Related Recs

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Leisure Centre (48 Hester Street, NY, NY)

Leisure Centre is a vintage shop on Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Frank, the owner, is a really cool, interesting dude - and his shop reflects that. It’s impossible to walk in there and not find something you like. It’s well-curated and well-priced; everything is a steal. I do damage every time I visit… my wardrobe is slowly turning into only pieces I’ve found here.

@lumia-nocito

Nov 27, 2023

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nyc restaurant + thrifting reccs for first timers

Not a native New Yorker but have lived here since 2011. I’m an actor + antique lover. Here are my top reccs for newcomers (restaurants + thrifting only) lmk if you want more! 🍔Restaurants with unique atmosphere + great food: 1. Freeman’s Alley - lower east side. Unmatched vibes. hidden at the end of an alley. Amazing roasted Brussels sprouts. great cocktails and wine selection. Dark and moody and cozy. 2. Tea & Sympathy - west village authentic spot for British high tea and pub fare. as tiny as a matchbox. Ridiculously charming. The staff are lovely. There’s a british import store next door. 3. Buvette - west village worth the hype. Incredible spot for brunch (or anytime meal). Unbelievably cute. 4. Lucali - Carroll gardens, Brooklyn possibly the best pizza in the city. Beyonce and Taylor swift apparently love it too if that helps sway you at all. No reservations, you need to line up by 4p to get a table. Otherwise order a pie to go for $40 and walk around the historic neighborhood eating your pizza and admiring the brownstones. 5. Sake Bar Decibel - east 9th street Hip underground sake joint with amazing food. Often crowded but the service is very quick. 👗For thrifting clothes: Manhattan: 1. Beacon’s Closet on 13th street (near the new school) 2.Housing Works on West 10th 3.Housing Works on 74th 4.Cobblestones on E 9th 5.East Village Vintage collection on east 12th 6. Crossroads Trading on 2nd ave Brooklyn 1. Beacon’s Closet on Guernsey (it’s MASSIVE) 2. Awoke vintage 3. Monk Vintage 4. Buffalo Exchange on Driggs 5. Unearth Vintage on Smith street 6. Life Boutique thrift on 5th ave 7. The attic brooklyn

@ellynhere

Jan 28, 2025

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Cool nyc vintage/Resale/Thrift

This is a Google maps list I made of my favorite places to shop vintage, thrift, and resale. Shopping second hand is the way!

@badjuju

Feb 14, 2024

Top Recs from @jon-caramanica

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Mike Holmes

Sometimes I think I’ve reached, like, the end of TV. I don’t really care about prestige drama. Reality franchises on their 7th or 12th iteration bore me. I gave up on cable news because it made me more jittery than coffee.I can watch HGTV for hours though. Inject all that mid-period Chip & Joanna straight into my veins. Show me all the secret brick-cuttters working on the fringes of Laurel, Mississippi. Interested in couples therapy? Sit with a few episodes of “Love It or List It.” Want to know exactly why that first wave of commercials for “Christina on the Coast” got reedited? I’ll tell you if you ask nice.Most of these shows revolve around how to make something more beautiful. Beauty fades, though. Is your dream built to last?When it crumbles, Mike Holmes can fix it. A no-nonsense Canadian who tears down drywall with bare hands, he has a persistent mien of disappointment. Electricians, roofers, landscapers, plumbers - they’re all colossal idiot cost-cutters who prey on unsuspecting homeowners. In Mike Holmes’s world, all is chaos, and he is the only hope for order.On his old shows - “Holmes on Homes,” “Holmes Inspection,” and so on, you get the point - - he glumly but firmly tears apart homes to find the evils that lurk within. He’s almost impossibly astute, an “Iyanla, Fix My Life”-level reader of the needs of a house - and its owners. (Reruns air mostly on the DIY Network, part of the extended Discovery/HGTV ecosystem.) I love how simple the homes are, and how catastrophic the hidden scars are. And yet time and again, he makes it right - an everyman healer and an avatar of the lost art of competence. In a time when every day feels like free fall, these shows are a somber acknowledgment of the ubiquity of disrepair, and a paean to the belief - the certainty - that it can be overcome.

@jon-caramanica

Aug 24, 2021

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Jordan Two3 Cavvy loafer

You ever search for something on eBay for so long it goes from unknown to unfindable to quasi-accepted to potentially washed - and that’s when it finally pops up in your size? Anyhow, I'm 95% sure my man Brendan Timmins (beautiful furniture – I’ve got two pieces!) put me back on to Jordan’s Two3 luxury line from the early 2000s, which looks pretty much exactly like the bizarro silhouette-experiment off-court fits so memorably documented on the defunct  What the F*** Is Michael Jordan Wearing? blog.Anyhow, the Cavvy - a square-toe slip-on Vibram-soled loafer in which the elastic runs vertically right down the middle of the shoe. It is maybe the platonic ideal of viable square-toe loafers, with apologies to Martine Rose and the vendors of Orchard St. It is bizarre and tough, and screams for a flowy wide leg pant. The colorway with black leather and beige elastic really is something, but a few months ago, I finally found an all-black pair in my size, sort of, for a reasonable price. They look absurd and hurt my feet. I’m so happy.

@jon-caramanica

Aug 24, 2021

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International Design Yearbooks

I’ve seen these annual digests of the best in product innovation around forever but only started buying them recently. I grabbed one at a place in LA that had loads of dusty design books on the cheap. Not long after that, I went to a Housing Works on the UES because someone on TikTok said it had the best clothing selection. It didn’t, but they did have 2 of these for $10 each.They’re pure cheat code. Every good idea that’s being ripped off by contemporary artisans is in one of these - lamps bent into unnatural shapes, shelves that don’t look like they hold very much, dinnerware that you’d never dare eat off of. The designs are Italian and Japanese, of course, but also Finnish, Canadian, Spanish, even American. Each edition has a different luminary as an editor: Arata Isozaki, Mario Bellini, Philippe Starck, freakin’ Alessandro Mendini. They’re tidy, portable museums.

@jon-caramanica

Aug 24, 2021