Walking Off the Big Apple

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 bittersweet lyrics call forth the sight of autumn in the big city, "the promise of new love," and a grateful acceptance of inevitable change and loss.


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 wistful song. The notes themselves, falling like leaves, were enough for the likes of Charlie Parker and the Modern Jazz Quartet. Read more, and listen.

The calendar includes most major events through the fall season. A New York City Winter Calendar will be published in December.
Seasonal Changes • Peak fall foliage
The peak fall foliage in NYC usually occurs in late October and the first two weeks of November, coinciding with Halloween festivities and the New York City Mar…

Following its record-breaking debut at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the blockbuster Delacroix exhibit has opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. While not all of the works could travel, as some are intrinsic to the Louvre, the big cats made the trip to the city. For the Delacroix exhibit poster, the Met has selected Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother, the artist’s great and surprising painting from 1830, as the signature and defining work of the exhibition.


Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863), known as the leading Romantic painter of his era, loved cats. His many notebooks show preparatory sketches of lions, tigers, and several charming domestic cats. The big cats, for the most part, made it into big paintings. At 52 x 76.6 in. (130 x 195 cm), Young Tiger Playing with Its Mother, 1830, is astonishingly large for an animal painting of his time, a size normally devoted to a history painting. His most famous work, La Liberté guidant le peuple, dates from the same year.�…

Update: MoMA is reopening August 27. Timed tickets. The Museum will be open daily, from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays are reserved for members and their guests. https://www.moma.org/visit/tips
Please see a new post, MoMA in Masks, about the museum reopening in the pandemic.

(reopened in 2019) The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Midtown Manhattan is undergoing a significant renovation and expansion that will increase gallery space by thirty percent upon completion in 2019. In the midst of renovation and following a long hot summer, the museum may currently look a little rough around the edges and even disorienting for longtime patrons. For starters, you’ll need to enter the museum on W. 54th Street instead of W. 53rd Street while the work is taking place, and the museum store is now currently on the second floor next to the coffee bar which has also moved.


This state of affairs didn’t stop visitors on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend from making a pilgrimage to the museum to gaze at tr…