Please don't wear five-inch heels on these stairs.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)A friend of mine once told me that one of the most striking characteristics of the Manhattan mini-neighborhood known as the Meatpacking District was the proliferation of "baby giraffes."
Basically, what he meant were the hordes of impossibly skinny young women in mile-high stiletto heels, teetering through the cobblestone streets of the party-heavy neighborhood as though they were juvenile specimens of Giraffa camelopardalis who couldn't quite control their pole-like legs. (In case you couldn't tell, the Meatpacking District's warehouses have largely given way to pricey designer boutiques and the nightclubs that keep Us Weekly's readership happy).
But those Giraffe Girls had better watch out, because the nerds are invading their watering hole.
On Friday night at 6 p.m., the doors will formally open to the third and largest Apple retail store in Manhattan, at the northernmost end of the Meatpacking District (it's on the corner of West 14th Street and 9th Avenue, to be more specific). Unlike its Fifth Avenue sibling, the West 14th Street Apple store won't be open 24/7--it closes at midnight, which might as well be the Meatpacking District equivalent of three o'clock in the afternoon. It's probably for the better. Steve Jobs has enough on his hands; he doesn't need to have to deal with dubious lawsuits from drunk girls in stilettos who've tumbled down that three-story glass staircase while trying to go hit on the guys behind the Genius Bar (they get way cuter after four cosmopolitans!)
The geeks have already taken roost at the old Port Authority building two blocks north, now home to New York's sprawling Google headquarters. Now they've staked a second claim with the Apple Store. Don't hold your breath, fellow techies, but if Tenjune gets replaced by a late-night arcade or something, we'll know the transformation is complete.
Click here for the rest of CNET News.com's fanboy-friendly photo gallery.
A look at the entrance to 770 Broadway from the north side of East 9th Street.
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)It'll be interesting to see how AOL chooses to classify its new corporate headquarters on 770 Broadway in downtown Manhattan. The historic building, formerly home to the Wanamaker's department store, spans an entire city block and now holds offices of one variety or another for companies as varied as J. Crew, Viacom and Billboard. And there's famously a K-Mart (one of Manhattan's few-and-far-between big-box discount retailers) on the ground floor. It's touted by owner Vornado Realty Trust as being "in the heart of the Village." Well, kind of.
Because so many of New York's neighborhoods have become iconic cities-within-a-city and hold rather weighty connotations about the people who live and work there, it's always interesting to see how a major company brands its office location. Google, for example, likes to talk about its Manhattan outpost as being in the design-savvy district of Chelsea. Locals, however, occasionally (OK, more than occasionally) snicker about how it's just a stone's throw away from the overpriced, Page Six-worthy Meatpacking District, which is better known for clubs with names like Cielo, PM, and Aer than for geeky Googlers with pythons on the loose.
770 Broadway is in a notably ambiguous location, to the point where AOL could really stake a claim to one of a handful of Manhattan locations depending on how it wants its new "advertising, not access" incarnation to be branded. Or it could go for the whole "at the crossroads" mystique. Five blocks north is the constantly crowded Union Square; a few blocks west is Washington Square Park; to the south is the retail-packed, not-really-a-neighborhood zone known as NoHo (North of Houston Street) East of 770 Broadway is Cooper Square, which really isn't much of a square anymore because of extensive development; it's an academic-friendly enclave due to the presence of Cooper Union and a number of New York University buildings, as well as multiple Starbucks locations.
But if you look further to the east, you can see the colorful strip that is St. Mark's Place, the western end of the East Village and home to a tome's worth of punk rock history as well as plenty of places to get an eyebrow piercing or a glass of cheap sake. It'd be a slight geographical inaccuracy for AOL to say it's found a new home in the East Village, and it'd make many of the liberal-minded residents cringe; but considering massive dot-coms' often unsuccessful affinity for branding themselves as the hip kids in town, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
A tip to AOL-ers moving to New York: If you take the 6 train to get to the office, when you leave the subway stop, look for the bright orange van that sells coffee. That's the Mud Truck. They make a tasty brew.
(Credit:
Grand Life NYC)
Left-leaning news hub The Huffington Post launched a new blog on Thursday, one that's been talked up quite a bit among the New York new media scene. It's called "236.com"--that's 23/6, which could be considered the 24/7 of the liberal leisure class that reads HuffPo blogs in the first place. (For the record, the main 236.com domain, which will include more print and multimedia content, has not yet launched.)
Anyway, in describing itself to curious visitors, a blurb at the top of the new blog explains: "236.com is a co-production between the gigantic, vaguely Death Star-like 'new media holdings company' IAC/InterActiveCorp, and The Huffington Post, a progressive news hub where outraged people go in order to get more outraged before going to have dinner at Balthazar."
For those of you outside the New York tech scene, that last sentence might not make a whole lot of sense, so I'll help you out with it. Balthazar is a highbrow, red-awninged French bistro in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo, opened a decade ago by restauranteur Keith McNally, and it has a reputation for high-quality but high-priced food at all meals of the day.
If you're involved in new media in Manhattan, chances are good that you've been to Balthazar more than a few times. But at first glance, the Euro-styled place isn't particularly nerdy. The crowd at breakfast typically consists of business-hipster types in black framed glasses who walk in with copies of the International Herald-Tribune tucked under their arms, and later in the day it's a social spot for well-dressed downtowners and tourists who still have a few bucks to spend after a day of shopping in retail-friendly SoHo.
The unlikely geek cred of such a place comes from the fact that Balthazar is one of the bigger and more high-profile restaurants in a neighborhood that's pretty much saturated with Web start-ups. Within shouting distance, aside from the Huffington Post, are Gawker Media, Flavorpill, Mogulus, Thrillist, TreeHugger, Socialight, GroundReport, PSFK, Blip.tv, and probably a handful of others I'm forgetting. Consequently, Balthazar is a constant go-to place for meetings, power breakfasts, after-work libations, and what-have-you.
In fact, it's become such a ubiquitous spot for the digital-media crowd that some people are downright sick of it, opting to instead hold meetings at--the horror!--the Starbucks across the street.
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