Day 3.2 – Getting Guggy

We worked out way through Central Park, which is pretty much everything people say it is. With the leaves turning colour, the grass still green, and the sky mostly blue, it was a great day to be in the park.

We all know Central Park has trails and ponds gardens and trees and running areas and bike paths and benches and young couples knoodling in the bushes, but I didn’t know there we such beautiful outcrops of gneiss of the Cambrian Manhattan Formation. Here we took a break from our knoodling to get a gneiss picture of Tig.

Our ultimate goal was on the other side of the park, to the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum. Now, I mentioned my irrational cult-like adoration of Carl Sagan last post, this time I get to mention Tig’s irrational cult-like adoration of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. For those who have no idea who these people are, the Guggenheim is an art museum, funded by the estate of Solomon Guggenheim, and designed by Wright. It was one of the last buildings Wright designed (it was not completed until after his death). It was testament to Wright’s reputation and attitude that he could build an art museum almost completely bereft of vertical walls. (making it rather difficult to hang pictures!)

Needless to say, we looked at some of the art, but to Tig and I, the building is the star of the show here. Built around a single, long, spiral ramp, the idea is to allow visitors to start at the top and work their way down the ramp, with art along the outside walls. Of course, the walls are canted outward about 15 degrees, and the floor of the ramp is a constant 3 degree slope, so there is nary a rectangle to be seen. Even the lone staircase is triangular.

Although there are wings (added after the fact) to allow more…uh… traditional displays, the main installation during our visit was a large mobile constructed of the collected works of Maurizio Cattelan, which is, apparently, a “a profound meditation on mortality”. There was enough interesting, funny, and bizarre stuff hanging there that every trip around the ramps of the Gugg brought more things to view.

So that is about it. Three Fast days in the Big City. We had some great food (Pho in the Village, Mexican-fusion in Hells Kitchen) some OK food (wings etc. at a sports bar, Thai food near Times Square, Turkish grub in Chelsea), rode the Subway a lot (and only accidentally crossed the East River once) didn’t see any shows (other than the streets of New York themselves!), and did not buy a single thing! (we are so bad at retail).

NYC Day 3.1 - Parks and Museums Day

Finally, on Day 3 we got north of 44th street, and wandered up to Central Park. We walked up the west side of the Park, past the defacto John Lennon Memorial Zone. The only positive I can say about that is that that it is rather remarkable the number of people who show up to pray at the site where a mosaic memorializes one of the world’s most famous atheists by spelling out the title of a song that is nothing short of an ode against theism and capitalism.

We didn’t go up there to see the Dakota as much as to go to the Museum of Natural History. This is a big museum with remarkable collections, but I was there to see two cool things: “Space stuff” and Dinosaurs.

The Space stuff started out really exciting, then got progressively less so. There was a big, spherical, planetarium-type theatre in the middle of the great hall, and collected about it, several models of planets, to scale. See the photo below, the planetarium is the big curve on the left, and the 4 gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were hung there, to scale. I didn’t see the Earth anywhere, but I calculated out it would be about the size of a tennis ball.

It wasn’t the incompleteness of the models that disappointed me, it was the movie the planetarium. In the lobby, they had a short video featuring one of the real rock stars of astrophysics, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think Neil is one of the best spokespeople for Science in the world today, and was glad to see he was going to be narrating the movie.

Alas, the movie starts and it is a female voice. I’m hunting for it while listening: Pamela Gay? No, too urban-sounding. Jill Tarter? No, too Jewish. Wait! Is that Whoopie Freaking Goldberg!?! Crap.

You see, this is a problem. There are some incredible scientists, and some incredible science educators, in the United States. My cult-like adoration of Carl Sagan aside, I can think of at least four people in this picture alone who do incredible science, are phenomenally eloquent, and can narrate a movie about the history of the universe from a point of knowledge at least as well as the twit celebrity from the View who, even on Star Trek, was so far from being a scientist that they made her the Starship Bartender!

But this is America. Even in a building dedicated to science and scientific discovery, people won’t listen to someone talk for 20 minutes unless they are “famous”, even if that fame comes from starring in a movies with Ted Danson. In the United States, “Famous Scientist” is a sorry contradition in terms. Seriously, name me the most famous living American scientist. Tough one, isn’t it?

Ok, back down on Earth. After Whoopie told me about the life cycle of stars (the ones in the sky, not the ones of which she is a group), we wandered down to the dinosaurs. The dinosaur (and, to be more inclusive, prehistoric life) collection at the museum was remarkable. Probably to shut up whiny science geeks like me (see paragraph above) their dinosaur collection was in two large rooms, divided in the only logical way: by the relative orientations of the ischia and pubes. The Hall of the Sauriscia had beautifully-mounted samples of theropods and full-sized sauropods, raptors were shown adjacent to transitional birds and early birds, so you could trace the (now obvious) evolution from dinosaur to bird.

In the Hall of the Ornithiscia, there was a great collection of armoured, spiked, and incomplete but compelling plant-eaters.

But it wasn’t all dinosaurs:

The Permian synapsid Dimetredon (a distant antecedent of reptiles and mammals)

Armoured mammals

Mammals from the Age of “Holy Freaking Tusks”

Placoderms (early jawed fish)

Turtles (which Tig regard with significant skepticism)

flying reptiles (there were no flying dinosaurs, right?)

 And a life-sized blue whale to put things into perspective:

We only saw about a third of the museum, even than at a pace faster than ideal. We only saw a third of the gift shops! Really, we should have spent two days in this museum, but there was much more to see across the park…

NYC Day 2.2 - Occupations

At the end of the HighLine, we hopped on a subway down to the Financial District.

nice address...

Not sure if you heard, but there has been this little protest-like thingy going on in New York City for a while. Well, now that I am writing this, apparently “the Authorities” have broken up and dispersed the protest, but trust me, we were there at Occupy Wall Street a few days before the Man had to go and harsh their buzz.

Zuccotti Park is located just off of Wall Street, actually closer to the 9/11 Memorial than to the New York Stock Exchange at the heart of Wall Street. The location, however, provides space for quite the detailed camp-out. From the outside it looked like complete chaos.

Walking through, you see a complex community, with everything from a medical tent to a community kitchen. Guys on bikes generating electricity, women knitting mittens, pretty much anything you might want in a small community.

Note, when the break up of OWS happened the next week, there was much talk about the need to remove the “huge piles of garbage” for human health and decency reasons. We saw no piles of garbage, but a well-organized recycling and composing system at the community kitchen (see above). Come to think of it, it was the only place in New York City where we didn’t see large piles of garbage. You see, there aren’t any back alleys on Manhattan, and no dumpsters, so every night, people take all the garbage out of the big buildings they live and work in, and pile it up on the curb – black bags of garbage are to New York what poodle poo is to Paris.

This pile of trash was in the Upper West Side, where the 1% live.

There was a stage where people were making speeches and singing protest songs, and from which the daily General Assembly makes organizational and logistical decisions. Although the General Assembly, with it’s human megaphones and waving fingers to express concurrence has been treated with derision by the American Media, from Fox News to the Daily Show, but I recognized it immediately. Although I don’t think the OWS organizers meant it this way, but their General Assembly is remarkably like the system that the Athenians used for societal decision making, the system that was the first to be called “democracy”. (Thank You, Brian D-W, for giving me the book from which I learned about the origins of Democracy).

After walking past the 9/11 Memorial, which was a strange amalgam of despair and American Exceptionalism, completely lacking thoughtful introspection or free expression, it was inspiring to walk around the edge of OWS, and hear the conversations going on. As passers-by provided support or criticism of the OWS residents, I never heard anger or shouting, but I heard snippets of many interesting discussions, the sharing of ideas, the challenging of dogma.

How can you not be inspired by a volunteer doctor standing there offering free Flu Shots to all passers-by, standing right next to guy holding a sign that says “Every vaccine contains either neurotoxin, carcinogen or sterilization agent”, and both were smiling, just getting their message out:

(you gotta click that one to zoom in and read…)

So we wandered through the shadowy tunnels of the Financial District, and had a few pints at a nice Wall Street Irish Pub, and on the way back to the subway, we ran into the bull that started this all.

For those out of the loop, the bull represents the growth of wealth by rising markets possible under a free market system. Apropos that the bull was surrounded by protective fences. That is what the OWS movement is all about: assuring those fences are protecting passers-by from the bull more than protecting the bull from passers-by.

Back up in Times Square we went to a crazy sports bar to watch the Canucks lay a beating on the New York Islanders. No-one seemed to care, as one of New York’s Football teams was losing on the other channel.

NYC Day 2.1 - Rivers and Greenways

Quick game of “which of these is not like the others”:
Large Double-Double, Sausage B.E.L.T, USA Today?

"Bake Shop!?!"

Day two we woke up all bright-tailed and bushy-eyed after what may have been too many cocktails the previous night… to get on a boat tour around the southern half of Manhattan. We sailed down the Hudson from Chelsea

…past the World Financial Centre and the new “freedom tower” (ugh)

…and some big ol’ statue they have out in the harbour, which Tig is helpfully pointing out here for the confused boat-load of tourists:

Then up the East River to see Wall Street from the outside:

The UN building (under repair)

Some dude fishing in the East River, from the New York Sanitation Department pier (YIKES!)

...and some bridges of note.

Our morning sail dropped us very close to the north end of the HighLine, and it was a beautiful sunny day to walk a linear park, as several thousand others apparently thought.

For those who don’t subscribe to Urban Planning Digest, the Highline is a new linear park that stretches through the recently-gentrified Chelsea neighbourhood on the lower west side of Manhattan. What makes it unique is it’s location: upon a 2km stretch of elevated railway that had been abandoned and fell into disrepair. When the City wanted to tear down the derelict riveted steel elevated guide way a decade ago, community activists fought to preserve it and develop it into public space. The result is an unexpected and unique Green Space in the sky,

In most places, the rails are still in place and emerge at times between the plantings of native grasses, trees and bushes, that provide shade and habitat for birds and bugs in a neighbourhood that has been warehouses and pavement for 100 years.

All along the route there are great features:

A flat “fountain” with cool water flowing from a cat-tail and moss garden across
some permeable pavement, and a few chaise-lounge to relax in

Picnic and meeting areas

Interesting paving and planting designs;

An amphitheatre where the streets of New York are the only thing on stage

Covered areas for Art showings and Artists

All remarkably integrated into the neighbourhood while rising above it.

What was great - inspirational - to see was how many people were on the trail on a sunny afternoon, and how every entrance and exit from the park was surrounded by cafes, businesses, and galleries. Clearly, this reclaiming of urban infrastructure has been a success for the community group that raised donations to build it, and for the neighbourhood that hosts it.