80 Blocks from Tiffany’s was what The Warriors
, the cultish and campy Hollywood street gang movie involving roller skates and a race to Coney Island, could never be. It was real. Shot over the course of a couple of weeks in the summer of ’79 (as the seeds of hip-hop culture were slowly sprouting in the BX), 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s
, produced by Lorne Michaels [and directed by SNL director Gary Weis], veers away from the social commentary typically associated with gang exposés. Instead, the 60-minute documentary focuses on the personalities behind the news reports, including a tough NYPD detective from the Bronx Youth Gang Task Force and a sympathetic community activist. Quoted from the introduction to
an interview with Gary Weis.
posted by filthy light thief
on Oct 12, 2011 -
15 comments
The
long-polluted New York rivers are
getting cleaner, but can still be dangerous to swim in. There are
efforts underway to clean up the Bronx River, but that will take years, if not decades. Until then,
signs are posted, warning would-be swimmers, yet people still risk sickness to battle the heat. One current safe solution is
the Floating Pool Lady, a barge that was remade into an 82-foot-long city parks department swimming pool.
She first arrived in the Bronx in 2008, and
she'll return to the Bronx in a week. There's a new Big Idea to bring swimmers back into the rivers:
the +Pool, a floating swimming pool located within a river, designed with a series exterior walls to filter the river water and make it safe to swim in. While that's in the early design stages, you can take a chance and
jump in a swimming hole.
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 24, 2011 -
26 comments
Stadium Status by the
Internets Celebrities (previously 1, 2) is a (short) documentary which examines the rush of new sports stadiums in NYC as the latest example of an obscene national trend. New stadiums are built every year and the private businesses that own them benefit from huge sums of public money for their creation. Are we getting our money's worth?
posted by unsupervised
on Jun 3, 2010 -
37 comments
A day by day account of the progress of the manufacturing of 12 Glass Windscreen panels by artist Mario Muller. The pieces are a commission by the MTA Arts in Transit program for Kingsbridge Road station in the Bronx. The work is being done at Franz Mayer of Munich in Germany.
More on the artist
here
and
here.
posted by pt68
on Oct 14, 2007 -
6 comments
