Commuters may have noticed a bit of extra traffic when driving into Manhattan at night lately—and things are not going to get much better for the next few weeks.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has announced that two major tunnels connecting the island to other parts of the city have been and will continue to be partially closed at night in an effort to carry out tests on the 20-ton flood doors that protect them from various storms and hurricanes.
The Queens Midtown Tunnel and the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel each feature doors that are 29-feet wide and 14-feet high and almost two-feet thick, so you can imagine that work on any one of them may take some time.
Photograph: Courtesy of the MTA
“In the event of a coastal storm, these doors provide the last line of defense, preventing water from infiltrating tunnels an causing extensive damage as was seen during Superstorm Sandy in 2012,” reads an official press release. “Eight doors were installed in 2017 as part of the agency’s long-term flood mitigation program.”
According to the press release, the to-be-tested entryways can only be moved when the tunnels are closed to traffic. As a result, one tube in each tunnel will be closed overnight on select dates. The remaining tube will operate two lanes, one in each direction.
Here is when each tunnel will be closed:
Queens Midtown Tunnel
Saturday, July 27 at 12:01am through 8am Sunday, July 28 at 1am through 9am Saturday, August 3 at 12:01am through 8am Sunday, August 4 at 1am through 9am
Hugh L. Carey Tunnel
Wednesday, July 24 at 9pm through Thursday, July 25 at 5am
Sugar Mouse NYC is a new sort of nightlife concept that we can easily get behind: marketed as a game hall and music venue, the new space at 47 Third Avenue near 11th Street also features ping pong and pool tables, a space for DJs and bands to play live sets, rotating art exhibits and a slew of different themed nights and events.
The destination comes courtesy of Professor Aaron Ho, also the founder of the no-frills Lower East Side coffee shop Black Cat and Sour Mouse, a tavern with pool tables that is also on the Lower East Side.
“Building a community of artists within the immersive space gives us the opportunity to support the creative community and showcase their talents, while also fostering thought-provoking conversations,” the owner said in an official statement.
Although no specific details about the food and drink offerings on site have been made public, back in February, EV Grieve reported that the venue was going to serve “pizza and snacks.”
Clearly catering to the downtown New York crowd, Sugar Mouse is sure to find initial footing in the area but here is to hoping it’ll do much more than that, offering city dwellers the types of all-encompassing nighttime activities that have been missing across town for quite some time.
Sugar Mouse is open Sundays through Thursdays from 4pm to 1am and Fridays and Saturdays from 4pm to 2am. Celebrating its opening week, the venue will be offering a free house of games to all patrons now through Friday between 4pm and 9pm.
New Yorkers walking around Union Square have been forced to stare at the empty store front that was once home to the beloved Blue Water Grill restaurant since 2019.
Things are finally about to change, though: State of Play Hospitality just announced that it has signed a lease to take over the landmarked building at 31 Union Square West to open Flight Club, a social darts bar that already operates locations in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston and Las Vegas. The destination will officially debut in late 2025.
First founded in London back in 2015, Flight Club focuses on the game of social darts, which is basically the company’s techie take on the traditional darts game. You’ll get to play while sipping on craft cocktails and munching on some bar food. Sounds like an epic New York night if you ask us.
“We’ve been looking for the right real estate opportunity to land Flight Club in New York for over five years, and this site has the potential to be a genuine landmark for the city and the group,” said Toby Harris, CEO of State of Play Hospitality, in an official statement. “Both 31 Union Square as a building and the stunning split level Flight Club space are as close to the physical brief for the brand that we could wish for. It’s exciting and humbling to be opening our North American Flight Club flagship at such a legendary location and I’m confident that, by complementing and retaining the character of the building, we will be able to do it justice.”
The history of the address shouldn’t be lost on anyone.
The 10,700-square-foot structure was building back in 1902 by the Bank of Metropolis as their own headquarters. It became a designated landmark in 1988 and has been home to the nightclub Zippers, the high-end restaurant and basement club Metropolis and, of course, Blue Water Grill, which opened back in 1996 and closed over two decades later (that’s saying a lot in a city like New York!)
We can only hope that the new owners will do the building justice.
“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They are published every week.
Let me tell you about some terrific shows that didn’t change my life.
We can start with Cole Escola’s riotous comedy Oh, Mary!, the surprise hit of the year, in which Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln as a boozy, raunchy, idiotic egomaniac. After a sold-out run at Greenwich Village’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, the show has moved to Broadway, where it opened this month to rapturous reviews. Last week, Oh, Mary! grossed $1,054,998—an all-time record for the Lyceum Theatre, which has been operating since 1903. The run was originally scheduled to end in September; it has just extended through November.
Out of nowhere, it seemed, Escola has suddenly been everywhere, bringing their estimable spark to late-night talk shows, The View and even the Met Gala. Like most overnight successes, this one has been a long time coming: Fans of downtown comedy and alt-cabaret have known for years that Escola is a special talent. (“Blending boyish mischief with dizzy charm and the ruthless twinkle of a starlet bent on fame, Escola’s comic persona suggests a street urchin raised by the gang from The Match Game,” we wrote more than a decade ago.) It was just a matter of time until the world caught on, and it finally has.
Photograph: Courtesy Emilio MadridOh, Mary!
But why now? Oh, Mary! doesn’t follow the template for most Broadway plays these days. It’s a modest production of an original work with no big-name actors and a zany premise. It’s a smash for one reason: It’s stone-cold hilarious. As I wrote in my review, “I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene.”
In short: Oh, Mary! is fun. It has nothing to teach about history—if anything, you may leave knowing less than when you came in—and it doesn’t have a message. It just entertains, and entertains very well. Sometimes, as an audience, that’s what you want, and comedies benefit from having a big live audience, especially hard comedies like Oh, Mary! The waves of delight that crash through the Lyceum sweep you up in the joy of being part of a happy crowd. It’s a collective high.
Fun, for lack of a better word, is good. Fun is right. Fun works. And fun is too rare on Broadway. Successful nonmusical comedies were once common on the Great White Way, but they don’t pop up very often now, and even musicals tend to be short on mirth. Perhaps it is because theater has become so expensive that shows feel they need to be Very Important and Life-Changing Events. But money should also be able to buy you—as Sweet Charity‘s taxi dancers sing in “Big Spender”—”Fun! Laughs! Good times!” And even as Broadway continues to bend toward seriousness—Nazis featured prominently in five shows last season!—there are signs throughout the city that fun is making a comeback.
Photograph: Michael Cassel Group/Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade
Consider the unsinkable Off Broadway musical Titanique, which debuted in 2022 at the crowded Asylum Theatre and is still going strong at Union Square’s giant Daryl Roth Theatre. The show is a total goof: a send-up of James Cameron’s 1997 romantic disaster film, narrated intrusively by Celine Dion and punctuated with songs from the Québécois nightingale’s catalog of hits. The script—by original stars Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue—is not as tight as Oh, Mary!’s; some of the jokes are groaners. But that’s part of its scrappy appeal to the merry spectators that come each night to have a few drinks and revisit the 1910s by way of the 1990s.
Consider, too, the shocking success of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, which takes a musical that had become a punchline—Andrew Lloyd Webber’s setting of cute cat-themed poems by T.S. Eliot—and makes it a triumph. Audiences at the Perelman Arts Center are losing their minds over this production, as well they should. Directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch give the show a comprehensive makeover, reimagining it as a ballroom runway competition. (I called it Paris Is Purring.) Voguing their tails off and decked out in pussy-realness ensembles, the cast serves attitude—cattitude?—for days. Yes, it’s still a show about singing and dancing cats. But now it’s fabulous.
And then there is Queen of Hearts, the latest outrageous spectacle from Austin McCormick’s Bushwick dance-burlesque troupe Company XIV. I wrote a profile of the company last year for their annual holiday extravaganza, Nutcracker Rouge, and this show is every bit as good: a dazzling collection of dances, songs and speciality circus acts inspired by the Alice in Wonderland books. It’s sexy and silly, sublime and ridiculous, and Zane Pihlstrom’s baroquely ornate costumes are a marvel. The audience is young, hip and thrilled to be out on the town at an event that feels like a classic New York City adventure. As Raven Snook put it in her review, “Queen of Hearts feels like Moulin Rouge! for actual bohemians.”
Photograph: Courtesy Evan ZimmermanCats: The Jellicle Ball
One thing these four shows have in common is a central queer sensibility, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. What they indicate, perhaps, is a movement away from the heaviness that a lot of queer theater took on in recent decades—in response to AIDS and the general fight for equality—and back toward camp: the fantastical, the exuberant, the unserious, the absurd. “Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy,” wrote Susan Sontag in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” her influential 1964 essay. “It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that only camp shows can be fun, but this is one area where queer artists can perhaps lead the way. American musical comedy had been moribund for nearly 20 years in 2001 when Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan brought it back from near-death with The Producers. The runaway success of that show made actual producers and writers realize that there was a major untapped market for a good time at the theater, and major coin to be made. I hope the success of Oh, Mary! will likewise inspire writers with unique and modern comic styles, like Escola’s, to try their hands at creating nonmusical comedies for the stage. In these tense times, we need more laughter. If nothing else, as Oh, Mary! has taught us, it’s what Mary Todd Lincoln would have wanted.
Photograph: Courtesy Mark Shelby PerryCompany XIV: Queen of Hearts
It seems like every year, getting around NYC gets more and more expensive, whether it’s because of subway fare hikes or Citi Bike rate spikes. If your favorite mode of transport happens to be on the water, you’re not off the hook: the price to ride the NYC ferry is about to go up (again).
The city’s Economic Development Corporation just announced that starting September 9, single-trip tickets on NYC ferries will increase from $4 to $4.50, while 10-trip passes will go up from $27.50 to $29.
Once upon a time, riding the ferry across town cost a humble $2.75, the same price as a ride on the subway. Then, in 2022, Mayor Eric Adams raised the price to $4 for “tourists and infrequent riders” to help subsidize cheaper rides for low-income New Yorkers, as well as people who are 65 or older or have disabilities.
The ongoing price increases are part of Eric Adams’ “NYC Ferry Forward” project, which kicked off in 2022, aiming to tackle the public subsidy problem. At its peak, the ferry cost a staggering $8.55 per ride, per 6sqft, but, luckily the city has managed to bring it down since then.
Starting on September 1, approximately 350,000 New York high school students will be eligible for a discount program that will spare them from the most recent price change. For people enrolled in the NYC Ferry Discount Program, the fare will go up from $1.35 to $1.45. To find out if you’re eligible to sign up for the discount program, visit NYC Ferry’s website.
For those of us who are not eligible, it’s time to pay up.
