New York Report #2: Riding with the fishes + the art of history

It was a slightly overcast Friday morning and that didn’t make me unhappy. Down in Battery Park, I could walk along the water without worrying about sunburn. It’s an easy place to reach on the #1 train from midtown. Battery Park is a beautiful place with gardens and monuments and an excellent white tablecloth restaurant as well as snack and drink stands. It’s the place where you can board a boat to take you to Ellis Island or the Statue of Liberty, but I’ve done those things before.

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I was interested in the new Sea Glass Carousel, which just opened in August. It’s housed in a circular building like a nautilus shell made of glass and steel that’s near the water and a short walk from the MTA station. The carousel is populated with many different types of fiberglass fish—a 14-foot-tall angelfish, a butterflyfish, yellow lionfish, triggerfish and a Siamese fishing fish, among others. 30 fish in all. For $5, you can sit in a fish of your choice and ride for about four minutes.

On another rainy day, I visited two interesting New York museums that I had missed on all my other trips. The Museum of the City of New York is housed in a grand building at 103rd and  Fifth Avenue, built in 1932 as a museum. I was particularly interested in several exhibits there:

Everything Is Design: The Work of Paul Rand, one of American’s pioneer graphic designers. Rand developed dozens of familiar logos and the corporate identity systems that supported them–mainly back in the day when an identity system meant a massive binder of instructions for every conceivable corporate application, from stationery and publications to trucks, signage and uniforms. (Today those guidelines still exist, of course, but not on paper.)

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Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival. An expansive exhibit of folk music in New York from pioneers such as Ledbetter and Guthrie to Dylan and famous venues such as Gerdes’ Folk City and Greenwich Village “basket clubs.”

Hip-Hop Revolution: Photographs by three photographers. I had seen Hamilton the night before, so of course I had to pay homage to the hip-hop artists who inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Activist New York. The drama of New York activist groups and issues over the years, from abolition (1830-65) and suffrage (1900-20) to civil rights (1945-64), gay rights (1969-2012) and bicycle lane advocacy (1965-2011). And a fascinating corner about the power of the pen: the Proletarian Literary Movement (1929-41).

The exhibits are all well curated and displayed. The three-story building also has a cafe. And there’s a beguiling door that displays this title: “This is New York’s most exciting stairwell.” And indeed the stair is lined with posters and billboards illustrating the city’s history and culture.

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Over on Central Park West is the New York Historical Society, where I wanted to see the exhibit, Art as Activism. The exhibit asks the question: “How did political messages go viral before the internet?” and answers it in a mesmerizing way, showing 70 posters from the 1930s to the 1970s. They’re all from the Merrill C. Berman collection at the historical society.  The posters are framed and installed like paintings. They tell stories you wouldn’t have learned in your US history classes unless you were using Howard Zinn’s remarkable People’s History of the United States.

All photos by Nancy Bishop except where noted.