Category: New York City

Manhattan Potpourri

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NYC HISTORY AND CULTURE

Museum of the City of New York

I don’t believe the Chief Penguin and I had ever been up to 103rd Street and 5th Avenue, but we ventured forth to visit the Museum of the City of New York.  It was well worth it!  The building itself is impressive, and a gorgeous staircase with a hanging light installation leads to the second level. There are two fabulous exhibits on through July 28, one, NY at Its Core: 400 Years of History, and the other, This is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture.

The downstairs exhibit focuses on four attributes that define New York: Money, Diversity, Density, and Creativity.  A wonderful interactive map shows how the city grew and expanded, what industries developed, where people lived, and how it thrived.  A series of alcoves along the side walls of a dark room home in on specific time periods with more details and artifacts.  

“New York at Its Core”

In the open center are free standing kiosks with screens.  Each kiosk features a series of historic figures and even animals relevant to NY’s history.  I engaged with the one on Alexander Hamilton.  You can keep swiping up on the screen to get more info or not.  Or you can choose to focus on another noteworthy individual such as Aaron Burr or see and read about the 20,000 pigs that roamed parts of the city in its earlier days.  Initially I thought perhaps all the featured folks were male, but happily discovered Emily Roebling, a force behind the Brooklyn Bridge construction, and Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a 19th century Black activist.  

Upstairs, the pop culture exhibit introduces a series of photographs of movie production in the city.  Sixteen screens on three walls in an adjacent room project a nonstop ever changing set of film clips all set in one of the city’s boroughs.  Most of the time the screens are not in sync showing the same picture, making for at times, an almost dizzying array of images.  

Overall, these clips capture the energy and liveliness of the city and the love its residents have for their individual neighborhoods.  There’s singing, dancing, cursing, love, and romance.  As you exit, you can scan a QR code to get a list of all the movies that are featured. (~JWFarrington)

DINING OUT: TASTY CHINESE FARE

Land of Plenty (Midtown)

Sichuan noodle dish (eattheworldnyc.com)

We enjoyed a delicious dinner at Land of Plenty with our family last Sunday evening.  The menu at this Sichuan restaurant on E. 58thSt. is extensive, and our daughter-in-law took charge of ordering.  We ended up with an array of tasty vegetables and starters:  green beans, bitter melon, wood ear mushrooms, cucumber salad, scallion pancakes, and dan-dan noodles.  

We also dined on Kung Bo chicken, shrimp fried rice, and a tureen of white fish in a tangy, slightly spicy broth.  The six of us enjoyed this feast, leaving nothing to take home!  The Chief Penguin and I vowed to return to sample more dishes.

WHAT I’M READING

George Eliot & the Constraints of 19th century Marriage

(wikipedia.com)

I have several books going, but I’m well into The Marriage Question:  George Eliot’s Double Life.  This nonfiction title by Clare Carlisle discusses Eliot’s informal “marriage” to George Lewes, a writer and married father with several children.  It reflects on her personal life and how she arrived at this relationship after being attracted to Herbert Spencer and John Chapman among others.  Her feelings in those relationships were not reciprocated, and they remained primarily friendships.  Using Eliot’s personal life as a lens, Carlisle probes her depiction of marriage in her novels, and comments on the legal constraints married women faced in the 19thcentury.  Single women had more freedoms and retained the rights to any money they may have earned or inherited.  I look forward to more exploration of Eliot’s work and may well have to go back and re-read one or more of her novels!

Historical romance novels, the good ones, depict the plight of women who marry and lose control of their property as well as their person to the demands and desires of sometimes controlling husbands.  British writer Evie Dunmore is the author of a new romance series called A League of Extraordinary Women.  Set in Oxford, these four women go against the established order, are actively engaged in women’s suffrage, think nothing of lobbying a duke in parliament, and publishing what many would call subversive ideas.  The writing is good, the women are smart and funny, and their men are sexy and ultimately surrender.  If you’re looking for a romp of a read, try one! 

Note: Header photo of cafe space at Museum of the City of New York ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)

Manhattan: Tulips & Art

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TULIP TIME

With the cold, somewhat snowy March followed by cool April weather, the trees here are just leafing out. But, there are tulips galore!  I love the little fenced square and rectangle gardens along the streets with their big bold tulips. Jefferson Market Garden was also a riot of tulip beds. Makes for a lovely spring!  Usually we come in May and any remaining tulips are bedraggled and beaten down.

AT THE WHITNEY

American painter Grant Wood is arguably best known for his portrait of a farm couple called “American Gothic.”  Actually it’s meant to be a father and daughter and if you look closely, you can see the difference in their ages.  Most people just assumed it was a husband and wife.  

Wood painted farm scenes and the rural folks of his native Iowa, but he did it from an idealized perspective based on memories of his childhood and his view of a simpler time.  Lots of rounded shapes and flat surfaces.  

Early in his career, he made the requisite European tour and this exhibit includes several impressionistic works from that time.  

But I was also taken with his “Women of Revolution,” a less than admiring portrait of three women of the DAR.

What comes across here and what I enjoyed most was getting an enlarged sense of the variety in Wood’s oeuvre. The exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art runs into early June and is well worth a visit!

 

GRANDPARENTS’ DAY

The Chief Penguin and I had the pleasure of experiencing Grandparent and Special Persons’ Day at Brearley, our granddaughter’s school.  Fortunately, all four of her grandparents were able to attend.  It’s an impressive place and it was great to hear and see how these kindergarten girls are being empowered to be creative, bold, and caring individuals.  

RETURN VISITS

We will eat a lot of meals out while we are in the city.  Here are several places we’ve re-visited.

Lenox Hill Grill.  The all-American comfort food you would expect from any respectable diner. Grilled ham and cheese with fries and a tuna salad sandwich with cole slaw on the side made for a quick tasty lunch.

Amali. Now billing itself as “sustainable Mediterranean” with a new menu with more veggies and small plates, it’s easy to avoid ordering an entrée.  We had prosciutto, chorizo, and buffalo blue cheese, followed by chickpea and cauliflower croquettes with a spicy salsa, grilled asparagus and green onions, and fluke crudo.  All delicious, with Greek and Italian overtones, and mostly healthy!

Gradisca.  This Italian restaurant on W. 13th Street was jumping on a Thursday night and service was slower than we’ve experienced in the past.  But, the pasta was as wonderful as always!  One of the specials was farfalle with little chunks of zucchini and shrimp in a light lemon cream sauce; another was Mama’s homemade beef tortellini that we watched her make at a side table in the dining room.  And our friends B. and A. were pleased with the cavatelli with eggplant.

Note: All photos by JWFarrington.

Brooklyn Bound

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BROOKLYN BOUND

Last week we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. We first took the subway from Christopher Street to Chambers St. and changed lines exiting at Clark Street in Brooklyn.   We walked down the hill to the Brooklyn Bridge Park for a pit stop, but also checked out the Manhattan Bridge from underneath and stood on the riverbank and gazed across the water.

The Brooklyn Bridge is an icon, solid and robust with its gray stone arches. It’s easier to walk than the Golden Gate in San Francisco because pedestrians and cyclists are on a separate level above the cars. It was a sunny, coolish day, and we spent about 40 minutes in all walking it, given that we had to stop to take photos along the way.

  

                                                      Back in Manhattan we walked past City Hall, stopped in that park, and then walked past the new Lower Manhattan transit center, past Ground Zero, and then went left toward the Hudson River. Ultimately, we walked the entire way back from Chambers Street to our apartment near Pier 45. Very good exercise!

The next day we took the Metro again, this time to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, another place we hadn’t visited.  The lilacs were done, the cherry blossoms long past, but the roses were in full bloom! The Stanford Rose Garden includes many different species and colors of roses from historic ones to more contemporary tea roses.  It was a riot of color.

To be different, the C.P. suggested we take the shuttle train from the garden stop to get the C train. We waited a bit for the shuttle and then waited some more for the C to Manhattan. Two stops later, the train halted—signal problem ahead. Five minutes later it was announced the signal problem was also a switch problem with a switch stuck in the middle. No A or C trains were going north to Manhattan with no indication of how long the delay would be.

Realizing this was a problem, we exited to the street and were able to get Uber within about 10 minutes. We saw more of Brooklyn than we had intended and it cost a lot more, but we were back in the hood in about 30 minutes. Thus we had our own experience with deteriorating service on the subway!

Note:  All photos  ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).  Header image taken in Stanford Rose Garden.