Our New York Marathon

Day 12

Friday, June 10, 2011

New Yorkers need to get away from the crowds and concrete of the city as much as we do, it seems.  There are lots of little oases spread throughout the city where people can just sit a spell in a garden or a tree-shaded courtyard, often near a waterfall that drowns out the sounds of the city.  

Today we searched out some of these special spots, and a couple landmark buildings, as well.

But first, we stopped at B&H Photo—a Mecca for photographers world-wide, with an overwhelming expanse of all things related to cameras, photography, optics and associated technology and electronics.  It was the most crowded space we have been in, other than the subway at rush hour.  There was one “take a number” row of 68 sales representatives/advisers to help with purchase decisions, islands for all the major camera manufacturers with sales people to answer questions and provide demos of their products, and countless roving sales people eager to provide advice and sales assistance for merchandise that was not sold behind counters.  You gave each item you wanted to a salesperson as you found it, the salesperson took it and gave you a receipt for it, then you checked out by the front door, where everything you had collected during your visit miraculously materialized.  Other than their awesome knowlegeability about all things photographic, the other thing that was unusual about B&H’s staff was that about 90% of them were male Orthodox Jews.  We understood why the store is closed on Saturday.

Our next stop was the High Line, a linear park developed on an elevated railway bed with a very interesting history.  Back in the early 1900s, Tenth Avenue on the West Side was known as Death Avenue, due to the high number of fatalities resulting from the collision of freight trains with other traffic on the streets of this busy industrial area.  Men on horses known as West Side Cowboys rode in front of the trains waving red flags trying to avert catastrophe.  The High Line, known then as the West Side Improvement Project, was approved in 1930, and built by 1934 at a cost in today’s dollars of $2 billion.  Its 13 mile long elevated track eliminated almost 200 street level rail crossings.  Due to reduced rail traffic, a portion of the High Line was torn down in the 1960s, and the last train ran on the remaining section in 1980 (carrying just three cars of frozen turkeys).  A citizen’s group with a vision saved it from demolition, and the first section of the High Line Park opened in June 2009.  The second section, adding ten blocks to the elevated park, opened just two days before we visited. 

The park is a heavily landscaped rail bed 30 feet above the tenement and warehouse lined city streets.  In some places, it passes so close to the buildings next door, that you feel you could reach out and shake hands with someone standing on their fire escape.  The tracks are mostly covered by blooming wildflower gardens, grasses or planters holding ornamental trees, but they do peek out in spots, reminding us of the origins of the park. 

The one thing the High Line is missing is shade, so we do not linger long after walking its length on the sunny warm day. 

We visit two other pocket parks in Midtown Manhattan, lovely little shaded courtyards with trees and waterfalls where people stop to rest, read or relax with their smart phones or computers.  We are impressed by how many people are plugged into technology here, so that they are present, but not fully present, wherever they go.

 

In contrast to the quiet parks, we visit Grand Central Station, which is bustling with travelers and tourists, but doesn’t seem crowded, since its huge expanse swallows the masses.  We notice a plaque on the wall recognizing Jacqueline Kennedy’s efforts which saved Grand Central Station from demolition in the 1970s.  That decade was a tough time for historic landmark train stations in the way of urban renewal, as we saw with our own Union Terminal in Cincinnati, but it is hard to believe that New York would consider squandering an architectural treasure of this magnitude.  Thank you, Jackie!  There is an audio tour available, but we don’t have time today—maybe later. 

Our next destination is the Flat Iron Building, where we find the city has closed off a section of the street out front and made a little garden with café tables.  Every New Yorker must have a little green space to enjoy nearby, if only they know where to look, it seems. 

Then we are back on the subway to Brooklyn, where we meet Dick’s son Matt, who was been conducting a workshop at PS 261 there.  We got together at a coffee shop for a quick bite, then Matt catches a taxi to the airport, and we head back to the Lower East Side on the subway.

 

In spite of all the time we spent in peaceful park-like settings, this has turned out to be a far busier day than we anticipated when we started out.  We vow to slow down tomorrow.

 

Two Museums and a Musical

Our New York Marathon

Day 11

Thursday, June 9, 2011

We packed two museums and a Broadway show into this very full day.

We began with the Museum of Sex, whose avowed mission is “to present the history evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality.  This Museum hit our radar screen when we read a very favorable review of their Burlesque exhibit in the New York Times shortly before we left home.  It was listed in our Frommer’s Guide to New York as a “find.”  

Well, overall the museum was a very seedy and poorly maintained place, a lot of its video graphics were too grainy or out of focus to do justice to the points they were trying to illustrate, a bunch of the other exhibitry was a bit graphic and prurient for our tastes, and the Burlesque exhibit took away all the glamour from the form, with (in this case in focus) videos of elderly women who no longer resembled their promotional posters reminiscing about the old days when their stars shone bright.  The most educational part of the exhibit was a quote attributed to present-day burlesque performer Scotty the Blue Bunny: “The difference between a stripper and a burlesque performer is a stripper will get upset if she doesn’t get money, a burlesque performer will get upset if she doesn’t get applause.”   Sorry, Sex Museum, no applause from us. 

On to The Frick Collection, which couldn’t be more different in every way.  Henry Clay Frick liked very high quality representational European art, and, since he made a fortune in coke and steel, he had plenty of money to buy the very best.  He built a French style mansion on Fifth Avenue where he could be surrounded by his beautiful collection in 1914, and unfortunately he didn’t get to enjoy it for very long--he died just five years later.  Fortunately for us, he arranged in his will for his collection to continue to be maintained in his home for our enjoyment today.   

They don’t allow photos in the house, but they made an exception for the New York Times, because the day after our visit, this photograph of “St. Francis in the Desert,” by Giovanni Bellini, illustrated a critic’s review of the painting.  It was in the spotlight, having been recently sent out for conservation and study.

There were plenty of other paintings to enjoy.  Frick collected three of only 34 attributed Vermeer paintings in the world—only the Met and the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam have more.  He also collected four Rembrandts, Hans Holbein’s famous painting of Sir Thomas Moore, and many French Salon and Barbizon school paintings.   

The paintings are impressive, as is the house itself, and the exquisite furniture and decor.  He redesigned one of his rooms to accommodate six huge panels originally painted by Fragonard for Marie Antoinette.  The panels cost him $750,000, and the rest of the period furniture and décor for the room cost five million dollars.  

The art is exceptional, the setting beautiful, the acoustiguide which is free with admission provides interesting stories about the artwork—this museum is a treasure. Thank you, Mr. Frick, for sharing your wealth with us.   

Our enjoyment of art today was not over yet.  Here is a picture of us on the subway at Broadway-bound rush hour.  We were on our way to “Memphis” at the beautiful historic Schubert Theater.    

Based loosely on the life of Dewey Phillips, the musical tells the story of a white DJ in Memphis in the 1960s who plays black music on a white radio station and falls in love with a black singer, creating controversy and scandal in both black and white communities.  It got the “Best Musical” Tony Award last year.  The show has a compelling plot, a great musical score by David Bryan (a founding member of Bon Jovi), and the cast members are dynamite singers and dancers. What’s not to like-- except maybe the caricaturish acting of Chad Kimball, who plays the DJ—but we forgive him, because he is such a fabulous singer and dancer.  

Happy Oceans Day at the Natural History Museum

Our New York Marathon

Day 10

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Our calendar says today is Oceans Day—it seems an appropriate time to visit the American Museum of Natural History.  The subway has a stop for the museum—and the walls at the stop are decorated with many tile depictions of animals.  Isn’t this life-size subway seascape a wonderful first photo for our Oceans Day log?  

Deciding where to go first is easy—the ticketing agent gives us tickets to the next Planetarium show and sends us off get in line for it right away.  It is a great show about how stars and planets form and die with lots of beautiful light show projections on the dome and special effects.  We think that an experienced educator decided that the effect that combines a surround-sound explosion with vibrating the seats has to happen at least every six minutes to keep the audience awake, and then they wrote the script for the show accordingly.  It worked for us. 

After that, the museum is so huge it is hard to decide what to do.  We wander around the gems and minerals (boring presentation) and the birds (the stuffed ones in the dioramas are very old and faded, and a lot of the exhibit is just study skins arranged on a wall—boring again).  We finally find our way into the evolution exhibit, which is captivating—clearly, someone has put some time into refreshing the content in the past thirty years, unlike most of the permanent exhibits.  The African animal dioramas are beautiful—renovated in 1972, the plaque says, giving us a hint as to how much longer ago it must have been that anyone touched the bird dioramas.   

We save the best—the Museum’s impressive dinosaur collection—for last.  There are no robotic life-size models or monstrous sound effects, just big breath-taking bones and excellent labels telling about how they were discovered, and urging the visitor to notice the clues that tell us how the dinosaurs moved, what they ate, and other aspects of their lives. We spend a very long time admiring the dinosaurs, and leave on a high note.  

We don’t do a lot more than this today.  When dinnertime rolls around, we think about all the different ethnic foods we have had lately, and decide it is time to add to our repertoire by strolling over to our own neighborhood’s Little India.  Just a few streets over from ours is a block that has around a dozen Indian Restaurants to choose from--each with an Indian standing at the door urging us to come on in and enjoy a free appetizer, or free music, or air conditioned comfort.  We pick one that looks particularly lovely and busy, and enjoy a wonderful meal . . . and a great end to yet another great day in New York.

We Discover the Secret Life of Willis

We suspect that Willis, our reason for being in New York, is secretly a celebrity model cat.  We have seen his picture on the side of trucks driving around town.   

A Day of Biking (Mis)Adventures

Our New York Marathon
Day 9
Tuesday, June 6, 2011

The Hudson River Greenway is the busiest bikeway in the United States.  Stretching from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan to the Little Red Lighthouse at the foot of the George Washington Bridge, it offers eleven theoretically car-free miles of scenic riding pleasure.  The car-free nature of the trail is merely theoretical, since the day we rode it, there were two detours which sent us out onto the streets—in Harlem, and, more terrifyingly, in the Financial District at rush hour (where I came within inches of being flattened by a limo).  But those detours were nothing, compared to our big flat tire adventure.

 

We rented our bicycles from Master Bike Shop, located just half a block from the middle of the Greenway, and reputed by comments on the web to be a helpful and friendly place.  We did not find   much evidence of helpfulness in our transaction, and they were close to surly when we expressed concerns about our seats slipping from their adjusted position, but we took the bikes and got out of there as soon as we could, ready for an enjoyable ride.  And, except for a few stops to readjust our slipping seats, that’s just what we had.     

We headed north along the trail first.  The trail passed through parks and green spaces, and paralleled busy Riverside Drive, where cars were going far more slowly than we were.  We shared the trail with joggers and dog walkers, skate boarders and other bicycle riders, and plenty of people who came just to sit on the many benches along the way to watch the river and the passing parade on the Greenway.  

We turned around at the Little Red Lighthouse, where a large school group was on a field trip of little visible educational value (a pattern we saw on our Circle Tour and will continue to see at each museum we visit here).  Having seen the Little Red Lighthouse on our Great Loop cruise years ago, and again on our Circle Cruise last week, it was a treat to stand at its base on land a get a good close look today.  

We stopped at a trailside grocery store in Harlem to buy picnic supplies, and immediately thereafter, Dick got a flat tire.  When he called our “friendly” bike shop for assistance, they told him to call the operator to ask where the nearest bike shop was and to go there to get it fixed.  We brainstormed our options over lunch, and Dick used our maps and smart phone to come up with what seemed like a good idea at the time.  We would walk to the subway, take the train ten blocks, come out right by a bike shop, and be all set.

The devil was in the details.  When we got to the subway, it was elevated, so we had to carry our bikes up several flights of stairs to get to the track.  Then, when we got to our stop, we were underground, so we had to carry our bikes up a couple more flights of stairs to get to the surface.  Ooops, we weren’t where we thought we would be when we emerged.  A phone call to the bike shop where we were headed for repairs clarified that we would have to walk through the campus of Columbia University and through a park to get to the shop.  Pretty campus.  Lovely park, except that it was built on a hillside, so we had to carry our bikes down roughly 100 steps by the time we got through it.  

When we finally found the bike shop, we had walked about three miles in temperatures approaching 90 degrees, and Dick was carrying the back part of the bike, because the tube and tire had completely disassembled from the rim.   The people at the shop were very nice, and fixed the tire quickly.  If they had rented us the bikes, they would have sent someone out to help us, they said.  

They gave us directions back to the bike trail (which was pretty far away, as it turned out), and we continued on our way south.  At Chelsea Pier, tables shaded by blue umbrellas in a colorful garden beckoned us to stop and rest a while.  We bought fruit pops from an ice cream vendor’s cart.  They were so cold they stuck to our lips.  They were so refreshing that Dick got another.

Then we continued on our way, with Manhattan high rises to our left and docks, marinas, a cruise ship port facility and other municipal and commercial ventures along the riverfront. We passed the big Hudson River Park we visited on our walking tour with Joyce Gold, the Intrepid docked next to the pier where we boarded our Circle Cruise last week, and continued toward the tip of the island, where there were more riverfront parks and plazas, a magnificent marina, and the detour that sent us out onto busy city streets near Ground Zero. 

With the detour situation we aren’t sure if we made it to the “official” south end of the trail, but we figured we were close enough.  We turned around, jockeyed our way through the detour streets to get back to the relative serenity of the trail.

We went through Riverfront Park to 72^nd street, then rode east to the bike shop.  We figure we tallied up a total of about 23 miles of riding the bikes and 3 miles of walking/carrying them today, and our flat tire fiasco added a couple hours to the ride.  We were disappointed, but not surprised that the Master Bike Shop employee was ungraciously grudging about compensating us for the repair of the flat tire, which included a new tube, commenting that it was pretty expensive. ($13 is expensive for on demand flat tire repair parts and labor in New York? C’mon!)

Needless to say, when we rent bikes to circumnavigate Central Park, it won’t be from them, even though they have an ideal location just a block and a half from the park.

Another Full and Photogenic Day

Our New York Marathon

Day 8

Monday, June 6, 2011

We were not much impressed by our visit to the Folk Art Museum last week, but the art we saw in the East Village during our bike tour captivated us, and we had to go back to get a closer look today.

These fanciful flowers made of aluminum cans, plastic bottles and other found objects line the chain link fence surrounding a community garden that is only open during limited hours on weekends. These festive flowers are always in bloom, they’re accessible even when the garden gates are locked, and they project the spirit of the community instead of hiding it away inside a fence.

There are lots of aluminum security shutters with graffiti painted on them all over the city, but this mural is exceptional for both its artistry and the poignancy to the message.

This is the most beautiful fire escape in all of New York, blooming with brightly painted umbrellas.

It isn’t far from here to the edge of the largest China Town in the Western Hemisphere.  We lunch at a Chinese restaurant where we are the only English speakers, and the only customers who don’t look Asian.  We do not recognize much on the menu except dumplings, but because each item is clearly described in English, we avoid ordering goose web or intestines, duck’s tongue or blood, chicken feet or cold jelly fish.  Our food is good, and they even have a fork for Dick (he is the only one in the restaurant using this utensil).

Just around the corner is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, where an outstanding educator leads us on a tour of a tenement building, telling us the story of the neighborhood, the building, and two Jewish immigrant families who lived there in 1900, when this block was the most crowded place in the world. Back then, 2,200 people lived on the block, which houses 300 people today.  There were half a million Jewish people living in the Lower East Side, the largest settlement of Jewish people in the world.  There were also 25,000 homeless children.

The two families whose recreated apartments we visit worked in the garment industry.  There were 23 garment factories on this block—most of them in the tiny three room apartments where families lived—and 70% of residents here worked in the garment trade.  Through photographs, demonstrations, and vivid descriptions, our guide helps us imagine just how miserable life must have been back then, with no electricity or running water, and no cross ventilation in the summer (it was a warm day, so we got an inkling, but could only imagine how much worse it would be without the electric fan and with a stove on to heat the coals for an iron to press fabric during garment construction).   The word “sweat shop” was coined here, and our guide tells us that to this day there are still 300-400 sweat shops in the city, according to city inspectors.  Things may not have changed as much as we would wish over the past 100 years.

After wandering around the Lower East Side for a week now, it does not surprise us to learn that 40% of Lower East Side residents were born in another country. 

We end our day at the Empire State Building, where we stand in a long line to be screened by security, another long line to wait for the elevator that goes six floors below the observation deck, another line for the elevator that takes us up the final six floors, and then we join a huge mob on the observation deck.  The views of the city shining below us are stunning, but we have to wait to get to the rail for an unimpeded view no matter where we go around the perimeter of the deck.  I find myself doing mental calculus to determine whether the aggravation is worth the reward. I think my results may be biased by my lack of affection for heights, but this experience is clearly not going to make it to my top ten highlights of the trip list.  We did get some pretty nifty pictures to show for all our trouble, though

An All-Day Foray to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Our New York Marathon
Day 7

Sunday, June 5, 2011

We chose this day for our visit to the Met because of a special program scheduled in conjunction with the 2011 Science Festival being held in New York this week.   Two Nobel Laureats--Harold E. Varmus (Physiology of Medicine, 1989) and Roald Hoffmann (Chemistry, 1981)--and Met curator Kathryn Calley Galitz explored this painting—Jacques-Louis David's 1788 Portrait of the Lavoisiers--from the perspectives of science, politics, and art, with some feminism, philosophy, and social commentary thrown in, as well. Garrick Utley moderated the lively discussion, which mesmerized me and put Dick to sleep.  So it goes.    

 

The Lavoisier story in short—Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was the father of modern Chemistry, and his wife was an able assistant to him and a talented artist who illustrated his scientific publications, although she was never given credit for her work at the time. Lavoisier was also an economist and a tax collector, and was fabulously rich—which enabled him to commission this life-size portrait and pay an extraordinary sum for it—twice what the king paid David to paint his portrait a few years earlier. Alas, just five years after the painting was completed, the Lavoisiers lost their aristocratic bourgeois heads to the guillotine.   

A surprising highlight of our visit was a special exhibit of the work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen, entitled “Savage Beauty.”  (No use of cameras was allowed for this exhibit—I pulled the pictures here from the web.)  The show includes dresses and accessories designed by Alexander McQueen, presented in dramatic gallery spaces that include music and videos from his sometimes eerie and always theatrical fashion shows.

Most of the clothing in the exhibit looks like it would be dreadfully uncomfortable, and some of it is downright dangerous, but every piece is exceptionally creative and has exquisite workmanship.  We don’t have a fashion design vocabulary, but we felt that many of McQueen’s dresses and accessories were made with the vision of transforming the wearer into a form of living sculpture or a piece of performance art.    

One dress is made of ostrich feathers and microscope slides dyed red; another is made of razor clam shells.  A flaring balsa wood skirt guarantees no one can get into your personal space, but all will watch you pass in awe.  His Romantic Gothic pieces are surely inspired by Edgar Alan Poe.  Constructed with slashed leather and feathers and bones, one even uses vulture skull bones as epaulets.   Spikey metal collars and corsets resembling external rib cages (one even had a spinal column with a tail!) could be recycled for use in a torture chamber. 

Just when we were thinking that McQueen was unsettlingly dark, we got to the Romantic Exoticism section of the exhibit, full of Japanese and Chinese-inspired creations, re-visioning traditional kimono and obi forms in layers of richly embellished and embroidered silk.   

The exhibit ended with a hologram of a wisp of smoke twisting and expanding to eventually develop into Kate Moss wearing a diaphanous gown, billowing around her in as she spun slowly in the wind, then continuing to twist and disappear back into a wisp of smoke once again.  It was a beautifully haunting image.   

This was contemporary art that caught us by surprise and had a strong impact on both of us, though we are still puzzling over why exactly. 

Our third favorite part of our visit to the Met was afternoon tea.  We shared a tiered tray of fancy little sandwiches and sweets to carry us through the end of our long day in the museum.  The guards had to chase us out at closing time.