25 Great Things to Do in New York City

Some favorite New York experiences, old and new, from Walking Off the Big Apple

1. Take a tram to Roosevelt Island and walk south to see the Renwick Ruins.
"The Gothic Revival structure, granted the status of Landmark Site by the Landmarks Preservation Committee in 1975 on the basis of its picturesque ruination, is now undergoing a $4 million stabilization process in order to stem the tide of accelerating decay."

2. Shop at a bookstore and then visit a nearby cafe.
"In the olden days, many of us liked to shop for books and then go to a favorite café to read or write. We never worried about the availability of electrical outlets or a wireless cloud."

3. Read up on the history of Audubon Terrace and visit the Hispanic Society of America.
"Flash backward and imagine the estate that once belonged to John James Audubon, the famous naturalist and explorer, and then jump forward to the early 1900s when railroad heir and philanthropist Archer M. Huntington commissioned this acropolis."

4. Visit the permanent exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.
"Discover and explore Tut's Fever Movie Palace, an art installation and functioning theatre designed by Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong that serves as an homage to the art of cinema."

5. Ride a bike through Times Square.
"Seeing this part of the city by two wheels is nevertheless a strange excursion, because the cultural history of New York has little reference to experiencing Times Square and the theater district in quite this way."

6. Take a tour of Lincoln Center.
"We were in fact watching a rehearsal of a rehearsal, a confusing spectacle that appealed to my sense of the absurd."

7. See The Unicorn Tapestries at The Cloisters.
"In 1850 the Count de la Rochefoucauld decided he wanted his family's stuff back."

8. Take a walk through the South Village below Houston Street.
"An area of tenement buildings with well-preserved late 19th and early 20th century architecture, the South Village below Houston Street features small specialty shops, restaurants, and cafes in a friendly, well-balanced and human-scaled neighborhood."

9. Find New York places mentioned in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.
"The disappearance of the New York locations mirrors the disappearance of the main character. Of course, changing New York is part of reality and not just a literary device."

10. Drink a Red Snapper at The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis and then shop on Fifth Avenue.
"The "Red Snapper" is the name for the St. Regis Hotel's "Blood Mary," the now-ubiquitous concoction the hotel introduced to the United States."

11. Take an evening stroll from the West Village to the Hudson to watch the sunset.
"The winding streets, European-style cafes with outdoor seating, sports bars, small stores, music clubs, theaters and public parks offer so much that many stay awake all night to enjoy the neighborhood."

12. Visit 123 Lexington, the address for Kalustyan's, an amazing spice market and store, and appreciate that it was once home to President Chester A. Arthur.
"As I suggested, please stop into Kalustyan's to shop for exotic spices or to grab a bite to eat. Bring a shopping list, because when I visited I wish I had already prepared a grocery list for some spice-heavy dishes."

13. Wander around the Ramble in Central Park.
"Because the Ramble works in mysterious ways, I wandered over the Azalea Bridge, near the area you see here, and then made my way east."

14. Stroll along W. 10th Street from Fifth Avenue to Waverly Place.
"At 51-55 once stood the Studio Building where artists Winslow Homer, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, among others, once worked and where the sublime American West was painted."

15. Go find real bagels, rugelach, and bialys on the Lower East Side.
"I wanted a little of everything, but I decided to restrain myself by settling on a lone large chocolate pastry that's somewhere between a rugelach and a babka. I was told I made a really good choice."

16. Visit Bryant Park just to appreciate the glories of the American Radiator Building.
"It's unusual to see a building made of black brick, much less one with gold trim. Designed by Raymond Hood, the American Radiator Building of 1924 fit the bill of the clients - it was massive, solid, and it would glow at night."

17. Read a book while sitting in Greenacre Park.
"Greenacre Park, with a 25-foot waterfall, a stand to buy snacks, comfortable movable chairs, and a zen-like design, provides one of the most successful types of spaces in our urban fabric."

18. Visit the lobby of the old New York Daily News Building, aka The Daily Planet.
"Visiting the Daily News building should be on every visitor's list. The building is only a few blocks east of Grand Central Station. Only the lobby is open to the public, but that's the part you want to see."

19. Listen to street musicians in Washington Square Park.
"Self-styled bohemian traditions of the Village do not conform to an imposed order from the outside, and in that sense, I embraced my neighbors' righteous protests. Some of their good ideas made their way into the new design."

20. Participate in Jazz & Sketch Night at the Society of Illustrators.
"Tuesday night's session of "Jazz & Sketch" at the Society of Illustrators (link below) perfectly fit our needs - a beautiful setting in the society's home on E. 63rd., one with a rich artistic and social history, the exquisite additions of live jazz and a cash bar, excellent models, and a congenial atmosphere."

21. Walk through the Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn.
"In addition to its early connection to the writer Walt Whitman, Fort Greene is known for its successes as a racially diverse neighborhood. The final stretch of the walk took me past beautiful townhouses along Carlton Avenue."

22. Walk from Battery Park to the Esplanade in Battery Park City.
"The promenade next to the water, with views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the Jersey shore, and the cool esplanade of trees in a stretch of the southern section make for a particularly satisfying walk."

23. Pretend you're Greta Garbo and walk the streets and avenues near her apartment.
"Greta Garbo often walked up and down the streets you see before you, "Mademoiselle Hamlet," as Alice B. Toklas called her, wanting to be alone. Starting at her apartment on the East River, Garbo wandered west and mostly north through streets and avenues of Midtown and into the Upper East Side."

24. Tour the ruins of American finance and ask for your money back.
"Surveying the urban landscape of New York, the financial capital of the world, I've mapped out the pinpoints of flickering light (some have flicked off) - among them, AIG Private Client Group (70 Pine Street), Bernard Madoff's penthouse apartment (133 E. 64th St.), RIP Bear Stearns (383 Madison) until its purchase by JPMorgan Chase (270 Park Avenue), Lehman Brothers (745 7th Ave.), and several more."

25. Visit Grant's Tomb. Seriously. A very moving experience.
"After spending some time looking at the tombs of Ulysses and Julia and then visiting the churches, I began to think of this stroll as the Death, Reconstruction, and Resurrection Walk."

And now the map.

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Images and text by Walking Off the Big Apple.

A Visit to Audubon Terrace and Environs

Though far from the state of dilapidated ruin that would excite the fantasy of the modern romantic, the worn facades of the monumental museums that make up Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights look sufficiently weathered to induce a civic form of melancholia. Step into the courtyard of this once bright place and see verdigris on copper doors, layers of city dirt wedged into the carved incisions spelling out names of Spanish conquistadors high along the walls, grasses peaking up between the cracks. Flash backward and imagine the estate that once belonged to John James Audubon, the famous naturalist and explorer, and then jump forward to the early 1900s when railroad heir and philanthropist Archer M. Huntington commissioned this acropolis. But flash-forward again to the present, and closer investigation hints not of signs of decay suggested on the surface but rather points to simmering signs of life. Considering that the blocks to the south comprise the necropolis known as the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, that's saying something.


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The construction of Audubon Terrace, this formal configuration of museums between 155th and 156th Streets just west of Broadway, began in 1904. The plan was conceived in tandem with the building of the uptown subway, and indeed, the 1 train stop at Broadway and 157th delivers visitors conveniently to the complex. In 1908, the Hispanic Society of America opened to the public, then the American Numismatic Society, the American Geographical Society, the American Indian Museum (1916), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1923). Two churches are within the area - the Church of Our Lady of Esperanza and the Church of the Intercession. Later, another building was added to the Hispanic Society. Archer Huntington's cousin, Charles Pratt Huntington, a 1901 graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, designed the original buildings, and architects Cass Gilbert and William Mitchell Kendall from the firm McKim, Mead & White contributed with their designs for the American Academy. Now, of the founding residents only the Hispanic Society and American Academy remain. The American Indian Museum relocated downtown to the Customs House. Boricua College, a college founded for Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics, makes its home in the Geographical Society.

With the American Academy of Arts and Letters closed for the season following its exhibition season, museum-goers at this time of summer are left with one choice, but a good one - a visit to the Hispanic Society of America. Though the society's building on the north side of the pedestrian courtyard and one of its popular rooms, the Sorolla Room with large-scale panoramic canvases in the south building, are closed for restoration, the stunning Huntington collection of Spanish art is well worth a trip uptown. Leaving the brightness of the formal white Beaux Arts exterior courtyard, one that features a sculpture of El Cid by the ubiquitous Anna Hyatt Huntington, Archer's wife, and stepping into the dark and sensuous, abundantly rich interior of the Hispanic Society is like leaving ecumenical New York for a trip to the Spanish Empire. Among the many treasures therein are paintings by Francisco de Goya, El Greco, and Diego Velasquez, but in the richly decorated main gallery and library an abundance of works from all eras invites a long stay in this surprising place. According to a helpful gallery guide, the building housing the contemporary works should be open in a few weeks.

A visit to Audubon Terrace could also include a walk through the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, especially if interested in visiting the final resting place for the naturalist himself. The grave site is just to the east of the Church of the Intercession near the southeast corner of Broadway and West 155th St. I also highly recommend a walk north along Broadway to explore the stores that serve the Honduran, Ecuadoran, and Mexican communities. Stroll to the west of Audubon Terrace to see some beautiful apartment buildings that are now part of Audubon Park, one of the city's most recent designated historic districts. A circular Beaux-Arts apartment building on Riverside Drive is built on the land where the naturalist's house once stood.

Any combination of a love of Spanish art, a longing to see the grave of John James Audubon and a hankering for Dominican food should make this a satisfying walk.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple from July 15, 2009.

Additional external sites of interest:
• The Hispanic Society of America
• American Society of Arts and Letters
• See this informative audio-visual tour of the Hispanic Society of America on Museum Planet.
• Page from a commercial Audubon website on "Minniesland," the name for the Audubon estate, with images of the original house.
• Read this recent, March 11, 2009 article from NYT's City Room on the new glass structure linking two of the buildings for the American Academy of Art and Letters.
• Neighborhood website for Audubon Park, "the neighborhood Manhattan forgot."

Just added - many more images from the walk on this set on Flickr WOTBA.

French Lessons: Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art's New American Wing, and Paris Photographs from the Second Empire

The New American Wing, the second phase of the renovation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American collection, has opened to the public, including the Charles Engelhard Court and the period rooms of decorative arts. In spite of the name, the wing feels as much French as American, given the museum's strengths in French-influenced artists like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John LaFarge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, collaborators on several occasions for projects favored by East Coast patricians. Richard Morris Hunt's French-style lamps that once graced the entrance of the museum take a new place in the airy room, a court that echoes the classical mindset of the Founding Founders (of the Met and of the nation) and the aesthetic preferences of its early tastemakers.

The museum has repositioned many of its decorative objects, making new use of the balcony space. While new computer screens aid in understanding the form and function of the decorative objects, the works themselves, although exquisite, tend to reinforce old school notions of Americana. With the exception of the sprawling Frank Lloyd Wright room, the one that looks the most radical and the most comfortable in context, there's not much evidence of a nation that looked west for a significant part of its history. Though the Met has a different mission that the Smithsonian, for example, I'd love to see a period room here representing the diversity of the American experience - a California Mission-style house, a Texas Victorian ranch, or a beautiful adobe structure with New Mexican retablos and Spanish furniture.

One stunning highlight of the American wing, although French in spirit, is American artist John Vanderlyn's "Panoramic view of the the Palace and Gardens of Versailles, 1818–19." First exhibited in a building called the Rotunda near City Hall in New York and now installed in a large circular room in the museum, the panorama was a sensation in its day, giving the viewer the illusion - we may call it virtual reality, of actually walking through the gardens of the great French palace. The work is impressive in its precision, though once again, the effect is more French than American.

For those interested in seeing a special exhibition that deals forthrightly with France, I recommend a visit to the Met's small focused exhibit titled Napoleon III and Paris (The Howard Gilman Gallery through September 7, 2009). The modernization of Paris under the direction of Baron Haussmann, a powerful city planner who directed the destruction of the medieval and less hygienic city in favor of wider and more manageable boulevards and the construction of a monumental Paris, is told through the photographers of the 1860s and 1870s, many of whom were commissioned to document the changes. The exhibit is divided into Old Paris and New Paris, culminating in images of the ruins of Paris following the crisis of the Franco-Prussian War and the brief uprising of the Commune of 1871. Yes, people often compare Baron Haussmann to Robert Moses, the man who oversaw much of the remaking of modern New York.

I didn't know how to resolve these dueling ideologies of the civic city. In gazing through the exhibit's stereoscopes, half of me wanted to roam the orderly tree-lined sidewalks of the Boulevard de Strasbourg in the company of fellow flâneurs. The other imagined herself behind the barricades, seething at the attempts to destroy the mysterious streets of the old world. Those were my thoughts leaving the steps of this grand Beaux-Arts museum and into the rush of Fifth Avenue. It's the duality of how I often feel roaming the streets of this New World city - as a willing booster of its avenues, as clandestine subversive in its winding lanes and streets.

But today, I'm on the barricades. "Le jour de gloire est arrivé!" Happy Bastille Day, everyone.

Additional French-related Posts on Walking Off the Big Apple

• Gustave Caillebotte: Impressions of Water
• Antoine de Saint-Exupery on E. 52nd Street
• Edgar Varèse Lived Here
• J.P. Elephant: Drawing Babar at the Morgan
• A Walk in Nolita, Sometimes Speaking French
• Seurat Out Walking and Drawing on an Ordinary Sunday
• The Cloisters: The Unicorn Tapestries and Their Provenance
• Homage to Pâte à Choux: French Pastry South of 14th Street
• Walking Off the Big Apple with the Situationist International

Elsewhere: Many stereoscopes of Paris in the 1860s and 1870s may be viewed on this external site, stereoscene. It's possible to simulate the 3D aspects of the images by holding your index finger in front of your face at the place in the middle of the two pictures and relaxing. Try not to go cross-eyed.

Exhibit Information:
Napoleon III and Paris
The Metropolitan Museum
June 9, 2009–September 7, 2009
The Howard Gilman Gallery

Images of the New American Wing and John Vanderlyn's "Panoramic view of the the Palace and Gardens of Versailles, 1818–19" by Walking Off the Big Apple, Sunday, July 12, 2009.

New York, in Vintage Black and White, and Photography Posts on Walking Off the Big Apple

Some see the world through rose-colored glasses, but many of the city's most famous image-makers prefer to see New York in black and white. Street photographers, portrait photographers, documentary photographers, photojournalists, almost every variety of shutterbug finds a soft place in the heart for black and white film. You remember film. Photographers Diane Arbus, Weegee, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Margaret Bourke-White, Garry Winogrand, Edward Steichen, James Van Der Zee, Helen Levitt, Berenice Abbott, Lee Friedlander, Gordon Parks, Alfred Stieglitz, and many others selected and shared with us impossible, scandalous, mundane and beautiful moments of the city's story. It would be entertaining to select the most famous photographs of New York or of New Yorkers, but near the top of my list would be Alfred Eisenstaedt's "The Kiss at Times Square," the one of the sailor kissing the nurse during a V-J celebration on August 14, 1945, or Diane Arbus' "Exasperated Boy with Toy Hand Grenade," the disturbing image of a boy in Central Park from 1961.

Black and white photographs cut to the chase, drawing attention to content, composition, and always, the value of light. Shooting images in black and white, as opposed to color, makes amateur photographers like myself connect to a tradition of fine art photography. I remember a two-week stay in Paris many years ago when I took pictures in color for the first week, but for the second I switched to black and white film. I still value many of these latter images of Parisian places - a windy street in the Marais, a cafe on the Left Bank, or a walkway in the Place des Vosges, and I hardly know where I've stashed the color ones.

Yesterday, I spent three hours in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mainly to see Roxy Paine's Maelstrom on the roof, the New American Wing and a small number of exhibits - Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, and yes, a photo exhibit of Paris, Napoleon III and Paris. I didn't bring a conventional film camera, only a digital point and shoot, but I did recently install the "Vint B&W" app on my iPhone and wanted to try it. The images turned out just OK, but they bore me less than the color ones I took with my digital. The black and white vintage qualities automatically date the images, like I was there not yesterday but in 1959. I was OK with that.

A Selection of Photography-related Posts on Walking Off the Big Apple

• The Lomo/Leica Walk
• Walker Evans, a Block on E. 61st Street in 1938, and a Visit in April of 2009
• The Flâneur's Sketchbook and Camera
• How to Take Better Images With the iPhone 3G Camera
• Making My Own Manhatta (on Paul Strand)
• William Eggleston and Alexander Calder at the Whitney (Note: If you work in color photography, study Eggleston)
• Earning Her Wrinkles: Rosalind Solomon at Silverstein Gallery
• Capturing the Big Mo: Michele Asselin's Photographs of Mike Huckabee
• The Intrinsic Beauty of Gotham in the Falling Snow
• Diane Arbus and the Hotel Chelsea Walk: No Freaks, No Punks

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple from July 12, 2009 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art made with the Vint B&W app for iPhone3G. Click on an image to enlarge. When I illustrate future posts, I'll try not to bum myself out if the pictures are in color.

American Cultural History on Walking Off the Big Apple: A Chronological Guide to a Selection of Posts From the Last Two Years

Over the course of the last two years writing Walking Off the Big Apple, and it's been two years this week, I realize that many posts situate themselves in a category that would best be described as American cultural history. While I spend most of my time on contemporary issues and urban matters, I often explore topics in the history of visual and performing arts, literary history, and architecture.

When I'm out looking for the past, I often find that historical walks find their way into current preoccupations. For example, last fall when I was trying to recreate the fictional world of Lily Bart and her creator, writer Edith Wharton, the Wall Street collapse drew immediate parallels with the writer's time. Even seeing an art exhibit on Babar drew parallels with the Gilded Age.

To better understand the city involves being able to perceive the layers of its history, so when I'm out walking I often chase the furtive shadows of the past. I've put together a chronological guide to a selection of posts, approximately 42 of the 700 on this site, thinking it would be useful to share with student types and with readers who may see old posts that they haven't yet read.

1600s
• The "fresh, green breast of the New World- Mannahatta/Manhattan
• Towards a New Amsterdam: Celebrations of Henry Hudson

1810s
• Washington Irving's Solitary Walk through Christmas

1850s
• Before the Whale: Ishmael Takes a Walk in Manhattan

1860s
• Walking Broadway With Abraham Lincoln: The Visit to New York for the Cooper Union Speech
• Living Now in the New York of the Gilded Age: Inheriting the Built Environment of the Nineteenth Century

1890s
• Reservoir Dog: New York's Demon-Cur of the Winter of 1893
• Charles Hemstreet's Nooks and Corners of Old New York: Lessons in Mortality
• Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate and One for the Wool Trade

1900s
• New York 1900: Edith Wharton and The House of Mirth
• A Walk for a New York Christmas: O. Henry and "The Gift of the Magi"
• Henry James' Uneasy Homecoming to Washington Square

1910s
• Fifth Avenue and the High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge and Flannery O'Connor
• Harvey Wiley Corbett and the E. 8th Street Apartments
• The Woolworth Building
• 1917: Trotsky's Flâneur Boy Wanders Downtown
• Focus on POTUS: The Two Washingtons of the Washington Square Arch

1920s
• A Visit to Astoria, Then & Now: The Marx Brothers at Paramount Pictures and Notes on Contemporary Attractions
• Making My Own Manhatta (on Paul Strand)
• New York's Theater District: The Legacy of the Golden Age, A Walk and a Map
• The Marx Brothers on Broadway, & Notes on New York Theatres in the 1920s
• From The Great Gatsby: Nick Carraway's Walk
• Walking New York: Theodore Dreiser on St. Luke's Place

1930s
• Lessons from the Days of the "Empty State Building"
• The New York of Raymond Hood, Architect: The Daily News Building
• Walker Evans, a Block on E. 61st Street in 1938
• The Light in Edward Hopper: The Sunny Side of the Great Depression

1940s
• Flannery O'Connor's Six Months in New York City

1950s
• Mapping Holly Golightly: Walking Off Breakfast at Tiffany's
• Places From The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath's New York
• The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
• Garbo Walks: Into the Modern

1960s
• JFK: The Presidential Candidate From the Bronx
• The New York Hotel That Looks Like It's in Miami
• Freewheelin' Jones Street

1970s
• After Walking, A Place to Sit: Greenacre Park, E. 51st

2000s
• Walking Off the Wall Street Bears: A Subprimer (November 2007)
• After the Closing Bell, A Protest Against the Wall Street Bailout (September 2008)
• A Timely Visit to The Museum of American Finance
• Follow Your Money: The New York Financial Crisis and Walk
• A Stroll Down Pennsylvania Avenue
• J.P. Elephant: Drawing Babar at The Morgan

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple.

The "fresh, green breast of the new world" - Mannahatta/Manhattan

A particularly noisy robin lives near me, perched somewhere in a sycamore tree on the east side of our building. Already sensing the light of day and anticipating the morning, the bird chirps incessantly through the hours of nautical and civil twilight until shortly after the sun rises. At this time of summer, on the island of Manhattan, the tweeting often begins around 4:20 a.m. and continues until 6 a.m. I've heard the bird for a long time now, and only this week, while out on the first dog walk of the day, have I seen it with my own eyes and caught it in its song. While I live on the west side of the building, facing the sunset over Greenwich Village and the Hudson, I wonder how anyone on the east side of the block could sleep through this incessant chirp.

Yesterday, while visiting the enthralling exhibit, Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City at the Museum of the City of New York, I thought about my bird when I came across the following quote from an early visitor to Manhattan, dated 1630, and posted on a gallery wall: "Birds fill the woods so that men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise and the chattering.” Adjusting to life in Manhattan most always involves coping with an often-discordant symphony during the early hours, but I never realized until now that the earliest visitors and residents may have also suffered from lack of sleep.

What a beautiful place this Mannahatta, the verdant paradise Henry Hudson and fellow sailors came upon almost 400 years ago. Switching from audio to visual for a moment, the visual aspects of the exhibit at the museum, with several geographical sections including Inwood, Foley Square, Turtle Bay/Murray Hill, Harlem, and Times Square illuminated in their own display, are stunning in their virtual renderings and computer simulations of the bygone natural world. Explaining that the pre-neon Times Square, for example, was a natural draw with its convergence to two streams, it's no wonder that we continue to assemble there. Now the lawn chairs make more sense.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous quote from The Great Gatsby, one of the most beautiful passages in American literature and that adorns one wall of the exhibit, speaks to the imagined awe of the explorers' first encounter.* The exhibit could have shamed us for our crass destruction of such a beautiful environment, but the organizers take a different route. Instead of bemoaning the lost Eden and advocating its return, the exhibit, curated by Eric W. Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo, aims to heighten awareness of the theme of diversity throughout the area's history. At the time the Dutch arrived, the place had already lost its Eden qualities, as the small native-American population cleared and rearranged the land for their own purposes. Yet, here were hundreds of species of plants, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals living in a hilly-forested place with many islands and streams and in several distinct ecosystems. In time, a great diversity of ethnic groups and nationalities would come to live here and rearrange the landscape.

Like the two New Yorkers stumbling across the mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon in Lerner and Loewe's 1947 musical, it is still possible to encounter glimpses of Mannahatta now and then. In fleeting moments, a walk down Minetta Street in the Village, for example, feels like walking beside a stream. Of course, it should. Minetta Brook, from the Dutch Mintje Kill meaning "small stream," once flowed there, part of its wandering course from 23rd Street down to the Hudson. In most parts of the city you can watch volunteering native plants push up through cracks in the pavement or between cobble stones or from under the tracks on the High Line. Even in the elaborately landscaped and affected "natural" parts of Central Park, in the Ravine and the Ramble, the original Mannahatta makes an appearance here and there. The birds know where to find it, and they'll let others know the location by their sounds in the twilight.
__________

Images: above, computer simulation in exhibit; below, NW entrance of Central Park by Walking Off the Big Apple, Thursday, July 9, 2009.

Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue (link to website)

Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City
Through October 13, 2009

Also recommended: Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: The Worlds of Henry Hudson
Through September 27, 2009

Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered
Through September 13, 2009

* "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925

For more on The Great Gatsby and New York, read the related entry on Nick Carraway's Walk.