1,000 Places to See in the U.S.A. & Canada Before You Die (40 page)

Never Pay Retail

New York, New York

Think of anything you know about the Jewish experience in the U.S. and it probably has its roots in the Lower East Side, where, between 1882 and 1924, nearly two million Eastern European Jews began their
American adventure. At its peak in 1910, the tiny area—less than 2 miles north to south, and only a mile wide—was one of the most densely inhabited spots on earth, with more than half a million residents crammed into block after block of five- and six-story tenement houses. Inside, tiny apartments often served as homes to as many as seven to ten family members and boarders, and doubled as piecework sewing factories during the day. Outside, the streets were crowded with pushcart vendors, while every business in sight was Jewish-owned. To an immigrant arriving from violently anti-Semitic Russia or Poland, it must have seemed like the safest place on earth, for all its crowding and hardships. It was the greatest concentration of Jewish life the world had seen in almost 2,000 years.

But things change, and after the Immigration Act of 1924 slowed eastern and southern European migration to a trickle, Jewish families began leaving the Lower East Side in search of greater space and more opportunity. Still the neighborhood remained home, a bit of the old country in this new country, even as Latin American and Caribbean immigrants who succeeded the Jews were themselves displaced by gentrification. Today, hip bars, trendy boutiques, and restaurants (including the busy ’inoteca, serving Italian small-plate favorites and a very impressive wine list) occupy storefronts that were once bodegas, and before that kosher delis. The Yiddish theaters that once dotted Second Avenue are gone, and the small synagogues that hang on throughout the area often have difficulty assembling a minyan, the minimum of ten adults required for communal prayer.

But still, some things remain. The Moorish-style Eldridge Street Synagogue was the first great house of worship in America built by Eastern European Jews, in 1886. In its heyday it drew thousands for worship, but as Jews left the area in the 1930s, the synagogue fell into decay. In the late 1980s a long-term (and ongoing) restoration began, rescuing its vaulted 70-foot ceiling, remarkable stained-glass windows, and ornate wood and plasterwork. Today visitors can tour the interior, then tour the neighborhood for added historical context.

Farther north, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum preserves an entire five-story tenement building as a time capsule of immigrant life, offering tours of apartments meticulously reconstructed to mirror the lives of actual residents like the Levines, Polish immigrants who operated a dress shop from their apartment here in the 1890s, and the Rogarshevskys, Lithuanian immigrants who lived in the building from 1910 to 1941. Through the stories of these and other residents, visitors gain insight into both the day-to-day lives of the neighborhood’s immigrants and the larger social forces that shaped their time. The museum also organizes neighborhood tours.

A handful of the neighborhood’s old-time Jewish eateries have managed to weave themselves firmly into the fabric of contemporary New York life. Step inside the cavernous Katz’s Delicatessen, in business since 1888, where decades-old signs (“Send a salami to your boy in the Army”) compete with photos of visiting celebrities, while customers compete at the various serving counters for takeout. Timeless classics like thick-sliced pastrami sandwiches and blintzes are washed down with a nice cream soda. Every film buff knows this was where Meg Ryan had her fake orgasm in
When Harry Met Sally.

Nearby, Russ & Daughters is a beloved fourth-generation food emporium opened by immigrant Joel Russ in 1914. Its gleaming white-and-stainless-steel interior is home to New York’s best smoked fish, lox, and other Jewish favorites. Down the street, Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery is of the same vintage, its brick ovens turning out knishes—pockets of dough stuffed with delicious fillings—since 1910. On Grand Street, Kossar’s Bialys has been baking the “Jewish English muffin” since 1936, its commercial-bakery interior suffused with the smells of warm bread, fresh-ground onions, and the essence of another time.

W
HERE:
bounded roughly by Houston St. to the north, the Bowery to the west, Catherine St. to the south, and the East River.
’
INOTECA
: Tel 212-614-0473;
www.inotecanyc.com
. Cost: dinner $45.
E
LDRIDGE
S
TREET
S
YNAGOGUE:
Tel 212-219-0888;
www.eldridgestreet.org
.
When:
tours Sun and Tues–Thur.
T
ENEMENT
M
USEUM:
Tel 212-431-0233;
www.tenement.org
.
When:
closed Mon, Sept–June.
K
ATZ’S
D
ELI:
Tel 800-4HOTDOG or 212-254-2246;
www.katzdeli.com
.
Cost:
sandwich $12.
R
USS
& D
AUGHTERS:
Tel 800-RUSS-229 or 212-475-4880;
www.russanddaughters.com
.
Y
ONAH
S
CHIMMEL:
Tel 212-477-2858;
www.knishery.com
.
Cost:
knish $3.
K
OSSAR’S
B
IALYS:
Tel 877-4-BIALYS or 212-473-4810;
www.kossarsbialys.com
.
Cost:
bialy $1.
B
EST TIMES
: avoid Sat, both for crowds and for Sabbath; the un-air-conditioned tenement museum can be very hot in summer.

Pilgrims, an Inflatable Mickey, and Santa

New York, New York

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is as much a part of America’s most beloved holiday as turkey, cranberry sauce, and football. Although an annual tradition since 1924, when it got its start in the midst of the radio age
, the parade is a true child of TV, having reached generations nationwide since its first broadcast in 1948.

You can see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade’s huge balloons inflated the night before the festivities alongside the American Museum of Natural History.

It all started locally, when the giant Macy’s Department Store organized a group of mostly immigrant employees for a march down Manhattan’s West Side. Drawing from the traditions of the European carnival and American ragamuffin parades, the marchers wore colorful costumes and were accompanied by marching bands, clowns, fairy-tale floats, and animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo—and Santa Claus tagged along to ring in the holiday season. Inflatable animals replaced most real ones in 1927, beginning a tradition that’s become the centerpiece of the parade to this day. In the 1930s, popular cartoon and comics characters like Mickey Mouse, Pluto, and Superman made their first appearance. Following a hiatus during WWII, the parade returned on a shortened route and has remained essentially the same ever since, with classic balloons like Uncle Sam,
Freida the Dachshund, and Humpty Dumpty now replaced by contemporary creations like Ronald McDonald and SpongeBob Square-Pants. Human participants range from TV, sports, and pop stars to Miss USA, the Radio City Rockettes, and marching bands from around the country, all led by a huge Tom Turkey float. Santa Claus rides the parade’s last float, and his arrival at Herald Square signals the parade’s terminus and the “official” beginning of the Christmas season.

For New York City kids and their parents, the parade is one of the things that makes living in the city great. Ideally, their experience begins the night before, when thousands turn up alongside the American Museum of Natural History (see p. 185) to watch as the balloons are inflated. The next morning, bundled in early-winter-wear, the families make their way to the route up to three hours early to get a good spot among the 2.5 million other parade goers.

The Thanksgiving Parade is only one of dozens of parades staged in New York each year, most of which are ethnic community events. The most famous of these is the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on March 17, when 150,000 marchers, bagpipers, drummers, and marching bands parade up Fifth Avenue. The celebration dates back to 1762 and is billed as the largest civilian parade in the world. On Easter Sunday, Fifth Avenue from 49th to 57th Streets is cordoned off for the annual Easter Parade, which originated as a chance for New York gentry to show off their Easter finest. These days it’s more of a populist runway-show-slash-carnival, with Easter bonnets (some traditional, some outrageous) sharing the route with folks in bunny costumes and dogs in their best spring hats. Things get considerably crazier at the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade (see p. 175), but that’s another story.

T
HANKSGIVING
P
ARADE
: Tel 212-494-4495;
www.macysparade.com
.
S
T
. P
ATRICK’S
D
AY AND
E
ASTER
P
ARADES:
Tel 212-484-1222;
www.nycvisit.com
.

Modern City, Modern Art

New York, New York

New York is the city where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning helped launch Abstract Expressionism. It’s the city where Jean-Michel Basquiat transformed graffiti into high art, and where Christo and
Jeanne-Claude’s
The Gates
transformed Central Park into a luminous 16-day saffron-colored dream. It’s a place where modern matters.

Founded in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is home to the world’s finest collection of works from the late 19th century to the present, including 3,200 paintings and sculptures—among them Van Gogh’s
Starry Night,
Cézanne’s
The Bather,
and Jackson Pollock’s
One: Number 31, 1950
—plus 6,000 drawings, 3,000 objects tracing the history of modern design (from appliances and tableware to cars and helicopters), 4,000 posters, 22,000 films and videos, and more than 25,000 photographs, including work by Man Ray, Walker Evans, and Ansel Adams.

Housed from 1939 in an International-style building designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, the museum underwent a total transformation in 2002 under the guidance of architect Yoshio Taniguchi, emerging two years later with double its exhibition capacity and a new look that emphasizes light and open space. Outside, the beloved Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden was preserved in its original design, as conceived by architect Philip Johnson in 1953, while expanding it and adding various vantage points from within the museum itself. Overlooking the garden, The Modern restaurant offers patrons the chance to linger over French-American cuisine at the elegant Dining Room or enjoy Alsation cuisine in the more casual Bar Room.

A little farther uptown, the Whitney Museum of American Art is home to possibly the finest collection of 20th-century American art in the world. Founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930 to showcase the works of neglected American artists, the museum holds an ever-growing collection that currently numbers some 13,000 works. Highlights include paintings and sculpture by Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, and Willem de Kooning.

The museum’s Biennial exhibition of new American art inevitably causes a stir, but that’s all in a day’s work for a museum dedicated to pushing the envelope. Even its building, a stern, Brutalist inverted granite ziggurat designed by Marcel Breuer, caused a ruckus when it went up in 1966. The other repository of modern art on the Upper East Side is the seashell-shaped Guggenheim (see next page).

Elsewhere in Manhattan and around New York’s outer boroughs, modern art aficionados have a wealth of options. In Queens, P.S.1 operates as an affiliate of MoMA, presenting contemporary art in a former public school—thus the name. Nearby, the Noguchi Museum presents the works of artist Isamu Noguchi, including stone, metal, wood, and clay sculptures; models for public projects and gardens; and the artist’s famous bamboo-and-paper lanterns, an icon of 1950s modern design. Across the street, right on the East River, the Socrates Sculpture Park offers artists the chance to create and exhibit large-scale sculptural works in a parklike neighborhood setting.

Back in downtown Manhattan, minimalism lives in two important exhibitions. In SoHo, Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room is exactly that: dirt—280,000 pounds of it—filling a 3,600-square-foot loft wall to wall, since 1977 completely transforming an otherwise normal interior. A little to the south, in TriBeCa, minimalist composer La Monte Young and visual artist Marian Zazeela have created the Dream House Sound & Light Environment, a bare plushly carpeted white loft bathed in magenta-hued light and a complex, droning chord composed of 32 microtonal frequencies of the harmonic series. Stay for a while, especially around sunset, for the maximum effect.