“We’ve been suffering ever since they moved in [six years ago],” said Sean Sweeney, director of the SoHo Alliance and Greene Street resident, who ticked off a litany of complaints ranging from noise from steam cleaning the façade in the middle of the night or from the HVAC equipment on the roof to the hordes of people who line up for new gadgets — and allegedly leave behind heaps of trash.

The final straw — which prompted Sweeney to fire off a letter this week to elected officials — was last Tuesday’s Jonas Brothers concert held at the store, attracting thousands of screaming tweeners for several hours to Sweeney’s block “like it was Shea Stadium and the Beatles.

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BEIJING—The last night of the old, normal life, July 19, was mild and beautiful. The air was clear, even though the Olympic rules would not take effect till the next day: the driving ban on half the city’s three million private cars, alternating daily between odd- and even-numbered license plates; the halt to construction digging and cement pouring. Tomorrow, by plan, the Olympic city would be in place.

I had spent the morning and early afternoon 80-some miles away in Tianjin—the Newark to Beijing’s New York. I had in mind that I would return on the brand-new bullet train, but the bullet train isn’t open to customers yet.  read more »

"This is an awesome space, an awesome location," chef Scott Conant said, during a packed-house grand opening party at his new digs in the meatpacking district--er, at least, sort of in the meatpacking district.

"It's not really in the meatpacking, it's on, you know what I'm saying?"

The former L'Impero and Alto cook's latest restaurant Scarpetta opened Monday evening in the former Gin Lane and old Village Idiot space at 355 West 14th Street, just east of Ninth Avenue.

"A lot of the core clientele, a lot of Upper East Siders and a lot of people from Uptown, they're not going to be kind of spooked by going too much into the meatpacking. Too far inside of it, it might scare 'em off. But because it's on it, they feel comfortable coming down.

"I looked everywhere," Mr. Conant said. "But I really wanted it to be a West Village restaurant. It's probably one of the last neighborhoods that is pure New York."  read more »