🍂 The 2026 Autumn Guide lands Tuesday, the first day of fall, because we have a flair for the dramatic and love a theme. Eighty days of the west side and New York: leaf walks, orchards, Oktoberfests, five trick-or-treat corridors, and weekend trips. We hope to surprise you.

In a disappearing act that would make Penn & Teller proud, and all of us annoyed, the after-hours magic show coming to Zabar's, on October 1st, is already sold out.

In January of this year, the same company hosted a stand-up show inside Zabar's, and people are still boasting about how they attended that singular affair.

It was a bold move by the event promoters, Underground Overground, to tell everyone to "get on the waitlist," and then have the whole thing sell out before most of us finished typing in our phone number. When we learned of this, Thursday morning, we immediately joined the waitlist, as this obviously was going to be a spectacle so rare it would seem vulgar to repeat itself.

Alas, when tickets went out on Sept 15 for this after-dark experience at Banksy's West Side patron saint, the folks who had signed up on the promoter's waitlist had first dibs. The producers claim about 2,300 people were on the link when tickets opened. There were two showtimes offered, 7:30pm and 9:45pm, and as of this printing it's marked SOLD OUT.

If you want to cast your lot to see if maybe something else opens up, join the waitlist. It's free. Maybe the hand of Fortuna will deem you worthy. Who doesn't want to experience Zabar's after the lamps are lit?

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts announced this week that they received a $60 million donation. A touch of humble bragging, minus the humble, it's the largest single donation in their existence. The timing couldn't be better, as they have 15 million items in their archive that won't see the light of the internet or AI unless they are digitized.

According to the Library for the Performing Arts, an alarming amount of their archive is entering its composting era. The collections worth saving include the White Studio archive, which shot over 85% of Broadway's productions in the early 20th century, 325,000 boxes of records, and millions of cellulose acetate negatives and glass plates on deteriorating film.

For the uninitiated, and we were patient zero, glass plates are super old-school photos from the 1800s and early 1900s printed on actual glass. They have insane detail but shatter easily, and the image layer can peel right off. Acetate negatives were the standard film for most of the 20th century. The problem is they chemically rot over time, smell like vinegar, and wrinkle up until the photo is completely ruined.

That's the thing about preservation money: it only works if it shows up before the rot does.

Nobody is saying how this particular gift was structured, and the donor is anonymous, but West Siders know a $60 million windfall is often less pure charity and more a brilliant financial maneuver that satisfies two completely opposing worldviews.

Instead of writing a check, the aggressively solvent usually donate stock that skyrocketed. AI boom, anyone? It's almost annoyingly sensible: sell the stock for cash first and there's an eight-figure capital-gains bill attached. Donate the stock directly, and you can sidestep that tax while taking a charitable deduction.

So let's get prematurely excited that there will be many more donations like this between now and the end of the year for so many deserving 501(c)(3)s on our home turf.

Classical music isn't your thing? Bear with us.

A few weeks ago at the Hollywood Bowl, Chris Martin of Coldplay joked about falling in love with Gustavo Dudamel "musically" when they met 12 years ago, then serenaded the maestro with an original called "Santa Maria." "Someone we love is going away. Hello New York, goodbye LA."

It was a true Dudamel event, not because it was his swan song from the LA Phil, or another sold-out house, but because it wasn't about him. He turned a farewell into a benefit for his homeland, for those hit by the June 24, 2026 earthquakes, featuring the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles alongside LA Phil musicians. Dudamel's DNA seems coded altruistically, to lift others and shine a light on the people who don't normally get one.

Dudamel's momentum hasn't tapered since he won the inaugural Mahler competition in 2004, conducting Germany's Bamberg Symphony. He was 23, and classical music watched an unreasonable amount of talent torch the old playbook. His conducting was joyous, electrifying, with animalistic magnetism.

In an almost trope-like Hollywood script, two men on that jury were Esa-Pekka Salonen, then the LA Phil's chief conductor, and Ernest Fleischmann, who ran the symphony from 1969 to 1998. Both were struck that Dudamel was a serious outlier. Five years later Salonen handed him the LA Phil.

In July maestro was on the field at the World Cup final, leading the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" with the Muppets. Two months later he's at David Geffen Hall, a fifteen-minute walk from most of us. So why should you care?

Dudamel is a product of El Sistema, the Venezuelan government program that put instruments in the hands of impoverished kids teaching that music education teaches discipline, teamwork, and how to belong. When he arrived in LA, he built the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles in the same spirit: free instruments and expert instruction. The result is kids who show up for each other and their communities. For Dudamel, music is a human right, not a luxury behind a gate.

So West Siders, living through the best of times and the worst of times, when the robots may kill humanity or usher in a renaissance, when democracy is under threat and the rent is still the rent, we have a neighbor who, like many immigrants who come to America the Beautiful, has become the defining musician of his generation, in classical music and beyond.

Creating music is complicated, debated, and criticized, yet it is the friction where Dudamel births hope. As he puts it, "There are not borders. There are bridges. A symphonic orchestra can also be immersed in pop, folk, and musicals. We are all in the same space." Neighbors of all creeds and ideologies can find rest in the audience seat, nourished for body and soul. What he makes reminds us that art is what makes us divinely human.

Watching Dudamel conduct is a thrill. Watching him pull a room together is transcendent. "I don't improvise, but I don't impose, either," he told New York Magazine this week. At his first Geffen Hall concert he wouldn't take a solo bow. He stood each section up instead, walked in among the players, and got off the stage fast.

The NY Phil has spent the last few years struggling to find its spiritual footing. Two seasons without a music director will do that. It's Dudamel's era now, in a renovated hall, in a city with a thousand other things to do on any given night. So if you've never been to a classical concert, why wouldn't you start with the John Lennon of the genre?

He's as comfortable with Billie Eilish, Dave Grohl, Beck and Coldplay as with Mahler. Last summer he spent ten nights at Wembley, opening for Coldplay and then playing in their main set. It's a religious experience: deep, visceral humanity wrapped in technical genius. We're holding out for the Taylor Swift x Gustavo Dudamel collab.

If you want to hear him talk rather than conduct, he's in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda at the Delacorte on Wednesday at 7pm.

Want to welcome the man properly? Skip the fruit basket, and the sidewalk fan-girling. The Venezuela relief fund he partnered with the UNDP on is about a quarter of the way to a million. West Siders, let's move this number!

P.S. Apparently he's still deciding between an apartment up here and one in Chelsea. Somebody invite the man to Barney Greengrass.

Opened: 📸 Aperture — 380 Columbus Ave (at 78th). The photography foundation Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange helped start in 1952 opens its new home today, across from the Natural History museum's 78th Street entrance. It spent decades on a fourth floor in Chelsea, where, as the director puts it, the only people you talk to are the ones already looking for you. Now they're at street level giving away Arbus and Goldin for free through Nov 1. The Oct 3 talk is already full. So much for nobody knowing where you are.

Reopened: 🛒 Trader Joe's — 2073 Broadway (at 72nd). Last Saturday, after 116 days, TJ's was back. Within three hours, an escalator had died, ironic since fixing the escalators was one of the primary reasons for closing. The shelves were picked clean by the weekend, a triumphant return. Since it's pumpkin spice season, we'll continue our daily pilgrimages in search of the rare goods. Burn some sage, because at this rate TJ's may require an exorcist before Halloween.

Coming: 🍩 Doughnut Plant — 2167 Broadway (76th–77th). Before the holidays. The Beard Papa's cream puff window has been dark since 2021. Five years of walking past nothing, and what finally shows up is a doughnut shop. Yes please.

Opening: ✂️ Canine Puppy Cuts — 73 W 83rd St. Sept 28. Jose De La Rosa spent 25 years grooming at A Cut Above, in this exact room, until it closed in March. He gutted it, rebuilt it, and brought another A Cut Above groomer with him. Second grooming shop to open here in two months, after Cassidy's Dog Spa in July. Somebody's poodle is having a better year than we are.

Opened: 🥡 Szechuan Gourmet — 239 W 105th St (Broadway–Amsterdam). The 39th Street establishment, long Michelin-recommended, has moved uptown. The plot thickens: Szechuan Gourmet is replacing the old Szechuan Garden, the names suggest a family reunion. They are, in fact, unrelated.

Opened: 🍸 Mr. Byrdie's Joint — 998 Amsterdam Ave (109th–110th). Sandwiches, wings, empanadas, dessert, open till midnight Thursday through Saturday. Discounts coming for Columbia students and first responders. Food after 11pm above 106th: a previously untapped demographic of people who are still hungry.

Coming: 🍳 Friedmans — 541 Amsterdam Ave (86th–87th). They bought the retail unit for $4.1 million. You may unclench, Barney Greengrass and Hudson & Charles are staying. The restaurant goes into the old Granola Bar space, empty since January. Rumored it may be entirely gluten-free, however we have no facts, menu or opening date.

☀️ Friday is 82 and sunny. 🌥️ Saturday drops to 70. 🌧️ Sunday is 71 with a 60% chance of rain, on the exact day Broadway closes for two street fairs. Bring a jacket, bring an umbrella, bring low expectations for the funnel cake line.

💬 in case of fire, speak: Research, Process, and Collaboration, Bruno Walter Auditorium at the Library for the Performing Arts, Friday 7pm to 8:30pm. A conversation about a new dance work made in response to Martha Graham's American Document. Free, and the people who made it are the ones talking about it. FREE, with ticketed registration, and there were still tickets as of this writing.

🤸 Juilliard Outdoors: PLAZAWORK 2026, Hearst Plaza, 30 Lincoln Center Plaza, Saturday at 11am. Juilliard artists improvise sound and movement to live prompts, all over the plaza. World-class musicians and dancers, outdoors, no ticket, no dress code. Rain date is Sunday, which, given Sunday's forecast, is worth knowing. FREE, no tickets.

🎞️ Saturday Afternoon Movie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, St. Agnes Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, Saturday 2pm to 4pm. This month's matinee theme is science fiction, which is one way to describe the best breakup movie ever made. FREE.

🎤 Ben Schwartz & Friends, Beacon Theatre, 2124 Broadway, Saturday at 7pm, doors at 6pm. Improv built entirely from suggestions shouted by the room. Starts at $52.95, fees included. There's a 10pm show too, ticketed separately.

🎙️ Fumi Abe, Matt Ruby and friends, West Side Comedy Club, 201 W 75th St, Saturday at 10pm. Fumi Abe, a Just For Laughs New Face who has done Fallon and Colbert and written for James Corden, headlines a six-comic late bill. Starts at $28.10, fees included. Two-item minimum, 16 and over.

🎞️ Silent Clowns Film Series: Colleen Moore and Some Funny Friends, Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th, Sunday at 2:30pm. Silent comedy with live piano accompaniment by Ben Model, which is a genuinely different animal from watching it at home. Starts at $12.

🛍️ STREET FAIRS

We took July and August off, which is a surprisingly effective way to avoid collecting poll results. So, back to business. Click the one that vibes the most.

🐦 Summer on the Hudson: Birding Walks, W 120th St and Riverside Drive, tonight, Friday, 5:30pm to 7pm. An evening walk with the NYC Bird Alliance during fall migration, built for families and beginners. Some binoculars available, bring your own if you have them. FREE.

🎬 Summer on the Hudson: Uptown Film Center Pop-Up, 96th Street tennis courts, Riverside Park, tonight, Friday, at 7:30pm. In the Heights, outdoors, on a warm night in September. This is the UWS version of a drive-in. Bring a blanket. FREE.

🎨 Arts and Crafts Festival, West Side Community Garden, 123 W 89th St between Amsterdam and Columbus, Saturday and Sunday 10am to 4:30pm. Ceramics, jewelry, needlework, paintings and photographs for sale on 89th Street, with a whole program inside the garden. Saturday is Kids' Day: windsock craft, the Young People's Chorus of NY at 1pm, Danny the Clown at 2pm and Ballet Hispanico at 3:30pm. Sunday is karaoke at 10:45am, open sketching at noon and a poetry open mic at 2pm. FREE to enter, cash preferred at the stalls.

♟️ 25th Annual Chess-in-the-Park Rapid Open, Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park, Saturday 11am to 5pm. Registration closed at capacity with more than 1,300 players, but you don't need a seat at a board. Anyone can walk up and try the 90-second puzzle race with a live leaderboard, get strategy tips from the chess coaches on hand, add to the community wall, or grab the soft seating and charging stations while the kids run around. Watching 1,300 people play chess in a park is its own kind of afternoon. FREE.

🐕 Camille Henrot: Dogs, Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park at 60th and Fifth, up now through Aug 29, 2027. A pack of large-scale dog sculptures in bronze, stone, steel and concrete, at the park entrance. Worth the cross-park walk for this. The artist Henrot is a West Sider, and the Public Art Fund's curator says each one mirrors the shapes, sizes and temperaments of the dogs she meets around her Upper West Side neighborhood. Somewhere in there is your dog. FREE.

🎥 Bring a Memory to Life: Stop-Motion Animation Workshop, Riverside Library, 127 Amsterdam Ave, tonight, Friday, 3pm to 4pm. Kids 6 to 12 turn a memory into a stop-motion animation with ALT Alliance. FREE, online registration.

🧪 Line Leader Lab, Makerspace at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, 212 W 83rd St, Friday and Saturday, 10:30am to 12:30pm and 2pm to 4:15pm. Kids 5 and up make badges and pins with their names on them and decorate them with stickers, stencils and doodles. Drop-in, no sign-up, no schedule to keep.

🦪 Summer on the Hudson: Billion Oyster Project, the pier at W 125th and Marginal St, Riverside Park, Saturday 12pm to 2pm. Meet the Billion Oyster Project on the Baylander's Jungle Deck and find out how oysters are being put back in the harbor. Your kid will tell you about oyster reefs for a week. FREE.

🧒 Upper West Side Kids' Club, St. Agnes Library, 444 Amsterdam Ave, Saturday 2pm to 3pm. School-age kids share ideas and make things, and the whole thing is run by a local kid. FREE.

📖 Summer on the Hudson: Story Hour, 102nd Street Field House, Riverside Park, Saturday 3pm to 4pm. Rotating books, guest readers, outdoors while it lasts. FREE, with tickets through Eventbrite.

📯 Blow Paint Shofars, Makerspace at the Children's Museum, Sunday and Monday, 10:30am to 12:30pm and 2pm to 4:15pm. Ages 5 and up decorate shofars by blowing paint around, which is both a Yom Kippur craft and an excuse to make a mess at someone else's building.

🎬 Movie Monday: Lilo & Stitch, Riverside Library, 127 Amsterdam Ave, Monday 3:15pm to 5pm. No school Monday, and the library has volunteered to handle 3:15 to 5. Open to all, no registration, seating is first come, first served. FREE.

Reminder: All Children's Museum of Manhattan programs are included with museum admission, which starts at $17.

🎭 Verdi's Macbeth, The Metropolitan Opera, 30 Lincoln Center Plaza, Tuesday at 6:30pm. The Met opens its season with Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen as the most ambitious couple in opera. Starts at $33, which is less than dinner two blocks away.

🎙️ Jessica Kirson Live in New York, New York Comedy Club, 236 W 78th St, Tuesday at 7pm and 9:30pm. Kirson headlines her own night, with two specials behind her. Starts at $35, plus a $20 minimum spend per person before tax and an 18% gratuity, so budget accordingly.

💎 Jewels, David H. Koch Theater, 20 Lincoln Center Plaza, Tuesday through Friday at 7:30pm. Balanchine in three parts: Emeralds to Fauré, Rubies to Stravinsky, Diamonds to Tchaikovsky. The run continues through Sunday Sept 27. Starts at $54 in the Third Ring. Balanchine from the cheap seats is still Balanchine.

🎭 Public Forum Duet: Gustavo Dudamel and Lin-Manuel Miranda, Delacorte Theater, Central Park, Wednesday at 7pm. Two weeks into the job, Dudamel sits down in the park with Miranda to talk about music and play some. FREE, and there are four ways in on Wednesday: tickets handed out at the Delacorte from noon, an in-person lottery at noon at The Public on Lafayette, the TodayTix digital lottery until noon, and a standby line at the Delacorte from about 6pm.

🎷 John Coltrane Centennial, Bruno Walter Auditorium, Library for the Performing Arts, Wednesday 7pm to 8:30pm. Coltrane's life and influence, unpacked around a new visual history of the man. FREE, ticketed registration.

📖 Selected Shorts: The Five Boroughs, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Symphony Space, Wednesday at 7pm. Cynthia Nixon hosts an evening of New York stories, closing out the Brooklyn Book Festival on our side of the park. Starts at $19, livestream $26.

💃 The Annual Dr. Sunil Kothari Lecture, Bruno Walter Auditorium, Library for the Performing Arts, Thursday 6pm to 7:30pm. Rama Vaidyanathan comes from India for this year's lecture, on dance as a path to stillness. FREE, ticketed registration.

🎬 Paper Tiger, New York Film Festival opening night, Friday Sept 25. James Gray's New York thriller with Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, all of whom turn up with Gray for the 6pm Q&A. Nearly every showing is gone, but the 9:15pm still had seats at $53 as of this writing. For the rest, standby is the way in: go to the Walter Reade box office before each screening, one per customer, first come, first served.

🎤 Chelsea Handler: The High and Mighty Tour, Beacon Theatre, 2124 Broadway, Friday Sept 25 at 8pm, doors at 7pm. Before you get your hopes up: every seat still listed is City National Bank cardholder preferred seating at $165.30. There is no general public inventory at all, which means unless you happen to bank somewhere specific, this one is gone.

🇻🇪 Let's give Gustavo a West Sider welcome by donating to the cause closest to his heart right now. He's asking people to give to the UNDP's Venezuela earthquake fund, which is about a quarter of the way to a million. Any amount works.

Let's help him hit a million!

Be the neighbor you think you are.

🎹 Rush Hour: Rhythmic Dissonance, Juilliard Station, 130 W 66th St, tonight, Friday, at 6pm. Pianist Adrian King plays Bach, Brahms and Missy Mazzoli. FREE, no tickets, and these fill fast, so get there early.

🕺 ¡VAYA! New Swing Sextet, David Rubenstein Atrium, 1887 Broadway, tonight, Friday, at 7:30pm. Ninety minutes of Latin soul from a band that's been at it since the sixties. FREE. Fast Track passes are gone but general admission is still open, first come, first served, and Lincoln Center suggests showing up an hour early.

🎼 Dudamel Conducts Prokofiev, Adams & Di Castri, Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, tonight and Saturday at 7:30pm. The man himself, in the room that's now his. Sold out on paper, but the box office is always worth a try: cancellations get released to whoever's standing there. Students can rush it for $25 with code STUDENTRUSH.

🎷 Aaron Diehl Trio, Dizzy's Club, Broadway at 60th, Friday and Saturday at 7pm and 9pm. Grammy-nominated pianist, original tunes and standards taken somewhere new. Starts at $24.

🎻 Juilliard Orchestra Conducted by Teddy Abrams, Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway, Saturday at 7:30pm. A world premiere by Elise Arancio, plus Gabriela Lena Frank, Copland and William Schuman. Starts at $45, and it's livestreamed if you'd rather stay in.

🎺 Gazebo Concert for George Gabriel, Julia Gabriel People's Garden, 1039 Amsterdam Ave at W 111th, Sunday from 11:30am, last set at 3:30pm. Five acts in memory of a neighbor: Uptown Hoedown at 11:30, Cool Parlour at 12:30, the Rich Jenkins Trio at 1:30, Eve Weiss and Charles Mokotoff at 2:30, Tom Phillips and Bill Christopherson at 3:30. FREE.

🎺 Jazz in the Park at Ralph Ellison, Ralph Ellison Plaza, Riverside Drive at W 150th, Sunday 2pm to 5pm. Berta Indeed presents "Let the Music Play," three hours of community jazz. FREE, first come, first served, and heavy rain cancels.

🎹 The New Series: Steve Reich @ 90, Willson Theater, 155 W 65th St, Tuesday at 7:30pm. FREE, but tickets are required, with a talk at 6:30 open to ticket holders. Free and ticketed for a composer this big means it will go. If you miss out, it's livestreamed on juilliard.live, though only live, with nothing on demand afterward.

Alternate side parking is suspended Monday Sept 21 for Yom Kippur. Meters still run as posted.

Now the part where the MTA explains why your usual plan won't work this weekend.

And a heads up if you live near the Central Park West water main work: Council Member Gale Brewer's office says West 81st, 82nd and 83rd between Columbus and CPW will have no water from Wednesday 9pm to Thursday 5pm. Twenty hours, overnight into a workday. DEP is replacing 2,700 feet of 1870s cast-iron main along CPW through 2028, so expect more of these, usually with about four days' notice. Fill something before you go to bed Wednesday.

Shout outs to Nick, Kelsey, Mona, Tara, Allison, Cameron, Paul, Dan, Sarah, Martin, and Alex, who checked in over the summer to ask whether we were coming back.

About twenty of you did, and we only got 11 names out of the inbox, so we definitely missed someone. Blame the inbox, not the affection. Tell us and we'll put you in next week.

Hopefully this first issue back didn't disappoint.

📣 SHARE THE WEST SIDER Forward responsibly. Or irresponsibly. We're not picky.

That's it for this week. A sold-out grocery store, a rotting archive saved at the buzzer, and a maestro apartment hunting. We'll be back next Friday morning.

— The West Sider