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!
