Tonight I spent a couple of hours at The Met - sitting in the Balcony Cafe with a glass of wine & some nibbles listening to a piano & string quartet. A very civilised way to spend an evening - and then I spent an other hour or so wandering around the galleries ... and somehow I have trained my eye to spot the Caillebotte in the room - and there it was, a carnivores 'still life'.
The rest of the day was spent at tap with Lynn Schwab - who literally keeps me on my toes! And at the Cooper Hewitt Museum which is part of the Smithsonian. It had two amazing exhibitions one of Van Cleef & Arpels jewellery - which was amazing in both its detail and the size of the gemstones. Who would have though you could get diamonds that big? Or so many matching rubies? sapphires or emeralds???? And a fascinating Sonia Delaunay featuring both her paintings but also lots of her fabric designs and swatches of material and examples of some of her clothing designs - including a fabulously patterned but totally impractical knitted woollen swimsuit!
Yesterday was a day out and about enjoying the limited sunshine and trying to ignore the cold wind. I walked the highline - that which was once an elevated trainline and is now a garden. I viisted the Merchant House Museum - yet another historic house which was owned by the one family between 1860s - 1930s and then donated to the city and became a museum.
Later on I made it to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum where I fluked into the last available ticket to the museum for the day. While Easter doesn'e seem to be a big deal here (everything was open today Good Friday) there are a lot of people in town for Spring Break! The tenement museum is a restored (sort of) 4 storey building that had 4 x 3 room flats on each level and was home to over 7000 immigrants between the mid 1800s and early 1930s. We saw 3 of the apartments set up to reflect the different families that lived there in the early 1900s - a Russian family that worked as part of the clothing industry and did piecework at home during the day & employed others to work in the flat with them. Apparently the term 'sweatshop' originated here & emerged to describe these 'factories' where people worked at home in non OH&S conditions. The lower East Side of NY supplied 70% of America's clothing during the end of the 19th C.
And then last night I saw 'Million Dollar Quartet' - which was a total suprise as I bought a ticket not really knowing much about it. It tells the story of the afternoon that Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins & Johnny Cash spent at Sun Records having a jam session in December 1963. It was fantastic! Great songs - of course - and amazing performers who not only created credible & believable impressions of the musicians but also played all the music. Some of the songs in the show included: Blue Suede Shoes; Walk the Line, Great Balls of Fire; See ya later Alligator; & some really soulful spirituals ...
Tomorrow I have tix for Baby Its You and for the Addams Family on Sunday. And tomorrow night is the season premiere of Dr Who season 6 on BBC America!
Only a week left here and I am starting to feel like I am running out of time to do all I want to . And the cold weather - tops of 11 C today - means that spending time lingering in the outdoors is not a pleasant option. So glad I brought the coat & gloves & scarf with me!
1 comment:
I've read an article about the tenement museum.. it sounds amazing.
i wonder if it has a website? such a bit part of american life that doesnt get 'exported' the same way the american dream does, running through all those bright and buzzy sitcoms that commercial stations seem to buy in job lots. what were the other flats like? did they have any stories about the people that lived there?
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