Good morning and happy Friday. We’ve got a gray day ahead of us with the occasional shower. The weekend forecast is for two contrasting days — stormy on Saturday and sunny and warm on Sunday.

Attention, caffeine fiends and Hell’s Kitchen happy hour-seekers — coffee-themed cocktails and high-quality java brewed with a mixologist’s eye have arrived at Coffee Project, taking over the former Ikebana Zen sushi restaurant space. Read more…

Coffee Project

Jeff Dyksterhouse’s Hell’s Kitchen journey began as a wide-eyed midwestern boy with just $300 to his name, to working on some of the biggest musicals of the late 80s and 90s, and finally settling down to becoming a successful neighborhood real estate broker. Read on for his West Side Story…

Circle Line Pup Cruise ZZ_PUP Jeff Dyksterhouse

What we’ve been reading

* Stories that might be behind a paywall are marked with a 💰

This short film documents the work Christine Berthet and other HK activists put in since 2005 to make changes on 9th Avenue. (Streetfilms)

Bridgerton comes to Hell’s Kitchen as an experience… (SecretNYC)

In our neighborhood… “85 percent of households don’t own a car, but suffer the third worst air pollution in the city, the fourth-highest traffic volumes, and the slowest bus speeds” — still, NYPD Midtown South made it to bad parking finals. (Streetsblog)

How much is the city spending on hotels to house migrants? (New York Times💰)

You can soon play pickleball at $120 per hour at the Wollman Rink in Central Park. (Gothamist)

Freeze Frame

Smoke Shop

Walking 9th Avenue below W42nd Street yesterday, I finally (after 5 months) got to witness the smoke shop phenomena. The Holland Bar has been predictably been replaced by one — and next to Tavola another one is getting ready to open. Sigh…

Happy birthday to Catie Savage — who is spending her early morning being our substitute proofreader — and to Sal Sinatra and Jesus Gutierrez.