Classic New York: 59th & Fifth (with Slideshow)

I spent the late morning in the vicinity of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, the epicenter of Classic New York. After visiting with the carriage horses parked at Grand Army Plaza, I walked into the restored Plaza Hotel where I drank a cup of coffee, looked around at the new furniture and floor coverings and then gazed out a front window.

It was my first time back in the Plaza Hotel since the soft reopening, and I was disappointed that the place didn't smell like its older self - that mix of irises, spilled champagne, musty drapes, lingering cigar smoke, coffee, chocolate, and Joy perfume that I so strongly associate with my memory of the hotel. This morning, I smelled more fresh paint and sawdust than anything, and my attempt to enjoy a cup of coffee was interrupted by sounds of electric saws and shrill experiments with the hotel's PA system. I knew I was going to be a hard customer for the reopened Plaza, but many like myself associate great moments of our lives with this once-charmed place.

Leaving The Plaza, I wandered into surrounding stores, including Bergdorf Goodman (still very much like its older self, and in a good way) and FAO Schwarz, the legendary toy store. The Apple Store, with its clear cube above-ground entrance, seems well-settled in this location.

Yesterday, I passed by a Bond No. 9 perfume store, and posted in the window was Andy Warhol's quote, "My favorite smell is the first smell of spring in New York." Andy may have been pulling our leg, but leaning over the fence at 59th Street this morning to look at the first verdant signs of spring in Central Park, I thought, maybe, it could also be my favorite smell, too.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple from Friday, April 11, 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
Classic New York: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

For more about Fifth Avenue, see the separate WOTBA walk, Fifth Avenue and the High Road to Taos.

UPDATE: WOTBA outtakes and additional photos NOW ON FLICKR.

Classic New York: The Algonquin

From Times Square, making my way east along 44th Street, the crowds dispersed as I crossed 6th Avenue. It was a noticeable break between Frantic and Serene. The block along 44th, between 6th and 5th Avenues, regains the polished luster of Classic New York. Of course it does. It's the block, among other things, of the Algonquin Hotel, at 59 W. 44th.

Mame Dennis once worked as a personal shopper at the Algonquin, but, according to Patrick Dennis, the hotel didn't fare well enough in the poor days of 1931 to keep around a woman with expensive taste. He writes, "So she passed most of that spring chatting with old friends in the lounge."

The doorman opened the door for me, and I had to adjust my eyes to the dark surroundings. At around 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon, the lobby was in full swing, with couples and larger groups chatting around cocktails, giving the impression they had been there since breakfast. The first creature I noticed was Matilda, the Algonquin Cat, perched at the reception desk. Now 13, she could care less who walks through the front door. I asked directions to the Blue Bar, and the host escorted me through the lobby to an adjacent room. "Welcome to the Blue Bar," he said, and he said it like he meant it.

I took my place at the far end of the bar. I started up a conversation with the bartender, ordering a "Matilda," a lemony orange vodka concoction finished with a touch of good champagne. The drink is named, of course, for the Cat Who Could Care Less. Finding whatever I said Dorothy Parkerish, the couple next to me struck up a conversation, asked me where I was from ("Greenwich Village, by way of Texas," as part of a lengthier monologue), and said that I just missed a posse of Texans from San Antonio. I'm sorry I missed them, but the bar was clear enough at that point for me to look around at the Al Hirschfeld theater drawings, the subdued blue backlights along the ceiling, and what was on the three television sets.

The presence of TVs in the bar (which would have been impossible in the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis) - tuned yesterday, by the way, to the General Petraeus hearings, the Par 3 round at the Masters, and on the largest, Animal Planet, keep the Algonquin not only a comfortable and friendly place with a rich history but also a living entity in contemporary life. Don't you know there's a war on? How about that Tiger Woods? And, what about that tiger? Sitting at the bar in the Algonquin, I realized that Classic New York is still accessible to the living, not something long gone and in the past, and given political progress since the days of Mame in matters of civil rights and justice, more accessible to more people than at any time before. The matter now, I'm afraid, concerns how many people can afford these kinds of drinks in a contracting economy, an issue Mame faced in 1931.

The hotel and the bar, while beautifully restored, doesn't come across as a set piece, with its best days far behind, but a place where I would like to bring friends to have a drink and to write our own fresh dialogue for 21st-century New York.

Website for The Algonquin Hotel.

Image: by Walking Off the Big Apple. April 9, 2008.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Classic New York: Henri Bendel

After leaving the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, making my way back through the lobby and into the sunshine of 55th Street, sunglasses back on, I couldn't recollect if I had spent twenty minutes in the bar or over an hour, most likely a magic time distortion brought on by the merry old soul in Parrish's mural. Whatever time it was, it was no time to go home and walk the dogs. Flushed from a merry bar conversation, I decided it was time to shop.

Mame Dennis, for one of her short stints in the real world, modeled tea dresses for Henri Bendel's store. After "an ugly contretemps" in which a rich old man pinched her in the rear and she said something back, M. Bendel let her go, offering her the advice that the best career for her would be marriage. Walking along Fifth Avenue, I saw the Henri Bendel storefront, so I wandered in to get a look.

After the indeterminate number of minutes or hours at the St. Regis bar, I proved a likely candidate to buy the first thing any one of the seemingly thousands of makeup specialists at Henri Bendel would try to sell me. I had barely gotten in the front door when a nice man held out a lipstick sample for me to try. Thinking I probably needed lipstick after quaffing the "Red Snapper," but certainly not rouge, as my cheeks, nose, and eyes were already aflame, I sat in a chair and let the makeup specialist paint my lips with an appropriately subdued cinnamon color and then a touch of lip glacé. When speaking to me, the expert, like all the good ones in makeup land, balanced restrained flattery with the ever-so-slight suggestion that I would look much better if I continued to sit there and try on more things before I pulled out my wallet.

Carrying my little brown and white striped Henry Bendel bag with the lipstick and gloss wrapped inside, I made my way through the onslaught of the ensuing makeup expert gauntlet, ambushed by perfumes and a special bottled water meant to cleanse my face. It was not at all unpleasant, but upon eyeing the fabulously colorful Chanel display on the second floor, I rushed up the stairs to higher and safer ground.

The visual culture of Henri Bendel is splendid - the famous Lalique windows overlooking Fifth Ave, the colorful handbags and cashmere sweaters in bright seasonal colors, and alcoves of even more perfume bottles. Close to my heart, a branch of the Chocolate Bar occupies an atrium on the third floor. After buying a caramel and a brownie to take home, I decided the proverbial clock was ticking on this day in old New York, and I needed to get back to the Village before the enchanted fairy dust dissolved in the perfumed air.

Website for Henri Bendel.

Image: Window, with Whitney Biennial 2008 promo and pink handbag, Henri Bendel, 712 Fifth Avenue. New York.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

The Classic New York of Mame Dennis

Patrick Dennis, a pseudonym for writer Edward Everett Tanner, gives the straight and narrow an alternative role model with his witty 1955 bestseller, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade. When young Patrick arrives at Beekman Place, the door opens to his aunt's unconventional bohemian life in the glitzy New York of the Jazz Age, and, by example, to a different way of being. A party is in progress: "They all used funny words, like 'batik' and 'Freud' and 'inferiority complex' and 'abstraction.'"

Patrick soon grows accustomed to his aunt's nocturnal habits (where 9 a.m. is "the middle of the night"), her glamorous theater friends, her preference for Bauhaus decor, and the experimental schools, psychotherapy, and all matter of fads and crazes (all of which Mame tries). Beekman Place is no place to be square.

Busted for placing Patrick in an experimental school (where all children were stripped of their clothes and expected to make their own fun), Mame loses her grip over her nephew when his furious trustee places him in a boarding school. Worse, she loses her wealth in the crash of 1929. Forced to leave her posh apartment for a carriage house in undesirable Murray Hill, she tries to support herself through jobs for which she is intellectually but not practically equipped. She runs through brief "careers" in literary publishing (loses a valuable manuscript), interior decoration (defies the client's orders for French Louis XV and delivers instead "Bolshevik barbarism"), entrepreneurship (her own moderne store on E. 54th is a hit, but she forgets to mail in insurance forms after it burns down), a saleswoman at Henri Bendel (10 west 57th, but since 1990, at 712 Fifth Ave.) a speakeasy operator, a personal shopper at the Algonquin (59 W. 44th St.), and then, in a hilarious ill-fated turn, an actress in one of Vera Charles' plays.

Finally, Mame takes a Christmas retail position in the toy department at Macy's, selling roller skates. Not easily trainable, she remembers only how to write up sales slips as C.O.D.'s. Those who know the story will recall that she's fired when she lets a customer help her make out the necessary cash sales slip. The customer, happily, is her future wealthy Southern husband, one Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, of Georgia.

Sweeping her off her feet, Burnside moves Mame to ten rooms at the St. Regis Hotel (2 E. 55th St.) and encourages her to resume her old spending ways. On their first anniversary, he buys her "a big old mansion" on Washington Square (for me, a noticeable and impossible slip in an otherwise good make-believe). In the movie version, the two travel to Europe where Burnside dies after falling off a mountain in the Alps. In the original book, though, the day of their housewarming party on Washington Square, Burnside dies after being kicked in the head by a horse in Central Park. Alas. Mame becomes a very wealthy widow.

Mame's New York is the classic New York of Depression-era fantasy – the room service, hatboxes, dressing gowns, perfume, after-theater dinners, gloved doormen and bellhops, glamorous show-biz friends, witty repartee and liquor. The fantasy regenerates in postwar 1950s New York, the time of the book's publication (think, too, of Capote's Holly Golightly).

Visiting the places of Auntie Mame – the classic hotels (Algonquin, St. Regis, the Plaza), the legendary department stores (Macy's, Henri Bendel, etc.), and the nightlife (21 Club at 21 W. 52nd St., etc.) would make a fine walk, don't you think? I think so. Over the next few days I plan to seek out this classic New York fantasy and report back on my findings.

Auntie Mame would never take such a walk herself, by the way. Mame owns a Rolls-Royce.

Image: New York, New York, Macy's department store at Herald Square. September 1942. Marjory Collins, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USW3-007681-D DLC (b&w film neg.).

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis

I can't remember the year I first saw the 1958 movie Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell, but the persona of the wildly eccentric aunt made an enormous impression on me. Curled up on the floor in a Dallas suburban home and watching Mame open new doors for her orphan nephew, I graduated from the Dorothy Gale School of No Place Like Home to a budding sophisticate. I wanted Auntie Mame to take me, too, to new places and to teach me how to live life large.

A year or so ago here in New York, I attended a Sunday morning service at a large Episcopal church on Fifth Avenue, and the visiting priest (a woman, by the way) took as her sermon topic the Christ-like example of Mame Dennis. No kidding. The priest extolled the virtues of Auntie Mame's large spirit, anti-bigotry and generosity, and told us we would do well to follow in her righteous path. At the end of the sermon, I could have passed out from happiness.

My high school in Dallas put on a production of the musical version. I think I was in the chorus, not having aspirations to try out for the leads. I can't sing, at least at any kind of Broadway level. Nevertheless, the part of Vera Charles, an actress and Mame's bosom buddy, was typecast with a 17-year-old classmate who already seemed graduated beyond her years to a boozy, hard-talking sophisticate. She was none of these things, but she had the right husky voice. All of us knew she had to play Vera. Agnes Gooch, Mame's homely secretary, was played by a brilliant character actress who later enjoyed a career in New York experimental theater.

All grown up now, I'm reading Patrick Dennis' book, Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, published in 1955, and enjoying the witty charm of the author. The book was republished in a new trade paperback edition on September 11, 2001 (Amazon). For obvious reasons, attentions of the city and world were elsewhere on that day.

I plan to walk us through the New York of Mame Dennis, layering an older vanishing Manhattan with the newer one taking its place. In the course of the walk I will pass on what I've learned about the "real" Mame, if indeed there was one. As a tease, I end with this intriguing item:

From Time Magazine Obit. November 11, 1985
DIED. Marion Tanner, ninetyish, quirky, colorful, real-life model for the heroine of the Broadway musical Mame, which was based on the 1955 novel Auntie Mame, written by her nephew Edward Everett Tanner III under the pen name Patrick Dennis; of pneumonia precipitated by a stroke; in a New York City nursing home. For more than three decades she ran a salon for struggling artists, writers, self-styled radicals and, later, drifters. In 1964, unable to meet mortgage payments, she was evicted from her house, prompting a deputy sheriff on the case to remark, "She is an amazing woman . . . In an earlier time, she might have been a saint."

Image: Beekman Place. Patrick and Norah, his Irish nanny, arrive in New York at Grand Central Terminal and then take a taxi to 3 Beekman Place, the residence of his Auntie Mame.

See related posts:
Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis: A Coda, on Bank Street
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

The 40th Anniversary of the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today, the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr, I am reposting two items from January 2008.

"Walks Singing": The Selma to Montgomery March, March 21-25, 1965

The distance from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, the state capital, is about 54 miles. When marchers assembled for the third attempt to make the walk in support of voting rights with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in March of 1965 - the first had met with state-supported violence at the Pettus Bridge and the second stopped by court order, several participants were not fully prepared for four days of walking 12 miles per day and sleeping in tents on the roadside at night. But conviction will overcome these kind of obstacles.

Thousands of people flew into Selma and Montgomery to assist with the march and to give whatever aid they could. The march itself had been limited to three hundred participants at any time. Among the entertainers who attended a rally on the fourth night of the march were Shelley Winters, Tony Perkins, Tony Bennett, Nina Simone, Dick Gregory, Sammy Davis, Jr., Mike Nichols and Elaine May. On this last full night of the march, the last before the final miles into Montgomery the following day, many of the marchers started falling ill from exhaustion.

Journalist Renata Adler, in her enthralling account of the march, "Letter From Selma," for April 10, 1965 issue of The New Yorker, described the scene:

On its fourth night, the march began to look first like a football rally, then like a carnival and a hootenanny, and finally like something dangerously close to a hysterical mob...Word got out that the doctors on the march had treated several cases of strep throat, two of pneumonia, one of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, and one of epilepsy, and because of the number and variety of sick and handicapped who had made the march a macabre new joke began to go the rounds: "What has five hundred and ninety-nine legs, five hundred and ninety-eight eyes, an indeterminate number of germs, and walks singing? The march from Selma."

According to Adler, at the staged camp entertainment on Wednesday night, "A number of girls in the crowd collapsed and, because there was no other lighted space, had to be carried onstage, where Miss Winters did her best to minister them."

The march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights established the foundation for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the current presidential debate on this issue, I believe that credit for advancing this particular piece of legislation needs to shared with hundreds of exhausted walkers, the thousands that traveled to Alabama to lend their support and a handful of gutsy entertainers.

Image: Photograph by Peter Pettus. Modern gelatin silver reprint from 1965 negative. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (30)

See the website for the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail in Alabama.

The April 15, 1967 Antiwar March from Central Park to the United Nations

Organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the antiwar march from Central Park to the United Nations on April 15, 1967 was among the largest antiwar marches in New York history. Though estimates widely vary from 100,000 to 400,000 in attendance that day, participants included a broad coalition of civil rights activists, among them Martin Luther King, Jr., and an ideological spectrum of antiwar activists.

After assembling in Central Park for a peace fair, speeches and performances, the marchers walked down Fifth Avenue and then made their way east to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the UN. Though city officials worried about violence and mayhem, the march was peaceful, and the five people arrested belonged to the group of protesters who were opposed to the march.

The following newsreel account reveals the usual establishment sarcasm that's directed toward the protesters. In my opinion, marching with others for a just cause is a fine way to walk off the Big Apple.

Tribeca Living: A Building for Chocolate and One for the Wool Trade

The Powell Building (1892) at 105 Hudson Street (at Franklin St.), shown on the left, was designed by Carrere & Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and the Frick mansion, among other others. In 1890, Henry L. Pierce, the head of a chocolate company in Massachusetts, wanted a nice building for his company, a step up from the plain vanilla of industrial architecture. Hence, this elegant Beaux Arts-style building.

After Pierce died his estate sold the building to candy manufacturer Alexander Powell who, in turn, hired his architect to enlarge the building and add stories. In the 1970s the building's higher floors were converted into residences. The Japanese restaurant Nobu (restaurant website) is on the first floor, in the same place that Powell once displayed his chocolates.

The Renaissance revival building at 260 West Broadway (at Beach St.), its curved entrance shown on the right, was built as the New York Wool Exchange in 1894-96. The wilier wool traders of New York hoped to trump the wool traders of Boston with such an edifice, but the scheme never worked. In 1907 the American Thread Company took over the building, and since the 1920s it's been known by that name. Now, not surprisingly, the building is operated as a condominium.

Images by Walking Off the Big Apple. Part of the series, Walking Off Tribeca.

For those in search of chocolate and were disappointed reading this post, please see Wee Willy WOTBA's Downtown Chocolate Walk, for chocolate locations north of Tribeca.

See related posts:
The Woolworth Building
Establishing Shots: The Tribeca Film Festival
The Tribeca of Duane: Duane Street and Duane Park
Tribeca's Most Tripped-Out Vista
In Search of the Lower West Side: Before Tribeca
Walking Off Tribeca and Remembering Mostly Lunch
Walking Off Tribeca: The Lay of the Land
Walking Off Tribeca: Starting at Square One

Monday Roundup: Chelsea Planning Tip, Whitney Biennial, Green Peppercorn Sauce, and Other Items

Visiting Chelsea. Maybe the following quick Descent Into Art Hell in Chelsea has happened to others: I hate when I'm in Chelsea and I've just realized I wanted to visit a particular gallery but it's four streets back now and I walked right past it earlier and I don't feel like trying to find the stupid door on the self-important gallery anymore and I hate looking at art in this part of the neighborhood in the first place where there are hardly any trees and curse the person that thought warehouses and factories for baking cookies were good places to view art and where there's no place to sit down and it's kinda far from the subway and I don't feel like going back there now. I'm going home.

Golly. WOTBA needs some HELP. Look at that little girl on the horse. She looks like she's spoiled and could cry. I'm better now, thank you. I've started planning my trips to this well-known art mecca in advance through the website chelseaartgalleries.com, and I am a better person for it. The website includes a feature that allows you to plan shows you want to see by organizing them by street, and then you can print out the list. With organizing my excursions, I can enjoy myself now and even include some impromptu gallery visits.

Food. I've found good places for hamburgers. I like Rare on Bleecker, Soho Park on Prince, and now, I like Stand on E. 12th. I went to Stand last night and ordered the hamburger with green peppercorn sauce. Best thing ever. I prefer the lighting in the other places, however. Inside Stand, the spot lighting is a little too theatrical for me, and where I was sitting I thought I'd be called upon to deliver a monologue.

I met some friends for lunch the other day near MoMA. We gathered at Sushiya (Menu Pages) at 28 W. 56th Street, between 5th and 6th Ave., and I thought the sushi was some of the best I've had in New York. Very fresh, sublime texture. They kept replenishing our green tea, so we had to cover the glasses with our hands.

Lecture on Raymond Hood. For those who enjoyed reading about the architect on this website and will be in NYC this week, Carol Willis, the director of The Skyscraper Museum (39 Battery Place), will be delivering a lecture titled "Raymond Hood 'The Brilliant Bad Boy' of New York Architecture" on March 4th, 6:30-8 p.m.$10. More info here.

The Whitney Biennial 2008 opens this Thursday, March 6. The website is up and running, with bios and images of the participating artists. Ideas of fluidity, ephemera and displacement prevail among this youngish group of artists, and it looks like we'll all be invited to blog along.

Image: Myself, on horse, as a small child. Place: A Bar A Ranch, Encampment, Wyoming. Year: Once upon a time in the West.

Sick in Bed and Reading About Walking

Maybe I over-exerted myself in the East Village yesterday, bringing on what appears to be a common cold, or maybe it was Saturday's stroll up Fifth Avenue. Whatever it was, I am down for the count. The winds over the last few days have not helped, nor the dry indoor conditions that send blue sparks flying even on the lightest touch. I thought my dogs and I were going to electrocute one another.

I've taken to private chambers today (if you like the duvet cover, I wrote about it in an October post), curling up with my walking books. Here I am with Jessup's A Manual of Walking (1936). Right now I'm reading the final chapter titled "Walking With Burdens." Jessup argues that the inhabitants of modern Western civilization do not often walk correctly, because they're forever carrying bags and packages in their hands. Jessup makes a case for the head:

"Head-carrying is really a more rational affair than hand-carrying, although to be an expert you need to have done it for several generations. It is a custom that will probably never get very far in Western countries, none the less, some of its virtues are worth pointing out. The strength in the head is far greater than generally realized, and under it you have the full support of the body, the burden being perfectly centered."

Jessup goes on to suggest that most Westerners, because they're incapable of carrying shopping bags on their heads, should carry burdens on their backs, in the form of a backpack. The illustrations for properly packing a backpack that accompany the discussion are hilarious, and I will show them to you once I regain my strength to scan.

Weekend Frivolities: Cupcakes, Buildings, Obama, Comments Now Open

• After finishing that last self-guided walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos, I felt like I had walked from Fifth Avenue to Santa Fe and back. That was a big walk! I'm still putting together the interactive map of Fifth Avenue, but the rest of the walk is now fully assembled on new blue and beige pages HERE. From analyzing the site feed, I see that a lot of people liked that walk.
• For blogger-types who like to write long posts like myself, I highly recommend using Google Pages, a feature still in the Google Labs. That's how I'm putting together the complete versions of the walks.
• The cold weather makes me hungry, so yesterday I decided to visit Sugar Sweet Sunshine on Rivington and drink some coffee and eat a red velvet cupcake (or rvc, as I like to call them). They have two kinds, one with white icing and another with chocolate icing. I don't advocate walking to a bakery as a destination if weight loss is a goal, but I decided that if you walk far enough, you can walk it off and it's OK.
• I like the building on Avenue A with the BURGER KLEIN and Gracefully signs, so I took a picture of it. The other picture here is of the RV cupcakes.
• I have a hard time remembering the name of the place I got the cupcakes, and I think they should change their name to Rivington Bakery. Another place I like is Connecticut Muffin on Prince Street near the New Museum, but last time I was there they had taken the sign down. With the New Museum, the name didn't sound cool enough and so they plan on just going by 10 Prince Street. I have to agree that Connecticut Muffin sounds too uncool.
• When I was walking back home along E. 4th Street, I saw the color red everywhere, and I plan to go back to take photographs of all the red things.
• I lost a lot of pretend money in CNN's Political Market last night. It's a site for trading shares in a prediction market about the presidential campaign. I thought Obama was going to beat Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic Party primary by around 10 points, but he won by a much much wider margin with 55% to her 27%.
• I've been writing Walking Off the Big Apple for over six months now, and it's time I turned on the Comments section. Everyone's welcome to play.

Epilogue: Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos

When Mabel Dodge first saw the Taos Pueblo, she felt an intense surge of longing. In Edge of Taos Desert she writes:

"It was as though the Pueblo had an invisible wall around it, separating the Indians from the world we knew–a wall that kept their life safe within it, like a fire that cannot spread. "How self-contained it seems! I thought, and how contented it feels!" I mused to myself. "I wish I belonged in there!"

For many years after my father died, my mother and I traveled almost every summer from our home in Dallas to Santa Fe, staying at the old La Fonda Hotel. Sometimes we drove there, a seemingly endless and boring drive through the Texas Panhandle but an increasingly fascinating journey toward the end. It took us a few days to adjust to the altitude difference, so we would spend the first days keeping close to the main plaza.

On one trip we joined a group traveling to Taos, via the High Road. Toward the end of the day we stopped outside the Taos Pueblo. We got out and walked around for an hour, keeping a respectful distance between our tourist selves and the residents of the pueblo.

When it was time to board the van for the return trip, we could not find my mother anywhere. We waited thirty minutes. Finally, I spotted her walking out of a door in the Pueblo. I remember that she was wearing her typical smart Dallas fashion designer suit, with hose, high heels, and all the appropriate accessories, and I thought how comical she looked in that context.

When she sat down next to me in the van, I asked what she was doing in there. She said that she had struck up a conversation with a nice couple about their children and that they invited her to sit down. She had a great time. When the van pulled away from the Taos Pueblo, she told me she didn't feel like leaving. "I want to go back there," she said. "It's where I belong."

I love New York City, and I plan to stay for a long time. I feel, though, that there's a part of me I'm saving for later, the one that trades in urban canyons for longer memories and a much bigger sky.

See additional related posts for Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City.

Images: New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, House on Canyon Road, Santa Fe, and Lexington Avenue near 49th., NY, NY, 2008. You get the picture. Photos by Walking Off the Big Green Chili Pepper.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: The Art Pilgrimage to the West

See related posts for Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe and New York City.

Readers of this site who also regularly peruse The New York Times may have picked up today's NYT (January 25, 2008) art section to see yet another article on art in New Mexico. In this case, Roberta Smith reviews Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, a new exhibit at the Grey Art Gallery (NYU) that features a selection of paintings that the Ab-Exer Diebenkorn made while living in Albuquerque in the early 1950s. Smith gives the exhibit a glowing review - you can't miss it, a large reproduction covers the front page of the art section, and I plan to write something about the exhibit myself here over the next few days.

O'Keeffe's visit to New Mexico was certainly just one among many. John Sloan, who I've written a lot about here, visited Santa Fe in 1919, the same year as Mabel Dodge made her move, and he bought a house there in 1920. He spent four months of every year in Santa Fe from 1920 to 1950. Sloan learned of the place from his pioneering mentor, Robert Henri, who had visited in 1916 an 1917. It was a craze really, one that also attracted Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Stuart Davis. American modernism, with its taste for the exotic, couldn't do without the New Mexican landscape and its people.

Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, New Mexico continued to attract more artists, many from New York. Some stayed permanently, and others divided their time between the two places. Marfa, Texas has a similar appeal, one made even more enticing by its easy lack of access.

Another group of artists began to make their way to New Mexican outposts in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist artists like Judy Chicago, whose flower paintings were directly inspired by O'Keeffe's core imagery, found the region congenial. Lucy Lippard, one of feminist art's important theorists, makes her home there as well.

The reasons New Mexico continues to lure new residents remain the same as a century ago. After the busy syncopated rhythms of a large metropolis and where skyscrapers block the setting sun, the uninterrupted desert vista, with its warm daytime sun and cool nights, forces a steadier and slower pace. The land and its people seem to belong to the long cycles of human history as opposed to the short ones of the city and the fashionable whims of manufactured fads and consent.

It made sense that galleries and the art business would follow the artistic pilgrimage out west. Santa Fe is the third largest art market in the United States after New York and Los Angeles. Canyon Road, where many of the galleries are located, is always a pleasure to walk.

Images: Landscape panorama by Walking off the Big Green Chili Pepper, and Robert Henri. Gregorita with the Santa Clara Bowl, 1917, oil on canvas, Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Georgia O'Keeffe at The Met

I went to the Met on Tuesday to look at Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, but first I had to find them. A couple of museum workers thought they had seen one or two in the Modern Art section, but they also recommended that I check with the woman that runs the tiny shop next to the American Wing on the opposite side of the museum. I hadn't planned on my visit being another athletic adventure, but I nevertheless ended up pounding a couple of miles inside the Met.

Fortunately, I found the O'Keeffe paintings early on. After winding my way through Roman art and through the Michael Rockefeller Oceanic galleries, I made my way through the first rooms of the Modern Art section and could reassure myself I was in the right century. After a turn to the right and then around another corner, I saw paintings by Charles Sheeler and Arthur Dove. Surely she is near. And, yes, voila!, a room of Georgia O'Keeffes, and more than a couple. Ten.

After spending the week with her story, I was happy to see these particular paintings. While the Met routinely switches out artworks, the O'Keeffe paintings on display on Tuesday included (in chronological order here, not how they were displayed):

Corn, Dark, Number 1 (1924). Painted at Lake George
Grey Tree, Lake George (1925)
Black Iris (1926) The magnified iris, painted in plums and grey pinks, fills and pushes the boundaries of the canvas - a terrific tension of light and dark and the scandalous vulval core imagery that shaped the direction of feminist art in the 1970s.
Clam Shell (1930)
Ranchos Church (1930) O'Keeffe ventured out to Taos to stay at Mabel Dodge's and discovered the Saint Francis of Assissi Mission in the Hispanic community of Ranchos de Taos. Painting the church from the back side, the church takes on the essence of a natural earth formation. I love how the grey sky pushes on the outer surfaces of the structure.
Cow's Skull: Red, White and Blue (1931) See image. O'Keeffe's satire on the search for the Great American painting at the time of the Great Depression and the blossoming of American regional painting. In reaction to the depictions of decrepit buildings in the heartland, O'Keeffe sets a cow's skull, like a crucifix, on top of red, white, and blue, as her homage to American Art.
From the Faraway, Nearby (1937) A turn toward surrealism with the scale of the mountain range dwarfed by the hovering antlered creature that dominates the scene and sky.
Red and Yellow Cliffs (1940) The view of the striated coral and ochre cliffs from Ghost Ranch.
Pelvis II (1944) Highly sculptural and abstract, the blue sky seen through the interior of the bones renders the image a metaphor for mortality. She applies the white paint on the pelvis in strips, maybe with a palette knife, that gives a cracked texture to the bones.
Black Place II (1944) A dark and desolate but beautiful image of a stretch of hills she often liked to paint.

I decided to check to see if there were more O'Keeffe paintings by visiting the American Wing on the other side of the museum, but I knew that several galleries in that wing were closed and that access was tricky. So I spent the next hour, I think, wandering through room and after room of decorative art from various centuries, taking the wrong turn in musical instruments and again in medieval armor and then winding my way back to the main entrance. At that point I was told that the only way to get to the American Wing was from the Temple of Dendur, the expansive room that houses the Nubian temple to the goddess Isis. After passing the entirety of Egyptian civilization to get there, I felt like I was in an old video game.

I walked through many rooms in the American Wing but I didn't see another O'Keeffe. I found the woman who tended the gift shop, and yes, she said, I had seen all of them in Modern. Somewhere in the American Wing, a man approached a security guard and asked him how to get out of there.

Note: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the final stop on the Fifth Avenue and the High Road to Taos self-guided walking tour.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Dining New York by Southwest

See the related posts for Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City.

I'm a Fritos-type person, and in my experience it's always the skinny vegetarian person who shows up with the blue corn tortilla chips at a party. Blue corn, however, is the spirit of New Mexican cuisine, in addition to posole, green chili peppers and Chimayo chili powder. While there's no exact match in New York for dining in an adobe courtyard and smelling the piñon wood burning in a horno oven while looking at the stars, the city does have a few good Southwestern restaurants worth visiting.

Mesa Grill
102 5th Ave, New York 10011
Btwn 15th & 16th St
See Frank Bruni's revisit to Bobby Flay's popular restaurant here. This review is fresh, at the time of this posting just a day old.

Agave
140 7th Ave S, New York 10014
Btwn Charles & W 10th St

Los Dos Molinos
119 E 18th St, New York 10003
Btwn Irving Pl & Park Ave

Miracle Bar & Grill
415 Bleecker St, New York 10014
Btwn Bank & W 11th St

Santa Fe Grill
62 7th Ave, Brooklyn 11217
At Lincoln Place

If in Santa Fe and Taos, these are the Classics:
Santa Fe: La Casa Seña, The Pink Adobe, Santacafé, The Shed, Coyote Café.
The Pink Adobe's Steak Dunigan, a New York Strip with sautéed mushrooms and green chili, is cow heaven. Casa Seña features a trout wrapped in banana leaves and baked in adobe, so you have to smash it open at the table. Mark Miller's Coyote Cafe, representing the Santa Fe craze of the 80s, can be a fun, though expensive, theatrical dining event.

Taos: Bent Street Cafe and Deli, Doc Martin's at the Taos Inn, Ogelvie's Bar and Grill.

My favorite southwestern chef is Stephan Pyles, but eating at his restaurant requires a trip to Dallas.

Image: The Pink Adobe, on the Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe, New Mexico, with turquoise bike and dog. Photo by Walking Off the Big Green Chili Pepper.

Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Georgia O'Keeffe's Long Road Home

See the complete walk on new pages.

When Mabel Dodge invited Georgia O'Keeffe to spend the summer with her in Taos in 1929, O'Keeffe accepted the invitation without first consulting her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a dominating spouse. She spent the summer there without him anyway, awakening to the possibility she had found a new place that seemed like home.

"She wrote to Henry McBride from Taos in 1929, 'You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here-and finally feeling in the right place again-I feel like myself-and I like it- . . . Out the very large window to rich green alfalfa fields-then the sage brush and beyond-a most perfect mountain-it makes me feel like flying-and I don't care what becomes of art.' - Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters by Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton

Stieglitz was an aging New Yorker, embedded in the cultural life of the city, and far-away New Mexico was a place best left to his wife. In February of 1930 he exhibited her New Mexico-inspired paintings at An American Place at 509 Madison Avenue, his third and final gallery in New York. The gallery presented O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings every year until the gallery's closing in 1950.

Any artist would have relished O'Keeffe's life - time alone in New Mexico to paint a serious body of work as well as a successful artist-gallerist spouse back in New York to exhibit them on Madison Avenue every year. In addition, the two often enjoyed time at the expansive Stieglitz estate up on Lake George. But...

Enter Radio City Music Hall (1260 Avenue of the Americas), an odd tangent on our Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos walk. In the spring of 1932 O'Keeffe accepted a $1500 commission to paint a mural on the walls of the Ladies Powder Room. Wanting to paint something big, she accepted the challenge over her husband's objections. By October, after spending the summer in Canada, she grew frustrated with some technical difficulties with the mural and abandoned the project. In early 1933 she became ill and was admitted to Doctor's Hospital for psychoneurosis, a condition often brought on by acute stress.

Meanwhile, Stieglitz, who was 23 years older than O'Keeffe, had started a relationship with a young married woman, Dorothy Norman, his gallery manager, an artist, arts patron and a proponent of the photographic arts. He started taking photos of her, the same sort of sensational erotic images he made of O'Keeffe early in their marriage. The two spent a lot of time in the darkroom together. All this while his wife is sick. O'Keeffe knew what was going on.

O'Keeffe returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1934, first staying at Ghost Ranch seventy miles west of Taos, and until Stieglitz's death she returned there most every summer. In 1936 she and Stieglitz moved from the Shelton Hotel to a penthouse apartment at 405 East 54th St., a place nearer Stieglitz's gallery. In 1942 they moved to a small apartment at 59 East 54th St., even closer. During the summer of 1945 she bought an adobe house on three acres in Abiquiu. In 1946, Stieglitz, after a massive stroke, died in New York at the age of 82.

After spending a couple of years in New York, consumed with settling the Stieglitz estate, O'Keeffe permanently moved to New Mexico in 1949, dividing her time between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu. She had spent thirty years going back and forth from her home in the west to an apartment in midtown Manhattan, and she didn't have to do that anymore. She died March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe at the age of 98.

I've learned from this story that finding your own ranch buys you an extra 17 years.

Image: interior, New York Marriott Hotel East Side (formerly the Shelton Hotel), 525 Lexington Avenue at 49th St.

For Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: The April 15, 1967 Antiwar March from Central Park to the United Nations

Organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the antiwar march from Central Park to the United Nations on April 15, 1967 was among the largest antiwar marches in New York history. Though estimates widely vary from 100,000 to 400,000 in attendance that day, participants included a broad coalition of civil rights activists, among them Martin Luther King, Jr., and an ideological spectrum of antiwar activists.

After assembling in Central Park for a peace fair, speeches and performances, the marchers walked down Fifth Avenue and then made their way east to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the UN. Though city officials worried about violence and mayhem, the march was peaceful, and the five people arrested belonged to the group of protesters who were opposed to the march.

The following newsreel account reveals the usual establishment sarcasm that's directed toward the protesters. In my opinion, marching with others for a just cause is a fine way to walk off the Big Apple.



See related post, and the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail in Alabama.

The Building that Would Glow at Night: Raymond Hood, Georgia O'Keeffe, and the American Radiator Building

From the walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe and New York City.

Whenever I come upon the Radiator Building on 40th Street on the south side of Bryant Park I am immediately struck by its drama. 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. While Hood wanted the building to look like a cathedral, he knew that the many window openings would overly lighten the heaviness. He solved the problem by making the facade black. He didn't want lights turned on in the building after dark but directed the upper floors to be illuminated with floodlights.

O'Keeffe not only painted the Radiator Building at night but with all the windows illuminated. The painting is one of several O'Keeffe made in the mid 1920s in response to the changing New York skyline. At the time she and Alfred Stieglitz lived on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton Hotel at 49th and Lexington, and O'Keeffe frequently walked near the new building.

Her painting of the Radiator from 1927 (the same year as Fritz Lang's Metropolis, tellingly) is remarkable for its color and for the depiction of the artificial light of the city night - the purple/blue tints of floodlights and the fluorescent whites of the office towers. There's a touch of warm incandescent in windows here and there. The stylized smoky steam arising from the building at the right echoes the flipped curved cornices of the Radiator's top floors. It's pure theater.

After Stieglitz died in 1946, his personal art collection of some 1,000 works was divided up among six museums. One benefactor was Fisk University in Nashville, a university Carl Van Vechten suggested to O'Keeffe. Among the artworks in the bequest was O'Keeffe's painting, Radiator Building–Night, New York. For a couple of years, the cash-strapped university has tried to sell the painting, now valued around $20 million, and at one point worked out a co-ownership deal with a new Walton-backed museum in Arkansas. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico is attempting to legally block the agreement, and the matter is scheduled to go to court next month.

See Fisk university struggles to make cash from an art collection donated by Georgia O'Keeffe (Albuquerque Tribune)

The Radiator Building now houses the Bryant Park Hotel. The hotel's website makes my head hurt.

See related posts about Raymond Hood on this website.

Images: (l) photo by Walking Off the Big Apple, January 2008. and Georgia O'Keeffe. Radiator Building–Night, New York. 1927.

UPDATED APRIL 2008: Fisk appealing judge ruling to display collection. See AP Story here.

Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge and The Paterson Strike Pageant

From the walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe and New York City. The walk explores the worlds of Dodge and O'Keeffe, their intertwined biographies, and their individual decisions to leave New York for New Mexico. Several stops along the way need to be imagined, as the buildings in which events took place do not exist any longer.

In the late spring and early summer of 1913, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, John Sloan and his wife Dolly, the Harvard-educated radical journalist John Reed (see Warren Beatty's Reds), I.W.W. leader Big Bill Haywood, and others worked tirelessly to organize the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913. Over a thousand workers in the silk mill industry who had walked off their jobs earlier in the year took part in the elaborate staging of their plight.The venue was Madison Square Garden, when the Garden was located off Madison Square Park.

Dodge writes, "No one realized the fun of having placed the letters I.W.W. ten feet high on each of the four sides of the Madison Square Tower in bright red electric lights, so that they could be seen from one end of town to the other." (from Movers and Shakers)

In recounting the events of the pageant, Dodge acknowledges, "Everybody worked except me." Dodge's job, as she saw it, was to inspire her then-lover, John Reed, and raise money. Dodge, as a wealthy Fifth Avenue heiress, spent a lot of energy trying to convince the anarchists in her circle that she was a good capitalist. The most humorous parts of her autobiography, although I don't think she saw them as funny, involve her worries that her friend Emma Goldman might possibly kill her.

to be continued....See previous related posts.

Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge Sees Art By "A Schoolteacher Out West"

A continuation of the walk, Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City. See related posts.

Flashback: In the Fall of 1915 Georgia O'Keeffe was teaching at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina where she started working on a series of charcoal drawings. She tried out new techniques she had learned from her NY teacher Arthur Wesley Dow, especially a new way to treat light and dark, and the resulting work was like nothing she had done before. She sent some of these drawings to her close art school friend, Anita Pollitzer, who in turn showed them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery on January 1, 1916.

Every artist could use an Anita Pollitzer. The daughter of a wealthy Charleston, South Carolina family, Pollitzer could turn on the Southern charm. A burgeoning artist in her youth, she later made a name for herself as a suffragette and activist for the National Women's Party. Showing charcoal drawings of an unknown artist friend to someone as established as Stieglitz takes a great deal of panache.

Stieglitz loved the drawings and exhibited them without O'Keeffe's knowledge. She was angered that he did not ask her consent, but after talking it over with him, she agreed to let him exhibit her work. In August of 1916 she moved to Canyon, Texas to teach at West Texas State Normal College.

Mabel Dodge didn't often leave her place at 23 Fifth Avenue, but the 291 Gallery, a mile or so up the avenue, was "one of the few places where I went." One day in 1916 she met painter Marsden Hartley at the gallery, and Stieglitz "showed us some curious black and white drawings by a schoolteacher out west. Presently he hung them on the walls...This was the first work we saw of Georgia O'Keeffe." (Movers and Shakers)

The moral of this story, for all artists in the audience, is to find a nice flirtatious Southern friend who will brazenly show your work to dealers.

Image: Georgia O'Keeffe, Drawing No. 13, 1915. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alfred Stieglitz Collection.

Gertrude Stein, The Big Bear Buddha of Bryant Park