
Cooper Square and St. Mark's Place this morning... (and there aren't actually any docking stations at LaGuardia. Closest you'll get is 21st Street and 41st Avenue in Long Island City...)








In the older buildings that provide more than three-quarters of the city’s one million rent-regulated apartments, whose owners are barred by law from raising rents, taxes are also due to rise. The average tax on these buildings will rise 8.5%, including an 11.3% increase for Brooklyn landlords, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.











One of the women in the group took out her phone and said that she was going to make a viral video so no one would come to Ballaro anymore. Now this, more than anything, upsets me because Ballaro is a gathering place for neighbors, friends, lovers and strangers alike. We have a community that gathers in Ballaro and we all love and support each other and welcome anyone in our restaurant and bar. To possibly lose all that because of someone’s tainted point of view on social media, would be the worst thing.
My mission is to make everyone who enters through the front door feel like they are at home, because sometimes New York hardens even the best of us and we forget the true values in life: community and peace.
We want thank all of our customers and staff for the support and hard work over the past 7 years. With rising cost of operating a small business in NYC and the changes in the neighborhood, we could not longer stay afloat. Feel free to drop by our other restaurant Cacio e Vino across the street from Ballaro. Thank you again to everyone who helped to make Ballaro a place that will truly be missed.

Benenson and the Mack Real Estate Group have formed a joint venture to develop a mixed-use residential and ground floor retail property in New York City's East Village. The 80/20 property will provide both market and affordable housing units. The property is located less than a block from the L train and within blocks of Union Square, which is one of New York's busiest subway stations. Construction is expected to begin shortly and end in late 2016 or early 2017.


On April 10 the Queens Museum will present “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk,” a retrospective exhibition that will examine the group’s influence on both music and art, as part of a spate of spring programming under the museum’s new director, Laura Raicovich, that focuses on Queens as a Petri dish of global culture.
The Ramones show, organized with the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, where a second part of the exhibition will open on Sept. 16, will include more than 350 objects, from the band’s archives and those of Arturo Vega, who designed the band’s logo; from artists like Shepard Fairey and Yoshitomo Nara; and from Mad magazine and Punk magazine, to demonstrate, as the museum says, how the Ramones “served as both subject and inspiration for many visual artists, resulting in a large body of works.”
We've had a great run and are very proud of what we accomplished in this space in the last six years, but 2015 was a tough year and we did not manage to pull the nose up to restore the flight altitude we once enjoyed. We're hanging it up while we still have the buttons on our pants. The upshot we have about two weeks left before it's lights-out for Northern Spy, with our final service being Wednesday, February 17th.
A photo posted by Northern Spy (@northernspyfood) on
Five years ago on Mardi Gras the Ninth Ward bar was born. After five wonderful years we are closing our doors. Please come by in the next two weeks and raise a glass to both Mardi Gras and Ninth ward!!
We will be closing on Sunday, February 14th - Valentine's Day. "It's not you, it's me"
A New Orleans-themed bar in NYC called Ninth Ward has opened. Maybe I'll open a NYC-themed bar in New Orleans and call it World Trade Center