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.
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)
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
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.)
