People & Places >>

• Best Vigilante (3 Comments)
  Jimmy Justice
  Work for the city? Not too careful about how you drive? Jimmy Justice has his eye on you. There may be more egregious offenses performed by city officials than the U-turns and illegal parking that JJ catches with his video camera and posts on his YouTube channel, but he totally owns this narrow... More >>
• Most Entertaining Politician (Progressive)
  Charles Barron
  There are plenty of joke candidates and pretend pols who make good copy. But Charles Barron serves on the City Council and is dead serious about the stands he takes, which just make them funnier. In July, the former Black Panther attempted a citizen's arrest of School Chancellor Joel Klein for... More >>
• Most Entertaining Politician (Not So Progressive)
  Pedro Espada Jr.
  Can there be any doubt? He held the State Senate to a standstill for a full month this summer, at one point brandishing the keys to the chamber for stunned reporters. He's constantly under investigation for something or the other. (The Wall Street Journal called him "A One-Man Full-Employment... More >>
• Best Judge
  Jed Rakoff
  In one 12-page memorandum order, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff basically summed up the Wall Street meltdown and spoke for us commoners by blasting the government and the banks. Taking the unusual step of rejecting a settlement scheme cooked up by the SEC and Bank of America, the Manhattan judge... More >>
• Best Paulson
  John Paulson
  A very tough call: Do you pick Henry Paulson, the Goldman Sachs CEO turned Treasury Secretary who gave his reckless pals who melted down Wall Street billions of taxpayer dollars to bail them out? Or do you pick John Paulson, the hedge-fund guy who bet that America would fail, and made billions... More >>
• Best New Snarky Media-Gossip Site
  the Awl
  Helmed by Gawker survivors Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, the Awl has the tart, sardonic, gleefully hostile tone you'd naturally expect from such stock, whether the topic at hand is Tea Partiers, Kanye West, or amusing bear videos. But it's also just a touch more surreal, whether it's Ryan Adams's... More >>
• Best Downtown-Minded Internet Savant
  Bucky Turco
  You've gotta respect Bucky Turco. The editor in chief of Animal New York, Turco is a streetwise guy who once unmasked the defiantly anonymous art-world star Banksy by publishing (alleged) pictures of him while manning Complex Magazine's blog, and promptly got a cease-and-desist from a... More >>
• Best Babel Fish to the Celebrities
  Courtney Love Translated
  Courtney Love's Twitter account was a social-media traffic accident. Practically every day, Kurt Cobain's frog-faced widow would fire off a seemingly endless salvo of 140-misspelled-character outbursts, often in frantic early a.m. spells, that were almost always complete nonsense. An example: "i... More >>
• Best Place to Vent Your Renter's Rage
  Brownstoner.com
  Launched in April of this year, Brownstoner.com's appraisal feature—in which the site's readers assess how much a property on the market is actually going to get—is a fun little experiment in anger management. Here's how it works: 1) There is a bad, bad recession. 2)... More >>
• Most Addicting Site for Glamorous Narcissists
  patrickmcmullan.com
  Anyone who accessorizes all day and goes to parties all night spends any possible down time clicking on patrickmcmullan.com, photographer Patrick McMullan's site, where any event worth leaving the house for is documented with crystal clarity. In chronological order, starting with the most recent... More >>
• Best Neighborhood Blog (3 Comments)
  newyorkshitty.com
  Greenpoint is more than just the runoff collector for Billyburg hipsters, and Miss Heather of newyorkshitty.com wants to make sure you know it. In addition to gleefully chronicling the real estate disasters of the recent bust (like Magic Johnson's pathetic condo, the Viridian) and amusing... More >>
• Best Place to Watch Really Good Dancers Tango
  La Nacional
  La Nacional, the Spanish National Home, is a hidden gem located in the heart of the chaos of 14th Street. Go there on the right night, and you're in for a treat: The first floor is a traditional Spanish restaurant where the televisions are always tuned to Spanish news or soccer, and you can... More >>
• Best Neighborhood Paper
  The Wave of Long Island
  Fate led us to The Wave of Long Island, "Rockaway's Newspaper Since 1893," and we have lauded it ever since. Sometimes our praise has been fanciful, as with our Pulitzer Prize nominations for the hideous editorial cartoons of Robert Sarnoff. And there's as much happy-clappy stuff in The Wave as... More >>
• Best Neighborhood for Celeb Watching
  West Village
  Times Square only approaches a fun level at around 7 p.m. because that's when you see all the Broadway stars, not quite made up yet, racing to their theaters to sing and dance for their touristy fan base. It's a sight potentially filled with too much information, but it's stellar nonetheless and... More >>
• Best New Public Space
  High Line
  Embrace the hype, people. Like the Second Avenue subway and the Brooklyn Whole Foods, the High Line always struck us as something that would never actually happen. So just the fact that they got 'er done ("they" = Friends of the High Line; landscape architects James Corner Field Operations;... More >>
• Best Public-Access Show (1 Comment)
  Media Funhouse
  Most of the pleasures of public access are low-rent, low-brow, and loco. It's mainly a place where self-promoters spout off at wearisome length, regardless of interest or relevance. So it's a shock to turn on Media Funhouse—the Manhattan Neighborhood Network filmcrit show hosted by... More >>
• Best Alt-Museum
  The Museum of the City of New York
  "Of all museums/I've a pet museum/And it's not the Modern/Or the Met Museum/But it suits my taste/Like a knife suits a fork/The Museum of the City of New York." We don't know where that doggerel came from, but MOTCONY suits our taste, too. Its exhibits are not always exciting ("Growing and... More >>
• Best Self-Publicist
  JE Englebert
  In a city full of hustlers and hawkers, where Barnum and Trump have both ruled, it takes a lot to be king of the self-promoters. The smart play is to appear to promote something else, but make sure your name is all over it—and make it sensational. JE Englebert first came to our inbox last... More >>
• Best TV Sidekick Who Deserves His Own Show (At a Reasonable Hour)
  Willie Geist
  We're not sure when it happened exactly, but some time over the past year or so, Morning Joe became a big part of our wake-up TV routine. Yes, Joe Scarborough can be overbearing, and we don't agree with all the show's politics, but its looseness and general level of intelligence is easily... More >>
• Best Little Newspaper That Beats the Odds (1 Comment)
  Norwood News
  Someone forgot to tell the plucky publishers of Norwood News that the days of newspapers are over. For that matter, in the northwest Bronx—where this little tell-it-like-it-is biweekly paper is based—the days of newspapers never really began. Until Norwood News was launched back in... More >>
• Best Publicity Stunt
  Park Avenue Winter
  In March, when uppity restaurant Park Avenue Winter announced that it would give away free meals to girls dressed in school uniforms in a nod to the massive success of Gossip Girl, both nubile TV fans and perverted old men let out a collective "OMFG!" The week-long gimmick earned the eatery a... More >>
• Coolest Philanthropist
  Amy Vennema
  Amy Vennema may be Manhattan's truest meeting of style and substance. The designer behind AV max, the successful national fashion jewelry line (Bloomingdale's is a carrier), is also one of the founding members of New York Cares, the wonderfully expansive local charity that brings more than... More >>
• Best Reimagining of a Crosstown Expressway
  VISION 42
  If it's good enough for Portland and Seattle, then why isn't New York equipped with a light rail (aboveground) express for crosstown travel, done in an economical, environmentally sound way? The answer to that question may come from VISION 42, an initiative spearheaded by architect Roxanne... More >>
• Most Attractive Baristas
  B Cup
  Choosing your coffee shop is a crucial decision in New York; it's your brain's calm port in the storm, a place for deep contemplation, overdue paperwork, and the skimming of ginormous books. The java is secondary, but it shouldn't suck. We prefer B Cup in Alphabet City, because the oasis meets... More >>
• Most Disgruntled Business Owner in Town (3 Comments)
  Nick Sprayregen
  New Yorkers are a generally disgruntled bunch. We live in a city where it's impossible to avoid stepping on someone else's toes, and the mere act of breathing can set a neighbor off. But even in this perturbed crowd, no one's irritation approaches that of Nick Sprayregen. The feisty and... More >>
• Best Old-School Reporters Turned Bloggers
  Gabe Pressman and Leonard Levitt
  You can't get more old-school tabloid than reporters Gabe Pressman and Leonard Levitt, but these days, they're both found mainly in cyberspace, where they're still pounding away at wrongdoers and the abuses of the permanent government with some of the toughest prose around. Pressman started out... More >>
• Best Small-Business Lobbyist (1 Comment)
  Richard Lipsky
  Lipsky the lobbyist is usually found on the steps of City Hall: He's the guy in the suit, with a shock of dark hair and a brush mustache gone gray, talking nonstop into a cell-phone device in his ear. In a city where lobbyists get paid big bucks to whisper quietly to influential politicians,... More >>
• Best Assembly Mouth That Roars
  Richard Brodsky
  If Westchester Assemblyman Richard Brodsky could run for office in New York City, Mike Bloomberg's brazen bid for a third term might really be on the ropes. Back in January, Brodsky—a 27-year veteran Assemblyman—gave the Bloomberg administration its toughest case of conniptions yet... More >>
• Best Reason to Put a Ring On It
  Grand Opening
  Last summer, New York had a few less single ladies—and single gentlemen—when Grand Opening, a conceptual boutique, became a pop-up wedding chapel. The store, which had previously functioned as a barn, ping-pong parlor, and drive-in theater, transformed into a Vegas-style church. In... More >>
• Best Ex-Prisoners' Publicist
  David Rothenberg
  New York's Broadway theaters have spawned the world's greatest publicists, but only David Rothenberg—whose clients have ranged from Richard Burton to Alvin Ailey—can claim to have also launched the first organization to help ex-convicts. In 1966, Rothenberg, promoter of the original... More >>
• Best Cheap Advice on Everything From Credit Cards to Chicken Soup
  Good Advice Press
  Good Advice Press is a modern Farmers' Almanac—one-stop shopping for everything you need to know and everything that ails you. Years before no-down-payment and balloon mortgages became the bankers' favorite toy to hook unsuspecting buyers with, writers Marc Eisenson and Nancy Castleman... More >>
• Best Community Garden in a Place That Sorely Needs One
  Phoenix Community Garden
  You bike for what feels like miles without seeing a single tree. You pass identical city blocks that contain only boarded-up storefronts, tiny churches, and hair salons. You see a man place a chaise longue on the sidewalk of traffic-clogged Atlantic Avenue, as if there weren't any pleasanter... More >>
• Best City Block
  East 4th Street
  The West Side has its Lincoln Center. Nice, but a little garish for our taste. The East Village, on the other hand, has East 4th Street, a block-long cultural retreat boasting no fewer than 12 theaters, eight dance and rehearsal studios, and a screening room for avant-garde films. East 4th... More >>
• Most Accommodating Hotel Lobby
  Grand Hyatt Hotel
  It's sterile and ugly, we know. And it's Trump—but we repeat ourselves. Still, for waiting-on-a-friend purposes, the Grand Hyatt Hotel has one great advantage: As long as you look marginally respectable and don't make a scene, you can (in our experience) stay for an hour or more without... More >>
• Best Waterfront Hangout
  Red Hook
  There are few better ways to spend a summer day than biking over to Red Hook, picking up something delectable from Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies (204 Van Dyke Street, 718-404-6911), and finding a place to drape your feet over the promenade while you eat. This is one of the great simple... More >>
• Best Ethnic Market
  Flatbush Caton Market
  At some point south of Prospect Park, when the retail on Flatbush Avenue becomes dominated by roti shops and bakeries selling Jamaican patties, you come across a building that belongs in another time and place. Made of corrugated sheet metal, like a super-size Third World shanty, the... More >>
• Best Romantic Getaway in a Far-Flung Pocket of Brooklyn
  Akwaaba Mansion
  Looking to have a romantic getaway weekend without having to even leave the borough in which you live? We suggest making a reservation at the Akwaaba Mansion, a bed-and-breakfast located on a leafy brownstone block in the section of Bed-Stuy that real estate agents like to call Stuyvesant... More >>