least until next time you want to use your card

RIP to a real one, part II

RIP to a real one

love that DHS slapped a trademark symbol on a phrase that is registered to new york's metropolitan transit authority

Snow!

I never miss an opportunity to tell New Yorkers that the DVD section of the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center has a better selection than any video store I've been in aside from Mondo Kim's

Just count your lucky stars they didn’t keep the hyphen in “Long-Island” like was the fashion in the early 1830s (both for the rail road/railroad, and this Brooklyn newspaper!)

Wait, you’re telling me the average Brooklynite doesn’t keep one of these cart coins handy in their wallet?! (Ironically they’ve been phasing these out in Spain)

The best part of this story is not that everyone’s had the # wrong for literally centuries…but that someone else noticed the mistake in 1989 and it STILL went uncorrected!

The hidden chemical attack that forced the Northern line’s extraordinary repair www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the...

(The correct answer for “best” is the original “The Taking of Pelham 123” OBVIOUSLY)

Northern Lights aurora reflected in Madison’s Lake Mendota just now

The Christmas shopping event of the season is over, just like that—but if you missed out, don't worry: The Municipal Archives and Library are rocking all year long.

Scenes from this morning’s NYC Municipal Archives book sale inside the gorgeous Surrogate’s Court atrium. Building is a gem, go just for the architecture. (Yes there’s a line to get in!)

Congrats to NYC on starting down the road to a unified streets map. Took only 125+ yrs after consolidation 😉 Scanning each borough’s paper maps will be (mostly) easy, actually digitizing all the metadata would be really really hard. Here’s a close-up of what one of these paper maps looks like.

🎂 Happy birthday, #NYCSubway! 121 years ago #OnThisDay in 1904, the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) subway opened with 28 stations along a 9.1-mile line extending from City Hall to 145th Street. This #NYTMCollection silent film, shot just months after the subway opened, shows its early days.

College radio stations are seeing a surge in student interest. Stations that once struggled to fill airtime are now overflowing with student DJs.  I spoke to 7 college radio stations across the U.S. to understand what is driving the revival: emwhitenoise.substack.com/p/gen-zs-col...

Lol, the Brooklyn spaceship car has an ancestor (via Long Island Tercentenary parade down Eastern Parkway in 1936)

AI data scraping is causing major problems for digital archives. Many publishers of cool historical material (free for the public), like @hagleycenter.bsky.social, are being hit w/ bot swarms akin to denial of service attacks. Latest in The Lint Trap linttrapofhistory.substack.com/p/when-ai-da...

And hello to these street tree bed tomatoes 🍅

You’re not a True New Yorker until you know your building’s BBL

Squibb / Watchtower skybridge in Brooklyn Heights - inside & out

WELCOME

DUMBO’s borders are fluid…but when it comes to Furman Street below Brooklyn Heights, the people have spoken

200 yrs ago OTD: Just some Brooklyn neighbors complaining in the local media about the garbage, summer smells, businesses taking over the sidewalks, potholes and never-ending construction. City cranks never change 🤷‍♂️

More about “Honeymoon Row” in Brooklyn Heights, and why you don’t see many Gothic Revival rowhouses like this – on my blog

Great piece below by John Freeman Gill. Mystery solved–why Horace Greeley's name is on the doorplate. Happy to have shared some of my Brooklyn Heights building research! Fun fact: in 1921 this Clinton Street townhouse sold for $14,000. Today value is probably 25x the inflation-adjusted price.

200 years ago on July 4: Lafayette came to Brooklyn Heights, performed some Masonic rites over a time capsule & picked up 6-year-old Walt Whitman high above the crowd — what a day!

The city map proposal is a mixed bag. The report treats digitization like a pure tech problem - “just scan all the old maps!” But these maps have a huge amt of cryptic metadata interpretation issues that scanning won’t solve, and lots of the knowledge is off-map in other Topo Office resources. (1/x)

Some 725,000 people tuned into the mayoral debate last week, co-hosted by @politico.com, @nbcnewyork.com and @telemundo47.com. That's *huge* interest - 942,000 people voted in the 2021 primary.

Shout-out to the real ones on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn Heights loudly discussing R9A zoning

The true story behind Sherita, a brutal tale of old Brooklyn and a predatory real estate spree. Debbie Nathan and I dug deep to expose the brothers behind it, who hid behind phony last names.

It’s a beautiful system diagram - but some of us like to know where we’re going once we leave the platform 🙄

Best wishes to 1-day-old Baby W and her mom. DYK that NYC transit babies pre-date the subway?! 125 yrs ago, "B R T Colomba" was born in a Coney Island streetcar. Proud papa proclaimed he'd name her Beatrice Regina Teresa to match her first initials with the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company!