Entries tagged with “blogs” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

As I mentioned in a prior post, several local blogs helped us arrive at "Lost New York" as our conference theme, and so it seemed natural to assemble a panel of bloggers to talk about the relationship between writing, new media, and attempts to stave off the rapid transformation of traditional neighborhoods. Some of the folks we invited aren't able to be on the panel for one reason or another. Two of my favorite anti-gentrification bloggers, Jeremiah Moss (from Jeremiah's Vanishing New York) and EV Grieve, agreed to a conversation about the nature of their projects and the NYC blogosphere in general.

BW: Since you both blog under pseudonyms, I wonder: How did you come up with the names?

JM: As I wrote in a blog post a while back, "Jeremiah" began as a character in a novel I wrote prior to the blog. I've never published a novel and this one has not yet been seen by any editors -- I am still working it through. In that writing, I enjoyed having an outlet for my most curmudgeonly self, for the anger and powerlessness I experienced while watching the city I loved disappear. Writing is a kind of action, as opposed to passivity, and moving from the novel to the blog enabled me to stay in action about these issues -- much more than I expected.

BW: Do you still think of Jeremiah as a character you perform?

JM: I didn't expect many people to read the blog, and I didn't think I'd ever be communicating with readers. As that has happened, more and more, the line between me and Jeremiah has blurred even further. Simply put, the voice I use in the blog is me but not all of me. It is, however, an essential part of me -- sort of like a sharpened, clarified, angry, righteous part of me, undiluted by my natural tendency to see multiple sides of an issue. As Jeremiah, I can be staunch.

BW: When I read that post about Jeremiah's origins as a fictional character it really took me aback. It seemed both dangerous and liberating, given that I've only ever written online under my own name, though that can be both dangerous and liberating too. It also pushed me to think about blogging in literary terms -- as both literary writing and as performance -- in ways I hadn't quite before. Grieve, do you ever think of "EV Grieve" as akin to Jeremiah's semi-fictional avatar?

EVG: The Grieve name is meant to be about mourning. (And not pronounced as "Gree-vey.") Definitely Jeremiah's influence there. Plus I spent $35,000 on focus-group testing for that....

BW: Has becoming Grieve been something akin to Jeremiah's role-playing? Does being "Grieve" feel different in some ways from being the person you were before/are outside the blog?

EVG: At times. I've been out with friends, who don't know about the site, and I see an amazing urban etiquette sign or something. And I try to think of some perfectly good explanation of why I'm taking a photo of a funny sign or store closing. I'm the same person as before, but it now just takes me longer to run an errand. I'll meander more and scope every storefront, apartment entrance, etc. At times I'm worried folks might find my behavior a bit daft, that I'm casing the joint or something. And I've sort of lost my speedy NYC gait. Jeremiah, do you remember the commenter who thought we were the same person? As if we had the time and energy to do TWO blogs! In two fairly different tones!

JM: Yes, I do! We share a lot in common, but I wonder how people see us. I think I'm the grouchy one and Grieve is the more affable one. I don't know. Writing the blog has enabled me to enjoy the city more today than I did in the years leading up to the blog. So the irony here is that, through the writing of this angry blog, I've ended up feeling less angry. I was seriously thinking about leaving New York a few years ago. Then I started the blog and it held me here.

BW: I think that less-angry side comes through in your eagerness not to be misunderstood, and your sense of fairness when you have readers (sometimes even trolls) who take you to task on some point. I also think I've noticed over time a tendency to celebrate things you like -- a trumpet-playing bus driver, for instance -- and not just to focus on the death and destruction of the New York you loved when you moved here. Grieve, where would you fall on the mourning/celebrating spectrum? Like you said, the name implies mourning ... but you were originally mourning the closing of a bar that ended up not closing after all, right?

EVG: Yeah. When the news came down in December 2007 that Sophie's and Mona's were for sale, I was naturally very upset. While I wasn't a hardcore regular there, Sophie's, in particular, was always very close to me. (I think we all have some sort of fond Sophie's memories....) Meanwhile, I was already a regular reader of The Villager and Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, as well as Bob Arihood's Neither More Nor Less and Lost City. I was growing increasingly tired of the onslaught of the condofication, bankbranchification, duanereadification and whatnot of NYC, in particular of the East Village. These things all inspired me to do something.

So on a drunken, lonely night (always a good combination for doing something stupid, like starting a blog! Plus, actually, it was the middle of the afternoon!) I signed up for a Blogger account to create a tribute site for Sophie's. It wasn't supposed to be about me. At first, I just collected different news items on the possible sale. Then I thought it could evolve into this project we could all be part of.... making little films about the people, etc., who frequent the bar. Post photos. Chronicle the possible end of days. It would be a document capturing a special time and place.

Before I ever really figured what to do with the site or told anyone about it, it looked as if the bars were staying in the family. So I retired the site on that positive note.

BW: What made you change your mind and come back?

EVG: Well, Jeremiah encouraged me to continue, to turn my attention to other things in the neighborhood. So I did. Didn't do much at first. I'd get about six hits a day on the site. Was just having a little fun. But I was following this premise for the site: Appreciating what's here while it's still here. Remembering what's no longer here. Wishing some things weren't here that are here. Doing this awakened the reporter that was in me.... and the site has evolved to be a little more newsy -- and hopefully provide a slice of life about a special neighborhood....

BW: So you slide back and forth between celebrating what you love and mourning the things that shouldn't have passed. Oh, and expressing disdain for guys in pink shirts.

EVG: Well, I don't mind pink shirts as much as the behavior of the person wearing it out and about. Anyway, like Jeremiah, doing this site has rekindled my love affair with the neighborhood -- and the city. FroYo and popped collars or not. To be honest, I hate having to leave for a long weekend or holiday.

JM: It's true that I encouraged him. And now look! He grabs up all the East Village news before I can get to it. Seriously, though, Grieve has an amazing ability to be everywhere in the East Village at once, to pick out minute details and spin them into something quietly meaningful. We have a very friendly rivalry when it comes to neighborhood business. Sometimes, I have to call dibs, because I move much more slowly than he does. We encourage each other. Blogging is this weird, lonely "vocation," something of an obsession, that I think appeals to introverts who yet want to be known, but not too known. So it's been great having Grieve and other bloggers to connect with through the process.

BW: The literary historian in me wants to ask if blogging is perhaps the next site of the formation of literary community, one of my long-standing interests in NYC literary history.

EVG: The relationship that formed between me and Jeremiah is one of my favorite things that has come from doing the site.... which makes wanting to crush him that much more difficult! Ha! I wonder if people might be interested in knowing how often we actually do talk via e-mail.... or run ideas by each other.... and, on occasion, read each other's posts if we're unsure how it's working. I also look forward to what he's going to have on any given day. I truly think he's one of the best essayists around....

JM: An anonymous commenter on another blog, Jill's "Blah Blog Blah," recently referred to the "East Village Blog Mafia." It was derisive, but fascinating--that someone's out there imagining that these bloggers have any kind of real power, a bunch of middle-aged people sitting around critiquing the uncontrollable. But there is some kind of community here, in this NYC blogosphere, though I know virtual communities and relationships are much maligned these days. I have mixed feelings about them. Are they any less real than in-the-flesh relationships? When I first came to New York, I sought a literary community. I couldn't find it. The blogosphere may be the closest I've come to it.

BW: As far as content goes, as different as your blogs are I see both of you working in a time-honored tradition of lamenting the loss of an older and more authentic New York. It's a pattern of nostalgia that seems especially bound up with the bohemian tradition in New York, from the 1910s forward. That lamentation seems to be part of the bohemian experience itself: either it was over just before you arrived, or just before the next guy did. Is there something quantifiably different in that lament since, say, 2001? Or does pointing to this long-standing pattern distract us from the very real changes that deserve to be critiqued?

JM: The most dramatic change to me in recent years is the people. I sometimes get flack for critiquing people as a group, but super-gentrification, Starbucksification, etc. -- none of it happens without people. Many of the people who come to the city and specifically to the East Village today seem different than the ones who came 15 or 20 years ago. Their values are different. Their behavior is different. Their attitude toward the world around them is different. When I think about gentrification and my own role in it, I parse it this way: do you come to a neighborhood because you like the way it is, because you like not just the cute cafes, but also the down-at-the-heels bookshops and delis, and the old people on their stoops, the corner psychotics, and even the stink of the garbage at high summer? Or do you come to a neighborhood with the wish and the intention to change it? Do you see a "project" that needs work?

BW: I hear you. I've just been through exactly this problem with my kids' middle school on the other side of Chinatown, down by the river. (I refuse to use the label "Two Bridges.") We came to the school four or five years ago when it was just on the upswing: charismatic principal and staff, a well-rounded set of course offerings, grant money starting to come in for athletics and extra-curriculars like music and a robotics club and Saturday fashion and art classes. And it had real diversity among its students. The school was predominantly Asian and Latino -- something like 2% white kids. It didn't stay that way for long. Now it's been thoroughly infiltrated by Tribeca and the Village. A couple years ago we were asked to go to our old elementary school's "middle school info night" to represent our new school. When we were there, it was clear the middle school was already starting to get a lot of buzz. People whose kids weren't even admitted yet were talking about fundraising and running for PA offices. Pinko intellectual that I am, I said something like, "Well it's important to realize that we're entering a delicate ecosystem: there are already some culture clashes and neighborhood histories that make the parents' association both a challenge and a real opportunity for cosmopolitan learning -- parents and kids alike. We're not coming in here to colonize the place, after all." And one Tribeca mother looked me square in the face and said: "That's exactly what we're doing!" And I'm not kidding, I almost got into a shouting match with her at a parent meeting in the principal's office two years later, when I couldn't listen to another moment of her trying to bully and belittle the principal, who was trying to end de facto segregation in the school by slightly altering an honors program that had become skewed mostly toward the new arrivals. I'd guess white kids are up to 30% or so at the school, many of them from wealthy families, and their parents seem very entitled -- wanting the city and the school to conform to them and not vice versa. They bring energy and money, but in some ways at the expense of the dignity of the people who were there first.

JM: I think a lot of people now have come to the Lower East Side, the East Village, and other neighborhoods in the city with that attitude. They see "potential." They see plans for renovation and "renewal." And there is so much hatred and fear in that -- disgust for what and who is already there.

BW: At the same time, how to stop the wave? We were part of the vanguard of gentrification, after all. Such conversations always make me wonder: do you think 150 years from now a committee will be formed to save Blue from destruction? ("Save Blue! It was the most unique of all the sore thumbs that invaded the neighborhood in the early 21st century!") Or are things cyclical? Will it be filled with squatters?

JM: The thought of Blue standing for 150 years is too much to fathom.

EVG: Well, I do believe that there will be people like us 150 years from now lamenting the loss of Blue ("The one-time home of Justin Long!") and getting excited about the discovery of a hidden 16 Handles ad.... there will always be people who love the city and appreciate its history. I have a friend who has lived here since, well, forever, and he'll say things like, "Oh, the Bowery hasn't been the same since prohibition ended!" Not a real sentimentalist, but I understand the point....

JM: Grieve once forwarded me a blog post from a young woman who recently moved to the LES and was now moving out again. She actually said she would not miss the "disgusting stink" of the pickles emanating from Katz's Deli. To me, if you don't like the smell of Katz's pickles, then don't come live here. Or live here with the intention to learn to love that smell. Or something. Basically, it boils down to a lot of people moved to NYC after 9/11 who seem to hate urban life and everything about it. It baffles my mind to wonder why they came in the first place.

BW: I do think blogs have been crucial in supporting efforts to preserve a traditional sense of neighborhoods. Do you guys have a favorite NYC blog or two you think deserves wider exposure than they've received?

EVG: Even though Bob Arihood has been featured in the Times, I think he deserves more attention. I love what he does... and his photography needs to be in an exhibit somewhere. I also really like Slum Goddess. She's funny and opinionated. She knows a lot of people. Her blog really exemplifies what a blog is supposed to be -- a little bit of everything. Hunter-Gatherer does this very well too -- you feel as if you really know the person and his or her interests.

JM: I second all of those choices. And one less-known blog I enjoy is It Was Her New York, by C.O. Moed. It doesn't get much attention because it's not about what new cafe opened up on Ave A or how tenement residents are fighting back against noisy luxe hotels. But it's written by a native Lower East Sider and it's very intimate.

BW: Thanks, both of you, for taking the time for this conversation! I look forward to hearing from more bloggers on these questions at our panel Saturday -- or here, in comments.

Photo credits: 1, 3: Jeremiah; 2: Grieve; 4: Bowery Boogie

For the full Lost New York conference program, click here.

Saturday, 3 October (13-19 University Place, room 102)

2:00 PM - 3:30 PM: BLOGGING THE APOCALYPSE: NEW MEDIA, NEW GENRES, AND THE LITERATURE OF A LOST CITY

Sukhdev Sandhu (New York University), moderator

Panelists:

Lost City
Ephemeral New York
Flaming Pablum: Vanishing Downtown
Bowery Boogie

When Cyrus and I were narrowing the theme for the conference this coming weekend, our imaginations were led along the lines suggested by diverse a group of blogs that dealt with neighborhood scenes, New York history, and, more often than not, the link between the two. Some of them were more straightforwardly historical: our long-time favorite The Bowery Boys, for instance, or Kevin Walsh's Forgotten NY. Others leaned toward the goings-on of particular neighborhoods or boroughs: Bushwick BK, Uptown Flavor, Bronx Bohemian, or Washington Square Park Blog. Some limit themselves by activity or mode of transport rather than a particular neighborhood landscape: Second Avenue Sagas, for instance, or Walking Off the Big Apple.

In the case of many -- though not all -- New York blogs, we find a new kind of urban literature emerging, much of it focused on nostalgia for a lost city and a desire to create and preserve cultural memory. Around other sites, we see the emergence of literary community as well. "Literature" here is broadly conceived: we take it to include a range of artistic productions, considering the electronic medium for blogging is as distinctly visual as it is, often but not always, verbal. So hybrid art forms emerge as well, such as the many photo blogs New Yorkers have established. (For a representative favorite, see Greenwich Village Daily Photo.)

With some difficulty narrowing things down we made an initial round of invitations to bloggers to participate in the conference on a panel devoted to this emergent form of New York writing. The four panelists we've ultimately lined up suggest a well-rounded quartet of types.



Lost City, the name of which resonates clearly with our conference theme, is one of the granddaddies of New York anti-gentrification blogging (est. 2006). Manhattan User's Guide, which lists it as a favorite New York website, describes it this way: "It's the vestiges of Old NY v. the real estate market. Guess who wins?" The narrative voice for Lost City is one Brooks of Sheffield, a food/restaurant critic, neighborhood history buff, and parent based in Brooklyn but ranging far and wide throughout the city. He seems to know every old bar and comfy diner and has his eye on the same properties developers do -- though with a preservationist agenda. He makes no bones about his disdain for the reigning mayor and his plans for a third term. Earlier this year the blog Who Walk in Brooklyn ran a terrific interview with him. If the jeremiad, as the literary critic Sacvan Bercovitch long ago argued, is a persistently powerful form of expression in American writing, Lost City Brooks is one of a growing number of city bloggers carrying that torch.

Ephemeral New York, our second panelist, has a distinctive, straightforward methodology for her site: she simply takes an old photo, a postcard, a faded ad on the side of an old building, a scrap of newsprint, and from that bit of ephemera extracts a bit of information about the time and place that produced it, perhaps something about the people who were involved as well. The posts are short; the stories stick. She describes her own project as "chronicl[ing] a constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York's collective remainder bin," and describes herself as someone "from the West Village who recalls stepping over winos to enter the Grand Union on Bleecker Street, a happily chaotic class packed with 35 other first graders at PS 41, and that Mays, not Whole Foods, was once the flagship shopping destination of Union Square." Other blogs out there follow a similar formula, at least part of the time, but ENY has perfected it -- each daily dose is equal parts surprising and intellectually rewarding.

Flaming Pablum comes closer to the genre of the personal blog -- a life chronicle -- than any of the others on our panel. But several things separate "Alex in NYC" from the legions of other livejournalists out there: his deep attachment to multiple neighborhoods (the Upper East Side of his childhood; the upper Greenwich Village where he now lives with is family), which allows him historical perspective on a changing city; his training as a journalist; and especially his eye as a photographer. "My Vanishing Downtown" was the first section of Flaming Pablum I stumbled upon: in one stunning photo after another it chronicles building after building now lost to developers' bulldozers (or other disasters). He recoils instinctively from the thought of John Varvatos hawking high-fashion rock nostalgia on the Bowery in the old CBGB space. He is suspicious of the new bike lanes (though I think he'll relent when his kids start riding on their own). He carries his camera when he walks his kids to school and comes home with whole photo essays ready to upload. In addition to blogging contemporary life and chronicling parts of old New York now gone, Alex has been a witness to the city's music scene (and record stores) for decades, and his passion for rock and roll of the 1980s nearly matches his passion for the city. In many posts -- and, recently, in the group-blog The New York Nobody Sings -- those twin loves converge. Alex in NYC has been writing Flaming Pablum since summer 2005. Check out his other hits and misses here.



Bowery Boogie does exactly what a neighborhood blog should: it chronicles openings and closings, street fairs, changing signage. It patrols mainstream web and print news sites for stories about the neighborhood. It help makes up a web of likeminded blogs in adjacent neighborhoods. No detail is too mundane, and as a result we find persistent aspects of the old city still rearing their heads from time to time:  Pirated electricity on the Bowery fueling an old-school boom box! Who's filming what where? (Useful info when you want to avoid a crowd -- or alert your teenagers to Gossip Girl's whereabouts.) Other bloggers frequently throw out the term "intrepid" to describe BB: he or his operatives seem to be everywhere at all times, day and night. As a result he's scooped the mainstream media more than once, most memorably with the fire that destroyed the Hong Kong Supermarket last spring. Searchable street by street, BB helps create the feeling that life on the other side of Bowery hasn't been completely lost to gentrification, even if the threat is ever-present.

What do these writers have in common, and what windows do their sites offer onto New Yorks lost and found? In what ways is blogging a twenty-first-century New York literary scene? Our moderator Sukhdev Sandhu, no stranger to electronic explorations of urban environments, will help provoke answers to these and other questions.  

This is a bit of a precursor to the next annotated conference program post, which I'll put up this afternoon. Before I introduce the bloggers we've asked to talk on Saturday afternoon about the relationship between blogging, literary culture, and cultural memory, I wanted to offer a sort of umbrella view of the NYC blogosphere, at least from where I sit in downtown Manhattan.

Over the last year or so, on the links page of my personal website, I've gradually accumulated a hefty set of links to NYC-oriented blogs. I don't claim to be comprehensive: I generally make a quick pass through a site I've stumbled across and give it a quick thumbs up or down based on a few set criteria. Is it oriented toward a specific neighborhood or borough or the city in general -- or even toward a particular aspect of the city -- as much as it is toward the idiosyncratic details of the blogger's day? (I don't have the time or space for every New Yorker's livejournal, in other words.) Is the blog fairly active? (If the most recent entry is already a month old I won't include it.) And does its take on the city comport with the roughest outlines of my own? Now, that last question may sound a little harsh, and when you see the list below I think you'll find that my umbrella is pretty broad. But I am aware of at least a few blogs geographically and/or spiritually rooted in certain neighborhoods I don't really care for, or focusing on items such as cupcakes or high fashion that really don't float my boat, and I've simply chosen not to include them. As Cyrus repeatedly reminds me, attempts at cosmopolitanism aren't the same thing as an uncritical cultural relativism. Maybe there's a place for pink blogs about shoes written by Carrie Bradshaw wannabes on the Upper East Side, but that place isn't my own personal links page.

Still, I love the fact that this set of links constantly expands in size and in the breadth of material it takes in, from Central Park birding photos to love-hate relationships with The New Yorker. As Cyrus and I have tried to map out what our own single-volume cultural history of New York will look like, we've confronted head-on the difficulty of reining in so much culture. What's not going on here, I ask you? And then there's the five borough problem: I've tried to maintain -- and to publicize, though my occasional Friday links posts -- a handle on blogging that's rooted uptown or in outer-boroughs, though my daily reads tend to gravitate toward neighborhoods and interests adjacent to my own. Is that provincial?

Enough preamble. What I really want to put out there is the list. So take a look. Tell us if there's something here you particularly like. Or hate. Or if you have a blog we should note or know of one you wish had been included. I'd like to compete with City Room for the most comprehensive city blogroll. Well, and still maintain my standards of course. If you'd prefer to see the links in a single column, click here and scroll down until you've passed the NYC Cultural History Resources.

NYC blogs

AIANY Blog Central Animal New York ArtCal ArtSlant Art Fag City Be in Brooklyn Bed-Stuy Banana Bed-Stuy Blog Bitch Cakes Bitch Cakes Commutes Blah Blog Blah Bloggy Bowery Boogie The Bowery Boys Brokelyn Bronx Bohemian Brooklynometry Brooklyn by Bike Brooklyn Diners Brooklyn Parrots Brownstoner Burn Some Dust (Blog) BushwickBK The City Birder City Room (NYTimes) City Snapshots Civic Center Residents Coalition Colonnade Row Curbed East Village History Project Blog East Village Idiot East Village Podcasts Eating in Translation Emdashes Ephemeral New York EV Grieve Fading Ad Blog Fecal Face NYC Flaming Pablum Forgotten New York Found in Brooklyn Free NYC Fucked in Park Slope The Girl Who Ate Everything Gotham Lost and Found Gothamist Gowanus Lounge Greater New York Greenpointers Greenwich Village Daily Photo Harlem Bespoke Harlem Hybrid A History of New York Historic Districts Council Newsstand Holla Back NYC Hotel Chelsea Blog Hunter-Gatherer Idealist in NYC I Hate The New Yorker I Shot New York I Spy NYC Inside the Apple Inwoodite It Was Her New York John Egan Harp Lens liQcity Lower East Side History Project Blog Kinetic Carnival Knickerbocker Village Lost City MaNNaHaTTaMaMMa The Masterpiece Next Door The Met Everyday Metroblogging NYC Mommy Poppins My NYC in Color Neither More Nor Less Newyorkette NewYorkology New York Daily Photo The New York Nobody Sings New York Portraits New York Shitty New York Yak Not for Tourists NY Art Beat NYC Garden NYC-grid NYC The Blog NYC Rhymology Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn Plain in the City The Origin of Species Out My Window NYC Queens Crap Roosevelt Island 360 Roosevelt Islander Runnin' Scared (VVoice) Save the Lower East Side Scouting New York Second Avenue Sagas Second Circuit Blog Sense & the City Shooting Brooklyn Slum Goddess Streetsblog Street Level Stupefaction Subway Blogger Tenement Museum Blog Today in NYC History An Unamplified Voice Untapped New York Uptown Flavor Urban Hawks Urbanite (AMNY) Vanishing New York Walking Is Transportation Walking Off the Big Apple Washington Square Park We Heart New York What about the Plastic Animals? Who Walk in Brooklyn Williamsburg Is Dead Writermama Young Manhattanite

AHNY friend and former Writing New York TA Spence Keralis passes on a link to a wonderful, continuously expanding site sponsored in part by New York Public Library: Abecedarium:NYC.

The project's blog describes the site this way:

Abecedarium:NYC is an interactive online exhibition that reflects on the history, geography, and culture -- both above and below ground -- of New York City through 26 unusual words. Using original video, animation, photography and sound, Abecedarium:NYC constructs visual relationships between these select words and specific locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.

Each word -- whether it's A for audile or Z for zenana -- leads to a different short video and a location in the city that you may never have experienced before. In selenography (the study of the moon), amateur astronomers celebrate the wonders of the night sky at Staten Island's Great Kills State Park. In open city (a metropolis without defense), the ruins of military installations throughout the five boroughs decay with time. Chatty teenagers in a Flushing, Queens cafe drink bubble tea in xenogenesis (the phenomenon of children markedly different from their parents). In diglot (a bilingual person), a Chinese accountant, Albanian baker, Palestinian falafel maker, Argentine film archivist and Cuban cigar maker speak candidly about their daily routines. In mofette (an opening in the earth from which carbon monoxide escapes) mysterious gases flow from gaps in the streets of Manhattan.

The experience of visiting Abecedarium:NYC is more than watching, listening and learning. Visitors to the project are invited to respond to existing content as well as to share their own experience of New York City by contributing original videos, soundscapes, photos or texts to the project blog. As more users contribute, the project grows in size, scope and experience, and transforms into a destination for sharing and learning about every facet of the city.

The blog itself is a little odd: if you want to see posts in chronological order, you'll have to search under the "dates" tab at the head of the welcome page. The whole thing seems designed to lead you down the path of hours spent exploring.

The perfect site for people who love words as much as they love New York.

The East Village History Project has launched a new blog, Today in NYC History, which is well worth checking out. (Their main blog continues to post new material as well.)

Today's post on TNYCH has to do with the 1970 Women's Equality Strike, which happened to take place the day I was born. I wrote about that event here and on Edge of the American West last year. Next August we should make a big deal about the 40th anniversary, which will be one way to distract me from the fact that I'll be turning 40. Ouch.

Ooh. Check this out. A New York music superblog made up of a host of folks whose individual blogs are already among my daily reads. As Alex at Flaming Pablum, one of the contributors, puts it:

Dubbed "The New York Nobody Sings," this website -- forged by EV Grieve, Hunter-Gatherer and Karate Boogaloo of Stupefaction -- is "dedicated to songs about New York. As simple as that. The only rules are that the songs must be brilliant and that the blindingly obvious numbers are excluded. The songs may be explicitly about New York or obliquely about the city in some way. There are plenty of great sites dedicated to photos and images about New York. This site is designed to be a musical accompaniment."

Here's a taste from a recent entry by Karate Boogaloo, with three very different songs all titled "Coney Island Baby."

Count me among the target audience.

Save Coney Island benefit @ Southpaw, Saturday 11 April [Kinetic Carnival]

Notes on a pre-Parkchester New York Catholic Protectory -- with a terrific postscript on a Staten Island Protectory alumna and the secret file the nuns held over her head for years [Bronx Bohemian]

A gallery of historical images of the Queensboro Bridge, still basking in the glow of its 100th bday celebration [Greater Astoria Historical Society]

Staten Island wins the stimulus package sweeps [WNYC]

Now on view at the Museum of the City of New York: The Worlds of Henry Hudson and much more [MCNY]

On public art in Queens: An excerpt from Public Art New York, by architect Jean Parker Phifer and photographer Francis Dzikowski [Newyorkology]

Coke with that slice? DEA busts drug-dealing pizza parlor in the Bronx. [Animal]

A guide to Boerum Hill [Lost City]

Images of America publishes new volume on St. George, Staten Island. Plus: "town" or "neighborhood"? [Walking Is Transportation]

The making of Manhattanville: What will be lost when Columbia expands? [Manhattanville.net, via an older post on JVNY]

Bonus: From my own back yard -- if you haven't seen Jon Kessler's amazing installation "Kessler's Circus" at Deitch Projects (76 Grand Street) you've only got through tomorrow. Here's an older VBS.TV documentary series on Kessler, set in his long-time Williamsburg studio, that should give you a feel for the work.

Image from Newyorkology:

Flight
James Brooks, Artist, 1938-40
Collection of the City of New York
Marine Air Terminal
Delano & Aldrich, Architects, 1937-40; Restoration by Beyer Blinder Belle, Architects, 1995-6
West end of LaGuardia Airport, Flushing

Okay, I admit it. I'm one of those downtowners who hardly gets above 23rd St without a toothbrush and sleeping bag and who visits Brooklyn and Queens a couple times a year. It's something I'm not particularly proud of. (Don't ask me the last time I was in Staten Island, let alone the Bronx.)

Even worse, perhaps, my blog reading habits mirror my real life downtown chauvinism. I tend to stick close to home, reading Eastsider blogs like Jeremiah's and Grieve's rather religiously. When they venture out or up, I ride along in my armchair, but for the most part I find enough in my own neighborhood to keep me entertained. I suppose the city works that way for a lot of folks, at least those who work where they live.

So to whet my appetite for things beyond walking distance, I've decided to try to keep up on uptown and outerborough blogging -- at least monitoring a few key sites a couple times a week. Here's a roundup of highlights from today's reading experiment:

Obama joins the ranks of presidents with fried chicken emporia named after them. [What about the Plastic Animals via Uptown Flavor]

Looking for something to do in Long Island City, Queens, this wkend? [liQcity]

Brian Berger plugs the NYRB reissue of L.J. Davis's 1971 from-Idaho-to-Brooklyn novel, A Meaningful Life, including details on an upcoming reading with Jonathan Lethem. [Who Walk in Brooklyn]

Interrupting several thoughtful posts on the relationship between print and digital technologies, Staten Island blogger Dan Icolari stops to notice the flowers. [Walking Is Transportation]

A podcast interview with the Bronx Borough Historian, Professor Lloyd Ultan [Bronx Bohemian]

No, not the B'hoys, and not the early 20c stage and film crew variously known as Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids, and Bowery Boys (pictured above).

I'm talking about the fantastic NYC history blog featuring weekly podcasts on neighborhood history. The most recent one features the Meatpacking District.

Who are these guys, and how do they have so much time for quality blogging like this? I'm green with envy; in any case, we've added them to the "Keys to the City" links at right.