If you’ve been a follower of this blog, you know I have loved New York City from the first time I got to really experience it. Imagine my disappointment when COVID hit a week after I finally was able to move there full time.
A chunk of posts in this blog aren’t about New York City and my new life as an empty nester there as it was intended to be. Instead it has been mainly focused on the travel we did during and after the Covid pandemic.
You may be surprised to know that until Mother’s Day weekend this year, I hadn’t been back to my all-time favorite city. I was a bit apprehensive as I’d heard it had changed a lot since the pandemic and not for the better.
I’m so glad that Sam, one of our sons, decided to treat me to a weekend in NYC for Mother’s Day! And I’m also glad that NYC is still as fabulous as ever!
To make the most of our three day weekend, we took an early flight out of Houston and even with losing an hour, we arrived well before lunchtime.
It was nice to see the fully renovated LaGuardia United terminal. It seemed like it was always under construction when I flew into there from 2017 until 2020. I had already found one thing that wasn’t worse since the pandemic.
We took the subway into the city, checked into our hotel and went on a search for lunch. We got lucky and found TAP, a nearby gluten-fee Brazilian cafe.
Next we walked to the New York Public Library. Although the library was established in 1895, the gorgeous Beaux-Arts style building wasn’t opened until 1911. Interestingly enough, we recognized some of the individuals’ names etched on the entryway walls whose donations were central to its founding. Surprisingly, Andrew Carnegie was not one of them. He did, however, donate $5.2 million in 1901 to fund 67 branch libraries across all five of the NYC boroughs. Many of these historic buildings still serve their original purpose.
I briefly thought about making a goal of seeing all of the currently active Carnegie libraries in the United States funded between 1883 and 1929 until I realized that there are more than 1,300 of them! I wonder what mark today’s billionaires and now trillionaire will leave on this planet.
The self-guided tour was informative, maybe too much information. Most memorable experiences of the library were all the brides having their wedding photos taken (yes, the building is that stunning), the ceiling in the third floor rotunda, and the rotating art exhibit.
The New York Public Library’s flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.
The McGraw Rotunda which features Edward Laning’s 1940s mural The Story of the Recorded Word, which centers on Prometheus bringing fire to humanity.
Next we hurried off to the Sociology Lounge at a nearby CUNY campus (City University of New York) to take in a lecture by visiting professor. He was discussing his new book, The Urban Way: An Assemblage of Global Urban Cultures. The other audience members weren’t quite sure what to make of us, but they made sure Sam was able to ask his question and it was answered thoroughly. The discussion was a bit over my head at times, but I loved the slide showing examples of the culture mix.
We meandered past the Empire State Building to dinner at my favorite gluten-free restaurant (thank you, Sam!) and then walked to an Off-Broadway show: Mexodus. A brilliant performance by two artists who told the little-known story of the southern Underground Railroad to Mexico. Using live looping technology they built the music on stage using various instruments and then layered on their vocals. What makes Mexodus especially impressive is that the two musicians/actors aren’t just performing in someone else’s work—they wrote the musical, too!
Whew! What a day. The only thing we had planned on Saturday was a matinee. How was Saturday ever going to live up to our Friday?
Somehow it did.
It started by Sam and me splitting up to meet up with friends for the morning – Sam in Brooklyn and me on the Upper West Side. After lunch we met for our matinee show at Times Square which happens to be near the Booth Theater.
More walking and discovering after the play…
And then we made the best of half of Sunday…
After breakfast Sam and I were walking around the Lower East Side and happened upon the Tenement Museum. We decided we had just enough time for a tour before we needed to start our journey home.
We walked into the museum and were asked which tour we wanted. Wait, which tour?? I looked up at the wall above the desk and saw tour times, last names and ethnicities.
Once our tour time arrived, I assumed we would head upstairs and see a gallery. Instead we walked a block down the street to a narrow four story building which the Tenement Museum acquired in the 1990s. It had sat empty since the 1930s. A bit like tar pits and dinosaur bones, the building was stuck in time.
Because I’m traveling with Sam, I got even more information than anticipated. After our tour of two apartments in the building, he asked our guide about being a tour guide for the museum. She said that next fall she will start her masters program in history at NYU. She also told us that they give each new guide a hundred or so pages of facts, stories, and images about each family. The guide decides which to highlight in the hour/ hour and a half tour. Also, each guide changes tours every 90 days. Thus, the information even on the same tour is always changing. I foresee a trip to the tenement museum in every one of my future trips to NYC.
Even with everything I had learned , the most surprising fact I learned was that in the early 1900s the Lower East Side was the most densely populated area on Earth.
One of Don and my favorite shops for all things pickled.
Inspire. Bold. Love. Respect. Learn. Grand.
New City New State 