| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 34 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | A book turned into a fantastically eroded landscape by Guy Laramée. Google that dude, his work is amazing.
|
The Center for Book Arts is one of those quixotic organizations whose unlikely existence helps make life in New York worthwhile. In this digital age, the idea that an organization will teach you how to letterpress print, how to bind a book, how to marbleize paper, seems hopelessly, charmingly, vitally anachronistic. In addition to classes, the Center for Book Arts also offers memberships; join and you can go and hand-set lead type to your heart’s content. Just don’t lick your fingers while you do it.
Tucked into Rockefeller Center, the Fire Department maintains a small kid-oriented presence called the FDNY Fire Zone. The Fire Zone consists of a modest-sized space with all sorts of fire equipment lining one wall, an old fire truck (at least, the cab of it and a slice of the back part), huge numbers of patches, given or traded from fire departments the world over, and a gift shop about the same size as the exhibit space.
However, if you have kids roughly 4-8 years old, the story differs dramatically. In that case the Fire Zone merits 4 Met buttons for visitability. For anyone with young kids interested in firefighters or fire trucks (and what young kid isn’t?), this place will seem ultra-cool, with a whole truck to play in and around. It’s a rare free, indoor play space. While it is somewhat commercial (there’s that gift shop after all), it’s not nearly as commercial as say the other kid-friendly indoor spots near Rockefeller Center, the Nintendo or Lego stores.
This is a necessarily incomplete review. Visiting a “farm museum” in midwinter is not a recipe for seeing the place at its best, busiest, or most inviting. Indeed, I’m not sure why the Queens County Farm Museum doesn’t just shut down from December til March. But it was open and it’s on my list. So I gathered an intrepid friend and we trooped out to the far eastern fringes of Queens, where New York City blurs into Nassau County, to get the lay of the land.
I’m sure that in more clement seasons the 40+ acres of grounds are verdant and bucolic. This time of year, not so much.
That it’s an institution related to September 11 doing the ripping makes it all the more vexing. If you want to learn about 9/11, the large museum at the World Trade Center, the 
Since 1996, the building, in a charmingly shabby state today, has served as the home of the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (or “WAH Center”), a moderately sized gallery space on its second floor. 
The best thing was a juxtaposition of Jordan Nassar’s white-and-blue embroidered designs and Joseph Shetler’s complex abstractions of blue pencil. I liked each, and they proved great complements to one another.
