How do you even begin to summarize New York without being hopelessly boring or stumbling into the limitless supply of clichés available? If you take even a minute to contemplate this question, you will realize how much you already know about the city: from the news, from music, from film, just from being alive. New York, in many ways, has permeated the fabric of our society and become the symbol and source of many cultural and societal icons.
Perhaps the most important aspect of NYC remains its atmosphere. Just being there, walking through the streets in the midst of that much humanity is an experience. While standing still in New York may get you run over, do take some time to pause and soak up the vibes.
However, having contemplated the glittering generalities, that still leaves the question of how to be more specific, more concrete without supplying so much information that it becomes overwhelming and therefore useless. Following are some attempts.
MUSEUMS:
If you go to www.nycvisit.com , you can search for things to do. Searching for museums and galleries will bring up over 100 results so whatever your interest, there is probably a whole related museum. However, for our purposes here, we will look at just a few of the awesome museums available:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Certainly, it is not possible to discuss museums in NYC without starting with the Met. The Met was founded in 1870 by a group of businessmen and financiers as well as some of the leading artists and thinkers of the day. Their mission was to create a museum that would bring art and art education to the American people. The collection began with 174 paintings from three private European collections. Today, the Met is NYC's most popular tourist site (visited by over 5 million people a year) and contains three million individual objects. The art there spans a period of 5,000 years and represents every part of the world. Obviously, the Met is not the place to wander aimlessly if there is a particular exhibit you want to see.
Museum of Modern Art
MoMA, as it is affectionately known, is housed in a new 630,000-square-foot museum designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, which is almost twice the size of their former facility. As with the Met, MoMA began with a humble offering of eight prints and one drawing. Today, the museum boasts over 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and drawings, and design objects. MoMA also owns some 19,000 films and four million film stills, as well as 140,000 books, artist books, and periodicals.
American Museum of Natural History
The museum is most famous for its three large dinosaur halls, but there are also more than 30 million other artifacts there so you will be busy. Their Museum of Television and Radio has a computer catalog of over 75,000 TV and radio programs that you can watch/listen to from over 90 consoles. Also popular with the kids are the many hands-on exhibits and interactive displays. The museum has various temporary exhibits as well, ranging from live animals to stunning artwork to ancient history to modern scientific discovery.
Guggenheim Museum
The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, as it was known, was established in 1939, and took root in radical new forms of art being developed at the time by artists such as Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian. The building that houses this unique museum was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright who designed it to be very organic, allowing visitors to wend their way down from the top by way of sloping ramps. This provided a sharp contrast to most museums that compartmentalized collections, floors, and exhibits. Today the museum still stands as one of the great architectural works of the 20th century as well as housing an amazing collection of non-traditional art.
PARKS/GARDENS:
You will probably be as surprised as I was to find out that NYC is actually the greenest city in America. It has 52,938 acres of park/open space out of 197,696 total acres, for a total of 26.8%. The city is home to over 750 different native plant and animal species including the endangered peregrine falcon, the sharp-shinned hawk, and white tailed deer.
Central Park
Although Central Park is undoubtedly the best known, it is actually only the fifth largest in NYC. Weighing in at 834 acres of landscaped and recreational areas, it still makes for an impressive swatch of green in the middle of Manhattan. Things to do and enjoy there include a zoo, carousel, skating rink, theater, lake, pond, reservoir, castle, gardens, fountains, food, tours, and various special events.
Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
Queens is home to the this wildlife refuge that contains more than 9,150 acres of diverse land and water habitats. They provide nature walks and bird watches, and are known as a prime birding spot due to the thousands of land, water, and shorebirds that stop there along their migration paths. Over the past 25 years, more than 325 species have been sighted and recorded there.
The New York Botanical Garden
The Garden functions in several vital capacities. It is one of the world's greatest plant collections, as well as the region's leading educational center concerning gardening and horticulture. It also serves as an international center for plant research. It was founded in 1891, and today is a 250-acre National Historic Landmark that includes dramatic rock outcroppings, wetlands, ponds, a cascading waterfall, and a 50-acre tract of the original forest that covered NYC. There are also 48 garden and plant collections containing an amazing range of plant specimens.
The Cloisters Museum
This curious place falls partly in the museum category and partly under gardens. It is actually part of the Met, but is located in Fort Tyron Park in northern Manhattan. The museum was assembled from architectural elements, both domestic and religious, dating from the twelfth through fifteenth century and is devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. The gardens are extremely impressive with the medieval herb garden containing 250 species, located around a fountain in a pink-and-white marble columned enclosure. There are also several other gardens planted in accordance with research from medieval treatises, poetry, garden documents and herbals, and medieval works of art, such as tapestries, stained-glass windows, and column capitals.
Sources:
( http://www.new-york-travel-services.com/ ) (Accessed June 28, 2004)
( http://www.nycvisit.com ) (Accessed June 28, 2004)
(
http://www.whatsontheplanet.com
) (Accessed June 25, 2004)