In the News: The Newsstand Reinvented

Luminaries Winter Garden rendering by Rockwell Group••• The New York Times has a long-ish article on the holiday light installation at the Winter Garden (rendering above); designed to rival the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, it sounds like it might be an annual affair. Indeed, Brookfield Place’s website says it’s “a new holiday tradition”:

Visitors send a wish to the lanterns above by touching a wishing station, transforming the installation into a mesmerizing display of lights. For every wish, Arts Brookfield will donate $1 up to $25,000 to the Grammy Foundation to support its Grammy in the Schools music education programs for high school students. Choreographed light shows are scheduled throughout the day and evening every two hours beginning at 10 a.m. and ending at 8 p.m. daily. The five shows are befittingly entitled “Snowfall,” “Christmas Tree,” “Ribbons,” “Firecracker,” and “Northern Lights.”

••• The Broadsheet‘s article on the Target opening in Tribeca notes that Australian “gastronomy emporium” Jones the Grocer, set to open at the Westfield World Trade Center mall, is now known as Market Lane.

••• Details on the M5 bus route change to be discussed by Community Board 1 this month: “The MTA is considering splitting the lengthy M5 bus route into two sections to alleviate delays that build up over the course of the 12-mile route. [The plan] would would separate the route in Midtown, where buses to and from South Ferry would turn around at 38th Street and buses from Washington Heights would turn around at 37th Street.” —DNAinfo

••• Matt points out that one of the new kiosks in the Winter Garden is the New Stand, recently profiled by Wired.

Like the newsstands of yore, The New Stand will serve news. But instead of selling Posts and TimeOuts, it will blast easily digestible nuggets of news from an app that will work underground, with or without Wi-Fi. It’ll include daily playlists, reblogged news stories, and photos and videos making the rounds online. Deitchman says the editorial part of The New Stand will be instrumental in stocking the store: by noting what users are paying attention to, The New Stand team can tailor the merchandise to customers’ interests—like a shoppable magazine that you can walk into. The New Stand guys have investor cash for all this, but they’ve designed an ecosystem that should, if all goes to plan, keep the company healthy. “With ‘Cool Stuff We Found on eBay,’ that’s a partnership with eBay, there’s a wall of stuff that’s curated by great Instagrammers,” Deitchman says.

 

2 Comments

  1. That’s great that those lights are raising money for a good cause, but they are still a huge disappointment, IMO. The Christmas lights in the Wintergarden before Brookfield took it over were spectactular.

  2. Splitting the M20 bus route (again) is a terrible idea. We trade the probability of buses arriving late (when do they keep to the schedule anyway?) for the probability of getting half (if we are lucky) of the buses currently driving the route. Since the M10 was split into the M20 and M10, we have had wait for over twenty minutes when the buses run to schedule. Does this mean one and a half buses every hour?

    And, of course, all downtown “improvements” are for the workers not the residents. Don’t expect to see too many buses at night or on the weekends. This a cut the schedule and save money project while screwing downtowners once again bad idea.

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