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A short weekend trip to see my son, Jeremy, in New York City, 9-12 February 2007.

Our goal on Saturday morning was the Guggenheim Museum which Jeremy had never seen and where I have not been in some thirty years.  The museum was jammed, however (the damned tourists swarm the museums on the weekends).  Since neither of us was particularly committed to seeing the current exhibition--Spanish art from El Greco to Picasso--we decided to put it off for another time.  Instead, after a walk around the Central Park reservoir where I discovered the twin towers of the El Dorado (about 300 Central Park West), we went to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. 

At the Cooper-Hewitt, we saw the National Design Triennial and also, really more interesting, an exhibit of intricate and beautiful made-to-scale staircases.  Apprentice craftsmen had to design and make drawings of staircases and then execute them (most of them are in various fine woods).

Late afternoon, we walked down to the half-price tickets outlet and got tickets for a revival of Company directed by John Doyle, who directed the revival of Sweeney Todd which I saw with Jeremy last summer.  In both productions, the players also serve as the band.  I had my doubts that Company could work as well as it did when it first appeared in the early 1970s, but the show was surprisingly effective (the rescoring helped a lot) and very enjoyable.  Afterwards, we went to a SoHo bar where Jeremy met up with Semester at Sea friends; after one drink I walked home, leaving the young'uns to hang out way into the morning.

After picking up treats at Moishe's Kosher Bake Shop (115 2nd Avenue at 7th Street) on Sunday morning, we ate our Almond Horns at a little park near the Cooper Union. Cooper was a New York industrialist, social reformer and benefactor, and failed presidential candidate (and his invention of a gelatin dessert led to the development of Jell-o).  Before his haircut, Jeremy looked disturbingly like Peter Cooper.  From there, we walked over to the American Jewish Historical Society which had a small exhibit of early 1930s photographs from the Lower East Side.  At the time, there was a plan to clear much of the area for new development, and so a project was organized to document the Jewish immigrant community for posterity.  The redevelopment plan collapsed because of the Depression and, now, Jeremy calls the Lower East Side home.  Then Jeremy wanted to show me the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) Design Store in SoHo, after which we went for a fake-meat lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, Red Bamboo, near Washington Square.  In the afternoon, we went to see the new museum, appropriately named the Neue Galerie, started by Ronald Lauder (Estée's son) for his collection of late 19th, early 20th century German and Austrian art.  There was an exhibit of interior designs (furniture and textiles) by Joseph Hoffmann, but, better, I got to see a few works by Klimt (not the famous "Kiss" but one of the Adele Bauer-Bloch portraits--golden and beautiful) and two works by Egon Schiele.  After a much-needed nap, off to Pianos where Jeremy was working sound for a combo-evening of stand-up (one good, two bad performers) and sketch comedy (The Whitest Kids U Know) which culminated (?) in a bit of brief, but insufficiently brief, nudity.  We rushed out to get over (by cab, no less) to Jeremy's haunt, The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, for an improv show featuring two Saturday Night Live performers (Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch), a Comedy Central writer (can't remember if Jeremy said he was from the Daily Show or the Cobert Report), a Conan O'Brien writer (don't watch it), and two others, as well as a terrible monologist who is supposed to provide the thread for the works.  Finally, a late-night dinner at a 24-hour Ukrainian restaurant, Veselka; I had pierogis.

After a Monday morning knish from Yonah Schimmel's, off to the airport for the trip home.

Advice for tourists:  You're more likely to find a newsstand in a New York subway station than a restroom--

F. David Levenbach, fidel@astate.edu, http://www.clt.astate.edu/fidel; personal http://www.geocities.com/aka_fidel

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Revised 08 April 2008 13:14:36 -0500