Awesome New York

Sideway Signs makes officially licensed replicas of the New York City Subway signs. Each replica is made of MDF wood and is painted, stenciled, and screenprinted by hand. They come in three sizes (17″, 24″, and 34″) and include a hanger for mounting. If you want something smaller, check out the shop’s art prints.

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.