Page 5 of 5
Brooklyn, New York
I know just how this thing ends
So we’ve finally reached the last themed page of this five page weekend/local trips slideshow. After seeing night pictures, building tours, super local destinations and art exhibitions, we’re ending with a theme that’s a little less defined, which is (generally) getting outside. To start the festivities, we’re going all the way up to the roof at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which is always more difficult than it should be) just so we can take in the great view and also try to figure out what exactly the deal is with Abetare by Petrit Halilaj. I mean it kind of looks like a slightly mischievous spider, which even if that’s all it is, it’s probably still enough.
One of my very favorite New York art experiences ever took place right here at Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens. Way back in 2011, I somehow found out about a one time performance of Odysseus at Hell Gate, a parade with giant puppets that included New York favorites Typhoid Mary and Robert Moses, among others (you can relive that for yourself by clicking here). Back then it was a real pain to get all the way out there, but now it’s super easy and only a short walk away from the Astoria ferry. And while sadly there were no giant Typhoid Marys or Unisphere headed Robert Moseses walking around, there was a pretty interesting art installation called We are nomads, we are dreamers by Suchitra Mattai, which included angled reflection that made parts of the park and city disappear into the cloudy summer sky.
If I’m going to go all the way out to that part of Astoria (and I have the time), you know I’m just going to continue walking four minutes more to see the Noguchi Museum, which feels almost exactly as nice as the last time I visited.
Careful readers already know that I live in northern New Jersey, a place which provides easy access into New York, although easy might be an exaggeration. My transit options include New Jersey Transit’s Morristown Line into Penn Station or Hoboken (Penn is faster but less reliable and more crowded, Hoboken is easier but is practical only on weekdays), or I could (usually) save time, drive to Secaucus and park and ride from the train station there. On weekends, the easiest PATH train station for me is at Harrison, although PATH trains can be excruciatingly rough on weekends due to ongoing track construction that feels never ending. I could also park in Paulus Hook or Port Imperial to take a ferry, although Paulus Hook on weekends has limited hours. So, depending on what day it is and exactly where I’m going, it can be easy to get there, although it always feels that it should be a little easier than it is.
So on a summer weekday when I needed to go to NYU to see a presentation (more about that later), I ended up taking a train into Hoboken, then a PATH train to the World Trade Center and then an E train to West 4th Street to get there- it could have been faster through Penn Station but New Jersey Transit delays through there were pretty rough this summer and not always worth the risk. Afterwards I decided to take the hour long walk from Washington Square up Fifth Avenue to MoMA, a street that I walk down a lot but rarely walk (at distance) up. And afterwards, I gave myself some time here at Olympics Plaza at Rockefeller Center, a temporary and quite popular pop up public space complete with its own Eiffel Tower and big screens showing live Olympics events. It took over the space normally reserved for ice skating or outdoor dining, and made a terrific pop up public space that was a lot nicer than an area roped off exclusively for people eating another overpriced lunch.
The York State Fair (not the New York State Fair but instead a fair at regular York out in Pennsylvania) claims to be the oldest fair in the country, although I’m not sure that alone is a reason to drive all the way out to York (not New York but instead a regular York out in Pennsylvania). But if you do decide to drive all the way out there, you will be rewarded with log rolling, butter sculptures, fake chickens and, if you’re lucky, a guy getting shot out of a cannon. For that photo you’re going to have to get in real close to see him, but if you do there really is a guy in mid flight there. I promise.
I’ve already talked about how this year I really went out of my way to push myself to get out more, to see new places but also to visit places again that (for whatever reason) I hadn’t been to in years. Just on this page alone, we’ve already made long delayed return visits to Socrates Sculpture Park and the Noguchi Museum, and if you count the header image, I’d add walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to that list (it’s so much safer now that they moved the bike lane). We’re also adding this place to that growing list. This is the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens, somewhere I normally just refer to as the Pepsi Sculpture Gardens, a free, weekend only experience and a good one at that. Both the sculpture and garden part of the sculpture garden are world class, and visitors are allowed to wander about the grounds all they want, although they’re not allowed inside the PepsiCo Headquarters Building that centers the whole place.
After adding Socrates Sculpture Park, the Noguchi Museum and the Pepsi Sculpture Gardens, we’re now adding Dia: Beacon to that list. One of my favorite local(ish) museums, it’s an indoor building but still kind of qualifies for this “getting outside” themed page. The museum is not artificially lit (unless you count the basement and bathrooms), and on a sunny and crisp October Saturday afternoon, the galleries were bathed in enough real light to make you think you might not even be indoors at all.
I decided to go to Beacon the hard way, which included a stopover at Grand Central Terminal followed by a river side window seat up along the Hudson. It seemed like a good idea, but unfortunately I was not the only person who had this same idea. It turns out that on a sunny and crisp October Saturday afternoon, when you are just starting to see a little color change on the trees, that the entire pumpkin hunting population of Manhattan gets on that same train. There were so many people on the train that some could not board at Grand Central, and no one at all could board by the time we got to 125th Street. Luckily I managed to snag that river side seat I dreamt about, but even with that prized seat, the unpleasantly overpacked train ended up being no fun at all, even if the views were exactly what I was hoping they’d be.
I was at Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel at Hudson Yards on opening day, and remained more impressed than most (it’s still annoyingly fashionable to say you hate everything at Hudson Yards). Since opening day though, Vessel closed to the public after four highly publicized suicides made it seem like it was starting to become an annoyingly fashionable place to merge with the infinite. In order to reopen Vessel, netting was installed for safety reasons (I’m fine with that), although the top level and about three quarters of the platforms are now off limits (I’m not fine with that). The experience of climbing Vessel really paid off on that top level, which felt like you were floating on an impossible structure, and I hope that the safety netting is extended or the glass guards raised so that experience can be experienced again. Until then, it’s still an interesting structure that photographs exceptionally well, so there’s no reason I won’t find myself back there again, appreciating what is open and grumbling about what it used to be.
This has been a long, long slideshow, but there’s a good reason for that. This year I really went out of my way to push myself to get out more and, well, I really did get out more, and I have the stats to prove it. My digital photo folders go back to 1997 (just like this site) and I have always organized them into one of two folders named Travel and Local. This year the Local folder held 44 subfolders- for reference, I’m usually around 10 to 15 subfolders a year, and the previous record holder was only 21 subfolders back in 2012. Adding things up, I was in the city (the city being New York) on 35 different days this year, more than I have ever been (not counting my time in graduate school). There were a lot of extenuating circumstances that added up to create this new subfolder record, including a week of free New Jersey Transit rides (they were trying to make people like them again after often terrible service this year), as well as (generally) regular things like conferences and walking tour research, but the numbers, including 5,613 photos in those local subfolders are (to me at least) pretty staggering this year.
All of this is to say that, believe it or not, there are a lot of things I actually left out of this long, long slideshow, a sample of which is included below. This includes the Poster House (a great place if you like posters), the RPA/MAS/Amtrak presentation about the future of Penn Station (to summarize, start lowering your expectations now), me and one other person alone in the James Turrell skyspace on the top floor of PS1 in Queens (yet another place I love that I haven’t been to in years) and the Asbury Park Zombie Walk (where I think that pumpkin head guy is a costumed participant). As for those other 5,418 photos not included in this long, long 197 picture slideshow, well, just be thankful that even in this long, long slideshow I managed to do at least a little editing.
All slideshows (even long, long slideshows) must come to an end, and this one ends here at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, which is just far enough away to make me think twice about going, although once I’m there, I’m always happy I went.
I was at Longwood gardens specifically to see the new West Conservatory designed by Weiss/Manfredi and part of the new Longwood Reimagined project that opened this Fall. The West Conservatory is huge, although in Longwood right next to its other downright massive conservatory, it feels comparably small. The West Conservatory sits on a reflecting pool outside, while inside there is also a lot of water, both make it a pleasant place to be and a nice addition to the gardens. The West Conservatory still has that new conservatory smell, and you get the feeling (or perhaps I mean to say hope) that over time, the gardens inside will feel more at home there than they do now. It’s not that the buildings and gardens are not nice, but more that when compared to the other, more lived-in conservatory, this one still feels a bit like a work in progress.
Despite saying that this slideshow was coming to an end a few paragraphs ago, now I actually mean it when I say that we’re finally, finally coming to an end. And just like the other four pages of this long, long slideshow, we’re ending this page with holiday themed pictures from here at Longwood Gardens where, as part of my plan to really go out of my way to push myself to get out more, I visited twice in 2024. So after five pages, 1,000 words and 197 pictures covering all these weekend trips that weren’t really weekend trips, we’re finally finishing up and already starting to look forward to whatever and wherever there is to see next year in 2025.
