Destination: New York
24 Hours in Airworld: An Empty Terminal
by Rob Verger | 06.10.09 | 2:21 AM ET
Photo by Rob Verger The terminal empties out for the night.
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz24 Hours in Airworld: Late Night Sports Fans
by Rob Verger | 06.10.09 | 12:12 AM ET
Photo by Rob Verger A few basketball fans linger as the terminal gets quieter.
24 Hours in Airworld: Mall or Airport?
by Rob Verger | 06.09.09 | 11:21 PM ET
Photo by Rob Verger The beat goes on here at T5. Last I checked—at around 10:20 pm—JetBlue still had about 15 more flights to get out tonight (delays were frequent today with the bad weather), and then the first flight out tomorrow morning is the 5:45 to Puerto Rico.
While delays may be bad for the traveler, they’re good for the restaurants in the terminal, including Deep Blue, where I ate a quick dinner of tasty but too-spicy Pad Thai followed by a big cup of green tea. (Anything to warm me up in this hostile, freezing environment.) I enjoyed sitting in the white and blue bar space there, looking out at the rest of the terminal as things began to wind down. From the shopping area here, as I mentioned before, it’s hard to tell you’re in an airport. (Although the people walking by pulling suitcases are something of a giveaway.)
24 Hours in Airworld: The Airport Bar
by Rob Verger | 06.09.09 | 8:20 PM ET
Photo by Rob Verger Airport terminals are, by their nature, transitory places. Nearly 12 million people flew through Kennedy airport on JetBlue (the largest carrier here, measured by passenger volume) between March 2008 and March 2009, according to numbers from the Port Authority. And so I’ve often wondered: Do airport restaurants and bars have regular customers? Do they have a rhythm to them, the way other places might?
I ate lunch today at a tapas place called Pequillo here in T5, and afterwards, went and sat at the place’s bar, which is set in a cave-like space where it’s easy to forget you’re in an airport. (It advertises itself as the first tapas restaurant in an American airport.) I talked to the gracious bartender there, Kenia, regarding my question about airport bars and regulars. She was born in Honduras, and now lives in Brooklyn, and says that regulars—maybe 20 or 30 different people—come in about twice a week. “If you remember their name, and whatever they drink, it makes them feel good, I guess,” she said.
24 Hours in Airworld: Terminal 5, Old and New
by Rob Verger | 06.09.09 | 3:11 PM ET
It was raining this morning in New York City as I made my way to J.F.K. to spend 24 hours hanging out in JetBlue’s Terminal 5. Every time I come to this airport, I’m reminded how far away it is from Manhattan. I took the 1 Train to the 2 Train to the E Train to the AirTrain to get here—a trip longer than some short flights.
On the elevated walkway from the AirTrain to T5, I was able to look out on the old Eero Saarinen TWA terminal—JetBlue’s new terminal sits in front of the beautiful, soaring old building, which is currently closed for renovations and is under the management of the Port Authority. Once it opens, JetBlue will have two self-service kiosks in there, and there’s a rumor that the building could one day become a museum—or a pod hotel. Today the building sat there closed, under gray skies, a landmark from another era, connected to the new building through the old tubes.
JetBlue’s New T5: A Nice Place to Live?
by Rob Verger | 06.09.09 | 10:54 AM ET
JetBlue’s terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport sparkles. At a cost of $743 million, the 635,000-square-foot terminal known as T5 opened in October 2008. I’ve passed through it twice and was impressed with how bright and scrubbed clean it felt. And it offers what every terminal needs: free Wi-Fi.
This last detail makes it perfect to work from—perhaps even, for a very short period of time, to live in.
So starting today, with the permission of the good folks at JetBlue, I’ll be living in T5 for 24 hours and blogging about it as I go. I’m not flying anywhere. I’m headed to the airport just for fun and will spend a full day and night writing about the pulse of the place and anything else that comes up.
Museums on Film: Three Memorable Moments
by Eva Holland | 05.21.09 | 1:24 PM ET
With Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian set to open this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about museums and the movies. The first Night at the Museum, released in 2006 and set at a fictionalized version of the American Museum of Natural History, raked in money at the box office and is credited with increasing attendance at the real-life Upper West Side museum by as much as 20 percent. According to USA Today, the Smithsonian is hoping to see similar benefits from its featured role in the sequel.
The two Ben Stiller vehicles may be remarkable for the amount of traffic they’re driving to museums, but they’re not unusual in their choice of setting. Museums and galleries have played prominent roles in any number of films and television shows over the years. Here, with apologies for my clear bias towards New York City and romance, are three of my favorite museum movie moments.
NYC Raises Subway Fares; Sky Falls
by Eva Holland | 05.13.09 | 2:50 PM ET
Photo by Eva Holland After months of ominous foreshadowing, New York City’s transit authority finally did it: Effective June 28, subway and bus fares will jump from $2.00 to $2.25. Reaction has been swift and snarky—check out this satirical subway advisory, for instance. Said one commenter on this Jaunted post about the hike: “Yet again NYC trumps all when it comes to being plain expensive.”
Whoa, hold on a minute. Sure, nobody likes a price increase, especially when consumers aren’t expecting to see improved service in return—the move is an effort to stop the bleeding, not rejuvenate the system. But New York City’s public transit is still cheap compared to what’s available in other big cities, and—much like the city itself, which I will always maintain is a fantastic budget destination—it remains a great value for money.
Straight to Airport Security, Your Phone as Your Boarding Pass
by Rob Verger | 05.11.09 | 12:13 PM ET
Have you ever checked in for a flight using your iPhone as your boarding pass?
Completely paperless check-in—by way of a boarding pass with an embedded barcode sent to your mobile phone, which you then present at security and the gate—may be becoming more widespread, NPR reports in All Tech Considered.
Interview With a Celebrity Chef: Govind Armstrong
by David Farley | 04.30.09 | 4:15 PM ET
Photo courtesy of Table 8 at the Cooper Square Hotel Govind Armstrong may not yet be 40 years old, but the dreadlocked chef is already a veteran in the kitchen, having logged time in some of the world’s most famous restaurants.
It all started at the improbable age of 13 when Armstrong found himself working at Spago, Wolfgang Puck’s celebrated Los Angeles restaurant. Now, after working in some of the most acclaimed kitchens in Los Angeles and Spain, he’s on the verge of his own restaurant empire. The Los Angeles and South Beach outposts of Table 8 won rave reviews, and now he’s about to take his biggest leap yet: New York.
On his way up the celebrity-chef ladder, he’s found himself on Iron Chef America, as a judge on Top Chef and on People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” list.
I met up with Chef Armstrong at the Cooper Square Hotel in New York’s East Village where he’s putting the finishing touches on the Big Apple outpost of Table 8.
Southwest and JetBlue to Face Off in Guitar Hero Challenge
by Rob Verger | 04.29.09 | 10:20 AM ET
There’s plenty of bad news out there about the airline industry these days, and things like swine flu, or the very dumb decision to buzz Lower Manhattan in a presidential 747 aren’t making people any happier.
So, I decided to focus on something a little more lighthearted here: an airline Guitar Hero showdown.
Hotel on the Hudson: Interview With Eva Ziegler
by Alexander Basek | 04.24.09 | 1:10 PM ET
W Hoboken’s opening party was last night, complete with ladies in giant martini glasses, a Jamie Foxx musical performance and W-shaped fireworks over the Hudson. (With some M’s and E’s mixed in, depending where you stood.)
Before the festivities began, I sat down with Eva Ziegler, W’s Global Brand Leader, in the W Hoboken’s “Chandelier Room,” the bar and club space with wall-length picture windows overlooking the New York City skyline.
The Things They Carried—On Planes
by Rob Verger | 04.21.09 | 10:22 AM ET
We carry our things with us when we fly, and sometimes those things are weird. And even if they’re not weird, they might seem strange when juxtaposed with the airplane setting, an incongruity in such a modern environment.
Last week, four baby pythons evidently escaped their container in the cargo hold of a Qantas 737, slithered somewhere in the plane—and disappeared. The plane was later fumigated. I don’t know if the snakes belonged to a passenger or were just being shipped, but it does make me wonder: What weird things do people carry with them aboard?
Woodstock: Disneyland for Hippies?
by Eva Holland | 04.10.09 | 2:23 PM ET
Well, the 40th anniversary of the mother of all music festivals may still be a few months away, but the “reflecting on Woodstock” pieces are already cropping up. This week, Rock’s Backpages digs up a vicious Rolling Stone piece—circa 1999—from David Dalton, eviscerating the festival as the death of the ’60s dream.
Here’s a sample: “Woodstock, if anything, amounts to the Disneyfication of the entire hippie enterprise—a just-so story about generational togetherness, a sort of temporary ’60s theme park that (alas!) has become an annual institution.”
Empire State Building Goes Green
by Joanna Kakissis | 04.08.09 | 10:35 AM ET
The trendsters have spoken: Either you’re a greenvolutionary or you’re just another energy-sucking monument. So the Empire State Building, helped by $20 million from the Clinton Climate Initiative, aims to become the Art Deco landmark with a LEED rating, according to Reuters. The eco-makeover will include upgrading the building’s 6,500 windows and adding eco-friendly heating and air conditioning systems, insulation and energy-efficient lighting. The whole project is expected to cost about $100 million and is intended to cut energy consumption in the 102-story skyscraper by 38 percent.