Monday Bulletin: The Story Behind an “Extraordinary” Central Park Photo; Nutcracker Helps Ballet Company All Year Long; Tale of a Pizza Taste Test; UWS Condo Sale Makes City Top 10 List

Today is Monday, December 29th, 2025

The forecast calls for a breezy, rainy day; high 49 degrees.

The rest of the week will be colder but mostly sunny, with the possibility of flurries on Wednesday and Thursday.

Today is the fourth day of Kwanzaa, a week-long holiday celebrating African culture and traditions.

Notices

Our calendar has lots of local events. Click on the link or the lady in the upper righthand corner to check.

West Side Rag will publish on a reduced schedule this week to give our hard-working staff a holiday hiatus. We’ll still run most of our usual columns, and if any big stories break, we’ll of course cover them. Otherwise, look for us to return with our usual raft of stories next Monday, January 5th. Note: The UWS Dish is on a two-week hiatus, returning January 12th.

News Roundup

Compiled by Laura Muha

Every week, the Associated Press selects an “extraordinary” photograph and interviews the staff or freelance photographer who took it.  This week’s featured photo — which we can’t run because it’s copyrighted, but which we’ll link to in a minute — is of a landmark that will be familiar to most UWSers: Gapstow Bridge, a rustic stone footbridge dating to the late 1800s, which spans the neck of the pond in the southeast corner of Central Park. Freelance photojournalist Adam Gray, who took the featured photo, said he’s “always really enjoyed the challenge of making an interesting photo in extreme conditions,” so when the AP asked him to document the city’s first snow of the season a couple of weeks ago, he headed straight to the park.

“As this was New York City’s first snow, it was important to include some recognizable locations to give the photographs context and location,” he explained in the column. “There aren’t many places more iconic than Central Park.”

Once there, he climbed a rocky outcrop that has a great view of the iconic bridge in one direction and the city skyline in the other. “Getting up there in the snow and ice wasn’t quite so easy but I made it and then waited for groups of tourists to stand in the right places,” he said.

See the resulting photo and read more about the story behind it — HERE.

To many ballet lovers who head to Lincoln Center at this time each year, “The Nutcracker” represents a beloved holiday tradition. But to the New York City Ballet, and other ballet companies around the country, it represents much, much more, according to a recent NPR story.

Although the Nutcracker is only one of about 60 ballets the company puts on each year, “[t]he revenue that it brings in is about 45% of our total ticket revenue for the whole year,” Kathy Brown, executive director of the NYCB and the David H. Koch Theater, told the news outlet. “So it is enormously important to the business model.”

The interview was part of a larger piece looking at the impact of the Nutcracker on ballet companies; there’s been increased interest in live performances since the pandemic, so ticket sales have gone up — but so have costs of putting on each production, which include things like electricity, stage sets, and costumes. For instance, NYCB buys most of its pointe shoes from England, and prices have skyrocketed thanks to new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

In addition, companies also have to figure out how to get “Nutcracker” fans to come back for other productions, Brown told NPR. “They may not come back to see an evening of contemporary choreography, but maybe they can be lured back to see another Tchaikovsky classic like ‘Swan Lake,’” she said.

Listen to/read the full story — HERE.

The best pizza on the UWS has long been a subject of debate; if you need proof, check out the Rag’s comment section every time we run a story that mentions a pizzeria.

But one local family recently got scientific about it — and then wrote about what happened for last week’s Metropolitan Diary column of The New York Times.

“The day after Thanksgiving, a question arose: What does one eat next?” recounted Naomi Malka in the column.

“For a family ranging in age from 8 to 80, keeping a festive mood through the weekend required a new idea. Someone suggested a blind taste test of Upper West Side pizzas. Soon, ballots were printed and categories debated: sauce, crust, mouth feel, overall taste. Three pies lined the kitchen counter.”

And the winner was …?

Well — the story doesn’t specify, except to say that the top pie “came from a spot near 105th Street and Broadway.” This being Metropolitan Diary, however, there is a surprise twist involving the leftovers, which we don’t want to give away; you’ll find the full story — HERE.

Last month, we reported on the most expensive apartment to sell on the UWS in 2025: a $46.7 million condo in the Extell development at 50 West 66th Street.

We’re bringing that same sale up again now, because the year-end data have been tabulated, and it turns out not just to be the most expensive apartment to sell on the UWS in 2025, but also the seventh-most-expensive sale in the city, according to behindthehedges.com, a site that covers luxury housing.

“Located in one of the neighborhood’s newest and tallest towers, the price achieved of $6,738-per-square-foot indicates a strong demand for modern properties in the Lincoln Square area,” the site said, noting that those figures came from the real-estate database PropertyShark.com. It was the only UWS property to make the list, though the top slot was claimed by a sale on the very edge of our neighborhood: a condo on Central Park South, which sold for $82.5 million.

Read the full story and see the other properties on the list — HERE.

ICYMI

Here are a few stories we think are worth a look if you missed them last week — or a second look if you saw them. (Note that our comments stay open for six days after publication, so you may not be able to comment on all of them.)

Fill in the Blanks: On Vacancy, Vision, and the Upper West Side

Man Stabbed in Back at UWS Station; Another Man Attacked With Bat: NYPD Seek Help in Both Cases

A Poet’s Call to Re-Discover and Re-Imagine Central Park

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