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New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 54 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Given my weakness for fancy-dressed skeletons, I was tempted to pick the Red Death costume from “Phantom.” But I will instead say Julie Taymor’s  costume/puppet designs from the Lion King are the best thing currently at the library, and still the best thing (visually) on Broadway.

The New York Public Library’s branch at Lincoln Center is easy to overlook, tucked in between the Met and the Vivian Beaumont Theater.  It puts on a number of free exhibitions throughout the year, and has a fairly large space for doing so.  I saw a great show celebrating the 45th anniversary of Sesame Street there a few years back. Continue reading “New York Public Library for the Performing Arts”

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New York School of Interior Design Gallery

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 19 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned The front doors of the school of interior design are massive, wooden, sliding.  When the revolution comes, the building will ensure that interior designers hold out a little longer than say doggie daycare purveyors or third-generation coffee roasters.

If you wake up one day and want to be an interior designer, there are worse places you could learn your new trade than the New York School of Interior Design.  Occupying a midtown building that runs through the entire block, the school has a gallery that’s open to the public.

Unless you’re in the trade, or on a self-imposed mission to go to every museum in the city, I’m not sure really why you’d want to go to an interior design museum.  I didn’t find much terribly edifying here. Continue reading “New York School of Interior Design Gallery”

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Dyckman Farmhouse

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 55 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Jacob Dyckman was the first in his family to go to college, earning a degree from Columbia in 1806.  They have his diploma on display in the parlor.  Always nice to meet a fellow Columbia man.

The Dyckman Farmhouse is the least fancy historic home I’ve been to so far on this project.  Owned by the Dyckman family, who had a large farm at the northern tip of Manhattan, the house is reckoned to have been built around 1783, so it’s also the oldest historic house I’ve been to yet.

The Dyckmans owned it for over 100 years, though they didn’t always live there; for a while they rented it, and it served as an inn for a bit too. As the subway was rolling north and Inwood was urbanizing, descendants of the Dyckmans decided the house should be preserved as a museum.  It opened to the public in 1916.  

It’s totally different from the fancy, symmetrical, Federal style of the other historic houses I’ve seen so far.  Rather it is very basic, 2 stories plus a cellar, simple, small, cozy, and a little threadbare.  And like all old houses, seemingly quite crowded and uncomfortable back in the day.

It’s hard to imagine the original surroundings of the house. They built it deliberately close to what was then the Kingsbridge Road (now Broadway).  But mentally erasing the apartment buildings, cars, and buses and putting in rolling fields and outbuildings is hard.  There’s a tiny plot of green in back and on the sides of the house, with a reconstructed Hessian hut, but it barely begins to evoke the original agrarian setting.

This would be a great opportunity for some augmented reality, though I get the sense that the Dyckman Farmhouse budget probably wouldn’t allow for anything that high tech.

The view from the Dyckmans’ front porch today

I didn’t go on a tour, just walked around the house on my own, and I definitely missed the value of a good guide, who I think would’ve conveyed a better sense of the people who lived there than I got from the room descriptions alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The winter kitchen, in the cellar. In the summer they would’ve cooked in a kitchen in a separate building.

I asked about Hamilton, of course, and to my surprise the answer was they’re not aware of any connections with the great man.  However, George Washington likely visited the farm at some point. That said, it would be easy and instructive to combine a visit to Dyckman Farm with the Hamilton Grange, providing a contrast of styles between a working farm and a stately country retreat.

For Reference:

Address 4881 Broadway, Manhattan (at 204th St.)
Website dyckmanfarmhouse.org
Cost Free/Donation

 

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Transit Museum at Grand Central Terminal

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Time spent 16 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned The Elevateds were built in the late 1890s and much of the signage was done in beautiful glass with floral decorations. I think of them as just big and hulking, but they must have been rather beautiful as well.

New York’s main Transit Museum is in Brooklyn, and it is very worth visiting.  When they restored Grand Central in the early 2000s, they opened a tiny branch (or “gallery annex”) of the museum there.  I’m tempted to say skip it — the exhibit space is very small, it’s more gift shop than museum, and there’s so much else to see at Grand Central.

And yet, I’ve seen some really good shows in that little space, so I wouldn’t dismiss the museum out of hand.

This year, the transit system is celebrating the construction of the new Second Avenue Subway.  In a brilliant bit of counter-programming, the current show at the Transit Museum’s GCT branch is about a bit of deconstructing, showing photos of the dismantling of the Third Avenue Elevated in 1955.

The pictures were all taken by Sid Kaplan, now a rather well known printer and photographer, but then a 17-year-old kid.  They are beautiful, great slices of life and times long gone. Even with the High Line and the remaining Elevated lines outside Manhattan, it’s still hard to imagine a time when Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues were overshadowed by train tracks.

Sometimes when I ride the subway I imagine the future moment when a train rolls down those tracks for the last time.  It’ll probably be because of some calamity.  Flooding of the tunnels, giant monster attack, zombies.  Or maybe the subway will be obsolete someday due to self-driving cars or teleportation. So it resonated with me to see a sign announcing to riders, in a matter-of-fact way, the end of the Third Avenue El.

If your time at Grand Central is limited and you have to choose between seeing the Transit Museum there and, say, having a half dozen oysters at the Oyster Bar, or strolling through Grand Central Market, or just seeing the building itself, I  recommend you prioritize any of those other things.

But if you have a spare 15 minutes, the Transit Museum’s small, well conceived shows are worth the time.  And it is a fantastic gift shop, too.

For Reference:

Address Grand Central Terminal, main level, west side
Website nytransitmuseum.org
Cost Free
Other Relevant Links

 

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Hall of Fame for Great Americans

Edification value
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Time spent 46 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Honestly, the whole thing, as a total work of art, history, sociology, Americana, and miraculous survival.  The whole Hall of Fame is the best part of the Hall of Fame.

Halls of fame today are two-a-penny.  Everyone and everything from minor league lacrosse to rock n roll  has a hall of fame.  But it wasn’t always that way.  There had to be, at some point, a first one.

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was the first hall of fame in history.  Designed by the ubiquitous Stanford White as part of his broader super-classical design for NYU’s campus in the then-bucolic Bronx at the turn of the 20th century, the Hall of Fame was a shining beacon on a hill, inspiring Americans everywhere by demonstrating greatness across all fields of endeavor.  And American greatness at that. Continue reading “Hall of Fame for Great Americans”

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American Folk Art Museum

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 52 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned

I’m impressed by the sheer blackness of the Folk Art Museum’s gallery space, as designed for the Gabritschevsky show.  It’s super different from anywhere else I’ve seen art yet.

I have a problem with the idea of “folk art.” In my mind, it always translates as “art that’s just not very good.” The naive stuff, the outsider stuff, the untrained stuff, the stuff made by people not right in the head…always it feels to me like there’s some qualifier that attaches to the creator or the work that sets your expectations lower. And for me art is all about high expectations.  I know there’s a Museum of Bad Art, and that’s cool.  Badness can, if it’s bad enough, be instructive and entertaining. But I wouldn’t want to go to a museum of mediocre art.  So I’d never been to the Folk Art Museum.

The Folk Art Museum also has one of the sadder recent histories among the city’s cultural institutions.  The museum built itself a large and beautiful home down the block from the Museum of Modern Art back in 2001.  However, demand to see folk art is apparently far smaller than they figured, and they couldn’t pay back what they borrowed to build it.  So the museum sold its building to MoMA in 2011 and moved uptown to a much, much smaller space in the white marble monolith that houses the Church of the Latter Day Saints diagonally across from Lincoln Center.  MoMA has since controversially demolished the old building, which really was striking, to further its own relentless expansion.

This is particularly sad because the museum has a substantial collection, but nowhere to display it.  When I visited, all of the small yet cavernous space was devoted to work by two artists, both in the “not right in the head” category. 

Eugen Gabritschevsky was Russian born and well on his way to a promising career in the biological sciences, including postdoctorate work at Columbia, when in 1931 he was institutionalized in Germany.  Carlo Zinelli was born in Italy in 1916 and committed to a psychiatric hospital in Verona in 1947, where he lived the rest of his life, until 1974.  Aside from both being in mental institutions, the two men and their art had little in common that I could see.

I’m going to be looking at more art by institutionalized people when I go to the Living Museum, at some point in this project.  It often feels uncomfortable, like it’s exploitative, or like there’s so little basis for understanding what the artist was thinking that any interpretation on my part is presumptuous.

Gabritschevsky, Untitled, no date
Zinelli, Untitled, no date

But should you go to the Folk Art Museum?  They know what they’re doing.  The two exhibits were beautifully installed, they used iPads cleverly, wall texts were generally great, and I really liked the way they suspend frames via cables, so that they float in the air.  But I’m not sure the museum in its current incarnation is going to win any hearts and minds.  If you already have a deep love of folk art, you should go.  Everyone else can feel just fine skipping it.

For Reference:

Address 2 Lincoln Square, Manhattan
Website folkartmuseum.org
Cost Free
Other Relevant Links

 

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Gracie Mansion

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 76 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned The name “Margaret” scratched in the glass of the library window.  Back in the 1960s, Margaret Lindsay, daughter of Mayor John Lindsay, decided to test whether her mom’s diamond ring was really a diamond.  Caroline Giuliani scratched her name in one of the windows, too.  Copycat. But I like that in an official house filled with history and art, they’ve allowed those little human touches to remain.

Visiting Gracie Mansion for this project made me realize I knew nothing about Gracie Mansion, beyond the name.

Gracie Mansion is both older and newer than I thought.  Older, in that I didn’t  realize that the original house was built in 1799, in the classic Federal style I’m coming to know well.  Newer in that it only became the official mayor’s residence of the city in 1942.  La Guardia was the first mayor to live there; prior to that it served several roles, including as the home of the Museum of the City of New York.

The Mayor’s front door
Just inside the front door of Gracie Mansion. The ballroom is through the doors at the top of the stairs. No photos from here on, sorry.

The Executive Director of the Gracie Mansion Conservancy, who was one of the leaders of our tour, described the situation as “Robert Moses wanted to be the mayor’s landlord.”  (He was head of the Parks Commission at the time.) And it became so. 

I also didn’t know exactly where Gracie Mansion is.  I always assumed it was in the East 50s or so.  More central.  Actually it’s in Carl Schurz Park, high in the East 80s, making it really far from everywhere in the city I tend to go.  And a beneficiary of the  Second Avenue subway.

Doing the math, this year is the 75th anniversary of the house becoming the mayor’s residence, and so they’ve decorated the public spaces with a great variety of art that hearkens back to the city in 1942, a time of war and jazz, fear and excitement.  Weegee photos, a Noguchi scuplture, a 1941 signed Yankees champion baseball, Joe DiMaggio prominently in front…

The house has evolved substantially from its original form, with additions true to the Federal style in the mid 1960s (which apparently was fairly scandalous in a time of architectural modernism, but I can’t imagine a modernist wing stuck on the old house).

As with all buildings over a certain vintage in the city, there is a Hamilton connection, although ironically it’s a recent one.  When they built the 1966 addition, they located and installed the mantelpiece from the Bayard Mansion in the new ballroom.  Thus Hamilton died post-duel in front of the ballroom’s  fireplace.  According to Curbed, there’s a chance that Gracie Mansion and Hamilton Grange were designed by the same architect, too.

Spectacular views from Carl Schurz Park

The tour was excellent, the art on display evocative and well chosen.  We got a little rushed, as there was an event going on with the Onassis Foundation that evening in honor of Greek Independence Day, and so we got chased out of the last few rooms.  Sadly the mayor did not crash our tour.  Still, I appreciated the overview of the history of the building and its evolution, and learned a bit I didn’t already know about LaGuardia and some of the other mayors who lived there.  All of the 14 or so people on my tour were New Yorkers, and I strongly encourage everyone who lives here to visit.

For Reference:

Address E 88th St & East End Ave, Manhattan
Website www.nyc.gov/site/gracie/index.page
Cost Free but tours are limited and advanced reservations required
Other Relevant Links

 

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Museum of American Illustration

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 61 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned I was just talking about taking a drawing class, and The Society of Illustrators holds $20 figure drawing sessions, with a bar and live music!  Naked people, alcohol, music, and art.  I mean, what more could one possibly want?

Here’s another place that I had no idea existed before starting this project.  The Society of Illustrators occupies a very handsome townhouse on East 63rd Street, and includes an ample museum space (and even a gift shop!) for showing off the work of illustrators of all kinds.

The museum is terrific, although given that it is a townhouse, there are some stairs to navigate — fair warning if you’re movement impaired.

But what they have is fascinating, including portraits of illustrious illustrators hung in the aforementioned stairways, and temporary exhibitions.  One of their gallery spaces is tucked into a narrow hallway that currently is painted bright red.  It really worked for a show of the work of graphic novel artist Tony Harris, but I hope it’s that way all the time. I’m pretty sure it’s the most exciting room I’ve visited on this project to date.

All the gallery spaces are enjoyable, if much less zippy than the Red Hallway.  They are extremely well suited to the types of work they show.  You can tell the Society has been doing this for a long time, albeit under my radar. 

And the current show is a stunner, a retrospective celebrating the 100th birthday of Will Eisner, possibly the most influential comic artist, well, ever.  In many ways he created the form, and it’s fascinating to move from pieces of his very early work, where he still worked within the then-standard grids of 12 boxes per page, to where he literally thought outside the box, and reworked pages into this extremely expressive medium we know today.  He didn’t coin the term “graphic novel,” but he is considered the father of the form.  Eisner was a relative rarity in that he both wrote and drew, so his books are his through and through.  Most modern comics take 3-6 people to produce, which is in no way meant to discount the talents of those who create them, just to emphasize how unique Eisner was.

Eisner was not at all afraid to get philosophical in his work. From “A Life Force,” 1988

I definitely recommend visiting the Society of Illustrators.  It’s a great space, with a neat, sometimes undervalued area of focus.

For Reference:

Address 128 E 63rd Street, Manhattan
Website societyillustrators.org
Cost  General Admission:  $12; free on Tuesday evenings
Other Relevant Links
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Czech Center New York

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Time spent 22 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Martynka Wawrzyniak slowly, slowly drowning in chocolate in a video that I didn’t really like per se but that I couldn’t look away from.  Definitely doused my craving for Ghiradelli for at least a few days.

The Czech Center’s museum space is small but effective, and it comes associated with three things that no cultural institution I’ve seen thus far can match:

  • A really awesome, dramatically red spiral staircase that goes from the ground floor up into the center of the gallery.

  • An amazing, landmark, 1890s-era building, the Bohemian National Hall.  I always thought the center of Czech culture in New York City was the Bohemian Beer Garden in Astoria, but lo and behold, this place was the heart of the community for almost 100 years.  It’s now home to the Czech Consulate, an investment office, the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, the gallery, a film space, and my third point:
  • A good-looking bar and restaurant on the ground floor.  I was a bit too early to stop in for a drink but I wanted to.  $5 for a small Pilsner Urquell! 

Continue reading “Czech Center New York”

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Drawing Center

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 46 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Gary Simmons’s “Ghost Reels,” an installation in the stairway featuring the names of black stars of the silent film era, written in the style of a typewriter typeface, and partially blurred or erased, evoking a part of film history that many have forgotten.

The Drawing Center occupies a beautifully designed SoHo space, cast iron Corinthian columns outside, several gallery spaces within.  It’s all very clean and spare and modern.  Imminently Instagrammable, as they say.

They generally have 2-3 shows going at a time, and at least currently each focused on the work of a particular artist.  Continue reading “Drawing Center”

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