Wednesday, July 14th - New York City

So Wednesday was a museum day. But the day started off at the Dunkin Donuts in the subway beneath Rockefellar Center. It was an interesting experience. . . let's just say that if you don't know what you want, you better get out of the way. . . which makes it all the more fun to take your time. The Rockefellar Center is probably most impressive because it is such a simple space. It isn't really big and it isn't really fancy. No crazy building geometry. . . but in a city where everyone is about maximizing profits, this space is a gift to the city that people from the city and from around the world enjoy every day.

St. Patrick's Cathedral with the Seagram building in the background.

After we ate breakfast, we started walking up the street toward Central Park.
It started to rain and even though we had umbrellas, by the time we got to the Guggenheim museum. . . well. . . Marthe was wringing lots of water out of pretty much everything.
We enjoyed walking through the museum. . . especially because our shoes were going squish squish every step of the way. The big skylight was covered, so the interior was not as impresive as it should have been with natural light streaming in.
They had a great Kandinsky exhibit, but we couldn't take pictures, so you'll just have to take my word for it.
By the time we finished (which was pretty quick, because some of the exhibits were pretty psycho) it had stopped raining. So we started walking back down the street. I turned around to get the shot of the building.


Approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art. . . the only think I could think of was "don't eat the pictures, no! no! no!. . . don't eat the pictures no! no! no!. . . . don't eat the pictures NO! when you go to museums"

The MET was interesting because the rooms themselves were decorated and themed to house the art that was inside them. We walked to the back of the museum and down to the cafeteria to eat some nice and bland food before enjoying the museum.

Some rooms had pieces of whole buildings in them.

Some rooms were basically replicas of other buildings, like the one below from one of Frank Lloyd Wright's residential designs. Imagine having this for your living room. Parade of Homes, eat your heart out.

The egyptian exhibit was cool. They transported and reconstructed a small temple complex from egypt to this room in the museum.

We made sure to take pictures of the mummies for the kids.

Below is the main lobby in the museum. . . it was one of the better spaces in the museum.

This is the sculpture court in the greek exhibit was pretty cool.

Here's a corner detail of the greek sculputre court.

This was the Roman sculpture court, patterned after the Roman courtyards.

Monet paintings are always fun to look at.

Van Gough paintings have such wonderful texture.

More Monet

And some Degas

More lobby. . .from the balcony

Suits of armor are always fun too.

Wednesday evening we went to the Broadway show Lion King. Of course I couldn't take pictures, but that is what the Google Image Search is for I guess. So here are some images from the show. We really enjoyed the show. It was really well done and it made me realize that I could be happy with seeing Broadway shows all the time. Musicals are in my blood. This one was a good one to see. I do wish we could have seen more shows, but they're pretty pricy.

Rafiki

Scar and Mufasa

The costumes were part of what made the show great. I couldn't help but wonder if the Disney imagineering crew came up with some of them.

Zazu was one of the great characters in the show. Excellent comic relief.

Pumba and Timon were great too. Timon had a great Brooklyn accent that was really fun.

We walked around some stores at Times Square after the show. . . because I don't think they ever close. . . then we went back to the hotel.

Tuesday, July 13th - New York City

Tuesday we got moving early. We stopped by a nearby McDonalds for breakfast (That information is for Uncle Devin's enjoyment), then we walked by Grand Central Station to the subway station under the Chrysler Building.
We took the subway down to Battery Park, where we boarded a ferry and went to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Marthe did ok on the ferry, even though she didn't have a life jacket. She said it wasn't rocking enough to be uncomfortable. The podium on which the statue sits is a museum. There are a lot of cool things related to the statue in the museum. Below are toe molds which were used to make the toes on the Statue of Liberty.
They had a model, cut away to show the structure of the statue. There are a lot of awkward truss configurations and how the forces are really transferred to the podium appears somewhat questionable. But they probably made up for it with really thick steel and lots of bolts.
The Statue itself looked its age. I was telling Marthe that it is too bad that it isn't a privately owned site because it would be taken care of a lot better. Obviously the taxes from the people don't go very far in taking care of the statue and the podium and the site.

Ellis Island was the next stop and we had fun walking around and learning about how people had to enter the country. We learned that around 2 percent of all the immigrants that came to the states got put on ships and sent back to where they came from, sometimes without their families. With the number of immigrants that came to the states during that time period, that ammounts to a lot of people. It definately was quite the system and required people to jump through all sorts of hoops to get into the states. . . . not quite as easy as jumping the border. :)

We walked from Battery Park back up to the financial district to see Ground Zero. By then it started raining and before long we were pretty soaked and bought some umbrellas. Not long after we bought the umbrellas, it stopped raining. Ground Zero is a big construction site right now as they are well underway with building the new Freedom Tower. . . or whatever it is called now. While we were there, we saw on the news that they found remains of an old ship while excavating. I bet the contractor loved that stop-work order so people could carefully decide what they want to do with the ship.
We then walked past City Hall and over to Center Street. We saw the Brooklyn Bridge from a distance.

Some of the city and courthouse buildings that were around that area were pretty cool.

It is kind of hard to see in the picture below, but in the distance is the Empire State Building.

There were some cool churches that we walked by.

Somehow we ended up back in Times Square after visiting the Paul Frank store and took the subway back up to our hotel's neighborhood.

After we ate dinner, we walked down and went to the Empire State Building. It was interesting to go here on the same day as we visited the Statue of Liberty. This was a high-class, organized and well-staffed site to visit (most likely because it is privately owned. . .I'll have to see if it really is or not). Anyway, the finishes in the building were well kept and the line to go up to the top was short and within a few minutes, we were up on the top of the building (86 floors up).

This is the view toward where the twin towers used to be in the financial district.

This is the cool wedge shape building. This building was used for the Daily Bugle in Spiderman.

The building below is the New York Times new building by architect Renzo Piano. He does some very cool work. It is one of the taller buildings.

On the left of the image below is the Bank of America tower and on the far right is the Chrysler Building.
This is us up on the top behind the sturdy web of fencing to keep you from getting too close to the edge.

That was pretty much it for Tuesday. . . stay tuned for the post for Wednesday, July 14th.

Monday, July 12th - New York City

We got to New York on Monday afternoon. We spent the evening just walking around and seeing some things close to our hotel.

The Apple Store Entrance - Complete glass structure
The Seagram Building - Designed by Mies Van der Rohe
Grand Central Station was grand.
The Bank of America Tower at Times Square - Designed by Cook+Fox Architects.

Marthe spotted some local wild life, so I took a picture.
Times Square was kind of like Vegas. . only more people. . . and no slot machines.

We saw Radio City Music Hall on our way back to the hotel. It was only a couple blocks from our hotel.

Went to bed after that. Stay tuned for the next post for Tuesday, July 13th.