Awesome New York

Like most longstanding structures, the New York City Subway is an urban Ship of Theseus, gradually expanded and reshaped over the last 120 years. This evolution inevitably led to several once coveted corridors and tunnels being rendered obsolete. It’s History takes us through some of these forgotten paths and the stories behind them.

The 30-year dream of Dassai sake’s founder, Dassai Blue, is their first American brewery, now producing its first American-made sake. Dassai Blue is a premium Junmai Daiginjo sake made with Yamada Nishiki rice — the gold standard for sake — through traditional methods such as “tokomomi,” drying the rice by hand.

Musician Navzad Dabu provided late-night commuters in NYC’s Metropolitan Avenue / Grand Street subway station with a phenomenal private performance. His graveyard shift concert included back-to-back covers of a dozen Radiohead tracks. We would have stood there for the whole show and missed our train.

Artist Paul Kenton paints colorful modern cityscapes. His creative approach involves splattering paint onto a canvas to lay in the backgrounds, adding details with a palette knife, and letting the drips of paint become watery reflections at the bottom. Watch as he transforms an abstract mess of paint into an impressive rainy day scene of NYC.

From the Empire State Building to the Flatiron to the Freedom Tower, the New York City skyline is iconic and imposing. Celebrate your love for the Big Apple’s architecture with Ian Flood and Chris Prosser’s skyline chess set, which includes 32 buildings, made from heavyweight acrylic, along with a folding game board.

New York City’s public transit system carries millions of passengers each day, so it’s bound to have its share of items left behind on its seats and platforms. Vicente Cueto’s documentary short film tells the story of lost items and their owners, as told by Sonny Drayton of NYC’s Subways and Buses Lost & Found department.

(Flashing Images) Filmmaker Thomas Blanchard presents a unique perspective on the diverse people, places, and things in New York City. The mix of black and white footage with bright flashes of blue and red breathes added energy into the already lively city. Sébastien Guérive’s music and sound design further enhances the mood.

The New York Times has been publishing the news since September 1851. In this fascinating and hypnotic 2017 video by Josh Begley, he offers up a visual history of the newspaper through the design of its front page. We’d love to see this updated on an annual basis. Best watched in 4K.

The Thunderbirds and Blue Angels paid tribute to America’s healthcare workers and first-responders with an awe-inspiring flyover of New York City. While piloting Thunderbird 2, Major Trevor Aldridge captured this amazing footage out of his cockpit as they flew along the East River.

Sam Morrison’s crowdsourced video aims to answer the the questions: “What happens when everything in the world has been photographed? From multiple angles, multiple times per day?” He created the clip by collecting Instagram photos of the same subject or location, then by piecing them together into a cohesive hyperlapse.

Apparently tired of the crowded streets of New York City, Yosef Lerner decided to make himself something that would clear the way for his stroll – a portable car horn that he can honk whenever someone gets in his way. We love when he uses it to beep at turning cars.

We can feel it all over. One of the funkiest songs ever written has got to be Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke. Recently, the members of the the artist collective known as Apartment Sessions turned in a rousing, appropriately brass-heavy performance of the track on NYC’s J Train, lead off by the soulful lead vocals of Aneesa Folds.

While many of the things we throw away are garbage, once in a while, there’s something of value. During his 34 years on the job, New York sanitation worker Nelson Molina collected items along his route, amassing a collection of over 45,000 items. Nicolas Heller’s documentary offers a profile of the man and his private museum of treasure.

Some high-end mobile phones have support for slow-motion recording at frame rates up to 960 fps. GlenMakes turned the camera lens of his Galaxy S10 towards the normally action-packed streets of New York City while moving through traffic, and the super slow-mo makes it look like the entire city has been frozen in time.

We always though helicopters weren’t designed to fly upside-down, but Red Bull Air Force pilot Aaron Fitzgerald proved that wrong as he performed a variety of insane helicopter flips, barrel rolls, and nosedives over the Big Apple.

These days, millions of cars are equipped with dashcams to record incidents on the road. But check out this black and white film footage from a camera mounted first on the front, then on the rear of a car as it drives through Manhattan more than 70 years ago.

The pranksters at Improv Everywhere took advantage of Apple’s NYC glass cube store’s renovations to set up shop in another glass structure, the elevator shaft to the 23rd Street subway station, complete with throngs of fake employees and a line for the iPhone X.

FilmSpektakel presents a bonkers hyperlapse video of New York City shot via helicopter, taxicab, on foot, and using a variety of cameras and rigs. Assembled from about about 65,000 photos, the fast-moving imagery is a perfect reflection of the city’s on-the-go lifestyle.

Desktop sculptures you build from recycled chipboard. They come in a variety of familiar forms, from those water towers on top of buildings, to a mailbox, billboard, and our personal fave, the halfpipe. They’re paintable, and also come in awesome artist editions.

A while back, we watched a guy with perfect timing hit 55 green lights in a row in NYC. Now, driver Noah Forman has smashed that feat, driving through an insane 240 intersections with traffic lights without a single stop. Somebody needs to turn this into a video game.

Claire & Max’s short film envisions New York City as a giant movie set, its buildings replaced by thin facades of themselves with the help of some super trippy visual effects. Though we’re pretty sure we’ve seen this somewhere before.

Digital artist Danil Krivoruchko used slow-mo footage captured on an iPhone, then ran it through a post-processing algorithm which transformed New York City into a sort of living watercolor painting. You can grab the rendering code he used on GitHub. Source footage here.

The New York Times Magazine enlisted photographer Jimmy Chin and safety expert Jamison Walsh to climb to the tippy top of the spire on Manhattan’s 1 World Trade Center, and shared this eye-popping 360º video of the journey. We only wish the video were longer.