The first time that I went to Coney Island, I was in college, fully in the grip of a newfound commitment to intellectualism. I was certain that I was going to be a professor, that I was going to be a prolific and influential author, and that most of the world was consequently not up to my exacting standards of culture, taste, and intelligence.
At that moment in my life, Coney Island struck me as the epitome of everything I hoped to reject. Tacky, cheap, loud, dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh, it was horrifying to me. I did not like the beach, or roller coasters, or even funnel cake. It was too hot, too full of naked skin, too shamelessly mindless. I know that I sound as if I were some sort of dreamy Hamlet, condemned to a layer of Dantean hell, but that is what it felt like. Though it pains me to think of it, I was once invited to a birthday party in Coney Island; and rather than play catch on the beach, I spent the time under the boardwalk, reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (which, to be sure, I completely failed to understand).
And yet, Coney Island is so pure in its embodiment of wanton fun that I was also, against my will, fascinated by it. While I felt superior, the place also made me feel as if I was missing something fundamental about life. It became, for me, a symbol of what I lacked, and that is basically how I described Coney Island in my novel Their Solitary Way.
With age comes wisdom, or at least acceptance. It took me time, a long time, to learn to relax and have fun. Now, a decade and a half after my first visit, I think Coney Island is one of the treasures of New York, something I look forward to every summer.
For about a century now, Coney Island has not been an island. Formerly, the Coney Island Creek separated the island from the landmass of Long Island; but a part of this creek was filled in in the 1920s. However, as “Coney Peninsula” doesn’t have quite the same ring, the original name was retained. Aside from Rockaway, Coney Island is the only beach accessible on the subway (and the ride is significantly shorter), and it is also the only amusement park.
Coney Island has been the playground of New York since the 19th century. This is evidenced by the grandiose Coney Island – Stillwell Avenue station, which is the terminus of lines D, F, N, and Q. With its eight individual tracks, it is more reminiscent of a train station than a lowly subway stop, and is obviously built for high volume.
As you walk around the “island” today, buzzing with beach-goers, dancers, tourists, baseball fans, and teenagers on line for various rides, you might be forgiven for thinking that Coney Island is now in its golden age. But the peak of Coney Island occurred from the 1880s to the Second World War. During that time, with three amusement parks operating—Luna Park, Dreamland, and Steeplechase—it was the largest amusement area in the United States.
An early symbol of Coney Island’s greatness was the Elephantine Colossus, a 122-foot tall wooden building in the shape of (you guessed it) an elephant. It was so big that it could be used as a concert hall, a palace of petty amusements, and even a brothel. Indeed, it was significantly bigger than the earlier Elephant of the Bastille, a plaster model of a planned—but never executed—statue, which became an attraction unto itself. (It is now famous principally for Victor Hugo’s description of it in Les Miserables.) Unfortunately, the wooden structure burned down in 1896; but there is another huge wooden elephant in nearby New Jersey, by the same designer: Lucy the Elephant, in Margate City.
(There is a far darker elephant story connected with Coney Island, that of Topsy the elephant. Topsy was a circus elephant who had a reputation for misbehavior. In 1902 it was decided that the elephant would be executed as a publicity stunt. With the blessing of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Topsy was poisoned, strangled, and electrocuted. Her electrocution was actually caught on film. This film survives, and it is gruesome to watch. Be it noted that Thomas Edison had nothing to do with this particular animal execution, though it was filmed on an Edison camera.)
But the powers that be were not always kind to the island. One way to demonstrate this is the history of the New York Aquarium. This institution was originally housed in Battery Park, in the historic Castle Clinton, and was free to the public. It was a beloved place, visited by millions per year. Yet it attracted the ire of the infamous park commissioner, Robert Moses—who disliked both the aquarium and Coney Island for being too plebeian—who forcibly transferred the aquarium from Castle Clinton to Coney Island.
This had several unfortunate results. For one, the new aquarium was forced to charge admission. (Currently the price is $30, which is so steep that I have never visited.) The aquarium was also unable to safely transfer their animals, leaving them with no choice but to release their collection into the ocean and begin from scratch. And last, the aquarium was deliberately put in real estate previously occupied by the amusement park, Dreamland, in order to reduce the tawdry attractions.
But an even bigger nemesis to the island was Fred Trump—Donald’s father. A real estate developer, Fred eyed the valuable property occupied by the former Steeplechase Park, and eventually acquired it with the aim of putting up high-rise apartments. He made sure to demolish it quickly, and publicly, before it could be given landmark status; but he was ultimately unsuccessful in his building project. Trump eventually sold the property back to the city, and it was duly turned back into an amusement park.
Nowadays, the only remnant of the old Steeplechase Park is the iconic Parachute Jump. This was a ride that consisted of strapping people into a seat, pulling them up to the top of a 250-foot tall tower, and then letting them fall to earth with a parachute. It sounds extremely dangerous, but the ride apparently had a perfect safety record. The now-defunct ride is strangely beautiful—a kind of blooming steel flower.
This information, I should note, was partly gleaned from the Coney Island History Project. As its name implies, this is a non-profit organization, dedicated to exploring, recording, and divulging the history of Coney Island. In the summer months, they run a small stand near the Wonder Wheel, where the visitor can see remnants of old rides (such as the steeplechase), as well as dozens of excellent old photographs.
The center portrays Coney Island as a haven of cheap fun, which had to survive decades of private greed and public neglect in order to serve its vital function to the city of New York. We have already heard about Robert Moses and Fred Trump; but before them, John McKane, a Tammany Hall politician, tried to sell off much of the publicly owned land for profit. (Unlike the corrupt politicians of later eras, McKane ended up in Sing Sing.)
Fred Trump’s demolition of Steeplechase Park, in the 1960s, inaugurated what was perhaps the darkest period in the island’s history. As its popularity among New Yorkers declined—a result of many factors, such as the rise of the automobile, and the new availability of other recreational sites—much of Coney Island was rezoned and redeveloped for urban housing, with large buildings constructed for lower-income residents. This was followed, predictably, by an increase in crime and a consequent decrease in legitimate business.
It was only in the late 80s that a movement got underway to protect and revitalize the area. The Coney Island Cyclone, the Parachute Drop, and the Wonder Wheel were declared landmarks, and plans were made to construct a minor league baseball stadium on the former site of Steeplechase Park. Of this stadium, more later. First, I want to pay my respects to the classic rides of Coney Island.
The oldest continually operating attraction on the island is the Wonder Wheel. Built in 1920, it has operated every year except 2020, during the pandemic (unfortunately, its centennial). Its design is unlike a standard Ferris wheel, in that some of the compartments can slide around between the rim and the hub. Despite being next to the larger Luna Park—which operates all of the major roller coasters—the Wonder Wheel belongs to its own separate amusement park, Deno’s. Named for Deno Vourderis, who acquired the wheel in 1983, this is a family-run amusement park, still operated by his two sons.
Only slightly younger than the Wonder Wheel is the Coney Island Cyclone. Built in 1927, it was actually the third of the great wooden roller coasters, after the Thunderbolt (1925) and Tornado (1926). The former stopped operating in 1982, but was not demolished until 2001; the latter was destroyed by arson in the 70s. The Cyclone narrowly escaped destruction, too, after it was acquired by the city in order to provide land for an expansion of the Aquarium. The Coney Island Chamber of Commerce fought the aquarium to a standstill, and the plan was eventually scrapped.
The original Thunderbolt rollercoaster, awaiting destruction.
The Cyclone is now the star attraction of Luna Park. Despite its age (or, rather, because of it), the ride holds up. Reaching a maximum speed of 60 miles per hour, it manages to be quite terrifying, as the loud clackety-clack of the car, careening over the spiderweb of ancient wood, gives the sensation of imminent collapse. The sense of riding a rickety antique provides a thrill no modern technology could duplicate.
The current Luna Park is a reincarnation. The original was opened in 1903; and judging from the photos and illustrations, it was a sensational place. With over a million lights—changing color every second—it had every sort of entertainment conceivable. Its name comes from its first and most iconic ride, “A Trip to the Moon.” In this, visitors would travel on a strange spacecraft, as scenes of earth and space were projected on the walls. Then, they would “land” on a papier-mâché moon, where the Man in the Moon would dance for them. It sounds pretty awesome.
A colorized photo of Luna Park in its heyday.
(This brings us back to the unfortunate life of Topsy the elephant. This elephant was acquired by the owners of Luna Park in 1902, and used to advertize the construction of the new park. This included hauling the “spaceship” used in A Trip to the Moon. However, the drunken handler started stabbing Topsy with a pitchfork during the move. The police intervened, and the handler responded by turning the elephant loose, causing predictable havoc. Two months later, this dangerous man rode Topsy directly into the police station—again, causing predictable havoc. Topsy’s execution was thus framed as “penance,” though it was timed as a morbid publicity stunt for the park’s opening. The past wasn’t always such a charming place.)
The Luna Park that exists today only shares its name with that original park, which closed in 1944. The current rendition opened quite recently, in 2010. It has dozens of rides, from spinning teacups to terrifying slingshots (which I would never try). Among these is the new Thunderbolt. Opened in 2014, this is a modern-style rollercoaster, with a completely vertical lift hill (possibly the scariest part of the ride), and four sections when you are momentarily upside-down. Surprisingly, its top speed is a hair under the Cyclone’s; and the comforting impression of modern engineering makes it ever-so-slightly less terrifying.
The new and improved (?) Thunderbolt.
But an amusement park isn’t just rides and roller coasters. An essential element are the carnival games. Coney Island is teeming with such amusements, from Whac-A-Mole, to the ring toss, to miniature basketball free-throws. When I was younger, I steered clear of these games, put off by their vaguely unscrupulous aura. Yet now I think a couple dollars is a fair price for the pleasure of spasmodically attempting to bludgeon some plastic vermin. And I was pleasantly surprised when I actually won a game of water racer (in which you have to fill a container using a water pistol), and was awarded an enormous pillow featuring the likeness of Lebron James. The world may not always be fair, but sometimes you get lucky.
Yet there are pleasures even more acute than these. On a whim, after a long day on the island, we decided to dip into the Eldorado Bumper Cars, on Surf Avenue. It was like walking into a nightclub. Dancehall music blared deafeningly from the speakers as we blinked in the neon darkness. Deliriously, I handed over my ticket, and was directed to one of the waiting cars. The power was switched on and I lurched into motion, careening endlessly around a track, while a teenage boy clipped me from behind with an inscrutable smirk on his face. It was a blast.
As it happens, this bumper car establishment is next to a Coney Island institution: Nathan’s Famous. This is the original location of what is now a hot dog empire. It was founded in 1916 by Nathan Handwerker, though the hot dog recipe was created by his wife, Ida—who, in turn, got the spice blend from her grandmother. Nathan was a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who used his entire life savings—a grand total of $300—to open a hot dog stand with his wife. The hot dogs were all beef, though they were technically not kosher (the animal has to be slaughtered and prepared a specific way) leading Handwerker to dub them “kosher-style.”
Over a century later, Handwerker’s small stand has expanded into a city block, and in the summer months it is consistently packed. Yet with cashiers and counters on three sides of the building, service is surprisingly fast. Now, I am not normally a huge fan of hot dogs—in flavor, color, and texture, they are so processed as to be food-adjacent—but Coney Island, the mecca of mindless fun, is the perfect setting to stop worrying and love the glizzies (as they kids call them nowadays). And insofar as such things can be judged, I actually do think the Nathan’s frank, with mustard and sauerkraut, is a cut above the average wiener.
Nathan’s is also famous for being the site of one of America’s most barbarous rituals: its July 4th Hot Dog Eating Contest. The contest has a mythical origin story, in which four immigrants decided to test their patriotism with an impromptu contest, all the way back in 1916. But the contest really dates from 1972, when it was dreamed up as a promotional event. Though it began rather informally, the contest is now the World Series of the professional eating world. Indeed, for something as silly as an eating contest, there is a surprising amount of drama in the “sport.”
For years, the contest was dominated by Takeru Kobayashi, a Japanese legend who broke record after record, winning from 2001 to 2006. But the food tsunami hasn’t participated since 2009, since he refuses to sign an exclusive contract with Major League Eating. Indeed, the depraved tidal wave was arrested in 2010 when he jumped onto the stage after the contest. Meanwhile, Kobayashi’s arch-rival, Joey Chestnut was barred from the contest in 2024 after he signed an advertising contract with Impossible Foods, which sells plant-based hot dogs. Chestnut still holds the world record for downing a stomach-exploding 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes; but in his absence, Patrick “Deep Dish” Bertoletti took home the 2024 Mustard Belt with a very respectable 58 franks.
Now, I have described the subway stop, the carnival games, the rides, the history, the hot dogs (and the animal cruelty); but Coney Island is, above all, a beach. The experience of visiting Coney Island, for me, inevitably involves walking up and down the boardwalk, taking in the ambience. Indeed, the almost complete lack of shade on the boardwalk never fails to put me in a semi-sunstroked state, giving the scene a kind of mirage-like sheen.
It seems only right and natural that there should be a boardwalk and a beach at Coney Island. Yet like all good things in this world, it had to be fought for.
At the beginning of the 20th century, most of the beachfront property was in private hands, and so access to the ocean was severely restricted. Many poor New Yorkers could only look longingly at the waves through the links in a fence. It was not until 1921 that the city forcibly acquired the land facing the sea, and work began on the boardwalk the following year. It was named in honor of Edward J. Riegelmann, the Brooklyn borough president, who was in charge of the project. He himself opposed the name, preferring the simple “Coney Island Boardwalk,” but his contemporaries were so grateful to him that he was overruled.
Like everything else at Coney Island, the beach is wholly artificial. The beautiful white sand that covers the shore is all imported from beaches in Rockaway or New Jersey. Because the island is shielded from the waves by Breezy Point, in Queens, sand (a product of water erosion) does not naturally form here in large quantities. As recently as the 90s, the US Army Corps of Engineers was called in to add more sand to the beach—in part, to fill in the area underneath the boardwalk, which had become an impromptu shelter for the homeless, as well as a site of frequent crime.
When I was younger, a stroll along the boardwalk was akin to Dante’s voyage through hell. It was a series of activities that actively repelled me. Nowadays, I find a strange comfort in the fact that, on any given summer day, Coney Island will have the same eternal elements.
There are, of course, the thousands sunning themselves on the beach—bronzed and glistening skin, of every imaginable shade, contrasting with the gaudy colors of their swimsuits. At various points along the boardwalk, aspiring DJs have set up speakers, and are pumping out loud dance music for the passersby. Usually there are only a few actual dancers, though they flail with enough enthusiasm to make up for the lack of participants. Further down, there is the snake crew, who carry their limbless, listless reptiles on their shoulders. Presumably they make money by allowing others to pose with the snakes, though I’ve never seen any cash change hands. I have no idea how to care for a serpent; but I can’t help suspecting that so much handling isn’t good for them.
Drinking in public is illegal in the United States. Yet in the bacchanal that is Coney Island, the rules appear to be suspended. Vendors freely sell beer to pedestrians, who drink it without even the formality of a paper bag. On my last visit, a man in an electric wheelchair zoomed around yelling “Corona! Modelo!” to all and sundry. If someone took him up on the offer, he led them to a Latino man with a cooler, who presumably gives his energetic advertizer a cut of the profits.
But to be truly adventurous, one must try a nutcracker. This is a mixed drink with no set recipe, but which usually consists of vodka or tequila mixed with something sweet and fruity, like Kool-Aid. They are sold in plastic bags and drunk through a straw. There is manifestly a lot of leeway for bad actors. Some vendors may save money by watering down their drinks, and a crazy person could easily mix in poison. In my experience, however, the drinks are sugary and strong.
Strolling along the boardwalk, the visitor passes by something all too infrequent in New York City: public bathrooms. The beach is amply provided with “comfort stations,” as they are politely called, some of them quite new and futuristic. Keep going, and you pass by The First Symphony of the Sea, a wall relief by Toshio Sasaki, created to adorn the wall outside the Aquarium. Further down, you leave Coney Island behind completely. The crowds thin out, and there is hardly anyone on the sand. This is Brighton Beach, the tranquil neighbor of Coney Island. It is notable for being the city’s Russian neighborhood. There are several boardwalk restaurants where you can order borscht or pickled herring, and the shop signs are in Cyrillic script.
Turn around now and head back towards Coney Island. The tangled metal profiles of rides loom up in the distance, and the garrulous facades of amusement park eateries—selling fried chicken, hot dogs, oysters, and the like—adorn the boardwalk. Overhead, planes drag huge ads through the sky (even beaches have commercials in America), and the crowds become thick and noisy. Finally, the towering Parachute Jump appears, and next to it the great pier jutting out into the water. Nearby is a large stadium. You have finally arrived at Maimonides Park.
Opened in 2001, this is the most recent addition to the variety of entertainment options available at Coney Island. And it is perfect. Now, the visitor can spend the day sunbathing, eat a hot dog and chase it with a beach beer, ride a roller coaster and win a stuffed animal at the Whac-A-Mole, and then complete the evening with a baseball game. It is America at its finest.
(The historically astute reader may find it curious that a baseball stadium in Brooklyn is named after a medieval Jewish philosopher who lived on the Iberian Peninsula. This is simply due to its being sponsored by the Maimonides Medical Center, a non-sectarian hospital with Jewish roots.)
Maimonides Park is the home of the Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor-league team. You see, each team in Major League Baseball has what are called “farm teams,” where young talent is trained and cultivated. The Cyclones is the farm team of the New York Mets—one of several, actually—whose players earn a small fraction of the money of their major league colleagues, living in the hopes of advancement. As a result, tickets to see the Cyclones are also a small fraction of the price of major league tickets. The last time I went, I paid a bit more than twenty dollars.
The biggest night in Maimonides Park is, by all accounts, Seinfeld Night. It has become an informal holiday. This is the only day of the season when all 7,000 seats of the stadium sell out, as fans line up for a chance to get a Seinfeld bobblehead (usually of George Costanza). The Cyclones go up against their arch-rival, the Hudson Valley Renegades (a farm team for the yankees), and even become, temporarily, another team entirely: the Bubble Boys. Obscure Seinfeld references abound, as show-themes contests are held between innings, and even a few minor actors from the show make guest appearances.
When I last went, the Cyclones—sorry, the Bubbles Boys—lost 0-3 in a rather disappointing game. But the real event began after the game ended: the Dance Like Elaine Contest. For those who haven’t seen the show (and I should shamefacedly admit that this includes me), this is a dance modeled on Elaine’s spasmodic dance moves, famously described by George as “A full-body dry-heave set to music.” Dozens of people dress up in Elaine’s boxy eighties outfits and dance with arhythmic vehemence, as the crowd votes through their cheers. This year, a young woman from Brooklyn, Shannon, took home the gold with a convincingly convulsive performance.
After the contest ended, and we poured out onto the street, I couldn’t help but feel a bit wistful. Coney Island has become an integral part of my summers, something that marks a time of total freedom. More than that, Coney Island is a living embodiment of the carnival spirit, a place where traditional values are suspended or inverted, where any notion of refinement, decorum, or even of a healthy diet do not apply. Indeed, this is partly why Coney Island has had so many enemies throughout the years, from Robert Moses, to Fred Trump, and even to an immature Roy Lotz. It has been attacked as crass, neglected as unimportant, and continually assayed by businessmen trying to privatize sun, sand, and waves.
But one way to judge a thing is by its enemies. By that standard, Coney Island is one of the treasures of New York City—a monument to the prospect that everyone should be able to have a little fun.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that the Hudson Valley is full of the former (and current) homes of the exceptionally wealthy. It is ideally situated to serve as a kind of country retreat for the rich—within a stone’s throw of New York City, but surprisingly green and bucolic.
In the stretch of Route 9 between Irvington and Tarrytown there is a conspicuous concentration of opulent residences. The most famous is arguably Sunnyside, the house of Washington Irving, which now seems like a cottage compared to its neighbors. Nearby is the Belvedere Estate, which once belonged to Samuel Bronfman, owner of Seagram Company, of Canadian whisky fame—though it now serves as the headquarters for the Unificationists, a Korean-Christian version of scientology. And there is also Shadowbrook, a Gilded Age mansion owned by famed jazz saxophonist Stan Getz.
More historical is Villa Lewaro, an Italianate mansion owned by Madam C. J. Walker, the first female self-made millionaire in America—a feat even more impressive considering that she was an African American, living at the turn of the century. She made her wealth by selling beauty products marketed for black women, and then became a noted philanthropist. During her life, Villa Lewaro became an important meeting place for black intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.
But the grandest of all of these mansions is Lyndhurst. Rising like a misplaced cathedral over the Hudson, Lyndhurst is a spectacular example of neo-gothic architecture. It was first built for William Paulding, mayor of New York City, and a relative of both John Paulding (the Revolutionary War hero who caught the treasonous Major John André) and, through his sister’s marriage, of Washington Irving. Its extravagant style led locals to deem it “Paulding’s Folly,” though the subsequent owner, George Merrit, expanded the house and made it even more fanciful. Both the original house and the expansion were designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, one of the most sought after architects of his day.
Yet the name most associated with Lyndhurst is that of Jay Gould. It is a name that was widely columniated during his life, and his reputation has hardly improved since his death in 1892. Gould was one of the most famous and despised robber barons, who manipulated markets, bribed politicians, and bent and broke the law in order to maintain his dominance. Unlike Cornelius Vanderbilt, say, Gould’s opulence was not due to his founding a useful business. He was more like Warren Buffet than Bill Gates—an investor, not an entrepreneur. Still, in his defense it must be admitted that, like Vanderbilt or Rockefeller or Carnegie, Gould was a self-made man, born into poverty. (Unlike Rockefeller or Carnegie, however, Gould never became a prominent philanthropist.)
Lyndhurst, as it stands today, is much as Gould left it. The visit begins in the old Carriage House, where there is a gift shop, an informational film, and where you sign up for the tour. (The house can only be visited with a guide.) The interior continues the gothic theme of the facade. The ceilings are vaulted, and the narrow windows curve into a pointed arch (making some rooms of the house rather dark). Imitations of gothic tracery even adorn some of the walls. The furniture, too, is in keeping with the severity of the aesthetic, but several lovely examples of Tiffany stained glass do help to alleviate the stuffy atmosphere.
A curious detail, pointed out by the guide, is the use of paint to imitate other materials. While many surfaces appear at first glance to be marble, they are, in reality, painted wood. Meanwhile, the gothic ceilings, window panes, and tracery are made of wood and plaster rather than real stone. This would seem rather counterintuitive, since Gould certainly could afford any medium he wished. But at the time it was considered both fashionable and luxurious to use faux materials. (There is a fine line, apparently, between extreme luxury and garbage.)
The second floor of the house is dominated by a central gallery, which is brightened by the large windows. This is filled with oil paintings—by lesser-known European masters—most of which can loosely be described as 18th century Romantic realism. Among the collection, however, is a rendering of the Jay Gould Memorial Chapel, a beautiful stone church he helped to reconstruct, as well as a study for the Tiffany stained glass windows to be installed in the chapel. There is also a portrait of Gould himself, who always comes across to me as a misplaced barfly, with his unkempt beard and surly expression.
The two opulent master bedrooms open out into this sun-filled art gallery, making a sharp contrast with the dark, almost church-like ground floor. I would feel rather depressed eating in the pseudo-cathedral of a dining room, but quite happy waking up to such a beautiful, open space.
With its strange mixture of neo-gothic, faux-materials, and ersatz religion, Lyndhurst is one of the most memorable of the great Hudson Valley mansions—surpassed in extravagance, perhaps, only by Frederic Church’s Olana. However, as with so many of these great houses, the gardens are ultimately the pleasanter place.
On its great lawn, jazz concerts are held in the summer, organized by Jazz Forum Arts, which hosts performances all along the Hudson Valley. It is crossed by two prominent trails, the Old Croton Aqueduct and the newer Westchester RiverWalk. There, the walker can enjoy the rose garden, which is reliably swarming with bees and other pollinators, and take in the ruins of the old Greenhouse, which once contained over 40,000 plants, but is now just an empty frame.
If you continue walking south along the Old Croton Aqueduct for about two hours—or, alternately, if you drive twenty minutes down Route 9—you will reach yet another grand Hudson estate. This one, however, is conspicuously lacking the mansion. Much like William Rockefeller’s Rockwood, the resplendent Greystone has long since been demolished (leaving only its name in the nearby Metro-North station). But what survived is arguably better than even the finest old residence. It is perhaps the loveliest garden in the Hudson Valley.
The bygone Greystone mansion
I am referring, of course, to the Untermyer Park and Gardens. Samuel Untermyer was another colorful figure from a bygone age. A lawyer by profession, he somehow made his fortune by fighting against corporate interests. He was an enemy of trusts and monopolies, an advocate of stock market regulation, and instrumental in the establishment of the Federal Reserve. He was also, as it happens, an avid botanist, who wanted to create gardens that would outshine even the landscape at John D. Rockefeller’s Kykuit. Thus, he hired the French-trained architect and designer William W. Bosworth—indeed, the same one the Rockefeller’s hired—to make him the finest gardens that money could buy.
The result is something unlike any other garden I have visited. It is surrounded by high walls, apparently in imitation of old Persian models. After passing under two shady weeping beeches, the central waterway leads the visitor’s eye down the highly symmetrical space. In its focus on flowing water, the garden is indeed reminiscent of its Moorish counterparts in the Alhambra, though the wet climate of the Hudson Valley allows for a proliferation of plant life—rhododendrons, lilies, hollies, hydrangea, amid much else—that is wholly unlike its Islamic models. This central space terminates in a large reflecting pool, over which two sphinxes preside.
After exploring this space (the pseudo-Greek Temple of the Sky was closed when I visited), you can walk down the long, cedar-lined stairway to the Overlook. This may be the best spot on the Hudson to enjoy the palisades, as the view somehow presents the illusion of a wholly undeveloped river, with no human habitation in sight. From there, a path leads to another pseudo-Greek edifice, the Temple of Love—sitting on top of an artificial rocky outcropping, from which a stream trickles down. It would, indeed, be a good place to take someone on a date—scenic, romantic, and free of charge.
It is heartening to see the gardens in such fine shape, as they suffered long periods of neglect after Untermyer’s passing in 1940. He wished to will both the mansion and the gardens to the public, but the cost of upkeep proved so daunting that the property was refused by New York State and Westchester County. The city of Yonkers eventually agreed to accept a small parcel of the original estate, though it quickly fell into disrepair and suffered vandalism. In the 1990s, community leaders began advocating for the purchase of more land, and in 2011 the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy started restoring the park to its former glory.
Even now, however, the beautiful gardens are only a shadow of what they once were. During Untermyer’s life, they had sixty greenhouses, tended by sixty gardeners, and was considered one of the centers of botany in the country. Yet what is left is remarkable enough—and all the more remarkable that it is free and open to the public.
Before the advent of “modern art” in the 20th century, the United States was considered something of a backwater as far as painting was concerned. Any American painter with an ounce of ambition had to travel to Paris and spend time copying masterpieces in the Louvre in order to become respectable.
This is precisely what Samuel Morse did. For two years he worked on what was supposed to be his masterpiece, The Gallery of the Louvre, in which he painstakingly reproduced several European masterworks in miniature. This technical tour de force, proof of his hard-earned artistic prowess, earned him—well, very little, which is why he quit painting thereafter and went into the telegraph business. Thus the eponymous code.
Of the American artists who did achieve success during this time, such as Mary Cassat, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeil Whistler, they all spent formative years in Paris and worked in thoroughly European modes.
But one school of genuinely American painting emerged in the 19th century which owed relatively little to the Old World. This was the Hudson River School. This consisted of grand, sweeping landscapes, capturing the relatively (to Europe) wild and untouched countryside. And though artists in this school would eventually paint all over the United States—and beyond—it is named for the place it began: the Hudson Valley.
It took a foreigner to see the beauty in the American landscape, and the potential to turn it into a new sort of painting. Having grown up in grimy, gritty England—in the throes of the industrial revolution—and moved to the United States as a young man, Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848) was deeply impressed by the endless green hills of the Hudson Valley.
Cole arrived in Catskill, New York, in his early 30s, and rented a room in Cedar Grove, the home of the Thomsons, a prosperous local family. A few years later he married Maria Bartow, a niece of the paterfamilias, and made the house his permanent home. What is now the Thomas Cole National Historic Site is, therefore, the ancestral Thomson residence.
The main house is a beautiful building in the Federal-style, constructed in the early days of the nation, with a lovely porch that wraps around the front. The view from the porch is, indeed, worthy of a picture, with the green-blue profile of the Catskills rolling in the distance. It is not difficult to see why the painter chose to live here. While the Catskills lack the dramatic rocky ridges of the great European mountain chains, the soft, undulating green carpet seems to embody the gentleness of nature.
Due to a navigation error, my mother and I arrived late for the “Deep Dive” tour of the house. Still, we got plenty of information. The house is well-conserved and presented. There are reproductions of many of Cole’s letters and journal entries scattered about, as well as several original paintings. The majority of Cole’s paintings portray rugged landscapes where small figures are dwarfed by nature, though at times he included wild architectural fancies, such as a blue pyramid in The Architect’s Dream.
Upstairs, the museum has the last painting that Cole ever worked on, still unfinished. A cloudy blue sky hovers over a featureless brown landscape, revealing the painter’s process—painting from top to bottom. The only clue as to what he intended to paint below are two figures holding a cross, scratched roughly into the paint. Yet still more eye-catching is his Diagram of Contrasts, a color wheel painted over a black background, which looks startling like a work of contemporary abstract art. Indeed, Cole’s description of the work in his diary is reminiscent of Kandinsky:
It is what may be called the music of colours. I believe that colours are capable of affecting the mind, by combination, degree, and arrangement, like sound.
My favorite part of the visit was a video in Thomas Cole’s original studio (a room which he hated, since its only light source was a window facing north). Using his diaries, the museum recreated a hike that he took in the Catskills, juxtaposing his sketches and paintings with photos of the scene now. Cole’s final product may not compare favorably with, say, The Last Supper; but it would never have occurred to that Italian genius—or, indeed, to any major European painter up to this time—to use hiking as a basis of artistic inspiration. It was a major innovation.
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site includes not only the main house, but several other buildings on the property. There is the visitor center, of course, and also two buildings that Cole designed himself: the Old and the New Studios. The Old Studio—which Cole used for the most productive years of his life—is little more than an adjunct to an old barn, with extra windows for good lighting. The New Studio was wholly designed by Cole, but was demolished in the 70s. It has since been reconstructed according to his design and now serves as an art gallery.
Thomas Cole died young, at the age of 47. But the movement he founded culminated in the work of his star pupil, Frederic Edwin Church (1826 – 1900). As a young artist, Church was a frequent visitor to Cole’s home; and it is easy to picture the young artist admiring the green hillside on the other side of the Hudson. After achieving both fame and wealth far beyond anything Cole could have dreamed of, Church bought himself a huge estate, and erected one of the most startling buildings in the Hudson Valley: Olana.
This property can be spotted from Cedar Grove, as a red dot among the green hills. Indeed, as of 2018, visitors can even walk from Cedar Grove to Olana, thanks to a pedestrian walkway that was affixed to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. I walked part of the way and recommend the experience, if only for the wonderful views of the river and the Catskills beyond.
Olana amid the hills, seen from across the river, with the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to the left.
Here is the reverse view, from the porch of Olana.
(Curious motorists may notice that the road from the bridge curves somewhat awkwardly on the western side. This was precisely to avoid disturbing Thomas Cole’s historic residence.)
Olana presents a startling vision to the new visitor. You see, Church was a remarkably well-traveled man, especially considering that he lived before the age of air-travel. He designed Olana—in collaboration with famed architect, Calvert Vaux—after returning from the Middle East, basing both the design and the name on Persian models. (In this, he resembles an earlier Hudson Valley resident, Washington Irving, who built his Sunnyside after returning from Spain.)
Historically, painting has been a poorly remunerated profession. Van Gogh famously died penniless, but even the great Rembrandt was considered as little more than skilled craftsman. Of course, most aspiring painters still carry the cross of poverty; but in the 20th century it became at least possible for the most successful artists to become independently wealthy.
So how was Church able to afford such an ostentatious house on one of the most attractive bluffs overlooking the Hudson Valley? This was partly the result of an innovative business practice. In addition to having wealthy patrons who supported him and bought his work—the life-blood of artists for centuries—Church hit upon the idea of touring with his paintings. That is, he sold admission to his works, which would be exhibited in well-lit rooms complete with benches, from which the eager audience could view the painting with opera glasses. At the time, it must have been like a trip to the movies.
This idea worked because of how and what Church painted. Like his mentor, Cole, Church was primarily a landscape painter; but he worked on a grander scale—painting enormous canvasses that could occupy the entire wall—and traveled to far more “exotic” landscapes.
His most famous painting, In the Heart of the Andes, is an excellent example. Inspired by the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Church traveled to a land where few Westerners had dared to go, and took painstaking care to accurately capture it all on his canvass—from plant species to climate zones. At a time before color photography, when long-distance travel was inaccessible to the vast majority, the painting must have been a startling window into a distant, alien world. It was a David Attenborough documentary for the 19th century. (You can see this enormous canvass in the Met, where it still may steal your breath.)
The house at Olana unites Church’s dominant interests: landscape, art, and travel. The many arched windows open out onto views of the Hudson Valley and the Catskills that are, indeed, worthy of a painting. And in addition to the house’s odd profile—a kind of Victorian imitation of Persian design, altered to suit a cold climate—it is further distinguished by the many stenciled designs that run along the walls, inside and out. Church designed these stencils himself; and along with striped awnings and colorful roof tiles, they serve to give the house a visual flair quite foreign to most American mansions.
The furnishing of the house reflects Church’s wide travels, as various knicknacks from Mexico and the Middle East are scattered among the elegant furniture. But the main thing the visitor sees are paintings. There are dozens of them—not only by Church, but also Cole and other artist acquaintances. The vast majority of these are landscapes, which again demonstrate both his immaculate technique and his wide travels. Compared to Cole’s more staid style, Church is a cinematic painter, whose landscapes transport you into another world. I would certainly have paid admission to see one.
In addition to Church’s home, the visitor can enjoy his estate, which must be one of the most attractive pieces of property in the entire Hudson Valley. But as it happened, we had to go west on the day we visited; so instead of strolling on the carriage roads, we got in the car and headed to a site on the Hudson River Art Trail: Kaaterskill Falls.
The name of this waterfall—like the name of the Catskills themselves—comes from “cat” (as in bobcat, which presumably were more common in earlier times) and “kill,” an old Dutch term for a stream. Indeed, throughout New York, the curious visitor will find many streams bearing ominous names, like the Sing Sing Kill or Beaverkill.
The falls are magnificent. A stream of water plunges down over 200 feet from a sheer cliff, making them taller than Niagara Falls, if orders of magnitude less powerful. It was largely thanks to Thomas Cole that the falls became a popular tourist attraction in the early United States, who was the first of many to popularize the cascade in paintings. On the day we visited, there were people swimming in the murky pool below, while dozens looked on, awestruck. It is easy to see how Cole was inspired to start a new artistic movement by this landscape.
The guy at the bagel store had noticed my camera. I was in Inwood, far uptown, waiting for my friend Greg.
“Oh, you know. A bit of everything, I guess.”
“Got any kind of social media I can follow?”
Very flattered, I typed in my Instagram on his proffered phone.
“I’m not famous or anything,” I said, and took another bite of my bagel—everything, with lox, cream cheese, and onions. A New York classic.
“I’m sure you got a lotta stories with these photos, boss,” he said, very kindly.
I tried to say “thank you” but, mid chew, only managed “thnnn ynnn.”
Greg arrived five minutes later. After ordering something for himself—“There is only one type of bagel,” he proclaimed: “everything”—we headed out. We were starting our walk to the bottom of Manhattan.
At my insistence, we had started late. I hate getting up early on the weekend, and so I set our rendezvous for 1 p.m.—which, of course, meant that we didn’t get moving until 1:30.
Where I began the walk, at Marble Hill, walking over the East River.
It was a brilliant summer day, hot but not too hot, and blessedly not humid. Our plan, if it deserved the name, was to follow Broadway all the way from the East River to The Battery. However, we also had an agreement—nearly fatal—that we would stop at anything that caught our eye. This happened almost immediately.
To our right, we noticed an old wooden house that looked jarringly out of place. A sign proclaimed it Dyckman Farm, the oldest—and possibly, the only—extant farmhouse on the island of Manhattan. Naturally, we had to visit.
The Dyckman family was of old Dutch stock, having arrived in the 1600s. During the Revolutionary War, however, they fled upstate to avoid the British occupation, returning later to find their original property destroyed. Thus, the current structure dates from around 1785.
Yet the description did not focus exclusively on this family, instead devoting ample space to the many enslaved people who worked and lived on the property, as well as the indigenous people who lived here before. “This is definitely not how it would’ve been described when we were kids,” Greg remarked, quite truly.
The visit cost us $3 and was short and sweet. Two things stick out in my memory. One was a small exhibit about the games that were played by the family, including a playable set of nine men’s morris—a board game even older than chess—with rules printed on the wall. If we had more time, we would’ve had a go. Upstairs, in the bedroom, the walls were decorated with “samplers,” which were embroidered fabrics meant to showcase the skill, class, and devotion of a young woman, in order to secure a favorable match. Tinder profiles seem more efficient, though perhaps less worthy to be deemed family heirlooms.
Yet, for me, the most startling item on display had nothing to do with the farm at all. It was a photograph of the construction of the Dyckman Street subway station, from 1905. What is striking about the image is the almost complete lack of a visible urban presence. It is a stunning reminder of how recent the city’s explosive growth has been. (The photo also intrigues for the apparently nonsensical decision to build public transit into empty land—a paradox resolved by the assurance that the land would be quickly populated once the subway was up and running.)
It is hard to believe that Manhattan ever looked like this.
Our walk continued. Broadway took us alongside Fort Tryon Park, a lovely green space overlooking the Hudson River. We briefly considered visiting the Met Cloisters, which sits atop the large hill, but wisely decided it would take too much time.
Now we were in the Heights. Manhattan above Harlem hardly feels like Manhattan at all. It is another world, an outer borough. With a few exceptions, the buildings are just a few stories tall, and there are virtually no tourists to speak of. This part of town is predominantly Latino. You see just as much Spanish as English in store windows, and hear more of it spoken in the streets. Men in tank tops, sitting on folding chairs, play dominoes on the sidewalk as if it were their front lawn. At one point, we passed by a family having a full-blown cookout, with giant trays of spaghetti and rice and beans. The food looked so good that I was a millimeter away from asking for a plate—when my better judgment forced my legs to keep walking.
On any walk through Manhattan, there are some sights that are unavoidable. A fire hydrant leaking water into the streets, for example, or some pigeons having a feeding frenzy. Rats dart from beneath giant mounds of reeking garbage bags. Orange funnels in the street ooze steam into the air—a byproduct of Con Edison’s massive steam heating system belowground—and identical wooden water towers sit inexplicably above every tall building.
But perhaps the most omnipresent Manhattan sight is scaffolding. There are about 400 miles of it in New York City, on seemingly every other building. Remarking on this, Greg recommended John Wilson’s episode on scaffolding, which is a deep dive into the surprisingly strange world of pedestrian protection. I second the recommendation. But here is the short version.
Scaffolding: a ubiquitous sight in Manhattan
In 1979, Grace Gold, a freshman student at Barnard College, was tragically killed when a piece of debris fell off a building, striking her in the head. This led her older sister, Lori, to a dogged campaign to prevent further tragedies, culminating in the passing of Local Law 11. This mandates the inspection and maintenance of the façades of buildings over six floors tall, every five years. During this work, scaffolds (also called sidewalk sheds) are put up to protect pedestrians below.
The scaffolds present a kind of obstacle course for the pedestrian. Sometimes they provide needed shade, or a place to lean and hang out; and for many New Yorkers, they become a kind of outdoor living room. They can also narrow the sidewalk and cut off pathways, creating annoying detours and bottlenecks. Businesses hate them for decreasing foot traffic, and tourists for ruining photos of iconic buildings.
This time around, it struck me how nearly all of these classic elements of the city—the garbage bags, the water towers, the steam vents, the scaffolds, and even the fire escapes—are absent from the other city I know best: Madrid. Indeed, they are absent from most other American cities, too. Yet when I lived in New York, it never even occurred to me that these features could be unique or identifying.
Now, I have created my own detour, and must return to the walk.
Our first major city landmark was the George Washington Bridge. We passed underneath the busiest bridge in the world and were immediately waylaid by some street vendors. Greg got himself a ring and an outrageous bracelet—successfully bargaining down the price—and we were off again, heading towards Harlem.
Broadway does not take you through any of the most iconic spots in Harlem, which are further east. But it does run by one of the most grandiose and least-known museums in the city: the Hispanic Society of America.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, its name is somewhat misleading. Though it is in a “hispanic” neighborhood, the museum is mainly devoted to Spanish cultural heritage; and is not, and has never been, a learned “society.”
The museum is housed in Audubon Terrace, a beautiful beaux-arts complex of buildings. And though it is still not fully open after its years-long renovation, it is free to visit, and was a very pleasant place to cool off for a few minutes. For me, it is a measure of the city’s internationalism that, on top of all of the cultures and countries represented in its boroughs and neighborhoods, I can find a panoramic series of paintings depicting all of the regions of my new homeland—by one of Spain’s greatest painters.
Broadway took us within striking distance of two other Harlem landmarks—Hamilton’s Grange and City College’s magnificent neogothic campus—but we powered on, down to 125th street, where we knew a bar with an excellent happy-hour deal on wine. My brother, Jay (who had previously done this walk, and so didn’t want to subject himself to it again), would meet us there, as Greg and I tried to limit our wine intake so as not to sabotage the journey.
This is, coincidentally, one of the most picturesque stretches of Broadway. The street dips low and then rises up again, which forces the adjacent Subway Line 1 to briefly become elevated above-ground. A century ago, Manhattan actually resembled Chicago in its plethora of elevated metro lines; but most train lines have since been moved underground.
For my part, though I can understand hating the noise and resenting the obstructed views, I think there is something remarkably charming about these elevated lines. The criss-crossing steel beams, looming overhead, evoke a moment in industrial history when technology was both gritty and excitingly new. And the view from the train is certainly better. In any case, the large arch over West 125th Street is worthy of a poem.
As you get into Harlem, one sight becomes omnipresent: public housing. These mainly take the form of square, red-brick buildings, surrounded by small grassy lawns. Admittedly, most of my knowledge of these housing projects comes from reading The Power Broker, wherein Caro describes how Robert Moses destroyed old neighborhoods to make way for soulless housing that was, in many respects, worse than what it replaced. But as the city—and, especially, Manhattan—confronts an ever-worsening housing crisis, it occurs to me that we may have to give the idea of public housing another look.
At one point on the walk, the sidewalk narrowed into a kind of tunnel, due to construction on the building next door. And for whatever reason, the pavement was littered with the lifeless bodies of spotted lanternflies. This is an insect pest, originally from southeast Asia, which has spread far and wide due to human activity (they lay their eggs on pieces of wood, which then get transported). Though the insect is actually quite beautiful—with brilliant red wings and an attractive spotted pattern—and though it poses no direct threat to people, New Yorkers were encouraged to kill them on sight for the threat they pose to agriculture and the environment generally.
By now, they’ve probably multiplied to such an extent that killing them doesn’t do any good; but we still did our part and murdered the three or four remaining living insects on the sidewalk.
“It’s like a level of a video game,” Greg joked, as we exited the lanternfly tunnel.
The best picture I’ve managed to get of a lanternfly, taken from inside a bodega.
Now we were entering the vicinity of Columbia University, whose presence stretches far beyond its main campus. One obvious sign that we were entering its orbit was the proliferation of bookstores and book stands. This was perilous for the both of us. Anyone who knows me is aware of my fondness for the written word. And Greg, well… he’s a history professor. If our odyssey was like a video game, then this level was far more challenging than the lanternflies. We had to resist the pull of knowledge.
Greg looking phenomenal next to a strange statue adorning an empty parking lot.
I did, however, take the opportunity to buy Greg a book I’d been recommending him for some time: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, by science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany.
Now, to give you some background, Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to clean up Times Square has often been celebrated as an example of successful urban redevelopment. Before Giuliani’s stint as mayor—that is, from the 1960s to the early 90s—Times Square was considered a rather seedy area, full of porn theaters, peep shows, and nightclubs. Far from a tourist attraction, it was an area most people tried to avoid. Its transformation from a symbol of the city’s decline to its star attraction is thus usually heralded as a triumph.
Delany calls into question this basic narrative, and he does so with stories of his own explorations—and sexual adventures—in the old, sordid Times Square. For a sex-positive, anti-gentrification, urban studies academic, and a proud New Yorker to boot (in other words, my friend Greg), this seemed like the perfect read.
The real highlight of this part of town was a visit to Tom’s Restaurant, the diner featured on Seinfeld. For such an iconic spot, it is wonderfully unpretentious, with reasonable prices and a classic diner atmosphere. We took the opportunity to order some milkshakes, and I heartily recommend the same to anyone in the area.
We kept going, moving out of Harlem and into the Upper West Side. This is easily one of the architectural highlights of the city, mainly due to the many ostentatious apartment hotels—the Dakota, the San Remo, the Hotel Belleclaire—that were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by architects such as Emery Roth. Indeed, this part of Manhattan could easily rival the heart of Paris for its elegance and beauty. Even the subway station at 72nd street is a monument. Rather than try to explain any more myself, however, I will recommend this excellent video by Architectural Digest—as well as their YouTube channel generally. It is some of the best content available about the city.
But I will pause to savor the pizza we had at one of my favorite New York spots: Freddie & Pepper’s. All of us ordered the same thing: a slice with tomato, basil, and fresh mozzarella. It was exactly what we needed to continue our walk.
Now, I would like to take a moment to consider the smells of the city. Though some, like pizza, are conspicuously good, for the most part Manhattan is malodorous: hot garbage, urine, car exhaust, bodies covered in sweat… But lately a new smell has taken over: marijuana. It is not exactly the most pleasant odor (at times it can smell remarkably like a skunk), but it is certainly omnipresent since the legalization, in 2021, of recreational cannabis.
One of the ideas behind legalization was to treat cannabis like wine or liquor, selling it at licensed stores. However, since the unlicensed distribution network was already (shall we say) quite robust, unlicensed stores and stands popped up throughout the city before the legal venues could get a foothold, much to the embarrassment of politicians. Indeed, a major government crackdown was taking place during the week of our walk, leading to the shutdown of over 750 illegal stores. Crackdowns notwithstanding, the city has certainly taken to legal weed with gusto.
The last major sight in the Upper West that we passed was Lincoln Center. We sat down to rest in the nearby Richard Tucker Park, while a bored-looking young woman sang operatic arias—quite well, really—in order to “fund her education.” Puccini and Verdi notwithstanding, I had the music of West Side Story in my head. It was here, after all, that the original movie was filmed—in the ruins of the demolished San Juan Hill neighborhood—and where the Steven Spielberg remake was set.
Greg, looking very serious about this walk.
Robert Moses enters this story once again, as it was the notorious commissioner who spearheaded the project—seizing the land from the working-class, multi-ethnic residents of the neighborhood, and then razing the property in order to make way for the city’s new bougie performing arts center. In other words, it was yet another chapter in the long history of Manhattan’s gentrification. At least Lincoln Center looks good.
Finally, as Broadway slowly bent eastward, we hit the next major landmark on our walk: Columbus Circle. This meant that we had finally gotten below Central Park, and were officially entering Midtown Manhattan. The entrance to the park was bustling with activity, as hot dog vendors and the drivers of horse-drawn carriages and pedicabs vied for the tourist’s attention (and money). Yet what struck our collective attention was the large monument on the park’s southwest corner. We stared at it, wondering at its significance, until Jay looked it up on his phone:
“It’s a monument to the USS Maine!”
Now, you may be forgiven for not remembering the significance of this ship. This was an armored cruiser that exploded and sank in Havana’s harbor in 1898, with the loss of 268 sailors. And though the evidence that it had been deliberately attacked by the Spanish was weak at best, the ship’s sinking became a cause célèbre which led to the Spanish American War. Nowadays, neither the Maine nor the war itself (which was basically an American colonial power-grab) are much remembered or remarked upon by Americans. Enormous monuments notwithstanding, the war had a more lasting cultural impact in Spain, as the country’s embarrassing loss to the upstart United States prompted severe self-doubt among its intellectuals, who were dubbed the Generation of ‘98.
Above us, some of the tallest buildings in Manhattan soared off into the sky. This is Billionaire’s Row, a collection of supertall, pencil-thin, ultra-luxury apartment buildings at the bottom of Central Park. For me, though the skyscrapers are impressive as feats of engineering, the buildings make a dubious addition to Manhattan’s skyline—imposingly tall, but not particularly pretty. And, of course, it is rather depressing to have the city’s silhouette dominated by properties to be used as investments for the super rich.
Almost as soon as we left Columbus Circle, we entered Times Square. Far from a discrete part of the city, Times Square seemed to spread impossibly far, its bright and suffocating tentacles strangling block after block. It seems unnecessary to describe the scene—the smothering crowds of gaping tourists, the blinding lights and flashing signs, the street acrobats occupying the sidewalks, the Elmos and Marios and Mickey Mouses (some with their helmets off, smoking a cigarette)—but I do want to mention the religious fanatic, who was standing on a street corner and yelling that Christianity had abandoned Jesus Christ. A man in a wifebeater stopped to shout “Fake news!” nonsensically at the preacher, and his young son did the same.
Greg and Jay took off like rockets—or, should I say, like real New Yorkers—once we hit Times Square, weaving and bobbing through the crowd like professional boxers. I could hardly keep up, though I did my best. It is a truth universally acknowledged by native New Yorkers that Times Square is to be avoided at all costs. And I have to admit that, by the time we got to the end of it—power walking in sullen silence through the crowds—I yearned for a few porn theaters or gogo bars to scare away the tourists. In other words, Samuel R. Delany may have had a point.
Right as we were approaching the southern end of Times Square, and the limit of our tolerance, we passed by a glowing neon American Flag, in front of which a drag queen was yelling into a megaphone, leading a boisterous anti-Trump rally. Just across the street there was a decidedly smaller pro-Trump rally, trying in vain to maintain a similar energy-level. My favorite character was a very calm black man who stood next to the Trumpers, casually holding a Black Lives Matter sign and chatting to his friend.
From here on, the walk entered its most grueling phase. The sun had set and we were all tired—especially me. In perfect frankness, I was suffering from an affliction that often plagues me during my summers in New York: chafing. Suffice to say that, by the time we got past 42nd street, every step I took was a minor agony. Added to this, I had chosen badly and worn my sandals for the walk, which meant my toes were grinding against pebbles and dirt, covering the sides of my feet in blisters.
By the time we got to 30th street, I was waddling like a duck, and in no mood to appreciate architectural treasures. In any case, the city was quite dark by now—and surprisingly dead. From 42nd street to 14th, we did not pass by a single store that attracted our attention. And though it was a Saturday in midtown Manhattan, the streets were surprisingly empty, mostly consisting of people dressed up for expensive outings elsewhere.
A silent rave we passed, in Herald Square
Finally, the Flatiron Building came into view. But something else attracted our attention, a large circular TV monitor. This was the New York-Dublin Portal, an art installation by Benediktas Gylys that opened this year. It is a simple but intriguing concept: a two-way video call so that residents of the two cities can wave at one another. But bad behavior shut down the portal for a week in May. People from both cities couldn’t resist exposing themselves, and a few on the Dublin side had the bright idea to display images of the September 11 attacks.
I was looking forward to waving to some Dubliners (despite the risk of getting flashed). Unfortunately for us, by the time we arrived the portal was closed for the day.
We did at least pause for a drink at an outdoor food stand. It was well past nine o’clock at night and we were all pretty ragged. The prospect of accepting defeat was seriously raised. We did not have much more in the tank. For my part, I badly wanted a shower and to change out of my sticky, stinky clothes. But I wanted to finish the walk even more. And when we saw on our phones that we had just over an hour to go, we decided we had to finish what we started.
Back on our feet—though walking slow—we got to Union Square. In normal times, this is one of my favorite parts of Manhattan (which is generally lacking in green space away from Central Park), but now I just felt a sense of relief that we were recognizably downtown.
I did pause to look up at Metronome, an art installation at the bottom of the park. It consists of a hole that periodically blows smoke rings, next to a series of numbers which don’t make any obvious sense. For years, I would wonder what the numbers might mean, to no avail. It turns out that the digits are a strange kind of clock, displaying (from left to right) the hours, minutes, and seconds from the last midnight, and then the seconds, minutes, and hours to the next one. Not particularly useful, I’d say.
However, since 2020 the display has been repurposed to make a Climate Clock, which counts down years and days to 1.5°C of warming—a number considered to be a threshold for many of the worst effects of climate change. As of this writing, we’re slated to pass over this threshhold on July 21, 2029. Yikes.
Just down the street we passed by one of my favorite spots in the whole city: The Strand Bookstore. It was probably fortunate that, by the time we limped by, it was closed for the day. We couldn’t have survived another delay.
This was the final stretch. The street numbers were falling, 4th, 3rd… until the numbers ceased, and all of the streets had names. We crossed Houston street (pronounced “Howston” in contrast to the city of “Hyooston”) and into SoHo. This was Old Manhattan, Dutch Manhattan, New Amsterdam—the original, chaotic colony, whose criss-crossing streets contrast sharply with the ordered grid of the city’s later expansion northward.
We walked on in relative silence. There was nothing more to say—except complaints. By now I looked as bad as I felt, hobbling down the sidewalk, trying my best to tune out the pain from my lower limbs. I did not have the mental energy to contemplate the African Burial Grounds National Monument, nor to even register City Hall, St. Paul’s Chapel, or Trinity Church…
It was only when we got to the financial district, and passed the iconic Bull Statue, that my spirits lifted. I could smell the water now. We were close.
The final stretch felt like a triumphal march, as we walked through the “Canyon of Heroes.” These are black granite plaques commemorating all of the ticker-tape parades held in New York’s history. You see, it used to be customary to fête important visitors with large parades, in which shredded paper would be thrown everywhere. The tradition started as a spontaneous celebration of the Statue of Liberty’s dedication. Most of the celebrants were visiting dignitaries, heads of state, military heroes, and—most prominently—great aviators. It is a rather charming reminder of the intense excitement of the early days of trans-Atlantic flight.
We finally exited Broadway and entered the Battery. The air was notably cooler, the sounds of the city mixed with crickets. There were surprisingly few people about. We turned a corner and, in the distance, Lady Liberty herself came into view—on the other side of a chain-link fence (a rather depressing image, really). I sat down heavily on a bench, too tired and sore to feel much of anything but relief. But we had made it, from the top to the bottom. It had only taken us 10 hours.
As an epilogue, I wanted to pay my respects to perhaps an unlikely hero of this post: Utagawa Hiroshige. A few weeks previous to this walk, the three of us—Greg, Jay, and I—had seen an exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum of Hiroshige’s celebrated series of woodblock prints, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
What impressed me most in those images was Hiroshige’s ability to display so many different aspects of the city that would become Tokyo: its parks, its seasons, its festivals, its streets and buildings, and its people—from priests to prostitutes. It struck me as remarkable that Hiroshige was able to find such beauty in familiar surroundings. But perhaps all he needed for inspiration was a very long walk.
Of the many famous names associated with the Hudson Valley—John D. Rockefeller, Alexander Hamilton, Washington Irving, just to name a few—one name looms over them all: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He needs no introduction. As president, he guided the nation through two existential threats; and he did much of his work from the home where he was born, overlooking the Hudson River.
The young cousin of the great Teddy Roosevelt—whose own stately home Long Island, Sagamore Hill, has also been turned into a monument—Franklin was from a wealthy family. His father, James, had a degree in law but chose to stop practicing, having received an ample inheritance. It was James who purchased the property in 1866, which he dubbed “Springwood” (a fairly bland name, if you ask me). And it was here, on January 30th, 1882, that his son Franklin was born.
When Franklin himself inherited the house, in 1900, he set about expanding and improving the place. Children notwithstanding, the extra space was mainly to house his collections of books, prints, model ships, stuffed birds, and other paraphernalia. He was apparently something of a packrat. But the result of this remodeling is a beautiful neoclassical structure—grand, without being grandiose.
Having been donated to the government two years before his death, the furnishings of the house are perfectly preserved. Often these are just the sort of things one might expect to see in the house of a patrician: fine furniture, oil paintings, expensive pottery. But a few things stick out in my memory. The most impressive room in the house is Franklin’s library, a beautiful space with dark, polished oak bookshelves filled to the brim. Other rooms are surprising for their simplicity. The bedrooms are anything but luxurious; and the dining room, though elegant, hardly seems big enough for the entourage of the head of state.
Undoubtedly the loveliest aspect of the house is its location. The view of the Hudson Valley from its upper floors could hardly be improved. It is no wonder that the young Franklin came to have a keen appreciation for natural scenery—doing more to expand America’s national parks than even his mustachioed cousin.
The tour of the house is relatively brief. After that, the visitor is free to explore the grounds. Nearby are the stables (Franklin’s father was an avid horse breeder), and I was amused to find a plaque for a horse named “New Deal.”
My mom and my brother, who was in his pandemic mustache phase
But the most moving spot on the entire property is Franklin’s tomb. As per his instructions, he is buried in his garden, where a sundial used to stand, encircled by roses. His tombstone is plain white marble, devoid of any decorations. The president died unexpectedly at the age of 63, of a brain hemorrhage, after being elected a record four times. His body was carried in a grand and somber procession to this place, as the shocked nation mourned his loss.
Interred with him is his wife, Eleanor, who died seventeen years later, in 1962. She was just as much a revolutionary as her husband, and transformed what it meant to be First Lady. If I had properly done my research, I would have gone to see her famous residence, Val-Kill, which is about two miles east of Springwood. Eleanor purchased this property along with two women’s rights activists, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. There, they put into practice their idea of handicrafts (heavily influenced by the art critic John Ruskin), teaching locals to make pewter and furniture.
The site is perhaps more interesting for its LGBT history, as Cook and Marion were romantic partners, and Eleanor herself had a long relationship with the journalist Lorena Hickok. (FDR, for his part, had a prolonged affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherford, Eleanor’s social secretary. You can say that they had a modern marriage.)
Closeby is Top Cottage. Aside from Jefferson’s architectural wonders in Virginia, this is actually the only building designed by a sitting president. It is certainly not a showpiece. Indeed, the cottage was primarily designed to be more wheelchair accessible, after his bout with polio in 1921 left FDR’s legs paralyzed. Curiously, then, Val-Kill and Top Cottage reveal how two normally marginalized groups—the LGBT and the disabled communities—were connected to the center of power during one of the country’s most perilous periods.
To get back to Springwood, however, no visit to the property is complete without the museum, located in the Henry A. Wallace Center. Now, normally I am not a fan of exhibits which consist mainly of long texts with historical photos. It always strikes me that the information would be better displayed in a book or magazine, rather than distributed throughout a building. Even so, I enjoyed the long biographical exposition of FDR’s life, and learned a great deal.
The visit culminates in the basement, with FDR’s iconic Ford Phaeton. It was modified to allow him to drive with his hands, and he keenly enjoyed driving. There is an excellent chapter in Winston Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War, in which he describes a visit to Springwood, where he was terrified by Franklin’s tendency to race around the country lanes. But Churchill had nothing but praise for the hospitality he received in Hyde Park.
Now, a visit to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Historic Site would be more than enough to fill a day. But the visitor is spoiled by being able to also pay a visit to the Vanderbilt Mansion, which is located just up the Albany Post Road.
The name Vanderbilt is nearly as synonymous with old money as Rockefeller. The dynasty began with Cornelius Vanderbilt (1764 – 1877), who managed to transform his father’s modest ferry business into a railroad empire. Upon his death he bequeathed the vast majority of his riches to his oldest son, William Henry, often called “Billy.” Understandably, the other Vanderbilt descendents were not happy with this arrangement, and this led to a lengthy court battle—which Billy eventually won, thereby becoming the richest man in America.
Billy was a careful guardian of his father’s empire. Though he survived his father by just nine short years, he managed to double the family’s wealth during that time. But he did not decide to imitate his father in leaving all of his wealth to his oldest son. Rather, he split his money between his eight children. While admirably equitable, this fairly well ended the Vanderbilt Empire, as his children proceeded to squander the family fortune, leaving very little for the next generation.
As a case in point, while Cornelius and Billy lived in (comparatively) modest circumstances, the grandchildren built a series of mansions across the United States. All told, they left 40 elaborate dwellings, many of which have become monuments. Among the best-known are Marble House, Rough Point, and The Breakers, all in Newport, Rhode Island. And the most famous of them all: Biltmore Estate, still the largest privately-owned residence in the United States, in Asheville, North Carolina.
The Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park belonged to Frederick William Vanderbilt. Of all of the grandchildren, he was perhaps the most reserved and upright. The ostentatious mansion notwithstanding, he managed to preserve his inheritance and lived free of scandal, quietly devoted to his wife Louise.
But there is nothing quiet about this house. It is palatial, making the Roosevelts’ Springwood look puny by comparison. Every room is decorated to the highest standards of Gilded Age taste—the American nouveau riche imitating European aristocrats. As far as furnishings go, it is a convincing copy: a photo of the interior could easily pass for the house of an English country squire.
My clearest memory of the tour was the guide’s description of their daily routine. It was leisure elevated into a formal art, with rigid rules. Men and women both had different attires for different times of the day—for some light outdoor sport, then for cocktails, then for dinner—and each hour came with its specific sort of alcohol. I imagine mustachioed men in tuxedos, drinking copious quantities of port wine and filling the room with cigar smoke, while their wives sat on the divan in the next room, sipping sherry in elegant ball gowns. It was the transmutation of alcoholism into sophistication.
The tour ended in the servants quarters in the basement—shockingly bare and utilitarian compared with the extravagant luxury in the house above. It was a stark reminder of the huge staff whose (poorly remunerated) work was necessary to make a life like this possible.
When Frederick Vanderbilt died in 1938—having survived his wife by twelve years, and never having had children—he bequeathed his estate to his niece, Margaret. Yet by this time, the huge Gilded Age mansion was a relic from another age; and his niece understandably had little interest either in living on the property or in paying for the upkeep. Her neighbor Franklin thus easily persuaded Margaret to donate the mansion and its property to the United States government (for the token sum of $1) to be turned into a national monument. In fact, FDR occasionally used the property to house his secret service and some visiting guests.
At the end of the tour, we asked the guide (who was excellent) where we could get a local bite to eat. He recommended the nearby Eveready Diner. And as I took a bite of my hamburger, I reflected that I’d just had a wonderful—and a wonderfully American—day in the Hudson Valley.
It was a thoroughly muggy day in mid-August when I boarded a boat in Battery Park.
My destination was the most famous statue in the United States, if not the world. And I was willing to pay to get up close. Now, if you merely wish to take a good picture of the statue against the New York City skyline, then no financial transaction is necessary. The Staten Island Ferry—a gratuitous vaporetto—passes quite near Liberty Island, allowing its parsimonious passengers an excellent vantage point from which to gawk and snap photos. But I was in no mood for drive-by glances; I wanted to see the statue from dry land, which requires a certain amount of money.
In the time before COVID-19, the ferry company had no qualms with herding us through a large security tent and then packing us into the boat like salted fish. I opted to stand on the deck. Despite the summer heat and the humidity, the sea wind whipped up soon after we set off, giving me goosebumps. But this was compensated by anticipation. Even a short ferry ride partakes, however modestly, in the romance of travel by sea. And as a good friend of mine once said (well, he said it repeatedly): “The best way to see a city is by boat.” This is certainly true regarding New York City, at least. Seen from the harbor, the Manhattan skyline is at its most vertiginously dramatic. The Statue of Liberty is not bad, either.
In about twenty minutes the boat docked at Liberty Island. Now, this was not always the name of this little piece of earth. Before Europeans came to dominate the land, the Canarsie people called it Minnisais. Since then, however, the island has been dubbed Love Island, Great Oyster Island, and Bedloe’s Island, among other appellations. It had many uses before being made home to an enormous copper goddess. Food was grown, men were hanged, garbage was dumped, and Tories waited here to be extracted to England. The island was even used as a kind of lazaretto for those suspected of harboring smallpox. Its last function before being turned into a monument was as a fortified battery; and the star-shaped remains of Fort Summer still sit below Liberty’s green heel.
I pushed my way down the boarding ramp and headed straight for the statue. This was not my first visit. Many years ago, when I was still in middle school, I visited the island with my Californian cousins, who wanted to see some of the main sights of New York. At the time I was inclined to see any sort of cultural excursion as a monumentally boring waste of time. Video games were infinitely more entertaining, and I resented my family for dragging me away from my computer. Nothing I saw made much of an impression on me: not the Empire State Building, not Wall Street, not Battery Park. It was wholly unexpected, then, when I found myself entranced by the Statue of Liberty. I could not take my eyes off it. I even felt inspired. Somehow the statue had broken through the many layers of youthful apathy and juvenile ignorance to touch a hitherto unknown part of myself.
This second visit was not quite as stupendous, if only because by this time I had grown accustomed to visiting monuments and the feelings that they evoke. This is not to say that I was uninspired. The towering lady is not as dynamic in composition or as beautiful in form as, say, Michelangelo’s David; and the sickly green color (caused from the oxidation of the copper) is not the most aesthetically pleasing shade imaginable. (Like the oxidized patina itself, however, it grows on you.) But statues of this size have different engineering constraints, not to mention serving a different purpose. As a synecdoche of the nation, as a grandiose welcome to those arriving by sea (many of them immigrants), and as an artwork that represents the Enlightenment values that (nominally, at least) set this nation apart, Liberty Enlightening the World could hardly be more successful. Granted, Bartholdi probably only intended some of this in his design; yet the mark of any great work of art is that it goes beyond even the vision of its creator.
I had opted for the cheapest ticket, which only allowed me to gaze at the statue from without. Paying more would have given me access to the pedestal, and still more would have allowed me to ascend to the seven-pronged crown. (Visits to the torch have been prohibited since 1916, for a somewhat obscure reason.) But even the most basic ticket seemed pricey to me. So after I had taken my fill of the statue, and walked around her a few times, I wandered over to the other end of the island to see the museum. The visit begins with a strange cinematic experience, wherein visitors are led into a big, empty room, shown an informational video about the statue’s history, and then led into another room where the video continues, and then yet another. I suppose they screen the film this way so that more visitors can be shown it at once, though I did wish there were seats available.
The museum in general was surprisingly good. There are models of the statue and its innards, a great deal of information about its construction and inspiration, and even real models and former parts. But rather than try to narrate the museum, I will use it as an opportunity to tell something of the statue’s history:
Given that Lady Liberty is one of the most quintessentially images of America, it is somewhat ironic, then, that the statue was designed and built entirely by the French, and given to us in an act of international generosity. I can think of no other major monument with such an origin.
The idea for a celebratory dedication to the United States evidently originated with Édouard René de Laboulaye, a prominent French abolitionist, who wished to celebrate the Union victory in the Civil War, and the end of American slavery. This proposal was taken up by his friend, the artist Frédéric Bartholdi, who liked the idea, if only because it would have provided an indirect rebuke to the repressive regime of Napoleon III. But such projects are seldom conceived and completed on schedule; and by the time the statue was finally built, in 1885, Napoleon III had been deposed.
It was difficult enough for the cities of Brooklyn and New York (when they were formally separate) to work together to plan, fund, and execute the Brooklyn Bridge across the East River. Imagine, then, the nightmare of coordinating an international project across the Atlantic. To build the statue, Bartholdi had to personally come to the United States, scout out a good location, meet with the president (Ulysses S. Grant at the time), and then cross the young nation trying to drum up support. Batholdi also had to come up with a design. That the theme should be liberty was obvious; but freedom can take many forms. It can be a bare-chested woman leading troops into battle, à la Delecroix; yet that seemed too violent or revolutionary. Instead, Bartholdi opted for a neoclassical design, staid and solemn, robed in a Roman stella (togas are for men), crowned with a diadem, and holding a torch rather than a sword.
In 1875 Bartholdi and Laboulaye set to work raising money for the statue. It was to be a long slog, combining a difficult PR campaign with a vast logistical challenge. Building material was needed, talent had to be recruited, and the public interest maintained at a high enough level to keep funds flowing. As an engineering task, the statue was daunting enough. Standing 46 meters tall, the statue had to support 91 tonnes of metal without crumpling or toppling over. The thin copper skin simply would not bear that much weight, and so Gustave Eiffel was contracted to design an internal steel skeleton. This internal work is a magnificent achievement in itself, since it could be easily assembled and disassembled, and also because Eiffel designed it in such a way as to allow the metal to expand and contract in the changing weather without cracking the skin. Were the copper exterior removed, then, New York would have her own Eiffel Tower.
While the French were busy with the statue, the Americans had to make the pedestal. This proved to be quite a challenge, for the simple reason that nobody wanted to cough up the money. Grover Cleveland—who was then the governor of New York—vetoed funding for the statue, which left the project lingering in unfunded purgatory. (Cleveland, as president, later presided over the dedication of the statue, which seems terribly unfair.) The task to fund the project fell, instead, to private industry and the good people of New York. Specifically, Joseph Pullitzer led a funding drive in his newspaper, The New World, promising to publish the name of every single contributor. Thus the pedestal was built with spare nickels, dimes, and pennies, mailed in from children, widows, and alcoholics. Even so, it took longer than expected to raise the required sum, and the pedestal was still incomplete by the time the statue arrived by steamboat.
The assembly and disassembly of the statue, transportation across the seas, and then reassembly in its new home, was yet another massive engineering challenge for the designers. Eiffel’s steel beams arrived with Bartholdi’s hand-beaten copper, and teams of workers had to put it all together, like an enormous erector set. The statue’s completion was celebrated by the city’s first ticker-tape parade, which culminated in a yacht trip to the island for a private dedication ceremony, attended only by politicians, dignitaries, and other officials. Ironically, in a fête for an enormous female, few women were permitted to attend. The values of the Enlightenment have their limits, after all.
My sojourn on the land of liberty had come to close; but I still had more to see. Tickets to visit the Statue of Liberty come included with a trip to Ellis Island, just a few minutes away. Like Liberty Island, this island used to be called Oyster Island, for the very logical reason that it was a shallow tidal flat where oysters liked to live. As such, it was used as an important food source by the Lenape people, but they called it “Kioshk” for the many seagulls which liked to rest there. Much later, when an island was needed to process the increasing tides of immigrants, the government started dumping sand, rocks, and soil (taken from the subway tunnels) in order to create something fit for permanent habitation. (This had very unfortunate results for the oysters, which scientists are now trying to revive in the Billion Oyster Project.) Ellis Island was not even originally a single island, but three separate ones which were gradually merged. The current landmass is shaped like a fat “C,” and ships dock in the space between the northern and southern halves.
Ellis Island has come to serve as a symbol of American immigration, but of course this particular institution represents only one chapter of the story. Ellis Island was never the only port of entry into the United States for immigrants, and it was active for only about thirty years, from 1892 to 1924. Most of these immigrants coming through Ellis Island were, naturally, from the other side of the Atlantic, specifically Europe. This includes Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, a great many Italians, Eastern European Jews escaping pogroms—and many more, to the tune of 12 million souls. It has been calculated that 40% of the United States population can trace at least one ancestor to Ellis Island (though I do not know if that includes me).
The basic visit is to the island’s Main Building. This is a large and surprisingly beautiful structure, built in a French Renaissance style. Your visit is meant to replicate the journey of an arriving immigrant to the island. You begin in the baggage room, complete with real period suitcases and trunks, where you pick up your audioguide. Then you advance to the registry hall, a cavernous open room topped with Guastavino tiles, which shimmer and sparkle in the indirect light. But I doubt that an arriving immigrant would have been in the mood to admire architecture, since this room was the scene of fateful decisions.
While the hall is now open and luminous, during the heyday of Ellis Island it would have been full with queues upon queues of incoming immigrants, awaiting their turns on long benches to talk with a customs official. While they entered and waited, doctors would inspect and examine the hopeful immigrants for any signs of ill health. Those presenting a worrisome sign would be marked with chalk and more thoroughly examined. If the problem was grave, or the disease highly contagious (like trachoma, an eye affliction), the poor soul might be sent all the way back—a fate of a small minority (about 2%), but a very crushing fate indeed after spending one’s savings and crossing an ocean in the hopes of a new life. If the problem was less severe, then the migrant may be in for a stay at the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital (more on that later).
In any case, even for the well in body in mind, the experience must have been extremely stressful. For the most part, the rich are not the ones who emigrate; it is the poor, with little money to spend. Consequently, then, the voyage aboard the steamers crossing the Atlantic was abysmally uncomfortable—cramped, cold, dark, seasick and poorly fed. Then the storm-tossed travelers were thrown into a hall echoing with unintelligible languages to be handled by unfeeling officials.
Thankfully, for the majority of those arriving on Ellis Island, the affair was quite short, lasting only a matter of hours before they were allowed through. Laws regarding immigration were, after all, far more lenient back in the day, especially in the decades leading up to World War I. Stefan Zweig, for example, remembers traipsing around Europe without even possessing a passport. But that war initiated a period of nationalism and xenophobia on both sides of the Atlantic. A literacy test was mandated in 1917 (in the immigrant’s native language), and by the 1920s quotas were imposed, thus ending the period of mass immigration.
From the registry hall, you move from room to room, each one used to process the immigrant in a different way—further health inspections, mental aptitude tests, literacy tests, legal processes, money exchanges, bus tickets, and so on. A courtroom was busy hearing cases of immigrants suspected of being professional paupers or contract laborers (oh, the horror!); luckily, immigrant aid societies paid for lawyers to help appeal cases, and 80% of the immigrants on trial were accepted. Particularly fascinating to me were the examples of IQ tests, meant to weed out those considered to be mentally infirm or deficient. This was a challenge, since the tests had to be applicable to anyone, regardless of their national background. Even a simple task, like drawing a diamond, was not a fair measure, since a large portion of immigrants had never even held a pencil. The psychologists thus settled on visual tests, like identifying faces or distinguishing between images. Still, the whole attempt seems rather silly in retrospect.
To repeat, for the majority of immigrants, Ellis Island was only a brief stopover. But a sickly minority required a longer stay—days, weeks, or even months—in the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital. For some, this meant a stay to “stabilize” their condition before being sent back, but for others successful treatment was an entry ticket to another life.
The hospital is on the other half of the island, and off limits to the casual visitor. To go, one must sign up for a guided hard-hat tour, as the buildings are nowadays in a quite dilapidated condition, empty and overgrown. But at one time this was one of the biggest public health hospitals in the world, complete with separate words for infectious diseases. Nowadays, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we can appreciate the role of border control in controlling contagious illness. This idea was old even by the time Ellis Island was built (there are islands for isolation in the Venetian lagoon, for example), though of course it was never a fool-proof way of controlling epidemics—such as the waves of cholera that arrived from the Old World. Still, Ellis Island was an important line of epidemiological defense for the United States.
Taken together, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are the country’s greatest monuments to the immigrant—symbols of the country’s open-armed embrace of anyone willing to come. At a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is once again raising its ugly head, these monuments are more important than ever, for they remind us that the majority of us are descended from immigrants, most of them poor, most of them uneducated, and all of them looking for a better life. How were those Hungarians or Italians, unable to write or even to hold a pencil, any different from the people now at our southern border, who fill us with so much fear?
Economists may show us, again and again, that immigrants do not steal jobs; and historians may demonstrate that xenophobia is used, again and again, as a scapegoat for other social ills. But no argument is as profoundly moving as that lady of oxidized copper, herself an immigrant, holding out her torch towards the vast and windy seas, inscribed with the words of Emma Lazarus:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
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Every child should have someplace wild nearby. For me it was the Rockefeller State Park Preserve. I was fortunate enough to have the entire sprawling forest right behind my house, accessible through the back fence. So much of my childhood is connected with that place. I remember searching for ghosts with a polaroid camera, playing make-believe with the neighbors, and taking a winter walk with my family. When it snowed we would sled down the hill behind our house (and my unfortunate brother split his lip this way, when his sled collided with a tree).
I really came to cherish the forest when we got a dog. Dogs need to be walked, of course, and the forest was the perfect place to do it. Most dogs would love to be walked somewhere with so many plants, animals, and other dogs. But my dog was rather special. She was only mildly interested in chasing squirrels; she was even apathetic towards other dogs. There were really only two things that mattered to her: humans and food. The forest had the former in abundance—people out for a walk or a jog—and every time I passed another person I had to wrap the leash around my wrist and hold it tight to prevent her from jumping all over her new friends. The forest also had things to eat, in the form of dog and deer droppings; but I tried to discourage that, too.
Jenny loved the snow.
My dog’s life came and went, but the forest remained. The many years of walking her instilled the habit in me so deeply that I continued to take walks in the forest just for myself. In fact, I started to walk much further than I ever could with my poor girl, since she had hip dysplasia (a common malady among purebreds). The forest was bigger than I had ever known. There were so many paths left to explore, stretching for miles and miles behind my house. It has been the work of years to know them all; and even now I am missing a few corners of the map. The park is so big that I reached its most distant corners when I took up running as regular exercise. That is the only way (besides horseback) to go from one end of the park to the other in a comfortable span of time. (Cycling is not permitted in the park, though it is allowed on the Aqueduct Trail.)
In this post, then, I would like to tell you everything I have learned about this park over the years. I have done my best to be as thorough as possible, describing the geography, climate, topography, history, flora, and fauna of the park. But I am not a scientist or a naturalist, or even a particularly knowledgeable amateur. Indeed, this post would have been impossible without the resources compiled by experts and nature-lovers alike, many of which are free online. Technology, for all of its ravages, does have its perks.
We shall begin at the beginning: with the formation of the earth. According to the geological maps I have been able to find—available on a superb application called Rockd—the bedrock of this area is composed of Fordham gneiss. The gneiss was formed between four billion and one billion years ago, which makes it one of the oldest rock formations in the world. Gneiss is a metamorphic rock (made by transforming other types of rock, such as granite in this case) created under high pressure and temperatures. This gives it a characteristic and rather attractive banding pattern that you can find on some of the exposed boulders in the area.
An exposed rock formation
According to what I have been able to find (and the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition on the New York State environment is the best resource I have come across), gneiss tends to form only a thin layer of fertile humus on the surface, making such areas ill-suited for agriculture. Further, gneiss tends to weather into “massive rough surfaces” (to quote the AMHN), which again is not ideal for planting and harvesting. You can see some of the exposed gneiss at various points in the park, most notably in the high elevations between the Aqueduct Trail and the Big Tree Trail. I suppose that this gneissic bedrock is why the land was mostly left alone by previous farmers. (Admittedly, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is situated on the same bedrock, and they seem to have no trouble with their agriculture.)
Note the banding pattern
The landscape also bears the traces of the previous ice age, which ended around 12,000 years ago. This is most obvious in the glacial erratics (large boulders left by the receding glaciers) that are scattered about. One of these is Spook Rock, a fairly nondescript rock with an obscure scary story attached to it, after which a trail is named. Then there is the nameless glacial erratic, which is tucked into a detour off of Nature’s Way, one of the park’s smallest trails. According to a story in the New York Times from 1987, this massive rock is perhaps the biggest glacial erratic in the country, and certainly the biggest in the Hudson Valley. It stands about 20 feet high and is over 60 feet in diameter, which means that it must weigh several tons. Just imagine such a thing being budged, bit by bit, by frozen water. Nowadays, benches are set up around the rock, where I assume educators give presentations to students.
The glacial erratic
On the subject of rocks, I ought to mention Raven’s Rock. This is not a glacial erratic, but a large exposed rock formation. As usual in these parts, a couple ghost stories have been attached to this place, too. In fact, Raven’s Rock is referenced in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: “Some mention was made also of the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock, and was often heard to shriek on winter nights before a storm, having perished there in the snow.” Of course, there is some question as to whether the rock was named after this episode in the story, or vice versa.
The topography of the park is not especially dynamic. New York in general is geologically inactive. A mild earthquake in 2011 was enough to send people running from tall buildings, and made front-page news. A lack of tectonic activity makes for relatively flat landscapes, and consequently this area is hilly rather than mountainous. Rockefeller’s own house, Kykuit, occupies the highest point in the Pocantico Hills, just 500 feet above sea level. According to my running app, even the hilliest paths barely exceed 500 feet in elevation over several miles of trail. As discussed below, the paths were originally laid out for horse-drawn carriages, which require a relatively flat surface.
The view from my back window, several winters ago
The Rockefeller State Park Preserve partakes in the climate of the lower Hudson River Valley, which is classified as humid continental. This means that there are quite dramatic seasonal changes in temperature, from well below freezing in winter to upwards of 90°F (or 32°C) in summer—both of which can be uncomfortable and even dangerous if you do not take proper precautions. Rainfall is heavy and steady. The yearly average is over 50 inches (or 130 cm) per year—for comparison, London gets less than half that amount—and it rains in all seasons. The typical Hudson Valley sky is low and grey, a consequence of the ever-present stratus clouds.
Even when it is not rainy, humidity is typically quite high, which can make summer days unpleasant. Even so, summer is my favorite time in the park, since the leaves shine with an intense greenness that I rarely see in Europe. It usually snows in the winter months, though how often and how much can vary quite a lot from year to year. The park can take on an ethereal beauty after a good snowfall. All of this snow, rain, cloudiness, and humidity can be somewhat depressing; but it does allow for a verdant landscape, full of plants and all the animals that they support. Fall is perhaps the most comfortable and certainly the most beautiful season in the park, when the trees turn bright shades of red, orange, and yellow. This effect is far more pronounced in the United States than in Western Europe, which is due to the much greater variety of tree species in America (a byproduct of the ice age).
A snow-less winter day
The Hudson River is the most important geographic feature in the area. The river is unusual for having waters that alternately flow north and south, depending on the ocean’s tide. This alternating current is due to the river being, in its southern portion, a tidal estuary, intimately connected with New York’s harbor. For this same reason, the Hudson’s waters are brackish (a mixture of salt and fresh water), are thus not potable. The Hudson also marks a divide in the area’s geography, as the rock formations on either side of the river are vastly different in age and type. The rocks directly across from the Rockefeller State Park, in Nyack, were formed in the Late Triassic, and have been found to contain dinosaur fossils. That is a difference of at least half a billion years in age.
But the Hudson is not the only relevant water feature in the park. Several smaller rivers and brooks—tributaries of the Hudson—wind their way through the park’s confines, having long ago carved out a channel within the topography. The most important of these is the Pocantico River (whose name is derived from its indigenous appellation). It is normally between ten and twenty feet across, and usually not much deeper than your knee. Normally the current is gentle enough to allow you or your dog to walk right in, though strong rains cause the river to swell and flood, washing over the bases of neighboring trees. Even smaller and gentler are the little Rockefeller and Gory Brooks, which connect with the Pocantico and which all eventually flow into the Hudson. As charming as are these little rivers, it is worth noting that they are quite contaminated—more so, in fact, than the Hudson River itself—and this from sewage leakage. Do not be tempted if you are thirsty.
The Pocantico River
The biggest water feature in the park is Swan Lake, with an area of 24 acres. This is one of the most picturesque areas in the park, as well as one of the best spots to see many of the local bird species. Quite nearby, though technically not within the park itself, is Pocantico Lake. This lake used to be used as a reservoir, and ruins of the old waterworks building still stand next to the dam. Every year, the lake is stocked with hundreds of brown trout, which swim down the Pocantico River into the Hudson. Other native fish include perch and suckers; and if you have the relevant license you are free to cast your line into the waters—though I do not think I have ever actually seen somebody do so. (Judging from observation, the fishing seems to be better in the nearby Tarrytown Lakes.)
Swan Lake
Human habitation in this area goes back far before Henry Hudson sailed up his eponymous river in 1609. Back then, the land of the park was occupied by the Wecquaesgeek people, a subgroup of the Wappinger. They spoke an Algonquin language closely related to the Lenape (the people who were living on the island of Manhattan), and lived as hunter-gatherers, dressing themselves in the skins of deer and beaver. When the Dutch began to settle in large numbers, in 1624, thus commenced a series of treaties, epidemics, and battles, all of which resulted in the Wecquaesgeek being pushed off their land. I do not know if any native artifacts have ever been found on the grounds of the park, or if anyone has ever looked.
Nowadays, the only things that may vaguely remind the visitor of this history are the lean-tos, situated in the forest near Spook Rock. Technically, they are not lean-tos, but “survival shelters,” made by leaning sticks against the base of a tree; and I very much doubt that they actually resemble anything that was built by the Wecquaesgeek. I believe they are made as demonstrations for boy scouts, judging by the little benches that have been set up nearby. If you find yourself lost in the middle of the woods for an extended period of time, I suppose that knowing how to build one of these may come in handy. Perhaps the very oldest surviving human constructions in the park are the stone walls that can be seen in many areas. These were built well over a century ago by yankee farmers, and they accomplished several purposes. The fields had to be cleared of stones to allow for planting; and the stone barriers helped to mark boundaries and keep livestock from escaping.
A survival shelter
The history of the park as it exists today begins with one of the most controversial men in American history: John D. Rockefeller, Sr., a man whose very name has become synonymous with wealth. In 1893, Rockefeller purchased the land for what was to become his new home, Kykuit, on the Pocantico hills overlooking the Hudson. Part of the reason he chose this spot was because his brother, William, had already built a mansion for himself fairly closeby, called Rockwood.
Rockefeller was a man of few pleasures, among which was to ride in his elaborate horse-drawn carriages. Thus, he made sure to buy up huge tracts of lands adjacent to his new home, which he turned into a kind of paradise for scenic rides. This explains the peculiar characteristic of the park’s trails: they are quite wide and usually have a gentle inclination—both of which are necessary for horse-drawn carriages. Rockefeller was something of an amateur landscape designer, and many of the trails were laid out by the tycoon himself, along with his son. You can still occasionally see carriages being driven along the trails of the park, presumably owned by the descendents of the Rockefeller family, who still live closeby. (One friend of mine claims to have seen Martha Stewart riding around.) Another reminder of the continuing Rockefeller influence are the helicopters that sometimes fly overhead, presumably ferrying scions of this noble family over their domains.
The visitor center
In the 1980s, this enormous swath of land—almost 1,800 acres of land (over twice as large as Central Park), with over 50 miles of trails—was donated to New York to be used as a park and nature preserve. Nowadays it is overseen by the state of New York, which maintains a visitor center off of Route 117. Here you can park your car, see a bit of art in a small gallery, take a map, use the bathroom, and learn about the wildlife.
When I was younger, as I walked alone through the tall woods, I imagined that the park was as close to pure nature as I was likely to see. But of course this is not true: the park is a managed environment, even if that land management is done with a light touch.
The most obvious human intervention are the trails. Topped with crushed rock, they are quite wide, smooth, and easy to walk on. The trails are carefully maintained. At some points in the park, stone retaining walls prevent a neighboring hill from spilling onto the trails. More subtle is the drainage system, visible as a series of ditches and gutters running besides the paths, which work to redirect rainwater away from the trails. Without simple systems such as this, I am sure that the trails would be washed away in a short while.
The sycamoreslining Canter Alley
The park staff also work to control certain types of invasive species. One of these is a vine called mile-a-minute (Persicaria pertofoliata), so named because of its rapid growth rate—about six inches a day. This plant is indigenous to India, and its accidental introduction to NY has put native species in jeopardy, since the thorny plant grows so fast that it can literally smother its competition. The park staff is currently engaged in a battle to stop this vine from spreading, and is asking for volunteers to help in the fight. (If you would like to help, call 914-631-3064.)
You can see the vine’s characteristic leaves all around
Another obvious human intervention are the many areas of the park which are kept as grassland rather than forest. The staff maintain this area in several ways. The grass is cut down at the end of spring with a tractor and gathered into bundles, to be given to livestock. The staff also bring in livestock—goats, sheep, and cows, guarded by a few wary dogs—to graze the land in summertime. Personally I find it quite charming to come across a group of these farm animals on a walk. And the animals are certainly effective. They eat all day from dawn to dusk, and they leave hardly a stalk untouched.
Livestock maintaining the fields
In layout, the park is massive and sprawling. The furthest reaches of the park are bounded by the Hudson River to the west and the Saw Mill River Parkway to the East. But between these two boundaries the park’s extent is uneven. Bits of the park jut out past Route 117 to the north or Route 9 to the West. One major artery through the park is the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, which runs parallel to Route 9 and across it into William Rockefeller’s old estate. Another major division is Bedford road, which cuts the park into two fairly distinct areas: the part to the east of Bedford road tends to have fewer visitors than the part to the west.
The view from the bridge over Route 117
Virtually every one of the park’s dozens of trails has its own personality. I am biased, of course, but for me the area closest to my house (between the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and Sleepy Hollow Road) is easily one of the most beautiful sections of the park. There are three stone bridges that span the Pocantico River. These are the clearest signatures of the Rockefeller family: for the bridges would certainly have been costly to build, and they perfectly evoke the kind of European antiquity that the Rockefellers enjoyed. For my part, I think they are lovely constructions, totally in keeping with the primeval aesthetic of the park. When I was a child, I could not help but imagine legions of centurions marching over these apparently ancient viaducts.
The largest stone bridge, spanning the Pocantico River
Some of the most beautiful trails—especially in summer—are in the area surrounding the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. (Stone Barns is a non-profit, sustainable farm founded by David Rockefeller.) Here the forest gives way to rolling hills shaded by rows of oaks, and the stone buildings and fields of crops create a bucolic picture. Just as lovely is Rockwood, located right on the Hudson River. There, several paths leads up a hill to what appears, superficially, to be a kind of stone fortress overlooking the river. This is actually the foundation for William Rockefeller’s mansion, long since demolished. Here you can sit on the wall and contemplate the new Tappan Zee bridge, and even spot Manhattan in the far distance. (For some reason, flies love to buzz around these rocky walls in summer.)
The view from RockwoodA colorized photo of the destroyed Rockwood mansion
One of my favorite places to run is the Thirteen Bridges Trail, so named for the many little bridges that lead the wanderer criss-crossing over Gory Brook. Once you finish this loop, you can cross back over Route 117 on one of the two metal bridges. Turning in one direction takes you on the Pocantico River Trail, which (you will be surprised to learn) runs parallel to the Pocantico River. Turning the other way can bring you to the Big Tree Trail. This trail runs along a lower-lying part of the park, and is noted (as you may have guessed) for its large trees. If you walk along the trail on a quiet afternoon, as the sunlight drifts through the canopy, and the sounds of birdsong echo from above, the enormous columns of trees can create the impression of being in a natural cathedral.
Big Tree Trail
This brings me to the flora of the park. By my count, the park is home to well over fifty species of tree. The tallest to be found is the tulip tree, which is so named because of its yellow spring flowers. The trunk is as straight as an arrow, and the tree can grow upwards of 150 feet (or 45 meters). In general, the tallest trees are found in lower-lying areas, often near the river. Erosion causes soil to fall from the higher areas and accumulate here. Apart from the tulip tree, the park contains a mixture of beech, maple, and oak, along with shrubbier trees such as sassafras and witch hazel. There are relatively few conifers—mostly spruces—and they seem to prefer the areas close to the rivers. The park also has some non-indigenous species, too, such as the beautiful European beech—with red leaves—overlooking Canter Alley. My favorite may be the (non-native) Shagbark Hickory on Douglas Hill Loup.
The view from the base of a tulip tree
In the fall, most trees lose their leaves. They accumulate on the ground as a thick, brownish, rust-colored matting. Even by late summer, this bed of dead leaves is still noticeable everywhere. It seems that all of the insects, fungi, and bacteria present in the park’s soil have their hands full with such a superabundance of nutrients; but sooner or later, the dead leaves decompose and enrich the soil. We must pause here to acknowledge the kings of the park, and indeed of all life: bacteria. They are the most abundant organisms in the park and absolutely essential to each vital process. This is most obvious with the case of diazotrophs, which are the bacteria that convert nitrogen gas into a form (ammonia) that plants can use. Without these helpful microorganisms, plants could not grow, and the rest of us would be out of luck, too.
When it comes to shrubs, ferns, grasses, vines, and other sorts of plants, the species-count goes up into the hundreds. I could not hope to identify even a significant chunk of these plants. Using the application Plantsnap, however, I have collected a list of some of the more common vegetation. Claytosmunda (or interrupted fern) is intermixed with sensitive fern and spikenard, forming a thick underbrush of low, leafy plants in summer. In some areas there are thick masses of wild blackberry bushes, whose fruits are delicious and safe to eat, but whose vines are covered with painful spikes. In the more open grasslands one can find reeds and grass, as well as wild carrot.
The bark of a Shagbark Hickory
(The application, iNaturalist, allows visitors to log any sightings of a species—be it bird, bush, or bear—within the park. This list, available here, has been a great aide to me.)
The most hazardous plant is poison ivy, which is quite common in the area. Rubbing up against this plant can cause painful rashes that last well over a week. (Lucky for me, I seem to be among those who have no allergic reaction to the plant, so I have never learned to identify it.) Another plant to avoid is the wood nettle, whose leaves are covered with little stinging hairs. Once I rode my bike through a patch of this stuff, and my skin erupted into painful red bumps. Fortunately, the effects from a wood nettle sting wear off in under an hour.
The park also has a robust fungus population. Identifying mushrooms is a skill that I lack entirely; but visitors to the park have registered about two dozen species. The mushroom I most often notice is a Stereum, I believe, which grows on the sides of decaying trees. Indeed, saprotrophic mushrooms (which feed on decaying organic matter) play an essential role in the park’s ecosystem, allowing dead trees and plants to be broken down and returned to the soil. To name just a few of the mushrooms identified by park-goers, there is the dryad’s saddle, chicken of the woods, turkey-tail, resinous polypore, and honey mushroom. Some of these may be edible, but I would not take my chances.
Fungus growing on a decaying tree
The park’s fauna is even more diverse than its flora. We may start with the arthropods—specifically, my least favorite animal in the park: the tick. There are two main species of tick in this area: the dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis) and the deer tick (Ixodes scapularis). Do not let these names mislead you, for both are happy to bite dogs, deer, or humans. The dog tick is bigger and is completely black, while the deer tick is smaller, with a brown body and black legs. Getting bitten by either is not fun, but it is really the deer tick that you should watch out for, since it can transmit Lyme disease. My dog would inevitably get a few ticks every summer (and got Lyme disease twice), and I have found three or four ticks on myself over the years. It is a good idea to check both yourself and your pets after a walk, especially if you went through a woody area. If you have been bitten, it is wise to watch out for any signs of Lyme disease, which can include a circular rash around the bite.
Coming in second for hazardous bugs are the mosquitos, which can also carry diseases. People in the area have been concerned about West Nile Virus for years now, and more recently there has been worry regarding Eastern Equine Encephalitis. Fortunately, the mosquitoes normally come out around dusk, and are mostly absent during the day. I ought also to mention the possibility of a wasp sting. Once, while walking on the Aqueduct Trail in the park, I accidentally stepped onto a wasp’s nest in the path. The angered insect flew out and stung my legs several times before I could run away—quite painful. But I think the chances of this happening are very low. More annoying than dangerous are the gnats that can sometimes be found swarming, particularly in low-lying areas of the park. Though they are completely harmless, some of them seem to be attracted to the secretions produced by your eyes, and so you can end up endlessly swatting away curious little bugs.
The park is also home to some beautiful insects. My favorites are the fireflies, which come out around dusk in summertime. They fly low to the ground, hovering slowly in search of prey. The light, created with chemicals in the abdomen, is used to attract small insects. Without this lure, the firefly would be quite an ineffective predator, since it is clumsy and ponderous in flight. Indeed, fireflies would be the perfect snack for any insectivorous birds—the easiest bugs in the world to find and catch—if they were not filled with bad-tasting chemicals. Thus they float around in security, lighting up the evening forest like little stars.
A monarch butterfly on the flower of a wild carrot
Also lovely are the many species of butterfly that flap about, including the majestic monarch butterfly. The best place to see them, in my experience, is the area around Bedford Road, in the fields of Buttermilk Hill. There the butterflies congregate in the hundreds, floating from flower to flower. Another attractive insect is the blue dasher dragonfly, which normally prefers watery areas like Swan Lake. They are graceful fliers, now hovering in place, and now darting forward at great speed—their long blue bodies flashing in the sunlight. A personal favorite of mine are the grasshoppers, which sometimes jump along the paths, their razor-like bodies cutting through the air.
Sugar maple leaves
Insects are not merely seen everywhere, but they generate the loudest noises of the park. In the evening the crickets chirp with their wings, creating that comforting chorus of summertime. (Aside from these chirping crickets, however, there is the so-called camel cricket, which is a large, wingless species of cricket. Lacking wings, this species cannot chirp, and it is mostly known for accidentally invading basements.) The big noise makers, however, are the cicadas. The park is home to both the annual and the periodical varieties. The former are responsible for most of the daytime noise in summer, creating a kind of sonic sheet with their buzzing wings. Though constantly heard, cicadas are seldom seen, at least not in my experience. Both cicadas and crickets will stop chirping if you get too close; and in general their sounds are difficult to track down. The periodical cicadas hatch in enormous broods every 13 or 17 years (prime numbers make it difficult for predators to synchronize) and are quite a presence when they appear.
Rather inconspicuous to most park-goers, but fundamental to the park’s ecosystem, are the bees. According to a guide compiled by Sharp-Eatman Photography, over 100 species of bee have been found in the park. Most people, I suspect, will be surprised to learn that there are 100 species of bees in the world, much less in a relatively small area in New York. But bees are an incredibly diverse group. There are several species of bumble bees, carpenter bees, leaf-cutter bees, digger bees, and mining bees, to name just a few common groups. The bees are attracted by the many species of wildflowers found within the park, which include (to quote the guide) “wild azaleas, countless spring woodland bulbs, American white water lilies, four varieties of milkweed and large swatches of dogbane and meadow flowers.” European honey bees are also kept at the Stone Barns, where they help to pollinate the plants on the farm and in the surrounding park.
I have reached the limit of my knowledge of the park’s arthropod life, and yet this short description only scratches the surface. I am sure the park is home to a great many species of ants, spiders, and beetles; but it just so happens that I hardly ever see these creatures. They live their little lives in a small-scale world, vitally important to life in the park, but mostly invisible to people having a nice stroll.
Most visitors, I suspect, are far more interested in the birds. The Rockefeller State Park is also a wonderful place for birdwatching; indeed, it is recognized as an Important Bird Area by the Audubon Society. Over 180 species of bird have been identified within the park’s confines, which is well over twice as many birds as I could probably name. I should admit that I am not myself a skilled birdwatcher; I lack the patience and the good binoculars. But even a casual visitor will likely see a great many interesting avians.
Starlings flying over the foliage
The most common bird in the park may be the humble house sparrow. This bird is not even native to New York, but is an invasive species from Europe. Apparently it was first introduced into New York in an attempt to control the linden moth, and since then the bird has become ubiquitous. This is a shame, since the sparrow is not particularly pretty and its call is a tuneless chirp. The common starling is another species imported from Europe. Now extremely widespread across the continent, the bird was first brought to the United States in the 1890s; it was introduced into Central Park by a group of Shakespeare fans who sought to import every species mentioned by the Bard. This whimsical idea has cost the United States billions in damaged crops, and untold more in damage to native ecosystems.
The starling is—to my eyes at least—a rather ugly bird with a mangy look to it; and its song is not very pleasant either. But the bird does have its delights. In the autumn months, the starlings flock together in massive formations, shifting shape in the air like an ethereal wave. I have watched them take off, swarm, divide, rejoin, twist and turn, and then land—all perfectly in sync. It is wonderful to see.
The smallest stone bridge
But now we should discuss some of the park’s native species. My childhood favorite was the American robin, which was named after (but completely unrelated to) the European robin. These are the only birds which can commonly be found on the paths, where they like to look for worms. Also common is the red-winged blackbird, whose few scarlet feathers contrast sharply with its jet-black body. Its song is one of the most distinctive in the park, a tripartite raspy trill. (Describing bird calls in words is always tricky.) Even more brilliant is the cardinal, whose bright red plumage (among the males, at least) is impossible to miss. The blue jay is superficially similar to the cardinal, with its bright color and distinctive head crest. But jays are only distantly related to cardinals, and really belong to the crow family. The beautifully colored eastern bluebird is also unrelated to the blue jay, and is actually in the same family as the American robin.
One of the prettiest birds in the park is the American goldfinch, a petite yellow bird normally found in the more open areas of the park. Even smaller, and even harder to find, are the hummingbirds. In fact, the only reason I know they live in the park is that my brother set up hummingbird feeders in my backyard, and I have seen them fly in to have a snack. Few things in nature as are charming as a hummingbird; they way they move through the air is not quite birdlike (and not quite buglike, either), and the low-pitched hum from their wings is unmistakable.
Among the more tuneful residents of the park is the black-capped chickadee, a small bird (about the size of a sparrow) with a complex and varied song. Its very name (“chickadee”) comes from one of its many calls, and is an immediately recognizable sonic signature. The tufted titmouse is a cousin of the chickadee, somewhat bigger more graceful in appearance, though lacking the chickadee’s elaborate melodies. (Why some birds develop elaborate calls while others stick with simple chirps? Does a chickadee have that much more to communicate than a titmouse? I will let the biologists ponder this one.)
The last of the three stone bridges
The eastern towhee—a pretty mixture of red, white, and black—has a musical call, with three notes that sound somewhat like an augmented triad. Even more alluring is the call of the wood thrush. Indeed, many have considered the thrush’s song the most beautiful in the country, and I agree. Henry David Thoreau had this to say about this small brownish bird: “The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. … When a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring.” To my ears, the thrush’s song has an odd auditory quality to it, sounding almost like water echoing in a closed chamber, or even like some digital effects on a sound editing program. It is wonderfully soothing, like the soft babbling of a river.
If the thrush is the most beautiful melodist, the mockingbird is the most virtuosic musician of the area. As its name indicates, this bird can imitate a seemingly infinite range of sounds, from the calls of other birds to the whining of car alarms. I should mention that the mockingbird is probably more commonly found in the suburbs surrounding the park than in the park itself, owing to its preference for short grass and open areas. In reasonably short doses the mockingbird’s endlessly shifting song is enchanting; but when one is keeping you awake in the middle of the night, the charm wears off. Strangely, mockingbirds accumulate a repertoire of mimicked bird calls, not in order to trick other birds—who are not easily fooled—but instead to impress potential mates. Evolution is a wonderous thing.
It is quite an impressive construction
One of the most charming sounds of the forest is not a call, but a rhythmic tapping or rattle. This is caused by the pileated woodpecker, whose large size and red crown make it easy to recognize. This tapping noise is not a byproduct of the woodpecker’s feeding, but is instead created intentionally as a display; the bird raps its beak against a resonant piece of wood, like a hollow log, in order to proclaim its territory. The woodpecker feeds by drilling into the sides of trees with its beak and gobbling up the ants and beetles living within the living wood.
We cannot depart from the world of birds without considering the humble raven. While no beauty, it is the raven that participates in one of my favorite animal spectacles in the park. Ravens are vigorous defenders of their nests, and do not hesitate to attack birds much larger than themselves. Thus, any red-tailed falcons that get too close—whether they are going for the raven’s young, or simply by chance—are likely to be harrassed by one or two angry ravens snapping after them. It is amusing to see the formidable profile of a hawk in flight from the pugnacious ravens, like a F-16 being driven off by a couple Cessnas.
The red-tailed hawk is one of the park’s apex predators. They can be startlingly big—big enough to be mistaken for an eagle (that is, until you see a real eagle). Red-tailed hawks are carnivores whose diet mostly consists of rodents, particularly squirrels, though I do wonder if they ever try to attack stray cats or small dogs. Their call is a high-pitched screech that sounds like a war-cry. Much smaller is the American kestrel, a petite little hawk with muted coloration, which likes to eat large insects and small mammals. Intermediate between these two is the Cooper’s hawk, which in my experience is significantly less common. There may be owls in the park, too—either barred owls or the great-horned owl—but I confess I have never knowingly laid eyes on one.
Cows in wintertime
The park is home to many water birds as well. If you are at Rockwood, looking out at the Hudson, you may be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a bald eagle. But normally the best place to see water-loving birds is, unsurprisingly, Swan Lake. There you can find the modest duck—in many varieties, including the common mallard duck, with its charming emerald head. The pestilent Canada goose is sometimes present as well, though in mercifully small numbers in the park. (Perhaps the presence of so many carnivores makes the park unsafe for the goose’s young, and so they prefer more human-dominated areas.) Out in the middle of the lake I have seen the black profile of a double-crested cormorant as it dove for fish and then reappeared on the surface.
More graceful avians include the great egret and the great blue heron. Both of these slender creatures tend to stand still in shallow water, waiting to snatch an animal with their long beaks. Coming across a heron—waiting motionless in a river—is one of my favorite moments in the park. It is stunning to see one stretch is long wings and take off. According to the website, the lake is home to “large-mouth bass, crappie, pumpkinseeds, bluegills, and bullhead catfish,” and this is not to mention the brown trout that are stocked every year. And this is not all: the egrets and herons also feast on some of the local amphibians, such as the common snapping turtle or the painted turtle.
As you can see, there are an awful lot of birds in the park. I ought to stop now before this post becomes truly unreadable. And yet I cannot leave off without mentioning the biggest bird of all, bigger than the bald eagle or the great blue heron. This is the wild turkey. They are rather reclusive creatures, and so catching sight of one is not easy. Indeed, I cannot say whether they are often in the park, or only very occasionally. I have only seen a wild turkey once, many years ago, as I walked on a quiet winter day. The startled birds ran off (surprisingly quickly) through the forest and out of sight.
The park has a few reptile and amphibian inhabitants, too, though thankfully they are not normally very visible. We have already mentioned the turtles, who like the water. The park is also home to several varieties of frogs and toads. Visitors have spotted and identified several: the bullfrog, the wood frog, the pickerel frog, the spring peeper, and the American toad. There are even salamanders. Snakes crawl among the underbrush, though thankfully no dangerous ones (well, not dangerous to humans, but lethal to the frogs). There are garter snakes, water snakes, milk snakes, and the tiny brown snake. I have never seen one of these snakes, and I am not particularly anxious to. (Technically, the park lies within the range of the timber rattlesnake, which is venomous, though I have never heard of any sightings.)
Now we come to the mammals of the Rockefeller State Park. We begin with the very smallest, the chipmunk. These adorable little creatures are most commonly seen scurrying about near the ground, usually at the base of a tree. They climb just as well as their larger squirrel brethren, but their burrows and much of their food is located at ground level, so it is not usual to see them in the tree-tops. The grey squirrel, one of the most common species of the park, is over twice as large as the chipmunk. Though so often seen as to be nearly invisible, the gray squirrel is quite an impressive animal. Not many mammals can climb and jump so ably; indeed the gray squirrel is one of the few mammals who can climb down a tree head-first. And if you try to prevent the squirrels from eating from your bird-feeders or fruit trees, you will find them to be wily and clever adversaries. Their name notwithstanding, a significant portion of grey squirrels are entirely black.
Before moving to Europe, I did not know how distinctive chipmunks and grey squirrels are to America. One does sometimes see gray squirrels in Spain, but there they are invasive. In the United Kingdom they have largely displaced the native red squirrel. Another of the squirrel species—an American icon—is the groundhog, which are also called woodchucks. (The name woodchuck has nothing to do with chucking wood, but comes from an Algonquin word.) These normally stay earth-bound, and live in underground burrows. Unlike the grey squirrel, which stores food away and is active all winter, the groundhog gorges itself and hibernates during the lean times. The chipmunk takes a middle road, and falls into a non-hibernative torpor (which is my winter strategy as well).
One of my favorite views, on Douglas Hill
There are some other rodents to be seen. The meadow vole (more often called a field mouse) makes it home in the park, though it is normally difficult to find. The eastern cottontail rabbit can sometimes be spotted at a distance; they are rather skittish, too. I suppose these rodents must be careful, considering the number of predatory birds circling overhead. Almost all nocturnal animals are not seen in the park, if only because it gets so dark that virtually nobody wishes to be there. Thus we miss the possum, a comically ugly creature that looks like an oversized rat. It is not a rodent at all, however, but a marsupial, the only one to live north of Mexico. This means that the young are born very small (the size of a dime) and reside in their mother’s pouch, just like kangaroos.
Mammals do not just inhabit the trees and undergrowth; they compete with birds for the air. Several species of bats are endemic to the area, and they can be spotted in the waning light of summer evenings. The most common types are the little brown bat and the northern long-eared bat. Personally I like bats, since they help to control mosquito populations; but they can also transmit diseases to humans. The most deadly of these is rabies. Once, when a bat was discovered in—and chased out of—my house, my whole family had to go several times the hospital for the rabies vaccine, just as a precautionary measure. At present, bat populations all over the United States and Canada are threatened by a virulent fungus that colonizes the bat’s skin, a condition called white-nose syndrome. This has had a devastating effect on many bat populations, reducing some by over 90%. It remains to be seen how they will recover from this blight.
One of the most common—and hazardous—animals of the area is the striped skunk. I know they live in the park, since my poor dog was sprayed twice. The smell is powerful and rancid. From far away it can smell vaguely like marijuana smoke, though from up close it is harshly chemical. If you keep your distance, however, skunks are harmless animals who mainly eat insects. Slightly more of a pest is the common raccoon. Once I was surprised when, seemingly out of nowhere, a group of raccoons appeared, pushed over a nearby garbage can, and then carried off their loot into the forest. They are very dextrous and intelligent animals, and able climbers. During a rainstorm I witnessed a raccoon climb to the top of an electricity pole and huddle their for well over an hour. Raccoons, like skunks, are only really dangerous if they are infected with rabies. A police officer shot a rabid raccoon at the top of my street some years ago. If you are unlucky enough to get bitten, you will need to get the vaccine immediately.
A snowy day
The park is also home to many predators. By their nature, these carnivores are quite expert at sneaking around unheard and unseen, and so catching sight of one is an uncommon experience. The red fox prowls around the park, eating pretty much anything it can find, be it bird, amphibian, reptile, or mammal, as well as some seeds and grasses. I have heard of bobcats occasionally appearing in Westchester county, but I believe there are not many; competition with coyotes often drives them away. And the Rockefeller State Park Preserve definitely has coyotes. Some nights, you can hear their high-pitched yelps and howls echoing through the forest. It can be very loud, and quite eerie.
I have only seen a coyote on three or four occasions—always at a distance, and always briefly. The only exception to this was one odd sighting, right in the middle of Tarrytown, of a coyote chasing a domestic cat. The cat escaped by clawing its way up a tree. Coyotes are bigger than foxes—though smaller than most dogs—and are more ferocious hunters. Close cousins of the gray wolf, coyotes prefer fresh meat and are capable of taking down animals as big as deer (but they normally go after immature animals). They are very effective predators, and can kill porcupines and rattlesnakes, as well as many species of birds, including wild turkeys. Coyotes are not pack animals, but instead form pair-bonds, which are probably more stable than most human relationships. Unless they are rabid, they pose no threat to humans.
Coyotes became top dog after gray wolves were hunted out of the region, which was done over 100 years ago to protect livestock. Now the biggest canines in the park are domestic dogs. Another predator that has been eliminated from the area is the cougar (or mountain lion, or catamount—it has many names), which became locally extinct about 200 years ago. Black bears have occasionally been sighted in Westchester County, though I have not heard of any within the park. The lack of predators may make the area a little safer, for humans and for cows, but it did greatly upset the ecosystem.
The most apparent evidence of this is the huge profusion of deer. The white-tailed deer is the biggest animal in the park (that is, not counting the domestic cows); big bucks can get even heavier than most adult humans. They are everywhere, and often they are not particularly skittish around people. Many will not even bother to run away when you walk by. The most flighty seem to be the males with fully-grown antlers, which can be seen starting in late spring. Perhaps they are nervous because the park does allow some limited bow-hunting of deer in one section of the preserve. This is done as a needed control over the deer’s explosive population.
This description, long as it is, does not even come close to fully capturing all of the manifold forms of life within the park. Language is linear, so we must go through these many species as a long list. But life is not a list, not even a long one. Every level and layer is intimately bound up with every other, creating a dense web too complex for us to wrap our minds around. This is the problem of organized complexity. We can readily understand things that are complex but disorganized (like the motions of gas particles) or simple but organized (like the orbit of a planet); but when there are so many variables, all influencing one another in precise and specific ways, we find ourselves grasping in the dark. This partially explains why humans so persistently disrupt ecosystems. We cannot tweak them by simply eliminating the parts we do not like—such as wolves or mosquitos—since every change has ripple effects through the whole system.
The European beech near Canter Alley
To see all of these particulars as one enormous whole is the challenge of the naturalist. But it is also what comprises the real beauty of a natural place. Organized complexity, after all, is what separates a forest from a botanical garden or a zoo, wherein species are divided and labeled. And this is also, I think, why natural spaces are so refreshing to us. Every human-made environment is composed of simple shapes—lines, circles, rectangles—all arranged simply enough for us to easily navigate them. From a suburban neighborhood to the inside of a cathedral, this holds true. Natural spaces betray no such simple geometry or geography. By comparison, nature can appear chaotic or disorganized; and yet if it were truly so we would not find nature so aesthetically pleasing. Rather, natural spaces are highly organized, but along non-intuitive lines; and this lack of obvious arrangement is why, I believe, it can feel so refreshing for us to take a walk in a forest. Sensually and cognitively, it is a richer experience.
Henry David Thoreau famously went into nature and found the meaning of life—or at least, the meaning of his life. I cannot say that the Rockefeller State Park Preserve has been to me what Walden Pond was to him. Yet the park has been a constant, comforting presence in my life, a place of beauty and continuing wonder. Even now, there are still some corners I have yet to explore, and so many plants and animals I have yet to know. Like all of nature, the park can teach many lessons, provided you are a willing pupil. The principles which shaped the park are the same as those which have shaped the entire earth; and so understanding one small plot of land may be the best way to come to grips with the cosmos. If the park has any moral lessons to teach, it is the lesson of all nature: that life goes on. I do find a sort of comfort in the thought that, whatever happens to me, this buzzing, blooming world will continue.
A free-standing oak tree
But the park has another lesson, too, and that is the value of cooperation. The Rockefeller State Park Preserve would not exist without the generosity, care, and work of thousands of people—from the original donors of the land, to the volunteers who help to combat invasive species, to the casual visitor who takes care not to litter. Wild places do not simply exist nowadays, but must be actively maintained. It is one of the ironies of our history that we only really began to savor wilderness when much of it had already been destroyed. Now, without places of refuge like the park, we will be condemned to wander among asphalt landscapes of endless surburbia. For our own sake—if for nothing else—we must fight to protect it.
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In a city full of famous art museums, the Metropolitan is undoubtedly the queen. The institution is a behemoth. With a collection containing millions of objects—objects which come from every corner of the world, from ancient times to the present day—the museum has nary a rival in the world for range. And the objects comprising this encyclopedic collection are, inevitably, of the finest quality that money can buy. By now I have seen enough of the great European museums to say confidently that the Met can compete with any of them.
The museum was conceived as a kind of sister institution to the American Museum of Natural History. It was an age when the rich and educated sought to “civilize” the less privileged. Both museums are located near Central Park, a place which itself was designed as a civilizing project—a kind of pastoral refuge from the ills of city life, where the people could learn to appreciate more refined recreational activities: Sunday strolls, picnics, birdwatching, and so on. The Museum of Natural History would bring the light of knowledge to the uneducated, while the Met would show the unsophisticated the value of high art.
The museum’s founders were embarking on a pathbreaking project. There were already plenty of examples of great European museums to learn from. But what would an American art museum be like? When the museum opened in 1872, its collection was modest. Indeed, many of the works it displayed were either prints or reproductions of famous European works. Yet this quickly changed. New York was emerging as the financial capital of the world. Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan were among the city’s residents. Since Europe was still considered the cultural epicenter of the West, these newly-minted super-rich naturally spent their piles of gold in buying up as much European artwork as they could.
The Metropolitan benefited immensely from this confluence of money and ostentatious display. Not only did the museum itself have the budget to purchase high-quality works, but it also increased its collection from gifts and bequests. After all, donating beautiful art to a public museum is a good way to demonstrate wealth and civic-mindedness at once. We ought not to criticize, however. There are times when the vanities of the world manage to produce genuine treasures. And the Met is certainly such a treasure.
At present, the museum’s holdings are so vast and varied that no single person, however knowledgeable, could hope to do justice to it all. It would take a team of professional art historians working for years on end to complete even a basic catalogue of the museum’s works, much less an appreciation along aesthetic grounds. And I am no art historian. So in this post I hope only to give you a superficial tour through this enormous institution. (Much of the information and many of the images come from the Met’s website, which is quite well-made. The people at the museum have done the world a service by publishing high-quality public domain images of their collection.)
We begin at the entrance on Fifth Avenue. The museum is difficult to miss. The building stretches out along several city blocks. Fountains shoot and sprinkle outside, and the sidewalk is always thick with crowds. The building is neoclassical in form, its façade a kind of pale white decorated in a pseudo-Roman style. The steps leading up to the main entrance, lined with imposing double columns, are one of the most iconic spots in New York. There are always food stands parked right below these steps, and usually a street performer—a dancing saxophonist, perhaps—plays for the amusement of those sitting on the steps.
We enter the building, and are faced with a choice: right or left. There are ticket stands on either side. To the left there is a graceful Greek statue of woman, and to the right a stiff Egyptian man seated on a throne. These statues are informative, since the respective galleries for these cultures are located in these directions. For the purpose of getting a ticket, the choice is immaterial: the lines on either side are normally about the same, and usually move pretty quickly.
Now, there was recently a significant change in the museum’s admissions policy. For the past few decades, visitors could pay any amount they liked. Just last year, however, the museum changed its recommended prices to mandatory payments—for everyone except residents of New York State, that is. (Lucky for me, I am still a resident.) Another change, by the way, was the switch from using metal clips to using stickers to identify visitors. I am sure that the Metropolitan has increased its budget by making these changes. But I admit I miss the old, pay-as-you-wish, metal clip Metropolitan. A man from China could pay a dollar, and leave with a nice little keepsake from his visit. I still have some of the old clips in my room.
Anyways, let us now enter the museum proper. I like to begin with the Egyptian section, not just because it is near the entrance, but also because it represents the chronological beginning of the museum’s collection. Here we can ground ourselves in one of the world’s oldest civilizations before we examine anything else.
The Egyptian section is massive and labyrinthine. Unlike the other departments of the museum, the Egyptian department displays everything in its collection—almost 30,000 objects. To make room for all of this, the halls double around one another, making it sometimes confusing to navigate the collection. But it is a worthwhile use of one’s time to get lost in the art. If you proceed carefully through the department, you can take a very satisfying chronological journey: beginning near the entrance, in prehistoric Egypt, and ending up in the same spot, having gone through the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, and finishing in the Roman era.
Now, I love this department, because it has everything. Walking through it, the visitor gets a very complete picture of life in this ancient civilization. Of course there are sarcophagi and mummies, along with amulets, jewelry, and ceramics. Among the most famous of the smaller pieces in the museum is William the Hippopotamus, a beautiful figurine made of faience, which is a ceramic type specific to Egypt. It has a radiant blue color that is delightful to look at.
The museum also has a wealth of larger statues, ranging from the size of a child to the size of a giant. For me, the most beautiful of these is a statue of the pharaoh Hatshepsut. As you may know, Hatshepsut was the only woman to officially become the pharaoh. This presented a challenge for Egyptian artists. The art of Ancient Egypt is distinguished for its astonishing conservatism, preserving the same stylistic features through centuries. A single glance is all we need to know that something is Egyptian. But portraying a woman required innovation, and the artists rose to the challenge. Rather than making her appear masculine, as they did in other works, in this seated statue Hatshepsut appears both feminine and even feline. There is a smooth grace and delicacy to the sculpture which is rare in the usually rigid forms of Egyptian art, and I find it enchanting.
Though not, perhaps, especially beautiful, some of the most illuminating artifacts on displays are sets of models. Made around 1900 BCE, the models were found in the 1930s in a tomb in the Memphite region of Egypt. They show us rare scenes of daily life in Egypt. We can see several boats travelling along the Nile, one of them transporting a mummy, another for hunting. There are also models of more cotidian scenes: a granary, a garden, a house. These models are wonderful little things, since it is as if they were made by the Egyptians for a museum exhibit about Egypt. It is difficult to identify with the people who sculpted enormous statues of god kings, but very easy to see oneself gardening.
The centerpiece of the collection is the Temple of Dendur. The Met actually has large sections of several temples in its collection, from different periods of Egypt’s history, but this is the only complete, free-standing temple in the museum. It is in the center of a large room, surrounded by a little water moat where visitors like to throw coins. Statues of crocodiles and lion-headed gods surround the space. The temple itself is of a fairly modest size, and is from the end of Egyptian civilization. It was built after the conquest of Egypt by the Romans, and commissioned by Augustus himself. While the temple is a lovely work of architecture, what most stuck in my memory were the many graffiti carved into the walls.
When you complete your circuit through the Egyptian section, you will be where you began, right by the entrance. From there, I like to go across the hall and then into the section on Ancient Greece. This part of the museum looks very different. Whereas the Egyptian section is twisting and jam-packed, the Greek section is open and clear. The visitor enters a large hall with a vaulted roof. Free-standing statues are scattered through the space, while friezes line the walls. For any lovers of classical art—with its flowing robes, idealized forms, and restrained emotion—there are dozens of works to admire. While I greatly enjoy the statues, I find myself even more interested in the friezes. Some of these come from Athenian tombs, such as a touching portrayal of a little girl cradling a dove.
The collection contains many excellent examples of art from Classical Athens—art that we readily identify as quintessentially Greek. Besides the statues and freizes, there are many examples of Greek vase art. But the collection also contains works that do not fit this description. Among these are the many sculptures from pre-Classical Greece, which to our eyes can seem more Egyptian than anything. The museum has an excellent example of one of these kouroi: A young man, standing with one foot extended forward. I like the work, since it is an interesting example of a midpoint between Egyptian stylization and Greek realism. The young man is manifestly unreal, and yet the musculature in his limbs and torso is well done. An even older work—from around 750 BCE—is a terracotta vase. Its decoration is very much unlike the red, white, and black images of gods and heroes we normally associate with Greece. Rather, it is covered in a thick pattern of geometrical shapes and tiny like stick-like figures. I quite like it.
The collection of Roman art is perhaps even better than that devoted to Greece. There are several excellent busts of Roman Emperors. I have a long, personal attachment to a bust of Marcus Aurelius in the collection, which to me is the perfect image of a philosopher—calm, wise, detached. I use it as my own symbol now. A much more amusing work is a statue of Trebonianus Gallus. It is a rare example in the Met of art gone wrong. Clearly, whoever made it was not a master. The whole figure is awkward, with a bulging stomach and a head that is manifestly too small. Maybe Rome was not doing so well in the year 250 CE, when it was made.
Statues, being made of metal or rock, naturally preserve very well. But painting is another story. Even though the Greeks had a developed tradition of painting, nothing has survived the ravages of time. That is not the case for Rome, from which we have many well-preserved wall paintings. The Met has an entire room, the bedroom of P. Fannius Synistor, which was buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. The art on the walls is really wonderful, showing several architectural and natural scenes. It shows us how the Romans gave a realistic impression of space without using the technique of perspective. Having seen my fair share of Roman wall frescoes and mosaic floors, I must say that they had wonderful taste in interior decoration.
As you can see from this example and the Egyptian temple, the Met is big on re-creating interiors. This is a theme throughout the whole institution, and one of the Met’s most distinguishing features: The visitor is allowed to walk into history.
Before moving on to the next department, I want to mention the wonderful collection of Etruscan art (from Italy before the Roman period) on the balcony above the Roman section. One of the most outstanding pieces in this section is a bronze chariot from around 550 BCE. Having a preserved chariot is quite rare, so it is a treat to be able to see one so exquisitely decorated.
The Greek and Roman section leads direction to the collection of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Of course, one can tell at a glance that this grouping is a kind of mishmash of art from non-Western cultures, which in previous days was called “primitive.” In reality the arts of these three continents have nothing to do with each other; and, of course, the amount of geographical space supposedly represented in these galleries is incomparably more vast than that of Greco-Roman or Egyptian art. That being said, at least the Metropolitan has a fine collection of art from these parts of the world, which are too often ignored.
For my part, it is a great refreshment to go from the world of Greece and Rome to this gallery. Our culture has so internalized those classical forms that they charm us more for their “perfections” than for any surprises they contain. Thus it is a pleasure to sample some of the other great visual cultures from around the world, which really do contain surprises for Western eyes.
The grand hall of the collection (gallery 354) is one of the most spectacular in the museum. From the ceiling hangs an enormous collection of shields from Oceania, arranged into a kind of meta-shield formation. I am always reminded, incongruously, of a spaceship. Large sculptures fill the space below the shields. There are some slit gongs from the island of Vanuatu, which double as huge musical instruments and works of visual art. There are funerary sculptures from Papua New Guinea; called malaga carvings, they are beautiful and highly intricate wooden carvings meant to be used only temporarily to celebrate the dead, and then disposed of. (This certainly goes against the grain of Western thinking, wherein we want our art to be eternal.) The bis poles of the Asmata people, another culture in New Guinea, are used for a similar purpose, and are also beautifully carved and then disposed of.
The adjacent section on African art is equally captivating. During my last visit I was particularly attracted to a small wooden carving of a man, called a Power Figure, made by the Kongo peoples. Bent forward slightly, standing with arms akimbo, the statue has a real intensity when seen in person—the exaggerated form only magnified by the many steel nails emanating from the man’s body. More famous is the Benin ivory mask, a real masterpiece, made by the Edo people of Nigeria—one of the great pre-colonial states in sub-saharan Africa. The mask, which represents a powerful queen mother, is clearly the work of experts working within a vibrant tradition. The mask has an elegance and a graceful polish that make it very satisfying on the eye: each detail is finely crafted, and yet they all work together to make a perfect form.
During my last visit, I was especially interested in the section on pre-colonial American art, since I had just finished listening to an audio course on the peoples of North America. I was delighted to find beautiful examples of geometric pottery from the Ancestral Pueblo culture (fascinating to compare to the geometrical designs from pre-Classical Greece). Among the many sculptures on display, one of the most iconic is a ceramic baby from the Olmec culture, made around 1,000 BCE. It is a wonderful piece, surprisingly lifelike despite its stylized face. The folds of fat and the hand placed idly in the mouth serve to make this sculpture a far more realistic depiction of babyhood than the many portraits of the infant Jesus made over 2,000 years later in medieval Europe.
Moving on in our rapid tour, we come next to the museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary art. The very fact that the Met has this department is a testament to its uniqueness. I can think of no other museum in the world that has significant holdings of ancient and non-Western art as well as “modern” art. But the Met is devoted to a vision of total universality—the art world’s equivalent of the Museum of Natural History—and so has it all.
The collection as the Met is almost as impressive as that in the MoMA—and that is saying a lot. Though there are so many great works on display, I will restrict myself to mentioning my favorite painting, which is also perhaps the most famous painting in the whole collection: Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein.
It is an extraordinary portrait, arguably the greatest of the previous century. The painting is revolutionary. Gertrude Stein sits in a kind of abstract, unfinished space. She is not surrounded by her papers and books, but instead sits alone. While previous portraits in European art showed us the heroic and cultured male, handsome and lithe, Stein is hunched-over, short, and tick. Yet her body—mostly concealed under her heavy clothes—has a kind of elemental power on the canvass, even a monumental grandeur. But her face is what attracts the most attention. Rather than faithfully reproducing Stein, Picasso turns her face into a kind of mask. Thus her eyes and nose do not obey the normal rules of perspective and anatomy. Ironically, though this technique necessarily makes Stein’s face blank and inexpressive, the result is a convincing representation of the writer’s presence, of her indomitable energy. There is a charming story that, when told that Stein did not look anything like this portrait, Picasso responded “She will.” He was right: this portrait has helped to define Stein’s image far more than photographs of her.
I will also mention the largest work on display in this Department: America Today, a mural by Thomas Hart Benton. It consists of ten canvasses, and shows in visual form the America of the 1930s. The work was commissioned by the New School of Social Research—a kind of progressive think tank. I quite like the mural, as I do much of the public art created during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Looking at this work, one feels that we modern Americans were successfully creating our own visual language with which to decorate our public monuments—much like the Egyptians and the Greeks. The inclusion of this large mural is also keeping with the Met’s proclivity for immersive artistic experiences.
Next we come to the massive Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Once again, the Met excels when it comes to the re-creation of historical spaces. One of the most beautiful rooms in the Met is an entire patio taken from a Renaissance Spanish villa—the Castle of Veléz Blanco. Not only are the carvings on the arches and columns beautiful, but the space is filled with quite lovely statues of mythical, historical, and religious figures. Just as astounding is a study from the Ducal Palace of Gubbio. Every surface is covered in images made using the technique of wood inlay (intarsia, or marquestry), which consists of piecing together little bits of colored wood in order to make a complex image. The amount of time it must have taken to assemble a whole room this way is frankly stupefying. The result is an extraordinary work of immersive art, whose walls symbolize different areas of human activity. I am sure the room itself is a greater accomplishment than whatever happened inside it.
These two rooms only scratch the surface of the department’s holdings of decorative arts. There is everything one would expect to find in the homes of aristocrats and royalty, from elaborate coffee pots to ornate globes. I admit that, however fine these products are, they are generally less interesting to me than the sculptures.
Some of the museum’s best sculptures can be found in gallery 548, which takes the form of a large atrium. On one side of the space, you can even see the brick façade of the museum’s original building (which is mostly buried in the later constructions). There are two outstanding statues in this space. The first is Perseus with the Head of Medusa, by Antonio Canova. It is an extremely fine work of Neoclassicism, achieving the idealized grace of the Greeks and Romans. Simply as a composition, the statue works marvelously, with the gruesome head balanced by the peculiarly barbed sword, making a strong diagonal. The other great statue (in my opinion) is Ugolino and his Sons, by Jean-Baptise Carpeux. This depicts a story taken out of Dante of an Italian count who—along with his sons and grandsons—was imprisoned and starved to death. We see the count, driven almost to insanity through starvation and despair, surrounded by the tortured forms of his progeny.
Continuing on through the museum, the visitor will next reach the museum’s section of Medieval Art. Now, I feel justified in mostly passing over this department, since the bulk of the museum’s medieval art resides in the Cloisters Museum, uptown (an enchanting branch of the Met). Even so, it must be said that the central room of the Medieval Department is a beautiful space, with a high ceiling and high windows, like a cathedral. An ornate grill (from the Valladolid Cathedral, in Spain) stretches most of the way to the ceiling, and charming examples of sculptures, tapestries, and stained glass give the space a properly church-like atmosphere. This last time around I was particularly impressed with the museum’s small collection of Byzantine art.
From here it is appropriate to go straight to the Department of Arms and Armor. As you can imagine, this was my favorite section to visit when I was a young kid, and did much to fuel my youthful obsession with swords and guns. Even now, I admit I find this section extremely impressive, and I have never seen any collection of historical weapons even half as good. The presentation is excellent. The visitor enters a large hall, where medieval flags are hanging from the ceiling. A group of mounted knights ride through the center, while other armored knights stand guard all around the periphery. One feels that one has entered a jousting tournament.
The suits of armor are fascinating and, often, strangely beautiful. They are like abstract sculptures of human forms, or a kind of proto-machine with moving parts. Though you naturally would think that a metal suit would be extremely cumbersome, you can see innumerable little joints made into the armor, giving the wearers a surprising range of movement. The most beautiful of these many suits on display is that made for Emperor Ferdinand I (brother of Charles V). Every piece of metal is covered in ornate designs. Just as wonderful are the Japanese suits of armor on display. Rather than turning their wearers into metallic turtles, this armor is clearly designed for a different sort of fighting—one requiring more lightness and flexibility. The monstrous grimaces on the helmets would be genuinely terrifying if someone was coming at you wearing this.
Right next to this department is the American Wing. This is one of the areas where the Met is really untouchable. Other museums may have finer paintings or sculptures or what have you, but I do not think any museum has such a complete and rich collection of American art. Indeed, the American Wing could be cut off and moved to a different spot, and it would still be one of the finest museums in the country. Its collection is vast, and it is so wonderfully presented. The visitor enters an enormous courtyard full of benches and statues. The glass wall and roof flood the space with light, making the department a welcome relief from the dark medieval section. Bright, colorful stained glass, and an equally colorful fountain, line the walls; and a beautiful bronze statue of Diana, lightly resting on one foot, occupies the center.
The visitor enters the main collection through a kind of pseudo-façade, as if this is an entirely different building. And, indeed, the visitor suddenly finds herself thrown into a richly-furnished home. In keeping with the museum’s penchant for interior spaces, there are a great many recreations of American interiors from different points in the country’s history. Surely, we have not invented anything as close to time travel as this. Proceeding onward, the visitor next finds a strange sort of room. It is in the shape of a large oval, and on the walls there is an enormous painting of the palace and the gardens of Versaille. When standing in the center of the room, the curving panoramic does create a satisfying illusion of actually standing in France. Just as the study in the Ducal Palace of Gubbio, this painting (by John Vanderlyn) must have taken a nauseating amount of time.
I walked up the stairs, and then found myself in what is called “open storage.” These are the chairs, tables, paintings, lamps, and everything else that the museum has but did not have the space to use. So they hang here, in transparent cases. I recommend a visit to this, if only because it gives you an idea of the enormous amount of material any major museum must be holding in storage.
Proceeding onward, we come to the painting gallery. There are far too many excellent works to name. I was particularly happy to see a portrait of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington—both of which used to hang in Hamilton’s home, up in Harlem. More conspicuously, there is the iconic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware—almost ludicrously heroic. I was also happy to find Frederic Edwin Church’s painting, In the Heart of the Andes. Church was inspired by the naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, and included as much scientific detail as he could in this painting. Just as famous is John Singer Sargeant’s painting, Madame X, an intentionally risque (at the time) portrait of a society beauty (her real name was Madame Pierre Gautreau).
I was most delighted to learn that the museum has an entire room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I am no expert in the design of houses or in interior decoration, but I must say that it is both a welcoming and an animating space. It is easy to imagine myself reading a good novel within, while watching the snow fall out the windows.
This completes our long circuit around the museum’s massive ground floor. If we continue on, we reach the Egyptian section again. So now let us return once again to the Great Hall, and then ascend the grand staircase to the museum’s first floor (or second floor, in America).
Finally we come to the museum’s collection of European Paintings. Now, I must be careful here to avoid getting pulled into an endless catalogue of the museum’s excellent works. Like the American Wing, the Met’s Department of European Paintings could be a self-standing museum, and still be one of the best in the nation. Whether you like Dutch, Italian, French, or Spanish art, you will not leave the gallery disappointed (though German painting is fairly absent).
As you might expect, I am most interested in the Spanish paintings on display. The Met has excellent examples of the three great Spanish masters: Velázquez, El Greco, and Goya. The outstanding work of Velázquez is a portrait of Juan de Pareja, an enslaved man of African descent, which the artist executed in Italy. You will be pleased to hear that the great painter freed Juan de Pareja, who went on to become a skilled painter himself (there is a work of his hanging in the Prado). In any case, when you look at this painting, you do not see a man in bondage. To the contrary, Juan de Pareja appears almost regal with dignity. The painting is beautiful and startlingly realistic. To depict a man of African descent in such a way was a radical gesture on Velazquez’s part.
Goya’s contribution is a portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, a very young aristocrat. As usual with Goya, the figure has an odd stiffness, and the face is inexpressive. The viewer’s eye is naturally drawn to the scene at the boy’s feet, where two cats hungrily eye a magpie on a leash. This is a strangely morbid scene for a portrait of a youth, and it becomes all the more eerie when one considers that the boy died only a few years later, at the age of eight. El Greco’s outstanding work is his View of Toledo, the best of the artist’s few landscape paintings. As always, the artist’s signature style is immediately apparent: deep, rich colors combined with a dramatic verticality. This style is perfect for the city of Toledo—which is built on a hill overlooking a river, and filled with sharp towers. El Greco manages to imbue this wholly secular and inanimate scene with a burning spiritual intensity.
The number of excellent French painters in attendance dwarfs the representatives of any other nation. My personal favorite is Jacques Louis David. There is a charming portrait of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was executed during the French Revolution under false accusations. This is quite a historic loss, considering that Lavoisier is normally considered to be the father of modern chemistry. David’s more famous painting is his The Death of Socrates, a historical scene showing the great philosopher’s final moments. Socrates, who was very ugly and was quite old at the time, is shown as a partially nude Greek hero—with a muscular torso to boot. While I am not sure the painting captures the spirit of Plato’s dialogues, it is a brilliantly theatrical image.
On the subject of French painters, I must also mention The Love Letter, by Jean Honoré Fregonard, a delightfully coquettish image of a young woman receiving a note from her secret admirer. (I use this image in my blog’s newsletter.) I would love to keep going—since paintings speak to use in a modern language, easy for us to appreciate—but I will content myself with a short list of the artists in attendance: Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Ingres, Canaletto, Tiepollo, Turner, Klimt, Monet, Manet, Guaguin, Cézanne, Dürer, Memling, Rubens… Really even the list gets too long. The museum’s holdings of 19th century European paintings is so big, in fact, that the collection is held in a different section of the building.
To get there, you must pass a little hallway devoted to drawings, prints, and photographs. Now, you may be surprised to learn that, counted by individual works, this department is by far the biggest in the museum. But only a fraction of the drawings and prints in the museum’s holdings are on display at any given time. Sometimes they are taken out for special exhibitions, such as one on Michelangelo a few years ago. There, I got to see some of Michelangelo’s schematic drawings for fortresses, when he was briefly hired as a military engineer. Besides being innovative designs, the drawings themselves are beautiful works of abstract art.
Continuing on through the paintings of 19th and early 20th century Europe—where you can admire the great impressionists and post-impressionists—you get to the Department of Islamic Art. During my time in Spain I have come to admire Islamic art for its intricate designs, its geometrical sophistication, and its sense of divine calm. Wonderfully creative patterns decorate everything from tiles, to carpets, to pages of the Qur’an. As an example of the last, there is a stunning illuminated Qur’an from Turkey, whose decoration is just as intricate as the Book of Kells in Dublin.
Representational art is relatively uncommon in the Islamic world, as it is explicitly forbidden by the religion, but there are still some examples in the gallery. A particularly beautiful one is a tile panel from Iran, executed in a style that looks to my ignorant eye as if it could be Indian. A seductively posed woman is being courted by a man wearing a European hat. I wonder who made object, for whom, and where it would be placed, since it seems to so flagrantly flout the strictures of Islamic religion.
In keeping with the museum’s love of historical spaces, this section has the Damascus Room. This is a winter reception room from a palace in Damascus, Syria, made around the year 1700. It is a beautiful space. Shelves display ornate ceramics and the gilded covers of Qur’ans. Panels of lovely calligraphy (bearing messages from the Qur’an) and floral designs decorate the walls, and the floor is covered with geometrical tiles. The ceiling is perhaps the most stunning of all, composed of elaborate woodwork. It is such a sophisticated, elegant space; it must certainly have set the tone for any conversations which took place within.
Next we come to the museum’s relatively small section on the Ancient Near East (Mesopotamia). For the most part these halls are filled with wonderful little objects from long ago, like cylinder seals, jewelry, incense burners, and small-scale statues. Among this last category is a small statue of Gudea, made around 2,000 BCE. It is a work of skilled craftsmanship, showing us a Sumerian king in a rather humble pose. His robe bears an inscription in cuneiform about his accomplishments (typical propaganda). What is striking is the thoughtfulness and even the humility of the king’s gaze and pose. He strikes us as more of a monk than a fearsome ruler. Another outstanding work is the bronze head of an unknown ruler, made between 2300 and 2000 BCE. Though not exactly realistic, I think this work is remarkable for the degree of individualization in the ruler’s features. We are not looking at a generic, stylized male head, but a particular man from 3,000 years ago.
But the real stars of this department are the lamassu: colossal sculptures of human-headed winged lions that flank the hallways. These were made in Assyria, around 850 BCE. Walking through this hallway, flanked by these mythical figures, feels like walking into the past. One detail I particularly like is that the creatures have five legs, as a result of a bit of illusionism. The front two legs are parallel, as if the creature is standing still; yet from the side, an extra leg is added (invisible from the front) to make it look as though the creature is mid-stride when seen from the side. The walls surrounding these stone guardians are covered with friezes in low relief, depicting other mythological scenes. For me, this Assyrian art is as lovely anything in the Egyptian section.
You emerge from ancient times onto the balcony overlooking the Great Hall. Here you can walk across and enter into the Department of Asian Art. This is one of my favorite areas of the museum, partly because of the art itself, and partly for the way that this department is laid out. Clever planning makes the department seem much bigger than it actually is, and walking through it the first time feels like exploring an old palace or temple.
The viewer enters the department by walking into a grand gallery, filled with enormous works of Chinese Buddhist art. There are large stele, bearing inscriptions and carvings, and a huge sculpture of a Bodhisattva. This may, in fact, be the biggest statue in the museum. It is 13’9’’ tall (over 4 m) and must weigh thousands of pounds. It is also quite beautiful, with richly decorated robes. On the wall is an even bigger paintings of the Buddha of Medicine, seated among a large retinue. It is a magnificent way to enter Asia.
From this large hall, one can either further explore Chinese art, on the left, or enter the arts of India, on the right. For the sake of consistency, we can begin with China. The Met’s collection of Chinese Buddhist sculpture is the largest outside of Asia, and more examples can be seen in Gallery 208. There are so many lovely sculptures. One I particularly like is a ceramic sculpture of an Arhat (or a Luohan, as they are known in China), which is a person who has achieved an advanced state of enlightenment. The sculpture is lifesize; and the man’s tired and worn expression is extremely compelling. His robes are still brightly colored, even though this was made over 1,000 years ago.
The Met also has a wonderful collection of Chinese drawings, calligraphy, pottery, and much else. But the most stunning room is the so-called Astor Court: a recreation of a Ming Dynasty-era courtyard. This is just another example of the stunning interiors from around the world collected at the Met. Finished in 1981, this installation was built by hand, using traditional methods; and besides being a beautiful work of art, it represented a landmark in cultural exchange between communist China and the United States. You enter through a round doorway guarded by two stone beasts (one is reminded of the lamassu in the Ancient Near East). Immediately you find yourself in a different world. A sheltered walkway surrounds a garden filled with oddly shaped rocks. These are called Taihu stones; they are formed via water erosion at the foot of a particular mountain in China (Dongting), and they are abstract sculptures in their own right.
At the end of the garden is a large room, designed to be used as a study, I believe. Unlike the great European interiors of the Met, this room does not appear at all ostentatious. Rather it is spare, restrained, and tasteful. As in the Damascus Room, it is impossible not to be awed by the high degree of sophistication and elegance of the room and the adjoining garden. I cannot but help imagining myself as a Ming Dynasty scholar, sitting in the garden and contemplating some intellectual puzzle. The space seems to invite contemplation.
Next we shall enter India and Southeast Asia. But before that, I ought to mention the Met’s small but delightful collection of Korean art. It is all in one room, Gallery 233, and I quite like the space. All of the objects are diminutive, and many have a kind of geometrical simplicity and elegance which gives the space its own distinct aesthetic. But we have no time to stop and savor. We walk from China, through Korea, and into India.
For me, the standout objects in these galleries are the many small figurines of gods. Indian sculpture enchants me for the kind of whimsical energy it often possesses. Though magnificent, the many gods do not seem remote or beyond reach, but rather quite approachable and inviting. These galleries are arranged chronologically, so we begin at around 2,000 BCE—about as old as anything in the Egyptian or the Ancient Near East sections—and move towards the present. To pick just a few of my favorite examples, there is an Avalokiteshvara Padmapani from the 7th century, a Bodhisattva who seems to be coyly beckoning. Or there is a statue of Shiva as the Lord of Dance, wherein the god is shown mid-stride, dancing within a fiery circle.
Another favorite is Yashoda with the Infant Krisha, who is suckling the young diety at her breast. This sculpture is especially resonant for Westerners, since we also have a tradition of representing the sacred mother suckling the divine child. But the style is here so very different. Whereas Mary is de-sexualized as much as possible, Yashoda is nearly naked and her breasts are almost comically large (of course, I am looking at this sculpture as a Westerner). Indian art is, after all, famous for its erotic content. An excellent example of this is a sculpture of a loving couple in a passionate embrace, made in the 13th century. You may be surprised to learn that this was part of the decoration of a temple. Certainly you would never see anything similar on a gothic cathedral!
The last work I will mention is a statue of Ganesha from the 12th century. This elephant-headed god is the bestower of good fortune, and it is customary to make an offering before doing anything important. When I visited a few years ago, I was delighted to find that this practice extended into the museum: there were coins left at the base of the statue.
We still have Japan to cover, but first we must take a little detour. Standing near the end of the section on India and Southern Asia is a beautiful wooden ceiling. This comes from a Jain temple built in the late 16th century. The staircase underneath this roof leads up to a small gallery on the floor above, this one devoted to the arts of Tibet and Nepal. For my part, this is some of the coolest art that I have ever seen. Though thematically related to art in both the Chinese and the Indian sections, the art here has a peculiar intensity not found anywhere else. An example of this is the painting of Walse Ngampa, a wrathful deity of Tibetan Buddhism. The figure has an electrifying intensity, with two arms wrapped around a terrified victim about to be devoured, while its many other arms are outstretched, holding symbolic objects.
When we descend, we can finally make our way to the section of Japanese art. Here, too, we can find some excellent statues. I particularly like the wooden guardian figures, which flank a statue of the Dainichi Nyorai, or the Cosmic Buddha. These guardian figures are formidable. I am always drawn to their fearsome grimaces. Even more wonderful is Ogata Korin’s ink drawing of waves on a folding panel. Here we can see a non-Western tradition of drawing that is intensely sophisticated. The waves do not occupy any kind of realistic space, but instead seem to emerge from nowhere and engulf everything. The lines of the waves are nothing like the blurry colors of Turner’s seascapes, which gives these waves a disturbing sense of solidity; the leading edge of the water appears sharp and even claw-like. It is a wonderful image.
We have already spent hours and hours in this museum, and yet there is still more to see. From the Japanese Department we can move on to the Department of Musical Instruments. This is housed in two galleries overlooking the section of Arms and Armor. I have never seen a collection of musical instrument that even comes close to the Met’s collection. There are superb examples of instruments from around the world: Italian harpsichords, Chinese pipas (similar to a lute), Native American rattles, Congolese horns, and Japanese drums. Seeing them in this context reminds us that instruments can be very beautiful simply as objects. To pick just one extravagant example, there is an Indian taus (a bowed lute) in the form of a peacock. And, of course, we must not neglect to mention the Stradivarius violins.
This gallery also has paintings with musical subjects hanging on the walls. My favorite is Dancing in Columbia, by Fernando Botero, if only because a copy of it has been hanging in my mother’s living room as far back as I can remember. Two balconies connect the two halves of the instrument department. On one of these is a charming old organ, and on the other is a fantastic assortment of wind instruments, arranged as if they are exploding from a central point. It is an evocative representation of a fanfare.
By now we have made our way through most of the major sections of the museum. There is only one place left on our tour: the Robert Lehman Collection.
Robert Lehman was a banker who owned one of the biggest and best private art collections in history. Active for a long time on the Metropolitan Board of Directors, he bequeathed his extraordinary collection to the Met, but on the condition that it not be mixed in with the other departments. Thus, the Met built a special space, attached at the back of the building, almost like a spaceship taking off from the main building. The rooms of the department are furnished to vaguely evoke a private home. Personally, I do not like having this department separate, since I do not see any good reason to do so other than vanity. If Lehman wanted his collection separate, he could have done what Frick or Morgan did, and established his own museum. But, in any case, there are some extraordinary works of art to be found, so it cannot be missed.
Robert Lehman seems to have been most interested in European paintings, and that is what we find in abundance. One of my favorites is The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, by Giovanni di Paolo. I love the color palette of the paintings, filled with rich dark hues. But I am most drawn to the representation of the creation of the world: with God holding a series of concentric circles surrounding an image of Eden. Most famous, perhaps, is a portrait by Ingres of the Princesse de Broglie. Ingres’s technique is masterful, brilliantly capturing the rich fabric of her dress and furniture. It is also psychologically subtle, as it shows us a woman poised between shy reserve and self-assuredness.
There are dozens of other great paintings in this collection, and thousands upon thousands of great works in the museum, but this is where our tour must end. I have already written far too much. But the Met is endless—or, at least, it might as well be.
Confronted with such an enormous mass of culture and beauty from all around the world, it is difficult to know how to react. Part of me wonders whether all of these objects really should be here. With the financial resources that the Met possesses, the museum has been able to get nearly anything. But should they? And were all of the objects collected in ways that we would now approve of? Admittedly, the museum is trying to address this last question with their Provenance Project, paying particular attention to works that may have been looted by the Nazis and not restituted to their rightful owners. Personally I wonder about many of the objects in the Department of Oceanic, African, and American arts.
On the other hand, I think it is important that we do have spaces where we can see the human experience as one enormous tapestry. Traveling from Egypt, to China, to Turkey, to Senegal—in short, to nearly every inhabited corner of the world—and seeing these different traditions unfold through centuries of time: one would hope that this might lead to some insight into our human condition. There are some very obvious lessons, the most obvious one being that humans really like to make art. Other common themes are the relationships between art and power, or art and religion. It is all too much to really digest everything. But I hope every visit provides just a little bit more to chew on.
To conclude rather lamely, the Met is a uniquely excellent museum. Not only does it have vast and high-quality collections, but the museum is unique in many respects. As often mentioned, there is the museum’s emphasis on interior decoration and the arts of daily life. More important is the museum’s attempt to be all-inclusive: incorporating art from all over the world, and from every historical period. The Met’s view of art is expansive, incorporating not only paintings and sculptures, but swords, helmets, harpsichords, photographs, and dresses (the Costume Institute is downstairs). It is a kind of universal storehouse of human activity. I will surely keep going as long as my legs will take me.
I stumbled upon the Alexander Hamilton’s house completely by accident. I met a couple of friends from out of town, and in the process of exploring the Upper West Side we came upon it.
The discovery that one of the Founding Fathers’ houses was here, in Harlem, was astounding. The humble wooden house could hardly look more out of place nowadays. Set amidst the landscape of glass, steel, and concrete, the Federal style building looks as if it has been plopped down from another age. And in a way it was. The house has been moved from its original location not once, but twice.
When Hamilton had the house built, in the early 1800s, he was already in the twilight of his career. He had finished his epochal tenure as the Secretary of the Treasury—during which he constructed the nation’s financial system from the ground up—and had been reduced by a series of quarrels and scandals to an ordinary private citizen. To name just two watersheds in his life, he was publically exposed (and exposed himself) as an adulterer, and he also openly quarelled with John Adams, the presidential candidate of his political party, the Federalists. He was a brilliant statesman but a poor politician.
After this semi-voluntary retirement from the life of politics, Hamilton worked as a high-profile lawyer in New York City. Brilliant in everything he did, his career in law was no exception. To escape from the bustle of the city, Hamilton hired John McComb Jr.—the architect who designed NYC’s majestic City Hall, among other things—to build a rustic retreat for himself and his large family (he had eight children). At the time, Harlem was of course nothing like the city it is today. The area was still mostly farms and undeveloped woodland, an ideal spot to build a country house.
Hamilton did not have much time to enjoy his little paradise, however. Just two years after it was completed in 1802, Hamilton was killed in a duel with Vice-President Aaron Burr—another high-profile NYC lawyer, and a long-time rival of Hamilton’s. The property stayed in the family for some decades hence, occupied by his long-surviving wife Elizabeth and their children. But eventually it was sold and, by the late 1800s, it was in foreclosure and doomed to destruction. The building only survived because of the intervention of the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, which bought the house and had it relocated, to conform with the Manhattan street grid.
This purchase was not for purely disinterested historical reasons, however. The church modified the house so that it could be used for services—a purpose which it served for many years. Eventually a larger church building was constructed, enclosing the old home. Then, in the 1920s, a historical preservation society intervened, buying the property and partially restoring some of its original features and decoration. It was only in the 1960s that it was designated a National Historic Landmark. But it remained hemmed in by the many tall buildings that sprung up around it.
Finally, in 2006, the house was moved to a more open location, in St. Nicholas Park, which was still within Hamilton’s original property. The move was a minor feat of technical achievement, gently cradling the entire structure and shifting it, inch by inch, to its new home. Now it stands in a relatively open space, near a few churches, some brownstown apartments, a playground, a taxi service, and a funeral home. And this curious conjunction of the historical, the mundane, the holy, the profitable, and everything else, is what New York City is all about.
For anyone who has visited Jefferson’s Monticello or Washington’s Mount Vernon, Hamilton’s little home may be something of a let down. Hamilton was never greatly wealthy in life; he owned no slaves*—indeed, was part of the Abolition Society—and, though addicted to work, was scrupulously honest in his personal finances. In any case, much of the house’s original furnishings and character were lost in its two moves and its many renovations.
The visitor enters on the ground floor, what used to be the basement. There is a small gift shop near the entrance, with books by and about Hamilton. The rest of the space is a miniature museum. There is a time-lapse video of the epochal re-location of the house, and a short documentary that plays on a loop, giving an overview of Hamilton’s life. His accomplishments are also displayed in a series of informational panels and timelines. My favorite object on display was a mourning scarf—a scarf made and sold on the occasion of his untimely death, for people to honor his life. Amusingly, the scarf gives an incorrect account of Hamilton’s background, saying that he was “descended by his father of respectable Scottish ancestry, by his mother was reputably connected to New York.”
The Dining Room
The reality, as you may know, was very different. Hamilton’s father, James, was a complete failure in life, and abandoned Hamilton and his brother when they were very young. (James may not even have been Hamilton’s real father, anyway, as Chernow speculates.) Further, Hamilton’s mother was far from reputable—she abandoned her husband and had Hamilton out of wedlock—and, in any case, died when Alexander was very young, leaving him little in the way of property or connections. Hamilton was, in other words, both a bastard and an orphan, as his musical proudly proclaims. But I suppose it is not polite to mention that at a funeral.
The Salon
The house’s period rooms are all upstairs, on the first floor, accessible with a small wooden staircase from the basement. The hours of access are extremely limited (on weekdays from 12:00 to 1:00, and from 3:00 to 4:00), which makes visiting somewhat inconvenient. But it does not take much time to see everything. There are three main rooms to visit: the dining room, the salon, and Hamilton’s study (where he must have spent most of his time). The dining room features a long elegant table and is well lit with three tall windows. The salon is where I imagine the family spent much of their time, playing cards and receiving guests. Hamilton’s study is much as one would expect: decorated with maps and well-stocked with books. It must have been far messier and fuller when he was alive. He was an avid reader and inveterate scribbler.
Two notable paintings hang on the walls, one a full-length portrait of Hamilton himself, looking like a sophisticated dandy. There is also a portrait of George Washington, given as a gift to the Hamiltons from the Washingtons (the two men worked very closely together). The two original paintings are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they hang proudly in the American Wing; the paintings here are reproductions. Even more captivating is a life-sized bust of Hamilton, dressed like a Roman statesman and looking quite like one too. According to the guide, Hamilton’s wife considered the bust extremely lifelike, and even spoke to it after his death. It is a wonderful piece, bringing him to life with a winsome and wise smile. (Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton’s great rival, had a replica of this bust in his house in Monticello, placed opposite to his own, so the two would be forever in opposition.)
And that is about all there is to see. If anything, the house is charming because it shows how humble may be the life of an extraordinary historical figure.
But I should not end this post without mentioning another monument next door. Up the hill from Hamilton’s Grange is one of the most attractive college campuses I have ever seen: the North Campus of CUNY’s City College. The entire complex is built in a flamboyant neo-gothic style, designed by the architect George Browne Post. Everything follows a unified aesthetic, from the elaborate iron grillwork on the gates to the little lamps flanking the entrances. The stonework on the buildings is particularly delightful, with enough subtle variation in color and texture to remain endlessly pleasant to examine. Every detail is well-done, from the wry gargoyles scattered throughout to the ornamented roofs and towers.
The centerpiece of the complex is Shepard Hall—named after a prominent NYC lawyer—which features a central building in the shape of a cathedral, and two curving wings on either side. Unfortunately I could not enter the building, as all the doors were locked. If I had gone inside, I would have seen the monumental Great Hall, a sort of central nave at the end of which is a mural by Edwin Blashfield, the artist who decorated the Library of Congress. In front of this hall is a statue of Alexander S. Webb, a general in the Civil War and the second president of the university. The statue makes him out to look like quite a swaggering military figure, and not exactly a bookish man.
(On the subject of statues, I ought, too, to mention the statue of Alexander Hamilton in front of the Broadway Spanish Baptist Church nearby. Here he looks rather like he does in the aforementioned painting, a heroic dandy.)
To me, the campus is a delightful and inspiring place. Indeed, the only American university campus of comparable beauty I know of is the University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson. Having gone to a rather unattractive university myself, I am very sensitive to the effect that architecture can have on the mood and atmosphere of an institute of higher learning. The strong verticality of the gothic buildings lifts one up and their historical form inspires a sense of participating in an honorable intellectual tradition.
*This may not actually be true. Subsequent research has shown that Hamilton probably did buy, sell, and own slaves. Oh well.
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New York City is a land of bridges. According to the site, The Bridges of NYC, there are 2,027 bridges in the city—over five times as many as the bridges in Venice. Most of those bridges are small, ugly, and deservedly ignored. But several attract attention, and for good reason. The most famous bridge in the city is, of course, the Brooklyn Bridge. But before getting to that bridge, I will review some of the other 20 bridges that connect the island of Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, or New Jersey.
The largest bridge connected to the island of Manhattan is the George Washington Bridge. The bridge spans the Hudson, and connects New York to New Jersey. If not the biggest bridge in all of NYC, it is the busiest—carrying hundreds of thousands of commuters per day on its two levels. A suspension bridge opened in 1931, the George Washington is not especially beautiful; indeed, it is rather grey and devoid of character. But the bridge is open to pedestrian traffic, and so can provide an excellent view of the Hudson River (though this view is, admittedly, somewhat impeded by the anti-suicide net).
The George Washington Bridge
The majority of the bridges into Manhattan are located on the other side of the island, spanning the Harlem River between Manhattan and the Bronx. A traveler on the Hudson Line of the Metro North will pass by or under many of them, including the apparently unnamed railroad bridge that takes the train over the Harlem River, between the Third Avenue Bridge to the south and the Madison Avenue Bridge to the north. Both of these are swing bridges, a design that allows the steel structure to rotate to let boats pass by (though this is seldom nowadays).
The Macombs Dam Bridge. Photo by Amoldius; licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0; taken from Wikimedia Commons
As the train goes north, it passes by the Macombs Dam Bridge, which appears to be just another swing bridge, but which is also the third-oldest bridge in the city, having been opened in 1895. Further north are two large bridges, the Alexander Hamilton and the Washington (not George Washington), which rest on enormous steel arches.
The Alexander Hamilton Bridge (and Washington Bridge beyond), as seen from the High BridgeThe Broadway Bridge. Photo by Beyond My Ken; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; taken from Wikimedia Commons
After that comes the Broadway Bridge, a somewhat odd-looking lift bridge, whose central span can be elevated to allow for passing boats. When I am waiting for the train at the nearby Metro North Station, I like to watch the Line 1 Subway pass over this bridge, creating an odd metallic echo and illuminating the bridge with blue sparks. And finally there is the Henry Hudson Bridge, another tall and not especially beautiful structure resting on a single steel arch. The infamous Robert Moses had to fight against the protests of the local residents to get the bridge constructed, as a part of his Henry Hudson Parkway plan.
A plaque on the bridge.
The very oldest and one of the most beautiful bridges in the whole city is also found in this area: the High Bridge. Constructed in 1848, the High Bridge was originally built as a part of the Croton Aqueduct, ferrying water from upstate New York into the city in a long tunnel, carried across the Harlem River on a series of stone archways. The High Bridge’s design and function gave it the appearance of an ancient Roman aqueduct; but the stone columns impeded traffic on the Harlem River; so in 1928 the columns were replaced by a single steel arch, much like the nearby Alexander Hamilton or Washington Bridges. Nevertheless, the bridge—now for pedestrians only—is one of the loveliest in the city, ideal for a walk with a view. The old water tower, designed to pump the water from the Croton Aqueduct uptown, still presides over the Manhattan side of the bridge, looking like a turret from some forgotten castle.
The bridge today, facing towards the Bronx.
The most impressive bridges in Manhattan are, however, concentrated downtown, connecting the borough with Brooklyn, across the East River: the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Of these, the last named was the first to be built and remains the crown jewel of NYC infrastructure, a monument of engineering and one of the most significant public works of the 19th century.
A chromolithograph from 1883, the year the bridge opened. (It used to be referred to as the East River Bridge.) Note the spire of Trinity in the distance.
When construction began on the Brooklyn Bridge, in 1870, Manhattan and Brooklyn were two different cities. Unification of the boroughs would not come until 1898. Thus, the politics behind the bridge were controversial and complicated, requiring the cooperation of two rather corrupt city governments (“Boss” Tweed, of Tammany Hall, was on the board for the Bridge). Before the bridge was built, the only access across the East River was provided by a handful of ferry companies. For decades commuters relied on these little boats to get to work, as Walt Whitman immortalized in his poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”:
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
John A. Roebling
The Bridge was designed by John Augustus Roebling, a man of enormous proportions. After studying philosophy with none other than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Germany, Roebling moved to the United States to pursue a Utopian vision of a collectivist, agricultural community in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. When this did not pan out, Roebling turned his attention to engineering, creating daring and ingenious designs of suspension bridges and perfecting the steel cables necessary to build them. He was the natural choice to design and build the Brooklyn Bridge. But, when the bridge was still in the planning stage, Roebling injured his foot, developed tetanus, and died. (A believer in water therapy, he refused conventional treatment and insisted on soaking his injured foot and wrapping it in towels.) This left the project to his more-than-capable son, Washington Roebling.
Washington was already a Civil War hero and, thanks to his travels in Europe, an expert in caissons. A caisson is a sort of massive container, meant to be sunk to the bottom of the river. Water is then pumped out of the bottom chamber, and pressurized air is pumped in, allowing men to dig on the riverbed. They had to dig deep into the river until they hit the bedrock appropriate to carry the weight of the bridge. It was harrowing and dangerous work—deep underwater, under intense pressure, with water constantly seeping in. As the caisson sunk deeper and deeper, requiring higher pressure to keep the water out, the men began to develop the bends when they returned to the surface (or, as it was called then, “caisson sickness”). Since the condition was not understood at the time, the management had no idea how to prevent it. Workers would come up from the heavily pressurized air to sea level in only a few minutes, not nearly enough time for the body to adjust. This left many in agonizing pain, some permanently injured, and a few dead.
Washington Roebling himself was a victim of decompression sickness (though it may have been compounded by stress), leaving him so sickly and weak that he had to communicate all of his instructions by letter and observe the bridge by telescope. Even so, the caissons eventually reached the appropriate depth, were filled with concrete to serve as the foundations, and then construction of the stone towers began—easily the most massive buildings in the city at the time. Then, the wire cables had to be suspended. The board unwisely chose an unscrupulous wire manufacturer, who knowingly provided shoddy products in order to increase his profit. And though the bridge engineers caught on to this ruse, some of the defective wire is still built into the bridge (though not enough to make it unsafe, I am assured). In fact, John A. Roebling’s original design was meant to make the bridge at least six times as strong as necessary, making it possibly the most durable bridge in the city.
Finally, in 1883, the bridge was opened to massive acclaim. It was a technological marvel, a pivotal work of infrastructure, and a tourist attraction—as it remains. Originally the bridge had room for pedestrians, electric street-cars, and horse-drawn carriages, and also two cable-cars that ferried people back and forth. One of the earliest film recordings by Thomas Edison is a passenger’s view from the front of one of these cable cars, as crowds of men in top-hats walk by. (To learn more about the bridge, I recommend David McCullough’s excellent history, from which I am drawing my information.)
The bridge looks rather different now. For one, the cable cars have gone. And the street cars and horse-drawn carriages have been replaced by a sea of yellow taxis and multicolored automobiles. Pedestrian access is via a special walkway, elevated above the road level, going through the center of the bridge. The walkway nominally has both a walking lane and a bike lane, though so many tourists crowd the bridge on any given day that cyclists must fight their way through the crowd—shouting constantly. The view from the bridge has changed quite a bit, too. Far from being the largest structure in the city, the bridge’s towers now appear diminutive against the background of skyscrapers in Manhattan.
But the bridge is still a lovely sight. The gothic arches rise up and into the air, culminating in a solid block of stone that seems oddly ancient in the city of glass and metal. The surrounding steel cables create a pleasing geometric pattern, shifting slowly as one crosses the bridge. From the center of the walkway the cables form a kind of receding net, creating a grid that disappears into a vanishing point, much like a Renaissance painting. And the view of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the East River from the bridge is one of the best in the city. Considering that it is so iconic, so pleasant, and free, the Brooklyn Bridge is a necessary part of any visit to New York.
Yet the bridge’s neighbors also deserve mention. Slightly east of the Brooklyn Bridge is the Manhattan Bridge, an all-metal suspension bridge that used an innovative design which was to prove highly influential. Opened just 26 years after the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge nevertheless appears modern and unremarkable—wholly functional, with no thought given to aesthetics. Unlike on the Brooklyn Bridge, this bridge’s pedestrian platform is separate, off to one side, and situated below the main span, which somewhat limits the view. I do, however, enjoy the experience of riding the subway (lines B, D, N, and Q) over the bridge—hearing the hard clack of the tracks and seeing the city through the triangular bars.
The Manhattan Bridge, as seen from the Brooklyn Bridge
Further east and north is the Williamsburg Bridge. This bridge looks to the untrained eye rather similar to the Manhattan Bridge. Opened six years earlier, in 1903, it is also an all-metal suspension bridge, appearing nowadays to be plain and utilitarian. In my opinion, however, this bridge is one of the lesser-known treasures of NYC. Like the Brooklyn Bridge, it has a central walkway that gives a nice view of the city (though, admittedly, the view from this bridge is obscured by a thick metallic cage that encloses the walkway). If the bridge is less picturesque, it compensates by being far less crowded than the Brooklyn Bridge. Both times I walked across, the span was nearly empty. The visitor can also observe the subway (lines J, M, and Z) passing underneath the platform, causing a pleasant ruckus and rumbling. I even observed some love-locks on the bridge.
The Williamsburg Bridge.The view from the Williamsburg Bridge.
I will end this post by mentioning one bridge that I have personally never seen. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is the longest and largest bridge in NYC, and was also the longest in the world for nearly twenty years (1964 – 81). (The Williamsburg Bridge and the George Washington have both held that distinction as well.) The enormous bridge was built under the auspices of Robert Moses as a way of connecting Brooklyn with Staten Island, and named in honor of the first known European explorer to enter New York Harbor, Giovanni da Verrazzano. Strangely, however, Moses forgot to look up the spelling of that explorer’s name, officially naming the bridge called the “Verrazano-Narrows” (with one z). It was not until 2018, fifty-eight years after its opening, that the name was finally corrected. Now Giovanni can rest in peace.
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, from Staten Island. In foreground is a 19th century fort, Battery Weed. Photo by AJ Idnam; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; taken from Wikimedia Commons
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Lotz in Translation 