More Bike Explorations

We had only one play to see today and the weather was absolutely perfect. So we decided to ride around New York on bikes. We started off near the Chelsea Piers and decided to ride south. 

A very pleasant ride down the Hudson River bikeway brought us to the financial district. We had lunch there in the shadow of the new Freedom Tower, the replacement to the World Trade Center. 

We went to see the 911 monument. I found the fountain curiously unmoving. I understand the idea behind this memorial, but it just for me it lacked the emotional impact of something like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial. 

The new town certainly looks better than the old Twin Towers. Those were a eyesore from the moment they went up. This tapers slightly, and the lines create a sense of upward motion as well. 

The transportation hub, designed by famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, is impressive, at least from the exterior, although I am hardly convinced it is worth the nearly four billion dollar price tag. 

John and I wanted to revisit St Paul’s chapel. We had been there a couple months after the attacks and found the displays from around the country moving. It was, however, closed up pretty tightly for some unspecified renovations. 

From here, we cut through the maze of streets in the old part of downtown towards the Battery. Our plan was to explore the bike path along the East River. Unfortunately, this bike path has the charm of the one along the Los Angeles River. It takes you through some pretty depressing post-industrial parts of New York, and in places it is not particularly safe. One small high point is where you get to see the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Somewhere around the United Nations we cut over to the West Side and returned to Chelsea to clean up and take a nap.

In the evening, we went to see our final play of time in New York, The Color Purple. This revival is generally supposed to be much better than the original. I vaguely recalled reading the book and seeing the movie a couple decades ago. The plot seemed somewhat familiar. But most of the audience knew every world already by heart. For me, it had the feeling of being not at musical revival but a religious revival. 

 

But as much as I appreciated the set design and the fine performances, I was singularly unmoved by the show. 

 

 

Tomorrow we pack up and shuffle off on a sleeper not to Buffalo but to Chicago! Off to see Rebecca and Dennis and the Illinois family. 

Two Plays

We had breakfast this morning at our new Chelsea accommodations. As much fun as it was to stay at the Ritz, none of the people we saw there were particularly interesting. We enjoyed talking to people at the Townhouse, and none more than Betty. 

With an strong Melbourne accent and those wonderful glasses, Betty seemed like the basis for Barry Humphrey’s famous Dame Edna. But this woman was hardly a silly suburban housewife. She is a judge on the Victoria Supreme Court and her passions are criminal justice and politics, not china patterns and gladiolas. 

We were staying not far from the celebrated High Line, an old elevated train trestle converted into an urban oasis. 

Part of what makes this part of New York so appealing is that the old factories and wharves that separated the city from the Hudson River are now largely gone. Of course, there is a downside to that as well:  those industries and the shipping connected to them created middle class jobs.

There is a lot of art on the High Line, and some of it is a little disturbing….

This part of Chelsea used to be called the “Meatpacking District” and we found one small remnant of that era. 

The new Whitney Museum anchors the southern end of the High Line. It’s a seven story building, but only three floors are devoted to exhibition space. Here is Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney herself in a portrait that scandalized polite New York society. 

We did a tour of portraits from the permanent collection. I was particularly intrigued by the idea of “portraits without people.” These are painting that symbolically represent a person. The one below called Painting, Number 5, 1914 is by Marsden Hartley. A New Englander who studied in Berlin, Hartley fell in love with a young German cavalry officer named Karl von Freiburg. Unfortunately, von Freiburg was killed right at the outset of the First World War. This painting was intended to capture his essence as a Prussian military man. 

Some of the art was apparently still in the process of creation. 

And some of the art was on the other visitors to the museum. We learned later that Lynn, our niece, had gone to the Art Institute of Chicago with this guy. 

 The decks and stairwells of the museum provide a find look at the city and the High Line

and the integration of art in its urban context was particularly fascinating. 

In the afternoon, we went to see The Humans. This play won Best Drama this year at the Tonys. It is a family drama set in a cramped China town basement apartment on Thanksgiving. 

Family dramas have been a staple of the American theater since Eugene O’Neill, but this play was sensitively written and superbly performed. 

In the evening we rode bikes again up to the theater district to see Shuffle Along. This play is about the making of the groundbreaking African-American musical in the early 1920s. Although the book awkwardly combines the standard backstage musical plot with somebody’s doctoral dissertation in American musicology, the score is good and the dancing was particularly fine. The lead in this show was the celebrated Audra McDonald. She was great, and, as Scripture says, great with child, too. The show will close next month so she can have her baby. This is a shame, while not the greatest show I've ever seen, I certainly liked it better than many huge Broadway hits (Book of Mormon, Cats, Rent and the list goes on) that I’ve seen. And the show is an ensemble piece and not a star vehicle.

This scene, using the suitcases as percussion instruments, was probably my favorite in the show. 

Tomorrow will be our last full day in New York. The time is going fast!

New Home and Fun Home

We moved today from our grand splurge to more realistic accommodations. We will be staying for the next three nights at the Townhouse Inn of Chelsea, a bed-and-breakfast that received rather good ratings on TripAdvisor and booking.com. It’s a bit of a letdown after our glorious accommodations overlooking Central Park, but we will be fine I am sure. The room is somewhat dark as it is in the back of the building, but there is absolutely no street noise even with the windows open, and given the fact that it is on West 23rd Street, that is a minor miracle.

John and I decided to sign up for three days with the Citibike program. We decided to take a ride back through Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum. John knew that there was this huge fashion display there and he wanted to see it. I lasted about five minutes before begging permission to explore some other part of the museum. John as you can see below spent much more time here. 

I am not sure if anybody was even supposed to wear this one. 

The fabric is kind of cool on this one, but it must be designed for some woman with awfully long arms. 

This one is rather startling, though I am not sure if anybody I know would look good dressed like a sponge. 

No surprise — this one is a wedding dress. But unless you were getting married at Saint John the Divine I suspect the train would still be at the front door when the bride had made it to the altar. 

I explored lots of old stuff like this Assyrian bas-relief, 

a reconstruction of a Roman bedroom,

Art Nouveau furniture, 

 and stuff from Africa. 

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Meanwhile, John also discovered something that looked like the set from Psycho on the roof. 

 As we were riding back, I made John stop so I could take this picture. That way I figured we could tell everybody that we had seen Hamilton in New York. 

In the evenings we went to Fun Home, the Broadway musical. I found the story quite engaging and the score was pretty good for that modern Broadway style. 

After it was over, we walked around. Times Square at night. While it is hardly as seedy as it was when I first came to New York in the early 1980s, it did not strike either of us as being quite as cleaned up as it was ten years ago.  

Putting on the Ritz

After a train ride through mostly urban decay we arrived in New York City, which was decked out for the 4th July. I had gone crazy and booked us for one night in the Ritz Carlton. Our view from the ninth floor was amazing. We had access to the club room which served round-the-clock Hors d’oeuvres. John refused to understand my logic that this made the hotel a great deal that practically paid for itself.

At these prices John was hard-pressed to get me to leave the hotel for even a minute.

Of course, since it was in the neighborhood, we had to visit St. Patrick’s, which had just undergone a very thorough cleaning  and gleamed white inside and out.

At the end of Rockefeller Center we found this object of art. It's a full size swimming pool set on its end. I thought it was rather silly untilI John told me the name of the piece, “Van Gogh’s Ear”, and then I thought it was profound.

 

We got into MOMA for the last forty-five minutes before closing for half price. We saw this Seurat of Honfleur where we had once rented a house with our friend Vicki.