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Posts Tagged ‘new york city’

New York has solicited design concepts for giving its old payphones new life. Now the city is asking “the crowd” to pick its favorite.

As Amar Toor writes at The Verge, “The City of New York this week announced the six finalists in its Reinvent Payphones challenge — an initiative that invites students, urban planners, and designers to propose their visions for the payphone of the future. The finalists were selected as winners in six different categories, and are now in the running for the Popular Choice Award, to be determined later this month.

“Not surprisingly, interactive and digital features play a major role in most of the six designs, including NYC/IO, winner of the Community Impact category. Created by Control Group and Titan, the proposal calls for the city’s phone booths to be replaced with high-tech kiosks, replete with transparent screens that pedestrians could use to not only make calls, but find restaurants, pay parking tickets, or surf the web.”

Read about all six designs, here. “You can vote for the best design on the New York City Facebook page until March 15th.”

And speaking of tapping the wisdom of crowds, Suzanne would love to have you vote on a logo for her new line at the birthstone jewelry company that hosts Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog. Targeted at young women and girls, the new line is going to be called Stellina — it’s the younger sister in the Luna & Stella family. The voting ends tomorrow, March 8. Do take a look at the logo designs, here, and vote if you have a minute.

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Speaking of theater, here’s a new one on me.

According to Edward Rothstein in the NY Times, “Passengers on ‘The Ride’ — a tour bus with floor-to-ceiling windows and nightclub-style audio — tool through Manhattan, encountering such (pre-arranged) sights as a businessman breaking into tap dance, a juggler tossing hot dogs, and a ballerina in a glowing tutu dancing around Columbus Circle.” Read more.

I’d love to look out a bus window and see a businessman breaking into a tap dance. Years ago, I knew a tap dance teacher who wanted to organize groups of “shoppers” who could suddenly break into choreographed tap routines up and down supermarket aisles. Am still looking for them.

I do have to wonder what NYC tourists expect to see when they look out bus windows. An artsy guy, my brother’s classmate, was walking down the street in Greenwich Village minding his own business one day in the sixties when someone leaned out of a bus and called, “There’s one of them now!” One of what? he wondered.

Whatever you’re looking for in New York, you can probably find it. All you have to do is believe.

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I had dinner with friends at Harvard Square’s Casablanca last night.

Hadn’t seen them in ages. Their older son is moving to New York City with his family this summer. A key attraction is an experimental “international” school opening in Chelsea in the fall. My friends’ granddaughter will start in the new middle school and their grandson in the new elementary school.

Avenues School is the brainchild of publishing whiz Chris Whittle, best known for his not-so-successful Edison Schools. He puts that experiment in a positive light on the Avenues website, saying that it helped to spark the charter school movement. My friends say that experienced and inventive educators from all over have rushed in to help with Whittle’s new global approach to education.

“Begin by thinking Avenues Beijing, Avenues London, Avenues São Paulo, Avenues Mumbai,” says the website. “Think of Avenues as one international school with 20 or more campuses. It will not be a collection of 20 different schools all pursuing different educational strategies, but rather one highly-integrated ‘learning community,’ connected and supported by a common vision, a shared curriculum, collective professional development of its faculty, the wonders of modern technology and a highly-talented headquarters team located here in New York City.”

Erik went to an international school in Wales, a United World College, and made lifelong friends from many nations. As Avenues plans to do, United World Colleges has campuses in different countries. The one in Wales is for high school, but other UWC schools are, like Avenues, preschool to 12th grade, even beyond. Kim Jong-Il’s grandson attends the one in Bosnia!

 

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When playwright Willie Reale started the 52nd Street Project in 1981 it was to meet a need. Children living in poverty in and around the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City often had little joy in their lives. A group of theater people decided to use the art they knew best to change that.

“The mission of The 52nd Street Project is to bring together kids (ages 9 to 18) from the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, with theater professionals to create original theater.  The primary activity of the Project is to present free theater to a general audience. The Project’s deeper purpose is to use the art form of theater to engage the children’s imaginations, broaden their means of expression, and increase their sense of self worth, their literacy skills and their appreciation for the arts. With the addition of our expanded Clubhouse and our own theater, the Project has been able to add programming in various other art forms (such as Photography, Poetry, Theatrical Design and Dance). Additionally, the Project runs a free, after school homework help and academic mentoring program.”

In the early years, I saw some of the plays created when one child and one actor bonded and collaborated. Delightful. As Reale says, “There is no way to fast forward and know how the kids will look back on this, but I have seen the joy in their eyes and have heard it in their voices and I have watched them take a bow and come up taller.”

In this clip, kids work with adult partners on haiku.

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