I told Gina before we left for NYC there were two things I wanted to do for sure, one of them was to go to Brooklyn and shoot the sunset over lower Manhattan. The sleet and snow and overcast finally went away on our last full day in the city, so the plan was to go to Brooklyn, eat some authentic NYC pizza and watch the sunset on the banks of the East River. But we still needed something to do in the meantime. After much hemming and hawing we decided to go visit the Museum of Modern Art to get a little high culture.
So we waited in the long, slow line to check Gina’s backpack and head into the exhibits. We milled around looking at the modern art for about a 15 minutes, and I turn to Gina and say “I don’t get it.” She laughs and says, “Me either.” This piece with the cones was my favorite. (Sorry for the crappy iPhone photo. We had just gotten there and I didn’t realize that real cameras were OK to use.) It looked like something Abby could have dreamed up and probably executed to a certain extent. A man should be able to look at a piece of art and be able to have some sort of instant emotional reaction. A series of cones doesn’t do that. So I had to resort to reading the little placard to get the artist’s explanation. It had something to do with the tragedy of AIDS. Now, AIDS is no doubt a tragedy, but white cones on a white board just doesn’t say that to me. I still can’t believe that a world-renowned art museum wouldn’t laugh you out the door if you brought them some cones and explained that they represent the AIDS epidemic. But there were many such pieces on this modern-art floor. Just past the cones was a dark room with a black and white movie projected on the wall. The movie consisted of a bunch of out-of-focus blobs with no sound. Again, I had to find the placard for an explanation. It seems the artist set out to make a film, but didn’t know how to focus the camera and the entire thing came out totally blurry. The artist decided that was good enough. And yet this person was allowed a major chunk of real estate in a major art museum.
We sped through a couple more floors and things got better, actual paintings and sculptures and a wing of photography. Then I got yelled at for the second time on this trip for touching something in a museum. Remarkably, MOMA doesn’t put any of the pieces behind glass or velvet ropes or any kind of barrier. We walked past a huge hunk of shiny metal sitting in the middle of the floor and I unconsciously reached over and ran my finger across a small portion of it. A guard rushed over yelling, “Don’t touch the exhibits.” I apologized profusely as he rushed past. He went over and bent down to inspect the area I had touched. Apparently nothing on the solid slab of steel was harmed as he didn’t whip out a taser. We finally got to the top floor where the real art is kept. Like the Andy Warhol soup cans and a bunch of Picassos and Van Goughs.
It only took about an hour to get fed up with MOMA and we hit the streets of Midtown and wandered around until we hit St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Madison Avenue. I’m not big on the God thing, but I’m impressed by beautiful architecture. And this was some kind of building. When there’s no mass going on, they let people wander all over the place, taking pictures, lighting offering candles to the saints and so forth.
One section of the church is dedicated to depicting the Stations of the Cross carved into stone. This is a photo of the Seventh Station carving.
Did I mention the place is huge. At the far end behind the main altar is an alcove that appeared to be a church within a church that was the size of a regular-type church.
Then we went across the street to give Rockefeller Center another go.
Finally, we got on the subway to head to Brooklyn. It was still early in the afternoon, so we went down to the Southstreet Seaport in Lower Manhattan but it was pretty dead. Then I got the bright idea to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which we were almost directly under. About 45 minutes of confusion and help from a cop followed before we actually got onto the bridge. Then it was smooth sailing.
The bridge is pretty cool.
Locks with no apparent purpose festoon the bridge. I thought maybe they had to do with locking bicycles and the owners used them to stake out their favored locking places, but that idea crashed when I realized there weren’t any actual bikes locked up anywhere. After consulting the Internet on my phone (BTW consulting the Internet on a tiny phone is the greatest thing that has ever happened), I discovered they are love locks. The idea is to declare your love to someone by writing on the lock, then locking it to a bridge and then tossing the key over the edge. It evidently originated with some movie. Apparently they’re also a real PITA for city workers who have to remove the things.
We made our way across the bridge and, after a wandering through a classic Brooklyn Street with those Sesame Street style brownstones, found Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, which sits almost directly under the bridge. It was classic fold-in-half New York City pizza. Very tasty. After dinner we took a short stroll to Empire-Fulton Ferry Park on the East River between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges so I could get my sunset photo. It was still early so we had about an hour to kill.
So I took some shots of the Empire State Building.
And the Manhattan Bridge.
The wind whipped off the river and it got colder and colder as sunset approached. Gina was an incredibly good sport about it all. She didn’t even complain about having to use a porta potty in a nearby deserted construction site.
And it paid off with the best photo of the trip.