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🍜 UWS Outdoor Dining + NYT 100 + Where to Watch the Knicks — more than 103,000 folks have used this map.

📰 Issue #18: Bananas, Blue Angels, and the Big 2-5-0 — in case you missed it.

What do 30 pounds of silver and a T. rex have in common? This Monday, the 27th, an address on CPW. The Larry O'Brien Trophy, the one the NBA hands its champion, goes on view at the American Museum of Natural History, which called the league about borrowing it two years ago, when the ask amounted to a wish. Then the Knicks went and won the championship.

Somebody in that building manifested a finals win and still hasn't taken credit. Would the real Knicks curator please stand up?

It joins For the Win, seventy-odd objects across fifteen sports and worth the trip even if you follow none of them: the Vince Lombardi Trophy, one of the four golds Jesse Owens won in Berlin in 1936, and Claressa Shields's middleweight belt, inscribed with her nickname, T-Rex. Which makes two in the building. The exhibit sits inside the Hall of Gems, and it's never dripped harder, the Star of India aside.

Red Holzman's championship fob is already in there, a small basketball charm that went to the coach who won the Knicks their last title in 1973, before this trophy existed. Two in the collection now, 53 years apart.

So bring the kids and take the picture. Nearly nineteen years ago a 20-year-old Messi bathed a baby Lamine Yamal in a plastic tub for a charity calendar, because the family won a raffle. Sunday they met in a World Cup final. Nobody planned it. Everybody's going to try now. May your kid need less than two decades.

The trophy's up through January 3. The Guggenheim got the Knicks' lucky handbag for five days. We're getting the flex for five months.

A Seven Nation Army, led by a Maestro. The World Cup's first halftime show ran eleven minutes and was the most American thing to happen to soccer all summer, unless you count the ad breaks (reports put Fox's haul as high as $250 million).

Maestro Gustavo Dudamel led members of the NY Phil and Venezuela's Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, along with the Muppets, through The White Stripes anthem "Seven Nation Army." The two orchestras played together for the first time as a tribute to Venezuela after last month's earthquakes.

Animal dominated the drums.

Somewhere is a parent whose kid made a World Cup roster and somewhere else a parent whose kid won a chair in the Phil. Sunday afternoon both were watching the same eleven minutes. Two different childhoods of practice and competitions, ending on the same field.

As for the tournament, the host committee says fans spent $1.2 billion in June, generating $2.1 billion in economic impact and $228 million in taxes. Hotels finished $120 million under forecast and NJ Transit moved about half the riders it expected. Everybody hit their number except the ones who trusted FIFA's.

Coming: 🧠 The Ackman Oxman Institute — 125 West End Ave (65th–66th). Bill Ackman's foundation put $190 million into the building and has another $70 million under contract for its neighbor at 320 W 66th, with Mount Sinai signed on for a brain research institute that could run 700,000 square feet. The building has had more lives than most of us: Chrysler parts depot, New York Times printing plant, ABC. Now neuroscience. West End Avenue keeps its options open.

Present: 🎬 Tom Cruise — AMC Lincoln Square, Broadway at 68th. IMAX had a screening of Nolan's The Odyssey teed up here on the 15th, two nights before it opened, with one guest everybody was waiting on: the actor who has spent years telling the rest of us to see films on the biggest screen we can find. Then a storm scrambled his travel and he walked in at 10:45pm, well after the credits. The man does not use a stunt double and he was not about to accept a missed screening, so he had them run the entire film again. Then he pulled in the AMC crew, who had already started cleaning up after everyone else, and gave them seats for the second showing. Somewhere on the Upper West Side is a kid who was forty minutes from clocking out and instead watched a Greek epic with Tom Cruise. They will be telling that one at Thanksgiving for fifty years.

Closed: 🥯 Tal Bagels — 2446 Broadway (90th–91st). The Health Department closed it after a July 17 inspection, and the number is the whole story. You need 28 points to earn a C. Inspectors logged 157. Live roaches, evidence of mice, sewage where the food is. It's still dark and will be for a while. Now, before you swear off the name entirely: the company that runs the four Tal Bagels on the East Side sold this store more than 20 years ago and has nothing to do with it. Same name, different bagel, four Grade As.

Closed: 🍤 Halal Cajun Platters — 2707 Broadway (103rd–104th). Three days later, inspectors did it again thirteen blocks north: 74 points, nine violations, five of them red-flagged, live roaches, cold food sitting warm. In a normal month that's the worst number on Broadway. This month it's second place. Also still closed. The place had been open barely a year.

Closed: 🍕 Cheesy Pizza — 2640 Broadway (at 100th). Thirty-five years on one corner, and the gate is down for good. Mario opened it in 1991 and told a neighbor the rent was headed toward nearly double the $20,000 a month he was already paying. He isn't reopening anywhere else. And since it's keeping rough company on this list, worth saying plainly: the Health Department had nothing to do with this one. They passed with an A in May. That's the part that stings. You can do everything right and still lose the corner. Francesco's went dark earlier this month. That's two pizzerias gone before August.

Coming: 🧸 The Little Apple Toy Shoppe — 2484 Broadway (92nd–93rd). Something to break up the gate-pulling. Jenn Mattie, an Upper West Side mom of three who ran the Poppie Toys pop-up, opens a real one in September: open-ended play, vintage odds and ends, a sticker wall, crafting clubs at night. We haven't had a dedicated toy store since West Side Kids closed. The space she's taking over was a smoke shop called Exotic Munch. We're calling that a net gain.

Opening: 🐩 Cassidy's Dog Spa — 219 W 79th St (Broadway–Amsterdam). Opens Monday from the training outfit down the block, certified Fear Free, which in practice means cooperative care: the dog gets choice, control, and a vote in what's happening to it. Your dog will have more say in its haircut than you have in most meetings. You don't need to be a training client to book.

Facelift: 🗿 Franz Sigel Monument — Riverside Park at W 106th. If you've been losing a fight with the 106th Street stairs this week, this is why. Parks has a crew working the 1907 bronze from a lift, with torches and steam, stripping the lacquer from the last treatment in 2004 and switching to wax. They start at 6:30am, because torch work in July is its own punishment. Sigel was a Union general on a horse, which you have walked past ten thousand times without once asking who he was. When the crew finishes he'll be slightly greener and he won't flake. Twenty-two years and a boom lift for that.

🌤️ Finally. Eighty-one today, 81 tomorrow, 82 on Sunday, humidity under 50%, and a rain chance that rounds to nothing. Three weeks ago Central Park hit 100 for the first time in a decade, so consider this the apology. The one catch is the UV index, which sits at 9 out of 11 all three days, meaning the sun is still very much in charge. Hat, sunscreen, the whole routine. Sunset is 8:18pm tonight and tomorrow, 8:17pm Sunday.

🎻 Chamber Music Society: Summer Evenings VI, Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th, Sat 7/25, 5pm. Eleven years of this now, and half the appeal is the room: two hours of chamber music in Alice Tully's air conditioning, then a free glass of wine in the lobby with the musicians. The Calidore String Quartet plays Haydn's quartet that is actually nicknamed "The Joke," plus Mozart, Hugo Wolf, Wynton Marsalis, and a quartet attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who evidently found the time. The show is sold out, but 100 free tickets go out through the TodayTix lottery, and it closes at noon today. Enter here. FREE

🎹 Tori Amos, Beacon Theatre, 2124 Broadway (74th–75th), Fri 7/24 and Sat 7/25, 8pm. The In Times of Dragons Tour, which is to say a woman, a piano, and a room full of people who wore out Under the Pink in a Discman. Seats are running $157 to $398 with not many left. Ticketed.

🎬 The Piano, Film at Lincoln Center, Fri 7/24 through Mon 7/27, showtimes at 1pm, 3:30pm, 6pm, and 8:30pm daily. Jane Campion's Palme d'Or winner is back in a 4K restoration she supervised herself, scanned off the original 35mm negative. Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin both won Oscars for it. 121 minutes, and if you struck out on The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm, this is the consolation prize three blocks south. Saturday's 1pm and Sunday's 8:30pm are open-captioned.

🎧 TAIGA, The Dance Floor at Lincoln Center, Sat 7/25, 9pm. A Chinese electronic duo out of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang running Khoomei throat singing, horse-head fiddle, and Tuvan lute through modern production. Amplified set at 9pm, then everybody puts on headphones at 10pm and it turns into a silent disco. Two hours, outdoors, all ages. FREE

🏳️‍🌈 Queer Central Park Tour, meets at Bethesda Terrace, Sun 7/26, 11am. Ninety minutes and about a mile and a quarter through the park's LGBTQ+ history, including sculptor Emma Stebbins, poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, and architect Bruce Kelly. Inclines, stairs, uneven trails, rated inaccessible. $33 adult, $28.05 for seniors, students, military, and visitors with disabilities, kids free with a paid ticket. Heat index over 90 and it's shortened or refunded.

🎪 Children's Museum of Manhattan, 212 W 83rd St. This is the last weekend of Soaring Over NYC Skies, which wraps Sunday. Both days bring a Circus Academy workshop with Dia Seskin, a handbalancer and contortionist who will have your kid on bucket stilts and spinning plates before noon (ages 5 and up, 10:30am and 11:30am). Also running Saturday and Sunday: Sky Motion Mobiles in the Makerspace (ages 5 and up, 2pm) and My Wooden Airplane in PlayWorks (ages 4 and under, 11:15am and 2:45pm). With admission.

🧧 Chinatown Records and Dance with Red Silk Dancers, David Rubenstein Atrium, Sat 7/25, 12pm. Chinese Arts Week at Lincoln Center. Margaret Yuen, who founded the Red Silk Dancers, runs an all-ages lesson in traditional and contemporary Chinese movement, silks provided, then the company performs to selections pulled from the Chinatown Records archive. About an hour, indoors, air-conditioned, which in late July is its own selling point. FREE

🩰 NDI 50: He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin', Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th, Sun 7/26, 5pm. National Dance Institute turns 50 and marks it by screening the documentary that put it on the map: Emile Ardolino, who would go on to direct Dirty Dancing, following New York City Ballet principal Jacques d'Amboise as he pushes a thousand city kids toward a performance at Madison Square Garden. It won an Oscar and an Emmy, which almost nothing does. A conversation with the people who made it follows, led by Budd Mishkin. $20, $15 for kids.

🎸 Hippo Playground Summer Concert Series: Esther Crow, Hippo Playground, Riverside Park at 91st, Wed 7/29, 3:30pm to 4:30pm. Not this weekend, next Wednesday. Esther Crow fronts a rock band called The Electric Mess and also writes music for children, which tells you roughly how these afternoons go. Riverside Playground Partners funds the series off proceeds from the Hippo Spring Fair, and it runs every Wednesday through August 26. FREE

Don’t forget: The New York Historical discount code FAMPASS26, good through 7/31.

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That's the week on the west side: a championship trophy moving in with the fossils, our orchestra playing a stadium with a Muppet on drums, two Broadway kitchens finding out what 157 points looks like, and Tom Cruise refusing to miss a movie. The weather is finally on our side. Go use it.

— The West Sider