New York City

Rooftop Water Towers

2011-12-01T13:50:00.000-08:00

Seen on rooftops all over the city, these water storage vessels last about 30 years. The yellow cedar wood strips are held together with steel bands, and the water inside swells the wood for a leak-proof fit. The wood insulates the water well enough to keep it from freezing in winter. Buildings taller than five stories need to have water pumped to the upper floors.

In the 19th century, NYC required that all buildings higher than six stories be equipped with a rooftop water tower. This was necessary to prevent the need for excessively high pressures at lower elevations, which could burst pipes. In modern times, the towers have become fashionable in some circles. As of 2006, the neighborhood of Tribeca requires water towers on all buildings, whether or not they are being used.

Two companies in New York build water towers, both of which are family businesses in operation since the 19th century. The original water tower builders were barrel makers who expanded their craft to meet a modern need as buildings in the city grew taller in height.

The rooftop water towers store 5,000-10,000 gallons of water until it is needed in the building below. The upper portion of water is skimmed off the top for everyday use while the water in the bottom of the tower is held in reserve to fight a fire. When the water drops below a certain level, a switch or valve activates activate a pump or open a public water line to refill the water tower.

Lincoln Restaurant and Lawn

2010-12-30T04:34:00.000-08:00

How many restaurants do you know of where you can walk on the roof? Lincoln, the ultra expensive new stand alone restaurant at Lincoln Center (average check for a glass of wine and two courses is $120 per person), offers a steeply angled 10,000-square-foot rooftop swath of green for picnics and sunning. I’m not making this up.

The 147-by-70-foot lawn offers much needed green space to the Lincoln Center campus, which has undergone a recent transformation with a price tag of more than a billion dollars. That’s billion with a “B.” They hired the firm behind the Bellagio fountains in Vegas to rework the Lincoln Center plaza fountain, and new wide steps leading up from Broadway have risers that have LCD lights spelling out promotions.

The Henry Moore sculptures, reflecting pool and grass-roofed restaurant, looking toward the Juilliard School. A corner of Avery Fisher Hall is on the right.

The southwest edge of the restaurant roof is at plaza level, but ascends up nine grassy steps to 23 feet in height. The tall grass surface (90 percent fescue, 10 percent Kentucky bluegrass) is energy-saving, temperature-regulating, and storm-water-absorbing. The restaurant structure straddles the steps that connect Avery Fisher Hall and the Vivian Beaumont Theater, descending from the plaza level down to West 65th Street, facing a reworked Juilliard building and Alice Tully Hall.

The scene from an upper floor of the Juilliard Building looking across W. 65th St. toward the Met. Avery Fisher Hall is to the left, the Vivian Beaumont Theater to the right.

The grass roof lies just a few feet above the restaurant's wood slat ceiling (shown below right)

Grand Central Terminal Laser Light Show

2010-12-01T15:55:00.000-08:00

See a spectacular kaleidoscope light show displayed against the famous Zodiac ceiling, walls and pillars of Grand Central Terminal, the world's largest train station. The light show is a holiday tradition established in 1999 and is enough to stop even the most frazzled and jaded commuters in their tracks.

To the strains of Duke Ellington’s “Take The A-Train,” lasers on the ceiling show two commuter trains arriving from opposite directions. The trains pull to a stop, and a reindeer leaps out of each one and crosses over to the other train. Then a laser beam traces the outline of one of the zodiac constellations painted on the ceiling. The crab (Cancer) leaps to life and becomes a train conductor, sidling down the center aisle of the car, punching the reindeer's ticket stubs with its claws.

Delighted tourists hold on to each other as they lean over backward to gaze at the overhead display. Another show starts. The familiar music of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite fills the enormous room. As “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” begins, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building sprout arms, bow to each other, and begin waltzing across the ceiling. The show ends with giant sprigs of mistletoe appearing over the heads of the commuters and tourists. Cell phones come out of purses and pockets as tiny flashes capture affectionate real-life kisses and lingering hugs by those who just watched the show. Ah – Christmas in New York City!

Main Concourse, from December 1, 2010 through January 1, 2011, every half hour between 11:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. daily. FREE!

Grand Central Terminal: 87 East 42nd Street
www.grandcentralterminal.com

D'Espresso Coffee Bar

2010-10-16T02:01:00.000-07:00

Turn your head to the right, and it all makes sense.

The next time you’re near the NY Public Library, pop into D’Espresso, a coffee bar with a decorative punch. Walls and ceiling are covered with tiles printed with photos of bookshelves, the wall behind the long banquette seating is clad in wood flooring, and a skylight behind the bar boasts pendant lighting mounted horizontally.

Deliciously disorienting.

D'Espresso: 317 Madison Avenue at 42nd St. 212-867-7141

Washington Square Park

2010-04-17T19:24:00.001-07:00

Washington Square Park is a nearly 10-acre public park that is a landmark in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village. An open space with a tradition of nonconformity, the park’s marble Arch and fountain areas have long been popular spots for both residents and tourists. Most of the buildings surrounding the park now belong to New York University, which rents the park for graduation ceremonies and uses the Arch as a symbol. Although NYU considers the park to be the quad of the school's campus, Washington Square remains a public park (click plan image to enlarge).

Located at the foot of Fifth Avenue, the park limits are defined by Waverly Place, West 4th Street, McDougal Street and University Place. In the early 1600s the native Americans who lived here were attacked by the Dutch, who drove them out. By the mid 1600s the Dutch farmers gave this land to slaves, thus freeing them, as a reward for protecting the area from Indian attacks. In 1797 the land, then not part of the city proper, was purchased by the New York Council for use as a public burial ground; during the yellow fever epidemics of the early 1800s, most of the victims were buried here, safely away from town, as a hygienic measure. To this day, the remains of more than 20,000 bodies rest under Washington Square. The cemetery was closed in 1825.

In 1826 the city leveled the area and laid out a public square to be used as a parade ground for use by volunteer militia companies. The streets surrounding the square became one of the city's most desirable residential areas by the 1830s, and the protected row of Greek Revival style row houses on the north side of the park remain from that era. By 1850 the parade ground had been reworked into a public park, and a fountain was added in 1852.

Inspired by Roman triumphal arches, the Washington Square arch, at the southern terminus of Fifth Avenue, celebrates the centennial of George Washington's inauguration. It replaced an 1889 arch, a temporary structure made of wood and stucco. Having met with overwhelming popular approval, McKim Mead & White's original design was rebuilt in marble in 1891, in the fashion of the famous Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Decorated with sculptures of Washington in both his civilian and military guises, this arch became the symbol of a new America devoted to the arts. In the first decades of the 20th century, the West Village became an increasingly bohemian neighborhood, and this arch became a site of artistic and social rebellion.

Many NYC residents are not aware that Fifth Avenue motor traffic passed under the arch until 1958. During the 2007-2009 renovation of the park, the fountain was realigned to be on an axis with Fifth Avenue and the Arch. Because public input was not sought or considered, this recent renovation created much acrimony between the city and area residents.

Gemma: cum grano salis

2010-02-19T08:06:00.000-08:00

Gemma Restaurant
212-505-9100; breakfast, lunch and dinner
335 Bowery at E. 3rd Street (the Bowery Hotel)

The best thing about this over-the-top trattoria is the decor. The worst thing is that you can’t make a reservation unless you’re a hotel guest. It’s noisy, packed with trendies and serves great pizza and roast chicken (be sure to order the zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta). And not too expensive. Check out the adjacent hotel lobby, described by a fellow blogger as "the phantom of the opera retires to a Tuscan villa." With a grain of salt, indeed.

The Breslin Bar & Restaurant

2010-02-15T05:32:00.000-08:00

The Breslin, inside the Ace Hotel, is a veritable pork festival.

Corner of Broadway & 29th Street
212-685-9600; reservations not accepted
100-seat restaurant serves breakfast (from 7:00a), lunch and dinner (until midnight); closed 4:00-5:30 pm daily
Bar (seats 40 or so) open until 4 a.m. daily
www.thebreslin.com

This is the place to go if you weigh about a hundred pounds and just can’t seem to gain weight. Cure guaranteed. From the same folks who brought us the famed and trend-setting Spotted Pig, the Breslin, named after the hotel that occupied this location for many years, is an extravagant gastro-pub that opened last December. The menu is a paean to pork (vegetarians will run screaming), but the hottest item seems to be the lamb burger with feta cheese and red onions, served on a cutting board with a side of thrice-fried french fries (chips, as listed on the very Brit menu) and cumin mayo.

Housed in a 12-story corner building (c. 1904), the restaurant echoes a British pub, with tavern green walls, dark tufted leather banquettes and unfinished wood floors. Coveted booths sport plaid curtains and red cubbies to charge phones and computers. Those who need a touch more privacy can close the curtains and press a button to request a server (a light goes on outside your booth to signal the wait staff). How cool is that?

From the bar, try a “pickle back” – a shot of whiskey with a pickle juice chaser. I swear I’m not making this up. If the weather is truly frightful, try the egg nog with rum on the bottom, calories be damned. A popular main dish? Pig’s foot for two. Bar snacks? Semi-shelled boiled peanuts fried in pork fat. I swear to God.

Tip: Come VERY early if you don’t want to wait hours and hours for a table. This place is beyond hip and so full of buzz you’ll need insect repellent.

Direct from Portland, and also off the lobby of the Ace Hotel, is the east coast’s only Stumptown Coffee. Check out the hats on the servers and admire the street-facing floor to ceiling windows trimmed in black lattice. Is this place handsome, or what? Doesn’t hurt that they roast their own beans in Brooklyn. As if you needed added enticement to come to the corner of Broadway and 29th Street, the popular lobby of the Ace Hotel, stuffed with leather Chesterfields and tartan plaid wing chairs, is a destination in and of itself. At last midtown is waking up from its decades-old doldrums.

De Lamar Mansion

2010-02-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

233 Madison Ave at 37th St. (northeast corner)

Joseph De Lamar’s Beaux-Arts mansion at Madison Avenue and 37th Street is now the property of the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland. One of the most opulent gilded age mansions surviving in New York City, the stone residence was designed in 1902 by Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert (1860-1952), a society architect whose stock in trade was extravagant private mansions; his list of clients included the Woolworths. The De Lamar house, distinguished by a particularly colossal French mansard roof, was awarded New York City landmark status in 1975.

De Lamar, born in Amsterdam in 1843, left home as a youthful stowaway, but went on to become a Dutch ship captain. He later settled in Martha’s Vineyard, where he operated a marine salvage business. By the 1870s he fell victim to Gold Rush fever and become a speculator in metals in Colorado, where he soon made a $20 million fortune, mostly in copper. He served one term in the Senate of the Territory of Idaho, and a southern Idaho ghost town, De Lamar, is named after him. By the 1890s he was one of the wealthiest men in the United States.

He relocated to New York City, and after a divorce from his wife, a direct descendant of John Quincy Adams, De Lamar moved to Europe to educate his young daughter and collect art in Paris. Upon returning to New York he lived with his daughter and eleven servants in his new French mansion from 1906 until his death from pneumonia at seventy five years of age, in 1918. Although aloof and taciturn in his professional demeanor, he was an avid yachtsman and the life of the party among the New York City social elite. He commissioned a private manor house, “Pembroke” located in Glen Cove, Long Island, also designed by C. P. H. Gilbert (demolished in 1968). See note at end of post.

By the time his fabulous Murray Hill residence was built, the neighborhood was past its prime, but he chose this location to taunt J. P. Morgan, who lived just one block south. De Lamar had approached Morgan on numerous occasions, seeking a business collaboration, but he had been rebuffed every time. To say that De Lamar’s house put Morgan’s to shame is extreme understatement. Madison Avenue, which did not open until 1836, was named both for the square where it starts and for former President James Madison, who died that year. This avenue was not included in the original 1811 plan of New York, which assumed that few people would want to live in the middle of Manhattan Island, far north of the commerce of the shoreline at Manhattan's southern tip.

The vastness of scale, its numerous parlors and elaborately designed and decorated rooms met all expectations for humiliating J. P. Morgan. The first floor housed an expansive dining room, library and a billiard room. The main oval staircase incorporated a fountain surrounded by exotic plants and marble figurines. The second floor boasted a ballroom, a concert hall, and an art gallery painted in Pompeiian red with Tiffany stained glass illuminated by electricity, which made this magnificent structure quite modern for its time (J. P. Morgan, founder of General Electric, had the first electrified private house in the city; electricity for Morgan was supplied by a power plant built in his garden by Thomas Edison). Above the fifth floor, behind a classical mansard roof, was a terrace which exists to the present day. Artist and decorator Louis Schaettle completed the interior design, including finely executed murals. It is amazing that so much opulence could be contained on a plot of land measuring only 50 by 100 feet, purchased for the then staggering sum of $250,000. De Lamar spent three times that amount to build his house.

An unusual feature was a large metal plate flush with the sidewalk along 37th Street. It is the roof of an elevator designed to lower a horse and carriage to the basement (later used for automobiles). These days it is used to receive freight and facilitate trash removal.

De Lamar’s obituary described him as a Wall Street “man of mystery” and mentioned that he was an accomplished organist. He left an estate worth at least $32 million. After a brief stint as offices of the American Bible Society, in 1923 the house became headquarters for the National Democratic Club for fifty years. The Polish government acquired the mansion in 1973 and has restored it from top to bottom.

The public may visit the extravagant second floor rooms for lectures and concerts sponsored by the Polish government. A concert series to inaugurate the Chopin Year Celebration begins with a piano and cello recital February 23, 2010. Click the following link for particulars and subsequent events.

www.polishconsulateny.org/index.php?p=267

Note: Mr. De Lamar had one of the country’s finest residence pipe organs installed on the staircase landing at Pembroke, his Long Island waterfront estate in Glen Cove; he was himself an accomplished organist, a fact mentioned in his obituary published by the Boston Globe. In 1920 this 50-room mansion, also designed by Gilbert, was sold by De Lamar’s daughter to Marcus Loew, a founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer. It was here that Elizabeth Taylor honeymooned with Richard Burton. De Lamar’s 47-acre Long Island estate had a palm court with a cave and waterfall, and all its "significant" windows were of stained-glass designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The basement contained a movie theater, squash court and shooting range. The house was demolished in 1968 by an owner who thought it too unwieldy; he built a new, much smaller house on the property.

Murray Hill Carriage House

2010-01-15T10:25:00.000-08:00

Click photo to enlarge.

149 East 38th Street (between Lexington and Third Ave.)

This two-story stable building was constructed in 1902 for William R. H. Martin, a businessman and real estate developer active in the Murray Hill section of the city. Architect Ralph S. Townsend designed this small building in a distinctive Dutch Revival style, with an elaborate stepped gable and oversized white granite quoins and voussoirs, which set off the Flemish brickwork. Oval inset panels of horse heads allude to the building's original function, while a bulldog near the top of the gable adds a whimsical element.

The stable was purchased in 1907 by George S. Bowdoin, who lived nearby at Park Avenue and East 36th Street. Bowdoin was a partner in the banking firm of J. P. Morgan and Co. and lived close to Morgan's residence, which was at the corner of 36th Street and Madison Avenue. In an arrangement typical of private carriage houses, Bowdoin's stable housed his horses and carriage on the ground floor, and had living quarters for the coachman on the upper floor. Bowdoin's daughter Edith inherited the building from her father, had it converted to a garage in 1918, and held ownership until 1944. As a rare surviving stable structure in Manhattan, this building serves as a reminder of the period of New York’s history when horses were an important part of daily life and their care and housing had to be taken into consideration; when this carriage house was built, there were approximately 4,500 stables in the city, accommodating more than 70,000 horses.

At the time the carriage house received historic landmark status in 1997, it served as a single family residence. Now owned by the Gabarron Foundation Center for the Arts since 2002, this unique space serves as a meeting place for organizations, corporations, government and individuals. The sun-lit contemporary interior is in striking contrast to the period facade. Recent bookings at the carriage house include product launches, culinary events, cocktail receptions, fashion shows, film shootings, private dinners, weddings, lectures and seminars. When not leased for special events, the Gabarron Foundation promotes Spanish and Latin American culture by producing public concerts, art exhibits, lectures, tastings and film screenings.

www.gabarronfoundation.org/Default.aspx?tabid=472

Trivia: A few doors down, at 133 E. 38th St., detective novelist Dashiell Hammett lived at this address in 1931, when he was writing The Thin Man. Across the street, near the corner of Third Ave., Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, lived at No. 166 from 1901-12.

Note: While many carriage houses faced the street, the vast majority were located in mews, off an alley (street front property being too valuable for a carriage house). Of course, most of the present day survivors have been converted into coveted private homes, a pleasant alternative to high rise living. A notable example is Sniffen Court (photo below), off 36th Street in Murray Hill, also between Lexington and 3rd Ave., where the former Civil-War era stables, designed by architect John Sniffen, were converted to ten residences during the 1920s. These homes are in high demand. Until she died while working in her Sniffen court studio, Malvina Hoffman (1887-1966), a New York City born student of Rodin who became an important American sculptress, kept a salon here, at the far end of the alley, where a hand pump once supplied water for the thirsty horses; Hoffman’s decorative plaques of Greek horsemen can still be seen flanking either side of the former studio's entry (bottom photo). Another American female sculptor, Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (1880-1980), also a student of Rodin, lived at Sniffen Court until 1937. The homes are privately owned, except for two that have entrances directly on 36th Street: The Amateur Comedy Club (now a private membership club not open to the public) and the exclusive showroom of habersasher Henry Jacobson (to the left of the gate). The Sniffen Court Dramatic Society, an amateur theater group, used to perform plays in a theater located within the court.

Trivia: the cover for the Doors 1967 "Strange Days" album was shot here. But you knew that.

The Colony Club

2010-01-10T21:59:00.000-08:00

In 1903 Mrs. J. Borden Harriman (president), along with other wealthy women, including treasurer Anne Morgan, daughter of J. P. Morgan, raised the astounding sum of $500,000 and commissioned Stanford White, of the leading architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, to build a home for their newly formed women’s social club, known as the Colony Club. This structure, located on the west side of Madison Avenue just north of 30th Street and built between 1904-1907, was modeled on 18th-century houses in Annapolis, Maryland. The landmarked interiors, which still exist, were created by Stanford White's long-time friend Elsie de Wolfe, a former actress who had recently opened an interior-design business; her companion, theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury, was one of the club's founders. Wolfe’s adept completion of this commission established her financially successful career as a society decorator. De Wolfe, who became known as America's first decorator, lived in the club during construction, designing interiors ranging from French reproduction to American neo-Colonial styles.

Miss de Wolfe’s later marriage to diplomat Sir Charles Mendl in 1926 (she was sixty-one and became "Lady Mendl") was front page news in the New York Times, which revealed that “the intended marriage comes as a great surprise to her friends.” Since 1892 she had been living openly in a lesbian relationship. As the Times stated, “When in New York, she makes her home with Miss Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place.”

When the Colony Club opened in 1907, the interiors established her reputation overnight. Instead of imitating the dark, heavy interiors of most men’s clubs, de Wolfe introduced a casual, feminine style making liberal use of glazed chintz (immediately making her “the Chintz Lady”), tiled floors, light draperies, pale walls, wicker chairs, clever vanity tables and the first of her many trellised rooms. Among her innovations was the installation of ceramic stoves in lieu of fireplaces. The astonished reaction of the members to her iconic indoor garden pavilion (photo below) put de Wolfe’s name on many lips and led to lucrative commissions across the country. Her contract with Henry Clay Frick, which paid commissions on every item she selected, made her a rich woman. Later clients included Cole Porter, Condé Nast and the Duchess of Windsor.

The Federal Revival style building has unusual header-bond brickwork applied in what is known as a diaper pattern (click top photo to enlarge). Sold after the club moved to larger quarters on Park Avenue, the structure serves today as the east coast headquarters of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, housed at this location since 1963. The building was awarded Landmark Status by the City of New York in 1966.

Though the original purpose of the club was to provide athletic facilities, its elite status cemented the social standing of the original 500 subscribers when it opened in 1907. The New York Times published a complete membership roster on the first anniversary of the club. Included were four Vanderbilts, four Whitneys, Mrs. John Jacob Astor and Mrs. Walter Damrosch (her father, Republican politician James Blaine, ran for president of the United States against Grover Cleveland). The ground floor had receiving rooms, and the second floor contained a double-height gymnasium with a running track on the balcony, and an elegant French-style ballroom at the front, with a musicians’ balcony above. In the basement was a swimming pool, which still exists, surrounded by white marble walls and floors, with an illuminated trellised ceiling.

However, there arose a significant problem within a month of the club’s opening. A law prohibiting liquor licenses within 200 feet of a church, without the church's consent, had not been taken into account. Across the street was Madison Avenue Baptist Church, which refused to grant such permission, reflecting its denomination’s strong stance on temperance. While club officers denied that the club even served alcohol, stating that members brought in their own, the presence of a wine room in the basement ran counter to that claim. Further, a disgruntled employee leaked receipts and other documents to the press, including a menu reading, “All wines will be charged by the bottle.” In fact, the club was not able to get a liquor license until it moved north to larger quarters on Park Avenue (photo below).

The club eventually replaced most of its women employees with men, because, as the New York Times reported, “A club officer said that the female employees put themselves on an equal plane with the members and talked too much.”

When vacated by the Colony Club, the original building soon became a WWI hospital, then a club for Catholic girls and later an arts center. When the American Academy of Dramatic Arts moved in, it converted the gym and ballroom to theaters, but made few other major changes. They have recently repaired and cleaned the exterior, and original custom lighting fixtures remain intact. Original mirrored walls also remain unaltered. Fortunately, the limited financial resources of the owners have prevented disposing of original decor and architectural elements. For instance, when the academy considered installing modern windows, its contractor priced new windows at $9,000 each, whereas repairing the original ones cost only $3,000 per window. Also, students do not live in the building, which decreases wear and tear associated with most college structures.

The Academy in New York was founded in 1884 to train actors for the stage, becoming the first school in the United States to offer a professional education in the acting field. Numerous students of the Academy have gone on to distinguished careers throughout the entertainment industry, receiving awards and nominations for Tonys, Oscars and Emmys. Graduates include Lauren Bacall, Anne Bancroft, John Cassavetes, Hume Cronyn, Cecil. B. DeMille, Brad Davis, Danny DeVito, Kirk Douglas, Christine Ebersole, Ruth Gordon, Anne Hathaway, Florence Henderson, Grace Kelly, Agnes Moorehead, William Powell, Robert Redford, Edward G. Robinson, Rosalind Russell, Gene Tierney and Spencer Tracy.

Museum Mile

2009-12-15T03:17:00.000-08:00

The upper east side is home to a large clutch of museums, but these three facing Fifth Avenue make an excellent all-day museum outing, a great plan for a rainy day. Try to have lunch at Neue Galerie's Café Sabarsky.

Solomon Guggenheim Museum (5th Ave. at 89th St.)
$18 adults; $15 seniors 65+
Daily 10:00a-5:45p (except late Sat closing 7:45p)
Spend some time outside to marvel at the corkscrew spiral architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Celebrating its 50th Anniversary, this museum offers landmark works of modern art. The distinctive building, Frank Lloyd Wright's last major work, opened in October, 1959, six months after the architect’s death; Wright labored over the project for 15 years, and it was already "retro modern" when finally built, considering that construction took place at the same time as Lincoln Center.

The museum contains a renowned collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, modern and contemporary art. Internally, the viewing gallery forms a gentle spiral from the main level up to the top of the building, which is wider than the bottom, an unusual feature. Paintings are displayed along the walls of the spiral and also in exhibition space found at annex levels along the way. In 1992, the building was supplemented by an adjoining rectangular tower, taller than the original spiral (see photo at top of post). A large circular skylight illuminates the central atrium of the main building, casting deep shadows onto the exhibit areas, unfortunately. Many of the living artists represented in the museum's collection objected to having their works illuminated by artificial light. At the time of this post, much of the museum is closed to the public as a major retrospective on the works of Frank Lloyd Wright is being installed.

Dining options include the just-opened restaurant/bar simply called “The Wright.”
The Wright Restaurant (lunch 11:30a-3:30p, dinner 5:30p-11:00p; Sunday brunch 11:00a-5:00p)
The Wright Bar (appetizers/sandwiches 11:30a-5:00p)
Café 3 (on third floor) sandwiches/pastries with a view of Central Park (10:30a-3:00p)

Neue Galerie (5th ave. at 86th St.)
Austrian & German art circa 1900
$15 Adults; $10 seniors 65+; Building is the former home of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III
11:00a-6:00p (closed Tue/Wed) Complimentary coat check

Early 20th century Austrian paintings and decorative art (2nd floor). Be sure to view Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer
Early 20th century German art (third floor)

Café Sabarsky Thu-Fri-Sat-Sun 9:00a-9:00p; Mon &Wed 9:00a-6:00p (separate entrance)
Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner “Echt Viennese” menu; exceptional pastries

Metropolitan Museum of Art (5th Ave. at 82nd St.)
A pay-what-you-wish museum (but $20 per adult recommended). If you can visit only one New York City Museum, this is the one that can't be missed.

Fri/Sat: 9:30a–9:00p (cafeteria open 11:30a-7:00p)
Sun: 9:30a–5:30p (cafeteria open 11:30a-4:30p)
Mon holidays (such as MLK Day): 9:30a–5:30p (cafeteria open 11:30a-4:30p)

Other dining venues at the Met:
Petrie Café and Wine Bar (a la carte menu; large windows overlook Central Park)
Fri/Sat from 9:30a; last seating 8:30p
Sun 9:30a-4:30p
Daily afternoon tea begins at 2:30p ($24 per person)
Reservations (dinner & brunch only) 212-570-3964

Great Hall Balcony Bar (live classical music)
Fri/Sat only 4:00p-8:30p (last call 8:00)
Wine/beer/cocktails & appetizers

New American Wing Café
Fri/Sat 11:00a-8:30p
Sun 11:00a-4:30p
Soups/salads/sandwiches/desserts

Lincoln Center Exhibit: Celebrating 50 Years

2009-11-30T20:33:00.000-08:00

LINCOLN CENTER: CELEBRATING 50 YEARS
OCTOBER 15, 2009 - JANUARY 16, 2010

After nearly five decades of artistic excellence and service, Lincoln Center has embarked upon a major transformation initiative to fully modernize its concert halls and public spaces, renew its 16-acre urban campus, and reinforce its vitality. The complex, bordered by Columbus (9th Ave.), 62nd St., Amsterdam (10th Ave.), 66th St. and Broadway, includes the Juilliard School and Damrosch Park in addition to fines arts spaces (Jazz at Lincoln Center is south of the main campus, at 60th St and Broadway, Columbus Circle). Thirteen arts organizations are in residence at Lincoln Center.

To that end, the first exhibition to focus on the evolution and influence of America’s first performing arts center, “Lincoln Center: Celebrating 50 Years” features a collection of some 400 historic and contemporary objects: photographs, correspondence, costumes, set pieces, props and video recordings.

Images and memorabilia from the May 14, 1959 groundbreaking ceremony, including a signed photograph of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the site as well as the shovel he wielded at the event, are among the items on display. A selection of architectural renderings and photographed models offer a full look at Lincoln Center’s architecture and planning from the original vision of the late 1950s to the current revitalization projects now underway. Rare performance images, video excerpts and personal correspondences are on display, including Leonard Bernstein, Beverly Sills, Julius Rudel, John D. Rockefeller, George Balanchine, Pierre Boulez, Rudolph Bing, Placido Domingo, Leontyne Price, Luciano Pavarotti, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Wynton Marsalis and Jessye Norman, among many others.

The landmark performances and commissions that have come to define Lincoln Center as one of the world’s leading performing arts centers are documented in photographs and set pieces as well as signed scores, programs, memorabilia and selections of costumes and set designs. Behind-the-scenes photographs, video clips and documents illuminate Lincoln Center’s historic and continuing dedication to innovative technology. From its pioneering role in introducing opera super-titles to its award winning broadcast series Live From Lincoln Center and The Met: Live in HD, Lincoln Center’s pursuit of state-of-the-art technology has been and continues to be a vital ingredient in Lincoln Center’s defining synthesis of innovation and tradition.

Lincoln Center’s strong commitment to arts education is also highlighted. Photographs of artists who trained and studied at Lincoln Center include a youthful Martin Scorsese (winner at the Film Society’s first National Student Film Festival in 1965), a young Darci Kistler in class at the School of American Ballet with teacher Suki Schorer, as well as Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone during their Juilliard years. Also on view are student art work and letters as well a listing of musical cues for a 1962 Young People’s Concert notated front and back with Leonard Bernstein’s own edits.

The Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center is located at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza (between the Metropolitan Opera House and the Vivian Beaumont Theater; see map below). Exhibition hours through January 16, 2010, are Monday and Thursday from 12:00 p.m. to 8 p.m.; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11:00 a.m. to 6 p.m.; and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.; closed Sundays and holidays. Admission is free. For exhibition information, call 212.870.1630 or visit the Library’s website at www.nypl.org/lpa.

On October 1, 2009, the Lincoln Center Revson Fountain, the centerpiece of Josie Robertson Plaza, returned to a fully functioning state. WET Design, the company responsible for the landmark fountain display at Bellagio Las Vegas, redesigned the Philip Johnson original fountain. A ring of water jets that can rise 12 feet high “dances” at various heights and configurations. High pressure water cannons shoot columns of (recycled!) water up to 40 feet into the air.

King Cole Bar at St. Regis Hotel

2009-10-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

King Cole Bar
After a $100 million restoration, New York's St. Regis Hotel is just as much of an old-school New York icon as it’s always been. Pass by Italian marble, gilded moldings and a gleaming chandelier in the hotel's lobby to the King Cole Bar, which houses a famous 1906 Maxfield Parrish Art Nouveau mural, complete with "fiddlers three." Mixological lore has it that the so-called "Red Snapper" drink came over from Harry's New York Bar in Paris and eventually morphed into the Bloody Mary, King Cole's signature cocktail. Beyond this claim to fame, this is the place for making good impressions and stimulating conversation, and even if you’re capable of neither, be heartened that the lighting will flatter you, the beer nuts are the best you’ll ever have (almonds, macadamia nuts and green wasabi peas are on offer), and your top-shelf liquor cocktail will be stiff (as will be the bar tab – trust me on this; about $125 for 4 cocktails including tax and tip). The scene can be subdued and tinkling or downright hectic at peak hours, since this is a rather small space. If you're lucky enough to secure a table at the banquette, settle in and sip slowly as the Old Guard and the Well-Maintained parade in and out. They serve the best Cobb salad I've ever had in my life.

On my latest visit I noticed a lot of “older” gentlemen in bespoke tailored suits flirting with/being courted by much younger unaccompanied women, if you get my drift. Dress Code: No shorts or sneakers after 5pm. No hats at any time. Don't come here if you can't make an entrance looking like one of the monied set; you'll spoil the ambiance.

If "mere alcohol doesn't thrill you at all," a celebrated afternoon tea is served in the hotel’s Astor Court room to the accompaniment of the requisite harpist.

The St. Regis is a Starwood hotel property located at 2 East 55th Street (at 5th Avenue) in mid-town Manhattan. Built in 1904 by (Colonel) John Jacob Astor IV, the great grandson of the country’s first multi-millionaire, the St. Regis is a Beaux Arts landmark. When it was built, this was the tallest hotel in the city.

The front desk and lobby are all marble and gilt (check out the ceiling frescoes), and even the standard guest rooms boast elaborate chandeliers (and a nightly rate of $850 or so; Internet access is extra, and you’ll have to upgrade from a basic room [lowly shower/tub combinations] if you want a genuine soaking tub). The hotel’s 24-hour butlers wear tails and white gloves and anachronistic charm on their sleeves, but they can also help with any and all modern conundrums, such as hooking up your iPod to play through your room’s surround sound system (in case you left the kids at home). Reassuring, no? The lobby seating areas boast elaborate period paneling and carved marble fireplaces, just like home. In a demonstration of silly pretension, door handles in some of the public spaces are marked with brass rectangles in French, so you’d better know a “tirez” from a “poussez.” I’m not kidding.

Chrysler Building

2009-06-06T20:22:00.000-07:00

The Chrysler Building – 405 Lexington Avenue at 42nd Street – was built in 1928-1930 by Walter P. Chrysler. Its design was a 77-story tall triumph of Art Deco, and it was one of the first skyscrapers to make a major use of metal in its construction and adornment. Many consider it the most important Art Deco building in the world.

Until his departure in 1920, Walter P. Chrysler had been vice-president of General Motors in charge of operations and president of their Buick division. Five years later he had bought out the Maxwell Automobile Corporation and reorganized it into the Chrysler Corporation. In 1927 he bought the much larger rival Dodge Brothers Company and renamed it the Dodge Division of Chrysler.

Heady from that success, Walter P.Chrysler teamed up with architect William Van Alen for the design and construction of an office skyscraper. Van Alen was essentially given a blank check to come up with a design to fit the car magnate's ambition.

Architects Van Alen and H. Craig Severance, the architect of the Bank of Manhattan's building at 40 Wall Street, had been former partners but were now ardent rivals – both wanted to build the tallest building in the world. Severance had just finished the structural work on his Bank of Manhattan building by a winning margin of less than one meter, so Van Alen revealed his trump card on October 23, 1929, just one day before the stock market made its first plunge. To hide the last design revision to incorporate a needle-like top, the pieces for the 27-ton vertex were hoisted to the 65th floor, assembled inside the spire and, with the help of a derrick, raised that day in just one and a half hours to add another 37.5 meters to the building's height – a total of 1,048 feet – exceeding the Eiffel Tower (then the tallest structure in the world). It was the first building ever to exceed 1,000 feet in height. However, four months later the rapidly ascending Empire State Building caught up and overtook the Chrysler Building’s height. Nevertheless, it remains the world’s tallest brick building.

Elevator door detail:

Completed at a cost of $20 million, the Chrysler Building was officially opened on May 27, 1930, and Van Alen was already in trouble. He was accused of taking bribes from contractors and Chrysler refused to pay his full percentage-based fee. Van Alen hadn't made it any easier for himself by not making a written contract with Chrysler for the design commission. Although Van Alen would later reach immortality with this building, he had lost his good reputation as an architect and never worked on a notable commission again. Moreover, the building was scorned by critics, who saw it merely as an oversized advertisement for Chrysler with little architectural merit.

The building is clad in white brick and dark gray brickwork is used as horizontal decoration to enhance the window rows. The eccentric crescent-shaped steps of the spire are made of chrome-nickel steel as a stylized sunburst motif, and underneath it immense steel chimeras depicting American eagles, which stare over the city. The building has a lot of ornamentation that is based on features that were being used on Chrysler cars of the day. The corners of the sixty first floor are graced with eagles, replicas of the 1929 Chrysler hood ornaments. At the thirty first story, the corner ornamentations are replicas of 1929 Chrysler radiator caps (see photo below).

Although Walter Chrysler had his personal office here for a number of years, contrary to popular belief, this building was not built or financed by the Chrysler Corporation. Instead, it was a personal project of Walter Chrysler to be given as a business venture for his sons, Walter Jr. and Jack, who were not interested in the automobile business.

The three story high, upwards tapering entrance lobby has a triangular form, with entrances from three sides, Lexington Avenue, 42nd and 43rd Streets. The lobby is lavishly decorated with red Moroccan marble walls, sienna-colored travertine floor and onyx, blue marble and steel in Art Deco compositions. The ceiling mural, the largest in the world at its completion, was painted by Edward Trumbull and praises the modern-day technical progress – and of course the building itself and its builders at work. The lobby was refurbished in 1978 by JCS Design Assocs. and Joseph Pell Lombardi.

Unsurprisingly, a street level showroom for the Chrysler line of automobiles was incorporated in 1936 by Reinhard & Hofmeister. All of the building's 32 elevators are lined in a different pattern of wooden paneling; eight varieties of wood from all over the world were used in the elevator decor. The doors are of a fantastic design that perhaps better than anything indicates the great influence of ancient Egyptian designs on the birth of Art Deco – the burst of Deco's themes and the uncovering of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 being a good coincidence.

Inside the metal pyramid, on the building's top floors, a duplex luxury apartment with triangular windows was built for Walter Chrysler's use, completed with a walk-in fireplace. During the Prohibition, the fashionable Art Deco-style Cloud Club at the top of the building, on floors 65 and 66, was an exclusive male club with a jazzy atmosphere for the social elite. A large mural on the club wall depicted the city as seen from the clouds. On the 71st floor, an observatory deck – living its heyday from August 1930 until the opening of Empire State's observatory eight months later – sported a ceiling mural depicting the night sky. The club and the observatory deck have been closed for decades, and all the interior decor of those spaces was removed at the request of the current tenants.

A recent owner of the building, Jerry Speyer (who co-owns Rockefeller Center) bought the building, together with the neighboring Chrysler Building East, for an estimated $220 million in 1997, with an additional $100 million worth of repairs waiting to be carried out. The most recent transaction was in July, 2008, when the government of Abu Dhabi bought a 75 percent stake in the landmark building for $800 million.

The Chrysler Building was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1978. In 2007, The Chrysler Building was ranked #9 on the American Institute of Architechts “150 America's Favorite Architecture” list. National Historic Register #76001237.

Trivia: Chrysler ran Buick successfully for the full term of his contract, but resigned his position in 1919 when the term had been fulfilled (upon his departure, Chrysler was paid $10 million for his GM stock). Walter Chrysler had started at Buick in 1911 for $6,000 a year, and left one of the richest men in America.

Chrysler was then hired to attempt a turnaround by bankers who foresaw the loss of their investment in Willys-Overland Motor Company in Toledo, Ohio. He demanded, and got, a salary of US$1 million a year for 2 years, an astonishing amount at that time. When Chrysler left Willys in 1921 after an unsuccessful attempt to wrest control from John Willys, he acquired a controlling interest in the ailing Maxwell Motor Company. Chrysler phased out Maxwell and absorbed it into his new firm, the Chrysler Corporation, in 1925. In addition to his namesake car company, Plymouth and DeSoto marques were created, and in 1928 Chrysler purchased Dodge. He personally financed the construction of the Chrysler Building in New York City. In 1929, Walter Chrysler was named Time Magazine's Man of the Year.

Boathouse Restaurant in Central Park

2009-06-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

The Boathouse Restaurant
East 72nd St. & Park Drive North
(within Central Park, west of the Metropolitan Museum)
212.517.2233
Mon thru Fri: Lunch noon-4:00p; Dinner (Apr-Nov) 5:30-9:30 (last seating)
Sat and Sun: Brunch 9:30a-4:00p; Dinner (Apr-Nov) 6:00p-9:30 (last seating)

Located at the northeastern tip of the Lake, the Loeb Boathouse houses the Boathouse Restaurant, a famous icon of Central Park. Overlooking the lake, it is a charming place to have lunch on a pleasant afternoon (or dinner April through November). Many diners prefer the deck, where they can watch the rowboats and occasional gondola drift by.

Year-round, a complimentary trolley picks up patrons from a stop at Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street and drops them off directly at the boathouse (between Nov. 4 and Apr. 14, the trolley runs only Sat., Sun., and holidays). Weekdays from 3pm to 7pm (when vehicles are permitted in the park) patrons can use the restaurant parking lot. At all other times, diners may use the Metropolitan Museum garage at 80th Street and Fifth Avenue and taking the free Boathouse Trolley to and from the restaurant. The garage is open 24 hours.

Note: Vehicles are permitted in Central Park only Monday through Friday from 7-10am and from 3-7pm. Whether by car or by foot, enter the park at Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street and follow the traffic road to the right. It is a very pleasant walk to the restaurant and takes approximately 5-6 minutes.

Chanin Building - Art Deco Masterpiece

2009-06-06T05:15:00.001-07:00

Chanin Building
122 East 42nd Street at Lexington Avenue

Irwin Chanin was an architect and real estate developer who had visited Paris in 1925, taking in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. He was so inspired when he returned that he immediately set out to incorporate these forms and motifs in his current projects. Not yet a registered architect, he worked with the firm of Sloan and Robertson to fashion his crowning achievement, the Chanin Building, which notably rose 56 floors in 1927 between the extant Grand Central Terminal and the future Chrysler Building. Its construction cost exceeded $14 million at the time, and the entire structure was erected in just 205 days.

The Chanin Building represents a turn away from the Beaux Arts style of Grand Central Terminal towards a more humanistic and modern imagery appropriate to the industrial age. In particular, the facade illustrates the introduction of colored glass, stone and metal on the exterior of tall buildings. Materials such as bronze, marble and terra-cotta are used in inventive and exuberant ways. Inside the lobby, the walls are decorated with reliefs by set-designer Jacques Delamarre and Renee Chambellan that represent "The City of Opportunity" and "The Active Life of the Individual," the latter a reference to Irwin Chanin's own rise from childhood poverty to power and wealth.

Above the base, the building's steel frame is clad in buff brick and terra cotta and is set back (starting at the 22nd floor) in conformance with the 1916 Zoning Law. At the top, it is capped by a dramatic crenelated feature that was once illuminated at night. To attract tenants, Chanin provided centralized services at the base of the building including an underground connection to Grand Central Terminal and ground-floor retail spaces.

The detail on this office building is some of the most exquisite French-inspired Art-Deco ornament ever created in New York. On the outside is a band of stylized terra-cotta with curving and angular leaf-like forms, and a frieze over the storefronts that was meant both to entertain and educate. It depicts the theory of evolution – the frieze starts with amoebae and then the amoebae become jellyfish, the jellyfish become fish, the fish become geese, and there it stops abruptly. At that point, the theory was too controversial to continue! This bronze frieze at street level depicts the sea and the tower rising majestically above it as land. The street level blandness of the Chrysler Building is a poor relation to the rich ornamentation visible to pedestrians as they approach the Chanin Building.

The main lobby boasts beautiful elevator doors that use the same goose motif used outside. A client would take one of the elevators to the top floor, to Chanin's office. But before entering his office, the guest had to pass through a pair of bronze gates that were every bit as much a part of the building's story. The gates represented the greatness of the city, with its art and commerce and its tremendous dynamism. Decorative elements included gears, which signify the industrial prominence of a great city like New York. And, at the top, in the center, a violin splits in half, indicating the cultural life of the city. Included are dynamic electrical bolts that shoot through, indicating the city's dynamism. None of this would have been possible without a great deal of money, so these gates rest on piles of gold coins. Amazing. Irwin Chanin ran his real estate empire from his private office in the Chanin Building up until a month before his death in 1988.

There was a private cinema theater on the 50th floor, as well as a viewing roof, neither of which is accessible anymore. At one time a bus depot with a rotating turntable was located on the ground floor. Overshadowed by the neighboring Chrysler Building, Chanin’s glorious edifice still had a tremendous influence on the future Rockefeller Center complex and remains a monument to the Art-Deco style.

Trivia:
In the summer of 2007 a Con Ed steam pipe ruptured within the building, and the explosion resulted in the temporary closing of the Chanin Building. 120 windows were broken, and the New York Fire Department teams caused much damage as they responded to the crisis. As well, there was significant water damage caused by the steam explosion. The building reopened on July 30, 2007, a scant ten days after the steam pipe rupture. No physical evidence of the explosion remains.

In 1915 Brooklyn native Irwin Chanin (1891-1988) graduated from Cooper Union college, located in the East Village area of Manhattan. In 1981 Cooper Union named its school of architecture after him: The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. The school ranks among the top five architecture study programs in the United States. In the span of his 96 years, Chanin designed, developed and built apartment buildings, movie palaces and Broadway theatres. From 1931 until his death, Chanin lived at the Century, a 400-unit apartment building he built in Manhattan.

From bottom to top: bronze, Belgian marble, terra cotta relief.

The Standard (hotel)

2009-05-30T05:12:00.000-07:00

848 Washington Street at 13th St.
Rooms from $195; 212.645.4646
http://www.standardhotels.com/new-york-city/

The Standard Hotel on the High Line is now open. The hotel is a rare bit of concrete construction in NYC, perched up on stilts directly above the High Line, a strip of abandoned elevated railroad track being converted into a park running through the Meatpacking District and West Village. The hotel’s architecture and interior decoration have a strong 1960s retro vibe. Rooms feature floor to ceiling glass windows and bathrooms with glass walls looking into the guest rooms, many of which have stunning views of the Hudson River. Note: Bear in mind that there is no way to eliminate the direct view from the bathroom into the guest room (only the toilets are screened off); this will be considered problematic for some, sexy as hell for others. Each room has a sofa, flat screen TV and free WiFi. Premium-priced corner rooms and suites are especially coveted.

The full length of the High Line park will be open by mid June, 2009. The result will be similar to the popular Promenade Plantée in Paris, a park also constructed on disused elevated railroad tracks.

The runway-like entry path, flanked by yellow plastic picnic tables, continues through the revolving door and into lobby.

Roosevelt Hotel

2009-05-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

Madison Avenue at 45th Street
212-661-9600

A Grand Dame of Madison Avenue since 1924, the building spans a full city block on Madison Avenue across from Grand Central Terminal. Named after President Theodore Roosevelt, this midtown hotel was built as part of the thriving Grand Central Terminal City project of the 1920s and is the only one of the group still operating in its original form. The Roosevelt Hotel was linked with Grand Central Station by way of an underground passage that once connected the hotel directly to the train terminal.

In 1996 the hotel underwent a $65-million top to bottom renovation of its public spaces and all 1,015 of its rooms. The hotel recently added a rooftop lounge that operates under the name “mad46.”

Guy Lombardo performed “Auld Lang Syne” for the first time in the hotel’s Roosevelt Grill, and Lawrence Welk began his career here.

The Roosevelt Hotel has been seen in several major motion pictures, including “Maid in Manhattan” starring Jennifer Lopez, “Wall Street,” “Quiz Show,” and “The French Connection.” The hotel is currently owned by Pakistani Airlines.

Helmsley Building at Park Avenue

2009-05-03T02:41:00.000-07:00

The Helmsley Building, designed by Warren & Wetmore, is a 35-story building positioned in the center of Park Avenue. Before being dwarfed by the 1960s Pan Am Building (now the Met Life Building), it served as a visual termination point for Park Avenue at 46th Street, immediately north of Grand Central Terminal. It was the tallest element of the vast Terminal City project of hotels, offices, post office and railroad terminal that began construction in 1912. The Helmsley Building was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1987.

Built in 1929 as the headquarters for the New York Central Railroad Company (founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt), it was originally called the New York Central Building. When New York Central sold the building to real estate mogul Harry Helmsley, he renamed it the New York General Building. His wife, Leona Helmsley, infamous for her well-publicized tax evasion indictment in 1989, later renamed it the Helmsley Building. Helmsley-Spear Management owned the property until 1998, when it was sold to Max Capital for $253 million. It was sold again in 2006 for $705 million to Istithmar, an investment firm owned by the royal family of Dubai. It was subsequently sold to Goldman Sachs in 2007 for over $1 billion; in nine years the value thus increased four-fold. Stipulations require the name to remain The Helmsley Building, regardless of the owner.

The cupola-capped pyramid roof is dramatically lit at night:

Before the electrification of the New York Central Railroad in 1912-1913, the neighborhood north of Grand Central Terminal was populated with open-air railway yards and tracks used by steam locomotives. The electrification and covering of the yards enabled the continuation of Park Avenue to the north and the construction of new buildings such as this.

The middle part of the building, flanked by 15-story wings on the sides, rises as a tower to the pilastered top and the pyramidal roof, crowned by a distinctive copper-clad cupola. At night the roof and cupola are illuminated. At the base of the tower, there are two large arched portals on either side of the lobby to provide access for traffic from Park Avenue through the building, to the elevated platforms past Met Life and Grand Central Terminal, and to Park Avenue South via the Pershing Viaduct. Similarly, pedestrian traffic moves through two tunnels with connections to retail space. It is thus a unique drive-through and walk-through building.

The ornate art deco clock was erected 68-feet above street level on the cornice above the portal in 1928. Edward Francis McCartan created the piece during his three-year appointment to the New York City Art Commission. Cut in limestone, the clock features two statues four times life size. The male figure on the left is Transportation, symbolizing the spirit of speed. He rests his arm on a winged wheel of Progress and holds the staff of Mercury. On the right is a female figure, Industry, who embraces a staff in her arm, while resting on a beehive. Several other smaller symbolic figures round out the design including the Liberty Cap, crowning the clock's top. The clock, 45 feet in width and 19 feet high , has a dial with a diameter of 9 feet. Helmsley had the figures gilded, but subsequent restorations returned them to their original stone finish.

The ornate entrance lobby has lavish white travertine and marble decor replete with mirrors and chandeliers. Bronze reliefs above the elevator doors depict a winged helmet surrounding a globe, symbolizing the American empire's global reach. The elevator car ceilings are painted to represent clouds.

Trivia:

Mafia murder: On September 10, 1931, capo de tutti capi Salvatore Maranzano was murdered in his ninth-floor office here by hit men sent by Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese, ambitious underlings whom Maranzano had ordered killed by Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll.

A view of the Helmsley Building from the Met Life building:

The Gates (Chelsea): Ghost of the Biltmore Hotel

2009-05-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

290 Eighth Ave. (between 24th & 25th Sts.)
212-206-8646

On May 8, Danny Kane and Rod Surut will reopen one of the city’s storied and ultra-lavish spaces, the former luxury dining spot known as the Biltmore Room (the marble walls alone have been valued at $2.4 million). The venue will be a super luxury restaurant/bar/lounge, called The Gates.

The marble and bronze interior was transported from the former Biltmore Hotel’s location adjacent to Grand Central Terminal to a townhouse in Chelsea (prior to the Biltmore Room restaurant, it served as a gay male club known as Rome, with staff dressed as centurions, so let’s hope the third time’s the charm!).

The hotel's iron gates and ornate, mirrored bronze door doubled as the grand entrance to the luxurious and chic Biltmore Room restaurant, which opened in 2003 with a month-long waiting list for reservations to sample the Asian fusion cuisine. In mid-2006 the restaurant closed when owner-chef Gary Robins decamped for the uptown Russian Tearoom next to Carnegie Hall.

Still intact, however, are the exquisite bronze detailing, marble floors and a ceiling glittering with crystal teardrop chandeliers. Separated from the more cavernous dining room/lounge by a pair of bronze French doors, the front bar feels intimate and inviting. Another carry-over is the former dumb-waiter that was retrofitted as a booth for cell phone calls – for those times when conversations must remain private.

Cross your fingers and stay tuned.

A corner of the restaurant/lounge shows the many types of marble used in the midtown Biltmore Hotel construction.

The New York Biltmore Hotel (1913-1981, nearly 1,000 rooms) was a landmark luxury hotel designed by the architectural firm of Warren and Wetmore, who also designed the adjoining Grand Central Terminal. Both buildings opened on the same day, February 2, 1913. The hotel was located between 43rd and 44th Streets from Vanderbilt Ave. to Madison Ave., and was one of several hotels built as part of the Terminal City project, a vast complex that included the train station, hotels, a post office and many commercial office buildings, all designed by Warren and Wetmore. The other hotels were the Commodore (now the Grand Hyatt New York) and the Roosevelt (still in operation).

Warren was a cousin of the Vanderbilts, owners of the New York Central Railway and builders of Grand Central Terminal. Warren’s partner, Charles Wetmore, was a lawyer by training. Their society connections led to commissions for clubs, private estates, hotels and terminal buildings, including the New York Central office building (now known as the Helmsley Building), The New York Yacht Club, the Chelsea docks and the Ritz-Carlton, Biltmore, Commodore, and Ambassador Hotels. The legendary Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, is their work, as well.

Unfortunately, the landmark Biltmore Hotel building was gutted in 1981, and The Bank of America Plaza Building, at 335 Madison Avenue, was built from the hotel's steel skeleton. The owner asked in extreme haste, before the Landmarks Preservation Commission could take action to stop him. With no warning the hotel shut its doors on August 14, 1981, and teams of demolition workers arrived the next day. Even so, the owner/developer established a $500,000 scholarship for the Landmarks Commission, chiefly to stave off any further action against him. The bank’s offices, which opened in 1984, still retain the hotel's piano and famous lobby clock. During that time a collector purchased the hotel’s lavish marble and bronze lobby fixtures and reinstalled them in a Chelsea residence, which later housed a restaurant called The Biltmore Room (2003-2006) and now operates as a restaurant/lounge called The Gates (290 Eighth Ave. between 24th and 25th Sts.; 212-206-8646).

For decades the Biltmore Hotel appealed to lovers. Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald honeymooned there so boisterously that they were asked to leave, and the Biltmore’s solid bronze clock was a popular meeting place for amorous couples. Fitzgerald wrote a short story titled “Myra Meets His Family,” which is set at the Biltmore. An American Playhouse TV production of this story, which aired in 1986 on PBS, was called “Under the Biltmore Clock.”

The railroad arrival room under the hotel was called the kissing room, and was the meeting place of many couples who then would proceed to the Biltmore Palm Court for lunch or a drink. On the nineteenth floor the Biltmore had a restaurant with a hand-cranked sliding roof called “The Cascades,” which allowed diners the opportunity to gaze at the stars while having dinner. The circa 1920 advertisement below illustrates the placement of the live orchestra and tango dancers on the floor of the rooftop "Cascades" venue:

An innovation at the time it was built, the hotel was designed in an “H” shape, thus giving every one of its 900+ rooms an outside exposure. As well, The Biltmore boasted one of the first hotel indoor swimming pools and saunas. The Italian Garden between the Biltmore East and West Towers was an open air escape in the summer and served as an ice skating rink in winter. In the 1920s and early 1930s it had its own resident orchestra.

In J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, “The Catcher in the Rye,” when Holden Caulfield showed up in the Biltmore lobby for a date, he was struck by the crowd of young women. “I was way early when I got there,” he recounted, “so I just sat down on one of those leather couches right near the clock in the lobby and watched the girls. A lot of schools were home for vacation already, and there were about a million girls sitting and standing around waiting for their dates to show up. Girls with their legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs, girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls.”

Trivia:

Located immediately west of Grand Central, the Biltmore Hotel had a convenient direct elevator and stairway to the terminal.

In 1970 feminists demonstrated to "liberate" the men's bar at New York's Biltmore Hotel. On August 10 Mayor John Lindsay signed a bill prohibiting sexual discrimination in public places.

Bert Lown’s orchestra enjoyed a long booking at the hotel. In this YouTube video his band performs “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.” The accompanying slide show includes several interior and exterior images of the New York Biltmore Hotel. In a glaring error, however, the photograph of the lobby is actually an interior of the Los Angeles Millennium Biltmore, not the New York Biltmore.

Café des Artistes

2009-04-30T20:29:00.000-07:00

Café des Artistes
1 West 67th Street; 212-877-3500
Open seven days a week, lunch 11 to 3 pm and dinner 5 to 11pm.
$35 three-course prix-fixe dinner offered year round.
Business casual attire (jackets not required for men).

This legendary café, built in 1917, has been a long-time New York favorite, lauded over the years as enchanting, romantic, and transforming. It invokes old world elegance, in part attributable to the famous 1934 murals of female nudes frolicking in the woods and a location in a prewar hotel just off Central Park. This gothic building was created to house artists' studios, and luminaries such as Noel Coward, Norman Rockwell, Isadora Duncan, and Gary Oldman have all resided here. The café functioned as a dining room and kitchen for residents.

The six murals are the work of Howard Chandler Christy, an illustrator and portrait painter who was a resident of the hotel in which the café was housed. His fame spanned the entire first half of the twentieth century. The Café celebrates the murals with cocktails named after them. Two are "The Fountain of Youth" (Poire William scented champagne with spiced pear) and "Swing Girl" (Corazón Tequila, orange liquor and pineapple juice).

The restaurant caters to a mature clientele in a location convenient to Lincoln Center.

The Campbell Apartment Lounge

2009-04-28T02:59:00.000-07:00

The Campbell Apartment
Grand Central Terminal
Entrance at 15 Vanderbilt Ave. (between 42nd and 43rd Sts.)
212-953-0409; Open daily from 3:00 pm.
Proper attire is required (no baseball caps, t-shirts, athletic shoes).
Live jazz on most Saturday evenings.

John Williams Campbell, one of the investors in the 1913 Grand Central Terminal, was able to lease the “corner office” at 42nd and Vanderbilt Ave. as payback for his serving on the board of the New York Central Railroad. He built his office and private salon in a space the size of a chapel (25 by 60 feet with 25-ft. tall ceilings). The room had a butler, a pipe organ gallery, an enormous leaded glass window, a library and one of the world’s largest Persian rugs (it was said to have cost $300,000, or roughly $3.5 million in today’s money).

After Mr. Campbell’s death in 1957, however, the space fell into peculiar times, even including a short stint as a jail. Not until 1999 was it restored and renovated into a lush saloon of dark wood, dim lamps and Jazz Age cocktails now known as The Campbell Apartment.

Now, people enter the exclusive lounge and are wowed, but the place was a run-down wreck in 1999. The leaded glass windows had been boarded up, massive duct work was hanging from what had been an elegant ceiling, and there were workers’ cubicles all over the place. The painters who restored the spectacular beamed ceiling were put to work on their backs, as if they were painting the Sistine Chapel. The colors and patterns of the original room were replicated to create an elegant space inside the city-within-a-city that is Grand Central Terminal. The completed project soon attracted a significant destination crowd who wanted to take a train back in time.

By 2006, Mark Grossich, who restored the space in 1999 and owns the bar, decided the place was getting a bit tired and threadbare (he called it his seven year itch). He hired Nina Campbell (no relation to John Williams Campbell!), an interior designer based in London, to spruce it up. She replaced the blue color scheme with a red one, taking her cues from the red of the Campbell tartan, which now hangs as drapery near the entry. In a dramatic decorating moment on March 4, 2007, in less than 12 hours all the new carpeting and upholstery were installed to avoid closing for even one night. A platoon of workers labored morning to afternoon to refashion the Campbell Apartment into something still agreeably old but almost entirely new. The 1999 restoration of the Campbell Apartment cost more than $1.5 million, and the recent make-over more than $350,000 – a significant investment for a lounge that seats only 60 customers.

There is no evidence that John Williams Campbell wrote letters or kept any diaries. To Allyn Freeman, who is writing a book about the Campbell Apartment, personal facts about him are almost as scarce as those about Shakespeare. But what few facts are known are choice. Mr. Campbell, who resembled Warren G. Harding physically, favored Savile Row tailoring but disliked wearing socks, even with shoes, said Mr. Freeman, who has spoken about him with Elsie Fater, his niece. He disliked wrinkled trousers, so he hung his in a humidor, while he worked untrousered at his desk.

Mr. Campbell was born in 1880, the son of John Campbell, the treasurer of Credit Clearing House, a credit-reference firm specializing in the garment industry. The family lived in the affluent Brooklyn neighborhood then known as The Hill, now called Fort Greene.

There is no record of the younger Mr. Campbell attending college. He started work at 18 at his father’s firm, where he became a senior executive at 25 and later president. This credit-reporting business later became Dun & Bradstreet. In 1920, he was appointed to the board of New York Central Railroad, where he crossed paths with William K. Vanderbilt Jr., the railroad scion whose office was in Grand Central Terminal. By this time, Mr. Campbell was prosperous enough to have workmen come from Tiffany & Company to his Park Avenue home to polish the silver.

Sometime in 1923, he commissioned Augustus N. Allen to build an office in his leased space in Grand Central Terminal. Mr. Allen was an architect known for designing Long Island estates and grand offices. Mr. Campbell filled his new office with Italian furniture, a pipe organ, a piano and a a large stone fireplace. There was a bathroom and even a small kitchen, but the most striking feature was a Persian rug that covered nearly the entire floor, which is the length of a subway car. Since Mr. Campbell entertained business clients there, he had a butler (named Stackhouse) on staff.

After Mr. Campbell’s death in the late 1950s, it is unclear what happened to the rug and other furnishings. The space became a signalman’s office and later a storage space where transit police stowed firearms and other equipment. It also served as a small jail, in the area of the present-day bar. By the 1990s the room was outfitted with dropped ceilings and flourescent lighting.

As for the name Campbell Apartment, that is a misnomer. People wrongly assume that such a baronial space was an apartment. While there was a couch in the office, there was no bed. Mr. Campbell and his wife lived just a few blocks away at 270 Park Avenue, not far from the Waldorf-Astoria, so there was never a need to sleep in the office overnight.

Note:
The Campbell Apartment is frequently rented out for private events, so be sure to call 212-953-0409 before stopping by.
If this room seems familiar to fans of TV’s Gossip Girl, the long bar is where the infamous Serena-Nate sex scene was shot.

The walls are faux-finished to resemble travertine.

Library Way - East 41st Street...

2009-04-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

...a celebration of the world’s great literature.

Library Way, located on the two blocks of East 41st street between Park and Fifth Avenues, displays 96 bronze plaques designed by sculptor Gregg LeFevre. Each contains different quotations from literature and poetry. The plaques lead to the doorstep of the grand New York Public Library Humanities and Social Sciences Library, where the famed stone lions "Patience" and "Fortitude" guard its doors. The official dedication of Library Way was held on May 27, 2004.

In 1996 Grand Central Partnership, along with the New York Public Library and New Yorker Magazine, convened a distinguished panel of literary experts and librarians to select the quotations from prominent works of literature. These quotes have been brought to life by urban sculptural artist Gregg LeFevre in vivid bronze plaques that have been set into the sidewalks. In honor of the project, New York City Mayor Bloomberg enacted “Local Law 34 of 2003" on June 3, 2003, that ceremonially designates this two-block stretch of East 41st Street as “Library Way.”

A directory of the plaques may be found at:
www.grandcentralpartnership.org/what_we_do/beautify_library_way_plaques.asp

Grand Central Terminal

2009-04-24T03:08:00.000-07:00

87 East 42nd Street at Park Avenue
midway between the Chrysler Building and the New York Public Library
Closed for fours hours each day (from 1:30-5:30 am).

The four-sided clock atop the low, round Information Booth in the middle of the main hall gives the best viewpoint to see most everything on the Main Concourse. A world-famous rendezvous spot, the circular marble and brass pagoda in the center of the Main Concourse has a hidden, spiral staircase leading to the Information Booth on the Lower Level. During the recent restoration the clock (made by the Seth Thomas Company) was moved slightly to align with the compass points of the building. The clock’s faces are made from opal, and it is said that it would cost millions of dollars to duplicate it today.

As you glance around this vast concourse, you should perhaps first contemplate a bit of the rail history at this location, dating back to 1871. Click photo to enlarge.

Shipping magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt purchased property between 42nd and 48th Streets, Lexington and Madison Avenue for construction of a train depot and rail yard. On this site was the first Grand Central. This depot, designed by architect John B. Snook, was built at a cost of $6.4 million and opened in October 1871. Virtually obsolete on the day it opened, it was grandly reworked and reborn as "Grand Central Station." The reconfigured depot’s most prominent feature was its enormous train shed constructed of glass and steel. The 100-foot wide by 650-foot long structure rivaled the Eiffel Tower and Crystal Palace as the most dramatic engineering achievement of the 19th century. The updated station also featured a neo-classical façade, a 16,000 square foot waiting room and distinctive ornamentation, including monumental cast-iron eagles with wingspans of 13-feet (one of which was recently salvaged and will rise again above Grand Central Terminal’s new entrance at 43rd Street and Lexington Avenue – the other one can be found on the corner of 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue).

With the demise of steam locomotives (which needed an open-air rail yard), the tracks could be moved underground to accommodate electric trains. By 1902 plans were in place to demolish the existing station and create a new double level terminal for electric trains. Excavation, which began in 1903, was an enormous undertaking, as the grade of the rail yard was lowered to an average depth of 30 feet below street level. The old rail yards were paved over all the way north to 49th Street. A stunning new Grand Central Terminal debuted in 1913, after ten years of construction at a cost of $80 million – roughly $2 billion in today’s dollars. At its heydey in 1947, over 65 million people – the equivalent of 40% of the population of the United States – traveled the rails via Grand Central Terminal. From the 1950s, however, Grand Central entered decades of decline, as the automobile replaced trains as the public’s main means of transportation.

In 1967, New York City's recently established Landmarks Preservation Commission (formed in response to the demolition of Pennsylvania Station) designated Grand Central Terminal a landmark, subject to the protection of law – blocking its planned demolition and redevelopment. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was an outspoken advocate against the demolition and redevelopment of the site. In 1976, the National Register of Historic Places named Grand Central Terminal a National Historic Landmark. During the 1980s plans were made to update and restore the landmark structure. This restoration, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, began in 1992. A gala Rededication Celebration of Grand Central Terminal took place on October 1, 1998.

The stunning result of this structural and architectural refurbishment stands before you. Completely restored to its original 1913 splendor, Grand Central has become a midtown destination for five restaurants and cocktail lounges, 20 casual international eateries in the lower level Dining Concourse, gourmet foods from the Grand Central Market and the 50 specialty shops throughout the concourses, all in to addition to its main function as a commuter train transportation hub (67 tracks served by 44 platforms, the largest train station in the world by number of tracks). Grand Central is also a major subway station (second busiest in the system). First, pick up a Grand Central Map and Directory at the "I LOVE NEW YORK" information window in the Main Concourse.

The Beaux Arts interior of the Main Concourse measures 275 feet long by 120 feet wide, and the vaulted ceiling is 125 feet high. The arch windows are 60 feet high at each end. The floors are paved with Tennessee marble, and the walls are covered with buff colored stone with wainscots and trimmings of cream-colored Botticino marble.

The most notable feature of the Main Concourse is the great astronomical mural, from a design by the French painter Paul Helleu, painted in gold leaf on cerulean blue oil. Arching over the 80,000 square-foot Main Concourse, this extraordinary painting portrays the Mediterranean sky with October-to-March zodiac and 2,500 stars. The 60 largest stars mark the constellations and are illuminated with fiber optics, but used to be lit with 40 watt light bulbs that workers changed regularly by climbing above the ceiling and pulling the light bulbs out from above. Soon after the Terminal opened, it was noted that the section of the zodiac depicted by the mural was backwards. For several decades lively controversy raged over why this was so. Some of the explanations offered were that it just looked better, or it didn’t fit into the ceiling any other way. The actual reason is that Paul Helleu took his inspiration from a medieval manuscript, published in an era when painters and cartographers depicted the heavens as they would have been seen from outside the celestial sphere.

In the original 1913 architectural plans there were supposed to be two grand staircases. In true Beaux-arts style, they were to be balanced, but with a few small differences. But when Grand Central was opened on February 2, 1913 there was only one staircase. The team of architects – St. Paul based Reed & Stem and New York’s Warren & Wetmore – somehow decided against constructing the planned second staircase. During the recent $200 million restoration the second staircase was finally built. Just in case you are wondering, the staircase on the west side of the building by Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse is the original staircase and the staircase leading to Métrazur on the east side of the building is new. The Eastern balustrades are slightly less elaborate to differentiate the old from the new. Both sets of marble steps, sweeping from the Main Concourse up to the mezzanine level, are modeled after the grand staircase of the Paris Opera House (Palais Garnier).

There are melon shaped chandeliers on both sides of the Main Concourse and several more in Vanderbilt Hall. They were always thought to have been bronze, but they had been covered with dirt for many years. The chandeliers were taken down and cleaned recently. Remarkably, with just one cleaning the glistening gold was revealed. Note the bare light bulbs. In 1913 electricity was new and not widely used by normal households, so the New York Central Railroad wanted to give the sense of grandeur, luxury, and opulence to its train terminal, and did this by showing off the nickel and gold- plated chandeliers with electric light bulbs.

As you walk around the building, notice the design in the stonework of the water fountains, above the entrance to the railroad tracks, in the design of the chandeliers, and in the green metal windows frames seen from the Main Concourse and Vanderbilt Hall – Grand Central is filled with acorns and oak leaves. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt had a rags to riches story. He did not come from a rich family and therefore did not have a family crest as many wealthy families of the 18th century did. As Vanderbilt’s fortune grew, so did his desire for a family crest. He chose the mighty oak tree’s acorns and oak leaves, referring to the old saying “from an acorn a mighty oak shall grow!”

Two ramps lead down to the lower level, joining in front of the famous Oyster Bar (closed Sundays), which has been open for all of the Terminal’s history, in continuous operation since 1913. These ramps were hidden for almost 70 years. Back in 1927, the New York Central Railroad, the operating company at that time, decided that they needed more office space, so they built an eight-foot wooden ceiling over the ramps. This made the ramps dark, narrow, and gave a tunnel-like feeling as you walked down to the Lower Level train tracks. These ramps were opened up and brought back to their original splendor.

Photo at right:
On the balcony level the former private office and salon of 1920s tycoon, John W. Campbell has been refashioned as The Campbell Apartment, fully restored to its original splendor – and reborn as a cocktail lounge that has been cited in the national media as one of "the best bars in America" (open daily from 3:00 pm). Proper attire is required (no baseball caps, t-shirts, athletic shoes, etc.). If for no other reason, you should visit Grand Central Terminal to have a drink at this lounge. Note: The Campbell Apartment is frequently rented out for private events, so be sure to call before you stop by. 212-953-0409.

The Whispering Gallery, located at the end of both Oyster Bar Ramps when heading down to the Lower Level, is one of the bigger attractions in the Terminal and offers a phonic treat. Get two volunteers and put them in opposite corners facing the walls. A person can whisper into one of its corners and be distinctly heard diagonally across the gallery on the other side.

The Biltmore Room, known as the “Kissing Room,” was located right under the old famous Biltmore Hotel (now the Bank of America building) and was where the famous 20th Century Limited train arrived. Celebrities, politicians, and soldiers would get off the trains to meet their loved ones and hug and kiss in the middle of the room before going up stairs into the Biltmore Hotel.

Walk outside the building to see the sculpture “Transportation” by French artist Jules-Alexis Coutan that sits atop Grand Central Terminal's south facade. You will see Mercury flanked by Minerva and Hercules. Minerva is the goddess of wisdom and represents all the thought and planning put into this building. Mercury is the god of speed and represents both the speed of commerce as it grew up into midtown Manhattan from the financial district and, of course, the speed of trains. The mythological hero, Hercules, represents the strength of the men who built Grand Central. Carved out of Indiana limestone, the group stands 50 feet high and 60 feet wide, weighs 1,500 tons, and surmounts a clock 13 feet in diameter. This clock contains the world's largest example of Tiffany glass.

Trivia:
During the 1930s, a secret platform, number 61, was constructed under the station. This was built to convey President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his limousine directly into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in order to hide from the public and press his disability, caused by polio.

The Seth Thomas clock company, manufacturer of the valuable four-faced clock atop the center kiosk of the Grand Concourse, went into receivership in January of 2009. The company was founded in 1813, exactly 100 years before Grand Central Terminal opened its doors. The company web site states that there is a new owner, and to revisit the site at a future time for further information.

South Street Seaport Museum

2009-04-15T04:11:00.000-07:00

New York City's maritime past is celebrated at South Street Seaport Museum, located in the 19th century waterfront district that today is home to six historic ships and exhibitions of maritime art and artifacts. Designated by Congress as America’s National Maritime Museum in 1998, South Street Seaport Museum sits in a 12 square-block historic district that is the site of the original port of New York City.

The area's cobblestone-paved streets surround a complex of restored 19th-century buildings along the East River at the southern tip of Manhattan island. From here it is possible to sail around New York harbor on a twin-masted schooner. The two block area of short brick buildings are a sharp contrast to the looming modern skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan. The port is as much an outdoor mall as it is a museum; galleries, housed in restored buildings, are in three locations within the seaport's borders, while the rest of the space is occupied by stores and restaurants. Except for South Street itself, the area is closed to automobile traffic, and the overall sense of the seaport is similar to other historic parks like Colonial Williamsburg.

The exhibit on board the Peking, one of the two tall ships at South Street, offers an impression of what life on an old sailing cargo ship was like. The galley, crew quarters, officer’s staterooms and captain’s cabin have all been restored to their original condition.

The onshore galleries feature a broad range of topics, everything from antique clocks to old charts, including the alarmingly inaccurate 16th and 17th century maps drawn by early European explorers. There is also a large assortment of model ships on display.

Tips:
The best time to arrive is between 10:30 and 11:00 am.
The area sometimes smells bad because of the nearby active fish markets.
A visit to South Street will take at least half a day, excluding a harbor cruise.
There are exceptional views of the adjacent Brooklyn Bridge from this area.

Interactive map of South St. Seaport area:
seaportdistrictmap.org

High Bar in Hell's Kitchen

2009-04-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

High Bar
251 W. 48th St (near 8th Ave.)
212-956-1300
Open 5 p.m. to midnight Sun.-Wed.; until 2 a.m., Thur.-Sat.

A popular spot for private birthday parties of the hip, young and rich. Be nice and patient with the doorman, and don't be put off by the decidedly unglamorous residential building which must be navigated in order to access this popular rooftop lounge outfitted with sofas and cabanas.

The West Side view from High Bar:

Sleep Pods - NYC Metro Naps

2009-04-10T05:54:00.000-07:00

OK - you've come to the city that never sleeps. And while the biggest of all apples might not need rest, you own body starts to let you down. Maybe it was last night's third glass of wine, or the knockout bar tender who inspired you to stay until closing (were you REALLY out until 4 am?), but it's now 2 p.m. and what you really need is a nap. You're in midtown, but your hotel is a daunting 50 blocks north on the Upper East Side.

Not to worry. You can catch some much-needed Zs on the 22nd floor of the Empire State Building. Just the thing for your weary mind and feet, and the whole process takes less than 25 minutes of your valuable time.

Time for a recharge -- you'll lie down in a jet-age designed sleep pod and drift off as you listen to relaxation-inducing sounds. The sleep pod will then wake you in 20 minutes with a gentle combination of light and vibration. Next, you toddle over to the "Wake Station" to make use of the lotions, facial spritz and lemon-scented hand towels to bring you back to the real world. All for just $14 (additional 20 minutes $9.50).

www.metronaps.com/mn/store/nap_center
Empire State Building
350 5th Ave (Suite 2210)
New York, NY 10118
212.239.3344

Bookmark Lounge

2009-04-07T07:36:00.000-07:00

Bookmarks Bar (at Library Hotel)
41st St. at Madison Ave., one block from Grand Central Station
212.983.4500

This 14th floor lounge boasts a handsome room with granite topped padded bar, an open air terrace and glass enclosed “writer’s den.” Open daily (except Sunday) from 4:00 pm until midnight.

Keens Steakhouse

2009-04-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

Keens Chop House (est. 1885)
72 W. 36th St. (between 5th & 6th Aves.)
212.947.3636
Open daily except Christmas.
M-F 11:45a-10:30p; Sat 5:00p-10:30p; Sun 5:00p-9:00p
http://www.keens.com/

Not much has changed at Keens since it opened in 1885, except the name change from "Chop House" to "Steakhouse" in 1995. Nevertheless, to satisfy the traditionalists, they kept the "Chop House" sign intact. Keens is the antithesis of most New York City restaurants. It's a dark, low-ceiling place near Herald Square, Madison Square Garden and Penn Station that serves artery-clogging meats with abandon. Their signature "mutton chop" (actually saddle of lamb) keeps cardiologists in business, yet Keens has remained a runaway success for generations.

The menu touts the Mutton Chop as a specialty – but it’s a ruse. That was all in the past. Since not long after the end of WWII Keens has served lamb chops, not mutton, in spite of what the menu says. The lamb comes from an animal 10 months old, which is older that most lamb served in restaurants, but not old enough to be called mutton. The restaurant does serve a cut that resembles mutton on the plate (you’ll understand why side whiskers are called “mutton chops” at first glance). Stick with the aged beef and lamb dishes (the lunch menu fried chicken salad being an exception), and apple crisp (other desserts are blah). Instead of dessert, however, why not enjoy a flight of single malt scotches (200 varieties on offer) at the end of the meal?

Today, Keens is the only survivor of the once-famous Herald Square Theatre District. In an age which tears down so much of the past, it is comforting to find one landmark that continues.

Yet Keens is known for more than its food. They own the largest collection of churchwarden clay pipes in the world. Keens displays thousands of these pipes on the ceilings of their dining rooms, which ramble over two floors of three connecting town houses. The tradition of checking one’s pipe at an inn had its origins in 17th century England where travelers kept their clay at their favorite inn – the thin stemmed pipe being too fragile to be carried in purse or saddlebag. Pipe smoking was known since Elizabethan times to be beneficial for dissipating “evil humours of the brain.”

The Keens pipe tradition began in the early 20th century. The hard clay churchwarden pipes were brought from the Netherlands, and as many as 50,000 were ordered every three years. A staff pipe warden registered and stored the pipes, while pipe boys returned the pipes from storage to the patrons. The membership roster of the Pipe Club contained over ninety thousand names, including those of Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Billy Rose, Grace Moore, Albert Einstein, George M. Cohan, J.P. Morgan, Stanford White, John Barrymore, David Belasco, Adlai Stevenson, General Douglas MacArthur and “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Today, most of these pipes are displayed on the ceiling (click on the photo below).

A Keens specialty: a flight of after-dinner scotches.

Tips:
1. The prices are gentler in the pub, where a more casual menu offers sandwiches, burgers and salads.
2. The clubby, masculine bar is not to be missed (first photo of this post).
3. The Bullmoose Room is considerably quieter than the noisy Lambs Room.

Rose Bar (Gramercy Park Hotel)

2009-04-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

Rose Bar (Gramercy Park Hotel)
2 Lexington Avenue (at 21st St.)
212.920.3300

Reservations required after 9 pm
(only by E-mail: rosebar@gramercyparkhotel.com).

Over-the-top decór with prices to match, but these are delicious $20+ cocktails. An original Andy Warhol hangs next to the pool table. Entry off the lobby through the red velvet curtains (turn right at the chandelier).

230 Fifth Lounge & Rooftop Terrace

2009-04-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

230 Fifth (open daily 4 pm to 4 am)
230 5th Avenue (at 27th St.)
212.725.4300

Ride up in the gilded elevator and enter an Art-Moderne inspired room with floor to ceiling glass windows and beveled mirrors, all capped by a lacquered red ceiling (Austin Powers would be right at home here). The lounge is fitted with curvy suede sofas and modernist furnishings.

Ascend another level, however, up the chrome staircase to a stunning rooftop space that stays open all year round – this is why you’ve come here. The views are awe inspiring, the New York skyline shining, the Empire State Building towering right before you. Pricey cocktails and a varied wine list on offer.

44 & X (Hell's Kitchen) Restaurant

2009-04-01T18:30:00.000-07:00

44 & X (Hell’s Kitchen)
622 10th Ave. at 44th Street
212-977-1170
“Reinvented American Classics” cooking packs this all-white room with Hell's Kitchen neighborhood locals and savvy theatergoers, happy to find such good food and friendly service just west of the Broadway theater district. You'll find down-home dishes such as mac-and-cheese, buttermilk fried chicken with chive waffles, and meat loaf swathed in tomato sauce. Not to mention grilled braised short ribs and fish (sea bass, salmon, etc.). An interesting crowd – a happening spot. That said, there is little to absorb sound, so be warned that the indoor noise level can get a bit loud.
Full bar, warm-weather sidewalk terrace covered by a striped awning.
Dinner 7 days from 5:30 pm. Lunch M-F 1:30-2:30; Brunch Sat/Sun 11:30-3:00.
www.44&X.com

Flatiron Lounge

2009-03-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

Flatiron Lounge (daily from 5 pm)
37 West 19th St., between 5th/6th Aves.
212.727.7741

Set in a historic building dating back to 1900, Flatiron Lounge is a retro dining lounge that serves old school classic cocktails – available in flights of three. The style is a tribute to the glory years, with sleek banquettes, dark wood and wrought iron work – classic old New York. The bar itself a 30-ft.-long Art Deco counter that used to be in the legendary Manhattan Ballroom. Esquire Magazine rates this as one of the nation’s top bars.

Lobby Lounge at Mandarin Oriental

2009-03-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

Lobby Lounge at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel
80 Columbus Circle at 60th St.
35th Floor; 212-805-8800

www.mandarin-oriental.com/newyork

There are enviable views across the southwest corner of Central Park from the floor to ceiling windows of the Lobby Lounge, located on the 35th floor of
80 Columbus Circle.
Light fare is served alongside very expensive drinks just a few steps down from the round reception area. There is also a proper bar, called the MO Bar, separate from the lobby.

Hotel Metro

2009-03-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

Hotel Metro New York City
45 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
212-947-2500

A mid-price range hotel near Penn Station, Macy's, Madison Square Garden and the Empire State Building, this property dates from 1901 and features Art Deco architectural detailing. The lobby decor pays homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood. A complete renovation took place in 2006. Its rooftop terrace (open seasonally) affords stellar views of the Empire State Building and Manhattan skyline.

Member World Hotels First Class Collection

179 guest rooms and suites
Rooftop terrace with views of Empire State Building (weather permitting)
Metro Grill Restaurant & Bar
Complimentary Continental Breakfast
Complimentary WIFI throughout the Hotel
Complimentary use of Business Center
iHome Clock Radios with iPod Docking Station
Room Service
Fitness Center
In-room Laptop Size Safe
Check-in 4 pm; check-out noon

Blithe Spirit at the Shubert Theatre

2009-03-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

From left: Jayne Atkinson, Rupert Everett, Angela Lansbury, Christine Ebersole.
Directed by Michael Blakemore.

Noël Coward’s 1941 play “Blithe Spirit” was written in seven days in reaction to the “pitiful sight” of London’s wartime devastation. It played 1,998 performances, one of the longest runs in London theatre history. Coward’s brilliant ghost play explores the connections between memory, mourning, and the erotic; it’s a comic demonstration in which the dead’s aggression toward the living confronts the aggression of the living toward the dead.

The novelist Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett) has arranged a séance, as research for a murder mystery he’s working on. In a posh drawing room that’s as proper and sedate as Charles’s sturdy second wife, Ruth (Jayne Atkinson), Madame Arcati (Angela Lansbury), the Martini-guzzling, Irving Berlin-loving local spiritualist, accidently conjures up his late first wife, Elvira (Christine Ebersole). Charles’s second marriage is a comfortable, sensible relationship – “Not the wildest stretch of imagination could describe it as the first fine careless rapture,” Ruth says. When the exciting and possessive Elvira materializes, in a sort of ghostly off-white chiffon poncho, she is a vision of long-mourned passion. She reminds Charles that he once beat her with a billiard cue. “Only very, very gently,” he replies. Charles can see and talk to Elvira; Ruth can do neither. Charles sees the memory of love; Ruth sees an apparent lunatic. The unconscious, in all its wayward self-destructiveness, has been released. Fiasco naturally ensues. Elvira’s malicious mischief ultimately causes Ruth’s death. In due time, Charles finds himself an “astral bigamist,” persecuted by the tyrannical ghosts of both wives. While they trash the drawing room, Coward, as he does in all his major comedies, lets his comic surrogate tiptoe away from the chaos. “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” Charles says, in the play’s last line, exiting as bookshelves and paintings tumble. The moment plays as both a raspberry to melancholy and a huzzah for denial.

At the bar at the Shubert, theatergoers can buy a “Madame Arcati’s Ectoplasm Martini.” You may lift a glass of this potent stuff to Michael Blakemore, one of the finest directors of farce around, and to his superb ensemble. A particular tip of the cloth cap to Everett, who in tuxedo and pompadour cuts a fine Coward figure, hitting every upper-middle-class note of the Master’s teasing nonchalance with swaggering languor. Atkinson’s fluting high dudgeon and Ebersole’s flirtatious hostility create a terrific force field for Everett’s droll reactions. At the center of the mayhem, of course, is the eighty-three-year-old Lansbury. The epitome of the swiftness that Coward admired in his players, she scuttles expertly around the stage like a water bug – not a poltergeist but a whirlwind of idiosyncratic expertise. Together, the actors offer a master class in light comedy.

Blithe Spirit - Directed by Michael Blakemore
Run time: 2:40, including one intermission
Shubert Theatre, 225 W 44th St. (between Broadway & 8th Ave.)

In this video, reviewer John Lahr sits down with the director Michael Blakemore to talk about staging Noël Coward and his long career working with actors and playwrights.

L’Ecole – Contemporary French Cuisine

2009-02-05T04:04:00.000-08:00

Restaurant of the French Culinary Institute
462 Broadway (at Grand St. – SoHo); 212.219.3300
Lunch Mon-Fri 12:30-2:00, Dinner Mon-Sat 5:30-9:00
A la carte dining available only at lunch. Reservations required.
www.frenchculinary.com/lecole.htm

Bargain gourmet meals are prepared by advanced students of the Institute. The prix fixe menu changes every six-eight weeks.

Sea bass with shrimp

Frozen lemon mousse

$42: 5-course Prix Fixe (dinner)
appetizer, fish course, meat course, salad, dessert.

$28: 3-course Prix Fixe (lunch)
appetizer, entrée, dessert.

Wine pairings are bargain priced, as well.

Before dinner service at L'Ecole, a culinary Chef-Instructor meets with his students before their kitchen shift begins. Students of Classic Culinary Arts and Classic Pastry Arts get real-world experience cooking in a restaurant for paying customers. Recently L'Ecole received a 25 score for food from Zagat, the same rating as the acclaimed NYC restaurant, Le Cirque.

Holiday ornament sculpture

2009-01-03T19:55:00.000-08:00

...located on 6th Avenue at 50th Street, just across the street from Radio City Music Hall.
(click thumbnail to enlarge)

Library Bar at Hudson Hotel

2008-12-30T01:33:00.000-08:00

Reminiscent of an old English club or drawing room, the Library is the perfect cozy hangout for relaxing by the enormous gas fireplace, chatting and drinking with friends, shooting billiards, playing a computer game, or reading a book from its extensive collection on topics ranging from film, theater, fashion and art, to travel and politics.

An artful blend of old and new, the two story Library features an antique billiards table covered in purple felt (and topped by Ingo Maurer’s enormous metallic hemisphere lamp shade), classic English caramel leather sofas and wing chairs, walls of leather-bound books and antique area rugs residing alongside cyber-desks fitted with laptop computers. Not to mention oversized black and white photographs by noted French fashion photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino of a most curious subject: Holsteins sporting jaunty couture hats. No lie.

Hudson Hotel
356 West 58th Street; 212.554.6000

Bottom photo courtesy Rob Tabor

Revival of South Pacific

2008-12-29T19:48:00.000-08:00

Winner of the 2008 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, Rodgers and Hammerstein's SOUTH PACIFIC concerns the lives of U.S. military men, nurses and residents of the Polynesian island they occupy during World War II. Nurse Nellie Forbush is “In Love With a Wonderful Guy,” a French planter, Émile, with small children. Clean-cut Lt. Cable has fallen hard for Bloody Mary's daughter Liat. And the seabees, sailors and marines will tell you that there is “Nothing Like a Dame.” The show's ravishing score also includes “Cockeyed Optimist,” “I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Younger Than Springtime,” “Honey Bun” and “This Nearly Was Mine.” In fact, some would say the musical score is the real star of this show.

The touchy issues of race and war that permeate the book of this sixty year old musical are still relevant. Based upon James Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific,” this was the second ever musical to win the Pulitzer Prize.

The Lincoln Center Theater production of South Pacific, helmed by Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher, opened April 3 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and was originally scheduled to close June 22, 2008. Lincoln Center Theater later announced that the musical would play an open-ended run at the Beaumont. Good luck getting tickets.

Current Cast Complications:

Noted operatic bass-baritone David Pittsinger will twice assume the role of Émile de Becque while Tony Award winner Paulo Szot fulfills his previously scheduled opera commitments. Szot, who earned a Best Actor Tony for his portrayal of South Pacific's romantic leading man, will take leave to appear in “The Merry Widow” for Opera Marseille this winter and “Carmen” for Opera Toulouse in the spring. In Szot's absence, David Pittsinger has been announced to assume the role of French plantation owner Emile de Becque from Dec. 2-Jan 25, 2009, and again from March 12-April 12, 2009. Later this season Pittsinger will also appear in the New York City Opera's concert performance of “Antony and Cleopatra” at Carnegie Hall.

Matthew Morrison (who plays Lt. Cable, shown below in leather jacket) will leave the production January 4, 2009, to take on the leading role in a FOX TV sit-com called GLEE, which will premiere in May. His role is the director of a high school glee club down on its luck.

Below:
Brazilian opera star Paul Szot as Émile de Becque and Kelli O'Hara as Nellie Forbush.

UNICEF Snowflake at 57th Street

2008-12-12T19:29:00.000-08:00

Located in front of Bergdorf Goodman, the UNICEF Snowflake is a dazzling, illuminated crystal ornament that graces the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in New York City each holiday season as a beacon of hope, peace and compassion for vulnerable children around the world.

The huge snowflake has become an iconic fixture in New York City during the holiday season. It was handcrafted by German lighting designer Ingo Maurer and is adorned with 16,000 Baccarat crystal prisms. At 23 feet in diameter, over 28 feet in height and weighing 3,300 pounds, the UNICEF Snowflake is the largest outdoor chandelier of its kind. It was switched on November 18, 2008, and will flash and sparkle for the entire holiday season. The snowflake was dedicated to UNICEF by the Stonbely Family Foundation.

The United Nations Children's Fund (or UNICEF) was created by the United Nations general assembly in 1946 to provide emergency food and healthcare to children in countries that had been devastated by WWII. In 1953, UNICEF became a permanent part of the UN system, and its name was shortened from the original United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. However, it has continued to be known by the popular acronym based on its former name. Headquartered in New York City, UNICEF provides long-term humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and mothers in developing countries.

Saks Fifth Avenue Snowflake Show

2008-12-12T15:52:00.000-08:00

Just in time for the holidays, 50 huge snowflakes lit by LEDs appear annually on the landmark Saks Fifth Avenue façade in Manhattan. Set to an original rendition of “Carol of the Bells,” the snowflake show, which opens each November, runs for two minutes every half hour throughout the evenings during the holidays.

The project was designed by American Christmas Decorations Inc., and lighting consultants Focus Lighting, led by Paul Gregory. Philips Lighting, the event sponsor, worked in collaboration with Permlight Products on the system. The LEDs are used in fourteen 20' snowflakes and thirty-six 8' snowflakes. Illuminated by 72,000 LEDs, the snowflakes feature more than 24,000 linear feet of lighting tied to 8,000 linear feet of steel.

The Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store is directly opposite Rockefeller Center. One of the most famous holiday sights in "Rock Center" is the herald angels placed along the Channel Gardens, which separate the French and British Empire Buildings of Rockefeller Center (appropriately named after the English Channel). These angels are wire-sculpted figures that have decorated Rock Center during the holidays since 1954.

Note: The stylized sun applied to the British Empire building alludes to the saying, "The sun never sets on the British Empire," and original tenants of La Maison Française included Baccarat crystal, Mumm's champagne, Les Parfums de Molyneux, the French consulate and the remarkable Librairie de France).

The snowflakes that decorate Saks Fifth Avenue are prominent in the background of this photo of the Channel Gardens Herald Angels.

Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree

2008-12-05T20:48:00.000-08:00

The 76 year old tradition of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree goes a bit greener this year. The Norway Spruce shares the center stage this year, not just with singing sensations, but with the energy saving environment in which it’s displayed. The majestic tree is festooned with over 30,000 energy-efficient LED lights, powered by “a ground breaking permanent array of photovoltaic panels” installed on the roof of 45 Rockefeller Center (after the holidays, the panels will continue to help power the center). The tree is topped by a 9.5-foot, 550-pound Swarovski Star with more then 25,000 crystals and 1 million facets — the largest ever for a Rock Center tree. This year's tree is a 77 year old, 8-ton, 82-foot-tall Norway spruce from the Varanyak family in Hamilton, N.J. The family used it as their Christmas tree in 1931, then planted it outside. It has grown a bit since then.

The first Christmas tree ever erected at Rockefeller Center was placed there in 1931. This time the concept was green, a nod to the environment movement that is generating steam. Green is now a marketing strategy. Solar power is among the renewable energy technologies that play a key role in ecomagination; every little bit of energy savings helps. The use of LEDs lighting instead of incandescent bulbs will reduce the electricity consumption for a daily savings of energy equal to the electricity consumed by a typical 2,000-square-foot house for a month.

Carlton on Madison Avenue Hotel

2008-11-24T03:25:00.000-08:00

88 Madison Avenue 212.532.4100

Built in 1904, this 11 story luxury hotel comprises 305 rooms plus 15 suites in a handsome Beaux-Arts building at the corner of 29th Street and Madison Avenue (Murray Hill). The spectacular three story lobby, designed by architect David Rockwell, features a curved limestone staircase and a unique flat waterfall sculpture that flows over a photograph of the original 1904 building. Near the Empire State building, Morgan Library, Madison Square Garden, Penn Station and two subway lines.

Member of Preferred Hotels group. Two restaurants: the acclaimed Country (with its original Tiffany stained glass domed ceiling) and a café. Champagne bar. Features: complimentary WiFi Internet access, iPod docking stations, complimentary daily newspaper, Frette linens, down feather comforters, executive work desks.

Trivia: Graucho Marx once worked here as a bellhop, when the hotel was known as The Seville.

www.carltonhotelny.com

Rockefeller Center

2008-11-19T07:47:00.000-08:00

Top of the Rock Observation Deck
Open 365 days a year 8 am to midnight.
360˚ views from 3 levels 70 stories above Rockefeller Plaza.
Adults $20, Seniors +62 $18, Children $13.
Allow a minimum of 45 minutes for a visit (many stay for 2 hrs).
Extensive Rockefeller Center multi-media exhibit at mezzanine level.
Fifth Ave. at 50th Street (restrooms at the top!).
212.698.2000
http://www.topoftherocknyc.com/

After closing in 1986, the observation deck atop the GE Building (originally the RCA building) at Rockefeller Center reopened in late 2005. After a $75 million reworking, access is now spread among three levels. Views of Central Park are far better than from the top of the Empire State Building, because Rockefeller Center is 15 blocks farther north. The Top of the Rock is also the undisputed best vantage point for observing the majesty of the Empire State Building.

Jersey Boys

2008-11-19T03:46:00.000-08:00

2 hours 30 min., incl. intermission
August Wilson Theatre
245 W. 52nd Street at 8th Avenue

Tony Award winning Jersey Boys is a documentary-style musical based on the lives of one of the most successful 1960s pop groups, the Four Seasons. The show uses many of the group’s hit songs to tell the turbulent story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ rise to fame. The musical’s success has spawned two current national tours, a London production, a Canadian production (Toronto), an Australian production set to open in July, 2009, and a new purpose-built Las Vegas theater at the Palladio Hotel & Casino designed expressly for this show (opened May, 2008).

The August Wilson Theatre, located on West 52nd Street at 8th Ave., opened as the 1,240 seat Guild Theatre in 1925. In 1981, the theater was purchased by Jujamcyn Amusement Corporation owner and board member Virginia McKnight Binger (renamed the Virginia Theatre in her honor). Jujamcyn derives its name from the names of the Bingers’ children: Ju[dith], Jam[es], and Cyn[thia]. Former Yale drama professor and Broadway producer Rocco Landesman (president of Jujamcyn Theaters, the third largest Broadway theatre organization), bought the Virginia Theatre in 2005. On October 16, 2005, only 14 days after Pulitzer Prize winning playwright August Wilson's death, the Virginia Theatre was renamed the August Wilson Theatre and thus became the first Broadway theater to bear the name of an African American.

Neighborhood dining:

Bar Americain
152 W. 52nd St. at 7th Ave.; 212.265.9700
Sat/Sun brunch 11:30-2:30; dinner from 5:00 pm. Especially handsome interior; seats 200.

Brasserie Maison
212.757.2233; 54th & 7th Ave. (www.maisonnyc.com);
Open 24 hours.
Moderate prices, extensive menu.

The Carnegie Club
Restaurant and cigar bar; Sinatra tribute crooner sings with an 11-piece orchestra Saturdays at 8:30 & 10:30 ($30 cover)
156 W 56th St (east of 7th Ave)
212-957-9676.

Red Cat Restaurant

2008-11-19T02:25:00.000-08:00

The Red Cat
227 Tenth Ave. (between 23rd & 24th Sts.)
212-242-1122 (dinner from 5:30 pm)
http://www.theredcat.com

The Red Cat purrs with informal bonhomie and good, unpretentious food. Its interior is clad in rescued wood from a falling-down barn, and butcher paper covers the tabletops. A casual crowd fills the restaurant to capacity early on; the bar also accommodates diners. Good-natured waiters proudly trot out owner Jimmy Bradley's flavorful dishes. Tempura green beans go great with drinks. Mushroom and chicory is paired with bacon and egg, and crispy fried oysters accompany truffle creamed baby spinach. Several vegetable appetizers get a cheese counterpoint and well-battered sweetbread schnitzel even comes with spätzle. The kitchen may not be flashy, but it isn't timid about intriguing flavor combinations. Paprika-roasted cod, for instance, sharing a plate with spicy escarole and anchovy-almond sauce, is another prime example of the slightly edgy yet still familiar dishes on offer here.

Village Vanguard

2008-11-18T01:00:00.000-08:00

The Village Vanguard
178 7th Avenue South
212-255-4037
http://www.villagevanguard.com/

This windowless, wedge shaped basement room, also known for its perilously steep, red stairwell, formerly housed the Golden Triangle, a speakeasy busted during Prohibition. When it opened as the Vanguard on February 22, 1935, owner Max Gordon (1901-91) booked beat poets, cabaret artists and comedians. Judy Holliday, Betty Comden and Adolph Green were all on stage there. Since the switch to an all-jazz policy in 1957, the club has hosted a veritable who's who of jazz: Thelonious Monk, of whom Lorraine was an early champion, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Max Roach, Dinah Washington, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, just to name a few. The great Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra made its residence there on Monday nights beginning in 1966; the current Vanguard Jazz Orchestra is its present-day incarnation. There is no argument that the Village Vanguard is a veritable jazz institution famous throughout the world - a sort of holy ground of jazz culture.

Numerous live recordings have kept close account of the musical dialogue within its walls and brought the venue to the forefront of jazz consciousness. Among the most famous are: Sonny Rollins' A Night at the Village Vanguard, John Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard, Bill Evans' Sunday at the Village Vanguard, and Dexter Gordon's Homecoming Live. The room has more recently been a recording studio to Tommy Flanagan, Joe Lovano, Brad Mehldau, and Wynton Marsalis. Many musicians say that the wedge shape of the room gives the sound a special focus, and that is what makes so many jazz musicians want to record live albums here.

No credit cards, no food, no distractions (the proprietress, Lorraine Gordon [widow of Max Gordon] will shush you if your party gets too loud).

St. James Theatre

2008-11-17T15:20:00.000-08:00

246 W. 44th, between 7th & 8th Aves.

The St. James Theatre, was built by theatrical producer Abraham L. Erlanger on the site of the original Sardi's restaurant. It opened in 1927 as The Erlanger, seating 1,510 patrons, but was renamed the St. James by the Astor family, who became its owners in 1930.

Notable Broadway productions at the St. James (with opening dates):
Oklahoma! (March 31, 1943)
The King and I (March 29, 1951)
Hello, Dolly! (January 16, 1964)
The Producers (Apr 19, 2001)
Gypsy - A Musical Fable (March 27, 2008)

Trivia: The theater has only one men’s lounge, making intermission a challenge (for guys).

Area Dining:

Café Un Deux Trois (French)
123 W. 44th St., between 6th/7th Aves. 212.354.4148
Busy, sometimes frenetic place in the heart of Broadway’s theater district. The best things are the retro décor and the $30 three-course theatre menu (price includes coffee/tea).

Carmine’s (Italian)
200 W. 44th St., between 7th/8th Aves. 212.221.3800
Tourist central, extremely popular. Big food.

Becco (Italian)
355 W 46th St./between 8th/9th Aves. 212.397.7597
$17.95 pre fix lunch menu; $22.95 pre fix dinner menu (antipasti or Caesar salad with unlimited tableside servings of 3 pasta preparations); à la carte menu, as well. All wines priced at $25 a bottle. Busy, busy, busy - so reserve.

Trailer Park Lounge

2008-11-17T15:06:00.000-08:00

Trailer Park Lounge
271 W. 23rd St. at 8th Ave. (Chelsea)
Open daily noon to 3:00 am
212-463-8000
www.trailerparklounge.com

You can't miss it. Look for the spare tire and the pink toilet parked outside the garage door. Then, once you enter this place through the screen door, it’s like being trapped in a John Waters film. Trailer Park Lounge is an over-the-top ode to white trash. Pabst Blue Ribbon served in a can with a side of tater tots. Chili-macs and Moon Pies. No lie.

Did I mention the wall of Tonya Harding memorabilia? Elvis on velvet? Astro turf? No? Well, it’s all there, in lurid living color. Pick your way through the rubbish that passes for decor (folding lawn chairs, a sixty year old gasoline pump) and you'll find a pink flamingo or two, even a couple of bowling alley lockers. Check it out for yourself. Signature drink: Jim Bob’s I.Q.

Metropolitan Opera House

2008-11-17T06:17:00.000-08:00

Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center
Broadway and West 65th Street

The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1883. The first Metropolitan Opera House was built on Broadway and 39th Street by a group of wealthy businessmen who wanted their own opera house. In the company’s early years everything was sung in Italian (even Carmen and Lohengrin), soon followed by a shift to German (including Aida and Faust), before finally settling on a policy of performing works in their original language.

The Metropolitan Opera House (Broadway at 39th St.) in 1905.

Enrico Caruso first sang at the Met in 1903, and by the time of his death had performed there more times than with all the world’s other opera companies combined. Arturo Toscanini made his debut in 1908 (there were two seasons with both Toscanini and Gustav Mahler on the conducting roster). Later, Bruno Walter, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, and Dimitri Mitropoulos contributed powerful musical direction. James Levine made his debut in 1971 and has been Music Director since 1976 (holding also the title of Artistic Director 1986-2004).

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the opera house on 39th Street did not have adequate stage facilities. However, it was not until the Metropolitan Opera joined with other New York institutions in forming Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts that a new home became possible. The new Metropolitan Opera House, which opened at Lincoln Center in September of 1966, was equipped with the finest technical facilities. Seating capacity is 3,800.

Hansel und Gretel was the first complete opera broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera on Christmas Day, 1931. Regular Saturday afternoon live radio broadcasts quickly made the Metropolitan Opera a permanent presence in communities throughout the United States and Canada. The Met continues its hugely successful radio broadcast series — now in its 77th year — the longest-running classical music series in American broadcast history, which is now heard in 42 countries around the world.

In 1995, the Metropolitan introduced Met Titles, a unique system of simultaneous translation. Met Titles appear on individual computerized screens mounted in specially built railings at the back of each row of seats, providing libretto translations into English, Spanish and German. “Met Titles” are provided for all Metropolitan Opera performances, and have recently expanded to include Spanish and German for select operas.

In the 2006-07 season, the company launched Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD, a series of performance transmissions shown live in high definition (HD) in movie theaters around the world. The series expanded from six to eight opera transmissions in 2007-08, reaching over 600 participating venues in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Each season the Metropolitan stages more than two hundred opera performances in New York. More than 800,000 people attend the performances in the opera house during the season, and millions more experience the Met through advanced new media distribution initiatives and state-of-the-art technology.

Click images to enlarge.

Hotel Roger Williams

2008-11-17T06:10:00.000-08:00

131 Madison Ave • 212-448-7000

In the low-key Murray Hill neighborhood, this hotel offers stylish, well-proportioned rooms at a modest price. Newly renovated in 2005, the hotel’s public areas enjoy a sleek modern look that is cozy, not cold. Honey-tone maple paneled walls and plank floors, subtle modern art and chrome accents create an inviting look in the light-filled double height lobby. The small lounge beside reception takes in the prime Madison Avenue views through floor-to-ceiling windows. Dining is up on the mezzanine overlooking the lobby. The breakfast here is a delicatessen-like affair, with selections from some of the city’s best grocers and bakeries.

The guest rooms boast eye-popping primary colors. Quilts top the beds, and modernist table and floor lamps add interest. The rooms are arranged with platform beds, desks, dual-line phones with voice mail and data ports, flat-screen TVs with DVD and CD players, mini-bars and coffee makers. High-speed Internet access is standard. The small baths have translucent glass walls and stainless-steel sinks with exposed plumbing. The smallest Classic rooms are 200 sq ft, but for a nominal up-tick in rates, the larger Superior rooms are a better bet. In warm months, book one of the limited number of Garden Terrace rooms, which are more spacious units appended with furnished terraces with city views. The small but helpful staff offers attentive service. Hip thirty-somethings comprise the lion's share of the clientele. Over sixteen floors, the 196 rooms are housed in a 1928 building. Tip: check out the rest room near the lobby level elevator; you'll have an entirely new concept of orange.

Trivia: Formerly an apartment house (Roger Williams Apartments) the property takes its name from the founder of Rhode Island, who was a champion of religious liberty, an interesting association, since the Madison Avenue Baptist Church is next door. Author Henry Miller stayed here when he was living in New York in 1935, pursuing Anais Nin; he finished his novel Black Spring while in residence. Across the street, at No. 120, is the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, founded in 1884 as the Lyceum Theatre School of Acting. The school later moved to this fine 1907 Stanford White designed edifice, originally built for the Colony Club, a private organization for women from old-school high society. Academy alumni include Cecil B. DeMille, Edward G. Robinson, Spencer Tracy, Rosalind Russell, Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly, Anne Bancroft, Robert Redford, Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes.

www.hotelrogerwilliams.com

La Boîte en Bois Restaurant

2008-11-17T03:23:00.000-08:00

La Boîte en Bois
212.874.2705
75 West 68th Street (just east of Columbus Ave.)
www.laboitenyc.com
$36 prix-fixe pre-theatre menu from 5 pm (starter – main – dessert); or à la carte

Tables are at a premium in this snug 45-seat step-down bistro, decorated to resemble a French country inn. The dark wooden ceiling beams, walls textured with horizontal strips of straw-like material, and antique prints and implements provide a calming effect on often rushed pre-theatre diners (Lincoln Center is in the immediate vicinity). Brick and barn-board, antique farm tools and copper pieces convey a rustic look (the name means “wooden box”), and simple, uncontrived dishes are the substance of the menu. Chef Gino Barbuti hails from Parma, Italy, so expect French Mediterranean cuisine incorporating black olives, anchovies and olive oil.

New York String Orchestra

2008-11-17T01:32:00.000-08:00

The New York String Orchestra, in its 40th season, under the leadership and guidance of conductor and renowned concert artist, Jaime Laredo, is a training program for musicians, aged 15-22. Competitive auditions are held each year for the admission of about 60 students from high schools, conservatories, and colleges. They are awarded full scholarships to come to New York from around the country to spend 10 days attending seminars, playing chamber music and preparing two concerts presented at Carnegie Hall, one of which is always on Christmas Eve.

Carnegie Hall – Stern Auditorium
Corner of 57th St. and 7th Avenue

Billy Elliot

2008-11-16T12:42:00.000-08:00

Imperial Theatre

249 W. 45th Street (between Broadway & 8th Ave.)
212-239-6200

The Imperial Theatre is a legitimate Broadway 1,490-seat theatre designed specifically to accommodate musical theatre productions. The Imperial Theatre opened on December 25, 1923 with the Oscar Hammerstein II-Vincent Youmans production Mary Jane McKane. Since then, it has hosted numerous important musicals, including Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Dreamgirls (1981) and Les Miserables (1990), which played at the theatre for thirteen years, until 2003. The current production is Billy Elliot (2008). Among the famed composers and lyricists whose works were housed at the Imperial Theatre are Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Irving Berlin, Harold Rome, Frank Loesser, Lionel Bart, Bob Merrill, Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, E.Y. Harburg, Harold Arlen, and George and Ira Gershwin (Of Thee I Sing and Let 'Em Eat Cake).

PDT (Please Don’t Tell)

2008-11-16T02:10:00.000-08:00

113 St. Mark’s Place, between 1st Ave. & Ave. A, south of 9th St.
212.614.0386
Subway L line: exit 1st Ave & 14th St.
OR #6 Line: exit Astor Place

You get inside the way it was done in the days of the Speakeasy. Walk down a few steps from the sidewalk into a hot dog joint called Crif Dogs.

Amble past the vintage arcade machines and look for the phone booth against the wall on your left. Press the buzzer on the phone. If there’s room for you, the back of the phone booth will swing open, and you and your guests will be invited through.

Decor: Brick walls and a wood lath ceiling tricked out with a stuffed deer head, owl, and otter, and beneath the floorboards, a glass enclosed miniature landscape from a child’s train set – without a locomotive. Plus a few painted nudes.

Bartender Mag rated this one of the 20 top bars in the US! Seats only 50, and it's popular, so reserve. Hungry? Hotdogs are served via a hole in the wall from connecting Crif Dogs.

Café Sabarsky & Neue Galerie

2008-11-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

Café Sabarsky (inside Neue Galerie)
1048 5th Ave., corner of 86th St.
Mon/Wed 9-6; Thu/Fri/Sat/Sun 9-9; closed Tue

The Café, which bears the name of Neue Galerie co-founder Serge Sabarsky, draws its inspiration from the great Viennese cafés that served as important centers of intellectual and artistic life at the turn of the twentieth century. It is outfitted with period objects, including lighting fixtures by Josef Hoffmann, furniture by Adolf Loos, and banquettes that are upholstered with a 1912 Otto Wagner fabric. A grand piano, which graces one corner of the Café, is used for cabaret, chamber, and classical music performances.

It’s the real deal, where patrons down Stiegl beer (from Salzburg) while perusing the pages of Die Presse and Der Standard. Others tackle a slice of Sachertorte with a melange on the side (all coffee orders are served authentically with a beaker of water). Heartier appetites are satisfied by goulash and spätzle.

Photo: Sachertorte mit Schlag

The building that houses the Neue Galerie museum and Café Sabarsky was completed in 1914 by Carrère & Hastings, also architects of the New York Public Library. It has been designated a landmark by the New York Landmarks Commission and is generally considered one of the most distinguished buildings ever erected on Fifth Avenue. Commissioned by industrialist William Starr Miller, it was later occupied by society doyenne Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III (Grace Graham Wilson). The family of Cornelius Vanderbilt III (universally known as Neily) was so against their marriage, that his father punished him with a paltry $500,000 inheritance, which his brother helped rectify by tossing in another $6 million after their father's death in 1899. This mansion was so much smaller than Grace and Neily's former mid-town 5th Avenue residence (77 rooms at 640 Fifth Ave., since demolished), that Grace referred to it as "the gardener's cottage." She lived in this "cottage" until her death in 1953. It was later purchased by Ronald S. Lauder (son of Estée Lauder) and Serge Sabarsky in 1994.

The glory of the museum’s collection of Austrian and German fine and decorative arts is Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) oil, silver and gold on canvas. In 2006, Lauder purchased Klimt's painting from Maria Altmann on behalf of the Neue Galerie for $135 million, at the time the most expensive painting ever sold. It has been on display at the museum since July 2006. The portrait, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist and the hostess of a prominent Vienna salon, is considered one of the artist’s masterpieces. For years, it was the focus of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and a niece of Mrs. Bloch-Bauer, who argued that it was seized along with four other Klimt paintings by the Nazis during World War II. In January, 2006, all five paintings were awarded to the niece, Maria Altmann, then 90, who was living in Los Angeles at the time.

Neue Galerie – 212.628.6200
Hours: 11-6; Fridays until 9; Closed Tue/Wed
Museum admission: $15 incl. audio guide (students and seniors $10)

In the drawing room of her Fifth Ave. mansion at 52nd St., Grace (Mrs. Cornelius) Vanderbilt entertained en masse while her estranged husband sailed the world on his yacht; one year she hosted 30,000 guests. By the 1940s, however, the big house at 640 5th Ave. was sold, and Mrs. Vanderbilt moved to what she referred to as “the gardener’s cottage,” a 28-room mansion at 1048 Fifth at 86th Street (now the Neue Galerie/Café Sabarsky). With a staff of 18, she continued to entertain in large numbers until her death in 1953. Interesting and attractive men were, in her opinion, the key to a successful party. She kept a list of 138 eligible men broken up into categories like: “men who will dance,” “men who can lunch,” and “men who will go to the theatre but not the opera.”

Photo below: The Vanderbilt mansion photographed back in its heyday, when it served as the residence of William Starr Miller, years before Mrs. Vanderbilt lived here. The house was sold subsequently sold to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which completed important studies on the Yiddish language. Cash strapped, this organization sold the air rights above the mansion to the Adams Hotel next door on 86th Street, which was being redeveloped as a residential property, assuring some of the future owners an unobstructed view of Central Park. Ron Lauder and Serge Sabarsky bought the building in 1994.

Below: An archive photo of the room facing Fifth Avenue that now serves as the Café Sabarsky. Note the card catalog on the rear wall to the right of the fireplace and the library tables, a clear indication of the research that went on here during its days as home to the YIVO Institute.

Morgan Library

2008-11-13T18:03:00.000-08:00

36th Street just east of Madison Avenue

The Morgan Library began as the private library of financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. As early as 1890 Morgan had begun to assemble a collection of illuminated, literary, and historical manuscripts, early printed books (including a large collection of incunabula, i.e. items printed before the year 1501), and old master drawings and prints. They became so numerous that it was soon evident he needed a place to house and catalogue them together as a collection.

During the last twenty years of his life, J. P. Morgan (financier, railroad, coal, steel and shipping magnate) had been on the most epic art-buying spree in history, spending close to a billion in today’s dollars. Although Morgan collected paintings and other fine art, there was a stiff 20% import tax imposed on paintings and antiquities by the U.S. government; books and manuscripts were exempt from this tax. Much of his fine art and paintings remained housed in his London townhouse and at Dover House, his English country estate, for the purpose of avoiding this tax, which was not rescinded by congress until 1909. Thus Morgan concentrated on rare books and manuscripts for his New York City residence, and his ultimate private collection remains unrivaled today.

Of the forty-eight extant Gutenberg Bibles, the Morgan Library owns three, more than any other institution. Spread among four buildings are the finest collection in America of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, Old Master drawings, Coptic manuscripts, Near Eastern cylinder seals, and an important collection of musical manuscripts. It possesses the ninth-century Lindau Gospels (circa 880, made for Charlemagne’s grandson); the 1459 Mainz Psalter; the Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1546) illuminated by Giulio Clovio; drawings by Michelangelo, Rubens, and Albrecht Dürer; the autographed manuscript of Mozart’s “Haffner” Symphony; literary manuscripts by Dickens, Balzac, Bob Dylan, and Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson, which Morgan purchased directly from its author), as well as the only complete manuscript of a Jane Austen novel. The only known manuscript of Milton's Paradise Lost is housed here, and the original manuscript of Charles Dickens's novella A Christmas Carol is displayed every Christmas season.

J.P. Morgan (1837-1913) was born into "old Yankee gentry" in Hartford, Connecticut. In addition to attending schools in the U.S., Morgan was educated in France and Germany; he spoke fluent French and German, and several other European languages, as well. He did the “Grand Tour” several times as a young man, and consistently spent six months of each year in Europe, where he moved in aristocratic circles. It was nothing for him to travel from Paris to New York, then hop on his own train to Washington to meet with the president of the United States.

Morgan served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1904 until his death in 1913, at which time 7,000 rare and valuable items were bequeathed to the Metropolitan. 4,100 of them were displayed by the Met from 1914-1916 in the first ever “block-buster” exhibit by a U.S. museum. It is a little-known fact that many of the finest holdings displayed in the city's Frick Collection were purchased from the Morgan estate. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “Progress of Love”paintings were purchased by Frick in 1915 for $1.25 million; today these paintings rank among the most prized possessions of the Frick Collection.

Mr. Morgan's library, as it was known in his lifetime, was built between 1902 and 1906, adjacent to his New York residence at Madison Avenue and 36th Street in today's Murray Hill neighborhood (this house was the first electrically lit private residence in New York; Morgan was, after all, the founder of General Electric). Three brownstone mansions, all constructed in the 1850s, occupied the entire east side of the block along Madison Avenue from 36th to 37th streets. All of them were to become the property of Pierpont Morgan. He bought and occupied the one at the corner of 36th Street. Because Morgan was born into a family of fabulous wealth and prestige, he did not find it necessary to participate in the ego-assuaging practice of commissioning over-the-top private mansions, as was the habit of the so-called “robber barons,” the self-made industrialists of the age. Morgan was content to occupy a recycled house.

To the immediate north of Morgan’s home stood a brownstone built for industrialist William Earl Dodge, which Morgan purchased and demolished to make room for a garden designed by Beatrix Farrand, one of America’s leading landscape gardeners (and niece of Edith Wharton). Among the extant masterpieces of Ms. Farrand are the gardens of the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, DC.

The brownstone on the corner of Madison Avenue and 37th Street was built for Isaac N. Phelps, whose grandson became one of the city’s prominent architects. In 1903 Pierpont Morgan purchased the Phelps mansion for his son Jack, who lived there until his death in 1943 (Jack founded the Murray Hill Association in 1914). Although it subsequently served as the headquarters of the Lutheran Church in America, this brownstone mansion came "back into the fold" of the Morgan complex in 1988. The house was used in filming the 1981 movie "Ragtime." Today the Thaw Conservation Center is situated on the top floor of the old Jack Morgan house. It’s an atelier where five to ten professionals and students perform the conservation work for all the Morgan Library’s works on paper. The ground floor of this building houses the museum shop, in the mansion's former ballroom, and a restaurant, located in the former dining room, both with their splendid architectural details intact.

Designed by Charles McKim of the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, Mr. Morgan's library was intended as something more than a repository of rare materials. Majestic in appearance yet intimate in scale, the structure was to reflect the nature and stature of its holdings. The result was an Italian Renaissance style palazzo with three magnificent rooms epitomizing America's Age of Elegance. Based on a 16th century Italian structure, its facade of Tennessee marble centers on an entrance in the form of a Palladian arch. The “dry masonry” of the McKim building, in which stone blocks were laid without mortar, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, bears example of its extraordinary refinement. To either side are lions carved by Edward Clark Potter and roundels and panels by Andrew O'Connor and Adolph Weinman. The refined simplicity of the exterior belies the richness of the interior. The entire structure is a virtual temple to books and art.

The Rotunda, an elaborate, colorful marble entrance hall, is crowned by a domed ceiling adorned with murals and plaster work by H. Siddons Mowbray. Mosaic panels and columns of lapis lazuli rise up from the marble floor, with its central porphyry disc, which owes its design to that of the Villa Pia in the Vatican gardens.

The East Library, pictured below (click photo to see details), is called one of the great achievements of American interior decoration. It is dominated by triple tiers of bookcases and ornamented with lunettes by Mowbry. This room houses 15,000 volumes, mostly in French, Italian and German. Above the fireplace is a sixteenth-century Brussels tapestry. Ceiling paintings feature portraits of great men of the past alternating with female muses and signs of the zodiac. A Gutenberg Bible c. 1455 (one of three in the collection), is always displayed on a table top in this room.

Completed three years before McKim's death, this library building is considered by many to be his masterpiece. In 1924, eleven years after Pierpont Morgan's death, his son, J. P. Morgan, Jr., realized that the library had become too important to remain in private hands. In what constituted one of the most momentous cultural gifts in U.S. history, he fulfilled his father's dream of making the library available to all by transforming it into a public institution. Over the years – through purchases and generous gifts – The Morgan Library & Museum has continued to acquire rare materials as well as important music manuscripts, early children's books, Americana, and materials from the twentieth century.

Without losing its domestic feeling, the Morgan expanded its physical space. In 1928, the Annex building (lower right corner in the photo above), designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris, was erected on the corner of Madison Avenue and 36th Street, where Pierpont Morgan's private residence was demolished to make room for it. The Annex connected to the original McKim library by means of a gallery. The 1991 garden court was constructed as a means to unite the various elements of the Morgan campus. The brownstone mansion in the lower left of the photo is the Jack Morgan residence at the corner of Madison Avenue and 37th Street.

Up close and personal with a Gutenberg Bible.

The largest expansion in the Morgan's Library's history, adding 75,000 square feet to the campus, was completed in 2006 after approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Designed by celebrated architect Renzo Piano, the project increased exhibition space by more than fifty percent and added numerous visitor amenities, including a new 250-seat performance hall/screening room, a main entrance on Madison Avenue, a new café and a new restaurant, a shop, a new reading room, and collections storage. Piano's design integrates the Morgan's three historical buildings with three new steel-and-glass pavilions. While there was no relation between the original J.P. Morgan brownstone mansion and the materials or design of his Italianate library next door, the 1928 library annex building blended in with and complimented the original library. Although the new Renzo Piano addition provides a soaring light-filled central court that connects the older buildings and serves as a gathering place for visitors, the Madison Avenue facade of Piano's structure is jarringly inappropriate and reminiscent of bad 1960s architecture; it has been dubbed the "tissue box" by its many critics. The interior is more successful, as it amounts to little more than a glass pavilion that connects the other structures; much of the additional space was gained from underground excavation.

The Pierpont Morgan Library and Annex was designated as a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1966. The interior was designated separately in 1982. National Register #66000544 (1966).

The Study, pictured above, is the most sumptuous, yet personal, of the rooms and the one that best reflects the personal tastes of its original occupant. It was here that Morgan met with art dealers, scholars, business colleagues, and friends. He loved to play solitaire and smoke Cuban cigars in this room (he smoked dozens a day), when time could be spared from saving the nation's banks. Pierpont Morgan helped end the “Panic of 1907" by rallying fellow bankers to supply liquidity to shore up the endangered national banking system. The crisis was resolved in this room after he locked the doors and refused to let the bankers leave until they agreed to a rescue plan.

With few exceptions, all the paintings, sculpture, and decorative objects in the Study where here in Pierpont Morgan's day. There is a painting of his son Jack, wearing the robes of Oxford University, from which he received an honorary degree after his father made a major purchase for the University. The paintings are primarily by Italian and Northern Renaissance masters; the art objects range in date from the third millennium B.C. to the nineteenth century, and give some indication of the original scope and diversity of Morgan's vast holdings.

Now open to the public for the first time, the Librarian's Office (above) is located at the north end of the Rotunda. This is the smallest of the McKim rooms and was the office of Belle da Costa Greene, Morgan's personal librarian, a leading figure in the international art world and the first director of the Morgan. This room continued to be used as a librarian's office well into the late 1980s. The librarian bore the mostly made-up name of Belle da Costa Greene.

Belle Greener, born in Alexandria, VA, where she grew up, was an African-American woman whose skin was light enough to allow her to pass herself off as Portuguese. An exotic beauty, a fashionable dresser, and a fiercely intelligent and strong-willed woman, Belle was a librarian at Princeton University and had an interest in illuminated manuscripts when Morgan hired her to manage his library and help build his collection. Belle’s father, Richard Greener, was Harvard’s first black graduate and a distinguished attorney and dean of Howard Law School in Washington, DC. Belle was introduced to Pierpont Morgan by his nephew Junius Morgan, himself an assistant librarian of Princeton.

It was only after her father took a consular position abroad and Belle’s parents dissolved their marriage that Belle and her mother, who lived together in New York City, changed their surname from Greener to Greene and began to pass themselves off as whites of Portuguese descent. It is said that Belle “moved her birth date around like a potted plant.” As agent, confidante, and adviser to Morgan, Belle became possibly the most powerful woman in New York City’s cultural establishment. With her outstanding knowledge, judgment and Morgan’s money, she was able to shape the markets in art and books. See photo below (circa 1911).

She traveled frequently to Europe, taking her thoroughbred horse with her to ride in London's Hyde Park. Described as smart, outspoken, and beautiful, she wore couturier gowns, feathered hats, and jewels to work. "Just because I'm a librarian, doesn't mean I have to dress like one," she said. Mr. Morgan left Belle a substantial amount in his will. She never married, retired in 1948, and died in New York City at the age of 66.

Trivia:
In his 20s at the time of the US Civil War, Morgan avoided military service by paying $300 for a substitute, a common practice among the wealthy at the time.

J. P. Morgan was a pioneer in industrial consolidation (he formed U.S. Steel and General Electric by purchasing and then consolidating competitors). A year before his death, Morgan, owner of the White Star Line, which built the Titanic, escaped a watery death by a quirk of fate. Morgan canceled passage on the Titanic mainly because when word got out that the financier would be on the maiden voyage of his great new liner, White Star was besieged by requests from an array of con men and Wall Street speculators, all wanting to book staterooms on the Titanic in the hope of cornering him at sea, where he had no escape, to badger him into funding their sure-to-make-millions schemes. He canceled his own booking, announcing he had no plans to return to the States until summer. At the same time he gave orders that his storied art collection, which was being shipped to New York that year, not be placed aboard. Morgan died in 1913 in Rome, Italy, at the age of 75.

Morgan's uncle, James Lord Pierpont, was a notable composer and church music director in his day. Pierpont was famous for composing the original "Jingle Bells" in the 1850s; it was originally titled “One Horse Open Sleigh.”

Morgan was a major collector of gemstones. In 1911 G. F. Kunz, chief gemologist for Tiffany & Co., named a newly found gem "morganite," after his biggest customer. Morganite was first discovered on an island off the coast of Madagascar in 1910.

J. P. Morgan Library/Museum/Concert Hall
225 Madison Ave at 36th St., 212.685.0008

Musical manuscripts, 3 Gutenberg Bibles, 2 restaurants;
10:30a-5:00p Tue-Thu., -6:00p Sat/Sun; -9:00Fri; closed Mondays.

$12 Adults; $8 Seniors 65 and over; $8 Students (with current ID)
Admission is free on Fridays from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Admission to the McKim rooms is free Tuesdays 3-5 p.m.; Fridays 7-9 p.m.; Sundays 4-6 p.m.

Admission is not required to visit the Morgan Shop and Morgan Dining Room.

www.themorgan.org

Note: Much of the content of this earlier post was expanded and updated from information found in the January-February 2010 issue of HUMANITIES, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Volume 31, Number 1. The author of the feature article is Francis Morrone, a writer and historian who has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture.
www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2010-01/MorganLibrary.html

Seppi’s Restaurant

2008-11-10T04:28:00.000-08:00

Seppi’s Restaurant (near Carnegie Hall)
123 W. 56th Street (between 6th & 7th Aves.)
212.708.7444; open daily until 2 a.m.
www.seppisny.com
$36 three-course pre-theatre menu 5-7 pm
$25 Sunday brunch from 10:30 am, incl. all-you-can-eat chocolate dessert buffet.
Frequented by Carnegie Hall performers. Bar can get noisy. Clarinetist Rick Bogart and his trio (piano, bass) perform swing style sets from 8:30 pm; Sundays noon to 3 pm.

Selections from the Sunday brunch dessert buffet.