New York. February 2022.

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Helen Rose Outdoors.

Hamilton

On a recent visit to friends in New York, I travelled around on the subway. I have been to New York many times and always find something new to spend time on. I am really impressed by the New York parks and the pride that the city takes in them. The New York Parks Department has the maple leaf as an insignia. . There is an interesting story of Alexander Hamilton in NYC in a Legacy and History Tour in central Park. He is the man on the $10 bill whose life story is now the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. For more than 30 years, Alexander Hamilton was also a New York City resident. Alexander Hamilton is the only person (besides Benjamin Franklin) on a U.S. bill who wasn’t a president. In fact, Hamilton was a leading figure in creating the United States’ financial system and he helped establish the U.S. dollar, the U.S. Mint, and the nation’s first national bank. He’s also one of the United States’ founding fathers and the country’s first U.S. Secretary of Treasury. He was born in the West Indies and brought up by a prosperous merchant. His grandfather was James A. Hamilton, a Scotsman who was the fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, the laird of Grange in Ayrshire.

Bronx Museum

We took the subway one day to the Bronx Museum of the Arts to see the exhibition Bronx Calling: The Fifth AIM Biennial showcasing the work of 68 early career artists from the 2018 and 2019 cycles of the Bronx Museum’s AIM Fellowship Program. The fifth edition of Bronx Calling considers the multiple crises of health, grief, the environment and identity that define our contemporary moment and celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

To mark this milestone, they were celebrating the cultural wealth of the communities and bringing to light the stories voices and visions of artists seeking a just and equitable world. It was an interesting exhibition and the staff there were very informed.

Manhattan

No visit to New York is complete without going to Manhattan. The Subways were busy but everyone wore a mask and was reminded by regular announcements. An African drummer on the subway was excellent and even gave us a lecture on rhythm and beats. We lunched at The Butcher’s Daughter restaurant in Nolita, Lower Manhattan on plant based food.

Also, I had a visit to friends who live in a penthouse at the corner of 70^th Street and Broadway. The views were spectacular over to the Hudson and the East Rivers and down Broadway.

Queens

Flushing Meadow in Queens is where the US Open Tennis competition is held. The park is also where the 1939 World Trade Fair was held and the US Pavilion is now the Art Deco building of the Queens Museum. The Panorama of the City of New York is the jewel in the crown of the collection of the Queens Museum and a locus of memory for visitors from all over the globe. Conceived as a celebration of the City’s municipal infrastructure by urban mastermind and World’s Fair President Robert Moses for the 1964 Fair, the Panorama was built by a team of more than 100 people working for the great architectural model makers Raymond Lester & Associates over the course of three years.

Lester was familiar with building larger than life model environments having worked with Norman Bel Geddes as an artist, designer and fabricator for the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair. In planning the model, Lester referred to aerial photographs, Sanborn fire insurance maps and a range of other City material as the Panorama had to be accurate. The initial contract demanded less than 1% margin of error between reality and the “world’s largest scale model.” Comprising an area of 9,335 square feet and built to a scale of 1:1200 where one inch equals 100 feet, the Panorama is a metropolis in miniature. Each of the city’s 895,000 buildings constructed prior to 1992 and every street, park and some 100 bridges are represented and assembled onto 273 individual sections comprising the 320 square miles of New York City. In this miraculously scaled cityscape, the borough of Manhattan measures a seemingly vast 70 x 15 feet and the Empire State Building is a towering 15 inches tall while the Statue of Liberty is only 1-7/8 inches in height. Long Island and New Jersey peek onto the model as black shadowy masses to the east and west. . My friends could even identify their own apartments! This exhibit is well worth a visit.

Tiffany Glass

At the Queens Museum, there was an exhibition of Tiffany glass. Established in 1969, The Neustadt is an independent non-profit collection dedicated to fostering a better understanding and appreciation of the artwork of Louis C. Tiffany. With a focus on Tiffany’s leaded glass, the collection includes an extraordinary array of floral and geometric lamps as well as landscape and figural windows. A unique feature of the collection is a vast, one of a kind archive of original flat glass and pressed glass “jewels” used by Tiffany Studios, which provides valuable insight into the development of the stained-glass movement in America at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1995, The Neustadt partnered with the Queens Museum to share its collection with the New York metropolitan area through a permanent Tiffany gallery and educational programming. This partnership has special significance because Tiffany’s glass furnaces, metal foundry and workshops were located in Corona, Queens less than two miles from the Museum.

TWA Hotel

The TWA Hotel at JFK Airport was designed in 1962 by the architect EEro Saarinen. The TWA Hotel was developed as part of a project to reuse the main building which had stopped functioning as an air terminal in 2001. The main building was protected from demolition as it had been made a New York designated landmark in 1994 and subsequently was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. The main building went largely unused until it was ultimately incorporated into an expansion of Terminal 5. It is very 60s in style with curves in the building.

Brooklyn

I was based in Brooklyn where many areas are being gentrified and new bistros are being established. My favourite café and bakery is Saraghina. A very good place for Saturday brunch.

Unfortunately, I did not have time to visit the new location for the Whitney Museum and attend an Alvin Ailey dance class but hopefully, there will be a next time……