The giant “Azel F. Merrell” oyster sloop flag hanging in the museum. The city’s oystering history is one of my favorite parts of the New York story.
Most historic buildings in New York are a scattershot, here-and-there thing, involving much travel through the contemporary city to get from one to the next. In terms of quantity in proximity it is impossible to beat Staten Island’s Historic Richmond Town, which boasts over 23 buildings from the 1600s to the 1800s, mostly within walking distance and periodically open to the public. Continue reading “Historic Richmond Town”
Wyckoff family members lived in the Wyckoff House right through the start of the 1900s. 250 years of family history in a single domicile boggles my mind.
Before starting my project, I never realized how many historic houses exist in modern New York. Some surprisingly old. Manhattan’s oldest, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, dates from the 1760s. The Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx was built in 1748. Bowne House in Queens dates to the 1660s. But in any city, there can be only one oldest house. In New York that is the Wyckoff House, located in the prosaically named Flatlands, a nondescript part of Brooklyn far from any subway line.
And so, on the first snowy day of the year, I made my trek, over the river and through the woods, half-metaphorically and half-literally, to the Wyckoffs’ ancestral home. Continue reading “Wyckoff House Museum”
My favorite fun fact from the tour is that the Lower East Side got the moniker “Klein Deutschland” before there even was a unified “Deutschland.”
There are certain combinations of places and architecture that just go together. Paris+garret; Newport+mansion; San Francisco+Victorian ; Brooklyn+brownstone. And “Lower East Side+tenement.” It’s almost redundant to call a place the “Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” But New York has one of those, and redundant or not, it is a fantastic, unforgettable recreation of a slice of life in this city.
How the Other Half Lived
The word “tenement” originally referred to any multiple dwelling building, what we’d call an “apartment” today. Very quickly, however, “tenement” came to mean a very particular type of multiple dwelling building. One aimed at the working class and recent immigrants, crammed with people and with very limited light, ventilation, and amenities.
A vertical tour brings you up close to the engineering of an old-school cathedral. The building is buttressed to support the weight of an enormous tower that was never built.
Above the ceiling…
To balance that buttressing, there’s literally tons of lead above the ceiling vaults, pushing down and out as the buttresses push in.
Although I have rarely attended a service there, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine has figured large in my life in New York City.
Shortly after I arrived as a freshman at Columbia, I attended an event at the Cathedral. The Dalai Lama spoke, as did the daughter of Desmond Tutu. I vividly remember it was right around Rosh Hashanah, and a group of monks offered a chant in honor of the High Holy Days. Tibetan Buddhist monks singing in honor of the Jewish new year in the largest Christian cathedral in the world. To this day, that stands as one of my quintessential New York experiences. Continue reading “Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine”
The library at King Manor houses beautiful, custom, glass-doored bookshelves and a library of 3,500 books.
I like that the museum put a statue of Rufus King there. I imagine it was his favorite room in the house.
Of all the historic houses in New York this is the only Manor. As in “Stately Wayne…” We have multiple “Houses” of course, a “Grange,” a “Birthplace,” and a “Mansion” or two. A “Homestead.” And now, a Manor.
Long Live the King
I now regret that I used “The King of Queens” in my review of Kingsland Homestead. Sea captain Joseph King was probably a fine guy, but Rufus King was far more deserving of the sobriquet.
Rufus King, owner of King Manor, served as a Major in the Continental Army, a friend to Alexander Hamilton, and a staunch abolitionist before that was fashionable. King contributed to the framing of the Constitution and signed it as a delegate from Massachusetts, his home state.
Rufus King
Washington wanted him in the Cabinet, but King demurred, and instead served in London as the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. He reportedly got on well with King George III.
On his return to the States, family connections along with Hamilton persuaded him to move his household from Boston to bigger, badder New York City.
King decided that he wanted a country farm as well as a place in town, and that’s how he came to discover his house in Jamaica. He bought King Manor in 1803. King added substantially to the house he purchased, taking an asymmetrical Dutch farmhouse and making it at least faux-symmetrical, on trend with the then-current Federal style.
What with the renovations and expansion King’s family didn’t move in until 1806 or so. Hamilton was of course dead by then, so sadly never set foot in King Manor. However, King and Hamilton were so close that A.Ham was godfather to King’s eldest son.
The King family was also close with Archibald Gracie. Two King sons married two Gracie daughters. Moreover, for a short time, King held a mortgage on Gracie Mansion.
Mind Your Manors
I was the sole visitor on a random weekday afternoon. The volunteer minding the place was terrific, though, giving me a thorough and thoroughly interesting tour.
The tour takes you to the kitchen, decked out with a beautiful cast iron stove that dates from after Rufus’s day (his household cooked on an open hearth, which the stove tidily fills). Visitors also see the parlor, King’s library, and the dining room, which is complete with a trendy curved wall.
That graceful curved wall is just internal. It wouldn’t do to have a semicircular exterior wall breaking the house’s symmetry. There are two closets tucked into the odd spaces between the interior and exterior walls
King Manor doesn’t have much in the way of genuine King furnishings. It’s got some reproduction portraits. I wish it were more furnished than it is–even if the furniture is ersatz, it helps convey a sense of what life was like. It does have a genuinely old piano, and hosts concerts.
King Manor stayed in the King family until 1896, when Cornelia King, one of Rufus’s granddaughters, died. Soon thereafter the village of Jamaica bought the house and 11 acres of land to create King Park, preserving the building in its original location — a relative rarity in New York City.
Absent original fixtures and furnishings, the kitchen, parlor, and hall are given over to displays geared toward the school kids who constitute a massive proportion of visitors. Wall texts discuss Rufus King and his role in drafting the Constitution — and his opposition to the way that document basically punted on slavery, with the abolitionists among the Framers just sort of hoping it would go away on its own. One of King’s sons, John Alsop King, continued his father’s anti-slavery fight after his father died in 1827.
Long Lived the King
Another wall display discusses life in Jamaica when it was an independent village a long way from the towns of Brooklyn and Manhattan. My guide pointed out that Mr. and Mrs. King (and son John King) are buried in the churchyard of the Grace Episcopal Church just a few blocks away, so after departing King Manor I went to pay my respects.
Should you Visit the King Manor Museum?
King Manor fulfills its mandate really well. While I’m not saying “get thee to Jamaica!” if you like historic houses or founding fathers at all then you should unquestionably visit King Manor. It’s a beautiful old house, and the home of a person who turns out to be more interesting than I first expected.
My guide pointed out that King ran for president in 1816. Unsuccessfully, of course (we got Monroe instead). But not just unsuccessfully: King won only 34 electoral votes to Monroe’s 183, and put the final nail in the coffin of the Federalist party. My guide quizzed me: “In the history of the United States, two people from Jamaica have run for president. One was Rufus King. Do you know the other?” I thought a moment before suggesting, “The current president.” Yep.
His failure as a presidential candidate notwithstanding, King found many ways to serve his country during a time when his country was just being invented.
On the topic of slavery, Rufus King was ahead of his time. You can’t say that about all of his cohort. A visit to his home will acquaint you with someone who might be a B-list Founding Father, but who deserves better treatment from history, writers of hit Broadway musicals, and his adopted city.
For Reference:
Address
King Park, 153rd Street and Jamaica Avenue, Jamaica, Queens
This case of Tibetan figurines. The story is a spoiler, so I tell it in the review below.
Oh, this one hurts me a little. I really, really wanted the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art to be a diamond of enlightenment in the heart of Staten Island. An amazing, secret Shangri-La in the midst of Shao-Lin. I really did.
But it’s not to be.
This Way to Shangri-La?
Near the geographic heart of Staten Island, high on a hill, there’s a lighthouse. Climb the road up that hillside. Pass the lighthouse and enter a well-to-do neighborhood of big houses. Eventually, you will reach a large stone wall, festooned on one end with distinctive Tibetan prayer flags. Stairs lead you down to a library, exhibit hall, and a small, steep, garden. Perched on the hill like a miniature Potala Palace, you’ve found the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan ArtContinue reading “Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art”
Rita McBride, “Particulates,” 2017, lasers, site-specific particulates, extraterrestrial dust, and water
The Dia Foundation is a powerhouse in the world of contemporary art. It got its start in 1974 to help artists “achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope.” (Source: Dia’s website.)
New Yorkers probably best know Dia in the guise of Dia: Beacon, an important contemporary art museum located in Beacon, NY, a bit over an hour by train north of the city. The Dia Foundation also manages the Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room in SOHO. And several other important art places and spaces around the world (most notably two key environmental art pieces out west: Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and De Maria’s Lightning Field).
Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj’s “Ru,” a room-sized installation of reproductions of Neolithic artifacts from Kosovo mounted on metal bird legs and perched in habitats of sticks and water, installed in a large white room.
Petrit Halilaj, “Ru” (detail)
It’s odd and obsessive and a little creepy and cute at the same time — like a Miyazaki movie come to life.
Petrit Halilaj, “Ru” (detail)
OLD REVIEW. This is my original review of the New Museum, dating to November 2017. I’ve updated my take since the museum recently reopened with a significant new addition..
The New Museum, devoted to cutting-edge contemporary art, turned forty years old this year. I know because one of the exhibits on currently celebrates its history, with a timeline and select ephemera from past shows.
Having turned 40 myself some years ago, I think it starts to feel a little ironic calling oneself “New” at that age.
Marcia Tucker, a curator at the Whitney in the 1970s, felt that new and emerging artists didn’t get a fair shake at “established” museums (this despite the Whitney Biennial). She therefore set out to create an institution specifically for, well, the new. And thus was yet another art museum born.
The New Museum moved into its current building on the Bowery in 2007, making that aspect of it still actually pretty new. More on the building in a moment. Continue reading “New Museum – OLD REVIEW”
Chris Jones’s surreal and fascinating, 3D-ish (2.5D?) depiction of an empty house of many rooms, collaged from book and magazine pictures.
Chris Jones, “After They Had Left,” 2016, Mixed media collage
According to the guard at the front desk, in order to visit the museum at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Institute of Religion, you must do four things.
Visitor Pass
Present a photo ID, which they will hold onto for the duration of your visit.
Submit any bags for an inspection.
Agree to be wanded down with a handheld metal detector.
Wear an orange “Visitor” badge around your neck or other suitably prominently visible place for the duration of your visit.
The lobby boasts a large interactive screen that enables visitors to browse through the ICP’s digital image collection, sorted by timeline or via a large number of tags/keywords. It’s fun to see what comes up, and how images connect across times and places.
UPDATE APRIL 2021: This review is obsolete, as the ICP moved into a new home on Essex Street just before the pandemic. I haven’t visited it yet, though it is high on my museum to-do list.
The International Center of Photography is one of two photo-specialist institutions in New York (the other being the Aperture Foundation). It has a venerable history, founded in 1974 by the photographer Cornell Capa, the brother of even greater photographer Robert Capa. It’s currently located on the Bowery, very close to the New Museum.
In addition to its museum space, the Center offers classes, a full-time school of photography, and events.
Ironically, the ICP does not allow photography inside its galleries. I’m not certain whether that policy is general or just for the current show. Regardless, I have a few shots of the lobby area and cafe, but that’s it.
The ICP Galleries
International Center of Photography features two moderately sized gallery spaces, as well as a small video screening area. Visitors begin in a bland rectangular space on the ground floor, then go downstairs to a similar space directly below. I don’t have a lot to say about them — they are windowless and fairly generic, painted white when I visited. Continue reading “International Center of Photography”
King decided that he wanted a country farm as well as a place in town, and that’s how he came to discover his house in Jamaica. He bought King Manor in 1803. King added substantially to the house he purchased, taking an asymmetrical Dutch farmhouse and making it at least faux-symmetrical, on trend with the then-current Federal style.
The tour takes you to the kitchen, decked out with a beautiful cast iron stove that dates from after Rufus’s day (his household cooked on an open hearth, which the stove tidily fills). Visitors also see the parlor, King’s library, and the dining room, which is complete with a trendy curved wall.
The New Museum, devoted to cutting-edge contemporary art, turned forty years old this year. I know because one of the exhibits on currently celebrates its history, with a timeline and select ephemera from past shows.
According to the guard at the front desk, in order to visit the museum at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Institute of Religion, you must do four things.
The International Center of Photography is one of two photo-specialist institutions in New York (the other being the