u/Magpie-Paju-1950

How do people feel about Spence's expansion (and the expansion of other private schools in the area?)

Has anyone lived over a public bathroom? or fought a noise battle for years?

The REI in the Puck Building will close its doors on July 23, ending a nearly 15-year run on the corner of East Houston and Lafayette. This is a closing of note. When the news broke last year, outdoorsy types across the city grieved and wondered where they would buy camping stoves for last-minute trips to the Adirondacks. There are plans for a funerary shrine on Lafayette Street. A reliably clean bathroom has also been lost. (“You learn a lot about a culture from how they treat public bathrooms,” said Juan Pablo Baene, an artist, while checking out a monocular with his kid. “It’s sad.”) Employees mourned too — mostly about being out of a job. I also overheard a few customers lamenting the recent arrival of OpenAI, which now occupies 90,000 square feet upstairs. There goes the neighborhood.

A story about the daily meetup in Jackson Heights for all ages -

A pretty unique club at Stuyvesant - "It was a warm Thursday in early June at Rockefeller Park, ideal weather for tanning on the grass or kicking around a soccer ball. But on a shady patch under a sprawling river birch, ten teens who had wandered over from Stuyvesant High School assemble themselves into breakout groups to discuss Zohran Mamdani’s recently released housing proposal."

some cool photos here from the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, 1971-including the rooms of Patti Smith and Jonas Mekas -

"When asked by the critic and art historian Michael Stoeber if the apartments at the Chelsea Hotel were “portraits of their occupants,” the photographer Albert Scopin replied, “Definitely. That amazed me. The magnitude of it was new to me.” Those likenesses, uncanny in the way a dog and its owner might begin to resemble one another, are unmistakable while paging through Chelsea Hotel, a new collection of Scopin’s photographs taken in and around the historic locale between 1969 and 1971. These images, long considered lost, resurfaced in 2016. In the book, they are paired with Scopin’s recollections on the people — Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe lounging in his annex studio on the ground floor; a woman named Lola who left her apartment just twice a week, “once to see her shrink and once to go shopping” — and their lives at 222 West 23rd Street."