manhattan Archives - Page 6 of 14

December 10, 2017December 10, 2017

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	109 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	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.

Tenement Museum

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.

Like how non-New Yorkers imagine New Yorkers live today, only even worse. Continue reading “Lower East Side Tenement Museum”

December 9, 2017December 10, 2017

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	58 minutes (most recently)
Best thing I saw or learned	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.

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

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”

November 30, 2017December 1, 2017

Dia: Chelsea

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	46 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Art made out of ginormous freaking laser beams! 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).

Dia’s offices are in Chelsea, and it has two art spaces there, too. Continue reading “Dia: Chelsea”

November 30, 2017May 24, 2026

New Museum – OLD REVIEW

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	96 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	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.

New Museum

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”

November 21, 2017

Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	28 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	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

Hebrew Union College Museum 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.

Continue reading “Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion Museum”

November 21, 2017April 11, 2021

International Center of Photography

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	71 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	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”

November 13, 2017April 11, 2021

Museum of American Finance

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	93 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	During World War II, Disney created character-driven U.S. war bonds to encourage the kiddies to contribute to the effort to “make life free and forever peaceful for all men.”

UPDATE APRIL 2021: The Museum of American Finance is closed as it seeks new space for its collection. It may reopen, but it won’t look much like it did in the pictures from this review.

I give the curators of the Museum of American Finance credit for chutzpah, anyway. In this day and age, a museum that lionizes financiers and the financial system seems tantamount to, I don’t know, a museum of baby harp seal clubbers.

That said, if you’re going to have a museum (or, as they style it, a MU$EUM) of American finance, there can be no better place for it than Wall Street. And no better place on Wall Street than in the Bank of New York’s former Grand Mezzanine.

The 1927 Bank of New York Building, at Wall and William Streets, is the third on the site. The original Bank of New York in that spot dates to 1796, about a decade after Alexander Hamilton and a coterie of America’s other financial founding fathers started it.

The Museum of American Finance was founded by a banker named John Herzog in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash. Herzog started his “museum project” (touché!) to create an institution to explain how the financial system worked. He reckoned that although Wall Street is synonymous with finance, most folks don’t really know what goes on there outside of movies. Continue reading “Museum of American Finance”

November 1, 2017November 3, 2017

Mossman Lock Collection

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	54 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	These two magnetic locks, made by James Sargent of Rochester, New York, in 1865 and 1866 respectively. Located in Case 7, they epitomize the combination of technical innovation (making combination locks much harder to crack) with aesthetics that characterizes Mr. Mossman’s collection.

For anyone who cares for such queer things, New York offers the gift of numerous institutions devoted to esoteric and hermetic topics. Coins, Tattoos, and Maritime Industry all get their due, as well as obscure people like Antonio Meucci, the would-be inventor of the telephone and Nicholas Roerich, a visionary Russian mystic painter. But I’d argue that New York’s most esoteric and hermetic museum is the Mossman Lock Collection, at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen.

General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, New York Continue reading “Mossman Lock Collection”

October 26, 2017October 26, 2017

DareDevil Museum of Tattoo History

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	28 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The story of Millie Hull from the Bowery. Family Circle magazine profiled her in December 1936 as New York’s “only lady tattoo artist.” She explained her choice of profession by saying she found tattooing “more interesting than embroidery.”

At this point, it is rare that a museum sneaks up on me. I believe (well, I hope) my database is complete, though of course museums are always opening–and sometimes closing–in this town. However the other day as I was wandering along the blurry borders between the Lower East Side and Chinatown on the way to the Museum at Eldridge Street, I stumbled on the DareDevil Tattoo Parlor — AND Tattoo Museum.

DareDevil Tattoo Museum

Continue reading “DareDevil Museum of Tattoo History”

October 23, 2017

Museum at Eldridge Street

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.

Museum at Eldridge Street

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”