Museums of NYC

Shortly after arriving in New York a few weeks back I bought a Lonely Planet guidebook to the city and made a list of everything I wanted to see while I’m here. Every week since then something has come up on the weekend and I haven’t been able to rush around the city and hit all the big sights like I intended on doing. After reviewing the list again last week it became obvious that one summer isn’t nearly enough time to cover all the great things to see and do in New York, but with a full Saturday at my disposal this weekend I decided to hit just a few of the top things on my list.

I ate at a few great ethnic restaurants this week that are worth mentioning. Katz’s Deli is a New York icon, and is famous for its incredible sandwiches, and for a certain scene in the movie ‘When Harry Met Sally’. I’ve had plenty of Rueben sandwiches at the New York inspired ‘Blue Line Deli’ on the bottom floor of the business school at BYU, but there’s no way I could leave the City at the end of the summer without having one at an authentic Jewish deli here. Delis in New York are so different from what nearly everyone else in the US thinks of as a deli, that I almost think they should be classified as a different kind of restaurant. A deli in New York serves meat, not sandwiches. Whether you want hot pastrami, corned beef, steaming turkey, or cured ham, the place to get it in New York is a deli… and to help you eat it, they’ll give you a couple slices of fresh bread too. After waiting in a giant line that was a real testament to the fame of Katz’s Deli, I finally got to watch a skilled butcher carve up a heap of pastrami for my own, authentic, New York Rueben sandwich. Sixteen bucks for one sandwich is a bit steep, but it is Katz’s Deli, it is delicious, and it is in New York… and they gave me a few fresh pickles on the side. The meat was so tender, hot, and juicy that I felt sinful eating it, but I had to have the New York deli experience at least once. Maybe later in the summer I’ll try the Carnegie Deli for comparison…

Wednesday I met up with a friend of mine from East High and had dinner at a Cuban place in Brooklyn called ‘The Habana Outpost’. The place was worlds apart from Katz’s deli, but every bit as colorful. My main course was an amazing Cuban-style toasted pork sandwich, but the real treat was the ‘Corn’. Corn on the cob is something I’m used to, but Habana’s puts a pretty incredible twist on it. First a fresh ear of corn is perfectly blackened on the grill, then it’s covered in cream, spices, chili powder, and parmesan cheese. I’ve never been a huge corn fan before, but the Corn at Habana’s converted me; and the Mexican-style Tamarind soda that I had was pretty good too.

Friday night I headed to the Astor Place Theatre to watch ‘Blue Man Group’. For the past eight or nine years I’ve heard so much about ‘Blue Man Group’ and I’ve seen advertisements for their show plenty of times in Vegas, so I was excited to finally see it for myself. The show was a mix between a comedy act, an acrobatic performance, a concert, and a commentary on modern culture. Three men dressed in black and covered entirely in blue make-up pounded catchy rhythms on drums and PVC pipes, and the musical parts of the performance were creatively interspersed with silent comedy acts and interactive acts with the crowd. At one point the three blue men climbed off the stage and up onto the seats of the spectators, making their way past the crowd by walking on the armrests. During another part the blue men pulled thick tissue paper from the back of the theatre and passed it up through the crowd as wild strobe lights flashed to the beat of loud rhythmic music. Throughout the performance a theme of acceptance of others seemed to be the only consistency. The show was radically different from anything I’ve seen before, but it was interesting to see and a fun way to spend a Friday night in New York.

Saturday morning I met up with my friend Jason, another BYU MBA who is interning at American Express, and rushed around the city to a few of the different museums. Jason likes large, iconic museums, so we started with the Museum of Natural History. Like the Met in New York, the Museum of Natural History is so huge that it would take days to see it all, but Jason and I picked a few of our favorite parts to keep us entertained for a couple hours. One section of the museum featured artifacts from foreign cultures all over the world, complete with descriptions of the people who created them. I particularly enjoyed the Asian and African cultures, including exhibits on Southeast Asia and Tibet, but I also enjoyed the Central America exhibit that featured a replica of a giant Mayan carving that I saw at the Copan Ruins in Honduras. Our visit to the Museum of Natural History wouldn’t be complete without seeing the dinosaurs, and Jason and I both enjoyed wandering through the exquisite life-size replicas of dinosaur bones on the fourth floor of the museum. I definitely felt like an eight-year-old kid getting that excited about dinosaurs, but it really was amazing and I don’t think I’ve seen dinosaur bones for at least ten years. As cliché as it may be, my favorite was the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Last November I really wanted to see the Guggenheim, but unfortunately didn’t have the time because I was occupied with other wonders in New York City. Jason and I made time for a visit Saturday and wandered up the spiraling corridor through the museum, enjoying countless architectural designs created by Frank Lloyd Wright as we went. I was surprised to see famous works by Picasso and Monet in the same museum, but my favorite exhibits were still those created by Frank Lloyd Wright. I could write about what I saw for hours, but in the interest of time, the most interesting exhibit to me was a design for a giant community center in central Baghdad. Obviously today the thought of a modern, state-of-the-art center for sporting events and commerce in Baghdad seems ridiculous, but only a few decades ago it apparently was a possibility. The exhibit included professional architectural models of the proposed project, as well as several of Frank Lloyd Wright’s incredible drawings for it. If built, the complex would have been incredible, and would be every bit as modern and impressive as the best facilities in the United States. It was almost eerie to me to walk through the exhibit, in awe of how much destruction has been done in that region in just forty years.

I finished the day off with a visit to the intimate ‘Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’ in SoHo, which featured original drawings for the ‘Batman: Year One’ comics created in the early 1980’s. Afterwards I dropped by the ‘WTC Tribute’ museum across the street from the World Trade Center, and just a half-block from the World Financial Center where I go to work every morning. Working in Lower Manhattan has brought the events of September 11th to life for me. Even though I didn’t see any of the newscasts because I was in the MTC, it suddenly feels more personal now that I know some of the people who experienced it and can literally see the entire construction site right below me from the 30th floor of the American Express Tower. It’s hard to imagine what that day might have been like; although I guess it would be like seeing a plane smash into the Goldman Sachs tower or the WTC7 tower next door to ours. Just the thought of it is pretty mind-blowing.

Saturday night I met up with some friends and headed out to Giants Stadium in New Jersey to watch the New York Red Bulls play (a MLS soccer team, for those who are unfamiliar with them). Sports games are always fun just because it’s a good way to hang out with friends, but I enjoyed it even more because it was a chance to get some close-up pictures of the action with my new camera. It’s amazing how much emotion can be caught with a telephoto lens from the stands. I liked getting shots of players juking each other or of a tense situation after a foul, but some of my favorite shots were ones where I caught players in unusual positions in the air.