A Quick Apple Trip

No question about it, New York, New York is a wonderful town, and I love the place.

I came here once as a child with my family -- I think I was nine years old. After that, I never came again until just eight years ago. Since that summer visit in 2016, I've been back five more times.

 

One of the biggest reasons for my return visits is the Metropolitan Opera House, one of the great opera theatres of the world. I've been to no less than eight shows at the Met in the last six years, and this week marked the ninth. All in good time with that story.

 

I hadn't really expected to go crazy with photography on this trip, but I encountered a rare combination of clear weather at both ends of my flight down to the  Big Apple, and with that the game was afoot.

 

To start, then, the view as my plane soared past the Toronto waterfront on the way across Lake Ontario. A look at the southern end of the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke...

 

 

 ...and a view of the skyscrapers of downtown and the iconic CN Tower.   

 

But then we approached New York and flew in a loop all around the city, south, east, northeast, and finally west on our final approach into LaGuardia Airport. What a spectacle!  Here, looking south down the East River with Queens and Brooklyn to the left and Midtown Manhattan to the right.

 

Two views of Midtown from the northwest and west. The first covers Times Square while the second features the circular Madison Square Garden and the legendary Empire State Building.

Then, we swung down the Hudson River, passing the Battery at the southern tip of the island. These are the towers of the Financial District and Wall Street, while across the East River you can see the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal and Cunard's transatlantic ocean liner, Queen Mary 2.

 

We then turned east across the Lower Bay; the view here shows both rivers, New Jersey on the left, the Hudson River, Manhattan in the middle, then the East River, and Brooklyn on the right, with the Statue of Liberty small but clear in the Lower Bay on the left.

Once I was on the ground, and after a 40-minute taxi ride, I arrived at my favourite New York hotel, the Hilton at Times Square. It's between 41st and 42nd Streets, half a block off of Times Square. Here's the entrance.

Welcome to the lively, glitzy heart of the Theatre District, where blazing signs many storeys high advertise theatres, restaurants, multiplex cinemas, arcades, cafes, a Tussaud's Wax Museum (just off the left edge of the photo), and numerous fashion stores. In the midst of it all, the hotel is just a doorway. Inside, you walk to the middle of the block through the corridor that goes all the way to 41st Street. There, a pair of express elevators whisk you nonstop to the hotel's working lobby -- on the 21st floor. On that level you will also find the restaurant and lounge, the front desk, and a takeout food outlet. From the lobby, you switch to the main hotel elevators to ride up to your room, somewhere on floors 22-44. 

 

Mine was on the 32nd floor, on the north side. Here's the view from my window off to the northwest to the Hudson River, with the New Jersey side of the river beyond.

To the northeast lies Times Square, hidden by the mass of buildings. The brown brick building with the clocks and the globe on its top, known as the Paramount Building, stands on the west (near) side of Times Square.

Here are a couple of close-ups of the Times Square area from that flyby as I was arriving. This view comes from the moment when we peered right down into the canyon of the Square itself. The modest building indicated by the red arrow is the 44-storey Hilton hotel where I was staying.

Here's another, and clearer view.

The Times Square of today is a world apart from the Times Square of my childhood. My family would never have gone near Times Square in those days. It was sleazy to the max, with porn theatres, strip shows, peep shows, prostitutes, hustlers, organized crime, you name it. It took a great deal of effort and a very great deal of money to clean up the area, through the 1990s and into the 2000s. It was in this time period that the high rise office buildings and hotels which you see in these pictures were built. Brilliantly lit advertising signs which stay lit 24/7 were and are required by city by-law, to help deter the sleazier elements from returning -- indeed, Times Square is unique in New York City in having a minimum limit for the brilliance of the signs rather than a maximum limit.

So let's go have a look at the Square down on the ground, on my morning walk during my one full day in the city. First of all, here's the Marriott Marquis Hotel which stands right on the western edge of Times Square. With a total of 1,966 rooms, this monster hotel looks awesome but is in truth pretty pedestrian. The sheer size leaves precious little room for any kind of connection between guests and staff (yes, I have stayed there and the place made me feel like a number, an item to be processed through the system). The huge advertising signs mandated by law mask the first seven floors of the building. The glass bay window and Marriott Marquis sign are on the eighth floor, the hotel's actual lobby level. I've read that it's one of the most profitable hotels in the entire Marriott portfolio, and given the sky-high rates I can well believe it.

 

 

Compared to the Marriott, the much smaller Hilton features staff who take the time to listen to you and make sure your needs are met. The server at the bar, as an example, remembered my entire order from the first night and got it to me super-express on the second night, when I placed the same order because I had to hurry to make an early curtain at the Metropolitan Opera. I can't imagine any of the staff I encountered at the Marriott managing or even trying to do that.

 

Here's a ground floor view looking north from 42nd Street along 7th Avenue into Times Square.

 

Farther north, turn around and face south. This is where you see the iconic view of the tower where the ball has dropped ever since 1907 on New Year's Eve. It's known as the New York Times building, more officially as 1 Times Square. It dates back to 1901, and was originally built as the headquarters of the New York Times newspaper. 

 

 

I know, it doesn't look that old. We're actually looking at two different buildings. If you check just above the Kia sign you will see the famous ball. That's the top of the New York Times building. The glass-walled building behind it, called simply Times Tower, is on the next block south. The old brickwork of the original Times building is totally hidden by the full-length advertising sign.

Times Square is a challenging place to photograph, because of it's weird hourglass shape and because of the crowds. It's said to be the most-visited single visitor attraction on the entire planet and I can well believe that. But I did manage to do one panoramic sweep with my phone to show some of the illuminated advertising signs.

From Times Square, I walked north to 50th Street, and then turned east. At 6th Avenue I came to the world-famous 5960-seat Radio City Music Hall, renowned for its spectacular shows featuring the Rockettes dance troupe. It's the first piece of Rockefeller Center which you come to as you approach from the west, hence the name "Rockettes." When opened in 1931, this was the largest stage theatre in the world. I've only ever gone there once, on that family visit back in the 1960s, when the combination stage and film show featured the new musical film, Bye Bye Birdie.

 

 

Across 50th Street from the Music Hall is the entrance to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the iconic skyscraper which features the deluxe Rainbow Room restaurant on the 65th floor and the observation deck, now called Top of the Rock, on the 66th floor. Notice how the original Art Deco signage, here as on Radio City Music Hall, has been carefully preserved. The entire central portion of Rockefeller Center, with its tall buildings and landmark underground shopping mall, is a textbook of Art Deco design and art carefully preserved as a heritage site.

Here at 6th Avenue is is where I began to encounter multiple traffic barriers along and across the streets. I was taking this walk on the morning of December 4, and that night was the date set for the spectacular illumination of the giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza. This event draws enormous crowds from all over the northeast region of the country, and perhaps even farther afield. This helps to explain why all the hotel rooms anywhere remotely near 50th Street and 5th Avenue were either sold out or horribly expensive. Here are two pictures of the unlit tree.

The security measures in place meant that I could neither get a clear view of the famous golden Prometheus sculpture (you can glimpse it in the background of the second photo) or of the outdoor skating rink which lies in the courtyard below Prometheus.

Out onto 5th Avenue at 49th Street, you can look north and see the shapely spires of St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral in between office buildings. It's located on the northeast corner of 5th Avenue and 50th Street. The glowing appearance of the Cathedral, even on a cloudy day, is due to the exterior being entirely clad with white marble -- also extensively used in the interior.

Due to all the modern buildings around it, getting a good view of St. Patrick's is difficult. However, here is an archival photo from the Cathedral's website showing the church as it appeared when newly finished. 

 

 

This trip marked the first time I visited the interior of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

I was much struck by the great collection of sculptural figures throughout the church -- plainly modelled as much as the building itself on the High Gothic of medieval Europe. The sculptures, though, have a realistic air which avoids the statuesque rigidity of the Gothic era and speaks of a more recent artistic sensibility. I've had no luck in trying to trace the name(s) of the artist(s) responsible.

Leaving the Cathedral, I noticed that I still had an hour to spare before my lunch date with a good friend who lives in New York. I decided to walk. From 50th Street south to 14th Street wasn't impossibly far, but I ended up being a few minutes late because I managed to miss pretty much every traffic light -- and that meant a pause at pretty much every intersection from 50 all the way on down. Do the math! I'm just not fast enough. You can tell the real New Yorkers; they know exactly how fast they have to walk to get all the way downtown or uptown without ever having to stop!

 

One thing is for sure, walking like that over a fair distance is a great way to get a feel for the varying tone of the city's different neighbourhoods as you go, provided you pay attention to the shifting composition of the crowd of people around you.

After that lunch, I resorted to New York's extensive subway network. Unlike some of my previous visits, it's no longer necessary to buy a special fare card. You can just tap your own credit or debit card on the reader to be admitted. Many cities worldwide have adopted this sensible approach.

The climax of my day came in the evening, when I finally got a chance to attend a live performance of Richard Strauss' epic opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten ("The Woman Without a Shadow). It's a real rarity of the operatic world, and I felt privileged to see and hear this piece with such a top-flight cast in the long and challenging principal roles. I didn't try to take any night time pictures but here, from a previous visit, is an exterior shot of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. It was a spectacular way to wrap up this short visit to the Big Apple.

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.

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 ("District 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.