Winter trip to New York City

Vickie and I had the interesting opportunity to spend a week in New York City just at the time of the biggest storm there in 20 years. We flew out on February 23rd and the storm dropped more than a foot of snow on the 24th and 25th. Fortunately, Vickie's sister and her husband live in New York, so we had a great place to stay. Take a look at a few places during the storm (the Metropolitan Museum and the street in front of Janet and David's place):

Though we certainly saw lots of snow, the real purpose of our trip was to pig out on museums, music, and ballet. We spent several days, for example, in the Metropolitan Museum, one of the biggest (my aching feet can testify to that!) and best museums in the world. Because Janet and David are members of the museum, we were able to go into the museum several times for a few hours each time; that was a real boon, because we didn't feel we had to do everything in one visit.

Since we might be going to Egypt next year (still tentative), we made sure we took advantage of the Met's Egyptian collection, one of the best in the world. A guided tour by a Museum docent was a wonderful start, giving us an understandable explanation of Egyptian religion, and its effects on Egyptian tomb and temple art. Basically, Egyptians believed that the ba or soul of a person spends nights in the preserved body of that person, but walks among humanity during the day. To feed and care for the ba, everything needed must be symbolically displayed in the tomb; hence the carvings of bread, meat, and so on, and the drawings of servants, models of boats and everything else required for everyday life. The Met contains a real Egyptian tomb and a real Egyptian temple, both removed from Egypt and reassembled stone by stone in New York.

Also in the Met, we took a guided tour of American artworks, and found one of the most intriguing spaces we've ever seen in a museum. In one of the storage rooms, hundreds and hundreds of paintings, pieces of furniture, jewelry, ceramics, you name it, are displayed with minimal labeling: this is part of the storage of pieces for which the museum does not have space for normal exhibition.

While we were there, we saw several special exhibitions, including one of drawings by Bronzino, a Florentine Mannerist and wonderful draftsman, plus one of the Books of Hours of the Duc de Berry, a masterpiece of Late Medieval illuminated manuscripts.

We also visited the Frick Collection, a museum housed in the former New York town house of Henry Clay Frick, who supplied the coke for Andrew Carnegie's steel mills, getting extremely rich in the process. The museum is small, but everything inside is absolutely first rate, including such gems as Hans Holbein's paintings of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, foes in life, who still stare at each other from opposite sides of a fireplace.

The other museum we were able to visit was the Brooklyn Museum, which turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. The building itself is huge, and the collections are very interesting. The displays are not up to the level of the Metropolitan, by and large, but are well-presented and shine a different light on what they do display. For example, the Met has wonderful large-scale Egyptian artifacts; the Brooklyn's Egyptian collection, while very large, concentrates on what the Met does not, like small-scale jewelry and the lives of more ordinary citizens. Taken together, one gets a far better picture of what life in ancient Egypt must have been like than one could get from either museum alone.

There is also an extremely interesting section devoted to feminist art, i.e., art by and about women. The prize of their collection is a sculpture/display/thing called "The Dinner Party." It is a triangular table set with 39 customized place settings, each one commemorating the life and work of a famous or not-so-famous woman or goddess. Each setting includes a large (~15" across) dinner plate whose design reflects the life of the woman commemorated, a customized place mat, plus silverware and a goblet. On the floor, the names of other women with accomplishments in the same area are written in gold. Overall, 1038 women are celebrated. Vickie brought home a copy of the display in the hall that gives the names and accomplishments of all of them.

As you can tell, we hit the museums pretty hard! That's at least partially because the snow prevented us from doing as much exploring as we would have liked. We were able to attend church at the Manhattan 1st Ward, which was fun, and walked around Midtown a bit. As it turns out, the LDS chapel and temple in Manhattan are right across the street from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. And we spent a bunch of time there.

We ended up seeing two performances of the New York City Ballet, one of the world's great ballet companies. The first performance was of two ballets by Jerome Robbins; one of those was his West Side Story dances telling the entire story, with minimal singing. For that performance, we sat up in the fifth ring (i.e., the nosebleed section); it was amazing how well we could see from there, though our binoculars were essential. On the other hand, the tickets only cost $20 each! The second night, we paid for better seats (no binoculars necessary) and saw an all-Balanchine program, including his Jewels, a ballet that Vickie loved when she saw it in the late '60's. The work was terrific, but seems a little dated now. Before that performance, we attended a talk by several of the ballet artists, which was a wonderful introduction to the performance. As it turns out, two of the principals of the company are a brother and sister from Sandy, of all places.

We also went to see the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The Gewandhaus is the oldest symphony orchestra in the world, and clearly one of the best, if what we heard is any example. They were unbelievable! Listening to them was like hearing silk or satin. Since Monday, March 1 was Chopin's 200th birthday, they played the Chopin 1st piano concerto, and made what can be a fairly pedestrian work come alive. Then they played the Brahms 2nd symphony, and, though I know it well, they brought out things I had never before heard. The only bad part was that we were up in the top balcony, which, judging by looking out the window, was about level with the 7th floor of the building across the street! The rows of seats were so close together that it was impossible even to put your knees at a 90° angle. Once wedged into position, we absolutely could not move a muscle. Fortunately, the people next to us gave up at intermission, so we fared better during the second half of the concert.

A famous story about Carnegie Hall comes from an experience of the famous violinist Mischa Elman; after a strenuous rehearsal one day, he was walking home carrying his violin case. A couple tourists, recognizing him as a musician, asked him, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Without even looking up, he muttered in reply, "Practice, practice, practice!" So I now own a t-shirt that says, "Practice, practice, practice." How could I not buy that!

We were finally able to spend some time wandering around. Monday the 1st was a beautifully sunny day, warm enough to be comfortable, and we made the best of it. We started out with a trip to Ground Zero, and took a tour narrated by two people who were intimately connected with the events of 9/11. One of them was an emergency responder who had set up some of the fire-safety systems in the Towers, and the other was a bus/subway driver whose brother worked for the Cantor/Fitzgerald brokerage firm with offices in one of the towers. That firm, as you will recall, was complete wiped out by one of the planes, which struck the two floors where their offices were located. The morning of 9/11, our guide and his brother had, as always, eaten breakfast together to start the day. That was the last time he saw his brother, and no part of the brother's body was among the 10,000 or so body parts that have been recovered.

Right now, Ground Zero is a huge construction zone, with one very large new building (Liberty Tower) going up, along with several smaller ones. Just across from the site is a complex called the World Financial Center. It was badly damaged on 9/11; here are pictures of the central Palm Court on 9/11 and today. We viewed the Twin Towers site from one of the concourses of the World Financial Center. To celebrate Chopin's 200th birthday, they had put a number of grand pianos around the complex and had relays of very fine pianists playing nothing but Chopin all afternoon - and were going to continue all week! It was amazing - yet another concert, this one all Chopin and completely free.

To cap off the day, we went on a long walk through Greenwich Village, at at a little neighborhood Italian restaurant (terrific!), then went to be hugely entertained by the Blue Man Group, which plays at a tiny theater next to NYU. what a day!

Eventually, of course, all good things come to an end, so we flew back to Salt Lake, tired but very pleased with the break from our busy and stressful lives.