The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Up in one of those difficult-to-find rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — so difficult that perhaps it simply vanishes after you leave it — is a series of 27 small oil paintings that one must view with a magnifying glass. The subjects of the paintings all reside in the same universe — a… Read More
Seventy-five years ago, in 1942, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses convinced Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to move his family from their home in East Harlem (Fifth Avenue and 109th Street) to an old mansion in Carl Schurz Park. It was the former home to merchant Archibald Gracie, built in 1799, to look out at the ships… Read More
The Museum of the City of New York finally delivers the ultimate history of New York City in its dazzling new permanent exhibit on the ground floor — New York At Its Core. And yet it feels very strange to classify this as a mere survey of history as though it were a row of… Read More
The Smithsonian Magazine-sponsored Museum Day Live!, this Saturday, September 24, provides you with an excellent reason to finally visit that local museum you’ve always wanted to go to or to go catch that exhibit that all your friends have been talking about. This is a national event and includes a great many museums, well beyond those operated… Read More
One hundred years ago, the American Museum of Natural History received a massive visitor, one so mighty that the doors of the museum’s delivery room “had to be removed and [the] partition openings enlarged” in order to accommodate it. Was it a dinosaur? A meteorite? Perhaps the remains of a great whale? No, the new… Read More
Saturday, September 26, is Smithsonian Magazine’s annual MUSEUM DAY with free admission to participating museums across the country. The only catch is that you need to visit the Smithsonian website and print out your ticket (good for two admissions) first before you go. It’s not free for everyone. You’re special! Here’s a list of participating museums and… Read More
It’s ancient mysteries week on the Bowery Boys! What, you ask, I thought you only did New York City history? In fact, at least two great Manhattan landmarks evoke the great mysteries of ancient times, meant to bring mystical energy and revelation to one of the world’s greatest cities. Here’s a replay of a podcast… Read More
Happy Easter! Audubon’s Golden Eagle with its bizarrely depicted bunny prize. Notice the small man in the background. That’s Audubon himself as ‘an American woodsman’, the only appearance he makes in this series of watercolors.You’d be forgiven for thinking that the latest show at the New-York Historical Society — Audubon’s Aviary: Parts Unknown (Part II)… Read More
Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year to go to more museums? To be more cultured? To know, generally speaking, what’s going on in this great big city in 2014? Then start with these three terrific history-related exhibitions — some of best shows from last year — either at their half-way points or… Read More
An illustration by Eduardo Manet from a 1875 French reprinting of “The Raven” We are all too comfortable with Edgar Allan Poe in the abstract. His fingerprints seem to be on everything these days. His morbid tastes and the flowering dark genres he helped create appear just underneath much of American pop culture in the… Read More
Stop what you’re doing and go play around with the New York Public Library‘s addictive Stereograminator, which gives you their collection of stereograph photography and the ability to animate them, emulating the ‘3D effect’ audiences who first viewed them would have experienced. Go here for the fun. The originals are below:
Due to the temporary shutdown of the federal government,the Library of Congress is closed to the public and researchers beginning October 1, 2013 until further notice. [site] The Library of Congress is my number one source of information for the Bowery Boys, through their newspaper archive and their amazing collection of photographs. Due to the… Read More
The Museum of the City of New York‘s new exhibition “Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s” examines the aspirational vision of the American future in the automobile age, and the use of a mostly-defunct style of public exhibition as a way to sell that vision. There were over two dozen World Fairs in… Read More
The Museum of the City of New York‘s new exhibition “Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s” examines the aspirational vision of the American future in the automobile age, and the use of a mostly-defunct style of public exhibition as a way to sell that vision. There were over two dozen World Fairs in… Read More
The monster within the Armory’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending A Staircase No. 2 PODCAST The Armory Show of 1913 was the mainstream debut of modernist art — both European and American — to New York City audiences. Galleries had previously devoted themselves to the great European masters, antiquity and American landscapes as… Read More