Escape From New York

Of course that is the title of a well-known action-adventure film from back in the day, but the film has nothing to do with this post.  No, my subject here is what I did when the incessant hustle and bustle and traffic and crowds and noise of New York began to get to me.

I took a 30-minute ride on the "A" subway line ("Take the A Train") from Times Square northwards, and got out at the 190 Street station.  Coming up to street level, I faced the entrance of Fort Tryon Park, just shy of the northern tip of the island of Manhattan.  A 10-minute walk north through this beautiful wooded park brought me to the peace and quiet of The Cloisters.

The peace and quiet is built into this museum, by intention.  It's a remarkable building.  Designed in a style roughly reminiscent of a medieval monastery, with no less than four cloistered courtyards, it was actually built in the 1930s by John D. Rockefeller to house the medieval art collections of George Grey Barnard and of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The building also incorporates numerous architectural features created for and taken from medieval European buildings.  It includes galleries designed to look like chapels and castles...,

...a restoration of a chapter house from a monastery..., 

 

...and several cloister courts which incorporate elements from various European monasteries.

It would be a mistake to assume that the original sites were pillaged for this purpose.  On the contrary, many of the elements incorporated into the building came from buildings that were destroyed or abandoned, and in many cases had already been pillaged for other uses.  For instance, the chapter house from a deserted monastery was being used as a stable.

When The Cloisters opened, a curator from the Louvre in Paris acclaimed it as "the crowning achievement of American museology."  But the enthusiasm wasn't universal.  Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum, related the story of a French art expert who later visited The Cloisters just once, and never returned.  This man asked, in acid tones, "Please, tell me, if you will, just who conceived this... oh, so romantic place?"  Not the ideal museum for purists or culture snobs, as Hoving drily observed.

I am totally captivated by the art of the medieval European world so I have had The Cloisters in my sights for a long, long time.  Thanks to the design of the building, it rarely becomes noisy, even when well-filled with visitors.  The four courtyard cloisters are made to order for meditative strolling.  The gardens inside the courtyards are filled with flowers and herbs grown in the middle ages, with placards noting the names and uses of the plants in medieval herbal medicine.  The terraces overlooking the forested parkland and the Hudson River are restful places too.

And then there's the extraordinary collection of medieval artworks and artifacts contained within.  I'm actually surprised that I got such good pictures when shooting with an automatic camera (no flash) through the Plexiglas display cases.

 For starters, there was a visiting exhibition of boxwood miniatures from the Middle Ages.  These exquisite carvings are crowded with immense if minuscule detail.  The prayer bead shown in this photo is all of 4 cm across, if that.  Each of the tiny figures was carved as a separate piece, and then inserted and held in place inside the bead with a miniature wooden peg that makes a standard toothpick look like a cave dweller's club by comparison.

In this cloister, the design of columns and their capitals changes from column to column with surprising variety, an intentional display of virtuosity by the builder of the monastery from which these columns came.

Some beautiful pieces of stained glass, preserved from several European churches, highlight the vibrant colours that are one of the lost secrets of the medieval glass artists.

This reliquary is one of the most spectacular of the many beautiful pieces found in the museum.

One of the great treasures of The Cloisters is the cycle of "Hunting the Unicorn" tapestries, the finest extant cycle of story-telling tapestries.  These were sized to hang on the walls of a very tall room, like the great hall of a castle.  Here's one of them.

The crown of the collection, for me, is this extraordinary altar cross, carved front and back, and believed to date from twelfth century England -- likely from the abbey at Bury St. Edmunds.  The figures here are not as small as in the prayer bead but each is a part of one of the five pieces of walrus ivory from which the cross is carved -- as are the scrolls they hold.  With only one exception, none are separate pieces pegged in place.  Each carved figure is about 2 cm tall, give or take a bit, yet they have detailed recognizable facial expressions and their tiny scrolls can be and have been read and translated, and interpreted -- in spite of the extreme abbreviation of many of the inscriptions.

A detailed view of the front, showing the scene of Moses raising the brazen serpent in the desert.  The entire roundel with all its figures and scrolls is a single piece of ivory.

I must have stood staring at this amazing piece of work for 10 minutes at least -- and that's after having viewed all kinds of photos of it over the years.  Truly the work of a master artist.

Even though I spent several hours at The Cloisters, I know there were pieces I missed and others to which I couldn't give as much time as I would like.  I'm sure I'll be back.

Back In The Apple Again

Once again, and for the third time in a year, I am back in New York City.  How ironic -- considering that I got through all the years from 1963 to 2016 without ever getting here at all!

I planned this trip around another of my bucket list items -- to see one or more live performances at the Metropolitan Opera, which is one of the world's greatest opera theatres.  In fact this week includes three shows at the Met, as well as one musical, and you can read all about those in my arts review blog Large Stage Live.

I began my first day in the Big Apple with a walk from my hotel at Times Square up and over to Rockefeller Center.  

I chose this location to ascend into the heavens for 2 reasons.  One is the Center's iconic collection of Art Deco art and architecture throughout the complex.  The Rock has it all -- from epic statuary...

 

 

... through more human-scaled pieces...

... and right down to the metal grids around the trees on sidewalks surrounding the complex.

As I walked through the underground shopping concourse of Rockefeller Center I felt like I had stepped into a time machine.  The whole complex is redolent of the 1930s and the height of the Art Deco style, in exactly the same way as the Toronto-Dominion Centre in (where else?) Toronto exemplifies the crisp Bauhaus look so fashionable in the 1960s.

The other reason to come here was the viewing gallery at the summit of the highest building, known as the Top of the Rock.  There are certainly higher buildings with viewing platforms in New York, but none are so far north and none give such a clear view of Central Park.  Also, the Top of the Rock gives an excellent look at the other two tallness icons: the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center.  

And, with the aid of the zoom lens, a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, some 8 kilometres away.

 An important hint at Top of the Rock.  When you come off the elevator from the lobby, you aren't at the top yet.  Walk all the way around this level, enjoying the outdoor viewing platforms, until you come to a revolving door, go through that and up a long escalator to the next level.  Here are more outdoor platforms, but on different areas of the building.  Now, find a small staircase tucked inside a poorly-marked doorway.  Climb that, and you are really at the top -- and on the one and only platform that is not surrounded by big Plexiglas walls.  That's because the top floor is set farther back, and anything you manage to drop (by accident, of course) will only fall as far as the viewing deck below -- not 70 more stories down to street level.

Next day I invested in a 2-day hop-off-hop-on bus tour package.  There are four or five companies that offer these, all at similar prices, all on double-deck buses with open top decks, and all with a choice of four or five loop routes in different areas.  But they all start right at or near Times Square, where I was staying.

This is definitely not the fastest way to get around to everything you want to see.  Traffic in New York moves at one of three speeds: slow, slower, or motionless, with very occasional intermittent bursts of 25 mph (40 kmh) which suddenly feel like an expressway by comparison.  But you will get to see far more than if you were down in the subway, and it gives you a real feeling for the city's various neighbourhoods.  New Yorkers have come up with quirky nicknames for some of these areas, such as Hell's Kitchen, Nolita ("North of Little Italy"), SoHo ("South of Houston Street," which by the way is pronounced Houseton and not Hewston), Tribeca ("Triangle Below Canal Street"), and my personal favourite, Dumbo ("Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass" in Brooklyn).  Yes, you actually see these neighbourhood names -- including Dumbo -- on street signs pointing out the best routes.

The main tour loops cover Downtown and Uptown respectively.  So first, a few pics from the Downtown loop.  Madison Square Garden, the main arena which sits directly on top of the cramped and crowded Penn Railway Station. 

The main post office building, which is being converted into a new and larger rail station, just across the street from Madison Square Garden.

The Empire State Building from 42 Street.

Farther downtown, the famous Flatiron Building from 1902 makes unique use of the pie-shaped corner where Broadway cuts at an angle across 5th Avenue.

The City Hall is surprisingly modest and attractive in a city where "bigger is better" so often seems to be the guiding rule.  The municipal office building behind the City Hall is more typical, and the style resembles some of the monster buildings constructed in Russia and East Germany under Soviet rule.

The park in front of City Hall is a popular relaxation space among the tall office towers of lower Manhattan, especially at lunch time.  I was far from being the only person enjoying lunch here, and the pigeons certainly knew that routine too!

All the way at the south tip of the island is Battery Park.  From there you get this unique view of the skyscrapers, showing the odd angles of the streets in this part of town.  The street grid begins much farther north.

On the way back north, along the East River, we passed the United Nations Headquarters complex.

The next day's ride started from Times Square and headed north. Driving up the long west side of Central Park brought us past many apartment buildings in contrasting styles.

 

Along the way, we had more than a few close encounters of the traffic signal kind.  Some of them were even closer than this one!

In the upper west side area of Morningside Heights I stopped to visit the enormous Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  This church certainly hews to the "bigger is better" ethic, and as an unfortunate result is still unfinished -- and likely to remain that way.  It's also a peculiar amalgam of Romanesque and Gothic styles, because the diocese changed architects in mid-stream, and changed styles along with the architects.  This Peace Fountain stands in a park beside the Cathedral.

View of part of the south side of the Cathedral from the park.

An interior view of the Romanesque chancel and apse.

A little farther north we passed the non-denominational Riverside Church, not nearly as long as the Cathedral, but much higher because of its completed carillon bell tower.  Indeed, the Riverside Church has the curious distinction of having a tower taller than the actual church is long (or so it appears, at any rate!).  From its inception, and still today, the Riverside Church has always been a leader in movements for social justice.

Turning east from Morningside Heights, we drove along the main street of Harlem, and past the Apollo Theater which is the historic cultural centre of the community.  Fittingly, the marquee advertised (among other events) a tribute to the great Billie Holiday.

On the way back south, we drove down the east side of Central Park, which is one of the key museum districts of New York.  Along the way, we passed Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Guggenheim Museum for modern art, and the massive Metropolitan Museum.  Those visits will await me on my next trip to New York.  The Metropolitan in particular deserves and requires a day to itself.

And one last look at the south entrance to Central Park before heading back to Times Square.