• Accompanying a friend who prefers to ask forgiveness rather than permission, we barged into the Crosby Street Hotel, which opens this week in Soho, for an advance look. The hotel, on Crosby between Prince and Spring, marks Firmdale Hotels’ first foray outside London. It’s a winner, warm and eccentric in all the right ways, as if Paul Smith went on a shopping spree in India. (Most rooms we saw were zestier than the one pictured above.) Even the standard rooms are airy, due in no small part to the floor-to-ceiling paned windows. That said, it helps if you’re paying the $500-and-up rate in pounds or euro.

• When we called McNeill Art Group in Southampton about its new gallery on Reade Street, Beth McNeill herself gave us an update. The gallery is “a yearlong temporary exhibition space,” she said. “We’re really trying to reach out and show emerging work, whether it’s art or even fashion design.” In fact, at the opening on Oct. 21, McNeill will be wearing a plastic, rubber, and wood piece by young fashion designer Alissa Smith. The public is welcome to attend (the opening is 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.), but the space only holds 100, so it’s a good idea to email mcneillartgroup@mac.com to let them know you’re planning on attending.

• The new exhibit of Peter Coffin sculptures in City Hall Park reminded us to check in on another Public Art Fund project, Julie Farris’s and Sarah Wayland-Smith’s A Clearing in the Streets in Collect Pond Park (left). The “meadow” has indeed grown a bit.

• The New York Times’s City Room blog looks into the Alliance for Downtown New York, a business improvement district for the area south of the World Trade Center site (are you ready to call it Greenwich South?): “Improving access is the main goal of the Downtown Alliance’s plan. It proposes opening Greenwich Street from the Battery all the way up to the High Line. This would involve punching through an existing pedestrian plaza and allowing some type of travel through the World Trade Center site. (In 1966, the Port Authority severed Greenwich Street to build the trade center.)” As might’ve been predicted, Curbed scoffed.

• A different City Room writer, Tetsuhiko Endo, mused about how the New York Surf Film Festival seems like a contradiction in terms (it just ended at Tribeca Cinemas).

• Battery Park City Broadsheet followed along as Eric Sanderson—a senior conservation ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society who was involved in the Mannahatta Project, which mapped out the island as it  looked 400 years ago—gave a talk in and around Teardrop Park. “If Manhattan were still like it was when Henry Hudson first saw it, it would be a national park, Mr. Sanderson said. There were more than 1,000 kinds of plants and animals on the island, not counting insects. Orchids grew wild in Manhattan. There were black bears and mountain lions and wolves. ‘A mountain lion was treed on the Upper East Side in the 1670’s,’ he remarked, ‘and a black bear was killed on Maiden Lane in the 1630’s.’ There were 350 miles of oyster beds, that provided food summer and winter.”

• The Feedbag praised Michelin’s new Bib Gourmand picks (signaling restaurants with good food and relatively low prices). None are in Tribeca. Click the link for the full list, if you want.

• 92YTribeca added two screenings of Milos Forman’s 1971 film, Taking Off (Oct. 8 at 8 p.m. and Oct. 9 at 7:30 p.m.): “A hilarious portrait of the country just coming out of the sixties, complete with amateur folk music, rebellious youth, and parents experimenting with marijuana. A lesser know film of Forman’s, many believe it to be one of his best, if not his funniest. With oddball folk-singer auditions cleverly laced throughout (look for a young Kathy Bates).” Tickets are $12.

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