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When Miriam and I traveled to New York City in September we stayed in White Plains in Westchester County.  I loved it there.

White Plains sits barely twenty-five miles from midtown Manhattan, but the experience of being there is entirely different.  White Plains is a city in its own right, with its own downtown, skyscrapers, train station, shopping malls, and so on.  But it’s also home to thousands of commuters who travel to New York City each day for work.  These commuters live in charming homes on shady lanes, or stylish old apartment buildings on tree-lined streets, and eat dinner or go shopping on Main Street or Mamaroneck Avenue.  They appear to have ample access to recreation in the warmer months at several parks and golf courses.  What I loved best about White Plains was that it felt like a city, had all the characteristics of a city, but still felt easily navigable on foot.

White Plains, like most of the cities and towns in the Northeast or New England, is old – as old as the United States itself.  As an old city it shares most of the characteristics of communities that developed before the automobile: the center of town is relatively compact; access to public transportation is easy; public buildings and spaces are prominent and easily accessible.  I loved all of that.  And though it’s harder to explain why, I loved one building in particular more than others.

The Westchester County Center is an eighty-year-old art deco gem that perfectly suits its purpose of hosting a variety of entertainment- and sporting events.  When it opened in 1930, Percy Grainger performed at the piano, and ever since it’s held concerts, car shows, dances, boxing matches, and, the week we were there, roller derby.

Suberbia Roller Derby was hosting “Derby in the Burbs”, the 2010 Women’s Flat Track Derby Association’s Eastern regional championship.  New York City’s Gotham Girls were clearly the superior team.  They crushed most of their competition, beating Providence by three hundred points, which was simply astonishing.  But the Philadelphia Liberty Belles were also good, and I also enjoyed seeing Pittsburgh’s team, and their terrific “Steel Curtain” maneuver.

The event wasn’t as heavily attended as I would have imagined, but that might have just been an illusion of the venue.  The facility is very large, with a big open floor with a stage at one end.  A balcony circles the room, but, brilliantly, no concrete or steel supports the balcony, giving unobstructed views to those beneath it, and increasing the usable floor space substantially.  Meanwhile, concessions and restrooms are available on each floor.  There were even custom benches made without nails or screws.  It’s the exact kind of facility that I wish Gainesville had.

In White Plains, Miriam and I stayed at the Crowne Plaza Hotel at the intersection of Hale Avenue and Maple Avenue.  Our room overlooked a parking garage and a cute neighborhood.  The hotel offered free transportation anywhere in White Plains, and we used that extensively, though we walked around, as well.  In the evenings we went to the city’s main drag, Mamaroneck Avenue, and got dinner.  One night we ate at a tasty pizza place, another night at a much less tasty tavern.  We ate a couple times at the charming City Limits Diner, where the food was good, and the atmosphere even better.

We spent a lot of time at the train station in White Plains, which lay halfway between our hotel and the Westchester County Center.  The station itself is nothing special, but it’s one of the busiest places in town, and was the site of perhaps the most ridiculous confrontation I ever witnessed.  As Miriam and I waited for a train, two women got into a fight.  One was the incredibly rude lady I mentioned before, who had repeatedly cut the ticket line a day or so before, and who asked the unfortunate Englishman so many questions on the train to Grand Central.  She didn’t start the fight, and anywhere else a fight would not have happened, but her behavior from earlier in the week caused us to have slightly less sympathy than we might have had otherwise.  The rude woman was talking loudly on her telephone in the waiting room of the station.  Another woman, also in business attire, was sitting on a bench next to her.  After a while, the second woman–we’ll call her “The Fighter”–said to the first woman, whom we’ll call her “Rude Lady”:

“You know you’re talking really loud, don’t you?”
“This is a public place.”
“Yeah, but we all don’t want to hear your conversation. I mean, what if I started singing right here?”

The Fighter then proceeded to sing loudly right in the direction of Rude Lady, who continued to talk on her phone.  I blame The Fighter for acting so childishly, but Rude Lady was being rude, and it wasn’t hard to understand The Fighter’s frustration.  Still, it was completely ridiculous.

It rained on our last day in White Plains, which was a Monday.  That morning I had an appointment to meet with the president of the Percy Grainger Society who was going to give me a tour of the composer’s house, only a few blocks from the hotel.  I will tell that story soon.  Meanwhile, I had to borrow an umbrella from the front desk so I would down to Cromwell Place.  While walking back I got a phone call from Miriam who asked me if I wanted to meet her for lunch at the gigantic mall directly next to our hotel that I hadn’t even noticed because it didn’t really look like a mall, insofar as it wasn’t surrounded by hundreds of acres of parking.  I met her at the food court inside, and she already had my food waiting for me, like a sweetheart.  I sat my umbrella down and ate.  When we got up to leave I, of course, forgot the umbrella.  I had been thinking how I needed to not forget the umbrella, because I knew that they made a note of my borrowing it, and would charge me if I failed to return it.  But we were already exiting the mall when I realized I’d forgotten it.  Meanwhile, we needed to catch the shuttle to the airport to make our flight, and that ride was only available once per half-hour.  So, in spite of my having just eaten a huge meal, I ran across the gigantic shopping mall–which was deserted, thankfully–and found the umbrella, still leaning up against the chair where I had left it.  I ran back across the mall to find Miriam, and we caught a ride to the airport.

The Westchester County Airport is one of the few things I didn’t like about White Plains.  It is small enough that upon arriving you are conveniently situated near exits and taxis.  The drawback is that when you are departing, you must sit in one room that must accommodate everyone waiting to board an airplane.  On the day we were leaving that included hundreds of people.  It was standing-room-only.  But our flight back to Orlando was safe, and my overall impression of White Plains remains extremely positive.

Filed under: Geography, Sports, Travel on January 9th, 2011 | No Comments »

Day Four

When I left Lincoln Center I was bound for a record store located somewhere in that vast area between midtown and downtown.  Academy Records and CDs is on 18th Street, which was convenient enough, since I could exit the subway only a block or two away from the shop.  But when I got down there I was the thirstiest man in America, and you would not have believed how hard it was to find a drink down there.  I found the store, but I couldn’t find a restaurant, cafe, or any other place where I could eat and get a beverage.  Only block after block of beautiful old buildings.  Finally, near Union Square Park I stumbled upon a burger joint that had a prominent soda fountain in easy reach of every patron.  I ordered lunch, got my cup and sat down directly in front of that machine and drank soda after soda until I was so full I could barely eat.

Eager to shop, I walked briskly back to 18th Street and entered Academy Records.  I could scarcely believe my eyes.  Though not a large store, classical music CDs were stacked almost floor to ceiling.  They were arranged terribly, though: Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner could be found on one wall, but Bach and other baroque composers were in a separate area, and that wasn’t especially substantial.  The Romantics were clearly favored there, but that’s fine.  Within minutes I had my arms full with Abbado’s set of Schubert symphonies, and Karajan’s set of Bruckner symphonies, at what seemed like bargain prices: a nine disc set for around $40.  I was quite pleased, but then I happened to glance behind me to the right.  A narrow corridor I assumed to lead to an employees-only area, or, at best, a room of LPs, in fact led to a whole other room of CDs, and those were the real bargain discs.  They weren’t bargain in the sense of being bargain labels, like Naxos.  On the contrary, the huge, bulging bins were full of Bis, Chandos, EMI, DG, and so on.  They were not arranged in any order at all, but they were $2.99 per disc.  I dropped the big sets I had in my hand and started all over.  I snatched Neeme Järvi’s complete cycle of Gade symphonies; some Vaughan Williams; Britten’s War Requiem; and more that I cannot remember at the moment.  I almost put all of it back, however, when I spied a massive opera wall, which seemed to have almost every recording I could think of.  It didn’t have Kubelík’s set of Mathis der Maler, unfortunately, but it did have Davis’s Benvenuto Cellini, which I need, and almost all of Dorati’s cycle of Haydn operas, which I had not seen in person for almost ten years.  I briefly contemplated putting back all I had and getting six Haydn operas, but those were not cheap, and I thought Miriam would be outraged at my insane spending.  I stuck with my bargains, and left happy with a full bag.

I walked briskly back to the subway, made my way to Grand Central Terminal, and from there caught a Metro North train leaving almost that instant.

The sky was clear and blue as I crossed over the Harlem River into the Bronx en route to White Plains.

Filed under: Food, Music, Travel on January 7th, 2011 | No Comments »

Day Three

Leaving the Empire State Building we once again headed underground to catch a subway to Brooklyn.  I had never been there and was curious to see what life was like in the New York City’s most populous borough.  We surfaced near Bedford Avenue and 7th Street in what appeared to be a simple neighborhood of apartments above shops and restaurants.  We walked several blocks, and though the sidewalks were far less crowded than those in Manhattan, we did find a group of young hipsters engaged in a photoshoot for who-knows-what.  It seemed entirely appropriate given the environment.  Miriam visited the Built by Wendy shop, but only browsed a few minutes before we strolled back to take the subway back to Grand Central and the Metro North to White Plains where we watched roller derby at the WFTDA Regionals.  More about that later.

Day Four

Our full schedule had prevented us from seeing a couple things in Manhattan that I was eager to see, so on Saturday, while Miriam watched roller derby in White Plains, I took the train into the city and explored a bit.

My first stop was, of course, Grand Central Terminal, where, once again, I enjoyed a cupcake from Magnolia Bakery.  This one was cinnamon with a delicious swirl of icing.  We had been at Grand Central each day of our trip, but I hadn’t really bothered to walk outside the building, since we usually caught the subway from there.  That Saturday, on my own, I decided I should see what was around the old building.  I walked out the doors onto Pershing Square, walked a little way down the block and took a photo.

The scale of Grand Central Terminal is massive; the ornate details are astonishing.  In marble over one door appear the words:

TO ALL THOSE WHO WITH HEAD HEART AND MIND TOILED IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THIS MONUMENT TO THE PUBLIC SERVICE THIS IS INSCRIBED

Inside, enormous chandeliers light great rooms with high ceilings.  It’s a wonder to behold, and a fitting introduction to the city to anyone who arrives there.

From there I meant to visit the Museum of Modern Art, but I struggled to find the most practical subway route.  I knew the best place to get off, but when I exited the car at that station I was confronted with a sign informing me that the station was closed that weekend.  I had to get back on the subway and exit at a less proximate station and walk.  In the end, I would have done just as well walking the eleven blocks from Grand Central.  In any event, I still made it to MoMA and saw neat stuff along the way, including St. Thomas Church on 5th Avenue and 53rd Street.

The Museum of Modern Art is in a rather unimpressive building.  Indeed, so nondescript is it that I didn’t even feel compelled to take a photograph of the exterior.  Inside, however, it is suitably modern, with a great atrium open to several floors.  I paid for my admission (nothing in New York City is free) and began exploring the art.  The first pieces I saw were not impressive.  Indeed, among the first I saw was one that was simply insulting.  The Mythic Being Village Voice Series by Adrian Piper consisted of framed pages from a newspaper.  The title plaque next to the “art” indicated that eleven different individuals or institutions contributed funds for its purchase.  For fifty cents and the price of a few picture frames I could have made the exact same thing.  Anyone could have.  It’s precisely this sort of fraud that leads the public to believe all modern art is a scam.  It isn’t, of course, but it’s easy to feel that way sometimes.  And when you see what hangs on the wall just a few rooms away, Piper’s piece rightfully appears weak.

I walked from gallery to gallery enjoying the genuine masterpieces on display in every room.  I passed Van Goghs on the way to Picassos, Matisses, Braques, Kahlos, Monets, Mondrians, and more Picassos.  There was wonderful sculpture, including mobiles by Calder.  The biggest disappointment was Dalí’s Persistence of Memory.  I’ve never thought much of Dalí in the first place, and I hadn’t even cared that this famous picture was at MoMA, but when I happened to pass a painting surrounded by a small crowd I decided I ought to look.  It was no bigger than a sheet of notebook paper.  Indeed, I think I may have said out loud, “you’ve got to be kidding me” as I walked past.  I think everyone else was underwhelmed also.

I found several things at MoMA that I loved.  Christina’s World has been a favorite since I was a child, and that was just hanging on a wall by an escalator.  The exhibit on modern design was fascinating, and really heightened my awareness of the banality of most of the everyday objects that surround us.  Take a look at any chair or table in the room you currently occupy.  Are any of them works of art in their own right?  What about the objects sitting on the table?  A ribbon fan on display was a perfect example of how designers used to create ordinary things both functional and beautiful.

Far and away my favorite work of art at MoMA was their magnificent Klimt.  I love all Gustav Klimt’s pictures, and had seen Mäda Primavesi two days before, but Hope is among his best, and what I was most looking forward to seeing at MoMA.  I stared at it for ages, as did many other people standing near me.  When I go back to Vienna I intend to visit the Belvedere and the Secession Building.

Leaving MoMA I made a last minute decision to walk up to Lincoln Center.  Along the way I stopped by Steinway Hall just to say I had.  It’s almost directly across the street from Carnegie Hall, and all the great pianists who give recitals there select their instruments at Steinway and Sons and have them delivered to Isaac Stern Auditorium.  As far as pianos go, Steinway is as good as it gets, and they still make them in New York City (and Hamburg).  You can see the process of making a Steinway piano in a film called Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037.  And don’t miss “How Does a Piano Get to Carnegie Hall”.

I passed some wonderful architecture near Columbus Circle, and there at Broadway and 58th Street stands the building that houses the Museum of Arts and Design.  No. 2 Columbus Circle, has an amazing history, and for a building that nobody outside of New York City knows or cares about, the Wikipedia entry for it is remarkably thorough.  In a nutshell, the building was designed by Edward Durell Stone and completed in 1964.  The “Lollipop Building”, as it was called, had few fans, since it was, by almost all standards, remarkably ugly.  It had almost no windows, but that was functional, since it housed an art collection.  In 2005 the building was ripped down to its skeleton, and the facade we see today is far worse than what came before it.  Even those who criticized the Lollipop Building find No. 2 Columbus Circle uglier than ever, and entirely lacking in architectural merit.  I agree.  Here is a site with many wonderful photos of the building as it once appeared.

Lincoln Center occupies several square blocks, which makes sense, since it’s the home of Avery Fisher Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House, among others.  The Met season was beginning only days after our visit, opening with a new production of Das Rheingold that was the talk of the town.  Posters were everywhere.  I went inside the Met Opera Shop, where they had hundred and hundreds of opera recordings as you might expect.  I was quite tempted to buy, but I am glad I saved my money, because the place I went next was unlike anything else I have ever seen.

Filed under: Art, Musings, Travel on January 6th, 2011 | No Comments »

Day Three

One of our goals while visiting New York was to try many of the various foodstuffs associated with that city, and to visit a couple of its famous restaurants.  Sardi’s had been a unique experience, but the food was not even close to being worth its high price.  Maxie’s was less outrageously expensive, but the food was still not outstanding.  On Friday morning, our third day in the city, we decided to just be simple.  I got a slice of New York-style pizza and Miriam got some Indian food.  My pizza was okay, but no better than you can get at any pizza restaurant anywhere in America.  Miriam thought her meal was the best she had our entire trip, and it was a relative bargain.  Once again we bought cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery.

We walked the bleak subterranean corridor from Grand Central to catch the 42nd Street shuttle to Times Square, where we caught the subway to Herald Square.  Our destination was the Empire State Building, but I noticed that we were passing by Macy’s, and I thought Miriam might enjoy it, so I suggested we go inside.  Any department store you have ever been in in your life, with the possible exception of Herrod’s in London, is nothing compared to this Macy’s.  The only other store I have been in that comes close is the Chicago Macy’s that’s in the old Marshall Field building.  This place is enormous, occupying at least eight floors.  Though it was only the end of September, Miriam wanted to see the Christmas decorations, and we ascended escalators from floor to floor trying to find them.  Amazingly, the escalators there are made of wood.  Finally, at the very top we found the Christmas wonderland.  It was insane.  So many things, and so many things of each thing.  I thought Miriam was going to lose it.  If you’re looking for a vast assortment of gnomes, or if you want to high-five a stuffed polar bear, go to the Macy’s in New York City.  (If you’re looking for a giant stuffed Unicorn or Pegasus, however, you’ll have to go to Chicago.)

The Empire State Building, only a block or so away, is immediately visible upon exiting the Macy’s.  Indeed, it’s visible from all over the city.  We knew well in advance that we wanted to see the city from high atop this great old skyscraper.  The only drawback, of course, is that it doesn’t offer a particularly compelling view of the Empire State Building itself.  (For that you’d have to go to, say the Top of the Rock.)  The lobby of the Empire State Building is tall and elegant, but not especially large for a building its size.  Visitors wishing to go to the observation deck are routed to an area that must take up half of the ground floor, where $20 tickets can be purchased, before being funneled Disney World-style through labyrinthine channels leading to a bank of elevators.  The special elevators to the observation deck move very fast.  The display counts ten floors at a time.  Somewhere above the eightieth floor you switch to another elevator to reach the eighty-sixth floor observation deck.

The observation deck is open, and visitors are kept from being blown away by a tall fence that curves in to discourage BASE jumpers and the bereft.  I was disappointed that, unlike the previous day which was clear and bright, Friday was smoggy, and the views from the top were limited.  But the area in our immediate vicinity was easily visible, and I snapped many photos, including this one looking down upon the area outside of Macy’s from which I took the above photo of the Empire State Building.  To the south I could just make out the Statue of Liberty behind the downtown skyscrapers.  Nearer to me I could see the iconic Flatiron Building.  To the east I could see the Chrysler Building, the river, and the bridges over to Queens.  Midtown was close and clear, and the old Pan-Am and GE Buildings were visible, too.

I am not a New Yorker, of course, nor do I ever intend to identify myself as one.  But I am one who appreciates beautiful architecture.  So, looking west from the top of the Empire State Building, the area around Madison Square Garden caught my eye.  Obviously, aside from the great old post office next to it, the new Penn Station/Madison Square Garden complex is ugly, especially compared to what used to be there.  As I wrote previously, present-day Manhattan stands over the graves of its once great buildings.  On the spot Madison Square Garden occupies today, the most beautiful train station in America once stood.  Penn Station was built in 1910, and until it was demolished in 1963 it was a masterpiece of public architecture.  The present-day Penn Station is so tragically inferior as to be offensive.  What you see in my picture at left once looked like this.

The same short-sighted foolishness that destroyed the old Pennsylvania Station has destroyed countless other great old buildings.  We can never get these places back.  Even if someone wanted to rebuild Penn Station in its former image, the cost would be so astronomically high that the first shovel of dirt would never get turned.  For all the money we spend on new architecture each year, we always seem to go the cheap route today.  Never again would anyone spend the kind of money it would take to make a new Empire State Building, Wrigley Building, or any other architectural gem.  (I will discuss this topic further when I write about Cleveland.)  Don’t misunderstand me; I do believe that good buildings are still being designed.  But does anyone think that a generic tower of reflective glass is beautiful?   Look at the picture to the left and tell me which is the better building: the plain glass box or the masterpiece behind it?  In great cities like Berlin war brought the demise of beautiful old buildings.  But war is a different kind of foolishness, and some of those buildings are being reconstructed, in spite of the cost.  Verily, there is a time to build up and a time to break down.  But we too often lack the wisdom to know when is the time to preserve what we have built.  It’s too late for the old Penn Station, for the old St. Petersburg Pier, for the old Gainesville Courthouse.  But it’s never too late to start thinking about what we still have worth keeping.

Filed under: Food, Rantings, Travel on January 5th, 2011 | No Comments »

Read New York City, Part One.

Day Two

We took the train from White Plains into the City again on Thursday, arriving at Grand Central Terminal at noon.  Being quite hungry, we decided to explore our various dining options in the basement of the station.  There were many.  Mrs. Hill wanted to try the vast array of famous New York foods, from their famous, but inferior style pizza to their namesake cheesecake and strip steaks.  That morning she opted for a bagel.  I decided on sweet treats from Magnolia Bakery.  The display case was full of delicious looking confections, and I was uncharacteristically eager to try everything, but played it safe with a vanilla cupcake with buttercream icing.  The frosting was slightly more buttery than creamy, and there was a noticeable sugar texture, but the cupcakes were delightful nonetheless.

From Grand Central we took the No. 4 subway down to the southern tip of Manhattan, and exited at the edge of Battery Park.  This was a busy, but open and airy place, and the sunny weather made it seem quite pleasant.  It was impossible to miss the ravaged Koenig sculpture that once stood at the World Trade Center.  We made our way to Castle Clinton to purchase tickets for the ferry to Liberty Island.  Alas, no passes were available to climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty.  I suspect that those must go quickly each day.  We waited in line to board the Miss New York, and once on the ferry made our way up to the top deck.  The ride out to Liberty Island was breezy and warm, and everyone on board snapped photos the entire time.  Once docked, we walked around the Statue of Liberty, viewed the Manhattan skyline from across the harbor, and took a few photos ourselves.  Though we could not go inside the statue, I still felt content to enjoy the weather and the scenery.

We caught another ferry which took us to Ellis Island, a short distance to the north.  Exiting the boat there we walked into a large old building, where, inside the lobby was an enormous pile of suitcases.  Up a flight of stairs we entered the Registry Room, which once looked like this, but today looks like this.  An extensive museum details the experiences of the many thousands of immigrants whose first American experiences took place at Ellis Island.  These people arrived with very little.  Some of what they did have was on display, too.  The clothing–particularly the costumes from eastern Europe–was beautiful.  Overall, the museum appears designed to give you the feeling that you, too, are an immigrant arriving in America.  Of course, not everyone who came to the United States hoping to make a new life came from Europe.  Many thousands of other arrived on the west coast, or elsewhere.  But Ellis Island is a remarkable time capsule of an era in which America was, to the rest of the world, a land of opportunity where the streets were paved with gold.

The Manhattan skyline grew larger as we made our way back to Battery Park, and it occurred to me that almost nothing visible along New York Harbor today would have been around when those waves of immigrants reached Ellis Island a century ago.  New York City, perhaps more than any other large city that never saw the devastation of war, has remade itself again and again.  Draw a circle around almost any single block on a map of Manhattan and you would likely find that that block has changed appearance over and over in the course of the last hundred years.  What today is a skyscraper of glass and steel was before a more modest skyscraper of steel and stone; before that, a block of shops with apartments above; before that, a row of brick or wood houses; before that, who knows?  I thought of this more and more the next day when I stood atop the Empire State Building.

Making our way back to Midtown that afternoon, we headed to Central Park where we watched an open-air rock show.  Pavement, one of Miriam’s favorite bands had reunited for a very short time.  We stood as close as could be, on the rail directly before the stage.  I don’t know much about the band, but they seemed in good form, and everyone played Fender guitars.  Their opening act was a band called Endless Boogie.  Their name was appropriate, because their songs seemed to go on forever.  The first song consisted of only one chord (an A7), played for over twenty minutes straight.  The bass player never played a note other than A.  Their guitarists took turns jamming, with remarkably pedestrian results.  If you know anybody who plays guitar even just a little, no matter how new they are to the instrument, they could play solos as interesting as the guys from Endless Boogie.  It was unbelievably boring.  The only excitement in the entire set–which consisted of two songs totaling almost an hour of playing time–came when the singer received what appeared to be a text message or voice mail.  He reached in his pocket, took out his cell phone, then proceeded to respond to the text message.  I would like to think it was somebody in the crowd writing, “Dude, yr show blows!:-(”

After the show concluded I had to replace a contact lens that fell out during Pavement’s performance.  I had forgotten my glasses at home, and I didn’t have any replacement contacts with me, so when it fell out, I had to save it in my mouth.  I know that sounds horrible, but there isn’t much else one can do under the circumstances.  Central Park isn’t the best place to deal with that sort of problem.  But Miriam had a small mirror with her, and I got my hands clean enough with some sanitizer, and using only saliva I got that contact lens back in my eye.   Leaving Central Park we saw scores of hipsters inhaling helium from balloons being passed out by some dude who told me not to take any pictures.  New York City is much tamer than it once was.

Filed under: Musings, Popular Music, Transportation, Travel on January 4th, 2011 | 1 Comment »