Back From the Big Apple!

Well, we got back yesterday after spending a lovely five days in New York City where we saw the sights during the day and went to shows and movies in the evenings. This time we drove down and parked on Staten Island at Warren's aunt's house and that worked very well as the hotel where we stay is basically "on the way" going and coming from Staten Island. Speaking of the hotel, this is a picture taken at dusk from our 12th floor hotel room at the Riverside Towers where we always stay. This year we had a corner "suite" with windows facing across the Hudson to New Jersey and down the Hudson toward 45th st. This hotel is located at 80th Street and Riverside Drive in a really nice neighborhood. Zabars is two blocks east on Broadway which is where we hop the subway as well!

Monday was spent visiting with Warren's elderly aunt who is getting very frail -- she is the last of that generation for the both of us and we like to visit each year and see how she is getting along. She has aides full time now as she does not want to go to a nursing home (and she is pretty healthy except for hearing and short term memory loss).

Our first day out on the town we spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which is always a must see for both of us. I particularly liked the Pierre Bonnard special exhibit. There was no photography but I took this picture also by Bonnard at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) two days later. That evening we went to see Shrek, the Musical which was very well done and the music was wonderful with great talented singers -- although we have almost never been disappointed by Broadway musicals.
This is of course the main entrance to the Met.

The next day we got up early to make our annual visit to the Zoo in Central Park which we really like. We particularly enjoy the building dedicated to the Rainforest birds. This was a particularly handsome polar bear moving around for our entertainment. We managed to catch the Sea Lion feeding as well for the first time.

We rushed up 9 blocks to take a guided tour through Central Park in the afternoon. It took us from East to West at around 72nd Street.

Always on the lookout for a new bird, I spotted this Hooded Merganser off in the distance camouflaged by many, many mallards! He wouldn't let us get anywhere near him!

Although you probably can't see him, Pale Male (a red-shouldered hawk) was sitting on this pole (left hand side) on an apartment building close to the Park. He caused quite a stir a number of years ago when the apartment building where is nest has been for years decided it needed to go!! Petitions were signed and the nest is back at the Montana (I also took pictures of that!). Quite exciting to actually see the famous bird as well (easily amused as I am).

There were actually flowers blooming in the park so spring can't be too far off. We saw a lone crocus, a pansy and some violets later in the week at the Brooklyn Botannical Gardens as well. Warren and I split up for the evening and he went to a Haydn opera given by one of the Manhattan opera companies and I went to another play -- this time August-Osage County which had won the Pulitzer for drama and several Tonies a couple of years ago. It was absolutely excellent. It was over three hours long and I never noticed it! Warren was getting worried as I was not arriving home and it was 11!

The next day we split again and Warren took the Grand Central Station tour that I had taken last year and I went to MOMA. This was really a high point of the trip for me. I especially liked a large exhibit they had on the history of printing and bought the book published by the Museum which was the full document -- it was fascinating!! We didn't have the patience to stand in line for tickets and there were no plays we were dying to see so we opted for the movies and saw Doubt which I would highly recommend -- superb acting and good thinking story. This is of course one of the many Picassos that is housed at MOMA.

This is one of the spectacular water lily paintings by Monet. It was probably 10 feet by 30 feet. I remember seeing a similar one at D'Orsay in Paris.

Friday was a gorgeous and fairly warm (60 degrees) day so we decided to walk the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn from Manhattan, go to the Brooklyn Museum and also to the Botannical Gardens. This was Warren with the Financial District of Manhattan in the background.


The view back down through the Brooklyn Bridge. The weather was supposed to be cloudy and drizzly this day - ha!
See, I didn't even wear my coat! I really enjoyed the Botannical Gardens and would love to see it in bloom. They have a wonderful section inside with Bonsai which is some of the nicest I have seen!

The highlight of the Brooklyn Museum was the Judy Chicago masterpiece called The Dinner Party. It is extremely impressive both from an artistic statement standpoint and sheer craftsmanship as well!

Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Circle Line Tour

Well, we did manage to get out to Staten Island to see Warren's elderly aunt which is always a treat. She is still pretty spry and has lots of stories from old although her short term memory is not doing so well. She lives in a ranch house in a lovely residential section of the Old Town area of Staten Island. It is hard to believe that such suburban looking areas exist as part of NYC.

I decided to take the 3 hour Circle Line tour my last day in New York City. I really like it so much better than the shorter trips as you get to see all of Manhattan and surroundings. The last time I took the trip was close to 25 years ago when the Statue of Liberty was clad in a metal brace while they were working on her. What a change there has been on the island of Manhattan since then!!! All for the better, I might add.

The tour guide said that they are putting up residential apartment buildings as fast as they can and are still not meeting the demand for living in the City! Hoboken and Jersey City right across the river are no longer grubby outposts but have been gentrified to take the overflow.

We decided to find Warren's father's tenement house one day. We knew it was in Brooklyn and had the address (thanks to Aunt Norma).



We had NO idea what kind of neighborhood it was now but got on the subway and headed out. I suspected it might not be too bad as it literally was next to the water looking onto Manhattan in Brooklyn. Well, turns out the neighborhood is Brooklyn Heights and is filled with those ridiculously expensive brownstones!! The tenement is still there but is now a nice apartment building! It is considered a historic district! His father would have gotten a big kick out of that! The family moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island when he was a teenager because a younger brother was thought to benefit from the fresh air of the "country".

Warren was born on Staten Island when it was still farmland and the only way to get there was by ferry. Times have obviously changed there as well! A recent look at his old address shows nothing but condos and small tightly built homes. Warren estimated there were probably 200 residences on the land his parents used to own! Now they made quite a bit when selling it, but what it must be worth now!!



This is the skyline of the financial district on Manhattan -- it looks so strange without the Towers which helped you to figure out where everything was.



This is a picture of Ellis Island where many of our ancestors first landed on American soil. I have at another time taken a tour of this island.

The Tour of Grand Central Station

These two pictures are from my hotel window in the evening after all the lights were on. I couldn't resist adding them to the blog. After all I have shown the view at every other time!!




Thursday Warren and I decided to split up as he wanted to take the tour of Central Park and my feet by this time were killing me! I opted instead for what I thought would be a short tour of Grand Central Station. Well, it was a great tour but not short. It is a free tour that is held by the historical society each Wed at 12:30. It was lovely in that we heard so much of the history of Manhattan as well as the history of railroading in NYC and of course Vanderbuilt.

Now when I was a kid, we lived in the Philadelphia suburbs, used public transportation and had no car. We frequently would take the train to NY into Penn Station and then switch to Grand Central for the "national" part of our trip. All that has changed as Penn Station is where the long rides originate out of now and all the local trains come from Grand Central.

Over a 15 year period, they complete refurbished and redid Grand Central to bring it back to what it was when it was first built in 1913. It is the largest in the world in terms of the number of tracks coming in and out (I believe it was 67 or 68). When they rebuilt, they actually opened up quarries long closed in Italy and Tennessee to obtain matching marble!

I remember the "before" version only as being a grubby railway station like many I had been in. The most striking thing was always the HUGE Kodak picture of the month or quarter which filled one end of the station. No, it is no longer there. They actually built a new part of the station according to the original plans which had never existed before -- on the east side. The reason it was never finished as only the poor lived on the east side of Manhattan and they would have no need for a railroad!!

It certainly has changed!!


This is the clock on the outside of Grand Central. You will see the red background on the 6 and this is actually a window that opens in the summer to keep the works cooled.


This is one of the many lights in the main section of the terminal. When they were contemplating the cleaning and refurbishing, they assumed that these were brass as they were so discolored by smoke and grime. It turned out that they were actually gilded with gold on nickel!! They are stunning.


This is a view looking up at the ceiling of Grand Central which is filled with a painting of the Mediterranean night sky from June through October. They didn't even know it was there, the ceiling was so dirty. Needless to say, they don't allow smoking in there anymore as that was 70% of the grime.



This is one of the light fixtures in what used to be the Ladies Waiting Room where women would shower and change before or after getting on the train. They are starting to do some more work in here.

A day at the Orchid Show at the Botanical Gardens

This is a view from the window of our room just at sunset. We came back to the room some days to rest before heading back downtown for a show each night.

Well, I happened to see that there was an orchid show at the Botanical Gardens so I found out which train to take and we headed off on Wednesday morning. It was very cold but beautiful and sunny. The orchid show had only opened a couple of days before.

This is me standing in front of a bank of all different kinds of orchids to give you a feel for how they were displayed. Double clicking on any of the pictures will make them bigger. I will be adding a slide show to this blog in a couple of days.


Well, they don't do anything halfway in New York City!! The Botanical Gardens are located in The Bronx just north of the Zoo. We had never been there before but will definitely go back some time when you can tour the outside gardens which cover 550 acres! We had to be satisfied with the Conservatory which was fantastic!! I am sure I haven't been in anything as well done as that ever.


I had been to Longwood Gardens many times but it pales in comparison to this. Add on top of that the absolutely fantastic orchid show -- well, it was a great way to spend half a day. Supposedly there were 2000 varieties of orchids. The display was unbelieveable -- they were woven into the permanent displays with bowers, arches and orchids hanging from trees as well as planted among the other exhibits.

It was truly breathtaking and the day was so beautiful and sunny to begin with! I have included a few pictures for your viewing pleasure but will post a Picasa album later on as I took a lot of pictures there of the various orchids.





Everything in the Conservatory is kept well groomed and beautifully maintained.


Despite the number of people, you felt many times like you were by yourself. It was a definite "must see".

The Trip to New York - Central Park Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

This is the view from our hotel room at the Riverside Towers at 80th and Riverside Drive in Manhattan -- a very cheap hotel which is clean and has a microwave and fridge but not much else except location, location, location!!!!

Well, we are finally back and exhausted from our trip! Warren seems to have come down with the flu but hopefully I have escaped at least so far but who knows! We were a little nervous about taking Delta instead of Jet Blue but it turned out wonderfully. We had thought that maybe we would be in one of those little jet props as the time to get home was double what is was getting there. But not a problem. They had built in the time we had to wait on the runway for takeoff into the time to get here so even though the flight was less than an hour on a very nice little jet, the wait time was over an hour!! There were 40 planes in line ahead of us on a Saturday night at 8:30!

WOW is all I can say about a week in New York City. Everything is bigger, better and lovelier -- it is just a city of extremes!

We went to four Broadway plays -- Grease, Young Frankenstein, Avenue Q and Chorus Line. We liked Young Frankenstein the best as the staging was unbelievable and the story is such classic Mel Brooks. Avenue Q was a delightful surprise suggested by our oldest daughter. Kind of a marriage between South Park and Sesame Street and laugh out loud funny music -- perfect for the 30 somethings that were brought up on Sesame Street and their parents who watched with them!! Very irreverent to say the least! Grease was okay as it starred the people that were picked on the NBC show. The talent in New York is astounding and many of the subordinates had much better voices than those two leads. I really liked Chorus Line on Broadway but Warren hated it.

Our first two days were spent going to the Central Park Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



Here is me posing per Warren's request at the Children's Zoo in Central Park. We had just been through our favorite exhibit which is the Rainforest Conservatory where they have all sorts of tropical birds just flying around.


Here are some of the ducks that were outside in the Children's Zoo.

It was beautiful on Monday and the trip to the park was glorious. It is a favorite for both of us. Tuesday the weather was not so cooperative but we spent the day at the Metropolitan. I spent the entire day looking at all the Special Exhibitions and the 19th and 20th Century painters. I took a lot of pictures of art I liked and so will have my very own inspirational book of art. I had forgotten how much I liked Monet and especially van Gogh -- awesome. They have a wonderful collection of the Impressionists and of modern art at the Metropolitan. They had a couple of wonderful special exhibitions as well. I especially liked the Jasper Johns exhibit of grays as well as a private collection of modern works (we couldn't take pictures in those two exhibits).



This is probably one of my two favorites of the van Gogh's at the Museum -- Cypresses. There are two from different angles in the display.




The sunflowers were my very favorite however -- I just loved the colors. I was lucky enough to see the traveling van Gogh exhibition that toured the United States back in 1962 at the Detroit Museum of Art. Unfortunately, you couldn't get far enough away from some of the paintings in that exhibit.



This one is called Red and Yellow Cliffs by Georgia O'Keefe. I really liked this one and it was different from many of hers.






The first of these is by Georges Braque and the second is by Pablo Picasso. They were both done when the men were together in 1911 and there are two others in the Museum as well that were obviously done about the same time. I liked the use of the neutrals. This is at a time in the painters' careers when they were experimenting with the new cubism. Hard to tell them apart!! After seeing all the Picasso paintings, it is obvious that he is a master of his craft as well as being very innovative. His work always seems so perfect to me.