NYC Local

Places, events, restaurants, and opinions - that's all

[Time Out New York @TimeOutNewYork]

Apartment solar may be coming to NYC. Here is the lowdown. https://t.co/uWkDGSjOgZ

[NYC Local @ToDoInNYC]

New Penn Station may be happening. Entrance will be on 8th Avenue, the Garden stays, and there's a new facade which somehow recalls the original. As the article says "Grand Central is clutching its pearls."

https://t.co/2AuPgxfRW6

[nazzo @nazzobetweeting]

I’M SCREAMING

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

A GUY AT GOOGLE DEEPMIND MADE AN ISOMETRIC PIXEL-ART MAP OF NEW YORK CITY AND PUT IT ON THE OPEN WEB FOR FREE

it's called https://t.co/8fAASvEmXT

you open the tab and the city is just sitting there in classic SimCity 2000 isometric pixel art. you scroll. and it keeps going. and going.

i zoomed in on midtown and i could read the H&M signage in times square. in red. as actual pixel-art letters on the side of a building.

i could see the crystalline spire of the Bank of America Tower poking out of a clump of skyscrapers. individual rooftop HVAC units. tiny green roof gardens. the little driveway loops in front of the hotels.

he estimates the map needs roughly 40,000 tiles. nothing is a placeholder.

the guy who made it is Andy Coenen, a senior staff engineer at Google DeepMind. he is not a pixel artist. by his own admission he is "a former electronic musician."

what he actually did is kind of insane:

> pulled NYC's geometry from the Google Maps 3D tiles API

> fine-tuned an open-source image model (Qwen-Image-Edit) on ~40 hand-paired examples of "satellite tile → pixel art tile"

> spun up 50 parallel instances on rented GPUs and generated tens of thousands of tiles in a few hours

> the fine-tune cost him 12 bucks

his own stated mission for the project, verbatim, is one sentence: "what's possible now that was impossible before?"

apparently the answer is "one engineer can pixel-art most of a metropolis for the price of a sandwich."

and the wildest part to me is he didn't sell it. no signup. no paywall. no NFT. you open the URL and the city is yours to wander.

the post landed at 1,325 points on Hacker News and topped bestofshowhn's 2026 list.

we live in a timeline where a senior engineer at one of the largest AI labs on earth spent his nights pixel-arting Manhattan for fun and then gave it away.

the internet is healing.

[Eater NY @EaterNY]

Tracking the newest restaurants and bars opening in New York City this month https://t.co/VJsENDSzgH

[Robert Sietsema @robertsietsema]

There's a new iteration of Flushing's historic Golden Mall in the Financial District, here's my assessment of a work in progress.
https://t.co/DICMGZlExY

[NYC Local @ToDoInNYC]

NYTimes anoints the top 100. #1 is Kabawa, a Caribbean place in the East Village.

https://t.co/oAiotEtr0j

[Anthony Castrio @AnthonyCastrio]

I made a super simple website where you can see everywhere you can get to in under an hour on the NYC subway.

The generated map is both a heat-map (changes color) and a cartogram (warps space).

https://t.co/liTziAmQEd

[New York City Kopp @NYCkopp]

That tiny window on the side of the IFC Center in New York City?

It’s a peephole 👀
So you can watch the movie from the street.

Old NYC didn’t need trailers…
just curiosity.

W 3rd & 6th Ave 🎬

[Donald Camp 康 普 டானல்ட் ேகம்ப் @donacamp]

Will there be a strike in #NYC next Tuesday?https://t.co/0ZSjbiT1HM

[Gothamist @Gothamist]

Here are 9 great places to eat — other than Zabar's. https://t.co/xtYh6Go3hZ

[Eater NY @EaterNY]

From an ecletic Cambodian restaurant to a fun Caribbean dinner party https://t.co/bnIy4HmHti

[NYC Local @ToDoInNYC]

https://t.co/tmKsmBvY0d

[Donald Camp 康 普 டானல்ட் ேகம்ப் @donacamp]

Some thoughts on South Indian (and Lankan) dining in New York City, focused on newcomers @Semmanyc, Kanyakumari, Kidilum, and Lungi. @EaterNY
https://t.co/vGHhOWKEhz

[New York City Kopp @NYCkopp]

Fifth Ave shuts down for hats 🎩🌸

The Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival started in the 1800s as a post church fashion stroll outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral…

Now it’s pure NYC chaos. No rules. Just creativity. 🗽

No place like NYC!

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

Ambassadors Clubhouse, both its popular London incarnation and this new outpost, takes its inspiration from a real house and a real ambassador, whose portrait hangs above the staircase in these fabricated digs. He is the grandfather of its owners, the Sethi siblings, and his summer home in Dalhousie was a meeting place for the jet set and his three grandchildren. With Ambassadors Clubhouse, the Sethis sought to re-create not only his “party mansion,” as they call it, but the entire period before the British Empire divided the region into India and Pakistan at the end of the Raj.

“The Sethis have worked a kind of high-gloss magic to good effect in London, where their restaurants are starry and starred destinations,” writes chief restaurant critic Matthew Schneier. “So it is destined to be in New York.” On a recent Friday night, people were getting turned away in groups, and the only stroke of luck fell to a young woman who’d come to plead a case for her boyfriend’s birthday celebration. “I watched her throw her arms around two hosts,” Schneier writes, “and were those tears?”

Read what Schneier thought of the glitzy new arrival: https://t.co/vtrRpUn8ej

[Viewing NYC @viewingnyc]

[WATCH] New York's West Village, Explained https://t.co/Xa7ht0vpcy

[NYC Local @ToDoInNYC]

In case you wondered, the NYC metro area is 31 counties across southeastern New York State (including Long Island and the Hudson Valley), northern New Jersey, and southwestern Connecticut.

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

New York (metro area) is back to its pre-pandemic population levels now. Any suggestion that one of the world’s most celebrated cities wasn’t to recover from lockdowns etc always sounded silly to me.

[NYC Local @ToDoInNYC]

Hyderabad Zaiqa on W. 52nd St. opened as a carryout in a below-ground space in 2023, got a Michelin star in 2025, and now is a full-fledged restaurant on 9th Avenue. https://t.co/GXPfyMB8ug

[Grub Street @grubstreet]

We’ve put our guides to the best restaurants in NYC, the best new restaurants in NYC, and the best affordable restaurants in NYC together in one spot! https://t.co/AR9zsJ4YsC