Events in Lexington KY

Every place has unique success factors, but no other city in America is quite like New York City.

There are about 8.6 million people in the 5 boroughs, each borough larger than most American cities; the smallest — Staten Island at 479,458 — is bigger than Kansas City #35 or Miami #44 (data).

If you are new to the City, here are some tips.

• Find and do the thousands of Free things. Parks, libraries, free Friday Museum night, live performances, lectures at the library or colleges, walking tours, street fairs, etc. By doing the free stuff you save money while experiencing “common” activities that you may never need to do twice (unless your friends and family come to town). List.

• Save money. Per above, do the free things and find the places for great and cheap. Fresh seafood and groceries in Chinatown. Meats at Western Beef ($8/lb filet mignons), Spice shops in Little India (28th/Lex), used Designer clothing at Housing Works, fresh $1 bagel shops everywhere, St. Marks area for dive bars and tattoos, and the list goes on for destination areas with quality, inexpensive goods and services.

Avoid paying full price. TKTS for half price Broadway tickets, Club Free Time for free off Broadway tickets ($19/annual subscription), Groupon, Goldstar, Yelp, Stubhub and other discount sites. With a tiny bit of searching you can save a lot of money.

• Avoid Friday and Saturday dinner or events in favor of weekdays for splurging on expensive things. Locals like Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday so you get better service and quality; tourist and outsiders come in on the weekends and make a mess of things. Cheaper theater and sports tickets are available mid-week.

• Network like crazy. Make new friends with others in your hobby, interest, profession, beliefs and age group. If you are young/20-ish, many of the people you will meet are from outside NYC and are hungry to meet others as well. If you have school age children, get active in the PTA, sport teams and performance classes.

• Work really hard. Regardless of age, but particularly if you are young, you should be working insane amounts of hours to outshine your peers in your job. High performance means high rewards in every NYC company and industry. I went from $15K to $50K in 3 years when I was starting out.

• Be a kid and don’t let the little annoyance get you down. The subway delays, constant noise, stinky smells, dog poop, traffic jams, oblivious tourists, rude people — ad infinitum — are in your face 24/7. Get used to it and “Love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

• Pay attention and learn. Learn Spanish and Yiddish saying and turns of phrase; “Bodega grocery market”; “Bagel with a schmear, please”. Learn shortcuts — even street go east, odd west — and about every 9th street, they go both ways (14,23,34,42, 57, 72). Avenues run North (uptown) to South (downtown) and switch from numbers to names; no local will ever call 6th Ave. the Avenue of the Americas. Download the MTA bus and subway apps.

• Be nice and help others. Very quickly you will see people that are perplexed and confused, generally tourist, Seniors, and homeless. Smile at them and they will either respond or not, then do what is right.

• Carve out personal rewards. Chocolate, truffles, ice cream, shoes, jewelry, music, theater, classes, cocktails, craft beer, sushi, whatever. NYC has everything and you should make a list of what to get when you deserve a reward.

Enjoy this? Here are a few other NYC focused articles I’ve written:

The Best Zoo in NYC. Forget the animals and watch the people.

NYC like a boss. Simple clean list with no ads.

Follow me on Twitter: lwsmith10011

Times Square

Officially, there are 6 Zoos and Aquariums in New York City; at least one in every borough:

• The Bronx Zoo, New York City’s main zoo in the Bronx, and houses over 4,000 animals representing more than 650 species.
• Central Park Zoo, in Manhattan, New York
• The Queens Zoo, located in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York
• The Prospect Park Zoo is located in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York
• The New York Aquarium located in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York
• The Staten Island Zoo, in Staten Island, New York City
• I consider the American Museum of Natural History to be a 7^th zoo, albeit one featuring many extinct species like dinosaurs

But in all seriousness, the best zoo in NYC is Times Square. It’s free, open 24/7/365, and features people from everywhere on earth.

You’ll see an amazing cross section of people from around the country and around the world. Tall and short, stick thin and pleasantly fluffy, dressed to kill or make you sick, looking up (buildings) or looking down (poop), walking right (US) or walking left (UK) or walking center (Asian) or walking on the street (local in a hurry). For us locals, these signals tell us where you spawn.

This Times Square Zoo is HUGE. According to the Times Square Alliance, in 2017:

• More than 355,000 pedestrians enter the heart of Times Square each day. For scale, imagine that the entire population of Anaheim, California (pop. 352,497), or Honolulu, Hawaii (pop. 350,395), passed through this ONE square mile every day.
• And on the busiest days, Times Square has pedestrian counts as high as 425,000; imagine all of Minneapolis, Minnesota (pop. 422,331) in the Times Square mile.
• What’s more, Times Square stays busy late, with over 85,000 pedestrians entering between 7pm and 1am.

While this zoo has no flora (plants) to speak of, the fauna (people) are unmatched versus any other place in the world.

Normal out-of-town Americans run in packs and are oddly dressed – meaning not wearing black. Foreigners stand out, stop in the middle of people moving in a hurry, and take all kinds of pictures. Street performers and buskers hustle for your attention, sometimes an inch away from assaulting you. The lights and sounds are overwhelming.

Food is everywhere, you can see it and smell it from restaurants and street carts. You must try at least one dirty water dog with mustard and onions – yummy, tasty.

The visual overload is unique — the billboards, neon, blinky signs, and video surround you everywhere.

While anytime is a great time to visit the Times Square Zoo, I like dusk the best as the sun sets and the lights glow. Sit in Father Duffy Square on the TKTS bleachers or one of the many tables on Broadway. There are always tons of Police and Military so you’ll be safe.

This is not the animal zoo where you go to catch a peek of the lion, tiger or bear hiding in their cave. This is not a place to see rare animals behind glass and jostle with others to wait your turn.

This is the living zoo.

Soak in the city!

Panorama of NY Harbor from the Statue of Liberty

Welcome to the Big Apple. There are about 8.6 million people in the 5 boroughs, each borough larger than most American cities; the smallest – Staten Island at 479,458 – is bigger than Kansas City #35 or Miami #44 (data).

According to the New York City Department of Health, in 2017 there were 26,618 restaurants in the whole city.

What’s more, there are thousands of attractions, many of them free or low cost, some permanent and others temporary. Some are easy to find and others require a bit of searching. Try the SirChear NYC page using your favorite keywords and the date; for example Jazz Concerts this Saturday October 31; free music this weekend; Greenwich Village walking tours.

On a budget or not, I suggest you check out StubHub.com and Goldstar.com for event tickets. Then hit up some discount deal sites including Groupon, Yipit, and TravelZoo. You can probably save some serious cash and see a show or game.

If you’re in NYC on a Friday and are ready to go, hit one of a dozen museums between 3pm-8pm for FREE! Click here for a great list. Also check out Upparent for some of the many places in NYC where kids eat free.

AGENDA: DAY 1

Start your Saturday morning with a NYC breakfast at a fancy place though I suggest you save the cash and find a bodega (deli) or street cart and grab a bialy, bagel or fresh Danish.

If you are in Manhattan, your first stop could be to the American Museum of Natural History on the upper Westside at 81^st Street. You should start in the Rose Center for the space and science exhibits, then the top floor for the dinosaurs.

For lunch, walk east across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and eat at one of their 3 restaurants; then see whatever is special plus the “must see” The Temple of Dendur, Chinese Buddhist Sculptures, and the Washington Crossing the Delaware painting.

After a couple hours, I would suggest moving on in one of three directions. The first, easiest is to hit one or more of the 8 other museums on the Museum Mile.

If you want to mix it up and go shopping, walk one block east (even number streets go east, odd west) to Madison Avenue then head south (opposite direction of car traffic). At 59^th Street, go back to Fifth Avenue and see the Plaza Hotel, gawk at the Apple Store and visit the Central Park Zoo.

Continue down Fifth Avenue for Tiffany’s, Rockefeller Center Shops, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and the Empire State Building.

By now, you should be exhausted and ready for a nice meal. There are infinite options in cuisine, price, and experience across all price ranges. My only recommendation is to try something unique that you can’t get at home; almost every ethnic cuisine is available so go online and search, or hit a neighborhood like Koreatown (32^nd St./5th), Chinatown (Mott/Canal), Little India (2^nd Ave/6^th St) or Little Italy (Mulberry/Canal) and let your nose pick.

Beware that cocktails, beer, and wine can get very expensive. Like food, prices range dramatically by venue from rooftop bars with $20 specialty cocktails to some of the greatest cheap dive bars with $5 PBRs and a whisky shot.

AGENDA: DAY 2

On day two in NYC, I would go downtown Manhattan and hit a bunch of places; many have long lines in the summer, so you should buy tickets in advance:

Statue of Liberty

Ellis Island

One World Trade Observatory

National September 11 memorial

Battery Park (free)

Staten Island Ferry (free)

Governors Island (Summer-only, free/fee for ferry)

Trinity Church (free)

Federal Hall (free)

National Museum of the American Indian (free)

All of these places are within a 20-minute walk of each other, and there are many other attractions along the way.

I would suggest having food or at least a quick drink at Fraunces Tavern, opened in 1762 and operating ever since.

If you have more time downtown, head north to:

South Street Seaport

Tenement Museum

City Hall

African Burial Ground

If these downtown sights are not for you, or you have an extra day, I suggest you hop the subway to the other boroughs.

Queens:

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (World’s Fair) includes these 3 sites, all in nearby walking distance:

Queens Museum – see a scale model of NYC

Hall of Science

Queens Zoo

Met’s baseball

Brooklyn:

Brooklyn Navy Yard

Brooklyn Brewery

Coney Island – includes NY Aquarium and Brooklyn Cyclones baseball

 Bronx:

Hall of Fame for Great Americans

Bronx Zoo

New York Botanical Garden

Fordam University is also next door to the Zoo and Garden, plus Arthur Avenue for many Italian restaurants and pastry shops.

City Island Nautical Museum 

Staten Island:

Staten Island Ferry

National Lighthouse Museum

Snug Harbor Cultural Center

Staten Island Yankees

Historic Richmond Town

Of course this list is not comprehensive. And there is way too much to do in a short time. And there are many places in between these locations that are interesting to browse. So have fun and just visit often.

@lwsmith10011

SirChear is dedicated to event search — those times and spaces that happen out there, in the real world, when we’re not sitting at our computers or in meetings.

The types and numbers of events in the world is truly vast — there are many millions of events, large and small, professional and amateur, paid and free, business and consumer.  This fragmented, transitory world is nearly impossible to keep track of and to nail down.  There are some wonderful events-oriented sites that do a good job of cataloging some small subset of the world’s events, but they’re not really good enough to cover all of the possible variations.

We decided that a simple search engine is a good start on getting to the events that matter to you, and the best of them is Google.  Under a theory that less is more, we’ve intentionally narrowed our search to just events.  This means that your search for “Billy Joel” or “Drones” or “Dental Implants” will not produce articles, reviews, Wikipedia entries, blog posts, Twitter feeds or anything else that you don’t want.  It will produce only Events related to your search.

What is an Event?

It is a thing that happens in public — a conference, a trade show, a convention, a concert, a play, a movie, a game or match, a lecture, an exhibition, a parade, a show, a ceremony … That pretty much squares with what you thought it might be, right?

It’s also whatever a webmaster thinks is an event.  We say this because we are especially targeting those web pages that the webmaster has described as an “Event” in a web taxonomy known as “Schema.org.”  Here is what Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex think an event is comprised of:

How does SirChear Work?

SirChear uses Google’s Custom Search engine to target especially those sites that have Schema markup or other kinds of structured data.  This means that it has a very strong bias toward showing those sites that have been declared events by their own webmasters.  They worked hard to do this, so we’re confident that they really are events, and not media, products, companies or other kinds of things that exist on the web.

Notice that your search results include a couple of interesting little doo-dads.  First, there is a set of tabs just before the search results.  They look like this:

This allows you to focus in on results from specific sites.  As we grow the SirChear site, new “refinements” like these will be included.  This should hopefully help you zoom in on results that are best suited to your needs.

In addition, we allow for certain sorting options:

Honestly, we’re not sure how useful this is to you, so we will experiment with a variety of different approaches (which will undoubtedly make this short description out-of-date).