New York Museum Exhibitions, Winter 2011-12: A Selected List, With Openings in December, January, and February

The warm weather of late doesn't feel like a New York winter is around the corner, but at some point soon we're likely to be bundled up against the elements and heading out of doors. The art aficionados among us will be making our way to a favorite museum, handing over our big coats to the coat check department, and then strolling the comfortable galleries as the gently falling snow gathers in arcs on the windowsills and the chimney rooftops of the city. Or not. Sounds nice anyway.

Model of the Portico Gallery for Decorative Arts and Sculpture,
south façade, by Davis Brody Bond, architects and planners for the project.
The Frick Collection.

December museum events include the opening of the new Portico Gallery for Decorative Arts and Sculpture at The Frick Collection (December 13), an exhibition at Asia Society spotlighting Sarah Sze's process (December 13), and an exhibition for the art-surviving winner of Bravo's Work of Art TV series at the Brooklyn Museum (December 15).

Two exhibitions pack heat with crime-centered photography. Police Work: Photographs by Leonard Freed, 1972-1979 opens at the Museum of the City of New York on December 20, drawing our visual memories back to the gritty 1970s. The master image-maker of criminal New York from 1935 to 1946 is the subject of an ICP exhibition, Weegee: Murder Is My Business, opening January 20, 2012. We love those big popping flashbulbs that capture the perp in blinding harsh light.

Other choice winter exhibitions include John Chamberlain: Choices, opening February 14, 2012 at the Guggenheim Museum, a blockbuster-y Cindy Sherman show at MoMA (February 26), and The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 28). Good thing the February art calendar is loaded with extra special exhibitions. If April is the cruelest month, February might be the most boring. By then, we're sick of the snow.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 97 1/8 x 63 15/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer.
© 2011 Cindy Sherman

On the Bowery, the New Museum's The Generational, a survey exhibition of the work of the less-than-35, opens February 15. Uptown, the notorious Whitney Biennial is not far behind (March 1, 2012). For our cultural visitors to New York City, book your flights and hotels accordingly. Cheers.

November Nocturnes: New York City at Night (Photos)

Occasionally, I joke to myself that after four years of blogging about New York, mostly in the daytime, that I should go back and do everything again but at night. The night in the city is a different world, a theatrical space lit with artificial illumination that seems the very opposite of the city's hard-nosed reality in sunlight.

Street lamps, holiday lights, incandescents, LEDs, heat burning devices, spotlights, marquee lights, display case lamps, and a myriad other lighting devices turn New York streets into a theatrical experience. These artificial lights prompt the imagination to make up stories for night's individual street scenes. The images that follow are not depictions of the famous city at night - Times Square, Broadway, the skyline, etc. - but are simply peripatetic snapshots from the more prosaic of our streets.

Please fill in the rest of the picture with your imagination.

After Shopping: Points of Interest and Dining Near the Big New York Department Stores

Shopping in New York is a major reason many visitors come to New York City, and it's not for the faint of heart. Making the rounds of several stores, especially the well-known large department stores, can seem like an athletic event and requires endurance and fortitude. After browsing or shopping, patience can become short. The feet grow tired. Arm muscles grow weary holding shopping bags. Companions and family begin to bicker over what to do next.

It's time for a long break. This post is designed to help shoppers at the big New York department stores find pleasant places to sit down and eat. Resting in a nearby park can also provide a healthy balance to the vigorous consumerism. Finding a barstool may also work for some.

Lexington Avenue between 59th and 60th Street, night.

The map at the bottom of the post includes a list of major NYC department stores and suggested places to visit and to eat and drink nearby.

• Century 21 (22 Cortland Street between Broadway and Church), a large discount store in Lower Manhattan, happens to be near Wall Street, the 9/11 Memorial, St. Paul's Churchyard, and Zuccotti Park. Believe me, if you've been shopping at Century 21 and then want to sit down in Zuccotti Park to lend a little solidarity to Occupy Wall Street, you will not be the first to do so.

Lord &Taylor

• Macy's. (34th Street, Herald Square) The store is vast and seemingly endless, but several pedestrian plazas nearby as well as Greeley Square provide a good place to rest. In the Garment District, try Ben's Kosher Deli for a feeling of an older New York. Later in the day, wander over to the Mé Bar at the top of La Quinta for an extraordinary terrace view of the Empire State Building.

• Lord & Taylor (424 Fifth Avenue) is just two blocks south of Bryant Park, making the park an excellent place to visit. To combine shopping and sightseeing, check out the renovated New York Public Library.

• Saks Fifth Avenue (611 Fifth Avenue) especially during the holidays, seems ideally placed in the middle of a bustling tourist district. One convenient place to sit down is a pew in St. Patricks Cathedral. Rockefeller Center, and all that entails, is across the street. For a great burger and old-fashioned diner experience, check out Primeburger. Find Paley Park, one of the most successful "pocket parks" in the city, for a restorative break from the bustling midtown sidewalks.

An Architectural Guide to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Route

The 85th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday, November 24, 2011 beginning at 9 a.m. will follow a path from Central Park West at 77th Street down to Columbus Circle, then take a quick jog east on Central Park South before heading down 7th Avenue to 42nd Street. Here the parade takes another little jog east to 6th Avenue and then continues south to 34th Street. The finale moves one block west on 34th to Herald Square, the location of Macy's.

Balloons from an earlier year try to pump themselves up the night before the big parade.

Manual Labor: Diego Rivera Paints New York City

The big man arrived in New York just as the town was going bust, sliding into the Great Depression, yet the city maintained its frenetic pace of building anyway. He saw everything with his big eyes, so uncannily large that his flamboyant wife suggested they allowed him as an artist to see more. The occasion of the visit by Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, was his retrospective (1931-32) at the Museum of Modern Art, a young institution then housed in the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue and which offered its second-only solo retrospective to Rivera, the first being to Henri Matisse.

For the MoMA exhibition, Rivera created new murals, complicated in their execution, portraying power relationships in revolutionary Mexico. After the exhibition opened, he painted three more murals inspired by New York. Excited by the experiment in the Soviet Union, Rivera trained his eye on the industrial worker and the dazzling built environment of this new city. At the same time, he was also trying to suck up to Junior, meaning the prominent capitalist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who was building the giant center in the middle of town.

Diego Rivera. 
Frozen Assets. 1931-32. 
Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanized-steel framework, 94 1/8 x 74 3/16 in (239 x 188.5 cm).
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico 
© 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Follow-the-Helicopter Walk (The Clearing of Zuccotti Park)

The news this morning of the overnight eviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park surprised many people, according to social media tweets and postings. For a time in the early a.m., many of the occupiers gathered at nearby Foley Square, the location of the first large community and labor march in support of the movement, and later in the morning in a lot near Canal Street and 6th Avenue. I don't believe many of the occupiers have slept at all. The situation was in flux and is still in flux. The police put on their riot gear, took it off, put it back on. Members of the media have been swept up in arrests relating to these events.

9:01 a.m. Follow the helicopter. The M5 stop on Broadway.

Sunday Autumn Morning in Washington Square Park, with notes about the song "Autumn in New York"

Sing it, people. You know the song. "It's autumn in New York." Walking around the city this season, in what looks to be one of the most splendid foliage seasons of recent memory, the song just can't be helped. The title line is brilliant, with its descending notes like falling autumn leaves.

Washington Square Park, facing west

Vernon Duke (1903-1969), né Vladimir Dukelsy, wrote the music and lyrics for "Autumn in New York," the jazz standard that originated in the 1934 Broadway musical Thumbs Up!. The lyrics tie the sight of autumn in New York with a wistful sense of home in the big city, "the promise of new love," and a grateful acceptance for the ways things are, even when mingled with pain. No wonder Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Holiday, Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Tormé, and a hundred of other crooners wanted to record such a song. The notes themselves were enough for the likes of Charlie Parker and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Walking Directions: Tips for Seeing New York on Foot

Many readers arrive on this site looking for help with directions in New York City, especially the distances between transit Point A (Penn Station, Port Authority, Grand Central, etc.) to well-known landmarks or neighborhoods (Rockefeller Center, MoMA, Greenwich Village, etc.) They want to know how long it would take to walk from place to place or if such a walk is even possible. Smart people do not want to wear themselves out.

Walking in New York can be immensely pleasurable, but it sometimes helps to review some of the prominent features of our urban geography before setting out. Tips for walking in the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn are included here. Other boroughs will be added later. The pace of walking varies from person to person, but from my own experience, it takes about 30 minutes to walk a mile in New York, accounting for stop lights and quick window browsing.

Manhattan

• Walking 20 streets uptown or downtown in Midtown generally covers a distance of approximately one mile. Doing the math means that walking 10 streets generally measures a 1/2 mile. Walking from W. 33rd St. north to W. 53rd Street along 8th Avenue, for example, a distance of 20 blocks, measures one mile.

• Walking the long crosstown streets, especially on the west side, is another matter and seems endless in comparison to walking uptown or downtown. Walking three longer blocks crosstown equals about .5 miles. 6 crosstown blocks in Midtown along the avenues = 1 mile. The important exceptions are the distances between the avenues on the east side: 5th Avenue, Madison Avenue, Park Avenue, Lexington Avenue, and 3rd Avenue. These are shorter.

Let's look at this map. Look familiar? It's the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade route, a distance of about 2.67 miles. By looking at the map, it's easy to visualize the streets flying by while walking uptown or downtown along the avenues. Even when not on a float and waving to people, this is a pleasant walk.

10 Short Walks from Grand Central Terminal

Famously crowded Grand Central Terminal functions as a major crossroads for the city, hosting busy commuters as they come and go from the suburbs via the Metro-North Railroad or within the city via a few subway lines, but the terminal also happens to be a good place to launch short walks. With its south side fronting E. 42nd Street and its massive structure interrupting Park Avenue, Grand Central provides quick access to many of the city's most well-known attractions.

In Grand Central Terminal

The New York Public Library and Bryant Park are only a couple of blocks away from the terminal, a quick jaunt on 42nd Street. And from there, Times Square is just another block or two farther west of the library, its neon shimmering in the distance. One wonders, standing near the intersection of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, how many souls have been lured away from their well-meaning library studies by the beckoning lights of the Theatre District.

Grand Central Terminal: Before setting out on walks, the terminal itself is worthy of exploration. This heavenly Beaux-Arts style palace of transit, constructed from 1903 to 1913 and successfuly restored in 1998, features grand staircases, chandeliers, a soaring ceiling vault painted in cerulean blue and decorated with a zodiac. The terminal encompasses many shops, fine restaurants such as the Oyster Bar, the sumptuous Campbell Apartment for cocktails, a downstairs dining concourse (essentially a food mall), and Grand Central Market, a gourmet food emporium that is a popular destination for commuters.

Oh, yes, one more thing. A new Apple flagship store in Grand Central Terminal, the largest of it kind in the world, is said to be nearing completion, training its staff in anticipation of a late November opening. (see current intelligence on 9to5mac.com) Imagine the crush of traffic when a new Apple store meets one of the busiest commuter stations in the world at the busiest time of the year. Grand Central will surely live up to the hype of its own frequently cited analogy.

10 Short Walks from Grand Central Terminal

The following walks from the terminal conclude at another destination worth exploring. If visitors are in town, tell them to go to Grand Central and pass along this list of nearby things to do. The walks includes suggested routes, many of them straightforward.


View Short Walks from Grand Central Terminal in a larger map

1. New York Public Library and Bryant Park, between 40th and 42nd Streets, 5th Avenue to 6th Avenue. The renovated main branch of the NYPL at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street features special exhibitions, an excellent library shop, and the extraordinary sight of people reading amidst the visual splendor in the Reading Room. Multifaceted Bryant Park is one of the most versatile public spaces in the city, adapting its programming to the changing seasons. (see more at the post, Reading for Pleasure.)

An unusually warm day for the Citi Pond at Bryant Park.

2. International Center of Photography. 1133 Sixth Avenue. Who doesn't take photographs? Visit the ICP for exhibitions of inspiring photography and the center's shop for fascinating photography-related gifts.

3. The News Building, 220 E. 42nd St. The Art Deco building designed by Raymond Hood is most famous for the comic book-like world globe in its lobby. Clark Kent all the way.

Sunday Walks: SoHo, Gotham, and the New York City Marathon

The arrival of Daylight Saving Times frequently shocks the system, whether on a personal level or for the larger urban fabric. It takes some time to adjust to the change. Of the two seasonal adjustments, I prefer Fall Back over Spring Forward. Aside from gaining an extra hour, I like to think that this time of year is made for those of us in the city who get up at an unreasonably early hour to walk our dogs.

Broome Street, SoHo. 7:13 a.m.

SoHo

I walked an extra hour yesterday, no doubt about it. The first morning walk was through SoHo, always unreal and pretty when few people are out on the Belgian block streets. The frivolous cast iron buildings catch the morning sunrise in just the right way, and if you venture out on a Sunday morning at first light, it can be a surreal personal landscape for one.

Greene Street, SoHo. 7:03 a.m.

Greene Street near Broome Street, SoHo. 7:08 a.m.

The Gunther Building, Greene Street and Broome Street. SoHo. 7:09 a.m.

Gotham

The morning is not often a good time for surprises, and confronting an unfamiliar scene can be extra challenging. Later in the morning, I was on lower Broadway at the entrance of Wall Street and was startled to see an enormous crowd assembled on the east end of the street. Squinting my eyes, I saw what look to be explosions. Flags on buildings were in tatters. Given the current Wall Street-centered uprising, you can imagine my alarm. Fortunately, the scene turned out to be a location shoot for the forthcoming movie, The Dark Knight Rises (Summer 2012). At any rate, I'm hoping Bruce Wayne will be able to finally bring the evil-doers to justice since no one else has bothered.

Public Art in New York City: Fall 2011

Just as we start missing the artwork that appeared last spring and summer - like the enormous yellow teddy bear at Seagram Plaza, the roses along Park Avenue, the giant girl's head in Madison Square Park - a new crop of public artworks have been popping up over town this fall.

Peter Woytuk on Broadway.
 Balancing Bearcat (aka Self Portrait), bronze Dimensions: 12′ H x 6′ W |  Weight: 1400 lbs Location: 67th Street

• Peter Woytuk on Broadway
On the Broadway Malls, beginning at Columbus Circle and continuing through the Upper West Side through Harlem and Washington Heights, look for 18 whimsical bronze animal sculptures by American sculptor Peter Woytuk. It would be quite the challenging walk to take in all of them. The walk may be easy at first - the pair of elephants at Columbus Circle, this balancing bearcat at 67th St., a kiwi at 72nd St., but you'll need to get out the hiking boots to see fetching ones uptown - a couple of birds perched atop apples at 117th, three bulls at 168th St., and many more whimsical creatures along the way. Better yet, start uptown and walk back. Gotta love those big apples.
A program of the Broadway Mall Association (website) in conjunction with the Parks Department and The Morrison Gallery.
Through April 2012.
Webpage for Peter Woytuk: http://www.woytuk.com/

Gran Elefandret (2008) Union Square East by Miquel Barceló

• Gran Elefandret (2008) by the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló stands trunk first on a traffic island on the east side of Union Square. The 26-foot tall elephant does a nice balancing act at this busy transit stop between uptown and downtown. Marlborough Gallery commissioned the work. Part of the Department of Parks and Recreation “Art in the Parks” program. Through May 2012.
See the Marlborough website for more information on the work.

For the 1,000th Post: A List of Lessons Learned

This is the 1,000th post on Walking Off the Big Apple, so I feel it's time to take stock of lessons learned, offer general advice that may be ignored, and suggest a few fun things to do in New York City. I mostly wish to thank readers who have helped sustain this ongoing adventure.

• Don't be afraid to venture into unfamiliar places. For backup or to lead the way, bring a dog.

Don't be afraid. There's probably just a guy playing saxophone in there.

• I once thought that visiting the standard sightseeing spots was a big cliché, but truly the famous places are famous for a reason. Times Square, so visually overwhelming, often feels like crossing over into another reality. The Statue of Liberty cruise is breathtaking, and so is walking around Liberty Island and taking in uncommon views of the statue.

• When taking a photo, often it's not the interesting view ahead worth capturing. Turn around and face the other direction. There it is - behind you.

• Visitors to New York are inclined to try to do too much and quickly exhaust themselves, becoming grumpy with their friends or family members. Acknowledge there's too much to do and then visit just one or two museums, for example, but not five in one day.

Sometimes the unusual views are the best ones. But you have to go there and find them.

• NoHo and Tribeca could use more trees.

• Visitors may learn more about New York and New Yorkers by choosing to walk up and down 8th Avenue or 2nd Avenue, as opposed to 5th Avenue.

• Fun thing: Grab a sack lunch and take it down to near The Pond in Central Park near 59th and Fifth. After lunch, walk straight east on E. 59th or E. 60th. At Lexington, go into Bloomingdale's, look around, take the elevator to the 7th floor and order frozen yogurt. After yogurt, go back out of the store and walk east down the street to the Tram Plaza and take the tram over to Roosevelt Island. Walk around and ride the Tram back.

• The best New York literature often involves unfair social and political forces that are beyond the control of individual characters. The city becomes overwhelming. I'm thinking of works as diverse as Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City.

Stuck in a rainstorm, I can think of few places I would rather be than the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• Another thing about taking photos - Because time passes and things don't remain the same, over time people who take pictures of the city will make invaluable contributions to the history of the city, especially in documenting cherished places we have lost.

• Taking a long walk helps many people improve their mental state. Whether it's personal problems, the cares of the world, or the too-busy Big Apple, walking it off puts things back into perspective.

Though the city changes, New York often looks timeless.
This view of the Flatiron Building is taken from the same spot as Edward Steichen's 1904 photograph.