Nerd York City is a hyper-local nerdy news, culture, and entertainment guide.
We’re experts in the field of niche New York, covering the beats of comics, movies, television, toys, games, anime, manga, science, art, music, and food. We’re a calendar, a black book, and a map to all that is nerdy for the 8.4 million who call Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Staten Island home.
Nerd York City is the pet project of husband and wife team Peter Tatara and Petrina Cheng.
Literally. Rather than getting a cat, they started this website. Peter spent close to 10 years at ReedPOP, where he worked on guests, content, and business development for events including New York Comic Con, Star Wars Celebration, PAX, the New York Anime Festival, Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, Singapore Toy, Games & Comic Con, Comic Con India, and Oz Comic Con. He left Reed to bring his love of anime and New York City together and is the founder of Anime NYC. Peter’s left-handed, a vegetarian, and his blood type is A. He’s also a fantastically self-published writer who likes animation, cashews, rice cookers, penguins, pugs, Pomeranians, WWII, NPR, Netflix, the New York Rangers, Doctor Who, and Universal Health Care. He dislikes the poetry of Sylvia Plath. The high point of his life was meeting Alan Alda. Petrina runs the delicious knitting and crochet shop Tea, Love, Crochet. She likes yarn, ruffles, lace, fancy dresses, and the color black. She has a crippling addiction to macarons, drinks her body weight in tea every damn day, and is very likely a vampire from Rococo France.
Nerd York City started in 2010.
And, if you’ve exhausted everything else there is to do on the internet, you can read our entire origin story. The short version is we wished this kind of website existed to help us plan our own weekends, and, since it didn’t, we built it ourselves. The current iteration of Nerd York City runs on WordPress atop a modified theme created by Anders Norén.
Nerd York City would not be possible without the support, guidance, and inspiration of…
Michelle Manning, Chris Cimi, Ali T. Kokmen, Jim Brooks, John Fuller, Asif Iqbal, David Bushman, Mike Negin, Mike Singer, Adam Ghahramani, Gina Gagliano, Anita Jacobs, Anna Fischer, Renee Gloger, Shannon Jowett, Newton Grant, David Tennant, Bibi Kam, Sonnya Paz, Megumi Sato, Andre Smith, Chris Troy, Carrie Wink, and Shauna from Sunnyside.
And an eternal huzzah and kudos…
To Clair Segal for coining the “Nerd York City” name as, before it, the working title for this website was fishcustard.com. And, before the brilliance that was fishcustard.com, concepts included newgeekcity.com, newyorkgeekly.com, geekle.com, sciencemeat.com, nerdsushi.com, wasabinyc.com, umaminyc.com, hachikonyc.com, oringo.com, dairingo.com, donburinyc.com, sukiyakinyc.com, 42ndstreetsamurai.com, spacegandalf.com, daleksinmanhattan.com, geronimonyc.com, and nerdsherpa.com. It’s amazing how bad most of these were, and it’s even more amazing that most of ’em were taken. Seriously, someone was squatting on oringo.com, but nerdyorkcity.com was open?
And, of course, we’re proudly Made in NYC.
Nerd York City’s secret headquarters is not so secretly just over the Queensboro Bridge in Sunnyside, Queens.
