Photos: Suzanne and John’s Mom.
I love walking around dirty old New York, even in cold and rainy weather. Today’s photos are from last weekend, when I took the train down for a wedding.
It’s the small things one notices. The saxophone player under the pedestrian bridge in Central Park, where the sound amplifies like an orchestra. He was playing “Beauty and the Beast,” with his sax case open for tips, a stick placed inside to keep any bills from blowing away.
A nicely dressed woman on a city bus scrolling her phone and wearing a rubber Halloween monster mask — blue and green rubber with a gaping hole at the nose and beaver teeth hanging down.
Then there were two people from my childhood that I ran into on the same morning in the Upper West Side. Not people I even knew from the Upper West Side but from Fire Island. The one I met in an elevator was a close childhood friend. The one I met in a diner was someone I knew from the Ocean Beach teenage musicals I directed. So there we were in a diner on Broadway singing one of those old teenage show tunes.
I got myself lost in Central Park on my way to the Met Museum to see the Harlem Renaissance exhibit. Like all New York, it was way too crowded, too many long lines. You spend 20 minutes waiting to buy a ticket, and then, if you want to unload your coat and backpack, you can wait in a ten-minute line to check them in and another long line to pick them up. I decided I could carry mine.
I photographed the Horace Pippin painting for my artist friend Meredith, a Pippin fan. There were many works by Aaron Douglas, but it was too crowded for much picture taking. Here’s a representative sample of Douglas’s art from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.
The Met exhibit was huge, with portraits of luminaries like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Marian Anderson, and scenes of Black life in the 1920s and ’30s rendered in many styles and media. Some artists, like photographer Carl Van Vechten, were not technically part of the Harlem Renaissance, but close observers.
Moving on to other New York sights.
I often envy blogger Sheree, at View from the Back, who can post the most wonderful door photos. Of course, she lives in Europe. I have to go to New York to get anything comparable. Here are two interesting doors, the second in Riverside Park, where signs of spring were defying the miserable weather.
I love that new homeowners in New York often clean up the lovely, old architectural details. Notice the carved staircase, all sandblasted and spiffy.
Finally, here’s a shot for my Ukrainian friends. Thinking of you. Always.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 