The inner borough community of Hunters Point defines the Long Island City image of traditional working class neighborhoods and warehouse districts that have become havens for Manhattan-centric tower-dwellers. Just one stop off Grand Central Terminal on the 7 train, I ascended into Hunters Point from the Vernon Boulevard/Jackson Avenue station at 50th Street. A variety of inviting restaurants includes the cozy Tuk Tuk Thai(having scooted from its former location in Brooklyn), Waterfront Crabhouse, several Asian fusion joints, pizzerias, pubs, and so forth. In warmer weather, the young-and-entitled gather at Water Taxi Beach to play.
One standout is Café Henri, a Queens outpost of the West Village bistro featuring light French fare. The atmosphere is cast with distressed ochre walls and high-backed benches around the walls, with small tables and wicker café chairs about. Their Le Petit Dejeuner menu has fresh croissants and eggs Benedict with salmon. I sampled the Saucisse Pimentee – brown crepe wedges filled with spicy sausage and a mixed green salad with a sharp cheese vinaigrette served up by the attractive waitress du jour, Lydie.
Visit Hunters Point for the food, the galleries, or to stroll the waterfront and its spectacular mid-town views.

Twenty-nine years ago today, John Lennon—perhaps the most beloved of the Beatles, and certainly one of the world's most strident voices for peace throughout his lifetime—was gunned down in the entryway of the Dakota on Central Park West by Mark David Chapman. Fans will gather, in the annual tradition, at the "Imagine" mural in the park's Strawberry Fields section to commemorate the life and music of the man who, with the considerable help of Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, changed the entire world's idea of what rock 'n roll was. The entrance, which has become something of a solemn tourist trap and a place that sneaks up on more than a few New Yorkers, is situated just west of Central Park West on 72nd Street.

In other news, it was recently announced that the SoHo arm of the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame will be closing on January 3rd, which means that the John Lennon: The New York Years exhibit will close as well. The exhibit is a stunningly comprehensive collection of artifacts from Lennon's life, including the very mail bag the NYPD returned Lennon's bloody clothes to Yoko Ono in, as well as a picture of the glasses Lennon was wearing when he was shot that is nothing sort of devastating.

Well here we go. From Gothamist comes this video of a woman running lines for her Real Daughters Of Long Island audition, perhaps. A perusal of YouTube points to this being a J train, for those of you keeping score. A note to tourists: our crazy people are usually way more creative, but the downside is they're not normally this persistent. A note to the faint of heart: graphic language and several allusions to forcible mastectomies.



The J train is not to be outdone by the D train, apparently. Gothamist reminds us of this fight on the comically shiny line:



Man, this is the Dark Knight to Improv Everywhere's Batman Forever. Speaking of which, the Ninth Annual No Pants Subway Ride is coming up on January 10th. Given the MTA's propensity for holding a heating lottery with the cars on every train during the winter, maybe bring along some break-away pants just in case. Here's what it looked like last year.

Last Monday, the City Council gave the roll-down gates of New York City's infinite retail face 17 years to roll right the hell out of town. Those full-on barricades—the kind that completely protect the front of businesses and, coincidentally, are the most useful in the event of a zombie apocalypse—will have to be replaced or removed by July of 2026, with gates installed after a July 1, 2011 deadline having to meet new guidelines, which allow the sort of peek-a-boo gates to be used. This will, of course, remove store gates from the list of potential graffiti canvases while letting first responders see what's going on in a business in the event of an emergency. The ridiculously long grace period for current gate-owners at least shows that the City Council isn't trying to force struggling retailers to remodel now, although, to be fair, won't we all have deflector shields by 2026?

The MTA's Twitter (yes, the MTA has a Twitter account) posted a photo of the new feature rolling out along the L train: real-time displays of where trains are on the route. This is comforting, somewhat, since simply not knowing when or whether a train is coming is half of the annoyance of public transit, but what about those long weekends, for example, when the F train isn't running between Church Avenue and Jay Street? Do we really want a live display of how bad our commute is going to be? Self-delusion about outages is the only thing, many times, that keeps the thronging masses from open revolt on the subway platforms. This heralds a new era of the MTA either trying to make themselves look better and more efficient or proving once and for all that they truly do not care what we think.

It's been a while, and we've missed an awful lot of publications going into stoppage time, but we were waiting for something really, truly worthwhile to post about. While Arnold Diaz has the distinction of being New York's weirdest newscaster, thanks mostly to his "Shame Shame Shame!" intro, Ernie Anastos has made a bid to take the throne. Mere hours ago, he advised a coworker—meteorologist Nick Gregory—to, and we're quoting here, "Keep ****ing that chicken." It's become so popular in the intervening time, and Wikipedia's introductory paragraph already says that he's "best known for his off-color remark 'Keep ****that chicken,'" and the incident already has its own section on the page. Also, a Google search for Ernie Anastos will yield that page and, in second place, a story about this little gem of a slip.



It's this reporter's considered opinion, however, that the gaffe itself isn't the troubling thing, it's that, with full knowledge of what Gregory has apparently been doing, Anastos not only sanctioned but insisted he keep doing it. Hopefully, Anastos will escape Michael Vick's fate and not be... ahem, dogged by this for the rest of his life.

Photo: Tracy Collins/threece

We've already seen mockups of the post-Gehry Atlantic Yards design, but this one... well, it's lit up! Barclays, who now owns most of the post-financial crisis world, has its own "Barclays Center" letter blocks forming a V around the plaza, but most interesting is the evidence of the gentrification most feared the complex would bring to the neighborhood: if you look closely, those are all white people milling around the structure. Little, tiny, plastic white people pushing out the lower tax brackets!

Really, these models are just the latest barrage of architectural pornography, since the beleaguered and underfunded project has slowed to a crawl since the gung-ho early days, including the lawsuit that sought to halt it altogether (even though that died in the New York Supreme Court with a win for Ratner and the Yards). Now slated to open in 2011, the home of the soon-to-be Brooklyn Nets may just throw off enough ambient light to scare aware the packs of rats currently holding court in the development's footprint. Surely, co-owner Jay-Z can drive them into the Gowanus Canal with his sweet, sweet beats.

Almost a year after Nicolai Ouroussoff's blistering piece on the worthless architecture of New York City, it looks like one of the most hated-by-locals square block of Manhattan may seem some change, and soon. Over the weekend, Amtrak agreed to relocate its Penn Station operations to the proposed Moynihan Station across the street to the old Farley Building. The super-massive structure, which is itself an entire city block in size, would relieve that adjacent block of its long-standing dual roles of transit hub and entertainment venue, something that has remained an uneasy truce since the current Garden was built in '68.

It bears mentioning that Moynihan Station—as beautiful as the conceptual renderings floating around the internet are—will always pale in comparison to the original structure that was demolished to make way for the "modern" sports and entertainment venue. The original Penn Station, an airy, steel-and-glass shrine to one of the most beloved American gods—transportation, has long been a cause for nostalgia and wringing of hands, and Moynihan Station is bound to be the girl New York ends up dating simply because it reminds us so much of the first girl that we ever loved, and who we subsequently allowed Mosean developers to raze and pave over.

Given its size and attendance, it's strange that the Brooklyn Book Festival didn't span more than one wayward September Sunday this year. The 4th annual festival brought publishers of all types out to the plaza at Borough Hall to ply their wares on a literary public, from giants like The Paris Review to college literary magazines (some clumped together at the same booth). As with the three previous installments, the main attractions were the panels and lectures from some of literature's most luminous talents. Brooklynite writers like Paul Auster and Ben Greenman and comedian David Cross shared schedule space with musicians Lupe Fiasco and Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth). Even the more graphic sort of novels were represented, with a full New York Comic Con alley as an appetite-whetting exercise for next month's convention. at the Javits Center.

Featuring an abundance of freshly-sickled wheat.