Wouldn’t it be amazing if living in New York could suddenly become easier — and even more enjoyable?
Whether you’ve been here since birth or are still discovering (and adjusting to) the city’s peculiarities and price tags, one fact remains the same: Staying for the long haul takes endurance — and you should take advantage of any little edge you can grab (ethically, of course) to make it work.
Our "How To Be a New Yorker" course will give you that upper hand. For our 2026 installment, we’ve delved into more advanced New York–ing — how to throw a party, where to get a haircut (and a facial, and your lashes tinted), how to work out without going broke, how to catch the best concerts, how to keep a child (and your schnoodle) relatively happy, where to sharpen your thinking, and even how to plan a funeral. We’ve also taken the time to help you bulk up your local Rolodex by asking discerning notables to tell us where they reliably — even gleefully — run all their errands.
We’re about to upgrade aspects of your city life that you didn’t even realize we could improve. Sign up at the link in our bio.
Illustrations: @brunozocca_
The Best of New York issue is presented by @CalvinKlein .
When our “Classifieds” section debuted in 1971, the listings reflected the moment: There was a polar-bear-pelt rug priced at $2,500, a build-your-own-dulcimer kit, wild rice from Minnesota going for $4 a pound, and “Scientology jewelry.” The majority of the ads were for services, and by the ’90s, that included yacht rentals, psychics, and gift-basket-makers. At one point, there were over a dozen listings for party caricaturists for hire.
While the demand for the latter has waned, New Yorkers’ desire for other people’s stuff has not, so we’re bringing back our “Classifieds” for New York–based subscribers. Each edition will have a theme — “I Love It, But It’s Just Not ‘Me’” is the first — and for our inaugural installment, we asked some tasteful New Yorkers to submit things they’re willing to part with that fit the prompt. Unlike in the ’70s, there’s no fee to submit a listing and it’s up to the buyer and seller to coordinate payment and pickup.
Head to the link in our bio to see those first listings or sell the stuff that just doesn’t feel like ‘you’ anymore.
“Most people could have torn it down,” Al Ravitz says of the 1929 country house he shares with his wife, Sue Ravitz. The property, which sits on three and a half acres in Wilton, Connecticut, had been owned for more than five decades by the president of a regional hosta society who was mostly preoccupied with the landscaping. “The house was in really bad shape inside,” Sue says.
The couple — he a painter and psychiatrist, she a self-taught fiber artist who has shown with the gallerist Patrick Parrish — own a studio apartment in Tudor City. They saw the derelict fixer-upper as a weekend home where they could host their grandchildren.
A year or two into their renovations, they cleared out the area above the garage and made it one great room that Al uses as an office and studio. Their contractor created a wood structure to support the cathedral ceiling, which was finished with plaster by professional church restorers. “They would bring little spray bottles of water and then smooth it with their hands. It was spectacular watching them,” Al recalls. “We have photos of the material underneath. It’s incredible.”
Swipe to see photos from the pair’s airy country home, and read more at the link in our bio.
Photos: @annieschlechter
In this week's #ApprovalMatrix: cruise ships give us another reason not to go on them (despicable), a members-only club is coming to Jacob Riis (also despicable), and two of the three former ‘SNL’ women on Broadway are Tony nominees (brilliant!).
To read more about what we find highbrow, lowbrow, despicable, and brilliant, subscribe to the magazine at the link in our bio.
Photo: New York Magazine
It’s easy to be cynical about Frieze, the Ari Emanuel–owned art fair ensconced in the Shed until Sunday, and think of it as a multilevel folly much like the nearby Vessel, a glittering skin around a hollow core. But while the casual visitor might be mystified by, say, the interactive De Beers diamond installation that sits next to a Turkish Airlines activation, to acknowledge the conspicuous cash on view without acknowledging the freedom that cash purchases is to miss the point, writes @david.micah.le .
‘Frieze, the biggest of the four art fairs opening this week alongside TEFAF, Independent, and NADA, is a balancing act: “Blue-chip slop,” as one attendee described it, keeps the lights on for the bright-eyed gallerist presenting work that can and will and should sit in a museum one day,” writes Lê. Admittedly, it is not always clear which is serving as a pretext for which.
“At the VIP preview on Wednesday, I was struck less by the ostentatious wealth than by the quiet conservatism of the goods on display: polite, retrograde abstracts; ‘fun’ bursts of color on canvas designed to sit in a beach home; and the last gasps of Biden-era ‘political’ works. With the stunt-queen brinkmanship of the Venice Biennale happening at the same time and a creeping sense that the art market is not fully recovered, what is notable at Frieze is its ‘don’t rock the boat or spook the collectors’ sensibility.”
Read Lê’s full thoughts on the “blue-chip slop” in question at the link in our bio.
WE'RE AT @friezeofficial ! We're distributing FREE broadsheets on May 15 and 16 on the top floor of @theshedny and also at @casamagazinesnyc . Fairgoers, don't forget to grab one!
In the early 1980s, a group of artists took over an abandoned shipping terminal on Pier 34 in search of an alternative to the commercial gallery and studio system. There, on the Hudson River waterfront, David Wojnarowicz wrote poems and painted murals alongside Luis Frangella and Mike Bidlo, while Peter Hujar and Dirk Rowntree photographed scenes of impromptu happenings and performances. Downtown Manhattan, and particularly the Lower East Side, appealed to small galleries with cheap rent, and together they helped launch the careers of pioneering artists like Gretchen Bender, Barbara Kruger, and Laurie Simmons.
Almost half a century later, the resurgence of the LES as an artists’ hub is being shaped by small, independent galleries, blue-chip galleries, and the East Side outposts of Chelsea galleries such as Hollis Taggart. Elizabeth Dee, the founder of @independent_hq — the 17-year-old art fair focused on artists making their New York debut — wanted to embrace the moment.
For the first time, the fair will take place at Pier 36, which stretches off to the west of Corlears Hook Park. Its new home is a sprawling, single-story venue, where the floors are lined with gray carpet and industrial lights hang from a corrugated metal ceiling, and it feels like a warehouse more than anything. Dee appreciated that quality — something that would “reflect the grittiness of New York.”
At the link in our bio, read how Independent is settling into its new home on the Lower East Side.
Photos: Andy Romer, Natasha Moustache, Kunning Huang/CKA/Courtesy of Independent
The Look Book is at @friezeofficial ! We're distributing FREE broadsheets on May 14, 15, and 16 on the top floor of @theshedny and also at @casamagazinesnyc . Grab a copy today!
Finally, some good news in the New York City housing market: It will take a person making the median household income only 20 years to save up for a down payment. (The current median is $105,481, and the math here assumes 10 percent put aside in annual savings.) Oh, that sounds like bad news to you? Consider the fact that this is actually a better projection than what we’ve seen in recent years (In April 2019, it was 24 years.) That's four whole years less!
Read the full update at the link in our bio.
Photo: Plexi Images/GHI/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
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.
Swipe to see a selection of Scopin’s photos and reflections from the book, and head to the link in our bio for more.
Photos: Albert Scopin Schöpflin
“People are obsessed with the house, no question about it,” says listing broker Richard Pretsfelder of the famous Bubble House at 251 East 71st Street. He got more press requests than he’d gotten for any listing in his 20-year career, and even did a radio spot for 1010 WINS. But he faced a different set of questions from serious buyers. “The majority who came in were planning on restoring it to a more traditional façade,” he says.
The house sold in 1974, and the family had moved out years ago, he says, using it as an address for their foundation. By any measure, “it needs a gut renovation,” Pretsfelder adds. “There’s a lot of formica in there.” Then there were the windows, which spin open from a central point, making them impossible to screen from bugs, among other concerns.
Read more at the link in our bio.
Photos: Gabriel Sebastian/Five7media
Over the past decade, a new generation of retail brands have branched out from their Elizabeth Street origins and multiplied across the city. Of course, you won’t find them on mall-brand shopping corridors like Manhattan’s 34th Street or Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Instead, these chains have congregated in stylish shopping strips like Bleecker Street in the West Village and Cobble Hill’s Bergen Street — corridors that have a distinctly “neighborhood” feel and attract younger shoppers with plenty of cash and a taste for (mildly) adventurous fashion.
It’s a positive trend for the city, says Jonathan Bowles, executive director at the Center for an Urban Future, who has been tracking the city’s chains for 18 years. “I think New Yorkers are after interesting retail and for a while, it seemed the phrase national chain meant something boring and generic — the same retail mix they have in Cleveland,” says Bowles.
It also coincides with a noticeable exodus of the megachains. In recent years, some of the most prominent national brands, such as T-Mobile, Starbucks and GNC, shed dozens if not hundreds of locations within the city. But the mini-chains are making up for the closings. The city now has 19 Warby Parkers, for example, along with 19 Aesops and seven Buck Masons.
At the link in our bio, Anne Kadet explores the phenomenon happening across the city.
Photos: Google Earth, Sukjong Hong
