Found Around NYC...

So Long NYC...

This week I leave NYC, the country's city of commerce that has always pulsated 24/7/365.  I select this final photo because it is a defining symbol of the essence of this city and it is a place, too, that has changed.  Where once it stood as a classical structure amid modern buildings in this city of commerce, it now stands draped and covered and the structure is less prominent than the new (old) symbol behind which it stands. 

Nothing stays the same.  This is the the last post here.

I'll continue blogging at MotherPie.
 

Found Around NYC: The Homeless

Before I started this site I had an idea of possibly turning it into a space that might help document homeless people in NYC and thought once I finished my studies I would document the homeless people that I come across in Manhattan.  With the internet, this might have been one way to help not only document those who are lost but perhaps help families and friends locate those people they have lost contact with and hope to find. 

If there is anyone who wishes to use this site for that purpose, please contact me.

Riding Horses in Central Park: No More

Claremont Riding Academy on West 89th has closed.  Still on my to-do list before I move from NYC was to ride around Central Park so I guess I'll need to strike that.  I regret not riding with friends when they came up last winter.  Even though I prefer riding Western, I'm a bit sad.  I'm a huge horse lover and just being around the smell of the stables would have been fun. 

The carriage rides are still here and I've not ever done that, either.  I wonder how much longer they will last.

The most beautiful horses I have found while living in NYC are those I enjoy on a regular basis through the photos of Sally, who lives in North Dakota.  She photographs her horses on a regular basis.  Here is her flickr page and the link to the photo pictured here.  She sells cowgirl/western items and jewelry on her ebay site, salgalnd. 

According to a New Yorker article by Roger Angell, Into the Sunset - Horse Talk on May 17, there were 120,000 horses in residence in New York in 1908.  Angell's article alerted me to the end of horseback riding in NYC.    When I left Houston in 2001 the city still had mounted police officers.  Those were long gone when I moved to NYC two years ago.

Park Avenue and Other Things I Love About NYC...

My sabbatical in this city is nearing an end.  Time to think about what I love best about this city...

For starters, it is full of talent and intelligence (or people with such traits). There are so many cultural offerings that it is never boring.  Museums, museums, museums.  One can live here and make a small comfortable world within the large city and neighborhoods are easy to define as one's own.  It is very navigable above ground.  The itty bitty dogs think they are people and try to make eye contact with people.  Central Park is the big pearl of the place, the pulsing heart that gives life and real ground to a concrete city. The big ideas, especially the one of the Mayor to plant a million trees here.

Then the living is easy and the doctors are great and elders can easily get out and about and around.  The restaurants are divine and I've barely touched the surface but I have my favorites on Madison I love and others that I just want to return to time and time again.  I've forgotten how to cook with all of the options for food delivery and deli food to pick up.  I love shopping in little spurts and the amount of walking you do in a regular day and the 92nd Street Y with all of its offerings.   

I enjoy the areas in SoHo and around Union Square and some of the little restaurants in that area.  It is a part of the city where I love to ramble.  The graphic design and visual art talent that simmers all the time and breaks out in splashes is about as robust as the big ideas that bubble all the time.

The plays,the shows (Wicked and The Drowsy Chaperone - top favorites), the opera, the music and Carnegie Hall, the architecture like Gehry's new building and living in itty bitty spaces. The galleries and the little nooks and crannies and little shops. For one who loves to dress in uniform, the black pants, shoes and coats were easy to adopt.  I love not seeing fast food restaurants everywhere or big mega stores.  And I like, especially, the way that people are direct and to-the-point.  It is not abrupt and people are friendly here, just as I've found them to be everywhere I've lived.  It is a full of people that look at everything with a wide-angle lense.  It is a gumbo city of a lot of people from everywhere else with a few spicy locals that keep the flavor.

The purse thing that I observed from the sidelines...those who buy on Canal Street from the venders tucked away selling knock-offs or black-market goods to the ladies who lunch at places so they can show off their new bags that cost zillions and they tip hefty sums to clerks who call them when the latest bags come in.  If I stayed a little longer I might have given in.  You know this is the purse fashion capital of the world and designs that make it here then go to be sold everywhere else.  I guess in other places people can mark status with cars or homes but here those elements that flash discrimination or money aren't as easily discernible so purses become the accoutrement tattoo.  And Park Avenue.  I love Park Avenue.

Well, I could go on and on. 

Van Gogh: Go See...

Vincent Van Gogh's paintings became the epitome of modern international art early in the 20th century, over a decade after he committed suicide.  His influence on German and Austrian expressionism is the subject of the Van Gogh exhibit at the Neue Galerie at 86th and Fifth Avenue.

Van Gogh's self studies and his sunflowers are less on view than the impact he had on others.  To prepare for the exhibit, I read The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh edited by Mark Roskill.   A few weeks ago I was surprised at how tourists flocked in front of Van Gogh's Starry Night at the MOMA and were more interested in capturing the painting on digital than they were in just taking it in with regular ol' eyeballs.  At the Neue Galerie you can't take photos but the collection of his works and the way they have been selected and curated is excellent.  This is a must-see exhibit.

Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo, who supported the artist,  "Cobalt is a divine colour, and there is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around things."   Van Gogh painted halos to also give a sense of the divine and you can see both the cobalt and the halo in this painting which is one of the ones on exhibit.  He painted many self portraits (at least 35) and sunflowers.

While there you can also see the most expensive painting, Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, purchased last year for the Neue Galerie.

Imagine: Found Around NYC...

As I wind up things in NYC, I thought I'd pay a tribute to my blog friend, Claude, who blogs from Paris.  She was the inspiration for this blog as she has enjoyed photography (she is a big Flickr user with over 17,000 photos posted on her Flickr site) and blogging from a big city.

I was too busy working on a graduate degree and adjusting the family to the move to really get out and explore when I first moved here.  I was inspired by Claude's daily walks in Paris where she would post on another blog a photo each day.  She no longer maintains her other blog but I set this one up to do the same thing.  I didn't do it at all on a daily basis like I did (and still do) on my other blog.  I was also encouraged when I started blogging by the Queen of the Elder Bloggers, Ronni Bennett, who was just preparing to leave NYC and still blogs at Time Goes By.  Ronni wrote a huge long email about what I should see and do in NYC.  So that is how and why this blog started.  I am a huge fan of her blog and also of Jill, at The Busines of Life, another smart woman who has been encouraging to a new (then) blogger.  Claude came to NYC not too long ago and met with blogger Naomi who I've yet to meet in person but thought if I could take on NYC like she does - man, just imagine.  So with this blog, I thought I'd eat up this city with the eye of my camera and the clicking of my fingertips.

So, when I came to NYC and studied new media, I learned how to blog as a class assignment.  Imagine, coming to NYC and learning to do something that I could do from anywhere.  Ironic, huh.

Peace, love and...blog.

Found: That the Heartland Has Meaning, Too...

The stuff in the middle of the sandwich is just as meaning full as the outside breads and that is true, too, of the United States.  For way too long the country has defined itself by the East Coast, West Coast or the Mythological West. 

I'm not alone in planning to migrate in.  Even native-born coastal residents are realizing the wonder and blue-sky life in the middle of the country.
Thanks to Jill at Business of Life for the link to the WSJ article on the Realignment of America where immigrants are moving into the big cities and Americans moving out.

According to the article:

The nation's center of gravity is shifting: Dallas is now larger than San Francisco, Houston is now larger than Detroit, Atlanta is now larger than Boston, Charlotte is now larger than Milwaukee. State capitals that were just medium-sized cities dominated by government employees in the 1950s--Sacramento, Austin, Raleigh, Nashville, Richmond--are now booming centers of high-tech and other growing private-sector businesses. San Antonio has more domestic than immigrant inflow even though the border is only three hours' drive away. The Interior Boomtowns generated 38% of the nation's population growth in 2000-06.

Rambling in Connecticut...

One of my favorite things is walking and talking. This day I walked and talked with my cousin around Rowayton, a charming little town with a good lunch/coffee shop on the water.  Many of the homes have historical markers.

We drove through Darian and she showed me the different areas and talked about life, children, commutes to Manhattan and she told me exactly how to catch the train out which was something I enjoyed learning how to do.

Most of all I enjoyed the architecture of the homes, especially in Rowayton and parts of Darian where the streets have older homes that are close together.  In these places children can go easily from house-to-house, play in the street and in each others' yards and there seems to be a friendly community. 

In the larger areas the homes are stellar and the properties are unbelievably gorgeous and it seems to go endlessly on-and-on, more so than the North Shore of Chicago and it makes tiny geographical areas like Piney Point in Houston or Highland Park in Dallas or Nichols Hills in Oklahoma City seem minute.  It is just like one endless high-end suburb. It seems so utterly opposite to the urban life of Manhattan. I'd love to know more about the lives of the SAH wives.  I wonder if they are lonely and feel isolated with their husbands working such long hours with those long commutes.  In layout and feel it seems equivalent to England and I wonder just what, in the social, cultural and lifestyle fabric, makes these areas such strong incubators of boarding school populations.

Top Shows...

For a tepid year with no blockbusters among the 35 Broadway shows, the Tony Award Nominations list only inspires me to think of seeing two shows/plays that I've yet to see: Angela Lansbury  in Deuce (up for best performance by a leading actress in a play) and Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, a three-part trilogy in 8 1/2 hours, up for Best Play.

Grey Gardens is up for Best Musical and Journey's End is up for Best Revival of a Play. I've written about Grey Gardens but not about Journey's End which my husband especially enjoyed.  It is set in the trenches of WWI and seems very apropos with an unpopular war raging at the moment.

Friends up to visit recently have gone to see Mary Poppins.  Disney on Broadway is becoming quite a machine to contend with... The Little Mermaid is the next show up and previous Disney releases include Tarzan, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.   When 80 percent of Broadway shows not recouping their investments, perhaps the Disney machine will recycle old stories on a new stage and we will reimagine Broadway as a continuum of the Disney story machines.

Also coming next season:  Grease and Young Frankenstein.  My top recommend is still Wicked. 

The Off Broadway Lucille Lortel nominations are out if you want to check for more theatre ideas. 

Also, American Idol Winner Fantasia is making her Broadway debut in The Color Purple.

To get tickets, I use these places: Broadway offers and  Telecharge.

Grand Central Station at Rush Hour...

Grand Central Station has been a metaphor for congestion, high traffic, busy people going places with their heads down.  Jackie O. helped save this building and it is a beautiful large interior space full of NYC workers at all times of day. But on this day, a Thursday at 5:00 p.m., it was busy. Suits, suits, suits and people thumbing on blackberries as they walk along, noses to the grindstone of the work in their fingertips. 

Multi-tasking on cell phones, reading something, whatever... no one was just paying attention, it seemed, to just what they were doing as they moved through this space.  Yet no one bumped anyone.  It was like watching ants stream along.

Want to experience a unqiue architectural design feature in NYC?  Go to the space outside the oyster bar on the first level on the south side inbetween the ticket counters.  There is a small domed space.  Have someone stand in one corner, face into the corner, and you go stand in the opposite corner, face into the corner.  You can whisper to one another and  it is as thought the person is just next to you.