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Archives for October 2009

Metropolitan Pool Center: Affordable Gym

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Help! I live in Williamsburg and can’t afford my rent, let alone a gym membership

Solution: The Parks & Recreation Metropolitan Pool Center. Located on Bedford and Metropolitan, it’s the lone city complex that invaded the self-centered silo of the burg (or vice versa) and successfully stayed put. Having walked past the chlorine scent for months, the time came to finally check it out.

bedford pool

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The fashion of JoAnn Berman—24 years of bourgeois-shocking

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Joann Berman / Boiy KraiA weathered loft building planted in the middle of an industrial zone in Bushwick, just off the Morgan stop on the L train, leaves little clue of the punky kaleidoscope on its fourth floor—the work space of JoAnn Berman, couturier for pop stars, the Metropolitan Opera, and under Britain’s Zandra Rhodes.

She has stories of styling a Michael Jackson video during the early 1990s—contemporaneous with her nights at Club 57 with the likes of Keith Haring and Dianne Brill. During the anti-fashion 1990s, she pushed forward her “jail suit,” which became the definitive name for the big hip-hop acts of the era, such as NWA, Sean Combs and A Tribe Called Qwest.  More recently, her former boutique at 112th Street and 1st Avenue in East Harlem got a visit from Rihanna.
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At the soul of her look—both in terms of the clothing strewn across her atelier and her own sartorial preferences—is her, rip it up, de and reconstruct, do-it-yourself early 1980s Lower East Side ethos. “In the 1980s, there were no cool stores,” Berman says, bedecked in a pair of black-and-white hound’s-tooth leggings and a coordinating argyle sweater vest. “Everyone was just trying to be rock stars and trying to outdo each other.”

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