April 1998. Central Park is a strange place. If you don’t have wheels on your feet, you are a second-class citizen; rollerbladers have priority here, along with the cyclists. You take your life in your hands as you cross in front of them, gaining some worried looks from the fast-approaching rollerblader in the process. The marathon man perimeter fence around the reservoir must be to stop joggers from getting their feet wet if they forget to follow the one-way system. The sloping glass wall of a huge conservatory nestled in amongst the trees presents an entirely different front to the Met, with an obelisk out front (Cleopatra’s Needle?). A bit of research reveals that this is one of three obelisks sold by the Viceroy of Egypt in the nineteenth century, so this is probably the oldest structure from the “civilised” world to exist in North America.
Strawberry Fields is extremely busy. “Imagine,” the John Lennon memorial, apparently has had fresh flowers placed on it every day since the singer’s death. By contrast, the scene of the crime outside the Dakota Building stands anonymously among the apartment blocks; that is, except for a guy on rollerblades that takes a tumble at that very point, quickly helped up and who apologises profusely for the interruption, before skating off down the street. Back in the park, ice-skaters are getting their feet wet as the 105 degrees air temperature is proving too much to keep the ice rink from melting.
Walking south, traffic, traffic, traffic and the Friday night stampede to get off Manhattan. The stampede is not actually going anywhere due to the sheer volume of traffic. I am told this happens every Friday as workers who stay on Manhattan during the week look to get home for the weekend. The destination for the walk is a jazz club in lower East Village, songs about heads turning up in garbage cans, tales about life in New York, performed by a band with female singer/guitarists, and a really entertaining evening.
The Lincoln Centre, home of the New York Symphony Orchestra, is strangely deserted during the day. Nearby, a slightly overweight statue of liberty appears above the rooftops of buildings on the opposite side of Broadway. Heading south along Broadway to Columbus circus at the east entrance of Central Park forms one impressive entrance to the subway, not taking the subway now though it is only a short walk to West Fifty- Third Street and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), “Humanising Modernism”, an exhibition of the works of Alvar Aalto, displayed in models and immaculate pencil drawings. In the main exhibition are the surrealist works of Salvador Dali, paintings much smaller than anticipated, probably due to the large number of oversized reproductions available as posters. The large canvases of Piet Mondrian, grids, primary colours, seemingly so appropriate to the location; the abstract expressionism of Joan Miro that captures so much life and movement; to the absolute raw energy of Jackson Pollock demand serious attention it could easily take a week to view each piece. Outside, in the sculpture garden, it really feels that MoMA forms an oasis in the desert of skyscrapers.
Barnes and Noble is much more than a bookstore; the books themselves on dark varnished wooden bookcases give a sense of something more akin to the library of the Reform Club as described by Jules Verne in Around the World in 80 Days. All around, armchairs occupied by people reading newspapers add to the illusion; books on coffee tables are available for anybody to pick up and thumb through. A counter serving coffee and cakes actually encourages people to be there, take their time, and actually enjoy the experience of reading, exploring and usually buying a book or three. For some, shopping is a necessary evil and reserved for times when items need to be procured. For others, it is a leisure activity, and in New York, Macys Department store occupies a whole block, bounded by Thirty- Fourth and Thirty-Fifth Streets, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway and could probably occupy a week for the leisure shopper. For the rest of us, it is worth a visit if only to ride on the original wooden escalators, said to be the world’s first, that climb through the ten and a half levels.
The full story is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris — Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture
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