Shhhh! For the inaugural Manhattan Times “Where’s My Peeps?” contest, we invited readers to treat the seasonal marshmallow candies called Peeps as if they were tourists to Northern Manhattan, photographing them visiting the area’s sites.

Shhhh! For the inaugural Manhattan Times “Where’s My Peeps?” contest, we invited readers to treat the seasonal marshmallow candies called Peeps as if they were tourists to Northern Manhattan, photographing them visiting the area’s sites. With only three days to go in the contest, one reader, Elizabeth Lorris Ritter, has taken the effort to heart by spending several days during the unseasonably warm weather whisking her little friends to her favorite places, literally from the top of the neighborhood (Columbia University’s painted “C” at Spuyten Duyvil to the bottom (a visit to Trinity Cemetery). You can see Ritter’s photos and posts at http://manhattantimesnews.com/en/shhhh-blogtwitter.html.

If her work inspires to contribute your own Peeps photos, email them to info@manhattantimesnews.com by 5 p.m. Fri., March 26.

Shhhh! Like Ritter’s Peeps, The New York Times also recently visited our northernmost outpost, stopping in for coffee at Indian Road Café on W. 218th Street as research for a piece published March 9 called “New York Is Finally Taking Its Coffee Seriously.” Of the casual coffee/wine bar, the Times wrote: “the macchiato is solid, and a nominal market has a good selection of beans from Counter Culture Coffee.”

Shhhh! While local businesses have long used artwork to help lure customers, two are pushing the envelope to extremes. H&R Block at 3933 Broadway off W. 165th Street is raffling off a mask from Ghana as part of an African art exhibit during the height of tax season. The free raffle of the mask, valued at $75, will be on April 1.

The second annual staging of the Vagina Monologues to support the domestic violence project at Northern Manhattan Improvement Coalition is scheduled for Fri., April 9 (in Spanish) and Sat., April 10 (in English) at William Black Alumni Auditorium on W. 168^th Street. Both performances are at 7:30 pm and cost $15 (visit www.ticketderby.com for more information).

The performances, by local theater group Teatro Las Tablas, were moved to the much more spacious auditorium, said NMIC’s Paula Walzer, after last year when the audience was so large, they had to turn people away at the door to Good Shepherd Church.

Shhhh! Speaking of art and business, if you haven’t already heard, the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA) has made its annual announcement for the poster contest for the Uptown Arts Stroll this June. Past designers have included Smashmanor, Knox Martin and Leandro Miguel Cruz. Local artists who want to compete for a chance to create the singular look of this year’s Stroll should reach out to

The deadline is Fri., April 16 at 5pm. Email info@nomaanyc.org for details.

Shhhh! On a sadder note, a mainstay of Northern Manhattan’s online community is hanging up his keyboard, at least locally. Brad Aaron, author of the hyper-Inwood blog Inwoodite, announced on March 17 that he would soon shut down the three-year-old blog.

“When I ‘launched’ Inwoodite one evening back in May of 2007, Inwood’s online presence was pretty small. There were other blogs, to be sure, but as far as I know Inwoodite was the only one exclusively devoted to reporting and gathering neighborhood news,” he wrote in his farewell post.

He notes that now, with the online social networking tool Twitter, information zips around the neighborhood faster than ever. That combined with changes in his “professional priorities” led him to allow one of the neighborhood’s brightest online stars wink out.

“And since there are few things sadder in the online universe than an abandoned blog, I will be taking Inwoodite offline in a few days,” he wrote.

However, if you just can’t get enough of his mass-transit and pedestrian friendly prose, Aaron’s work can be found on the site of his day job, Streetsblog. Aaron said he will still be in the online neighborhood, 142 characters at a time on his Inwoodite Twitter account.