Cast your vote in Trazzler’s big summer contest

by Katie Hammel on

Trazzler, a website that provides travel inspiration through destination descriptions submitted by users and freelance writers, runs a monthly contest that usually offers a prize of $250, and a contract to write 10 trips for the website. For their summer contest however, the team at Trazzler decided to up the ante.

They’ve teamed up with NYCgo, AKA Hotels, and jetBlue to offer one lucky winner an amazing prize – a 2-week writer-in-residence contract in New York City (including free flight and accommodations), and $10,000 to write 30 trips about his or her experiences in the city. Over 800 entries fitting the theme “oasis” were submitted. 200 moved on to the semi-final round, in which the public can vote on their favorite. The ten trips with the most votes when the voting ends (Monday at 7:59pm Eastern time), will move on to round three, where a panel of judges will choose the grand prize winner.

I entered the contest, and have made it to the semi-finals, where I’m fighting to stay in the top ten. You can vote* for my trip, check out the others in the top ten, or “trazzle” through the site to find your perfect travel inspiration.

*To vote, you need to register for the website, which is easy to do if you sign up with Facebook. Then just click “wishlist” under the trip to vote. You can only vote once per trip, but you can vote for multiple submissions.

Shopping tours of NYC – Shop like a local

by Annie Scott on

There are a lot of different tours of New York City available, but isn’t there something out there for people who just want to be more in-the-know about shopping? Or, for example, what if you live in town and need to occupy your mom or sister for the day?

Well, check out Shop-NYC Tours, led by the lovely Natasha Malinsky of VH1’s “Tough Love” (in the leopard print at right), for your solution.

The tour takes visitors all over New York’s chic boutiques and fave celebrity cafes and wine tasting spots — and while shopping time is included, once you know where everything is, it’s easy to spend the rest of your trip re-visiting your new favorite shops.

Shoppers on the Shop-NYC Tour receive exclusive discounts and even watch videos which highlight the latest fashion trends right on their coach. It gives shopping enthusiasts an opportunity to shop like locals and relax between excursions — no lugging heavy bags around.

The Chic Boutique and Vintage Boutique tours run about $40 per person (before any shopping you do), and you can visit the website to arrange a foreign language tour or a tour gift certificate. For $30, you can arrange a “Teen Fashion and Fun” tour, or even a “Recessionista Tour,” jam-packed with NYC’s best bargain spots.

Even local New Yorkers could benefit from a tour like that! Alternatively, check out their self-guided tours if you aren’t into the whole “group shopping” thing. Visit Shop-NYCTours.com for more information.

The Gossip Girl Tour of New York City

by Annie Scott on

Remember when we told you about the Gossip Girl Tour of NYC? Well, as a fan of the show and a New Yorker, I went ahead and took the tour.

It was pouring rain, but undeterred, about 86 of us piled onto a coach for $40 apiece. We were hosted by an adorable redhaired actress named Meghan, who definitely talked the talk and walked the walk, and dressed much like one of the faux Upper East Side denizens. She cheerfully and enthusiastically recounted favorite moments from the show, asked trivia questions, and did a stellar job of keeping track of everybody when we took little trips off the bus to places like Henri Bendel. She pointed out restaurants and bars which were shooting locations, and we walked the grounds of several spots like “Constance Billard School for Girls” (actually The Museum of the City of New York, pictured).

Highlights of the tour included fun tidbits like the fact that the real girls who attend Marymount — across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art — really do eat their lunch on the steps of the museum like Blair and Serena, pretty spots in Central Park, shopping at Dylan’s Candy Bar and a shot of agave-based frosting from a trendy bakery on the Lower East Side. For tourists, this tour really does take you all over the city and show you some very cool places to revisit on your stay, from trendy nightclub Butter to famed Ukrainian diner Veselka.

The pack consisted mostly of Gossip Girl-ishly dressed young ladies in their late teens and some parents, and I brought along a non fan with me (he has no particular aversion to the show, he just doesn’t watch it) to see how the uninitiated would handle the tour, as most of my New York friends said they had actually never seen it — would he be bored? Well, the next day he sent me this:

“One of the most compelling parts of the whole tour was the creative and engaging delivery of our host, who made every effort to recant the plotlines while untangling the web of characters and places along the route into a living map of the city and the show its self. While the tour was a bit long at three and three quarters hours, there wasn’t a moment where our host wasn’t actively engaging the attendees. It was a great way to be reintroduced to my city.”

He now considers himself an expert on all things Gossip Girl. The tour even included clips of the show played on video screens at the front of the bus (see gallery).

Lower points for New Yorkers would be photo ops at places like Grand Central where we just felt like we were in the way, but for an out of towner, that’s an important stop. It was a lot of fun, even as a resident, to see the heavenly little havens where shooting takes place — it gave us both a lot of respect for Gossip Girl’s location scouts. Really, you’d be driving down a regular east side street and suddenly there would be a storefront or apartment entryway that looked like a dream — they were almost invariably filming locations.

If you’re not into piling onto a bus with 86 people, you also have the option for a more personal Gossip Girl tour by limo. The tour is $180 per person for a minimum of five people and includes a guided tour and lunch at a restaurant used in filiming the show.

Click here to purchase tickets!
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Undiscovered New York: All things TV in NYC

by Jeremy Kressmann on

The television screen is a strangely natural way to view New York City. In fact, even if you’ve never visited New York, your perception of the city most likely stems from NYC TV icons like Bill Cosby, the cast of Friends or Jerry Seinfeld. In fact, television and New York tend to go hand in hand. Ever since NBC started broadcasting its signal here in the 1940’s the city has been dominated by all things related to the small screen.

Television’s presence in New York is fairly obvious. Anyone who’s ever wanted to check out a taping of The Daily Show or the Colbert Report, David Letterman or Saturday Night Live, knows where to find the tapings. But for every Jon Stewart appearance or Tony Soprano reference, there’s a world of strange TV history that lies waiting to be discovered. This is a city, after all, that has been in love with TV from the very beginning, with a history that dates back over 60 years.

Ever wanted your own private screening of a vintage TV classic from the 1940’s? Curious to discover some of the most famous facades and settings in New York City TV history? Don’t touch that dial, this week Undiscovered New York is covering all things TV. Click below to read more.
Famous Settings
When you picture the filming of a television show, it often brings to mind a giant studio lot decked with lights. Yet many of New York’s most famous TV moments and vignettes are played out right before our eyes as we walk the city’s many side streets and avenues. Ever wanted to check out the real life homes and businesses from your favorite TV shows?

Make your first stop in New York’s West Village, where 10 Leroy Street is the site of the Cosby family’s famous facade. And who knew Bill Cosby was neighbors with Monica, Joey and Ross? The building used as the apartment building for Friends is just around the corner at the corner of Bedford and Grove. Hungry for more TV locations? Why not stop by Monk’s Diner, site of so many meals on Seinfeld? It’s located at 112th Street and Broadway.

Making TV History
Ever since NBC began the first continuous TV broadcast in 1944, New York has been hooked on the small screen. Yet for all the show’s we’ve come to know and love in recent years, there’s more than 60 years of TV history waiting to be explored. A good place to start is Manhattan’s Paley Center for Media, formerly The Museum of Television and Radio, on 52nd Street. The museum is dedicated to exploring the “cultural, creative and social significance of television.” The way they accomplish this goal is quite a feat – in addition to ongoing exhibitions on some of TV’s greatest moments, visitors are free to explore more than 120,000 archived TV shows, commercials and radio programs at their leisure using individual consoles. It’s an interesting way to explore the evolution and and history of this influential medium.

TV Today
Although many of our fondest TV memories are behind us, it would be incorrect to assume television is dead. In fact, New York is also a great place to investigate the future of the medium. A good place to start would be the annual New York Television Festival, held each fall. The event was designed to showcase the work of those “creating for the small screen” and as a venue to discuss such topics as the future of advertising, sitcoms and broadcast journalism.

New York’s High Line Park stories

by Annie Scott on

In case you haven’t heard the hype, New York City had an abandoned, above-ground train track running from the Meatpacking District to Hell’s Kitchen. The historical track (authroized back in 1847) was going to be torn down, until some smart folks figured out how to save it: Make it a park.

The last train ran the track in the 1980s. A Chelsea resident and railroad enthusiast Peter Obletz worked hard to get the trains up and running again (in vain, but he was in part responsible for keeping the tracks from being torn down), but it was a group called Friends of the High Line, started by Joshua David and Robert Hammond in 1999, which finally found a way to save the High Line tracks for good. All they had to do was convince the city to make it into a protected park. They conducted a study in 2002 which proved that “New tax revenues created by the public space will be greater than the costs of construction.” Bingo!

One thing led to another, and then in 2003, a big Designing the High Line competition was held to figure out how to make the best use of the tracks. The winning design came from by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Their orginal designs were displayed at MoMa in 2005, and you can view the final designs here.

Completion is finally underway, and the first section, running from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, opened last month to the public! What’s it like? Well, it’s certainly unlike any park I’ve ever visited. But why listen to me yammer on about it when you can listen to Kevin Bacon, Diane Von Furstenberg and Ethan Hawke?

The Sundance Channel, as part of their “Online Only Orignal Content” series, has a collection of videos of public figures talking about the High Line called High Line Stories. You can watch Kevin’s commentary above, and click here to see the rest.