April 9, 2026

THE BIG STORY

Photo: Thomas Wilson for New York Magazine; Anita Chernewski (coffee); Stephanie Berger (dining table); Courtesy of owner (counter)

Whatever your problem is with life in the city, there is probably some way to implicate the dogs, writes the dog-owner Rachel Sugar. “Dogs are so numerous in New York, indeed, that they have already become a nuisance,” poet Charles Dawson Shanly observed in 1872, launching into an ethnographic survey of the local canine population. Then there was the question of whether dogs belonged in the city at all. “There is a place for the dog,” an irritated reader wrote the New York Times in 1903, “but that place is the country.” Today, the overarching narrative is that New York is doggier than ever, a product of the pandemic puppy boom, or gentrification, or declining (human) birth rates, or the suburbanization of the city. Sugar digs into the mounting tensions between canine lovers and other New Yorkers.

ARCHITECTURE

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: AIDIA, Getty, Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, Kéré Architecture

Architecture critic Justin Davidson assembled a small fantasy league of international architects and paired each firm with a real city project that is in the early stages and not yet assigned to any designers. The firms chosen range in size, age, fame, and length of track record, but they have one thing in common: They have never built in New York. At least, not yet.

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STREET FIGHTS

Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Frick, Getty

In the spring of 2018, Jeffrey Epstein got an email from his neighbor at the time, Howard Lutnick, then the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. “Are you aware as to them building to block our park views,” Lutnick wrote as Annabelle Selldorf’s now-widely-praised designs for the Frick were going before the Landmarks Preservation Commission. “What should we do about it? Time is of the essence.” Epstein replied via his assistant within a day in his typical, busier-than-God style: “no i was not.”

Epstein’s infamous mansion at 9 East 71st Street faced the Frick’s six-story research library and had unimpeded views to the west, over the Frick-family mansion toward Central Park. At No. 11, Lutnick had only a sliver of Epstein’s views — and apparently feared losing them. Adriane Quinlan reports. 

APARTMENT DEPARTMENT

Illustration: Emma Erickson

Dear Apartment Department,

We keep our shoes and coats organized on racks on the landing outside our four-story walk-up — everything is neatly in two coat racks and one shoe rack. But our landlord keeps yelling at us that we’re not allowed to keep things there and that we “don’t rent the landing.” Almost everyone else I know in NYC keeps things on their landing. He claims it’s a fire hazard, but the stairs are completely clear and no one else is walking through our space to get out (we’re on the top floor). We really need the space. How do we convince him to leave us alone?

Sincerely,

Don’t Tread on My Landing

"I skateboarded for most of my life. I got sober in 2021, and I wanted to be more physically active. A couple friends were doing muay Thai in one of their basements, and they invited me to come. I went over there and got my ass kicked. I was hooked." —Sean McLaughlin    Photo: Frankie Alduino

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Cats: The Jellicle Ball is at the Broadhurst Theatre.        Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

Part of a whole program of films shot in and around the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop, this bracing 1964 drama, starring Rod Steiger as an embittered Holocaust survivor who runs a pawnshop in East Harlem, is a highlight. —Alison Willmore

Shayok Misha Chowdhury (of Public Obscenities and Prince Faggot) performs onstage, and cheekily directs, his mother, Bulbul Chakraborty. She studies the fluid movements of sand, and their collaboration leads into a larger inquiry about their relationship, family history, and other questions of physics and metaphysics. —Jackson McHenry

Between two world wars, American modern-dance pioneer Martha Graham first stepped onstage with her company. A century later, it has leaped into a tour to commemorate the occasion. Graham’s work responded to atrocities and fascism abroad, reanimated Greek myth, and investigated the body’s primal movements. Her company will perform contemporary works as well as repertory pieces including the buoyant Appalachian Spring. —Rachel Stone

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