Red, White and Blue...

The Empire State Building was lit up in very patriotic colours last night to celebrate Labor Day Weekend...

Green Cab?

I saw my first green taxi today...

The green cabs are 'all borough' taxis - so the drivers can't get annoyed at you when you say you want to go to Brooklyn.

There aren't many of the taxi's around at the moment, this is the first one I've ever seen, but they're expect to be 12,000 of them in New York within the next 2 years.

Out & About...

By The Bridge...

We had a lovely day cycling around Dumbo and Brooklyn Bridge Park - the weather was perfect and the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan looked amazing...

Obey x Wooster Collective...

As part of the Wooster Collective's 10 year anniversary there have been some new murals painted around Brooklyn, we found Shepard Fairey's new one in Dumbo this afternoon...

We also found some big Andre the Giant faces that he must have sneakily put up around the place...

Rainbow Wall...

We found an amazing, huge rainbow wall in Dumbo...

Tight Rope Walker...

Love Cam...

Wooster Collective Anniversary Exhibition...

Yesterday was the last day of the 10 Year Anniversary exhibition for the Wooster Collective, so we went to the Jonathan LeVine to check it out.

The Wooster Collective are a New York couple who started a blog 10 years ago to document all the street art they saw around the city. Now it's grown into a huge blog and they've had books published and held exhibitions and given talks (the were at Offset a couple of years ago).

For the 10 year anniversary exhibition they had invited lots prolific street artists from around the world to take part, so there were pieces from Faile, Shepard Fairey, Space Invader, London Police, Lady Aiko, Buff Monste, Ben Eine, How & Nosm, JR and loooooads more...

 It was great that so many of the artists were people who's work I've seen around New York and a lot of them had done murals on the Bowery wall.

My favourites were, as ever, the Faile pieces...

All of the pieces were for sale, ranging from a few hundred dollars to $100,000 for a set of three Obey pieces (surprisingly they hadn't sold yet!).

It'll be interesting to see what street art will be like in another 10 years and whether it'll be as expensive and collectable. 

The Highline Hotel

Yesterday afternoon we had a lovely walk and a spot of lunch on the Highline. I had one of the best sandwiches I've ever eaten courtesy of Smokeline BBQ. It was called The Mess...

It had chopped brisket and pulled beef rib meat with chilli sauce, pink onion relish and a slice of fried cheese... it was absolutely amazing!

Then we walked over to the newly opened Highline Hotel to have a nosey...

The hotel is in part of this very grand old building (which looks like it belongs in England rather than Manhattan). The building was some kind of 'General Theological Seminary' whatever that is, and it's also joined to an old cathedral where 'Twas the night before Christmas' was written!

Now though it's a grand and fancy hotel that has New York's first Intellegentsia coffee bar in the lobby...

The lobby was quite small, but nicely decorated with old furniture and tables...

There were also some very lovely bikes parked outside with wooden boxes on the back with the hotel's branding engraved in the wood...

These were for guests to use (for free) to cycle around Manhattan on.

The smell of coffee was too tempting, so we got a latte and some earl grey and went to sit in the garden. The latte looked pretty fancy and Abi's tea was quite a performance. The lady behind the counter set a little timer to make sure the tea brewed for EXACTLY the right amount of time. Not a second too soon, or a second longer - Abi got given a bit of a look for asking if she could just take the tea, instead of having to awkwardly stand their while both her and the barrista just watched the tea in the pot...

 It was worth the wait though!

Made in America...

We went to Story (that shop that changes it's them every couple of months) to see the 'Made in America' collection.

As you'd probably guess, everything that was being sold in the shop had been made in America - and they'd curated it so that product from the East Coast were sold on the right side of the shop, West was on the left, North was at the back (top) and South was at the front of the shop.

There was lots of really lovely things for sale - and lots of extremely expensive things to! It seems you can whack on an extra $50 if it's been made in the USA!

They had some particularly lovely things from the Detroit Denim Co., as well as jeans, they made some really lovely looking aprons and bags...

There were also some very nice leather and suede things...

 This leather was SO soft and thin. There were also so lovely shirts that were made from American cotton - they were SO soft, it'd be lovely to have an American Cotton blanket that was that soft.

I also really liked these little wash-bags...

It's not nearly as nice as my Home Sewn wash-bag, but I do like the natural coloured canvas and leather mixed with the really bright zip (which coincidentally matches Abi's bracelet!)

The idea of the Story shop is brilliant, and they always have really interesting products and stories no matter what the theme of the shop is... it's just a swizz everything was a bit out of our price range, but I suppose you pay for the hand-made aspect and the craft that's gone into each product rather than the machine that's churned them out somewhere on the other side of the world.

The market for local hand-made stuff definitely seems to be growing though!