| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value | |
| Should you go? |  |
| Time spent | 79 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned |  In 1921, Christopher Robin Milne received a stuffed bear (of very little brain) for his first birthday. Other stuffed animals joined his menagerie, inspiring his father to write stories about them. Amid the sum of human knowledge, the Library keeps Christopher Robin’s friends safe for generations of kids to come. |
The Croton Distributing Reservoir stands out as a stunning architectural and engineering accomplishment, even on an island with no shortage of them. Two city blocks long, it stretches from 40th to 42nd Streets, and halfway from Fifth to Sixth Avenue. Built in an eccentric, Egyptian Revival style, it features walls fifty feet tall, and the zillions of gallons it holds help ensure a somewhat safe drinking water supply for Manhattan. The promenade along the top provides unmatched vistas of the Crystal Palace, nearby Longacre Square, and indeed, stretch all the way to Long Island Sound and New Jersey, making it a huge attraction for New Yorkers and visitors alike.
Wait, what? They tore it down? In 1900? I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
Whenever I visit the New York Public Library’s spectacular main branch, I always stop and imagine the imposing ramparts of the old distributing reservoir, which stood on its location from 1842 until 1900. There’s still a reservoir on the site, it’s just that now it stores and safeguards the sum total of knowledge of humankind. Continue reading “New York Public Library (Stephen A. Schwarzman Building)”
The Swiss Institute is a tiny open gallery space in the ground floor of an old Tribeca building. It’s small and very straightforward, with a little exposed brick and some antique floor tile, but without much floor area to play around with.
I don’t know much about John Giorno’s work, but I’d wear his super-cynical T-shirts.
White Columns has a venerable history, dating to 1970 and claiming to be the oldest “alternative art space” in the city. It’s an art gallery, but I have generally allowed public, not-for-profit galleries on my list, so like 
Located in a pretty but unassuming townhouse on West 86th Street, the Bard Graduate Center Gallery offers a couple of floors converted into spaces for, it seems, whatever Bard Graduate Center folks happen to be working on. Bard exhibits come in three flavors: focus projects, traveling exhibits, and artists-in-residence.
The Crystal Palace show tells the story of the first World’s Fair in the United States, and the tremendous glass and steel building constructed to house it — an epitome of high technology of the time. It’s a bit of a jumble, trying to pack a lot of things into a space too small for it. Somewhat like the Crystal Palace Exposition itself, I suppose. The show defines world’s fairs and outlines the 19th century vogue for them. It describes the Crystal Palace itself and the myriads of exhibits and displays of art, science, and technology that existed within. Guns! Hats! Sculpture! Furniture! Vases! Not much of it to my taste, but they ate it up in 19th century New York.
For a small show, it surprisingly offered not one but three audio tour options: one featuring recorded quotations from Walt Whitman, the other two from imagined perspectives of fictional fairgoers. I’m not so sanguine about the fictional accounts. Plenty of actual people, famous and not famous, visited the Crystal Palace and wrote about their experiences. For instance, the show includes a wall-text quote from a teenage Sam Clemens, who called it “a perfect fairy palace, beautiful beyond description.” It feels like the group that put this exhibit together couldn’t find the contemporary perspectives they wanted, so decided to just make some up.
The rare book show, billed as “Five Hundred Years of Treasures from Oxford,” blew me away. According to the wall text, many of the books on view have never left Corpus Christi College before. I can’t imagine the relationship that led to this exhibit happening. The title misleads, though: although it’s Corpus Christi’s 500th anniversary, several of the works on display are way older than that. Indeed, at least two date to the tenth century. I mean seriously. Here there be books over a thousand years old.
With its diverse institutions all pursuing their different missions, the exhibits the Center for Jewish History cumulatively deliver a comprehensive and diverse look at Jewish concerns and interests. The 
Temple Emanu-El is a beautiful, imposing synagogue, one of several great houses of worship on the green stretch of Fifth Avenue opposite Central Park. The temple itself is shut tight like a fortress between services, However, if you go around to a side entrance on East 65th Street and ask the guard, you can visit the Herbert & Eileen Bernard Museum, which hosts temporary exhibits on various aspects of Jewish life, faith, and culture.
SculptureCenter, a museum dedicated to, yes, sculpture, resides in an historic old trolley garage in the eye of the gentrification storm that is Long Island City these days. The stroll there from the Queensboro Plaza subway station boggles the mind — new residential high rises seem to be sprouting on every single lot for blocks around.
