Graffiti Hall of Fame and Intrepid Museum

After spending eight weeks in New York, I’m still blown away by how many great restaurants there are and how many great things there are to do and see. One thing I wanted to be sure to do this summer was to eat at a Tibetan restaurant in the City. Tibet is such a mystical place to me. Even though I’ve been to Nepal and Bhutan, which are both heavily influence by Tibetan culture and have a very ‘Tibetan’ feel to them, I still haven’t made it to the real Tibet. It would be unreasonable to expect to find something closer to ‘real’ Tibet in New York City than I did in the foothills of the Himalayas in Asia, but having a meal at ‘Tibetan Kitchen’ on Park Ave was still a lot of fun. Apparently Tibetan Kitchen is where the Dali Lama eats when he’s in New York (or at least that’s the claim that was made by a flyer on the door). The interior of the restaurant was covered in colorful Buddhist shrines and Tibetan paintings, and it instantly reminded me of my visit to Bhutan last year. The food was just okay… I had ‘tingmo’, which is a Tibetan bread roll, and some Tibetan curry with chicken. It came across to me as New York food at a New York price, but the ambiance was still great. I couldn’t help but be reminded of an incredible Tibetan restaurant I ate at in Nepal last year; and I even looked it up in my travel journal so I could recall the experience…

“I had an early dinner at a Tibetan restaurant in Thamel called “Old Tashi Deleg”. I ordered “Tingmo”, which is a Tibetan dish of a giant bowl of spicy curry with potatoes and pork, and three soft, steamed bread rolls on the side. There are some really great restaurants in Thamel. Dinner tonight was one of the best meals I've had weeks and it was as authentic as Tibetan food comes.”

Tuesday night I headed to Central Park after work to listen to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra perform their annual outdoor summer concert in the City. There’s no admission fee, so tens of thousands of New Yorkers come every year, and The Great Lawn at the park was packed with hoards of people. Giant speakers project the music across the park, and I quickly realized that this was very different than just an outdoor concert. Pretty much everyone was laughing and talking and enjoying the mood as the orchestra played, but it was still fun to be a part of it. A friend of mine who lives in New York described it well… “The Philharmonic concert in Central Park every summer is basically an excuse for everyone to come out and have a picnic.”

I love Broadway shows! This week I got a half-price ticket to ’39 Steps’, a play that spoofs iconic scenes from various Alfred Hitchcock movies to form a single full-length comedy/thriller. A particularly intriguing aspect of the show is that it features only four actors, and between them they play over 100 different characters. I wish I were more familiar with Alfred Hitchcock films so I could have recognized more of the spoofs, but there were a few scenes that were memorable even though I didn’t recognize them as famous. My favorite was a scene depicting the hero and a villain chasing each other across the top of a speeding train. The ‘train’ was really a collection of old trunks that the men jumped across; but between the sound effects, the lighting, and deliberate stumbling and flailing of the actors limbs, it was impossible not to imagine a speeding train.

Friday afternoon I left the World Financial Center with 30 other finance interns from American Express and went to ‘The Institute of Culinary Education’ in Midtown Manhattan. I still can’t believe that I get paid for this kind of stuff… for three hours Friday afternoon we partied away and stuffed ourselves with tasty hors d’oeuvres and a gourmet meal of filet mignon and salmon. The best part about it all was that we got to prepare and cook the food ourselves. The 30 of us rotated around at our own discretion between various stations and acted as chefs, with a few legitimate chefs to guide us as we worked. I helped mix ingredients for crab cakes, roll some Greek pastries, and fill wine glasses with a chocolatey mousse dessert.

Later Friday night I paid a visit to the Museum of Modern Art (more commonly known as the MOMA). I already knew that New York’s museums are world class, but I was still blown away by the quality of the Art in the MOMA. I imagined it would be something like the Tate Modern in London; very high-quality art, but mostly by contemporary artists, very few of whom are well-known. The bottom three floors of the MOMA are filled with rotating art exhibits that are very radical and often offensive (although I did spot a few less offensive pieces, including a photograph by a Utahan artist of a driveway in Bountiful). The top two floors blew me away. In only a few minutes I saw several renowned pieces by Pablo Picasso, ‘Starry Night’ by Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dali’s famous work “The Persistence of Memory”, several Andy Warhol pieces, works by Matisse, and paintings by many other wildly famous artists that I’m sure I would be much more familiar with if I knew more about art.

Saturday was yet another rush to pack in as much as possible during one of my few remaining weekends in New York City. I began the day by taking the Lexington Avenue Line up to 123rd Street, where I walked a few blocks to the ‘Graffiti Hall of Fame’. The place is a collection of murals covering the walls of a playground at a local junior high school, but the murals are clearly painted by professionals and are deserving of the ‘Hall of Fame’ designation. Most of the paintings are on the inside of the playground which was unfortunately locked, but from what I could tell, the best sections of the murals were reserved for the exterior walls of the playground, which are easily viewable by anyone walking down the sidewalk. I enjoyed observing the various styles and characters depicted in the graffiti. The artwork clearly wasn’t about tagging or gangs or vandalism, it was art for art’s sake, but in a style that is easily identified as graffiti.

Next up was the ‘Intrepid Museum’, a gigantic aircraft carrier that sits in the Hudson River at a pier on 46th Street. I couldn’t even begin to list all the amazing things I saw in just two hours at the Intrepid. I thought that I was just getting a tour of a big ship used during the cold war, but it turned out to be a whole lot more than that. During my visit at the Intrepid I toured a nuclear submarine from the Cold War, an authentic Concorde passenger jet used by British Airways (which flew between London and New York in about three hours), an SR-71 Blackbird spy jet, several US Navy fighter jets, and, of course, the interior of the Intrepid itself. One of my favorite parts of the visit was climbing up to the tower of the carrier from which the captain would guide the ship. As I looked out I saw the entire flight deck down below, and a former seaman from the Intrepid told stories of Japanese kamikaze attacks on the carrier to visitors passing through the room.

Since coming to New York last November I’ve wanted to visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum; a collection of tenements used by immigrants to New York in the early 1900’s. I followed a group of twelve other visitors to one of the tenements and listened as a guide described the building to us and what life was like for immigrants who lived in the neighborhood. The building itself was broken-down and dilapidated – deliberately left in the state it was found by the Tenement Museum when the acquired it in the 1980’s. We toured an apartment that was barely larger than my bedroom back home, and housed 13 people when it was in use. Our guide described many aspects of the lifestyle to us, but one of them was especially graphic and stuck with me. Many of the immigrants during the early 1900’s were malnourished and could not provide natural milk for their newborn babies. Buying cow’s milk was possible, but those who drank it faced incredible health risks. The milk was carried through Manhattan unrefrigerated – first through the wealthier neighborhoods on the Upper East Side, then through the Lower East Side several days later. To mask the stench and putridity of the rotting milk, vendors mixed ammonia and chalk into it. Between the bacteria, chemicals, and other unnatural additions to the milk, it’s likely that more babies were killed because of it than if they had gone hungry.

Later Saturday night I headed to a wedding reception in Central Park with John Calder. John happened to bump into some mutual relatives of ours in the city and was invited to the reception. The bride, Kim Calder, is a second cousin of ours, and we spent an hour or so catching up with extended family members who were there. I happened to see a few other friends there as well, including Sam Skidmore, a friend of mine from BYU who I used to go snowboarding with at The Canyons.

I finished off the week Sunday afternoon by wandering down to Washington Square Park near NYU. Originally I wanted to go there because it’s a prominently featured spot in the movie ‘I Am Legend’, but it turned out to be a fun place for entirely different reasons. The park is filled with talented performers on Sunday afternoons. From break-dancers to a string quartet, the park was packed with circles of people watching various music and dancing acts. The most memorable for me was a performer I had seen before near Times Square – a man banging catchy rhythms on metal pans, plastic buckets, and random kitchen utensils.