Manhattan, Old and New.

Manhattan, Old and New

Part Five of Kitchen Table Writer's look at Art.

I've just been treated to a trip to the Big Apple to view the art, history and culture.

In A Cultural Experience in Manhattan, I chronicled my adventures on our arrival in Manhattan; the ballet dancers in Columbus Circle…the nighttime boat trip under Brooklyn Bridge and around the Statue of Liberty…dinner at the Mandarin Hotel. The following day, we'd booked up a full tour of the history of Manhattan from the moment Hudson landed in 1607 to the building of the Memorial Towers.

We’d both read our book on the history of New York, so felt girded up for the five-mile tour of historic Manhattan that would take the entire day. We met our guide, Jessie, at The Battery, named after the artillery batteries that were stationed there in the 17th Century. While we were waiting, we enjoyed taking in a huge statue near the fortress. Made in the 1970s of bronze and red granite by sculptor Luis Sanguino to celebrates the diversity of New York City and the struggle of immigrants, by showing the different kinds of émigré who came into Ellis Island, such as European Jews, as well as a freed African slave, a priest and a worker Chinese. It uses heroic symbolism with facial and bodily expression to emphasise the struggle of the dislocated, clearly about to arrive at Ellis Island, straining to catch a first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, some reaching out, some collapsing with hunger and emotion. It reminded me of how I’d visualised such an event last night on the Bateaux.

The Immigrants

 Jessie arrived a bit late, which peeved my punctual daughter, but we were soon chatting away, as she turned out to be (like all the New Yorkers we met), very friendly and obliging. She was a Brooklyn girl who ran her own small drama company, but was excited about the MA she was about to start in drama…at the Old Vic in Bristol. ‘We come from Bristol,’ we said. ‘You’ll love it.’ Clearly, she was keen on local history, so we told her to search out the history of our native city. I’ve always believed that history is written in the brickwork, skyline and landscape of any place…you can see this in the buildings, waterways and green places of Bristol…now it’s becoming clear it’s also true of New York.

We started outside the Clinton Castle, the little fortress built by DeWitt Clinton – the inventor of the Manhattan grid system – to keep the British out of New York after the revolution. From the tip of The Battery, we saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time in daylight – this is where you catch the boat to Liberty Island. She looked just as regal and godly through the distant morning mists that she had close up and illuminated the night before. Jessie moved us on to the Bowling Green, where in 1765 New Yorkers protested against the British rulers by burning the picket fence. Doesn’t sound like much of a protest, but I doubt it stopped there. A new metal fence was erected, and Jessie showed us how the decorative tops of the posts had been roughly removed. This happened in the early days of the revolution, so no one knows what the missing ornaments looked like, or why they were sawn off.  

Charging Bull

On Wall Street, named because early settlers built a wall to keep the Native Americans out (don’t tell Trump, Beckie whispered), is the NY Stock Exchange, where we see the newly famous Charging Bull and Fearless Girl, two bronze statues that arrived like mushrooms blooming overnight. The artist DoModica created a larger-than-life statue of a bull in his art foundry and arrived early one morning to install it inside a ‘street works’ tent. The Bull clearly represents all that is belligerent about the stock exchange; flared nostrils and wicked sharp horns, ready to gore; its testicles are massively visible and the tourists ('specially the women!) are queueing to be photographed nestling them in their hands. The little girl arrived years later in 2017. She reminded me of Francie Nolan, the young heroine in Betty Smiths’ 1943 book A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, (a book, a film and a blogpost here)  The Girl faces off The Bull in button boots and a cotton dress, her hair blowing away from her face as if the snorting of the bull is creating a strong wind. She looks ready to take on the world. Both works are guerrilla art, and New York’s City Hall still insists they are on borrowed time. 

It was at the gardens of City Hall that we had the best historic ‘buzz’.

I’d been reading about ‘The Collect’, a large pond that supplied the best tea-making water to the

The Collect Pond, copyright Wikipedia

settlers Quite quickly it was ruined by the growing meat industry (clearly, even early Americans loved their steak), when  it became a dumping for the waste products of slaughter. In 1800 it had become a stagnant mess and was drained, filled with soil from the small hills that had been flattened as the city expanded. Houses were built on the land, however, no one had noticed that The Collect was fed by springs. Very soon the buildings began to subside, losing their value. The entire area ended up as a slum, with hundreds of poor New Yorkers living in abject poverty in sinking houses. Jessie hadn’t been sure where the Collect was, but here was a timemap in the grounds of the City Hall, describing its position not far from where we stood…although it was several acres wide so we were probably on the edge of it. In delight at our discovery, we jumped up and down. I’m sure she thought we were quite mad.

NY public library

‘Where would you like to go for lunch,’ Jessie asked us.' Shall we eat like New Yorkers?' She took us to a diner where we stuffed ourselves to the gills on sandwhiches packed full of pastrami and other cold meats and cheeses, served with crisps and a gherkin before catching a yellowcab into the central area of Manhattan to look at more architecture. She explained that there were two main periods before the modern skyscapers of glass and steel; Art Deco in the Jazz Age, which was preceeded by beautifully ornate, colonnaded buildings, built during what we think of as the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Jessie described this as Beaux Art (although she annoyed Becki by pronouncing this ‘beaus-art).

We start our trail with the quirky Flatiron Building; 22 steel-framed floors of triangulation built in 1905, then on to perhaps the favourite of the older buildings we saw; the New York Public Library. As we walk around it, Jessie told us it had been built in 1908 for the people of NY and there are over 50 million books housed here. From the outside, it’s beautiful, with neoclassical pillars, bas-relief work and statues. Inside, the decorative motifs, murals continue, but what I loved was that the library has the smell and atmosphere of an ancient house of reading. Both of us could have happily stayed there for some time, perhaps in order to look at some actual books, and we decided to put it on the ‘last day’ list of things to do.

Whispering corner

Grand Central Station that took our breath away. Built in 1913, it’s more like a temple than a railway station. The architecture feels like ‘Beaux Arts meets Art Deco’, offering the best of both. The main concourse has a massive floor of rushing people, but if you look up, you’re transported to the heavens. The ceiling is painted with the 12 constellations of the night sky. This starry wonder is, however, astronomically inaccurate in a complicated way. While the stars within some constellations appear as they would from earth, other constellations are reversed left-to-right, as is the overall arrangement of the constellations on the ceiling. Jessie’s explanation was that the ceiling design might have been based on the medieval custom of depicting the sky as it would appear to God looking in at the celestial sphere from outside. It’s probably just an error, though! Always on the hunt of a good oyster, Becki was instantly taken with oyster bar, Central's oldest business, while I was enraptured by the ‘whispering corners’ which allow to people to stand at either side of an area of the main concourse and whisper secrets into the pillars of one corner, to be heard perfectly in the opposite corner. One imagines the Mafia of prohibition NY using this device a lot.

Ground Zero waterfall

Finally, we brought history up-to-date. No one would go to Manhattan and not want to pay their respects to the terror and horror of 9/11 by visiting the Memorial at Ground Zero.

Twin Tower Memorial

From a little way off, the 9/11 memorials look like two enormous holes in the ground; both so big you can’t see both at once. They are the exact footprint of ‘ground zero’ - the space made by each World Trade Tower after it was destroyed by terrorists on the 11th of September 2001. As I moved forward, I could see – and hear – the massive waterfalls that form an outer square of walls. The noise of millions of gallons of falling water drowns out traffic and pulled me in to the emotional intensity of these two enormous pools, which are titled “Reflecting Absence”. The water disappears into a simple, square hole at the centre. The noise, the beauty of the four walls of falling water (the largest man-made waterfalls in the US), and the black hole that’s sucking at the life of the water, moved us both incredibly and made think about life, and the way it can be snatched from you in a blink. Around the edge, the names of all the dead are deeply carved, including the firefighters who lost their lives, moving memorials in the world, small stars and stripes flags are tucking into some of the names. Rising above them is Freedom Tower. It’s a triangular column of glass, and on this brilliantly sunny day, it caught the light of the at the very tip of its 1,776 feet, the date of the American Revolution in New York. 

The Oculus

Next to the memorial is The Oculus. This is  extremely interesting architecturally… it’s  as bowed and compact as the Freedom tower is stretched and liberated. From outside, it reminds us both of a white bird, half in flight. Inside, where there is a terminus, it’s like we were in the body of a dinosaur. New York felt the destruction of the World Trade Towers strongly, took the deaths of its citizens very hard. They want to celebrate those lives, cut short, as well as proving to the terrorists who tried to destroy their way of life that life will go on.  

Grand Central Station cocktail.

There's a coda to our day of Manhattan history; that evening we returned to eat at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station.  With its tramline furniture and vaulted ceilings, it really looked the part. One could imagine the Bright Young Things and flappers of the 1920s coming here for their oysters. Of course, back then they wouldn’t have been allowed alcohol with their shellfish, and to Becki’s horror, Champagne still wasn’t on the menu! ‘I can’t eat oysters without Champagne,’ she announced.
I didn’t fancy the menu at all…I was thinking that since the 20s, the clientele had deteriorated somewhat. Bag ladies rubbed shoulders with workers at the end of their shifts on the long communal tables. ‘Let’s try somewhere else,’ I said. So we wandered througj the Central Station Concourse until we reached an Italian Bar, where we ate at the counter. We had salads – Bex with her glass of Champers and me with the most eye-watering vodka martini I have ever swallowed down. Becki said later that she watched me getting more and more drunk over the course of this one glass.

It was ten when we left. I was keen for an early-ish night as we had another full day of sightseeing tomorrow. But as we left the Station, Becki spotted a sign. ‘the Campbell Apartment!’ she squealed .’I’ve read about that. When the station was being built, John Campbell, who was overseeing the work, lived here – he had both his office and his bed installed so he could keep a close eye on the work. And then in the 20s, it became a speakeasy. In fact, it’s the only cocktail lounge in NY that was originally a speakeasy. Inside, it was small, but perfect. It looks like the galleried hall of a medieval palace, but was packed with punters having a great, if noisy, time, squashed together round tiny tables.

The Cambell Apartment

The drinks, however, were not a patch on the Italian bar. My vodka martini was a diluted replica of the previous eye-blower. And Becki took one look at her Tatti and said, ‘it’s flat. There’s no fizz.’

‘Is your drink flat?’ The girl sitting on the next table heard Becki and leaned over to give advice.

‘I’m sure it’s from the dregs of the bottle,’ Becki said. ‘Tell the waitress, she insisted. ‘Go on. Call her over and tell her.’ Quite soon, Becki was in possession of a sparkling glass, and we had a new best friend in friendly NYC.