Walking Off the Big Apple

A New York Yankees State of Mind

2009-11-06T20:20:00.007-05:00

Hundreds of thousands of New York Yankees fans in the city got the chance to applaud their hometown World Series heroes for the parade and ceremony in lower Manhattan on Friday, November 6, celebrating along the Canyon of Heroes on Broadway and on the nearby streets under a sunny sky. Like many others I arrived too late to see any of the parade, but I did get to enjoy the moment with the crowds gathered in the chilly autumn weather. The diverse fans arrived from all the boroughs and from places even farther away, but they all shared today's required uniform of navy blue and pinstripes. Many grew frustrated when they couldn't see anything at all and turned around to go home, while the lucky ones up front applauded themselves for arriving hours before parade time at 11 a.m.. They got to see Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Hideki Matsui, Mariano Rivera, or any of the others, standing on floats and waving to the crowd, dressed in their street casuals, even as everyone in the crowd along the sidewalks looked suited up for a game.

At some point I turned home, electing to see the rest of the parade and ceremony on television in a warm living room. I was glad I had gone downtown just to be a part of the moment, but i was equally happy to have a better televised view of Mayor Bloomberg's ceremony at City Hall. When the Mayor started passing out the ceremonial keys to the city to every member of the team and to each of the many other members of the Yankees organization, however, the ceremony grew somewhat long and tedious, like it was a high school graduation. Fortunately, the show improved when the Mayor announced a reprieve of the performance from Game 2 of the series - Jay-Z's stunning new city anthem, "Empire State of Mind." No one seemed more happy than the Yankees themselves, who judging by their enthusiastic reactions to the song during Game 2 and during today's performance have taken the song to heart.
"Empire State of Mind" is not simply Jay-Z's response to Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" but a coda of sorts. While Sinatra's song (words and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb) speaks of the aspiration of making it in the city, Jay-Z's song is about the aftermath of success. He also sees the world differently as a native, someone with a homegrown attitude, in contrast to the Sinatra song where the perspective is of someone moving to the city with a degree of innocence. Now at the pinnacle of New York society, the mogul reflects back on his origins in Brooklyn (Jay-Z grew up in the Marcy Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant), as well as offering words of caution for others who get caught up in the chase for fame in the city. Success is a head trip that can just as easily set off a downward spiral into drugs and immorality. If anyone could relate to this message of a successful rapper and businessman who is said to be worth about $150 million, then it would be any of those multimillion dollar players standing and watching behind him. Yet, the song is full of love for the city, offering the dream to everyone - "These streets will make you feel brand new. Big lights will inspire you, let's hear it for New York." That's Alicia Keys singing the chorus. For many, this Yankees championship season and this song will always be remembered together.

20 Short Walks between New York Landmarks

2009-11-04T17:18:00.002-05:00

Favorable weather may encourage long walks through the New York cityscape, but sometimes a short walk of a mile or less may be just the ticket for some serious New York sightseeing. Perfect for brisk autumn weather, these suggested walks pair two nearby landmarks with a pleasant stroll along the way. The images suggest autumn to be the best time, but the strolls should be pleasant year round, weather permitting The cool air on a sunny day invites excursions, a little window shopping, and a stop in cafes or a cozy tavern.

Exploring New York without an agenda or a destination is fun, too, but appreciating museums, public sculpture, parks, and major buildings characterizes the informed and intelligent traveler as well as the savvy resident. Eventually, the well-traveled explorer develops a sophisticated internal map of the city, building up a repertory of options for navigating the city. While the map here should come in handy for visitors looking for sightseeing ideas, residents may want to mentally test themselves by imagining the route they would choose to walk between these pairs of destinations.

Of course, any of these walks would work just as well in the other direction. A map is included here.

1. Lincoln Center to the Boathouse in Central Park. Upper West Side to Central Park. A lovely walk that begins at the Lincoln Center Fountain and then ambles northeast through the park. Why not take a tour of the center and then walk to the boathouse for a cocktail?

2. Metropolitan Museum to Hayden Planetarium. Central Park East to Central Park West. After seeing an exhibition or two at the Met, walk across the park near Turtle Pond and then do some stargazing at the Planetarium.

3. Cathedral of St. John the Divine to the Apollo Theatre. Harlem. The soaring Gothic cathedral is remarkable for the extraordinary craftsmanship that went into its making. Folow with a visit to the famous Apollo Theatre for a walk through Harlem history.

4. Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum to Times Square. Hell's Kitchen to the Theatre District. Someone should enjoy touring both aircraft carriers and the neon sights of the Theatre District. Like a million sailors, right? They would know the way off the boat to Times Square.

5. Macy's to Rockefeller Center. Herald Square to Midtown. A classic holiday duo. Shopping in the vast Macy's followed by a trip to see the glories of NYC's most famous Depression-era complex.

6. Empire State Building to Gramercy Park. Midtown. A lovely quiet walk. From the heights overlooking the city, stroll to the city's most secluded gated park. Explore side streets near the park for beautiful townhouses and some of the city's best restaurants.

7. Seagram Building to the United Nations. Midtown West to Turtle Bay. Architecture fans will appreciate Mies van der Rohe's great modernist achievement, and then visiting the utopian ideals of the United Nations complex.

8. Gracie Mansion to Sotheby's. Upper East Side. Don't expect to see the Mayor in the Mansion (he resides at 17 East 79th St.) but the surrounding park is a pleasant stop. End at the famous auction house to see what's up for sale.

9. New York Historical Society to Riverside Park. Upper West Side. New York-themed exhibitions at the historical society are worth seeing, so start here and then walk west to enjoy the elegant landscapes in Riverside Park.

10. Abyssinian Baptist Church to Studio Museum in Harlem. Central Harlem. The church is important in the history of the civil rights movement, and during the 1930s, when Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. took over the pulpit from his father, the church was the largest Protestant congregation in the country. Walk south to the Studio Museum to check out new directions in contemporary art.

View 20 Short Walks between New York Landmarks in a larger map

11. The Cloisters to Fort Washington. Upper Manhattan. Residents know that autumn is the best time to visit the Cloisters, because the medieval branch of the Met sits high above a hill of bright fall foliage. Walk south along Margaret Corbin Drive, named for the first female soldier to fight in the American Army, to Fort Washington, the highest point in Manhattan.

12. Washington Square Park to Chelsea Market. Greenwich Village to Chelsea. Begin in the heart of bohemian New York (even if the ongoing park renovation seems to tear at its very soul) and walk west and then up Greenwich Avenue to the Chelsea Market. Food awaits.

13. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to Central Park Carousel. Midtown to Central Park. The museum and park combination is always a winner. After seeing the special exhibitions at MoMA, wander north through the park to look at the changing colors of the season.

14. McSorley's Ale House to Essex Street Market. East Village to Lower East Side. Drink and eat. Start at McSorley's, one of the oldest drinking establishments in the city and a favorite for artists in the Ashcan School, and stroll through the East Village to the Lower East Side's food specialists in the Essex Market. Or, start at the market (eat at Shopsin's) and then walk to the ale house for one of their special brews.

15. Lower East Side Tenement Museum to Henry Street Settlement. Lower East Side. The Lower East Side's living history is precarious, although the museum does its best to preserve something of the experience of the historic neighborhood during the previous great waves of immigration. Stop in the gift shop or sign up for a tour. Take a walk to Henry Street to imagine this neighborhood when it was the most densest part of the world.

16. Museum of Chinese in America to City Hall Park. Chinatown to Downtown. Explore Chinatown's history by looking at the exhibits in this newly opened museum on Mulberry Street. Wind your way down past the U.S. Courthouse and then south on Broadway to City Hall Park. The Woolworth Building is just across the way.

17. Staten Island Ferry to World Financial Center. Lower Manhattan to Financial District. Look at the harbor from the vantage point of the pathway along Battery Park and Battery Park City on the southwestern tip of Manhattan and check out the several artist installations all the way up to the World Financial Center.

18. South Street Seaport to Eldridge Street Synagogue. Lower Manhattan to Lower East Side. While the seaport comes off too commercial for some visitors, explore the lesser known streets near the old Fulton Fish Market. Follow Pearl Street north to St. James Place and then to the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue.

19. Queens Museum of Art to Queens Botanical Gardens. Flushing Meadows. Explore the site of the 1964 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows Corona Park by starting at the museum in the New York City Building, especially the famous Panorama. Walk to the gardens, which began as an exhibit at the fair.

20. Empire-Fulton Ferry Park to Brooklyn Heights Promenade. DUMBO to Brooklyn Heights. Stop to see the views of Manhattan and the bridges from this riverfront park and then walk south on Cadman Plaza to the Brooklyn War Memorial. From Cadman Plaza walk south to Henry Street to Montague. Follow Montague through Brooklyn Heights to the famous promenade for cinematic views of Manhattan.

Images of Central Park, Fifth Avenue (Central Park), and Madison Square Park by Walking Off the Big Apple.

Chatting with the Dead, A Steampunk Haunted House, the Village Halloween Parade and Other Events For Halloween Week in New York

2009-10-28T16:29:00.009-04:00

From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century many prominent scholars and writers professed a faith in spiritualism, the idea that one could communicate with departed spirits through a gifted "medium." Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was an early believer. So, too, were evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, New York physician John Franklin Gray and American psychologist William James. Many followers came from the middle and upper-middle classes, holding seances in their living rooms, while many popular mediums lectured in concert halls to sell-out audiences. While spiritualism had its heyday in the Guilded Age, clairvoyants are still popular, showing up for appearances on Larry King and such. Even one fictional medium, a typical suburban mom, is assigned to an Assistant District Attorney's office in a popular TV drama. For those seeking answers for questions about life after death, the appeal of spiritualism is understandable, albeit a little disconcerting.

In perusing the many events for this autumnal Halloween week in New York City, I spotted a listing for Concetta Bertoldi, a woman who claims to communicate with other people's deceased friends and relatives. The picture of her on her website does not meet conventions about the overall general appearance of such a spiritually gifted individual. In fact, she looks more like an opera diva, but watching her videos she talks like a nice regular middle-aged lady from Newark, New Jersey. She'll be appearing at the Gramercy Theatre on E. 23rd St. on October 31 at noon.

The full list for special events for Halloween in New York would take up a hundred pages, but here's a handful of events to get started:  

Wednesday, October 28, 2009
At 7 p.m. House of Usher (1960). Vincent Price stars in the Poe classic directed by Roger Corman. 70 min. At 9 p.m. Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum, also based on the Poe story. 80 min. Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Ave at 2nd St.).

For New York Yankees fans, I don't have to remind you of tonight's opening game of the World Series. If the Phillies take an early lead, this event, too, could become scary.

Steampunk Haunted House
I'm rather fascinated with steampunk culture, not really sure where it came from or why. Yet, I find the aesthetics of steampunk, with its emphasis on mechanical parts, hauntingly lovely. I'm thrilled, then, to learn of a haunted house made of clock pieces and such stuff. From Third Rail Projects at the Abrons Art Center/Henry Street Settlement, 466 Grand St at Pitt St.; Oct 28, 29 6 pm–9:30 pm; Oct 30, 31 8 pm–11:30 pm; $25

Thursday, October 29, 2009
The exhibit “Death & Mourning in the Mid-19th Century Home”  at the Merchant’s House Museum, considered one of the city's most haunted places, explores the death rituals of the 19th-century New Yorkers. Scenes include a bedroom death watch and a funeral in the parlor. Special candlelight ghost tours at 6 and 10 p.m. on October 29 and 30. Family friendly events for children on Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. and ghost story readings in the evening. See more at website. 29 E 4th St between Bowery and Lafayette St

Friday, October 30, 2009
Another unusual house museum in the city is The Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Garden on E. 61st St. Built in 1799 and converted to a hotel in 1826 Mount Vernon, the house once served as a pastoral retreat for city-dwellers (when New York pretty much stopped at 14th Street). Halloween tours on Oct 30 at 6 pm (family tour for children) and another at 7:15 p.m. for adults only. $15, children under 12 $5. between First and York Avenues. For more info, visit museum website.

Trinity Wall Street's Halloween Special Events include family fun in the churchyard from 4-6 p.m., a toast to permanent resident Alexander Hamilton during Haunted Hamilton Happy Hour from 6 to 8 p.m., and a screening of Phantom of the Opera (1925) in the candlelit church.

Saturday, October 31, 2009
Talk to the Dead with Concetta Bertoldi . At 12 noon at the Gramercy Theatre, Bertoldi will demonstrate her ability to communicate with other people's deceased friends and relatives. 127 E 23rd St between Park Ave South and Lexington Ave (212-777-6800); Oct 31 at noon, $47.20

Halloween Wonder Cabinet
Curated by Lawrence Weschler, an all-day event of oddities and wonders presented by the New York Institute for the Humanities. Presenters include Laurie Anderson, Walter Murch, David Wilson, and Peter Hutton. 10:45 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Free and open to the public. Cantor Film Center, 36 E. 8th St. More at website.

The Village Halloween Parade
The culminating event of Halloween week in New York is the Village Halloween Parade. Open to all, the event celebrates the creative spirits of New Yorkers. Part performance art, part puppet theatre, part radical street event, the parade is one of the city's signature events. Expect something like a quarter of a million people in costume on the streets. Official website.

Sunday, November 1, 2009
All Soul's Day

Images: Spirit Photography- "The Flaneuse of Death Visits the Merchant’s House Museum" and image of St. Paul's Chapel, New York, between Church Street and lower Broadway, by Walking Off the Big Apple.

E. L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley

2009-10-23T12:58:00.003-04:00

Homer & Langley, the sweet, funny and often heartbreaking novel by E. L. Doctorow, is inspired by the true story of the famous Collyer Brothers, Homer & Langley, reclusive siblings shuttered behind the doors of their Fifth Avenue mansion in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan in the early decades of the twentieth century. The shocking discovery of their deaths in March 1947, the police finding their bodies amidst an extraordinary amount of useless hoarded debris and clutter, raised profound questions about the lives of these two particularly eccentric brothers. The inventory of the clutter alone raised questions about the motive and purpose for the clutter - dozens of pianos of every type (Homer is the musician), a Model T Ford, their doctor father's jars of human specimen parts, tens of thousands of newspapers stacked from floor to ceiling, eight feral cats, sewing machine parts, a baby carriage and more. By imagining their story through the eyes of Homer, the blind brother, picking up clues from the inventory of what they left behind, Doctorow restores dignity to the poor fraternal souls.

At the outset of the story Homer and Langley live the typical privileged life of Gilded Age New Yorkers, sons of a prominent physician and his wife. After the flu epidemic claims their parents, Homer comes to depend more on Langley, a man who mind is damaged by mustard gas while fighting in World War I. As the Jazz Age unfolds, they continue to enjoy the world at large and employ a company of rotating housekeepers, though they stumble in their relationships with women. The Great Depression brings new challenges, but they're agile in adapting creatively to each decade. Hearing about the famous "rent parties" popular with their neighbors, they decide to host tea parties in their mansion. Yet, troubles start to accumulate, so the speak, as Langley brings home odds and ends as well as every single edition of the daily newspaper. Homer can only hope for the best with his clearly deranged sibling.
Unlike their real counterparts, these fictional brothers live beyond the late 1940s and through the 1960s, long enough for a band of hippies to discover and embrace them. They meet one another at an anti-war rally in Central Park. To the counterculture the long-haired brothers in their old fatigues and dungarees looked attractive as alternatives to bourgeois culture:

"And when these children-there were five who peeled off from the larger group and walked up the steps into our house, two males and three females-saw of what a warehouse of precious acquisitions it was comprised, they were moved beyond measure. I listened to their silence and it seemed to me churchlike."

While Doctorow clearly has fun weaving events of American history in and out of the story of the Collyer brothers, especially when hippies and Prohibition gangsters are involved, he nevertheless gently handles his sympathetic narrator, our blind storyteller Homer. As he begins to lose his precious hearing also, the story lifts out of the circumstances of the Collyers to reflect on the nature of consciousness itself. All of us may be shuttered in our mansions, in one way or another.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple. The Collyer Brothers mansion at 2078 Fifth Avenue (corner of 128th Street) was torn down as a fire hazard. The vacant lot was turned into a vest-pocket park that is now operated by New York Parks. See more about the real-life Collyers at the Parks' website for the historical sign.

"I love this dirty town": J.J. Hunsecker and the New York of Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

2009-10-16T16:12:00.006-04:00

Sweet Smell of Success is one of the great and final dramatic noir films set and filmed in an alluringly dangerous New York. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick with a brilliant script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, the 1957 classic, shot in glorious black and white by master cinematographer James Wong Howe, is a dark tone poem about the moral hazards accompanying the nearsighted pursuit of power, fame and fortune. At center stage of the drama is the relationship between two cold warriors of smears and innuendo, the powerful newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster, and Sidney Falco, a sycophantic press agent, played by Tony Curtis. The pulsing neon lights of Broadway, the Theatre District and Times Square provide the unnatural illuminations for their corrupt and bereft power plays. The city brings out the rawest of motivations - sex, power, and control, all wrapped in the tinsel of blackmail and full-length mink coats.

Everyone in town fears J.J. Hunsecker, the columnist. He makes breaking careers his sport, and Lancaster, repressing his athletic build behind dark suits, bathrobes, and spectacles, uttering his dangerous knowledge in smooth flat tone, could not be more fiercely menacing. He's wrapped his one prized possession, his pretty sister, in an expensive fur coat, and he's got his pretty press boy and student, Sidney, wrapped around his finger. All J.J. wants is to stop his sister from running off with Steve Dallas, her wholesome plain-coated jazz guitarist boyfriend. Curtis plays press boy Sidney as a neurotic mess of nervous energy and ambition, playing off Lancaster's cool slow drones with frenetic beats. The film is an extended jazz riff on Sidney's drive to be "way up high" in the "big game" with the "best of everything." With music onscreen by the Chico Hamilton Quintet, and Elmer Bernstein furnishing the rest, the cool hep cats play their own dirges. When Sidney thinks he's done his evil deed for J.J., planting a false blind item with another columnist, he remarks "The cat's in a bag, and the bag is in the river."

With its sharp criticism of the evils of innuendo and false rumors, Sweet Smell of Success can be interpreted as a parable of McCarthyism, the political scandal and national embarrassment that had reached a recent denouement. In addition, the film also documents the final days of the powerful gossip columnists working the Broadway beat. The model for J. J. is most likely Walter Winchell, a nationally syndicated columnist who is said to have invented the gossip column while at the New York Evening Graphic and an early McCarthy supporter. Newspapers, facing declines in circulation, felt pressured to publish more material like Winchell's. The gossip columnist who replaced Winchell at The Graphic, Ed Sullivan, rose to power as a rival, especially later while writing for The New York Daily News. Of course, his name would be more associated with television and the theater that bears his name than with the newspaper business. In a twist of contemporary fate, the current occupant of the Sullivan Theater, David Letterman, recently felt compelled to publicly share potentially embarrassing revelations about relationships with female staffers rather than submit himself to blackmail. Shades of J.J. Hunsecker.

Sweet Smell of Success features several New York locations. In addition to Times Square and surrounding areas, look for references to the 21 Club (21 W. 52nd St.), as well as the legendary but now defunct El Morocco nightclub (on East 54th Street.) The International Toy Center building at 200 Fifth Avenue stands in for the fictional New York Globe, J.J. Hunsecker's employer. The Flatiron, which is nearby, appears in one sequence. The most powerful images of New York are the streets, diners, and clubs of the Theatre District at night, photographed by James Wong Howe in a gritty yet seductive realism. Standing on the sidewalk and watching a fight spill out of a nearby club, Hunsecker looks truly in his element, breathing it all in. "I love this dirty town," he says. The look, and presumed smell, of the vanished New York depicted in Sweet Smell of Success is what some people miss in our outwardly greener and cleaner city. The drive for success and the measures people take to get there, however, is very much still part of the media landscape.

Gumshoes: A Partial Lineup of New York Detectives in American Crime Fiction

2009-10-07T11:20:00.012-04:00

The word gumshoe can be used as an intransitive verb, meaning to work as a detective, but more commonly gumshoe refers to the investigators themselves. While the etymology is a little murky, the term most likely refers to the new soft-soled gum that replaced leather on some shoes in the late 19th century. The soft rubber shoes, precursors to sneakers, sounded quiet on the pavement, allowing the wearer to sneak (get it?) around. In popular parlance, gumshoes may have originally referred to the perp, like a sneaky thief. By the early 20th century, gumshoes in literature mainly referred to detectives. The Oxford English Dictionary credits the first instance to A. H. Lewis's 1906 Confessions of a detective, a feisty little book full of New York street slang. Here, the word characterizes both a sneaky criminal - "One of Red Bob's gang had crept upon me, gumshoe fashion, and dealt me a blow with a sandbag" (33) and a detective - "Cull, you're d'gum-shoe guy I was waiting' fer, see!" Like gumshoe, a slang term for police officer is "flatfoot."

Great detective fiction thrives on the streets of a big city. Criminal activity unfolds in every nook and cranny, not just in the dark crowded streets and bars of the slums and backroom poker joints, but inside Fifth Avenue mansions, Wall Street boardrooms, luxury apartment buildings, and inside and outside the theaters of the Great White Way. The great detectives know their streets as well as they know the back of their hands and the soles of their gumshoed feet. Many of the great detectives, however, do without the footwear. They may be part-time sleuths, or in cases like Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, they rarely leave the house. Nevertheless, the geography of the streets reflects the interior mental map that detectives use to solve their crimes and, in the case on the winding cobblestone paths of the city's older sections, the mysterious labyrinths of human nature.

A Selected List of Writers and Their New York Detectives

Some of the books quoted below may be found in full or limited previews on Google Books. See my library for more details. Let me know in the comments section who else we need to put in the lineup.

• Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935)
Detective: Ebenezer Gryce, a lawyer
Quote: "As for his jurymen, they were, as I have intimated, very much like all other bodies of a similar character. Picked up at random from the streets, but from such streets as the Fifth and Sixth Avenues, they presented much the same appearance of average intelligence and refinement as might be seen in the chance occupants of one of our city stages. Indeed, I marked but one amongst them all who seemed to take any interest in the inquiry as an inquiry; all the rest appearing to be actuated in the fulfilment of their duty by the commoner instincts of pity and indignation." - The Leavenworth Case (1878)

• Willard Huntington Wright (1888-1939)
Pseudonym: S. S. Van Dine
Detective: Philo Vance, an upper-class dilettante in 12 crime novels
Quote: "His apartment in East Thirty-eighth Street--actually the two top floors of an old mansion, beautifully remodeled and in part rebuilt to secure spacious rooms and lofty ceilings--was filled, but not crowded, with rare specimens of oriental and occidental, ancient and modern, art. His paintings ranged from the Italian primitives to Cézanne and Matisse; and among his collection of original drawings were works as widely separated as those of Michelangelo and Picasso. Vance's Chinese prints constituted one of the finest private collections in this country. They included beautiful examples of the work of Ririomin, Rianchu, Jinkomin, Kakei, and Mokkei." - The Benson Murder Case (1930), the first novel in the Philo Vance series

• Rex Stout (1886-1975)
author of a series of Nero Wolfe mysteries
Detective: Nero Wolfe, overweight armchair private investigator, gourmand and beer drinker who stays at home in his brownstone western 35th Street, with his assistant and narrator, Archie Goodwin, walking the streets for him.
Quote: "It was just another rooming-house. For some reason or other they're all alike, whether it's a high-hat affair in the Fifties or a brownstone west of Central Park full of honest artist girls or an Italian hangout like this one on Sullivan Street." - Fer-de-Lance (1934), the first of the series

• Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961)
Detective: Nick Charles, accompanied by his lovely heiress wife, Nora, and their dog Asta. The Thin Man was Hammett's last novel. Though several movie sequels were produced, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, Hammett did not himself write another Thin Man book. Earlier, Hammett created the influential detective, Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon (1930).
Quote: "I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me." - opening line of The Thin Man (1934)

• Chester Himes (1909-1984)
series of Harlem novels, including Real Cool Killers (1959), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), and others
Detectives: “Grave Digger” Jones and “Coffin Ed” Johnson

Quote: " The black Harlem detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones had been cruising south on Eighth Avenue from 125th Street, looking for known pushers, and they were approaching the intersection of 113th Street when the alarm was broadcast. They hadn't seen any known pushers, just the streets filled with addicts." - Plan B (1993), unfinished, last of the series, published posthumously

• Carolyn Heilbrun (1926-2003)
Pseudonym: Amanda Cross
Detective: English professor and sleuth, Kate Fansler
Quote: "Later, I dropped Dawn at her home, and took the taxi to Park Slope. I've never understood how people can keep cars in Park Slope; there's never anywhere to put them. A guy I know calls it Double-Park Slope." - Honest Doubt (2001)

• Evan Hunter (1926-2005), born and raised as Salvatore Lombino
Pseudonym: Ed McBain
Detectives: Steve Carella and Arthur Brown, 87th Precinct (in the books New York is not named, only implied)
Quote: "Now, at ten minutes to eight, Carella and Brown started doing their paperwork. In this city, the tempo in August slowed down to what Lieutenant Byrnes had once described as 'summertime,' not quite the equivalent of 'ragtime,' a slow-motion rhythm that leisurely waltzed the relieving team into the sometimes frantic pace of police work." - The Big Bad City (1999)

• Richard S. "Kinky" Friedman (1944 - )
Detective: Kinky Friedman, oversize real-life Texan singer/songwriter/novelist P.I. living in Greenwich Village, aided by a motley crew, the Village Irregulars.
Quote"What, I wondered, was a blue-buttocked tropical loon doing in the middle of a rainstorm in the West Village? The blue-buttocked tropical loon belonged in a rain forest, not a rainstorm. Of course I could understand it making an occasional appearance in the East Village, but it was highly unusual for this rare bird to migrate to the more civilized West Village." - Ten Little New Yorkers (2005)

• Richard Price (1949 - )
Detective: NYPD Detective Matty Clark (appearance in Lush Life)
Quote: "When he made it to the scene at 4:35, twenty minutes after the call, it was still dark, although the first bird of day could be heard chittering in a low tree somewhere close, and the ancient tenement rooftops of Eldridge Street were beginning to outline themselves against the sky." - Lush Life (2008)

Images accompanying posts in Mystery Month made with WOTBA's super-secret detective iPhone 3G.

Read the related post, A Month of New York Mysteries, Ghosts, Detectives, Gothic Tales and Noir.

A Month of New York Mysteries, Ghosts, Detectives, Gothic Tales and Noir

2009-10-03T11:10:00.005-04:00

Thursday afternoon, the first real chilly day of the season with strong west winds, I visited two bookstores that specialize in mysteries. The chilly day, coupled with the passing of dark clouds, signaled the advent of many beloved autumn pleasures - sweaters, apple and pumpkin pies, hearty soups, and cozy bookstores. In October the residents of the island turn inward, leaving the sunny shoreline of Manhattan for comfortable places indoors. So, I was in one of those autumn moods, gathering stories of the mysterious, ghostly or noir variety to bring home and place next to a comfortable chair inside. In sync with the season, the gathering felt like a literary harvest.

Taking the train to the W. 4th. St. station, flipping through an anthology of classic mystery stories, I noticed three NYPD officers standing in my subway car. They looked nonchalant, occasionally yawning and staring at their feet, but of late New Yorkers have been asked to be alert to yet another security threat. I knew the authorities were keeping close watch on affiliates of a man recently detained on suspicion of a plot against the subways, so I tried to shrug off a growing anxiety by returning to my book. Leaving the train, I started walking faster than normal, but as soon as I reached the stairs near W. 8th to leave the station, I nearly stepped on a little rat nibbling on a piece of food. Walking now quite briskly across Washington Square Park, I happened to glance behind me. The same police officers from the train had taken up new positions on the western side of the park. More concerned that I had almost stepped on a rat, I got home as quickly as possible.

Browsing the bookstores and flipping through a wide selection of detective novels, gothic tales, classic mysteries and stories of contemporary noir apparently had an immediate effect on my imagination. Not that the police and the little rat weren't real enough, but shifting into the mystery mood of the season, I assigned their presence with more meaning than usual. Furthermore, I had been thinking about the larger role of the mystery genre in contemporary life and the specific geography of the New York mystery. With inventions of digital technology and high-speed communication promising to leave no one in the dark, how does the mystery story thrive? With bloggers and websites covering every inch of the five boroughs, will there soon be no urban mysteries to uncover? The policemen and the rodent provided preliminary clues to answering these questions. As long as humans are capable of crime and others capable of suspicion, there's always going to be a fresh trail to sniff out.

And what of the streets? How do mysteries quicken our steps on the storied avenues, dark intersections and back alleys of Gotham? Walking Off the Big Apple now turns attention this month to mystery stories of literary value, for we do not truck here in lesser thrillers. I have brought home a superior collection of books to consider - The Alienist by Caleb Carr, Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics edited by Lawrence Block, China Trade by S. J. Rozan, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, and Homer & Langley by E. L. Doctorow. If you would like to recommend a New York mystery novel, please do so in the comment section. I look forward to exploring the streets these stories take us. The game, gentle readers, is most definitely afoot.

Resources:
• Bookstores: Partners and Crime, 44 Greenwich Avenue (corner of Charles), New York, NY 10011, and The Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren St., New York, NY 10007
• Browse this list of Historical Mystery Novels set in New York City from the Springfield City Library

Images: Scenes on Bond Street, NoHo neighborhood, early in the morning. Bond Street was the scene of a famous gruesome crime in January of 1857. At 31 Bond Street, Harvey Burdell, a successful dentist, was found bound and stabbed multiple times. His landlady and ex-lover, Emma Cunningham, was put on trial and later acquitted. The mystery of the complicated and notorious crime reveals much about the relationship between the sexes in New York's gaslight era. See Benjamin Feldman’s 2007 book, Butchery on Bond Street: Sexual Politics & the Burdell-Cunningham Case in Ante-Bellum New York, for the gory details.

Read the follow-up post, Gumshoes: A Partial Lineup of New York Detectives in American Crime Fiction

A Walk Through the Studio Museum in Harlem - Hurvin Anderson: Peter’s Series 2007-2009

2009-09-30T15:23:00.010-04:00

During the next three weeks or so, I recommend a visit to The Studio Museum in Harlem to see several exhibitions from the museum's summer season that have been carried over into the fall. Hurvin Anderson: Peter’s Series 2007-2009, the first solo U.S. museum exhibition of the work of a London-based artist born in 1965 in Birmingham, United Kingdom to parents of Jamaican descent, reveals a fresh approach to both painting and to the relationship between artist and subject. While in the museum also spend time with the works by the artist residents, Khalif Kelly, Adam Pendleton and Dawit L. Petros, and don't miss the photographs by young artists in a downstairs gallery.

Hurvin Anderson's paintings explore the space of a barbershop that served as an informal social center for Caribbean immigrants during the 1950s and the 1960s in the UK. The particular place in these paintings is an intimate shop in a small attic where the artist's father got his hair cut, and Anderson found himself drawn to the space as a way to explore his sense of identity and relationship to the Caribbean. He had once taken photographs of the shop and could refer to them for his paintings, but certainly they are used as a point of departure or inspiration rather than as a concrete reference. Mindful that the shop seemed like a private place and therefore needed to be protected rather than violated, the artist evokes the space in early canvases in the series through abstracted forms only, yet filling in partial details in another. Still, where we are is uncertain. With one of the paintings in the series, Peter's: Sequel, Anderson repaints an earlier canvas from memory. Each painting becomes a careful, tentative discovery of a place revealing itself. The last three paintings incorporate a figure in a barber's chair, thus changing the work in profound ways. No longer abstract shapes evoking a general interior, we now have a human protagonist with a story. Still, we only see the figure seated from the back, so the sense of privacy remains intact.

Anderson paints his chosen space in an effectively limited palette and with thinned coats - predominately cobalt blue for the walls, rust for the floors and flat white for the ceiling. The shapes take on different textures. Over the course of the series, the artistic explorations come to feel like analogies for remembering a particular time and space. And that's what they are. Anderson's work has been compared to that of Luc Tuymans (review from 2008 on this website) and Peter Doig, the latter his art teacher in the 1990s. This series, while somewhat academic in its presentation and conception, holds out the hope that Anderson's artistically adept incursions into meaningful personal spaces can surpass the intellectual vamping that sometimes characterizes other artists.

Through October 25, 2009. See the museum's website for more on current and future exhibitions.

Upcoming:

• 30 Seconds off an Inch
November 12, 2009-March 13, 2010
• Wardell Milan: Drawings of Harlem
November 12, 2009–March 13, 2010

The Studio Museum in Harlem
144 West 125th Street
New York, NY 10012

Hours: Wednesday through Friday 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM ; Saturday 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM;  Sunday 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM. Admission: Suggested donation:  Adults $7.00;  Seniors and students (with valid id) $3; Free for members and children under 12.

Image of The Studio Museum in Harlem by Walking Off the Big Apple from September 24, 2009.

James Weldon Johnson's New York and Four Stops in Central Harlem

2009-09-28T11:11:00.001-04:00

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), influential writer, activist, and diplomat, settled into life in Central Harlem in an attractive red Romanesque building near the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in 1925. He lived in the building, designated a National Landmark because of his presence, until his death in an automobile accident in Maine in 1938. The intersection of W. 135th and 7th Ave., known in contemporary life as Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, served as a major crossroads of African-American life, not just for New York but because of the lives and events lived there, for the larger course of history. On the southwest corner, where Thurgood Marshall Academy stands, now occupied on the first floor by an International House of Pancakes, once stood the former Small's Paradise nightclub, a legendary jazz club that opened in 1925, the same year as Johnson moved in across the street. Small's is also the nightclub where Malcolm X worked as a waiter after moving to New York in 1943. Across the street on the northwest corner stood the Big Apple, a smaller club that nevertheless helped popularize the nickname for the city. Down 135th, at 244, the NAACP had its headquarters, the largest chapter in the country. There, for twenty-five years W.E.B. Du Bois edited the Crisis, the organization's influential publication of news, fiction, and commentary.

A figure at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson fused white and black literary traditions, functioning as "a linking agent for black America," as Sondra Kathryn Wilson describes him in her introduction to an edition of Along the Way: the autobiography of James Weldon Johnson. While many still know Johnson solely as the creator of "Life Every Voice and Sing," the song he wrote with his brother in 1900 and later was adopted as the Black National Anthem, he was a widely-published essayist. In a life of many "firsts" - he was the son of the first female, black teacher in Florida at a grammar school, he was the first African-American admitted to the Florida bar after Reconstruction, Johnson was appointed the first African-American professor at New York University and the first to teach African-American literature there.

Johnson's 1912 book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, recounts the story of a musician born of a black southern woman and a distant white man who struggles with his identity and is able to "pass." As an honest personal reckoning with the meaning of race, the work is historically specific but with a timeless message. New York figures importantly in the work as a beguiling, if dangerous, landscape in which to cast one's aspirations:

"New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments--constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as she watches them fall."

Johnson's somewhat sinister characterization of the city confirms a pronounced theme in New York's literary tradition - the city's alluring power to attract and then to whimsically crush its hopeful residents. Though part of a larger and older anti-urban theme in American literature, Johnson's articulation of the power of the city served as a cautionary tale for African-Americans seeking a better life at the outset of the Great Migration.

After stopping at this famous crossroads, walk to the nearby Mother AME Zion Church at 146 West 137th Street. The oldest black church in the state was founded in 1796 by African-American residents and later became known as a refuge in the Underground Railway. The church was originally located downtown at 158 Church Street, organized by James Varick and other members of a Methodist Church who wanted to worship on an equal footing. George W. Foster, Jr., one of the nation's first black architects, designed the current Neo-Gothic building (1923-25). The current pastor of Mother A.M.E. Zion Church, Reverend Gregory Robeson Smith, is an activist, businessman, and community leader. His uncle is the famous actor, singer, writer, and activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976). While not as famous as the Abyssinian Baptist Church just a block north (and will be part of a later self-guided walk here), the church is worth visiting during Sunday services.

View James Weldon Johnson's New York and Four Stops in Central Harlem in a larger map

Nearby is the NYPL's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (515 Malcolm X Boulevard). Arthur Schomburg, another central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, was a native of Puerto Rico, the son of a freeborn black midwife and German merchant, who moved to Harlem in the 1890s and began collecting a wide range of materials about African-American and Afro-Caribbean history. His extensive collection formed the basis for the center. Look at the library's website for many public programs and online digital presentations.

Following a visit to the Schomburg Center, proceed to Astor Row, the block on 130th Street between Fifth Avenue and Lenox Avenue. A beautiful tree-lied block with well-preserved townhouses on the north side, the south side features an unusual long row of 28 semi-attached houses built between 1880 and 1883. The three-story semi-detached houses are set back from the street, with gardens in front, and all have identical wooden porches. The spacious homes became desirable in Harlem's recent boom, and their sales have become a bellwether for the city's real estate market in the current recession. Read more in this story from the NYT. Harlem's architectural treasures are so vast that they need to be explored on more walks.

Directions: Take to A train to W. 125h and transfer to the B,C to the 135th street stop and walk east.

Images: Photograph of James Weldon Johnson by Carl Van Vechten, 1932. Images of the corner of W. 135th St. and 7th Ave., looking east; Mother AME Zion Church; Schomburg Center; and Astor Row by Walking Off the Big Apple. September 24, 2009.

Walking for Peace in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza

2009-09-23T13:32:00.001-04:00

When the leaders of the world convene in New York for the opening of the General Assembly at the United Nations, tying up traffic on the east side of Manhattan with their heavily armed motorcades, regular New Yorkers, many of them born in other parts of the world, work around the congestion and go about their normal business. Some avoid the area around the United Nations complex between 42nd and 48th Streets, but others, particularly those with concerns about the actions of a particular government, gravitate toward this area near the East River. While world leaders gather behind closed doors, concerned citizens of various nations gather on Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on E. 47th Street between 2nd and 1st Avenues.

Dag Hammarskjold Plaza is a remarkable place. A tree-lined thin rectangle of a park, the plaza is named for the equally remarkable Swedish diplomat who served as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 until his death in a plane crash en route to the Congo on September 18, 1961. A political economist by training, Hammarskjold showed a strong spiritual inner life with the posthumous publication of Markings (1963), his journal of reflections. A walk to the plaza is marked with streets and corners named in honor of other fallen peacemakers, among them Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Kudirat Abiola, the pro-democracy Nigerian activist, both victims of assassins. On April 15, 1967, one of the largest antiwar marches in New York history convened on the plaza. The march from Central Park to the United Nations included a broad coalition of civil rights activists, among them Martin Luther King, Jr. After assembling in Central Park for a peace fair, speeches and performances, the marchers walked down Fifth Avenue and then to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza.

By the 1990s the park itself had gone into decline, so a nonprofit community organization, Friends of Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (website) was formed with the mission to beautify and preserve this place, historic not just for the neighborhood of Turtle Bay but also for the world. The Katharine Hepburn Garden (NYC Parks website) that stretches along the plaza is named for a longtime Turtle Bay resident and neighborhood activist who loved flowers. She also won four Academy Awards.

View United Nations Walk in a larger map

A walk through the neighborhood near the plaza leads to streets characterized by a mix of architectural styles. There are some mightily odd touches, however, like a weirdly designed sequence of amorphous sitting spaces on 3rd Ave. between 46th and 47th. Like in the rest of the city, restaurants near the United Nations run the world gauntlet from Japanese sushi to Middle Eastern food to Irish pub fare. The difference in this neighborhood is the likelihood of running into members of the world's diplomatic corps, especially while the General Assembly is in session during the first few weeks of the fall.

The walk shown here begins and ends near Grand Central Terminal. The last image, the subway corridor, is located in the Chrysler Building, just off an entrance to 42nd Street.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple from Tuesday, September 22, 2009.

Art "That Doesn't Even Exist": Dave Hickey Explains Ennui; and Upcoming Lectures on Art and Art Criticism

2009-09-21T15:46:00.009-04:00

"Do y'all mind if I listen to my Ipod?" asked art critic Dave Hickey in a twang, just before striking the first notes of his freewheeling lecture at the packed SVA Theatre on. W. 23rd St. last Thursday evening. "I just put T. Rex The Slider on it." And then the writer of The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty and Air Guitar: Essays an Art & Democracy, to cite two of his most influential collection of essays, launched into an extended riff on the idea of ennui. Addressing how boredom directly relates to the non-existence of a great deal of visual art in contemporary life, Hickey advised the large audience of mostly art students on how to avoid the trap of making boring art, "art that does not even exist."

According to Hickey, who cited Robert Rauschenberg for sharing the idea, art runs in 40-year cycles. After a fresh new idea comes along, it plays itself out over time and eventually become stale. When artists can't claim it anymore, however, they can begin to steal from it, he explained. Hickey advised artists to look for inspiration in works from 40 years ago or to go even farther back. In his own case, as a practitioner of New Journalism, he reached back for writing models in Victorian reportage. "Go back right to the moment before it started sucking," the Texas-born critic-curator and former Nashville songwriter poetically explained. When art adheres too close to the cannon by replicating its conventions and permitted deviations, it's no longer there. It's boring. "Walk through a provincial museum, and it's like listening to AM radio," Hickey said.

In this lecture, as in his essays, Hickey raged against the moment in the late 1960s when art institutions, foundations, councils, etc. embraced the notion that art was good for us. When civic-minded institutions started shuffling misfit students into art classes, professing the virtues of creativity, and dispersing funds to various socioeconomic classes of arts, controlling artists under the patronizing idea of caring for them became "a murderous and ruthless concept." Hickey said he felt much better about the art world when no one was encouraged. While he did not extend his thoughts in the lecture, Hickey writes in Air Guitar that art was more fun when it was a personal discovery shared among friends and not something that we're inculcated to think is good for us. In the chapter titled "Frivolity and Unction," he writes he would like us to consider just how much better we would feel "if art were considered bad, silly, and frivolous."

In his SVA lecture Hickey characterized the art world as "an extremely Darwinian system" that rewards "the survival of the luckiest." A resident of Las Vegas, he has written before that at least in Vegas, unlike in the art world, you know the odds. Sounding a new note in his lecture, saving it for the end, he shared his thoughts on the circumstances of his own lucky stature as a famed critic in the art world. (He's even been awarded a MacArthur Fellow "genius" grant, a recognition that I believe he richly deserves.) At the time he started writing about art, he explained, a dozen or so up-and-coming arts writers were ready to take up the mantle for the next generation. They died of AIDS. He was left standing. He was the lucky one.

So, where does Hickey suggest we go from here? Looking for iconoclastic artists like Lynda Benglis and Larry Clark "to kick us through this," he idealizes a convivial democratic society where we chat about art and argue the relative merits of particular works. We'll talk about art not because it's good for us but for the kicks.

Such thoughts may not be appreciated among those who attempt to control what we think about art, but considering art as a pleasurable way to break rules and to subvert the norm can help free artists, and especially for the art students assembled in the theater, from the tyranny of conventions or art's current fashions. Casting aside expectations could also help art aficionados alter the general way we approach the new gallery season in New York. Instead of walking into an intimidating gallery and trying to get it, feeling forced to appreciate the art fashion du jour, we could just as easily turn around and walk out. Then we can search for the art that turns us on, roaming the galleries and spaces where the cool kids run the show, feeling lucky to live in a city with too many people who make it.

Note: A revised and expanded edition of The Invisible Dragon was published in April 2009 by The University of Chicago Press. Details here at Amazon.

__________________________
Upcoming lectures in art:
• The School of Visual Arts (SVA) has a fine Fall 2009 lecture series. Upcoming lectures include David Salle (Sept. 29), Robin Winters (Oct. 1), Naked Lunch at 50 (Oct. 10), Sabine Flach (Oct. 13), Sylvere Lotringer (Oct. 29), Lucio Pozzi (Nov. 10), Eleanor Heartney (Nov. 17) and more. See www.sva.edu/events

• On September 25 at 6:45 p.m., The National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts (1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.) in partnership with artcritical.com presents an evening of art scholars and writers discussing the work on display at four galleries. David Brody, David Carrier, Linda Nochlin, and moderator David Cohen will discuss the work of Janine Antoni (Luhring Augustine), Maya Lin (PaceWildenstein), Chris Ofili (David Zwirner) and Kehinde Wiley (Deitch Projects). More of these Review Panels are scheduled for the upcoming year. See www.nationalacademy.org

An Art Walk in Chelsea for a Weekday Afternoon, and Places to Stay for the Night

2009-09-17T15:15:00.023-04:00

Walking along W. 22nd Street yesterday, on my way to the galleries on the west side of Chelsea, I realized I had often walked this way before. Looking at the familiar houses and recognizing several stoops, I recalled the series I wrote last December on the literature of Christmas and how I've already pointed out several places near here. This time, however, I was on a different mission - first, to see one of the films screened for yesterday's formal opening of SVA's Visual Arts Theatre on W. 23rd St. Designed by Milton Glaser and inspired by Vladimir Tatlin's never-realized constructivist monument (see Wikipedia article), the complex features state-of-the-art projection systems in its two theatres and is now one of the best places to see a film in town. Second, I had plans to walk west to see several exhibitions that opened the cultural season in Chelsea. Still, though I had been here before, walking the same streets becomes a new experience each time. Furthermore, the last several months have brought important changes to Chelsea. While not apparent along the residential side streets, the neighborhood continues to draw new development, especially near the High Line.

Walking along the residential blocks of W. 22nd Street to the western end of Chelsea, as opposed to walking along the wider and busier W. 23rd St., makes for a pleasurable stroll from the subway stop on 8th Avenue to the galleries. A couple of years ago I thought walking to the Chelsea gallery district was almost impossible. Things are changing. The installation of bike lines and plantings of green things along the avenues have softened these streets, making them more pleasant to cross and to explore. Chelsea is much more accessible with the opening of the High Line, and though the current northern exit of the above-ground walkway is on 20th Street, its planned extension north to 30th St. will further link the gallery district with the rest of humanity. The new condo construction in evidence in the neighborhood presages the shape of Things to Come (and coincidentally, the title of the 1936 movie I had just seen in the SVA Theatre). The galleries just need to hang in there through slow economic times.

View An Art Walk in Chelsea for a Weekday Afternoon, and Places to Stay for the Night in a larger map

Listed on the enlarged map are many well-known galleries along W. 22nd and W. 24th Street, although the streets to the north and south are lined with many more. Look for gallery guides online to plan a visit. I like to use oneartworld.com.

Also, if you are planning a trip to New York and open to new ideas, look into the hotels and inns of Chelsea. I've noted a few recommendations on the map. In general, the area offers some breathing room from the congestion of midtown, and walking the residential streets in the morning and afternoon has a way of clearing one's head. I've also noted on the map the location of London Terrace, a massive complex of much-desired pre-war apartments, as well as a few places to rest and get something to eat. A cupcake and a cup of coffee at Billy's Bakery, a comfortable spot on 9th Avenue, provided just what I needed yesterday in order to fortify myself for fifteen exhibitions of contemporary art. The walk itself is only a mile, so plan to spend much of the time wandering the galleries.

Images from September 16, 2009 by Walking Off the Big Apple. From top to bottom - 1. a block on W. 22nd St.; 2. the SVA Theatre on W. 23rd (between 8th and 9th Avenues); 3. W. 22nd (between 10th and 11th Avenues); and 4. The Gem Hotel, 300 W. 22nd St.

Old New York Gets a New Amsterdam Market

2009-09-15T11:26:00.025-04:00

Are there really vineyards on Long Island? Yes. Where did the cocoa in the chocolate come from? Ecuador. What is in the Halve Maen pie? Mincemeat. Where can I normally buy this cheese? At Fairway. You really make handmade corn tortillas? Yes. Such were the questions directed toward producers at the New Amsterdam Market on South Street this past Sunday. Inspired by the notion that great public markets make great cities, the organization selected dozens of A-list regional producers to set up shop to sell their fare for the market's inaugural event.

Markets are ancient. Selling goods and produce in places where many are gathered has long propelled the growth of cities. Producers in rural areas travel to the city where they find buyers. Over time, many who grow the produce or make other goods move to the edge of the city to be closer to the action, and more people gather to shop and talk in the markets. Les Halles in Paris, a legendary wholesale central market in Paris, flourished for hundreds of years, and in the mid-19th century great glass and
iron buildings were built to house the merchants. By the mid-1960s, however, the crowded stalls were perceived as an impediment to traffic. The city dismantled the structures in the early 1970s, leaving behind a mess. An underground mall, an enormous subway station and the fast-food friendly Forum replaced the ancient markets, leading to a rather unfortunate decline of the area. The city has since been trying to replace the Forum with something better.
Markets play an equally important role in New York's history, but many have faded away - among them the Washington Market in present-day Tribeca and the Fulton Fish Market in its old location (providing the backdrop for the New Amsterdam Market). Yet, the interest in slow, artisanal food and healthier organic produce has created a need for new markets among conscientious consumers. Furthermore, and this was perhaps the most reassuring trend I observed at the New Amsterdam Market, many young people are showing an interest in the older craft aspects of food production, whether it's wine, cheese, bread, or chocolate.

One thing I appreciate about shopping in a public market is the ability to chat with individual merchants. This kind of exchange of questions and answers about consumables and their production mirrors the ideal of the political public space, a notion inspired by the polis of classical Greece where toga-draped men spoke great words about civic virtue. With a direct exchange of thoughts among citizens, compelling actionable policies move forward. I don't think we'll be discussing the merits of a war with Sparta at the New Amsterdam Market, but we could form the basis for long-lasting relationships. Getting to know the people that make our food is virtuous enough.

To bring this discussion down to earth, I ate two yummy things on site at the market - a succulent brisket and slaw sandwich from Marlow & Sons (Brooklyn) and a delicious Halve Maen Pie from Bathazar Bakery (it tasted like Thanksgiving Day). I also purchased handmade corn tortillas from the Hot Bread Kitchen (Brooklyn), a rustic bread from Sullivan Street Bakery (Hell's Kitchen), and a bottle of chardonnay from Paumanok Vineyards (Aquebogue, NY) for later.

The next dates scheduled for the New Amsterdam Market (official site) are October 25, November 22, and December 20, all extremely well-timed in advance of the nearby holidays.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple from September 13, 2009.

My One-Night Stand With Fashion

2009-09-12T18:55:00.010-04:00

I've never developed a long-term passion for fashion. As a child in Texas, my mother often took me to Neiman Marcus to dress me in pretty little Florence Eisemans, but my inner little cowgirl mapped out her own future in denim. Relieved to be sent to schools where uniforms stamped out visible distinctions and later to colleges where I could live in blue jeans, I've always adhered to the notion that as adults we find our own uniforms and stick with them. When not in farmwear, I sometimes played with clothes as costumes, accumulating a Janis Joplin-esque assortment of bracelets and feather boas. My graduation to fashion adulthood came with the discovery that jeans also came in black. The tendency toward dark colors has now fully transformed my closet into a black hole, a mysterious place that traps light and generates radiation.

I'm ambivalent about fashion. I appreciate the cut and feel of well-made clothes, but I'm not normally attuned to the trends of the season. I admire many designers, but I deeply distrust how fashion advertising can trigger low self esteem. While my brain is full of Gramsci and feminist theory, my psyche spins imagines of the rich, thin, and young struggling in a dialectic with the poor, fat, and old. I would love to own many beautiful jackets made from rich fabrics, but I'm too scared of the pricetag. While I love to shop in big city department stores, the intimacy of boutiques scares me. I'll spend money on my hair and sensible shoes, but big ticket handbags not so much. The recession makes it all worse.

Yes, I was ready for Fashion's Night Out on September 10, an evening of special events and open houses designed to shore up the spirits and income of the city's fashion industry.

I'm sure I started the evening at Vivienne Tam on Mercer and wound things up at Hugo Boss on Greene Street, but the order of the middle venues had already blurred a little by the next day. (Recreating this map helped.) Vivienne Tam was a good place to start the evening, because I enjoyed looking at the clothes, found many of them "affordable" ( a highly subjective concept, based on an ability to rationalize), and even envisioned wearing some pieces. I was therefore braced for the night. A different experience came soon thereafter at Nike on Mercer, largely because the party aspects were so fine. People enjoyed sharing stories of their comfy clothes, and I could have stayed there all night. Yet, I pressed on, chatting with revelers (in no particular order) at Anna Sui, Curve, Kate spade, Kima Zabete, and more. I particularly enjoyed my visit to the Kisan Concept Store on Greene Street, if only because I also saw so many books and gifts of the sort that can pry open my wallet.

So, I had a nice time. I finished the evening with my only purchase, the official T-shirt for the event. While I still haven't completed the final steps on the runway, and it will still take more than champagne and pink drinks to get me to try things on and hand over a credit card, new doors opened, ones that I had perhaps too easily slammed shut during my checkered life of fashion.

Images from the evening of September 10, 2009 in SoHo by Walking Off the Big Apple.

See also the related entry, Fall Fashion 2009 Edition: Walking By the Yard in New York's Garment District, Crimes of Fashion, and Fall Fashion Trends.

In New Amsterdam, the Half Moon Drops Anchor at the Battery, and Other Events of NY400 Week

2009-09-10T14:57:00.007-04:00

From Fall 2009

NY400 Week, a celebration of Holland on the Hudson, continues through September 13, Harbor Day.

• SHIPS: The Half Moon (above), a replica of Henry Hudson's ship and operated by The New Netherland Museum, docked at the Battery yesterday. This week students will take part in the 10th annual Fall trip that recreates Hudson's voyage up the Hudson. See official website for more. In nearby waters, two Dutch naval vessels are also engaging in special activities related to the 400th anniversary of Hudson's "discovery" of New York, and sailboats in the Flying Dutchman class are racing around the harbor. These ships and boats will join others in the Holland on the Hudson flotilla on Harbor Day.

• EVENTS: The New Island Festival gets underway today on Governor's Island. See page at NY 400, the official website of the Government of The Kingdom of the Netherlands for the celebrations of NY400. Another eagerly-awaited event is the New Amsterdam Market, Sunday, September 13, on South Street, between Beekman Street and Peck Slip, with a serious group of quality vendors. See official website. More NY400 Week event info at nycgo.com.

• IMAGES: See more moody and atmospheric WOTBA pictures of the Half Moon, along with plain ones of the New Amsterdam Village, a temporary Dutch Village set up on Bowling Green, in this set on Flickr WOTBA. The village is open daily through September 14, 2009 from 11 until 7 p.m.

• NEWS: A 13-year-old Dutch girl wants to be the youngest person to sail around the world solo. The government thinks she's too young. Read the story (Yahoo News).

• MAPS: Click on this link, http://marinetraffic.com/ais/, to see a fascinating map with live views of marine traffic, created by the University of the Aegean. Note the busy ports of the Netherlands, especially near Rotterdam. (Thanks to NewYorkology for sharing the link)

"There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs - commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see? - Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries."- Chapter i - Loomings, p. 1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Image of the Half Moon. The Battery, New York. September 9, 2009 by Walking Off the Big Apple.

My Augmented New York Unreality: Google Street View's Eerie Portrait of a New York Past

2009-09-08T13:51:00.005-04:00

(Editor's Note: Since I posted this, it looks like the Google Street View has been updated. - October, 7, 2009)

I'm experiencing a surreal and eerie flashback, because the images of Google Maps' Street View of my Greenwich Village neighborhood have become fascinatingly out of date. While opening Google maps the other day to update one of the self-guided walks on this site, I happened to switch over to Street View. There, at the southeast corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, an intersection I know well, I was surprised to see the now-shuttered location of Cafe Figaro still open - tables with checkered tablecloths on the sidewalk, a couple seated at one of them, and the doors and windows open to the streets. It's been a long time, it seems, that the restaurant left the corner (it has since moved east to the middle of the block) and replaced with a Qdoba, a Mexican chain restaurant. In this uncanny altered reality, I decided to virtually stroll around the nearby streets and check out what else was open in this other-worldy Greenwich Village. After all, it looked like a nice day in there.

View Larger Map

What month and year was it? I ventured from this spot west to Sixth Avenue and up to the IFC Theatre. From reading the names of the films on the marquee, I was able to date the Google Street view images to late September of 2007. Walking from the theater east on W. 3rd. St. I saw that the facade of the Blue Note jazz club was revealed - the grand piano was plainly visible and not behind scaffolding like I've seen it these last few months. On Bleecker, Le Poisson Rouge had not opened on Bleecker. Senor Swanky's was still in business. Other turns on nearby blocks revealed restaurants and cafes that have departed, banks that once planned a location but have gone out of business, and storefronts not yet renovated. In a surprising discovery that may hearten preservationists (or not), in Google's Street View imagery of Greenwich Village, Washington Square Park has not been renovated.

Selecting and roaming through other neighborhoods and then comparing the sights with recent visits revealed the noticeable changes in the city over the past two years. While change is intrinsic to the life of the city, this is a particularly rich time to compare and contrast then and now. In its thousands of sequential still pictures seamed together through image software, Street View provides a ghostly image of New York at the outset of the recession, a year before the flamboyant collapse of Wall Street firms last fall.

Short of these macroeconomic issues, the Street View window back in time can help you revisit a favorite restaurant or store that has since closed. Maybe you'll wander down the street to visit a cafe and then recognize yourself sitting there. For your privacy, Google has blurred your face. You're now a ghost in your own hallucinatory reality, an apparition in your city of two years ago. Furthermore, your perspective is that of a camera on top of a truck, creating the illusion of floating above the ground, stuck in endless traffic in the middle of the street, revisiting your old haunts.

Fall Fashion 2009 Edition: Walking By the Yard in New York's Garment District, Crimes of Fashion, and Fall Fashion Trends

2009-09-06T12:44:00.016-04:00

While no longer a bustling center of manufacturing, New York's Garment District between Thirty-fourth and Forty-second Streets and Fifth to Ninth Avenues still hums with fabric stores, machine shops, specialty notion stores, and showrooms catering to the fashion and theatrical trades. Shoppers for domestic and imported fabrics or silk or lace or even spandex explore the streets of the neighborhood, variably called the Fashion District, for particularly good deals from suppliers. Students of fashion, like the aspiring designers enrolled at Parsons or the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), roam the stores in search of swatches for projects. Maybe one day their names will be as acclaimed as those honored along the Fashion walk of fame on Seventh Avenue - among them, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Halston, Marc Jacobs, Anne Klein, Perry Ellis, Oscar Del La Renta, and Giorgio Di Sant’ Angelo. With the right fabric, Project Runway is in their future.

A good place to begin a walk through the Garment District is on the NE corner of W. 39th St. and Seventh Avenue. In addition to picking up information at the Fashion Center Business Improvement kiosk (official site), look at the oversize needle threading a button and the bronze sculpture of the garment worker sitting at a sewing machine. Walk north and wander west along 40th Street to browse a large selection of fabric in NY Elegant Fabrics or for wedding lace in Sposabella. Wander down W. 39th Street and look for buttons, sewing and knitting supplies in Vardhman. Nearby, Beckenstein Fashion Fabric carries on its legacy from its Lower East Side Orchard Street origins, providing high quality fabrics for men's wear. Look for sewing notions at Steinlauf & Stoller Inc. At Hecht Sewing Machine & Motor Co., the long-standing family-owned business in the Garment District can repair any sort of sewing machine. Many of these businesses reveal the heritage of early 20th century garment workers, especially Eastern European Jews and Italian immigrants. Today, workers in the garment trades are more likely to come from Central America, Asia, and the Caribbean. Stop in for a drink at Stitch's, a nicely tailored bar, or have lunch at Ben's, an old-school deli that recalls the days of an older New York.

View New York's Garment District in a larger map

The Garment Industry in New York: Tragedies, Crime, and Economic Decline

Occasionally, down in my Village neighborhood, someone will ask me for directions to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Building, the site of the horrific fire that killed 146 garment workers on March 25, 1911. At the time of the fire, the building at 23-29 Washington Place, a block east of Washington Square Park, housed a factory that made women's blouses and employed 600 workers, most of them immigrant women and many of them quite young. They worked long shifts and were paid low wages. When the fatal fire broke out in the factory, seamstresses on the ninth floor found one staircase full of smoke and flames, and the other exit door was locked. Many jumped to their deaths. The shame of the working conditions revealed in the tragedy helped spur growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (now part of UNITE, Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees). Complaints about substandard labor conditions in New York still keep investigators busy today, with many new complaints coming from older neighborhoods downtown or in Long Island City in Queens (see this news story from Crain's New York.).

Sweatshop conditions and exploitation of immigrant labor are only part of the industry's unfortunate history. By the 1920s organized crime took hold in the Garment District, and in the 1950s, the Gambino crime family started controlling the trucking companies that served the district. By the 1980s, Gambino's control was so pervasive that many companies could not afford to do business in the area. In more recent decades, the shift to overseas factory production coupled with rising Manhattan rents has contributed to an overall decline of the district. A recent article from The New York Times characterized the area as "in danger of extinction," noting new efforts to save the district by consolidating businesses in specially designated buildings. If New York is to remain a fashion capital, many workers in the fashion industry argue that they need to keep the suppliers nearby. (See NYT, "New York Seeks to Consolidate Its Garment District," Aug. 19, 2009.)

Fashion Week

The two seasonal events known as Fashion Week (one in September, the other in February) publicize the importance of the fashion industry in the overall economy of New York, the second largest after finance. Considering what has happened to finance, industry leaders in fashion naturally worry about the effects of a prolonged recession. On top on the agenda is creating a more optimistic consumer, and if the traditional advertising strategies of manufacturing desire do not work, an argument about saving jobs just might. The language on the website for Fashion's Night Out (official site), a multi-venue public event scheduled for the evening of September 10, 2009 and sponsored by American Vogue, NYC & Company, the City of New York, and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, makes this argument clear. And, as merchants reminded me during my walk through the Garment District, there's a critical symbiotic relationship between the Garment District and the nearby Theatre District.

So, finally, what must we wear this fall? Synthesizing the fall fashion previews, I think the following list about covers it (so to speak) - short biker jackets, party outfits from the 1980s, layers, pinstripes and camel hair, tights & leggings with shorts, tailored skinny jeans, layers of gray and black, revealing shoulders (preferably one), short velvet dresses, shoulder pads, tall boots, neon pink and chartreuse dress, and something in brick red. For men, the list is shorter - classic shapes, dark shades and suits. Think Don Draper of Mad Men. If you're ever in doubt as to what to wear in New York, my advice is to go for the classic tailored look, in whatever shade of black you prefer.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple: top, window, NY Elegant Fabrics, W. 40th St., middle, "The Garment Worker," 1984 (info at Smithsonian) by artist Judith Weller near corner of W. 39th and 7th Ave., and bottom, window, Invisiwig, W. 36th St.

• For more information about garment workers and labor history in New York, please see the NYU's Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives' New York City Labor History Map.

• Read about one West Village designer's efforts to keep the work within the Garment District in "Made in New York," by Adrianne Pasquarelli, Crain's New York Business, Sept. 6, 2009.

• To read more about the individual businesses described in this walk, please read my list on Metrotwin titled "Fabricating Fashion: New York's Garment District."

Please read the follow-up post, My One-Night Stand With Fashion, for a report on my experience at Fashion's Night Out.

Art Trips Up the Hudson: Day Excursions From New York City to Museums and Historic Sites, with a List of Special Exhibitions for the Quadricentennial

2009-09-02T12:03:00.011-04:00

With cool weather returning, September and October are popular months to explore day trips north of the city, especially through sites along the Hudson River Valley. Fall foliage, mountain scenery and a rich artistic and literary heritage contribute to the perennial popularity of the scenic villages along the river valley, but this year, special events and exhibitions celebrating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage (and let's not forget Samuel de Champlain and Robert Fulton's contributions - see NYC Arts.org Guide) bring additional excuses for day trips north of the city.

Highly recommended are visits to the sites associated with the Hudson River School artists, especially Thomas Cole's Cedar Grove and Frederic E. Church's Olana. The two estates are close to one another, on opposite sides of the Hudson, linked by the Rip Van Winkle Bridge (how charming!). Other places with special exhibitions featuring the Hudson River School include the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, and the Albany Institute of History and Art. If 19th century landscapes is not your thing, there's DIA Beacon and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.

Please check the individual websites for more information, including hours, directions, and admission cost. Some places are accessible by train, others only by car. The area around the Catskills is perfect for hiking and sketching. That's one reason why we have the Hudson River School in the first place.

View Art Trips Up the Hudson: Day Trips From New York City to Museums and Historic Sites in a larger map

Hudson Valley Artist Homes, Museums, and Other Historic Sites:

• Cedar Grove: The Thomas Cole National Historic Site
218 Spring Street, near the western entrance to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, in the village of Catskill, New York.
The home of Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, is a good place to start exploring the Hudson River School Art Trail, a new theme trail to places featured in Cole paintings.
See the exhibit, River Views of the Hudson River School, through Sunday, October 11, 2009.
The media-rich Thomas Cole National Historic Site website is worth exploring in advance. Look for the feature Explore Thomas Cole, a well-designed, informative guide to the Hudson River School history, paintings, and sites. Especially interesting are the detailed maps of artist homes and workplaces, both in the valley and in lower Manhattan.

• Olana: Persian-style home and estate of artist Frederic Edwin Church
The estate is also considered one of Church's masterpieces. The artist designed the unusual house and surrounding gardens on the site where he learned his craft from mentor Thomas Cole. The collection encompasses artwork from Church's travels all over the world.
See the website for many programs and special events.
Ways to get there: Take Amtrak to Hudson, NY, then take a short taxi ride to Olana, or if driving, find the entrance off of Route 9G, one mile south of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.

• Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz 1 Hawk Drive New Paltz, NY
Exhibit: The Hudson River to Niagara Falls: 19th-century American Landscape Paintings from the New-York Historical Society. Through December 13, 2009

• Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers, NY 10701
Exhibit: Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture. Through January 10, 2010.

• Website feature, "View the Hudson River School of Art Abound Throughout New York State. from Study in New York.

• Boscobel House and Gardens, Garrison, NY
1808 house from the Federalist period on a bluff overlooking the Hudson with spectacular views.
According to the website, "artists are welcome to Boscobel on the second Tuesday every month, at no admission, to practice their talents on our postcard-worthy scenery."
Also see the website, Home on the Hudson: Informative and nicely-designed website created by CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D Program in Art History and Boscobel Restoration. In conjunction with the exhibit Home on the Hudson: Women and Men Painting Landscapes 1825-1875. (exhibit on display through Sept. 7, 2009).
Directions: Take the Hudson Line (Metro-North) to Cold Spring Station. MTA special info.

• Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY
Exhibit: Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings at the New-York Historical Society. Through November 1, 2009.

• Locust Grove: The Samuel Morse Historic Site, Poughkeepsie, NY
A National Historic Landmark, the home of the inventor and painter Samuel F. B. Morse sits on 180 acres with an extensive art collection and planned gardens.

• Albany Institute of History and Art
On exhibit: Hudson River Panorama: 400 Years of History, Art, and Culture. through January 3, 2010

Contemporary Art:

• Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, 1701 Main Street, Peekskill, NY Open Saturdays and Sundays 12-6 p.m.
Exhibits: Double Dutch: A New Generation of Dutch Installation and Video Artists. September 13, 2009- July 26, 2010 and Fendry Ekel: Art and Architecture: A Way of Seeing the World. Opens September 12, 2009.

• Dia: Beacon, Riggio Galleries, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY 12508
See website for information about the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions.
Directions by train: Metro-North Railroad trains from Grand Central Terminal and Poughkeepsie to Beacon station. Note: Dia:Beacon will be open Labor Day, September 7, 2009.

See related posts on Walking Off the Big Apple about the Hudson River School artists in New York City:
• The Tenth Street Studio Building and a Walk to the Hudson River
• Art and Spectacle in Nineteenth Century New York

Image at top: near 155th Street looking north on the Hudson River to the George Washington Bridge.

Art and Spectacle in Nineteenth Century New York

2009-08-30T08:39:00.012-04:00

In the spring of 1857, artist Frederic Church (1826-1900) traveled throughout Ecuador, making sketches of the country's mountainous landscapes. Two years later, working in his studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, he painted a large canvas titled The Heart of the Andes, a spectacular and detailed landscape that opened a window into another world. White-capped mountains under a partly cloudy sky set off the closer rugged peaks of the mountain range. In the middle, a golden-lit green peaceful valley serves as home to a small mountain village, Christianized with a humble church on the lake. A waterfall tumbles toward the viewer, a miracle of playful nature. In the foreground to the left, a well-beaten path takes us to the sight of two reverent souls, clad in the traditional custom of the region, visiting a gravesite marked with a white cross. On the right, delicate blue flowers and large-leafed plants frame the bottom of the picture. Native birds of South America perch in trees. On the left, on a tree trunk lit by a speck of sunlight, just to the left of a branch on which sits a colorful plumed bird, the artist has carved his name. The Heart of the Andes invites a long look and a sense of wonder, for both the beauty of the region and for the skill of the artist in painting such bounty, especially in his meticulous rendering of abundant trees.

In New York, this painterly revelation of a new world was first shown privately in Lyric Hall at 765 Broadway, and then in late April the painting was moved back to Tenth Street. There, it went on view to the public for an admission price of 25 cents. Frederic Church hired an agent to help maximize the impact of its exhibition and its subsequent press, and this early foray into in-person and offline social media marketing, bypassing distributors, certainly made its mark. Church’s people hung curtains to dim extraneous light, and they framed the painting to simulate the affect of a window frame. Gas jets cast the painting in dramatic light, accentuating its features, most certainly the waterfall. The Heart of the Andes, an armchair vacation in oil paint, took New York by storm, with over twelve thousand people lining up to see it. Many brought opera glasses in order to view the exquisite details. The phenomenal painting then toured London and eight American cities. People wrote home about it.

While Frederic Church was unveiling his view of the Andes to New Yorkers, artist Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was off sketching in the Rocky Mountains. The young German-born artist accompanied Colonel Frederick W. Lander on a government-sponsored expedition to chart a new route to California, one that would venture north of Salt Lake in order to bypass Mormon-controlled territory. While Lander pushed on to California, Bierstadt set up camp for several weeks in the area around Wind River Mountains (in present-day Wyoming), making sketches and photographs of the sublime landscape and the Native Americans who lived there. In early 1863, back in New York at the Tenth Street Studio Building, he painted The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, a painting of massive romantic ambition that dramatized the American West. The work is considered a response to Church’s, but like the Andes picture, it’s a compilation of various preparatory sketches and imaginary sources. His Rockies look more like the Alps, for example. As with Church's canvas, its subsequent theatrical exhibition drew thousands of visitors and was sold for $25,000, an astonishing amount in those days.

Emblematic of the Hudson River School, Church's view of the Andes and Bierstadt's interpretation of the Rocky Mountains extol the search for spirituality in nature, the values of rugged nationalism and the aspirations of American empire. Exhibited at the 1864 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair, a fundraiser for wounded Union soldiers, the paintings inspired a vision of American destiny. Furthermore, the popularity of the fair itself, with near 160 paintings on exhibit, touched upon the need for a permanent city museum. In his 1867 history of American art, writer and critic Henry T. Tuckerman (1813-1871) argues for what he calls “a permanent and free Gallery of Art,” citing the growing popularity of art exhibitions, the talents of the American landscape painters, and the lack of exhibition space outside of their ateliers. The National Academy of Design met some of the need for space, but it had a different mission.

Thus, the sensation of the exhibitions of Church and Bierstadt's paintings set in motion the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. Frederic Church served as one of the founding trustees. Considering the breadth and depth of the Met's collection, the dreams of empire seem fulfilled.

The two paintings are currently on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a focused installation, American Landscapes: Selections from the American Wing, on the main floor of the Robert Lehman Wing. The first painting encountered in this exhibition is one by the father of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole. (At the time of my visit the Cole work on display was his View on the Catskill—Early Autumn, 1837, and not View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1836) as I had expected.*) Entering the gallery, Church's The Heart of the Andes (1859) appears on the left, and Bierstadt's is over on the right. Also on view are works by Jasper Francis Cropsey, George Inness, William Bradford, and William Lamb Picknell. The style of Picknell's Banks of the Loing, ca. 1894-97, shows more fashionable European influences on American painting at the end of the nineteenth century, telegraphing a waning interest in the Hudson River School.

These works belong to the Met’s American paintings collection and are on view in the Lehman Wing through 2010/11 while the current American galleries are undergoing renovation. The period room galleries of American art and design are already open in the New American Wing. To see the gallery with these paintings, walk past and behind the grand staircase, through the medieval rooms, and then into the circular Lehman wing at the rear of the museum. Spend some serious time with Church and Bierstadt. And don't forget your opera glasses.

* Ah ha! The old on-loan switcheroo! Cole's Oxbow turns up at PAFA through September 30, 2009.

• See Book of the Artists: American artist life, comprising biographical and critical sketches of American artists: Preceded by a historical account of the rise and progress of art in America by Henry T. Tuckerman (G.P. Putnam & Son, 661 Broadway, 1867) on Google books.

The paintings:

The Heart of the Andes, 1859 by Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900). Oil on canvas. 66 1/8 x 119 1/4 in. (168 x 302.9 cm) Bequest of Margaret E. Dows, 1909 (09.95) (top and right)

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863 by Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830–1902) Oil on canvas. 73 1/2 x 120 3/4 in. (186.7 x 306.7 cm). Rogers Fund, 1907 (07.123) (viewed through the curtains in the image top right)

This post is part of a series about the Hudson River School and New York City. Read more about the Tenth Street Studio Building and a walk through the West Village here.

Top image: The Heart of the Andes, 1859 by Frederic Edwin Church. Other images by Walking Off the Big Apple from Saturday, August 29, 2009 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Tenth Street Studio Building and a Walk to the Hudson River

2009-08-29T14:28:00.000-04:00

The Tenth Street Studio Building at 51 W. 10th Street was demolished in 1956 to make way for an apartment building. Though not as high profile as the destruction of McKim, Mead, and White's Penn Station, the Greenwich Village building nevertheless held historical importance as the center for artistic life in New York in the 19th century. In 1857, enlightened entrepreneur James Boorman Johnston hired Richard Morris Hunt to design a workspace specifically for artists, some that included living quarters. Finished in early 1858, the three-story building featured studios designed around a communal gallery space. The gallery had a domed skylight at the top, a source of light that would provide the right kind of luminosity for the paintings below.

Many artists associated with the Hudson River School kept their studios in the building, including Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt and Martin Johnson Heade. Winslow Homer opened his studio in the building in 1859. John La Farge worked there for 52 years. Later in the century, William Merritt Chase moved into Bierstadt's old studio, ushering in later fashionable European styles (See the interior of his studio here, from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.) The proximity of the artists and the discussions among them helped facilitate a vibrant culture of creativity that lasted for decades.

View Greenwich Village Walk: W. 10th Street to the Hudson River and Back in a larger map

The Tenth Street Studio Building slowly lost its prominence as an artistic center during the 20th century. In November 1938 Berenice Abbott photographed the building, an image that's part of the collection of her work at the Museum of the City of New York. You can see it here. The sweeping fashion in the 1950s and 1960s for bright shiny newness took out many buildings of historic and artistic importance, including this one.

In the spirit of the artists of the Hudson River School who worked in the Tenth Street Studio Building, this walk through Greenwich Village leads to the river. While this stretch of the river may not be as mountainous and scenic as the towns and valleys to the north that the artists preferred, there's still the same possibility of finding in the sky and in the clouds, especially during the "golden" hour, a sense of sublimity and awe. Many blocks in the Village maintain a sense of the city's distant past, thanks in large part to the work of Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), the fighter for urban preservation whose former home is along the way. The walk takes in several standards of Greenwich Village walks, beginning with the sublime stretch of West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple, August 2009.

Read the follow-up post, Art and Spectacle in Nineteenth Century New York.

An Unconventional Summer in New York: When Geography, Nature and the Weather Dominated the Conversation

2009-08-25T15:36:00.009-04:00

The summer is not technically over until September 22, 2009 at 5:18 p.m. (for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere), the date of the autumnal equinox, but with the nearness of Labor Day (Monday, September 7) and the subsequent start of the school year, it's nearly over for most practical purposes. It's not just the calendar that's bringing the season to a close but the subtle perception of the shortening days as the north pole tilts away from the sun. Along the shoreline of the Hudson yesterday afternoon, with the sun playing hide-and-seek from behind the clouds, the summer looked like it was winding down.

From Summer 2009

Summer never fully hit its stride this year in New York, with June and July staying under the 90 degree mark, and many August days have been compromised by erratic pop-up storms. A recent violent storm caused an extraordinary amount of damage to trees in the city, with the northern section of Central Park particularly hard hit. The storms became a frequent topic of conversation, both in person and online, with many people sharing their images of lightning strikes over the city or of a particularly colorful sky after a storm's passing.

Over the past three months, many of the city's top stories fell under the related categories of geography, the natural world, and the weather. For starters, the celebrations relating to the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage have focused attention on the area's bountiful and diverse natural heritage. The visualizations of the Mannahatta Project, as opposed to the Manhattan Project which implies blowing us to smithereens, showed the beauty of this Eden. Yet, the major events of the quadricentennial celebration are still ahead, especially in September, the month Hudson sailed the Half Moon into New York Bay. (See the websites NY400 and Explore NY 400 for more information.) After two centuries of serving as a military base, Governor's Island is now open to the public on weekends, giving many individuals a sense of New World discovery. The opening of the High Line fits into these summer highlights, too, because we can now see the city and its famous western river in a new way.

A Look Ahead

"In the transparent, mutable cumulus the Americans found endless possibilities which mirrored the larger esthetic issues behind each painter's specific vision."
- Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 97'

An upcoming series here will map walks to the Hudson River from various vantage points along the west side, taking in the sights of the city as well as views of the river. Along the way I plan to discuss several artists of the Hudson River School, the 19th century landscape painters who were inspired by the river, many of whom lived and worked, at least for a time, in the big city. Several made long-lasting contributions to New York culture. At the very least, I'll stretch out what's left of the summer.

Hudson River Park, New York, NY, looking west to New Jersey, between Pier 45 and Pier 46, near Charles Street and the West Side Highway. August 24, 2009. 3:51 p.m. Image by Walking Off the Big Apple. Visit the official site of Hudson River Park for more information about the location.

Bye Bye Penn Station: Mad Men Takes on an Epic Battle

2009-08-24T07:53:00.009-04:00

In Season 3, Episode 2 of AMC's Mad Men, titled "Love Among the Ruins," Pete Campbell, the Co-Head of Accounts for Sterling Cooper, the fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency at the center of the series set in the early 1960s, chairs an office meeting with the representatives of Madison Square Garden. The plans to raze one of the greatest Beaux Arts buildings in New York, designed by McKim, Mead and White and built in 1910, and replace it with the more modernist arena has set off a storm of protest. The Garden officials have a PR problem on their hands. During the meeting, the copywriter Paul voices his opposition to the destruction, siding with the protesters. The conflict sets up the ensuing drama. Don Draper, the series' central character, a man with a shadowy past, woos the Garden men in a subsequent meeting with a line out of John Winthrop's 1630 sermon to the Puritan colonists. The past, he argues, should be ignored in favor of a new New York, a modern and clean metropolis, a "city on a hill."

The old Penn Station was by most accounts one of the most spectacular monumental buildings to grace the New York landscape. Classical to the max, the massive granite building featured the largest indoor space in the city, welcoming travelers into a grand space fit for Roman emperors. The station was even more grand than Grand Central Terminal, and it was featured in several Hollywood films and novels (i.e. The Great Gatsby). During the 1950s, as highways and air travel became the more common means of transportation, the Pennsylvania Railroad looked to replace the building with a smaller structure. Plans for a new Plaza and a new sports venue called Madison Square Garden were announced in 1962. The idea that Penn Station could be razed set off a storm of protest, a heartbreaking struggle that would lead to the city adopting statutes for architectural preservation.
The demolition of Penn Station was part of a larger battle. Urban activist Jane Jacobs' seminal work, The Death and Life of American Cities, a call for the preservation of small urban neighborhoods of human scale, was published in 1961. Playing Goliath to her David, Robert Moses, the city's "power broker," as Robert Caro calls him in his masterful biography, oversaw the wholesale destruction of historic neighborhoods in order to construct super highways. His plan for a Lower Manhattan Expressway, for example, would have essentially destroyed Greenwich Village and SoHo. These types of plans and the psychic trauma brought about by the actual demolition of Penn Station, beginning in the fall of 1963, set in motion a new preservationist spirit and with it, a rejection of the modernist ethos. The battle between preservation and modernity continues to this day to influence how many New Yorkers envision their ideal city.

Image of Pennsylvania Station from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection; Collins, Marjory, 1912-1985, photographer; LC-USW3-007028-D DLC (b&w film neg.). Image of Madison Square Garden, opened in February 1968, from February 2009 by Walking Off the Big Apple. The title of this post plays on references in the TV episode to the film version of Bye Bye Birdie, released in 1963. The series, comfortable with product placement, slipped in this reference perhaps to remind us of Roundabout Theatre Company's upcoming Broadway revival. Previews start September 10.

The Educated Artist: A Guide to Continuing Education Classes and Workshops in the Fine Arts in New York City, Fall 2009

2009-08-21T11:42:00.019-04:00

Living in a city with so much art, it's not surprising that so many people who are not professional artists occasionally like to draw, paint, sculpt, and take pictures. So it shouldn't be surprising that many area arts schools, colleges, and other institutions offer a range of art courses and workshops. Nevertheless, in compiling this survey of continuing education classes in studio (and outdoor) art classes, many of which begin in the next few weeks, I was impressed with the range and scope of offerings for all levels of artistic skill - beginning, intermediate, and advanced. A few of these programs offer a drawing course, or at least a class session, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a classic way to improve artistic vision.

In addition to improving artistic skills and learning new techniques, participating in an art class is a fun way to meet others in the city who share the same interests. Based on my own experience taking continuing education art classes, classmates will come from all areas of the city, with different backgrounds and experience that shape their individual visions. You'll be amazed at what kind of work is out there among the amateur art population. Do not worry about your own level of talent. Someone will be worse than you. Others will blow you away.

Many courses begin in middle to late September. Most have daytime, evening, and weekend classes, plus intensive workshops. Classes with multiple meeting times over the course of a few months (for example, September to December) can range from $300 to near $550. Many multi-week courses fall in the $425-$475 range. Some include model fees. Particularly popular courses with well-known artist instructors can fill up, so register early. A few of the schools listed below hold information sessions prior to the beginning of semester course. Be sure to attend, because it's always helpful to find a good match between your inner artist and its new instructor.
These listings are constantly being updated.

• School of Visual Arts Continuing Education, 209 East 23 Street, New York, NY 10010
Painting, drawing, figure drawing, anatomy, drawing at the Met, drawing New York City, sculpture, printmaking, jewelry. Also many courses in photography, animation, illustration and cartooning, etc. Information session for fine arts courses is Monday, August 31, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 141 West 21st St., room 602C, 6th Floor.

• New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, 8 W 8th St, New York, NY 10011
Evening and Saturday classes are open to members of the public. Drawing, painting, and sculpture courses last 11 weeks.

• Cooper Union Continuing Education, Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003
Several courses in the fine arts including book arts, photography, painting, drawing for all levels (including absolute beginners), collage, color theory, drawing nature, drawing on location, watercolor and abstraction, drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• Parsons The New School for Design, 66 Fifth Avenue, 2nd floor. New York, NY 10011
Courses in drawing, painting, watercolor, Drawing at the Met (a 5 session course on Saturdays, beginning September 25, $320), printmaking, mixed media, collage, and more. Non-credit students pay tuition and fees as listed along with the course description, and a $7 university services fee each term.

• Pratt Institute Continuing Education, 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205
Large number of courses in Brooklyn and Manhattan in painting, drawing, jewelry making, photography, sculpture, metalworking, artist's diary, drawing on location, book arts, perspective drawing, illustration, and more.

• New York Academy of Art, Continuing Education, 111 Franklin Street, New York, NY 10013
Figure drawing; painting in oils; Landscapes and Seascapes: Painting on the Hudson (Offsite); human anatomy; watercolors, sculpture. All levels - beginning, intermediate, and advanced.

• The Art Students League of New York, 215 West 57th Street, New York
The league begins its 135th Regular Session in September.
Painting, sculpture, printmaking, mixed media. Registration is by the month. Students may enter any class at the Art Students League at any time, provided the class is not full. Registration fee of $20. Schedule involves a variety of classes- five mornings or afternoon a week, part-time, one or two evenings a week, Saturday classes, Sunday classes and so forth.

• International Center for Photography, 1114 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street
The School at ICP offers 10-week and 5-week courses, weekend workshops, and seminars on a range of topics, including digital and darkroom photography, lighting, documentary, portraiture, Photoshop, and printing. Consult course catalog on the site to see the school's extensive offerings. Open house: September 15 at 6 p.m.

• City University of New York (CUNY) Adult and Continuing Education
See website to search for course offerings in painting, drawing, and other disciplines at the many campuses across the boroughs.

• NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, 145 4th Avenue, Room 201, New York, NY 10003
Offers courses in drawing (also a drawing course at the Met), painting, photocollage, printmaking, watercolor, and more.

• 92nd Street Y Art Classes
Offers courses in painting, drawing, photography, collage & mixed media.

• Henry Street Settlement: Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street
Classes in painting and drawing, ceramics, and printmaking.

THE ART SCHOOL OUTDOORS

• The New York Botanical Garden Bronx River Parkway at Fordham Road Bronx, NY 10458
Courses in Perspective Drawing for the Botanical and Natural Science Artist, Drawing Trees, Garden Writing and Photography.

• The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation
Offers a 6-session Nature Photography Workshop in Wave Hill beginning September 11. $150.

Related posts:
• Drawing Sessions: The Walk-in Ateliers of New York
• Back-to-School Art Supplies Walk

Updated: Links to external sites now open in new windows. Images by Walking Off the Big Apple of her ever-increasing art supply collection and a couple of drawings on location.

Some Serious Wi-Fi: The Edna Barnes Salomon Room at the New York Public Library

2009-08-19T17:40:00.011-04:00

Needing a change of work space other than my own living room, one with more gravitas than a place where dogs bring me squeaky toys, I went uptown to the main branch of the New York Public Library this afternoon. I mainly wanted to try out the new wi-fi room the library made available this summer - the Edna Barnes Salomon Room. on the library's 3rd floor. Across the way from the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room and the Deborah, Jonathan F. P., Samuel Priest, and Adam R. Rose Main Reading Room (we can sure name them here, right?), the 4,500 square foot space has just the right amount of ambient light and classical proportions for concentrated work. After looking at the paintings along the wall, including many portraits of the Astors as well as other notables, I chose a space at a table in the back of the room near a 1971 portrait of Truman Capote. I remembered that Capote set an important scene in Breakfast at Tiffany's in the reading room of the main library.

After reading and completing my tasks, I walked over to the public catalog room and the main reading room in order to watch others work. The sublime Beaux-Arts setting with marble walls, table lamps with gold shades, oak tables, and ceiling paintings depicting billowing clouds seem conducive to reading, even if the medium is a computer monitor instead of a book. Not everyone was studying, of course, but at least the room established the mood for introspection and thought.

Leaving the library by way of the Fifth Avenue entrance, I walked down the steps and passed the lions and walked west on W. 42nd St. to the rear of the building and to Bryant Park. Many people were sitting and talking in the park on this warm and humid afternoon. We had a huge storm in the city last night, a fierce tempest that ravaged many trees in Central Park (NYT City Room story), so I would imagine that many people were talking about it.

See more about the New York Public Library's Edna Barnes Salomon Room in the press release here. Laptops are available for lease. The main branch is now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, named for the businessman who has contributed $100 million for the building's renovation.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple from August 19, 2009.

Cooper Union's Architectural Advancement

2009-08-17T17:28:00.008-04:00

Visitors to Astor Place, the Bowery, or the East Village may find themselves stopped in their tracks these days, confronted for the first time with the Cooper Union's new, although unfinished, academic building on Cooper Square between 6th and 7th Streets. Designed by architect Thom Mayne and his firm, Morphosis, in collaboration with Gruzen Samton LLP of New York City, the building appears like an oversize robot caught in the middle of some sort of action or in the midst of a mechanical speech. The big gash on the building facade looks a bit like the Kool-Aid Man - "Oh yeah!," as if the building is beckoning the students inside.

Actually, the building creature can cool off its academic visitors. The exterior mesh screen will help cool the building in summer and warm it in winter. A green roof with low maintenance plantings will keep the city atmosphere at bay. Carbon dioxide detectors will detect empty rooms and turn down power. The smiling gesture on the outside also appears to suck the building inward and down, creating the illusion that the building appears smaller than its actual size. Inside, a sweeping staircase from the lobby to the fourth floor apparently narrows at the top, also playing with perception. Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times architecture critic, noted the friendly gesture in his review. He writes, "From certain angles the facade’s concave form seems to exert a magnetic pull, as if it were trying to embrace the neighborhood in front of it."

The building's presence also helps out a couple of its unfortunate neighbors - the Cooper Square Hotel, a tall building that lords over smaller, older neighborhood buildings, and Gwathmey's Astor Place, the undulating glass tower that sits too much alone. Astor Place, the hotel, and the new building form the new foundations of New York's own Sim City-like future, working better together than apart. The Cooper Union building also works nicely with the seriousness of the school's ruddy and massive Foundation building, the place that is home to the Great Hall where Lincoln spoke.

Fortunately, I found the new building immensely likable. Maybe it is that industrial smiley face- kool-aid acid test. Now I may think of excuses to go to McSorley's, the ancient pub in its shadow at 15 East 7th St., to look at it again.

For more information:
• The Cooper Union Build website - Cooper Union Builds
• NYT's architecture review, "The Civic Value of a Bold Statement," by Nicolai Ouroussoff. June 5, 2009: "Thom Mayne’s design for the new academic building at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art proves that a brash, rebellious attitude can be a legitimate form of civic pride."

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple from Saturday morning, August 15. Clicking on the images will make them appear larger.