The art world has a real issue with making things overly conceptual, too complicated and using wanky jargon, says Trackie McLeod. It alienates people. So, for his latest show, Utopia, the 32-year-old Glaswegian has decided to create something more welcoming and familiar: a pub. Custom-built from scratch, the exhibition is a fully functioning boozer. McLeod will pull pints for punters, there's a dartboard where you can take aim at images of Thatcher or Trump,
The corner of 14th and U streets, Northwest, is now home to six LGBTQ bars, with just over 300 feet separating the nightlife options. The spots have all opened their doors over the past few years, bringing dramatic changes to a corner long associated with the District's bar scene. The recent wave began with 2023's opening of Bunker, a dance-focused space run by Zach Renovátes. He also operates a nearby bar, the District Eagle, that bills itself as "a home for DC's kink communities."
Kensington, for those not from Philly, has long had a reputation for potent but affordable street drugs. Interstate 95 and the Market-Frankford elevated commuter train line provide easy access to the neighborhood for buyers and sellers, and abandoned buildings offer havens for drug use and other illicit activity. St. Francis Inn Ministries, which was founded by two Franciscan friars in 1979, serves sit-down breakfast and dinner for thousands of people each year, many of whom suffer from poverty, homelessness and substance use disorder.
She moved before the pandemic, when gentrification with its huge skyscrapers and condominiums forced her out of Dumbo, Brooklyn. Between the kitchen and the upstairs room, in one corner of which lie part of the 5,000 pages of notes she took while writing it, Desai finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the monumental, 19thcenturystyle novel she has spent nearly two decades on.
I once lived in a Black mecca. But by the summer of 2022, my toddler son and I were often the only Black folks on the playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fact that felt both alienating and surreal. We moved to Bed-Stuy that summer to be close to my sister and her family. Reeling from a recent separation and scrambling for child care in a different neighborhood, I often found myself on the playground, trying to make sense of both our new life and this
Not many chefs working in small, family-run restaurants expect global megastars to turn up for dinner and to design them a menu from scratch. But that's what happened to Simona Di Dio last weekend, when she cooked dishes inspired by her Italian grandmother's recipes for Madonna, who sat on the single wooden dining table in their cosy, candlelit Italian restaurant in Margate's old town.
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Where I live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, we saw this cycle where landlords and bankers and policymakers had driven up the value of real estate using speculative financial capital, the housing market crashed, and then the solution to that was just a different private equity firm coming in and owning the buildings," Weaver, 37, said in a Dissent magazine interview published last winter. "This cycle fueled waves of gentrification in Crown Heights.
"MIAMI'S A SUNNY PLACE for shady people!" observed Iggy Pop in a 2008 interview with CNN, just a few years after Art Basel landed on the sandbar that is South Beach and forever altered the landscape of both Miami and contemporary art. "I'm practical, where this place is moody [. . .] and I'm materialistic in a sense that this place is fundamentally spiritual-there's a quicksilver quality about this place."
The intersection of University and San Pablo avenues, which tattered banners proclaim is named International Marketplace to recognize the area's many multicultural businesses, was once the gateway to Berkeley and its university for those arriving by ferry. More than 100 years later it continues to play that role for drivers coming off the nearby I-80 off-ramp. At its heyday, two movie theaters served the area, and it was home to a melting pot of immigrant communities.
Two American girls are sitting on a bench outside the establishment, sipping Nepalese green tea. The inside is a spacious and austere area reminiscent of an industrial warehouse with a visible bread oven, and English is spoken more often than Spanish. A man in his sixties, wearing a jacket and tasseled shoes, tells the young man behind the counter that he drove almost an hour from the wealthy residential area of Polanco just to buy a loaf of malted cereal: 165 pesos (about $9).
A few months ago, I went to a birthday party at a bar in Neepsend, an old industrial neighbourhood by the River Don in Sheffield. The bar had been a steelworks once, but now it was another example of the international style you find everywhere, from Portland, Oregon, to all the other Portlands in Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand: exposed brick, steel beams, concrete floors, Edison bulbs. The steelworkers had been transformed into accountants and brand managers, the molten pig iron into £9 cocktails.
Its chrome façade and its 1950s railcar-style silhouette part road movie, part film noir, which since 1968 have anchored the corner of Wythe Avenue and North Third Street, have become an integral part of the neighborhood's urban history, as well as the perfect backdrop for several high-profile film productions that helped shape American cinema.
In Korea, single occupant households have been increasing due to factors such as dropping marriage rates, rising real estate prices and apartment deposit frauds, combined with a more economically independent generation and the demand for more comfortable living situations among younger generations. So, in this meeting I was asked "1인 가구 현상에 대해 어떻게 생각하세요? (what do you think about the social phenomenon of single households".
Around 1964, the name Boerum Hill began to appear on maps of Brooklyn's old brownstone neighborhoods. The name, announcing a new residential area in downtown Brooklyn, was to be seen not on all maps but chiefly on those that had been drawn up in Boerum Hill itself. People living in such nearby areas as Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, and Park Slope-the establishment, so to speak, of Brooklyn's brownstone neighborhoods.
Tower Hamlets has pledged that half of any new homes on its land must be affordable housing and will prioritise family-sized homes over one-bedroom units to help combat gentrification, the Standard can reveal. The borough has said that 40 per cent of any new development that is not on council land will also have to be made up of affordable housing. The council is aiming to build at least 52,095 homes over the next 15 years, delivering nearly 5,000 homes a year.
As of publication, residents of San Francisco's District 4, comprising most of the Sunset from 7th Avenue out to the Pacific Ocean, do not have a representative on the city's Board of Supervisors; the 29-year-old former pet shop owner whom the mayor appointed to the position had to resign after around a week on the job. The cascading series of reasons is both very funny and a revealing look at the strange state of San Francisco local politics.
jackhammers still echo along the barrier island's main road, where new houses and businesses are going up next to vacant lots and the shells of buildings gutted by the storm. "We are nowhere near where we thought we would be three years ago today," says Jacki Liszak, chief executive of the Fort Myers Beach Chamber of Commerce, who owned a small hotel that the hurricane washed away. "I don't think we understood what happened to us the extent of it."
On a hot August Wednesday, I approach the 600-acre Dhamma Suttama silent-retreat center in Montebello, Quebec, a ninety-minute ride from Montreal, where I'm spending the summer. My driver, a Cameroonian man in his forties, hooks into a narrow forest corridor. We pull up to a concrete parking lot that wraps around a building paneled with wood and stone. Built in the eighties as a high school, it's now made up of sleeping quarters and meditation halls.
Ben LynchLocal Democracy Reporting Service LDRS A west London council has rejected an application to list Shepherd's Bush Market as an asset of community value (ACV). Earlier this year, Friends of Shepherd's Bush Market applied for ACV status in an effort to "protect" its future, after major redevelopment plans from developer Yoo Capital were approved. The group said ACV status would be the first step towards community ownership of the site, amid concerns that Yoo Capital intended on selling.
Consisting of five residential tenements, the area is home to more than 400 tenants, who have created a close-knit multicultural community over the decades. Credit Suisse, whose pension fund owns the building, has other ideas. The people of Brunaupark are served with notices as proposals for partial demolition and new construction get under way. Going from door to door, this documentary forms a vital piece of oral history, bearing witness to the defiance and resilience of those determined to stay.
Having recently passed the midpoint of a defining decade, we're just becoming aware of The Great Reordering's cascading collective traumas. The retail experience transitioned from shopping bags to cardboard boxes. Campuses with movie nights, lecture series, gyms and celebrity chefs were swallowed by Zoom meetings. Empty offices hollowed our cities and flattened urban social culture. Countervailing dynamics inevitably come into play, and the oversupply of commercial space has one silver lining.
CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research) in collaboration with THISS Studio and Orient Productions have completed an independent outdoor community arts space in Cairo, located in Giza's Agouza Children's Park, one of the city's few remaining publicly accessible green spaces. Titled Pergola and perched close to the Nile river front, the bright red, ten-metre tall structure offers a new beating heart for an emerging cultural scene in Cairo.
Mayra Flores and Cristal González Ávila honor their roots through poetry. Flores brings the stories of her East San José community. Her self-published debut, Flores, bridges generations towards change. Ávila, a daughter of farmworkers in Watsonville, has written and acted for the stage for the last 15 years. Her stories explore domestic violence and housing injustice, and recent playwriting credits include La Cortina de la Lechuga and Luz: Senior Stories, commissioned by Teatro Vision.
In Santa Ursula Coapa, the most constant sound is no longer that of shouts, cheers, and whistles from the stadium, but that of bulldozers. The neighborhoods surrounding the Azteca Stadium Santa Ursula, Huipulco, and Pedregal de Carrasco are experiencing an accelerated construction frenzy that many residents attribute to the impact of the 2026 World Cup. Mexico City will be one of the three host cities in the country for the tournament, along with Monterrey and Guadalajara.
These streets were once stand-ins for the worst New York had to offer. In Martin Scorsese's After Hours, the leather bar Griffin Dunne stumbles into on his long night's journey into day is the old Emerald Pub at 308 Spring Street, and a pretty bartender played by Teri Garr lives across the street at 307. I, too, stumbled into 307 Spring recently. The apartments have sailed out of barmaid territory, and the ground floor is home to a sprightly restaurant called Kiko,
