New York CityNYC impressions
The Met, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art usually called, is the foremost museum in America. Its galleries take in over three-and-a-half million works of art and span the arts and cultures not just of America and Europe (though these are the most famous collections), but also of China, Africa, the Far East, and the Classical and Islamic worlds. Any overview of the museum is out of the question: the Met demands many and specific visits or, at least, self-imposed limits.
Housed over two floors in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, the Met's twentieth-century collection is a fascinating and compact group of paintings. The second floor contains European and American painting from 1945 to the present, opening with a room filled with the gigantic, emotional canvases of Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still. Highlights on this floor include Jackson Pollock's masterly Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), Thomas Hart Benton's rural idyll July Hay, R.B. Kitaj's John Ford on his Deathbed, a dream-like painting of the director of western movies, and Andy Warhol's final Self-Portrait; hung alongside are works by Max Beckmann, Roy Lichtenstein (Painting Since 1945), Mark Rothko, and Gilbert and George.The New York Public Library (Center for the Humanities) on the corner of 42nd and Fifth Avenue is the first notable building on 42nd Street's eastern reaches: Beaux Arts in style and faced with white marble, its steps act as a meeting point and general hangout for pockets of people throughout the year. The library boasts a collection among the five largest in the world: 88 miles of books stored in eight levels of stacks beneath this room and running the length of Bryant Park, which alone covers half an acre.
Houston Street (pronounced Howston rather than Hewston) marks the top of SoHo's trellis of streets, any exploration of which necessarily means criss-crossing and doubling back. Greene Street is as good a place to start as any, highlighted all along by the nineteenth-century cast-iron facades that, in part if not in whole, saved SoHo from the bulldozers. Prince Street, Spring Street and West Broadway hold the best selection of shops and galleries in the area.
Back outside, push through the crush crossing Fifth Avenue and walk east down Manhattan's most congested stretch to where Park Avenue lifts off the ground at Pershing Square to weave its way around the solid bulk of Grand Central Terminal. The terminal was constructed around a basic iron frame but clothed with a Beaux Arts skin. Since then Grand Central has taken on an almost mythical significance, and though with the insidious eating-away of the country's rail network its major traffic is now mainly commuters speeding out no further than Connecticut or Westchester County, it remains in essence what it was in the nineteenth century - symbolic gateway to an undiscovered continent.
If you are going to Brooklyn, begin by walking over the Brooklyn Bridge – it's not too long (less than a mile across) and it may hold the best views of Manhattan that you will get. The walkway begins at City Hall Park next to the Municipal Building and ends in Brooklyn either at the corner of Adams and Tillary streets or at the more convenient Cadman Plaza East staircase.
Out of all of America's symbols, none has proved more enduring or evocative than the Statue of Liberty. The statue, which depicts Liberty throwing off her shackles and holding a beacon to light the world, was the creation of the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi in Paris between 1874 and 1884.
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