I Love NYC Street Fairs, 2018 Edition
There will be 166 street fairs in Manhattan this year… down just a hair from 168 last year. But really, who’s counting? They’re still great fun for those of us who love street food and cheap wallets and people watching. (And still an annoyance for cab drivers and others who find them a hindrance to getting around town.) Here, once again, is my annual Manhattan Street Fair schedule and map. As always, the information is here to help you find them or avoid them, depending on your inclination. And, of course, I once again include the standard disclaimers. The information is presented as is, without...
I Love NYC Street Fairs, 2017 edition
Another year, come and gone, with no posts. Some day, I’ll figure out what this blog is for–but until then, it makes a good home for my annual Manhattan Street Fair schedule and map. As always, the information is here to help you find them or avoid them, depending on your inclination. And, of course, I once again include the standard disclaimers. The information is presented as is, without any warranties, and always with the possibility that the event producers may change their plans at the last minute. There are a few outer-borough fairs, mainly gay prides. If anyone is interested in adding in a more...
I Love NYC Street Fairs, 2016 edition
This, unfortunately, has become my annual post to my old blog. But at least I write that much. It’s time again, ladies and gentlemen, to remind you of my annual effort at compiling and presenting all of Manhattan’s street fairs for the year. As always, the information is here to help you find them or avoid them, depending on your inclination. And, of course, I once again include the standard disclaimers. The information is presented as is, without any warranties, and always with the possibility that the event producers may change their plans at the last minute. Also, tracking just Manhattan’s street fairs is enough...
I Love NYC Street Fairs, 2015 edition
Love ’em or hate ’em. If you live in New York City–particularly, in Manhattan–you cannot escape them. From May through October, there are at least three of four every weekend–sometimes more. With several exceptions, they all have the same food vendors (sometimes with four or five booths scattered along a single fair!). They all have the same craft-and-T-shirt booths. But they are also–to me–a lot of fun. I go to at least two a month for the fresh-cut watermelon and/or mango, for the Mozzarepas, and for the unparalleled people watching. But it’s okay with me if you hate them, find them disruptive, whatever. This map...
I Love NYC Street Fairs, 2014 edition
Whether, like me, you love street fairs or, like some New Yorkers, you hate them, this is the only map I know of that collects all of Manhattan’s street events into one place so you can find (or avoid) them. This year’s NYC Street Fair map looks quite a bit different from previous years: Google’s newly-launched Maps Engine was intended to make creating your own map–like my annual NYC street fair map–simpler and more powerful. But in practice, it meant essentially re-doing my map from scratch (almost) to produce something that, in the end, would be more cluttered and confusing for the user. So...
I Love NYC Street Fairs, 2013 edition
Another spring has arrived with its showers sweet, and so has another edition of my annual New York City Street Fair Map and List. Full Google My Map with event listings in chronological order Like last year, I made this year’s map by editing the previous year’s. But to fix some glitches, I actually hand edited the kml file. Now the dates and other descriptive material will (I hope) appear correctly in the mobile version of Google Maps, and the color codes for each month will be consistent. For those viewing the map in Google Maps Mobile, please note that only the 100 events closest...
I Love NYC Street Fairs, 2012 edition
I still love New York City street fairs, and I still find these maps very handy for getting my weekly dose, so I wanted to make one for 2012. There’s a lot of work involved in collating the dates and locations from several web sites, and there’s no straightforward way around that. But I was hoping to at least automate the process of mapping that data. I looked around at several different systems for doing this and concluded that Google Fusion Tables would be the best tool. It comes in two tiers: simple UI platform and more a complex and powerful API platform. Unfortunately, I...
Ode to a Mozzarepa
In my previous entry explaining my love affair with New York City street fairs, I somehow forgot to mention the Mozzarepa. This distinctly New York innovation (someone please correct me if I’m wrong) is basically a variation on the popular Latin American staple, the arepa. It’s a round slice of pizza-type melty mozzarella cheese between two sweet cornmeal pancakes. A salty-sweet treat that can’t be beat. I’ve never seen them anywhere but New York street fairs, and they’re yet another reason I look forward to my near-weekly excursion. Several street vendors do knock-offs, but they’re often left on the griddle until they singe, or the...
I Love NYC Street Fairs
Not every New Yorker enjoys our street fairs. In fact, a lot of us hate them. Every season, the New York City papers are filled with stories about what a nuisance they are. With two or three running simultaneously each weekend day during the summer, the street fairs snarl traffic and displace parking spaces. And, it’s said, they’re all the same, with the same vendors pushing the same merchandise. City government here has recently responded to citizen complaints with a plan to reduce the number and operating hours of the fairs. Activist groups are also pushing for greater variety among and within the fairs. But,...
Gay journalists, cough cough
I would have posted about my great time at the NLGJA convention sooner, but I’ve been sick for ten days (more on that in a moment.) Now that I’m feeling a bit better, it’s time to catch up. Noel and I spent a few days in Miami Beach earlier this month at the 2006 National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association national convention. The programming at the convention was about like usual, but we had a great time because the Loews Miami Beach is such a spectacular venue for a convention. In addition to beautiful lobbies, rooms, restaurants, and fabulous service, the Loews also has a...
To the Berkshires and back again
The weekend before last I joined my friends Marty and Michael, and their new Jack-Beagle puppy Zoe for a weekend in the upstate New York Berkshire Mountains (photo gallery).We rented part of a horse country cabin, cooked, ate, slept, geocached in nearby Massachusetts, and swam in the pool. It was lovely and very relaxing. The only fly in the ointment was that Noel couldn’t come; he’s been so busy lately that I haven’t seen as much of him as I want. But that problem got some attention this weekend. Noel and I spent the whole weekend together. We sent to a Judy Holliday film festival...
DC Day Trip
Noel and I made a quick day trip to Washington, DC, last Sunday for the 50th birthday of Noel’s longtime friend Bob (co-celebrated with the birthday of Bob’s partner, Alex; both pictured here). The party itself was a lot of fun, and a chance to meet numerous new and interesting people. The same cannot be said of the roundtrip drive from New York to DC and back again — 9 hours in all. But Noel, God bless him, drove both ways (I had a little too much sangria and champagne to drive the return leg as planned). So all in all, a good party.
R & R
I took a day off work after I came back from covering the Gay Games in Chicago, but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. So I’m now taking a four-day weekend — and just staying home, taking care of a few errands, and watching some videos. In a way, I feel like I’m kind of wasting precious vacation days by putting myself under house arrest instead of travelling. But on the other hand, I have lots of comp days saved up (mostly from working company holidays that fall on weekdays when we still do the news)… and what I really need is a vacation from...
Geocache ’06 #1
Noel and I did our first geocaching expedition of the year… a little late in the year, if you ask me, but we’ve been busy, and better late than never. We found two caches, and didn’t find one. By the end Noel was getting a little tired of it, and I had a couple of big ole mosquito bites, so we knew it was time to quit. So then we did what we often do when we go out to the ‘burbs — we hit the Big Box stores and chain restaurants that aren’t available to us in Manhattan. Picked up some socks, underwear and...
Great movie week
Last weekend, Noel and I went to see The Devil Wears Prada. It’s a really fun film with a wonderful performance by Meryl Streep that straddles the line between authentic and scenery-chewing. But as it happened, there were whole stretches of the film I’ll have to see again because I got so excited by the fact that all the office lobby and exterior scene were filmed in the building where I work, The McGraw Hill-Rockefeller Center Building at 1221 Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan. And a lot of the movie happens in those locations, so I spent scene after scene giggling and pointing...