New York’s new High Line park may be semi-private, but lawn chairs in the middle of a pedestrianized, five-block stretch of Broadway that includes Times Square are absolutely free. 

They say by the end of the summer the chairs will be replaced by permanent seating fixtures about which there are already complaints. In the meantime, Times Square is half post-apocalyptic sci-fi and half peaceful sit-in. A positive view on the new pedestrian mall is here.

Tip! Thanks to the recession, NYC hotel room rates are way down, and if you can also take advantage of a new hotel’s soft launch prices – the new Standard Hotel is sort of open while they iron out the bugs – you can get an amazing deal for a week in New York. Coupon clipping! The Standard is a sort of minimalist 70s-style glass highrise in the Meatpacking District whose cement legs straddle the new High Line elevated park, and the rooms have a kind of swank that’s reminiscent of a bachelor pad/train comparment/yacht meets Japanese capsule hotel. Most of the hotel’s interiors are by New York-based design firm Roman and Williams, and they’re very successful – see the rooms, lobby, and grill below. I confess I had wanted to stay in the Maritime, which is a bit quirkier and vintage-ier and has the amazing porthole windows of its humbler, sailor-catering past, but amazingly the Standard was temporarily cheaper. We weren’t expecting the Standard’s capsule hotel feel: the rooms are quite small, and though the storage at first seems sort of clever and modular, from a functional design point of view function occasionally follows form, not vice versa. But problems (see below) will no doubt be solved before the real launch. On the plus side, the friendly, incredibly mod concierges look like 70s airline pilots, and there are the most mesmerizing simultaneous film montages of heaven and hell by Marco Brambilla in the elevators – imagine perpetually scrolling pop animations of a Breughel painting. The views are great in every direction – we’ve got the High Line elevated park below and the the Empire State Building across. The wood panelling behind and above the bed makes you feel as if you’re enclosed inside a roll-top desk, and the black tiles in the bathroom – and I’m not a huge tile fan – are beautiful. More hotel photos at contemporist.

It makes you sound a bit Princess and the Pea to point out that there’s little storage room, there’s amazingly only a single tiny hook for hanging all your towels so you end up draping them all over the place; no robes; the TV crackles in and out of focus then goes mute about every 9 minutes; the person who sleeps on the inside of the bed has literally nowhere to rest a book or, more problematically, a glass of water; and someone needs to decrease the tension on the automatic door closers so you don’t get the sort of door percussion we’ve been hearing all down the hallway. It’s amazing how ridiculously, stupidly high your expectations can get in a luxury hotel. These experiences always remind me of David Foster Wallace’s essay about mega cruise ships, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’d Never Do Again,” in which he details arriving on board humbly wanting to carry his own bags rather than inconvenience a porter, and then watches himself quickly, inexorably mutate into a spoiled, demanding pasha. Ignore me; the hotel’s fantastic. The retro lobby, the bar/cafe, the adventurousness of the entryway – they’re all great. PS: The geodesic-ish dome seen in the skyline view below turns out to be Diane Von Furstenberg’s apartment. This photo was used here completely unbeknownst to me and now I feel guilty for invading her privacy.

Of course the High Line park didn’t open on time for our New York trip – the first phase now opens June 15 - but at least we got to see all the frantic final activity from our hotel window. UPDATE June 6: This had seemed like a great urban park idea, and it would have made a very beautiful promenade for New York, but as it turns out its use is semi-private. Apparently when full public funding couldn’t be secured to produce a fully public park, private funders stepped in and this has meant that the park, a new design on the top of the old elevated railway, will sometimes be reserved for private use. You’ll need a wristband to enter, apparently, and sections can be arbitrarily closed off. (See discussion on gothamist, who also used our photos.) The park’s controlled use is unfortunate because politics aside, the design looks good. [End update.] It seems there’s been only minimal intervention on the el; the tracks remain, and only gravel, pavers and benches have been added. Some of the plants in the final design are the same indigenous species that have been occupying the long-overgrown line for decades. The benches are nicely designed – they ramp up from walkway level. It rained this morning but now it’s sunny and men are painting over graffiti on the adjacent buildings. There are more photos on the High Line website (including the black and white photo below). The Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District actually straddles the High Line, and from there you get a very good view of a portion of the new park. There’s a beautiful view of what it used to look like here and one by Timothy Schenk on Flickr:

More photos from “The Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating,” 1973, by Barbara D’Arcy. These displays –  a Japanese room, a psychedelic red room and a room done in a sort of wild Tudor hunting lodge style – were built inside Bloomingdales in the late 60s or early 70s. See more of the amazing display rooms D’Arcy designed for Bloomingdales in our earlier post,  The Saturday Generation. 

This is artist Donald Judd’s loft in Soho, maintained as a museum but only open infrequently. It was one of the first artist’s lofts in Soho – not to mention in New York – and is now almost the paradigmatic example of loft living. Judd bought the entire 1870’s industrial building for 70,000 in 1968 and moved in with his family. One of the central figures in minimalist art, Judd clearly lived his own aesthetic. His interest in industrial materials and engineering methods is evident here in the lack of any attempt to domesticate the space as well as in the simple, unadorned furniture he built for it. The NYT ran an article a while ago which included an interview with Judd’s son Flavin, who was 6 months old when he moved into this loft and who nostalgically described the Soho of the 60s and 70s as a small town smelling fragrantly of the cigars manufactured nearby. These days there’s a certain huffiness out there about modernism and minimalism’s supposed kid-unfriendliness, but Flavin Judd remembers this space – ground zero of minimalism – happily and even nostalgically (there’s a small image of the Judds at home, below). “There were “the best Swedish breakfasts on the second floor — 50 people would come over — ham, cheese, weird flatbreads, salmon,” Flavin Judd said. “It was a great place to grow up.” To read the whole story, which includes information on the heritage restoration of the whole building, see the NYT. See also this blog’s previous post on minimalism.vs. maximalism in interiors. There’s a good shot of the a reproduction of Judd’s famous daybed on AT , and lastly, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change by Sharon Zukin provides a really fascinating portrait and social history of artist’s lofts, including 101 Spring Street. According to the Judd Foundation website, tours of the Spring St. building and loft are suspended during restoration but will start up again in 2010.

Photos from the NYT and from DiscoContinental on Flickr. Take a fun quiz (is it a Judd or a piece of cheap furniture?) here.

Probably everyone and his/her dog has seen this NYC loft apartment by now, and possibly also blogged about it, but this is one of those places that is so hypnotizing I can’t stop looking at it. It’s on the top floor of a former industrial building on Broadway in NYC and not surprisingly it belongs to an architect couple. It is filled with Jean Prouvé and Hans Wegner furniture among other beautiful things, but it’s the beautiful diamond-patterned Berber rug and the striped pillows that make it. There’s something about these minimalist, monochomatic stripes and geometries that produce a mesmerized quasi-autistic trance, while at the same time they are also pleasingly reminiscent of the traditional striped textiles of both Sweden and Greece. Modernism’s long-standing relationship with simple agrarian-based weaving is not surprising. Without the wood and textiles this would just be another cool – even cold – white loft.

Via OWI.