There was a rumor that leading restauranteur Danny Meyer wanted to run the new restaurant to be established in the Union Square Park pavilion. Not true, says Meyer, but he will be taking over the cursed Wakiya space in the Gramercy Park Hotel and establishing an Italian restaurant there.
For New York City’s foodies and fans of fresh and local eating alike, the Union Square Greenmarket has long been a staple for gathering all the goodies and tools necessary for a delicious and sustainable lifestyle. But it’s not the most convenient experience for everyone, with the market only staying open in the morning and early afternoon hours, leaving those with strict daytime work schedules high and dry.
Well, someone connected with the greenmarket heard the cries and pleas of the working crowd — and maybe recognized a chance to cash in on all that hard-earned money — and has worked out the perfect solution. The first first Night Market of the season at Union Square, sponsored by GrowNYC, will start this Friday evening to allow shoppers to sample everything fresh and fantastic the foodfest has to offer.
Running from 4:00PM to 8:00PM, the Night Market will include a variety of offering from local eateries and entrepreneurs. Take home raw ingredients and vegetables to master your own flavorful creations at home, or sample incredible eats from New York City’s most fabulous restaurants to satiate your tastebuds if you just can’t wait to eat until after you leave the grounds.
Try basil pudding with a strawberry granola bar on the side from Northern Spy, Moroccan spiced goat with a Greenmarket salad (complete with a honey ramp vinaigrette) from Casa Mono, or a good old fashioned grilled cheese from ‘wichcraft. All dishes are running around $7 to $10 a pop. Even better — the Night Market is also featuring a beer garden, where thirsty and celebratory patrons can kick back and survey their spoils with a frosty beer, wine or hard cider.
Who knew eating well and Happy Hour could be combined? The Night Market opens in Union Square on Friday, June 6.
Partea, an arcade with bubble tea and fried chicken sandwiches, opened in Flushing, Queens back in September 2020. Now, the team has expanded across the water to Manhattan, with a new outpost at 220 E. 14th Street, near Third Avenue, in Union Square. Like in Queens, certain meal combos come with “surprise” plushie toys, and there’s a snack menu to pick from that includes Taiwanese sausages, cuttlefish balls, and spicy wings. The Union Square location is currently open, and a grand opening party is planned for August 18. Meanwhile, the team is already plotting a west coast expansion, with Parteas planned for West Covina and Little Tokyo, in Los Angeles. Partea Union Square will stay open most nights until 11 p.m.
Between 12th and 13th St. on University Place, the cleaners is moving, the European cookie store that no one needed is closing, and the Verizon store is gone. Is it a case of all leases running out at the same time? Who knows? What’s next? Who knows???
After a New York Post story complaining about druggies in the park, The Village Voice followed up to see if it’s really true. Their conclusion: “The piece smacks of sensationalism, so we have to ask: Is Union Square any worse than any other park in the city? Or is it simply a place we’ve all heard of, and probably been, that can symbolize the outrage? Cops have reportedly made 84 drug-related arrests in and around the park this year. But that’s hardly a return to the bad old edgy days that many of us can’t stop bemoaning the loss of, even if it is worse than recent years.”
The corner of 4th Ave. and 13th St. will soon be the home of the latest outpost of Sandwicherie, which makes…sandwiches. The fast casual dining revolution continues.
from Gothamist.com
The Metronome, the hulking piece of public art omnisciently keeping time in Union Square, has been an object of both fascination and derision for twenty years. The work is meant to be a rumination on time and rituals, and features a massive rock, a whirring digital clock that means wildly different things depending on who you ask, and a hand from Union Square’s own equestrian statue of George Washington that points to its history.
Yet something seems to be off about the Metronome. As a tipster pointed out to Gothamist, the steam that was supposed to emerge from the center of the piece hasn’t worked in ages, it doesn’t seem to have been maintained in a while, and even its website is defunct.
That might be because the Metronome wasn’t ever finished, as Kristin Jones, the artist who created the piece along with Andrew Ginzel, tells Gothamist. It was always meant to be more than be a “gaping hole,” “void,” or “smoldering anus,” as it’s been called before. Jones says that the “dismissive and inadequate” upkeep from The Related Companies (the real estate company that owns the property) means the Metronome has never looked, or kept time, as they intended it to.
According to Jones, the piece, a nod to European clocks’ different mechanisms for telling time, originally was going to emit steam twice daily (at noon and midnight) along with bursts of sound. It barely has, if ever. She also notes that in spite of “periodic upgrades” to the numeral display, the clock was “never correct in the first place,” especially because the artists never saw it before it went up and it never had the flexible software it needed.
Jones knows that people seem baffled about what the numbers represent: They don’t, say, represent the national debt or the time left until the Earth implodes, and it is indeed a clock meant to be read left to right. (The left half, at least, which displays the time since midnight. The right half, which shows the time remaining until midnight, should be read right to left.)
Curiously, the Metronome, steam and all, is prominently displayed on Related Rentals’ website, currently hawking one-bedroom apartments at the Union Square locale for a starting price north of $5,500 monthly rent. (“Live Luxuriously in a Work of Art,” it reads.) Related did not reply to Gothamist’s request for comment.
The Metronome came about when Related approached the Municipal Art Fund in 1995, as The New York Times reported, about what to do with the building’s wall space. Eventually Related and the Public Art Fund held a competition where artists submitted proposals for the wall. Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel ended up getting the commission, and in 1999 the Metronome first began ticking along at Union Square.
Since then, the artists say, they haven’t had input, or knowledge, as to how the artwork is being maintained, if at all. Jones says she’d personally rather see the Metronome be torn down instead of continue in its current state. “Since they don’t [correspond with us] I’m not interested in seeing the light bulb in the hole where there’s no steam,” Jones says. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Stephen Ross, the billionaire developer and chairman of Related, is responsible for Hudson Yards’ Vessel, the wastebasket-like stairway to…somewhere that owns your photos. Ross hasn’t been shy about his distaste for the piece Related had a hand in creating at One Union Square South. “It was a disaster,” he told The New Yorker last year. “That thing where the smoke comes out? Whatever the hell it is.”
“Union Square South was and is a machine for enrichment, as is so much of real estate development today often without sincere civic vision,” Jones and Ginzel wrote in a statement. “Witness Hudson Yards. If Mr. Ross maintains ‘The Vessel’ as he has Metronome, pity the public who must contend.”