Books Below 14

Tomorrow is independent bookstore day, and booklovers in Manhattan are celebrating along with the rest of the nation. True it’s very easy to get a new book delivered to your door without leaving your home, but there are still many true literary lovers who absolutely thrive on spending an entire day engaged in “an independent bookstore crawl.”

A few years ago Manhattan had a beautiful independent bookstore right on 57th Street.  The Rizzoli store was a six-story townhouse that dated back to the early 1900s, featuring wooden ceilings and chandeliers.  Although it closed in 2014 the Rizzoli store reopened in Madison Square Park, Manhattan and is still full of character.

And then there’s The Dusty Bookshelf which just re-opened (after its closure 2 years ago) in Manhattan. Offering live music and  hot coffee, opening day began with shelves being filled with books and the store making the new space its home.  Until it’s all complete true literary lovers are welcome to go through the boxes to see what might delight them. Open from 9am to 8pm every day, both new and used books are for sale.

Manhattan Guide: Take a Virtual Tour

Alex Hunter from Attaché (the show that gets you in, out, and around some of the world’s greatest cities in under 20 minutes), humorously takes a look at transportation options from New York airports. There are three of these which are all equally bad – but thankfully they are also all slated for major redevelopment in the next decade.  Here we get a review of the various options of getting from the airports to town.  Really good cab system.  The airporter is another option, flat fee $17 each way, free wifi, drops off at Penn Station.

East Village: Infrastructure and Transportation Updates

It seems that there is always construction in New York, in the hope of improving transportation and updating crucial infrastructure.  Finally though – at least along East 14th Street – things are calming down and construction work is due to at least be reduced from 16 to 12 hours according to a recent MTA announcement. This will somewhat ease the noise, dust and inconvenience of work being undertaken on East 14th Street from Ave. B to First Ave where endeavors are being taken to add an L train, elevators and new substation.

In related news, the MTA has been approached by lawmakers to pause work on proposed M14A/D Select Bus Service (SBS) changes.  The request is being made in an effort to connect express service to a supplemental local route.  The idea is to make the bus lines ahead of the L train’s partial shutdown faster.  The way this would be done would be by removing every other one of the M14A/D stops.  According to Carlina Rivera, city council member:

 “The proposed SBS stop spacing is a clear compromise between a local route and a typical SBS route—meaning that an M14 SBS will not have the ‘express’ travel times that other routes have. In fact, there is a successful model for this kind of plan just a few avenues away, where the M15 SBS runs parallel to an M15 local route. The MTA must pursue a similar strategy for the M14 route.”