A Lazy Day on the Hudson: New Yorkers Go Outside

All week the weather in New York has been "drop dead gorgeous," as many would say it here, with each day progressively warmer. The winter, suddenly gone, with its distinction between New Yorkers at work and visitors on vacation, gave way to an atmosphere of beach-time laziness for all. The West Side piers along the Hudson draw many New Yorkers, especially those living in the West Village. The Hudson River Park affords views of big sky, passing boats, the Jersey shoreline, and off to the left, outside of this picture, the Statue of Liberty in the distance. I was out there, too, today. It was a little hazy, but I was happy for the warm sun. Many, like me, are still a little pale. If I've been slack in my posts this week, you now know why.

Image: Hudson River Park, April 19, 2008. For additional NY pix, visit Walking Off the Big Apple's new photostream on Flickr.

More Scenes From the Snowstorm: Central Park, February 23, 2008 (A Slideshow)

The Jasper Johns exhibit took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this afternoon, but the snow took me to Central Park. After looking at all of Johns' gray artworks inside the museum, I decided to take a stroll and surround myself with the bright white of the fallen snow. At some point, I wandered into a wild...dare, I say, mad?...tea party, as you will see. Maybe I just fell into a rabbit hole.

Not Letting a Beautiful Day Go to Waste

After a stretch of gloomy days, the bright sun and warmer temperatures drew thousands of New Yorkers out of doors today.

The surprise gift of a beautiful day served as a way to open many conversations. It was a day to sit outside at the cafe, buy some tulips, or play handball in "The Cage." The dogs seemed to love it, too.

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.

Weekend Frivolities: Tour de Bears, Real, Imagined, and Stuffed, of Central Park

Now that the winter solstice has passed quietly in the night (approx. 1:08 a.m. EST NYC), I continue to dream of hibernation. I have feasted on nuts and berries and slumped into carbohydrate narcolepsy, and I dare not disturb my slumber until the vernal equinox. But I cannot rest up here in the frosty north. Some rotund bearded guy keeps me awake at night, my obese compadre of El Norte, and the frozen tundra has started to melt under my den. I shall seek out then quieter caves and lazier company in Manhattan's Central Park.

Da Bears -
• Real live polar bears named Gus and Ida live in the Central Park Zoo.
• A Dancing Bear statue is near the Zoo.
• "The Bear Dance," a satirical painting by William Holbrook Beard (1825-1900) on a poster for the New-York Historical Society, is popular with young people. The painting is also known as "The Bears of Wall Street Celebrating a Drop in the Market." For more on this bearish subject visit the office of Bear Stearns at 383 Madison Avenue, or better yet, see Walking Off the Wall Street Bears on this website. Dancing bears, a street act in which real captured bears are made to perform, is a cruel tradition and should be universally condemned.
• The bears in the American Museum of Natural History include the Alaska brown bear, grizzly bear and polar bear dioramas.
• "Group of Bears" (1932, cast 1963), a statue on the south side of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is by American modernist sculptor Paul Manship.
• The Art Bears inside The Met include Leonardo da Vinci's "A Bear Walking" and a Roman vessel in the shape of a bear made 200-400 AD. I'm sure there are more bears in there.

The Chicago Bears play the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, Dec. 23 at home on Soldier Field. 1 p.m. Check your local listings.

The name Arctic is derived from the Greek word meaning "bear." Antarctica means the polar opposite.

Walking Off the Big Bears (!) will go into hibernation December 25-30, 2007.

Walking Off Gramercy/Flatiron With Canadian Women

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A couple of weeks ago I took a large group of charming, adventurous, and educated women from Vancouver, Canada (and its extended geographical area) on a walk through the Gramercy/Flatiron neighborhoods. I am just now writing up an account of our stroll, and I've worried that I would forget some of the details. This modest walk works just as well, I think, for individuals who are not women from British Columbia. It's fun, though, to walk around with Canadian women who stop and notice beautiful buildings, ask a lot of questions and take about a million digital photographs. See if you can go find some.

Members of a book club, these women have known one another for years and so could handle the pressure of cramming every major New York tourist attraction into five days, sleep four to a room and still manage to stay friends. This group trip, a kind of Extreme Girls Night Out, was organized by a New York-crazed woman who had discovered Walking Off the Big Apple during the preparations for the trip and then had forced the others to read it. ("Oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee!"). She wrote and asked if we could all meet and walk around, and I had to think about it because I don't give tours in real life. I decided I was honored enough by her letter and so would make an exception for her group.

We met on a bright Sunday afternoon at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, and there we all exchanged lively introductions. If you care, I wore a bright red coat, dark sunglasses and a black hat. Highlights of the walk included the Met Life Building, the New York Life Building, Gramercy Park, a high-end pet boutique, and the Block Beautiful on 19th St. Somewhere along in there members of the group spotted a gigantic parrot in the window of a townhouse, and it looked to us like it occupied its own room.

At the end of the stroll, I led the group into Pete's Tavern. I rushed toward the kindly host and explained that I had sixteen women behind me and we just needed to stand at the bar and drink. He said, "The bartender will take care of you." And so there we stayed for a round of drinks, and then another, with the tavern providing the perfect backdrop for our happy new mutual acquaintance and the promise to one day walk off Vancouver.

(Quick note: The interactive map above misspells Gramercy.)

British Invasion Walk: The End of the Trail

To complete the British Invasion Walk (see the many recent posts if you're just jumping in), we'll stroll through Central Park and then pop out on the Upper East Side and keep walking east along 72nd Street.

While still in the park, perhaps at the glorious Bethesda Fountain, note that Frederick Law Olmsted, the park's famous designer, had an important British partner in this vast undertaking. His name is Calvert Vaux. The last name is pronounced to rhyme with "hawks." Vaux married the sister of a Hudson River School painter and became a U.S. citizen.

The storefront at 347 East 72nd St. is the home of The United Lodge of Theosophists. Co-founded by Madame Blavatsky and Wm. G. Judge, the U.L.T., based on a quick read of the pamphlets I brought home with me, does not engage in the usual Theosophist infighting. And I say, "Good for them!" They host all sorts of events, including Spanish study groups and "Theosophic Influences in Cinema, Theatre, and Literature."

A Ralph Lauren store is along in here, too, on the south side of the street, peddling its cause to Americans for the adoption of an expensive manor-born British way of life.

Continue walking to York. Here we are. Sotheby's itself, the New York branch of the legendary British auction house, all nice in its glassy New World outfit. When I neared the building the other day, I heard a man on a cell phone tell someone, "But we need to know exactly who painted it!" And I thought, "Yeah, you do."

WOTBA's fellow countryman, the Texas billionaire Ross Perot, a man who once described the intrigues of the 1992 presidential election as so much "Mickey Mouse tossed salad," will be putting up his very own copy of the Magna Carta for auction at Sotheby's in December. The auction house does indeed exercise considerable power on these shores, establishing currency and reputation for all artists, both the quick and the dead.

So this was a fun walk! It took me about two hours to walk the two miles from west to east, and that counted all the stopping and reflecting. I spent an extra hour in Sotheby's pretending to buy European tapestries for the apartment.

But, alas, I learned the lesson, just like Dorothy of Kansas, that the true source of British cultural influence in contemporary American life could not be found on 72nd Street - "And you were there! And you were there!, etc. "- but in my own back yard.

Tropicana City Hall Park

Gigantic hibiscus in City Hall Park.

Maybe tropical flowers enjoy the Air Quality Alerts we have here from time to time. Realizing that NYC would be hot and humid today, I took my morning walk early, starting out a little before 8 a.m. and heading south on Broadway.
The walk began along a fashionable section of Broadway in SoHo but gradually gave way to more prosaic stores lining the street.
I often gravitate downtown, stopping many times in City Hall Park. A small serene pocket of seasonal plants and flowers, the park sits amidst one of the more graceful skyscraper jungles. Sitting on a bench near the fountain affords views of the Woolworth Building, City Hall, and the old Tammany Hall.
City Hall is also the access point for the Brooklyn Bridge, so the park is the optimal place to decide whether one wants to continue south toward the Battery or head east, across the bridge and over to either DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) or Brooklyn Heights.
After resting and drawing, I walked over to the WTC site and then headed north on Church St. and through Tribeca toward home. The entire walk downtown and back took close to an hour, but I broke it up into two manageable sections.

Battery Park

Today was a downtown day, so I walked from my home base near Washington Square Park to Battery Park. The sky was slightly overcast, keeping the temperature down, so the 40 minute walk down Broadway was pleasant. I have several standard walks now in my repertoire, and walking south to downtown has become a favorite route. While there I visited the WWII memorial and Castle Clinton, and as a short side visit, the shrine of Saint Elizabeth Seton on State Street.

As usual, upon returning home (often by subway, as today) , I checked my distance online at http://www.gmap-pedometer.com. I just typed in 10012, zoomed in, and charted the course down Broadway. The distance was something like 2.3 miles, and that's my standard daily distance.