| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 50 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | Kiki Smith’s contemporary stained glass replacement for the museum’s original enormous rose window is extraordinarily beautiful. More about it in the review below.
|
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the various Jewish communities of the Lower East Side were coming into their own. Immigrants were doing what they do in the Land of Opportunity, pulling themselves up from abject poverty, starting businesses, and finding degrees of prosperity. A group of successful Orthodox Jews decided to build a house of worship that reflected their heritage as well as their new lives in the United States. That was the genesis of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, which opened in 1887.
Decline, and Rebirth
Fast forward to the early-mid 1900s. As happens so often in New York, families moved to new neighborhoods, up and out of the Lower East Side. Eventually, the congregation dwindled and those who remained couldn’t maintain a huge, fancy house of prayer. So they shut it down, meeting in the basement. (A small congregation still meets here to this day). Sealed up, the space declined, and not genteelly. Glass broke, brass tarnished, and pigeons nested and pooped all over the place. Continue reading “Museum at Eldridge Street”
Before I started this project, I never realized how many of New York’s city-run and community colleges have a space for art somewhere on their campuses. Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) adds another to that list. BMCC has had its campus in Lower Manhattan since 1983. Fiterman Hall, the college’s flagship building, was severely damaged on September 11, and needed to be entirely rebuilt.
The small “Victorian” garden hosts a couple of bird feeders, a grape arbor (they freeze grapes and make grape juice for visitors all year round), a patch of lawn, and even a teensy koi pond.
We didn’t even discuss it on the tour but this vintage washing machine (definitely later than 1661) evoked for me all the artifacts from hundreds of years of Bowne family life in this house– the stories they could tell!
Queens College started collecting art in the 1950s, and today holds a collection that, according to their website, encompasses over 5,000 objects from across history. That makes the Queens College art collection more comprehensive than that of the 
Flushing Meadows Corona Park is strewn with relics from New York’s two great World’s Fairs, in 1939 and 1964. While the 
The Americas Society occupies a handsome neocolonial brick mansion on Park Avenue, designed in 1909 by McKim, Mead, & White. It was a private residence through the 1940s, then the home of the Soviet Mission to the UN from 1946 until 1965. Which is an interesting claim to fame; I wonder if they still find CIA bugs in the walls from time to time.
Each of New York’s outer boroughs has a showpiece, namesake museum. They range from the huge and ambitious