Travels in the 2nd half

Many people visit New York City, and never leave the island of Manhattan, except when they fly into or out of one of our airports. That is a shame. The four other boroughs of the city offer a treasure trove of museums and galleries to enjoy. One great place to visit is Flushing Meadows - Corona Park in Queens. Flushing Meadows is near the eastern border of Queens, and it takes about half-an-hour to get there from mid-town. It is a trip worth taking. The park was created in the early 1930’s to provide Queens with a park to rival Central Park, and it is a beautiful place. It is most famous for hosting two world’s fairs, in 1939-40 and in 1964-65. Today it is home to the USTA National Tennis Center, home to the U.S. Open, a small zoo, a botanical garden, and to two museums, both with ties to those world’s Fairs. The Unisphere The Unisphere and the NY State Pavilion The Queens Museum is an art museum that occupies the New York City Pavilion, built for the 1939 fair. From ...

The Vista Dome Car There are many fun ways to spend a day in the country. One that I enjoy is finding a “Heritage Railway” for a ride. A heritage railway uses classic cars and engines to take passengers on a trip through the countryside. On a trip to the western Catskills last fall I found the Delaware and Ulster Railroad. The Delaware and Ulster Railroad (DURR) operates out of the town of Arkville NY. Its track is part of a rail line that has its roots in the 1860’s. In 1868 Thomas Cornell, founder of the Cornell Steamboat Company chartered the Roundout and Qswego Railroad to bring supplies and goods from towns in Central and Western New York to his pier in Kingston, along the Hudson River. While he never completed his plans to build all the way to Lake Erie, his railway began to carry passengers for the nascent summer holiday businesses in the Catskill Mountains. The passenger and freight service continued through several incarnations until passenger service ended in 1954....

NOTE: Some of the pictures in this blog represent violent acts.  Life in the age of COVID continues, and so does our desire to find ways to explore the world beyond the walls of our apartments and houses. So I continue with my exploration of smaller museums in New York City. For this article, I visited the New Museum in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There are many galleries in New York that are dedicated to contemporary art, but none are as large as The New Museum on the Bowery. The New Museum was founded in 1977 with the mission of introducing new art and new ideas, by artists who have not yet received significant exposure or recognition. It opened in The New School for Social Justice, in Greenwich Village, but quickly outgrew it space there. It has moved several times until, in 2007, it opened its own building, a beautiful 7 floor, 58,700 sq.ft. space. On my visit, their exhibit space was dedicated to two artists who present very different views of painting styles...