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City Secrets Manhattan

City Secrets Manhattan: The Essential Insider's Guide brings together the recommendations of artists, writers, historians, architects, chefs, and other experts whose passionate opinions and highly informed perspectives illuminate well-known sites as well as overlooked treasures. These expert travel companions share with you their favorite little-known places including restaurants, cafés, art, architecture, shops, outdoor markets, strolls, daytrips, as well all manner of cultural and historic landmarks. Clothbound, elegant, and pocket-sized, Manhattan features a subtle non-guidebook design and detailed maps. With over 150 contributors and 350 entries, Manhattan is a valuable supplement to any guide more devoted to travel basics. A percentage of the proceeds will be donated to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund and the Municipal Arts Society.

Clothbound | 384 pages | 4 x 7 inches | $19.95 | 978-0-9830795-4-5

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City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide

Books takes an intimate, insider's approach to literature, featuring brief essays by esteemed figures in the literary world, including authors, writers, journalists, scholars, and critics. Each has recommended their favorite overlooked book.

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City Secrets Movies: The Essential Insider's Guide

A compilation of short essays recommending a film that has been overlooked or underappreciated. Contributors include Alec Baldwin, Anjelica Huston, Barbara Kopple, Sidney Lumet, and Martin Scorsese, among many other film experts.

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City Secrets Rome, Updated and Revised

The long awaited second edition of City Secrets Rome is now available! Revised and updated, including 150 new entries.

Clothbound | 432 pages | 4.25 x 7.25 inches | $19.95 | 978-0-9830795-0-7

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City Secrets Florence, Venice & the Towns of Italy, Updated

See art and architecture of Italy's villages and cities through the eyes of the people who know them best: an architect leads you through a hidden passageway; a novelist points out the vistas that inspired St. Francis; and a cook divulges her favorite eateries.

Clothbound | 150 pages | 4 x 7 inches | $14.95 | 978-0-9835400-0-7

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Doubting Thomas

Categories: Rome | Travel

Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme
6th century C.E.

Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme 12
06 706 13 053

Take the Metro out to the church of Santa Croce, which holds the treasures that St. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, brought back from the Holy Land. See up close a thorn from Christ’s crown of thorns. See wood from the True Cross. See the actual nails that crucified Christ. Best of all, see the actual finger of St. Thomas—yes, the very finger that the doubting saint poked into the side of the living Jesus after the Resurrection.

John Guare
John Guare was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his Obie-, New York Drama Critics’ Circle–, and Tony-winning plays, including House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and A Few Stout Individuals. He teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.

POSTED BY Robert Kahn on April 14th 2012 | Add a comment

Economy Candy

Categories: Manhattan | Travel

Economy Candy
108 Rivington Street between Ludlow and Essex Streets
800 352 4544, www.economycandy.com

Started in the midst of the post-Depression era when candy still came in barrels, Economy Candy is a rickety little Lower East Side spot owned by Jerry Cohen, a grizzly New York City native with an auctioneer's voice and an attitude to match. This vintage candy warehouse brims lower east side floor to ceiling (literally-a stepladder is required) with jawbreakers, licorice whips, chocolate-covered raisins, root beer barrels, Chiclets, Pixy Stix, kosher gourmet jellybeans, and other Willy Wonka-like delicacies. A favorite of Jerry Lewis, Red Buttons, and Tony Curtis, Economy Candy was described by Gourmet magazine as "the penny-candy store elevated to an art form."

Other favorites include rock-candy swizzle sticks (red, blue, amber, yellow, pink, and green), Jordan Almonds, Atomic Fireballs, candy necklaces, eighteen kinds of halvah, chocolate-covered pretzels (milk, dark, and white), and Pez in every imaginable size and form. In fact, the only candy you won't find here is Chunky. "It's my favorite," says Cohen. "I don't sell it because I'd eat it all day long." At least the man shows some restraint.

Dany Levy
Dany Levy is the founder and editor in chief of Daily Candy, a daily e-mail newsletter dedicated to fashion, trends, and deals of the day.

POSTED BY Robert Kahn on January 4th 2012 | Add a comment

The Show Folks Shoe Shop Dedicated to Beauty in Footwear

Categories: Manhattan | Travel

I. Miller Building
1929, Louis H. Friedland
167 West 46th Street at Seventh Avenue

As you stroll down Broadway after your matinee, stop and glance at the inscription on the façade of 167 West 46^th Street (close to the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 46th Street), the site of the I. Miller shoe shop that served New Yorkers from 1929 into the 1970s. The words "The Show Folks Shoe Shop Dedicated to Beauty in Footwear" describe I. Miller's two passions-shoes and stars. As an added attraction, four statues by Alexander Stirling Calder (father of Alexander Calder of mobile fame) appear in niches below the inscription. Miller invited the public to vote for their favorite actresses as models. The winners were Ethel Barrymore as Ophelia, Mary Pickford as Little Lord Fauntleroy, Marilyn Miller as Sunny, and Rosa Ponselle as Norma.

Theresa Craig
Theresa Craig is the author of Edith Wharton: A House Full of Rooms-Architecture, Interiors and Gardens. She has taught literature at City University of New York and humanities at the New School University.

POSTED BY Robert Kahn on January 3rd 2012 | Add a comment

Hudson River Powerhouse

Categories: Manhattan | Travel

Hudson River Powerhouse
1900-1904, McKim, Mead & White
12th Avenue between West 58th and West 59th Streets
646 918 7917; www.hudsonriverpowerhouse.com

The IRT powerhouse is one of the most unusual architectural monuments in America. Designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1900 to power the very first section of the New York City subway system, it was the largest powerhouse in the world, and used the most sophisticated technology in the production of electrical power at that time. The delicately adorned exterior of the powerhouse was designed in the Beaux-Arts style, reflecting the civic minded ideals of the City Beautiful movement. In 1904, The New York Times described it as " . . . an ornament to the west side that enhances rather than diminishes the value of the surrounding property. But for its stacks, it might suggest an art museum or public library rather than a powerhouse."

In 1959, the building was sold to Con Edison for use as a power station for the New York City steam system. The utility promptly built a flat brick addition to the building, covering its western façade. As the demand for steam waned over the last twenty years, Con Edison has decommissioned most of the building and recently demolished the last of the original five smokestacks. The once majestic turbine hall stands largely empty. Decades of neglect have left other scars: steel loading doors have damaged the finely carved terra-cotta friezes and the original building cornice is entirely gone.

Efforts to designate the building a historic landmark, in 1979 and 1990, failed in the face of the powerful public utility. In 2007, The Hudson River Powerhouse Group was formed to lobby the city to designate the powerhouse a landmark, raise funds to restore the building, and re-purpose this once grand powerhouse as a public space. It remains to be seen if this gem will be preserved or demolished.

Basil Walter is the founding partner of Basil Walter Architects (BWA), an international architecture and design firm with offices in New York City and Beijing, China.

POSTED BY Robert Kahn on December 27th 2011 | Add a comment

Follow the Stroll to Bob Crachit's house

Categories: London | Travel

A Film Buff's Stroll

For thirty years I worked at Broadcasting House near Oxford Circus, and lived ﬁrst on the west side of Hampstead Heath, then on the east side, and would often walk the three miles home via Camden Town. The ﬁrst journey is the one Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson took from Oxford Street to Hampstead in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton to burgle the home of the "king of all blackmailers," who lived at a Gothic mansion on the corner of East Heath Road and Well Road. They subsequently ﬂed from the house, zigzagging across the Heath to emerge presumably on the Highgate Road and catch a cab back to Baker Street.

The second journey is the one walked by the intrepid Richard Hannay in John Buchan's classic conspiracy thriller The Three Hostages, just after World War I, following the ﬁrst clue that leads him from Oxford Circus via Camden Town to Gospel Oak at the Heath's southeast corner. His walk takes him past the apartment block at 122 Portland Place from which Hannay would later escape, disguised as a milkman, in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

The most sublime Hitchcock image from the 1930s is of the unattended horse-drawn milk-ﬂoat in Park Crescent. You can get to Camden Town by the Nash Terraces of Regent's Park's Outer Circle or Albany Street, from the top of which, at the White House, the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale ran his espionage ring in the 1960s. Camden Town is where the nine-year-old Charles Dickens lived in Bayham Street, as well as being the home of the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol and the inner-city area transformed by the coming of the railways in Dombey and Son. At Parkway, Camden Town, is Palmer's Pet Store, above which the Communist leader Bennett lived in Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield. (The black-and white shop front remains intact but inside is now a fashionable café, Yumchaa.)

Going North by the Holmes or the Hannay route takes you through George Orwell territory-in the mid-1930 she lived in Warwick Mansions, Pond Street, 77 Parliament Hill, and 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town, and worked at a bookshop called Booklover's Corner (immortalised in Keep the Aspidistra Flying) in South End Green, as recorded by a plaque on the corner. At Gospel Oak you'll reach Gordon House Road, along which a psychopathic hitman drives on his way to a killing on the opening page of Ruth Rendell's The Lake of Darkness. Cross over to the Heath and climb to the top of Parliament Hill, where D. H. Lawrence and Frieda watched zeppelins bombing London in World War I, as described in Kangaroo.

Philip French
Philip French is The Observer's film critic, author of Westerns, and co-editor of The Faber Book of Movie Verse. He was named Critic of the Year in the 2009 National Press Awards.

POSTED BY Robert Kahn on December 23rd 2011 | Add a comment