1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die (41 page)

M
O
MA
: 11 W. 53rd St. Tel 212-708-9400;
www.moma.org
.
When:
closed Tues.
T
HE
M
ODERN:
Tel 212-333-1220;
www.themodernnyc.com
.
Cost:
3-course prix fixe dinner $82.
W
HITNEY
M
USEUM:
945 Madison Ave. Tel 800-WHITNEY or 212-570-3676;
www.whitney.org
.
When:
closed Mon–Tues.
P.S.1 C
ONTEMPORARY
A
RT
C
ENTER:
Long Island City, Queens. Tel 718-784-2084;
www.ps1.org
.
N
OGUCHI
M
USEUM:
Long Island City, Queens. Tel 718-204-7088;
www.noguchi.org
.
When:
closed Mon–Tues.
S
OCRATES
S
CULPTURE
P
ARK:
Long Island City, Queens. Tel 718-956-1819;
www.socratessculpturepark.org
.
E
ARTH
R
OOM:
Tel 212-989-5566;
www.diaart.org
.
When:
open Wed–Sun, midSept–mid-June.
D
REAM
H
OUSE:
Tel 212-925-8270;
www.melafoundation.org
.
When:
open Thur and Sat, late Sept–mid-June.
B
EST TIMES
: Sun evenings in July–Aug for MoMA’s Summergarden concerts in the Sculpture Garden.

New York’s Boulevard of Arts

New York, New York

On Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue was once lined almost exclusively with millionaires’ mansions, but now it’s home to riches of another kind. Here, fronting Central Park between 82nd and 105th Streets
, lies one of the world’s greatest concentrations of museums, with several others just a few blocks to the south and one directly across Central Park.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the linchpin of the lot. With a collection of more than 2 million works from around the world, from the Stone Age to the digital age, it ranks as one of the world’s largest and finest repositories of art and culture. Founded in 1870, the museum has expanded to such a degree that its original Gothic Revival building is now completely surrounded by additions. Highlights include the Greek and Roman galleries; the Costume Institute; the collections of Byzantine and Chinese art; the collection of European paintings; the Arms and Armor collection; the musical instrument collection (with some 800 instruments from six continents on display); and the Egyptian collection, with its mummies, sphinx, and the amazing Temple of Dendur, a complete 1st-century B.C. Egyptian temple presented as a gift of the Egyptian government to the people of the U.S.

The Guggenheim Museum was architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s last major work.

The American Wing comprises one of the best American art collections in existence, with more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures, and decorative art objects, including more than a dozen period rooms that offer a window into American style and domestic life. The museum’s Roof Garden is a favorite summertime haunt for New Yorkers, with its great view of Central Park and rotating series of site-specific art installations. The museum’s concert series offers classical music performances at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium and occasionally in display rooms such as the Temple of Dendur and the Medieval Sculpture Hall, site of its beautiful Neapolitan Christmas Crèche.

Walk uptown to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1959. With a kind of spiraling seashell form, its top wider than its bottom, the structure reflects the architect’s use of organic form. Begin at the top and walk slowly down through the circling uninterrupted gallery, viewing a collection that spans from the late 19th century to the present, including Mr. Guggenheim’s original collection of nonobjective art; niece Peggy Guggenheim’s collection of Surrealist and abstract works; and pieces from various other schools, including the Impressionists, early Modernists, German Expressionists, Minimalists, and Conceptualists.

A little farther uptown, the Museum of the City of New York is a must for Gotham aficionados, with its collections of photographs, art, costumes, toys, and memorabilia that trace the city’s history from a small Dutch colony to the capital of the world. The Theater Collection is one of the world’s best, covering New York theater from the late 18th century to the present, with original set renderings, scripts, costumes, props, posters, and more. The Marine Collection boasts 100 scale models of historic ships and as many paintings of New York harbor. On the fifth floor, John D. Rockefeller’s 19th-century bedroom and dressing room are preserved intact, moved here from his house at 4 West 55th Street.

At 91st Street, the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design occupies the former mansion (built in 1901) of another famous New York tycoon, Andrew Carnegie. Part of the Smithsonian Institution, it’s the only museum in the U.S. devoted solely to historic and contemporary design, with collections of product design and decorative arts; drawings, prints, and graphic design; and textiles and wall coverings. One block north, the Jewish Museum celebrates 4,000 years of Jewish culture through painting, sculpture, photos, and archaeological and everyday artifacts—more than 25,000 pieces in all. The permanent exhibition, “Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey,” tells the story of the Jewish experience from ancient times to today.

Other museums on Museum Mile include El Museo del Barrio, dedicated to Latino history and culture; the National Academy of Design, with its collection of 19th- and 20th-century American art; and the special Neue Galerie New York, devoted to early 20th-century German and Austrian art and design.

And then there are the museums that aren’t technically part of Museum Mile at all, but why quibble? Located a little south of the Mile on Fifth Avenue, the Frick Collection offers a collection of European masters housed in an 18th-century French-style mansion built in 1914 by steel and railroad magnate Henry Clay Frick. Highlights include works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, El Greco, and Goya. Much loved for its intimacy and the relative absence of crowds, the museum is particularly lovely at Christmastime, when beautifully decorated. Nearby, the Whitney Museum of American Art (see p. 182) occupies the other end of the arts spectrum, with a collection of modern and contemporary American art.

Across Central Park from the Met, the American Museum of Natural History has a collection of more than 36 million objects, from moon rocks to the Brazilian Princess Topaz (the world’s largest cut gem at 21,005 carats) to the famous dinosaur halls. Don’t miss the Hall of Biodiversity, the classic dioramas of animal and village life, or the futuristic Rose Center for Earth and Space, a four-story glass sphere that holds the Hayden Planetarium, the largest and most powerful virtual reality simulator in the world, sending visitors through the Milky Way and beyond.

M
ETROPOLITAN
M
USEUM OF
A
RT:
Tel 212-535-7710;
www.metmuseum.org
.
When:
closed Mon.
G
UGGENHEIM
M
USEUM:
Tel 212-423-3500;
www.guggenheim.org
.
When:
closed Thurs.
M
USEUM OF THE
C
ITY OF
N
EW
Y
ORK:
Tel 212-534-1672;
www.mcny.org
.
When:
closed Mon.
C
OOPER
-H
EWITT
M
USEUM:
Tel 212-849-8400;
www.si.edu/ndm
.
J
EWISH
M
USEUM
: Tel 212-423-3200;
www.jewishmuseum.org
.
When:
closed Fri.
E
L
M
USEO
D
EL
B
ARRIO
: Tel 212-831-7272;
www.elmuseo.org
.
When:
closed Mon–Tues.
N
ATIONAL
A
CADEMY OF
D
ESIGN
: Tel 212-369-4880;
www.nationalacademy.org
.
When:
closed Mon–Tues.
N
EUE
G
ALERIE:
Tel 212-628-6200;
www.neuegalerie.org
.
When:
closed Tues–Wed.
F
RICK
C
OLLECTION:
Tel 212-288-0700;
www.frick.org
.
When:
closed Mon.
A
MERICAN
M
USEUM OF
N
ATURAL
H
ISTORY:
Tel 212-769-5100;
www.amnh.org
.
B
EST TIME
: mid-June for the Museum Mile Festival, when Fifth Avenue is turned into a pedestrian mall full of art and music, and admission to all Museum Mile museums is free (
www.museummilefestival.org
).

Towers, Portals, and Signposts of the Future

New York, New York

For every bulldozer-driving developer New York produces, it also yields a preservationist dedicated to retaining the best of what’s gone before. That explains the city’s streetscape, in which gothic gargoyles and Greek-revival
columns vie with Georgian, early Federalist, art deco, Internationalist, and ultra-modern freeform styles, all overlapping and interweaving. It’s a visual bonanza that seems inexhaustible.

Some of New York’s architectural master-works are described elsewhere in this section, but there are countless others that stir the soul, and are essential components of the organism we know as New York.

The skyscrapers are the most visible, having largely defined the image of New York throughout the 20th century. The first rose just before that century’s beginning, made possible by the near-simultaneous development of load-bearing steel frames and safe, efficient elevators. The 22-story Flatiron Building at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street was one of the earliest triumphs. Designed by Daniel H. Burnham and built in 1902, the building’s distinct triangular shape is heavily ornamented with limestone and terracotta columns and sculptural elements, all topped off with a magnificent overhanging cornice. In midtown, the 77-story Chrysler Building is generally considered the city’s most beautiful skyscraper and probably the finest example of the art deco tower anywhere. Designed by William Van Alen and constructed in 1928–29 as the Chrysler Corporation’s headquarters, the building is clad in white and dark gray brickwork for the majority of its floors, but the upper peaks explode with deco ornamentation: stylized American eagle gargoyles, sunburst-shaped rings, and a towering spire that points to the heavens, all made of chrome-nickel steel that gleams in the sunshine.

Just steps away, Grand Central Terminal dates to 1913. Its triumphant Greco-Roman beaux arts exterior is adorned with statues of Hercules, Minerva, and Mercury; its huge main concourse is covered by a ceiling that mimics the sky (complete with constellations); its arched, tiled passageways are as graceful as the domes of a Moorish mosque; and its lofty windows illuminate its marble interior with the kind of light usually seen only in pictures. For a classic experience of the station, have lunch amid the hubbub of the Oyster Bar on the lower level. In business since 1913, it serves 4,000 pounds of fresh seafood daily, including its famous New England clam chowder and dozens of different kinds of oysters.

A few blocks west on Fifth Avenue is the regal main branch of the New York Public Library, dating to 1911. Another magnificent beaux arts structure, the building offers a heroic entrance up its wide marble stairs, past a pair of lion sculptures (named
Fortitude
and
Patience
) that have become symbols of the library system. Inside, the great Main Reading Room is nearly as long as a football field, with a heavily ornamented ceiling 51 feet above and 42 heavy oak tables below, with room for more than 600 readers.

Midtown’s beaux arts trio is completed by the 1913 General Post Office, designed by the great New York firm of McKim, Mead & White. Once a companion to the great Penn Station across the way (destroyed in 1964 and replaced by Madison Square Garden), the building offers a grand facade with block-wide stairs and grand Corinthian columns, all crowned by the words “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”—a phrase supplied by the architects that is now the U.S. Postal Service’s unofficial motto. At this writing, tentative plans call for converting most of the building into a new Penn Station.