Reading about New York

First posted March 19, 2014.

Most of the nonfiction I read falls into the memoir category, with an emphasis on travel. But one of my favorites is Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a book for book lovers. If you haven’t read it, buy it now. It’s short and you’ll read it so quickly you’ll wish it were longer. I’ve read it a couple times and love all of the essays, but one of my favorites is called “My Odd Shelf”.

It’s about Fadiman’s obsession with polar exploration and the collection of books she has built centering on it. You can read a little of it in this review, but the concept is a simple one: many of us voracious readers have a niche topic which fascinates us, one that the general population wouldn’t understand. I have a few of them – favorite authors that I’ve read almost everything by, girls’ mysteries stories with a focus on Nancy Drew and books about Nancy Drew, and fairy tales. But I’m starting to build a small collection which could be called “Books about NYC that I haven’t finished reading yet.” Not quite like Fadiman’s collection. Oh well.

The only book in this collection that I did finish is called My First New York: Early Adventures in the Big City, and I gave it away. It’s a collection of essays from New York Magazine by notables from all fields about what New York was like when they first arrived, whenever it was. I saw it on the ubiquitous New York tables at bookstores and museums and finally gave in and bought it. It was, like Ex Libris, a quick read, but a good one.

Another “saw it everywhere” purchase was New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, edited by Teresa Carpenter, which offers snapshots of the history of this city in diary entries from New York residents throughout the city’s existence. I’ve dipped into it, but have yet to read more than 40 or so pages. What I’ve read, though, was fascinating!

When I graduated college I was given The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn as a gift. It traces the history of each section of the borough I’ve lived in since moving to New York, and while I’ve read up on some of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in, I have yet to read all of it.

Not strictly about New York, but my friend gave me a copy of To Marry an English Lord, the book that inspired “Downton Abbey”, and while I’ve only read about three-quarters of it, I was struck by how many of the American heiresses in it were from New York society, and by the portrait of that society it painted.

A book that is useful for this blog: the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: New York City 2014, given to me by the fabulous Allie Singer. Once the weather’s a little nicer I’m going to use it to plan adventures in parts of the city I haven’t had the chance to explore yet.

On my to-be-purchased list: Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve seen it in the Met bookstore (where else) and my fascination with museums means I will eventually get around to buying it.

What’s on your odd shelf? What books do you buy faster than you can read them? And what books about New York should I add to my read-eventually pile?

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Manhattan Day Out: A walking itinerary

Tourist season is upon us. If you live in NYC, that means you’ll soon have friends and relatives coming in for the weekend and sleeping on your couch. Some of them have spent time in New York and just want to see you, but I guarantee you’ll have at least one visitor per year who hasn’t visited before – and if you don’t live in New York and are reading this, that visitor might be you.

You can always go back through back entries of this blog when looking for ideas (check out my “things to do” tag!). But in this post and a few others, I’ll outline some sample itineraries for a weekend day with friends who want to explore the city. Because most of my visitors are twenty-somethings on a budget, most of my suggestions are free – though there are a lot of stores are on this itinerary, so remember to bring enough money for some small souvenirs! If you’re looking for something to do on a Friday evening, swing by the free hours at the Morgan Library & Museum. Grab some finger food at their café or have some sandwiches at the Pret around the corner before heading to bed early to rest up for a busy Saturday!

Note: This particular itinerary involves a LOT of walking, so it’s best attempted on a nice day. Wear comfortable shoes, weather-appropriate clothing, pack lightly, and bring a water bottle.

Get an early start on Saturday with coffee and a bagel, then hop on the subway and head to the museum of your choice! Most open at 10 a.m. I’d suggest starting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (be sure to check out the roof garden! And I love the period rooms!) or the American Museum of Natural History (the dinosaurs, the giant meteorite, and the blue whale are all must-sees). Both are pay-what-you-wish, so don’t feel pressured into paying full-price. They’re also both conveniently located on Central Park.

After a few hours at the museum, you’ll likely be hungry! Museum cafeterias are often over-priced but convenient. If you’re looking for something more reasonable and quick, you should be able to find a deli or a pizza place nearby without too much trouble, especially if you walk a few blocks away. The Shake Shack near the Natural History Museum is delicious, but very crowded during peak hours.

Another option is to walk into Central Park and get a hot dog from a hot dog stand – a little risky sometimes, but they can be delicious! Whatever you do, wander into the park after lunch. There are maps scattered throughout, but if you walk more or less south from either museum you’ll have a nice ramble and you’ll eventually end up at the bottom of the park.

Aim for the southeast corner, where you can visit the famous toy store FAO Schwarz and indulge your inner child – and walk by the Plaza Hotel and indulge your inner Eloise. From there, wander south on Madison Ave and enjoy the window-shopping. When you reach 51^st street, head west and south on 5^th Ave so you can take a look at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Walk a block and half south on 5^th Ave and head west into Rockefeller Center, where you can peek at where the Today Show is filmed, or visit the NBC Experience and Top of the Rock (neither of which I’ve done). For a free (unless you buy anything!) experience, check out the NBC Store, Nintendo World, the LEGO Store, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art store.  Other nearby destinations: Radio City Musical Hall, Magnolia Bakery, and American Girl Place.

From Rockefeller Center, wander south five blocks to 42^ndStreet, where you can check out the New York Public Library and Bryant Park, two of my favorite places (and two great bathrooms). If your feet aren’t too tired, wander a few blocks east to see the gorgeous constellation ceiling at Grand Central Terminal, or bravely trek a few blocks west to visit Times Square. If you’re in the mood, see how long the TKTS line is and get some theater tickets.

If you or your guests aren’t  theater-crazed, you’re probably getting hungry again. Hop a train down to SoHo to grab dinner at my favorite restaurant, Il Corallo. From there, hit up one of my favorite cupcake places in the neighborhood or take a walk or subway ride back up Broadway to Union Square and check out a few bookstores before taking your tired-but-happy self home to gear up for another day’s outing.

Anyone have suggestions for other stops along this route?

Here’s a map with most of the places mentioned above marked. The straight lines are routes I’ve suggested walking, while the squiggly one is the subway ride to Il Corallo. Enjoy!

Reading about New York

Most of the nonfiction I read falls into the memoir category, with an emphasis on travel. But one of my favorites is Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a book for book lovers. If you haven’t read it, buy it now. It’s short and you’ll read it so quickly you’ll wish it were longer. I’ve read it a couple times and love all of the essays, but one of my favorites is called “My Odd Shelf”.

It’s about Fadiman’s obsession with polar exploration and the collection of books she has built centering on it. You can read a little of it in this review, but the concept is a simple one: many of us voracious readers have a niche topic which fascinates us, one that the general population wouldn’t understand. I have a few of them – favorite authors that I’ve read almost everything by, girls’ mysteries stories with a focus on Nancy Drew and books about Nancy Drew, and fairy tales. But I’m starting to build a small collection which could be called “Books about NYC that I haven’t finished reading yet.” Not quite like Fadiman’s collection. Oh well.

The only book in this collection that I did finish is called My First New York: Early Adventures in the Big City, and I gave it away. It’s a collection of essays from New York Magazine by notables from all fields about what New York was like when they first arrived, whenever it was. I saw it on the ubiquitous New York tables at bookstores and museums and finally gave in and bought it. It was, like Ex Libris, a quick read, but a good one.

Another “saw it everywhere” purchase was New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, edited by Teresa Carpenter, which offers snapshots of the history of this city in diary entries from New York residents throughout the city’s existence. I’ve dipped into it, but have yet to read more than 40 or so pages. What I’ve read, though, was fascinating!

When I graduated college I was given The Neighborhoods of Brooklyn as a gift. It traces the history of each section of the borough I’ve lived in since moving to New York, and while I’ve read up on some of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in, I have yet to read all of it.

Not strictly about New York, but my friend gave me a copy of To Marry an English Lord, the book that inspired “Downton Abbey”, and while I’ve only read about three-quarters of it, I was struck by how many of the American heiresses in it were from New York society, and by the portrait of that society it painted.

A book that should be useful for this blog: the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: New York City 2014, given to me by the fabulous Allie Singer. Once the weather’s a little nicer I’m going to use it to plan adventures in parts of the city I haven’t had the chance to explore yet.

On my to-be-purchased list: Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve seen it in the Met bookstore (where else) and my fascination with museums means I will eventually get around to buying it.

What’s on your odd shelf? What books do you buy faster than you can read them? And what books about New York should I add to my read-eventually pile?

The Forty Part Motet at the Cloisters

I’ve already suggested visiting the Cloisters, but now I have to urge you: visit the Cloisters before December 8. If you do, you’ll be able to visit an installation which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.

Janet Cardiff, a multimedia artist who I’m definitely going to look up and learn more about, created a piece called The Forty Part Motet. It’s a recording of Thomas Tallis’s 16^th century motet for forty voices, but it’s not your typical choral recording. It is split into forty separate recordings, representing the forty voices, across forty speakers arranged in a circle inside a 12^th century chapel at the Cloisters.

According to the exhibit notes, this is the first time the piece has been presented anywhere besides a neutral gallery space (which, from a Youtube video I found, seems not to be true), but after hearing it in the chapel I can’t imagine why it was ever presented anywhere else. The motet is made to fill those stone walls, and anything else would just diminish the experience.

I visited the installation with a choir friend, because our choir will be performing the motet in the spring, and we were so enthralled that we listened to the piece straight through twice. I moved around inside the chapel, sometimes standing by one speaker, sometimes another, and sometimes standing in the center and hearing the forty voices in balance. The piece would be stunning however it was presented, but this format, where you could choose to focus in on a particular voice within the wall of sound and follow it through measures, notice when it fell silent, and hear it pick up again, was fascinating. It felt at times like being part of the choir, which is an experience I’m lucky to have regularly but must be novel for non-singers.

As we left, my friend and I discussed how the piece differed from a live performance. A live performance, even if it’s recorded, only happens once. The experience of listening to a recording is not the same as being at a live concert; the sound is flatter, the voices more melded together rather than individual. Cardiff’s motet is different. It’s still a recording—the swell will always happen at exactly the same moment, with the same build; the tired singer will take a catch breath at exactly the same moment.

But the forty voices are kept distinct, and the performance is never the same twice, just like a real concert, because the listener is never exactly the same. Unless one stands in exactly the same place, or plots a path and follows it precisely, the music one hears will be different each time. And even if one were to do that, the people in the room would be different, changing the sound—and the experience—in tiny ways. This is a piece of art wherein the observer charts his or her own path and emerges with a unique experience.

It requires more activity on the part of the listener than a live concert, and while I think that nothing is quite as magical as a live performance, this comes close. I suppose the only thing better would be forty singers standing in that chapel allowing listeners to walk right up to them—and even then, you can’t ask forty singers to sing this motet all day for weeks at a time so listeners can come back and hear it over and over again, which is part of the appeal.

Go to the Cloisters before the exhibit leaves after December 8. If you absolutely can’t make it, read the New York Times piece about it, and look up a recording of the piece. And then after you’ve done that, go, because you’ll want to.

ETA: For another look at the piece, check out this article in Chorus America.

From the roof of the Met

I have a fondness for viewing things from a height. When I traveled to Italy in college, I climbed to the top of something (usually a cathedral, but once a tower) in most of the cities we visited. When I studied in London, I climbed to the top of St. Paul’s, and loved the view from there much better than that from the London Eye. There’s something about being up high and out in the air that makes a view so much crisper than it is when viewed through the thick walls of the Eye’s capsule, or through a window in a building.

It’s been years since I’ve been to the top of the Empire State Building (I’ll write about it if I ever go again), but I’ve come across a few spots that cater to my love of Being Outside While Up High, and neither of them requires climbing 320 steps, like my trek up to the top of St. Peter’s in Rome did. One spot is the view from my office’s roof, mentioned in my September 11 post.

The other is the view from the roof garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I first found my way to the Met’s roof garden on a visit to the museum sometime last year, while the Cloud City exhibit was there. Cloud City was a twisty, reflecting structure that visitors could climb—perfect for me, only my sandals weren’t flats, and flats were required for entry. I was disappointed, but I still took time to lean against the wall of the garden and look out at the view.

The next time I visited, I brought a friend from home, and I was wise enough to take pictures. Here’s what the view from the Met roof garden looked like on an afternoon back in June. (You may notice a striking resemblance to the header of this blog!)

I love the way the skyscrapers frame the park, and the way the park stretches out toward the skyscrapers. The roof garden is a tiny observation deck overlooking a huge, sprawling green space. The skyscrapers look small in comparison, but they form a fence that keeps the park tame and doesn’t let it creep out into the streets. Someday I want to be up there at sunset.

The garden (and its café/martini bar) is open from May till late fall, weather permitting, and there’s an exhibit there now that closes after November 3. I don’t remember seeing the exhibit there in June, but it sounds interesting. If you can, go visit this weekend. If you can’t, make sure to check back next spring!

Any suggestions on tall buildings worth visiting, in NYC or elsewhere?