BIG PICTURE  Players glide, pucks carom and goalies guard the net during NY Rangers hockey games at Madison Square Garden, and all the action is instantly replayed on four 14-four-wide rear projection HD screens. The command center for all the state-of-the-art TV equipment is the 600-square-foot GardenVision control room, hidden between the beams in the arena's roof, high above its frozen floor. How does that floor become a sheet of glare ice? See "Inner Workings" (p. 16).


HAMMER TIME  At the venerable Christie's auction house, a recent sale of Impressionist and Modern Art fetched a whopping $491,472,000—the highest cumulative total in auctioneering history. The priciest lot of the evening was "Die Strassenbilder," a set of 11 paintings of Berlin street scenes by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), for which the winning bidder paid more than $38 million.

A WHEEL WINNER  There are 13,000 taxis in New York City, and all but one charge passengers $2.50 upon entry and 40 centsevery one-fifth of a mile. Riders lucky enough to hail cab number 1G12, on the other hand, can actually make money (a lot of it) en route to their destination. Driven by comedian Ben Bailey, the yellow van is the mobile "set" for Cash Cab, a game show on the Discovery Channel.

COOKING THE BOOKS  After preparing about 100,000 orders of tempura green beans, 55,000 sides of sautéed zucchini and 85,000 simple skillet roast chickens at The Red Cat, Jimmy Bradley shares his secrets in Red Cat Cookbook: 125 Recipes from New York City's favorite Neighborhood Restaurant (Clarkson Potter, 2006). Other local cooks with new books include Jim Botsacos of Molyvos, who updates traditional Hellenic fare in The New Greek Cuisine (Broadway, 2006), and John Doherty, author of The Waldorf=Astoria Cookbook (Bullfinch, 2006) and overseer of sevenchefs de cuisine, 10 sous-chefs, 18 pastry chefs, 14 garde managers and a legion of line cooks in the kitchens of the famed hotel.

"I'm just a Broadway Baby/Walking off my tired feet/Pounding Forty-Second Street/To be in a show —"Broadway BAby," words and music by Stephen Sondheim, from Follies (1971)