NEW OLD URBAN LANDSCAPE: NYC

From "The Ramble" in Central Park

The shape of the land

I never appreciated New York City until I moved away.

I don’t live in the “real” America, was how my thinking went when I was growing up.  Although I was born in Brooklyn and lived in Queens until I left for college,  “America,” my idea of it anyway, was of some other place, a place where there weren’t apartments or attached houses, but open fields, forests, maybe even mountains, where you could actually see the shape of the land.  (Right, I know, Vermont!)

What's not to appreciate?  A fancy nest in a yellow aerie.

Where else but NY?

It’s not easy to see the shape of the land when you’re in New York.  When Madison Avenue gently climbs uptown it’s a reminder that Manhattan isn’t a totally flat grid.  It just seems that way.  Knowing the lower Manhattan subways flooded after Hurricane Sandy, is a reminder that there is water all around, and lower Manhattan really is lower.  Central Park, thanks to Franklin Law Olmstead, is, of course, a hugely enhanced reminder of how things once looked––those primeval rocks sticking out of the ground––but other city parks are mostly manufactured.  And all the buildings, because of their immense height and size, create a kind of giant concrete sequoia forest, the throngs of people––if you can bear with this metaphor––like underbrush you need to push through if you want to get to the edges to see things like rivers. 

The High Line rises above that–literally.   You can see the Hudson River from it at every cross street.  It was created in 2002 after a couple of guys from the neighborhood envisioned an urban park cum walkway in the long-abandoned elevated railway line by then sprouting tall weeds and even trees.  (It starts at W30th Street for now (an extension over the rail yards is in the works) and ends downtown at Gansevoort in the meatpacking and one-time spice warehouse district.

A winter garden on the High Line; art work on building in background.

Sometimes you walk close to buildings...

Other times it widens; opposite the steps, the side of a building serves as a movie screen in summer

Places, things

A whole week in NYC offered a chance to do more than we do on the usual weekend visits:  the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (not just one day, but twice, and still not near enough to see it all), and the Museum of the American Indian (at Battery Park, a locale that reminds you the sea is out there).  Scratching the surface, in other words.  Still, when you have more time you see more, and you see differently.  At the Met, where it’s so hard to spend enough time when the only time is a single afternoon, we were half way through the second day's visit before we viewed a single painting, although paintings, and a few large objects, comprised most of my memory of past visits. 

At the Met I was struck by the weight of the armor:  ~90 pounds on the horse, maybe ~60 on the man, and then there was the weight of the man, plus lance.

The armor of Henry VIII in his late years; I could sense him inside, having just
read Hilary's Mantel's "Bringing Up the Bodies," about Henry VIII and
his long time chief advisor Thomas Cromwell.

One of the Met's magnificent big spaces

Probably not color-correct here,  one of several Van Gogh "Sunflowers" 

I had been eager to see Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” having spent countless hours on an annoying 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the painting with its challenging swirls and lacings of every conceivable color in sky, tree, mountains, town.  It wasn’t a complete waste of time, however, because I got to know intimately every shade Van Gogh used, and every section of his painting.  But what a revelation to see the original again!  How vibrant!  I couldn't get my eyes off it.  I felt as if I knew every brushstroke.  I found new colors I hadn't seen before.  I'd been working with a faded imitation that had several inches lopped off the top.  

 My stupid lousy puzzle.  Those aren't birds in the sky; six pieces got sucked up by the vacuum.  And my photo missed including bottom part.  But you get the idea. 

The original (well, sort of) at the MoMA  

Among other entertainments ("The Mystery of Edwin Drood, an award-winning musical that somehow lacked that elusive magic quality, a cabaret performance by chanteuse Ute Lemper that supplied the missing magic), we saw a remarkable play.  Memorable, you could say.  “The Perfect Crime" it was, and it has to rank as the worst play I have ever seen.  I include elementary school productions.  The crappy theater, the outdated set, the acting ("amateurish" would be a compliment), the utterly  incomprehensible plot––uniformly atrocious.  It is–unbelievably–the longest running play in New York theater history.  There are four roles and everyone was awful.  The leading lady has played hers for over 10,000 performances without missing a day since the show opened in 1987.  1987!  That’s when Reagan was President, and before cell phones, 9/11, and iPods.  What circle of hell must she be in?  

(My TripAdvisor review: “Was this a high school play rehearsal? Was the script written by furiously typing monkeys? Did leading lady Catherine Russell have a plane to catch? Did George McDaniel’s emoting belong to a different play entirely? Which correspondence course did John Hillmer take to learn his British accent? Why is this perfect mess still playing after all these years?)  The sentiment was shared by numerous others.  It was oh so very bad we actually kind of enjoyed it.

Constructions

NY is in flux, as usual, with buildings coming down, others going up.  As in a forest, it’s sometimes hard to pick out individual ones because there are so many assembled close.  Suddenly there may be a break between streets or a corner turned, and you see what otherwise you might have missed.

To enter the 9/11 memorial site you are required to line up and pass through a security check, like boarding a plane (belts off, pockets emptied).  After that you emerge onto a large open park, a place you might want to linger in if you didn’t feel so boxed in.  I hope it won’t always be this way. It signals menace.  Which, I suppose, is fitting.  I got the same feeling from the memorials themselves.  The dark pit into which the black water flows is creepy. That, too, seems fitting. 

Shattered remains of the Trade Center walls and piles of rubble were still here when we came to this place in October of 2001.  The air still smelled of unidentifiable substances.  Ash still filled several store windows.  Tourists were still posing with abashed-looking policemen.

The new World Trade Center

Speaking of buildings, it is the 100th anniversary of a great one:  Grand Central Station.  It's one-time counterpart, Pennsylvania Station, is nothing more than a subway entrance to the trains below.  Grand Central is a beautiful survivor.