Planet of the Grapes

622 Broadway Best Buy was gracious enough to provide us with the definition of a five. Five is the highest score a bathroom can receive for being perfectly clean without any aesthetic design. You feel comfortable using the bathroom but you don’t want to hang around. We were escorted to the facilities by one of [...]

55 E 8th St Chipotle seemed to spring up overnight in the northeast US, providing Manhattan with an above-par taste of cheap Mexican burritos. Far from the traditional roots of adobe ovens and handmade flour tortillas, this chain boasts a very modern and metallic style and puts the “fast” in “fast food.” A typical Chipotle [...]

1105 5th Avenue at 92nd Street The Jewish Museum, far from the Jewish Heritage Museum in Battery Park City, resides on the Upper East Side on Fifth Avenue – known also as Museum Row. It is one of the better-known museums here besides the Guggenheim and the Met and receives pedestrian traffic accordingly. With security [...]

83rd Street and Fifth Avenue There are two types of modern bathrooms. One is the ideal modern bathroom equipped with tinted glass stalls, ergonomic toilets that clean your privates and designer sinks and lights. Then there is the bathroom that prevails in the modern age: peeling walls, graffiti, broken toilets, and that familiar aroma from [...]

83rd Street and 5th Avenue The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the cornerstone of New York City art museums and home to one of America’s finest collections. The building sports a classical facade: tall columns, broad friezes and a general majesty to make you feel insignificant, but in that romantic way, unlike the glass phalluses [...]

34th Street and Broadway And now, onward and upward from the Macy’s basement to the 7th floor. Whereas the color palette in the basement brought band-aids to mind, here we have that very strange combination of orange and brown. Orange and brown can work in a weird way, beautiful and ugly at the same time, [...]

56th Street and 6th Avenue The truly benevolent ruler always points out the merits of his aides before executing them. Thus, we must note that Starbucks is great about letting one use the bathroom even if not a paying customer, as the employees are usually, to their credit, lax about this. Maybe they aren’t allowed [...]

1972 Broadway, corner of 66th Street Being that Barnes and Noble is a haven for knowledge and learning, a place one can go to to edify oneself through the written word (regardless of purchase, thankfully, as their attempt to perpetuate a ”lax vibe” results in many using it as a reading room), you may expect [...]