New York bar to set menu prices like stocks

NEW YORK (Reuters) – What’s the value of a pint of beer? Let the market decide, says a new restaurant in Manhattan where prices for food and beverages will fluctuate like stock prices in increments according to demand.

The Exchange Bar & Grill, set amid the bustling shops and pubs of the Grammercy Park neighborhood, is replete with a ticker tape flashing menu prices in red lettering as demand forces them to fluctuate.

Customers can move prices for all beverages and bar snacks such as hot wings ($7 for 6 pieces) or fried calamari ($9). The prices will fluctuate in $.25 cent increments, but will most likely plateau at a $2 change in either direction.

A glass of Guinness starts at $6 but could be pushed to a high of $8 or a low of $4, depending on popularity.

So if one drink is in heavy demand, its price will rise, causing the cost of other equivalent drinks to drop. A rush on a particular beer would increase its price, and cause other beers to drop.

The Exchange Bar & Grill has a long bar facing the ticker tape — and flat screen televisions — as well as a few tables in the back where patrons can eat in greater comfort.

Restaurants in New York and across America have had a tough year because consumers have slashed discretionary spending in a tough economic climate. New York has about 23,000 restaurants, with about 4,400 opening each year according to the city’s Department of Health, which tracks establishment licenses.

NYC mayor: Coney Island 'is coming back, big time'

NEW YORK — State-of-the-art new rides including a roller coaster and a pendulum will open this summer at Coney Island to jump-start the resurgence of the famed Brooklyn amusement park, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday.

"Coney Island is coming back, big time," Bloomberg said at a news conference near the boardwalk where the decades-old Astroland rides were dismantled in 2008.

The new rides are being created by Zamperla, the world’s leading manufacturer of mechanical rides, based in Altavilla Vicentina, Italy.

Luna Park at Coney Island will open on Memorial Day weekend with 19 rides. Among them will be the Air Race, which sends riders swinging and soaring around a control tower. It will be the ride’s global debut.

Also promised are games, live entertainment, and concessions including Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand, which opened in 1916, pioneering America’s concept of fast food.

By the summer of 2011, Scream Zone at Coney Island will offer two roller coasters, go-carts and a human slingshot launching people more than 200 feet into the air.

Central Amusement International of Parsippany, N.J., is investing about $30 million to build and operate the park. The company signed a 10-year lease for about 6 acres of land including the former Astroland site, paying the city $1 million plus part of gross receipts.

"We will have rides that will flip you, turn you, launch you, drop you, splash you and make the mayor want to lose his lunch," said David Galst, a CAI spokesman.

Not all of Coney Island’s old amusements were scrapped.

(more…)

New Yorkers beware! New cockroach hits the Big Apple

NEW YORK (AFP) – New Yorkers are used to fighting each other for space, but there may be a new contender in town according to a Rockefeller study that appears to have uncovered a new species of cockroach.

“The cockroach is genetically modified. Species don’t differ more than one percent, this cockroach is four percent different, which suggests it is a new species of cockroach,” Professor Mark Stoeckle, an expert on genomics and DNA barcoding at Rockefeller University, told AFP.

“We think that the museums of natural history in Paris or New York could be interested.”

The previously-unidentified creepy-crawly was uncovered as part of a project undertaken by two high-school students, Brenda Tan, 17, and Matt Cost, 18, under Stoeckle’s supervision.

In their roles as “DNAHouse investigators,” the pair trawled New York apartments, stores and street, collecting 217 specimens between November 2008 and March 2009.

They took samples from supermarket food, the remains of an insect found in a box of fruit, a feather from a duster, dried dung and a cockroach and matched DNA sequences using the Barcode of Life Database and GenBank.

The American Museum of Natural History laboratory identified 170 genetic codes, leading the researchers to identify 95 different animal species, including some that were unexpected.

“A feather from a duster yielded ostrich DNA. A delicacy labeled ‘sturgeon caviar’ instead turned out to be from the strange-looking paddlefish. A popular Asian snack was revealed as giant flying squid. Bison DNA was found in a dog biscuit,” the pair wrote on the Rockefeller University website.

In fact, they found that 16 percent of food items were mislabeled, including cheeses labeled sheep’s milk that were actually made of cow’s milk, a potentially dangerous labeling error for those with allergies.

But perhaps the biggest surprise for the researchers was the discovery of “a genetically distinct ‘mystery’ cockroach that might be a new species.”

“By appearance it looks like the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) but it is genetically different from other American cockroaches in the databases,” the researchers said.

Lawn Chairs in Times Square

Native New Yorkers were a tad confused today when they learned that Broadway was shut down between 42nd Street and 47th Street over the long weekend. A new traffic pattern was put in place and a huge number of lawn chairs were placed to give Times Square tourists a place to sit.

Photos of Chelsea Market

Here are some neat HDR shots (mostly) that I took at Chelsea Market in NYC:

[flickr album=72157617864623406 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

ATM card skimming happening right in NYC

Previously on C.S.I… a man found an actual card skimmer in the wild, in the flesh. Today, Gizmodo reader Sean became the card skimmer/PIN camera’s latest almost-victim. Where? Chase Bank in Manhattan, East Village.

Sean Seibel was inside a local Chase bank where he inserted his ATM card into one of two side-by-side automatic teller machines. When the machine told him it could not read his card, it took him a bit of jiggling to get his card back. He tried it a couple more times and got the same results. Before trying the other machine, he inspected the slot of the current ATM he was using and realized that it had a false plastic cover attached to the slot. The amazing thing about the cover was that the translucent green plastic matched the card reader slot perfectly, meaning that it was made specifically for Chase ATMs. After snapping a few photos with his iPhone, he alerted the branch manager and explained what happened.

As he was leaving, Seibel remembered reading about card skimmers having small cameras in the proximity in order to read PIN pad activity, so naturally, he went back to the ATM to inspect, which is where he found an extra mirror attached to the vandalized machine that the other ATMs didn’t have. Drilled into the mirror was a tiny pinhole with a camera inside, directed at the PIN pad. Seibel alerted the branch manager again and asked Chase why they hadn’t inspected the ATM after he had warned them the first time. Chase honestly replied that they hadn’t thought of it because they had never encountered that sort of thing before.

From the crazy amounts of feedback we received last night after we posted the first story, it seems that card skimmers are a common crime everywhere from Thailand to Mexico. But actually hearing about it happening to our very own readers here in America makes us want to help get the word out. Seibel says it best: "Take this as a warning and please inspect every ATM machine you use, no matter how secure you think the environment is."

See the full article at Gizmodo.

Times Square To Become Giant Pedestrian Mall

The Great White Way is on the fast track to becoming a pedestrian mall.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced experimental plans to close part of Broadway to vehicles.

But as CBS 2 HD has discovered, not everyone is on board.

“This midtown traffic mess is one of those problems everyone always talks about and you always say there’s nothing you can do about it, well, we’re going to try and do something about it,” Bloomberg said on Thursday.

The mayor announced an ambitious plan to actually close blocks of Broadway for pedestrians.

“We expect both travel times and safety to improve and in some cases substantially,” Bloomberg added.

The mayor’s plan, according to published reports, would be to close Broadway from 42nd to 47th streets and put chairs, benches and cafe tables where taxis and trucks usually go. The mayor’s vision would resemble last summer’s Broadway Boulevard Project below 42nd Street, which is still in effect.

See the full article at WCBS.

Spider-Man + U2 = Broadway Show?

Broadway’s Spidey senses are tingling.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the hyped stage musical directed by Julie Taymor (The Lion King) with music and lyrics courtesy of U2‘s Bono and The Edge, will kick off what its producers hope will be an amazing run along the Great White Way beginning with previews on Jan. 16, 2010, and a Feb. 18, 2010, opening night.

The $40 million effort, reportedly the most expensive Broadway production ever, will make its debut in the Hilton Theatre, the only venue big enough to allow the superhero room to spin his way around the sprawling skyscraper sets while duking it out with various bad guys.

See the full article at Yahoo News.

Robotrains take over NY's Brooklyn-Manhattan “L” line

If you ride the L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan at odd hours of the day, get ready for a little more automation in your lifestyle. As of today, the L will become the first NY subway line to be fully controlled by Communications Based Train Control, or CBTC, initially used overnights and during non-peak hours. It allows the trains to effectively run themselves, closer and faster than their meatbag conductors could otherwise, which should mean more trains more often.

Read the full article at Engadget and The NY Post.

That maple syrup smell in Manhattan? Solved!

Baffled city investigators began calling them “maple syrup events”: mysterious waves of sweet-smelling air that periodically wafted over Manhattan, delighting some, troubling others and vanishing as quickly as they had arrived.

After each episode — in 2005, 2006 and again this year — residents flooded the city’s 311 information hot line with calls. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection dispatched air testers. But nobody could pinpoint the smell — or its source.

See the full article at the New York Times