Good Morning, New York!

Did you know? Did you know? On this day in 1963, the first automated toll booths were tested in NYC.

In today’s NYC Newsletter:

Last minute gift ideas, best events this weekend, NYC history.

Let’s get to it.

– Sofia Kurd.

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NYC TRIVIA:

Which everyday NYC object is legally classified as a building under city code?
A) A hot dog cart
B) A newsstand
C) A subway entrance canopy
D) A sidewalk shed

The answer will be revealed in the next newsletter.

🎄🐶Is your pet dressing up this holiday season?🐶🎄

Reply to this email with an image of your pet in their best holiday outfit.

—> Best outfit wins a $10 Chewy gift card and will be featured in a future newsletter!

• Fri 7pm – NYC Magic Ensemble: A rotating lineup of magicians and mentalists present an unpredictable night of close-up magic at Young Ethel’s (South Slope); $10 (limited 2-for-$15 available).

• Fri 7:30pm – The Drunk Texts: A Christmas Carol: Random Access Theatre’s annual intoxicated holiday parody returns with drinking games, carols, and drunk puppets at Q.E.D. Astoria; $12.

• Fri 8:30pm – Bitches Brew Comedy Show: A women-produced, women-hosted stand-up showcase in the back room of Halyards (Gowanus); free (tip jar at the end).

• Fri 9:30pm – Yesterday’s Horoscope: A cosmic comedy show hosted by Kristina Gustovich and Jane Mitchell at Caveat, blending astrology, science, and stand-up.

• Sat & Sun (12pm, 2:30pm, 5pm) – A Charlie Brown Christmas: Live!: The Wild Oat Theatrical Company’s family-friendly, verbatim staging with a live jazz trio at ShapeShifter Lab (Park Slope); $25.

• Sun 10am–5pm (Sundays thru 12/28) – Holiday Nostalgia Train Rides: Ride restored 1930s-era subway cars on select F and Q line routes for the price of a normal swipe or tap.

• Sun 5pm – Fireside Mystery Theatre: An old-time radio–style holiday mystery with live actors, sound effects, and music at The Slipper Room (LES); $20.

A narrow Nolita storefront that specializes in European stationery, wax seals, and paper goods—perfect gift for the person who already has everything.

A West Village bookstore that stays open late and quietly stocks some of the best small-press fiction and essay collections in the city.

Personalize a Guerlain Rouge G lipstick with custom engraving at the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship on Central Park South—complimentary with purchase, available for a limited time.

Harry Houdini spent much of his career in New York, where the city became both his laboratory and his stage. Living in Harlem in the early 1900s, Houdini regularly tested his escape acts in local police stations, challenging NYPD officers to restrain him with their newest handcuffs and jail cells. He escaped every time. Offstage, he was obsessed with exposing fraud, especially spiritualists who claimed to speak with the dead; he used his technical knowledge of locks, traps, and stagecraft to publicly dismantle them. Houdini died famous, wealthy, and still skeptical—an immigrant who turned New York’s obsession with spectacle, truth, and reinvention into a global brand.

For most of the 19th century, New York City had no official street names above Houston Street. Roads followed farm paths, property lines, and colonial-era routes that shifted as land was subdivided. This changed with the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, approved by a state-appointed board that included Gouverneur Morris (a US Founding Father), which imposed the grid system that defines Manhattan today. What’s easy to miss is how radical this was: the city deliberately erased hills, filled valleys, rerouted streams, and cut through existing communities to force order onto geography. It was an early example of large-scale urban planning prioritizing efficiency and expansion over natural geography, and it became a model for later American cities.

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