Walking in Holden Caulfield's footsteps through Manhattan

Nearly 60 years after the publication of 'The Catcher in the Rye' you can still see much of the New York that he saw.

By David L. Ulin
April 24, 2010 | 4:02 p.m.

Reporting from New York

Holden Caulfield was a flâneur. That's not generally how we think of him, this archetype of adolescent alienation, this detester of phonies, this poor little lost boy whose voice — by turns knowing, childlike, cynical and bereft — drives J.D. Salinger's iconic 1951 novel, "The Catcher in the Rye." Yet, from the moment, about a quarter of the way through the book, he arrives by train at Manhattan's now-demolished original Pennsylvania Station building, he is our guide on one of the 20th century's great literary walking tours. ...

... You can walk Holden's Manhattan in one long afternoon, starting at Penn Station (or perhaps I should say the new Penn Station) and working your way north up Broadway through the theater district to the park. From there, you can check on the ducks in the lagoon, then wander over to the museums, before heading south, past the Central Park Zoo, and down through midtown to Grand Central Station. There are a few hidden landmarks, but for the most part, it's a city saunter, New York as New Yorkers know it, an insider's take on the streets. ...

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Can't Stand to Sit Too Long? There's a Desk for That

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Plan for Greener, Pedestrian-Friendly 34th Street

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: April 22, 2010

From the city that has banned cars from broad swaths of Broadway and put picnic tables in Times Square, here comes another great reshaping of New York’s streetscape.

The Bloomberg administration is moving ahead with what amounts to a radical, river-to-river reimagining of another major corridor: 34th Street, the Midtown thoroughfare that is home to Macy’s — and some of the city’s most congested traffic.

Automobiles would be banned on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, creating a pedestrian plaza bookended by Herald Square and the Empire State Building.

The result would be a street effectively split in two.

On the west side of the pedestrian plaza, all car traffic would flow west, toward the Hudson River. On the east side, all car traffic would move east, toward the East River. Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier.

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Making a BMW commercial

The commercial (From BMWBlog):




The camera platform:

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A New $100 Bill

In a bid to make counterfeiting of the bill more difficult, a new $100 bill goes into circulation next February.

The coming bill's new security features include, according to The Wall Street Journal, "a blue 3-D Security Ribbon on the front of the note that contains images of bells and 100s, which move and change from one to the other as you tilt the note, according to joint release from the agencies. Another security feature is the 'Bell in the Inkwell' image that changes color from copper to green when the note is tilted, an effect that makes it appear and disappear within the inkwell. "

The New $100 Note: Know Its Features. Know It's Real is an informative website with video and interactive features.

Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley

By Claire Cain Miller
Published April 16, 2010

CANDACE FLEMING’S résumé boasts a double major in industrial engineering and English from Stanford, an M.B.A. from Harvard, a management position at Hewlett-Packard and experience as president of a small software company.

But when she was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007, she recalls one venture capitalist telling her that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have business cards, because all they would say was “Mom.”

Read the entire, interesting, informative article by clicking the post's title.