You do not have to be a jazz aficionado to appreciate the workings of San Francisco Offside Festival’s co-founders – musician Alex Pinto and local music presenter Laura Maguire. Rather, at its core, the festival is about expanding the awareness of unique, local talent. The plethora of talented musicians all share the commonality of having cultivated their art in the Bay Area. Underscoring these sentiments, the festival’s founders exalt the local San Francisco music scene in their mission statement – “Our hope is that the San Francisco Bay Area ultimately gets the recognition it deserves as home to a rich, diverse, and exceptionally talented jazz community.” (more…)
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To contextualize the characters of a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, you have to first understand their relation to their surroundings. In Fitzgerald’s most celebrated novel, The Great Gatsby, Long Island’s Gold Coast region provides the necessary amount of drama, grandeur, opulence and richness to sustain the immortal characters in the novel. In Fitzgerald’s book, the West and East Egg of Long Island become leading characters themselves that entangle the characters into their fabric. To fully understand the magnitude of this literary landscape set during the golden era of the “Roaring Twenties,” we ventured out to the real Long Island Gold Coast to explore the Coe Hall Estate at Planting Fields with SideTour.
Prominently situated in the Morningside Heights neighborhood overlooking the park, the Church of Notre Dame has an interesting history and a unique architectural background, namely a grotto replica inspired by the site where Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in Lourdes.
The church was first erected in 1910 as a chapel and as part of the Church of St. Vincent de Paul’s mission. It was first operated by the Fathers of Mercy, who were a French community of priests and in 1915, Cardinal Farley dedicated the church. The church was later entrusted to the Archdiocese of New York in 1960, which led to a transition of responsibility and further expansion of the parish membership. A guiding principal of the church is to actively elicit the community’s influence and participation, which attribute to the diversity of the parish’s fabric. Notre Dame is associated with St. Luke’s Hospital as well as Columbia University. Columbia University was included in the church’s pastoral mission in 1988, leading to the first appointment of a Pastor of Notre Dame to the Catholic Chaplain at Columbia. Then lastly, the parish was transitioned to the Polish Province of the Dominican Order in 2003.
The exterior of the Church of Note Dame overlooking Morningside Park.
View of Millbrook Vineyards from the front of the former dairy barn.
On a wintery February morning, I took the Metro-North from Grand Central Station up to Poughkeepsie to spend the day at Millbook Vineyards & Winery. Having never ventured to this part of upstate New York before and wanting to learn more about New York’s wine industry, I excitedly accepted the unique invitation to attend MillBrook Vineyards & Winery’s final installment of their Winegrowing Boot Camp. (more…)
The Roosevelts’ lineage and history are intrinsically tied to New York’s narrative. Most notable are the legacies of Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor and Franklin Delanor Roosevelt. The Roosevelts’ many public contributions, private property endowments, and pioneering governmental policy work, all serve to immortalize them as one of the most eminent names in US history. In exploring some of their properties around Manhattan, I first visited Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace, he is the only US President born in New York.
Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was born in the house pictured above, in 1858, located at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan. His family lived in this house until 1872. The original home was completely demolished in 1916, but in 1919 the property was purchased to erect a replica of Roosevelt’s birthplace. Roosevelt was adamant against having a “shrine” constructed in his honor, however his relatives only acquiesced this request until he passed in 1919. The reconstructed home, which is made to look like the interior design of the house during the years of 1865-1872, was donated to the National Park Service in 1963.
The National Park Service tour guide provided me a brief snapshot of the 26th President of the United States’ childhood. Teddy was one of four children and due to severe ailments such as allergies and asthma, he spent most of childhood confined indoors and in this house. To fill his time, he consumed mass amounts of natural history books. He even called his collection of books and artifacts from his family’s travels in his room, the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History”. This zest for ancient history was very much fueled by Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., Teddy’s father, one of the founders of New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 1869. Last October, the museum reopened the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda after a two-year conservation of the murals.
The house stores many interesting pieces, taxidermy and original artifacts from the Roosevelt’s time in this property. The tour guide pointed out pieces of furniture that were unique to Teddy, such as the velvet ottoman placed by the fireplace just for him. The velvet chair was there for him due to the horse-hair covered chairs that were very irritating to his skin. The gas powered chandeliers and lamps in the salon also aggravated his asthma. His father believed that the cure-all for Teddy’s asthma was exercise. So a gymnasium was installed on the second floor, off of the nursery porch. You can see more images of the interior here. The Roosevelts also rented Wave Hill House in the Bronx for a couple of summers, which may have inspired Teddy’s later contributions to the conservation of natural parkland.
Jumping to the other famous Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor, they were residents of Manhattan as well. While Franklin Delano shares the same name and also became an American president, it was Eleanor who was more closely related to Theodore Roosevelt. Eleanor’s father, Elliott Roosevelt, was Teddy’s younger brother, and FDR was Teddy’s fifth cousin. In 1908, as a wedding present from FDR’s mother, Eleanor and FDR moved into their house located at 49 East 65th Street. It was largely during their residence here, that the most significant events and political policy contributions by Eleanor and FDR were made. Roosevelt recovered from his diagnosis of polio here in 1921, began his ascent into politics as a New York senator, was elected President and inked the New Deal. Eleanor was very involved with the Women’s Trade Union League at this time and forging equality in women’s rights.
Photo courtesy of Hunter College.
Architect Charles Platt designed the building to have two identical residences joined with a single entrance (FDR’s mother lived in the adjacent residence). In later memoirs from Eleanor, she lamented the first few years of living in the house next to her mother in law as she never felt like it was a place of her own. Throughout the property there are interconnecting doors between the parlor rooms, reception areas and the main sitting areas. The six story building has a facade made predominantly of brick and limestone. The house was acquired by Hunter College in 1942 and became a New York City landmark in 1973.
Photo courtesy of Hunter College.
Unfortunately the house decayed over the years and it wasn’t until the President of Hunter College, Jennifer Raab, secured funding for a remodel and new additions to the house in the early 2000s, that the house was under proper care. The library was converted into a museum and seminar room, the reception rooms were opened up as spaces for classes, receptions and presentations, and the upper floors became offices as well as apartments for special visiting scholars. The remodel was completed in 2010 and became the home of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. While the school is only open to students and staff of Hunter’s College, you can contact the school to set up a tour with an advance reservation. The website for the college provides great background on the history of the house during the Roosevelts’ residence, the Hunter College acquirement and the remodel.
The City of New York has honored Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy with FDR Four Freedoms Park on Staten Island, which opened last fall. Read about more presidential haunts from Grant to Obama.
Dramatic, peaceful, subtle, inspired, moving, loud — the list could go on and on when describing Ann Hamilton’s “the event of a thread” exhibit. The use of disparate words is intentional so as to best capture the distinct types of reactions to this exhibit. Ann Hamilton, an artist of large-scale multi-media art installations, is well known internationally for her unique constructs that fold in the site’s surroundings, history, space, architecture, as well as patrons, to interact collectively in the environment. The “event of a thread exhibit” will be housed at the Park Avenue Armory, in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and open to the public through January 6th 2013.
Visitors delighted in the inter-play of light and cloth as the large silk curtain billowed up and down above their heads. The movement of the sheet is driven by the swings. The horizontal swaying motion of the swings is converted into a vertical movement of the cloth as connected strings are threaded through a pulley system which is fastened to the ceiling of the armory. The two images above largely personify Hamilton’s motivation for creating her works. She strives to answer “What are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media saturated world?” This questioning provoked a very imaginative response as “the event of a thread exhibit“ masterfully immerses the viewer in a dissertation on time, memory, and tangible experiences.
There is a true communal feeling around Hamilton’s exhibit. Just as she leverages a collaborative process in merging multiple materials to create a piece; she creates a collaborative environment for visitors to participate in the environment in partnerships, with friends, with family, with actors in the exhibit and even with complete strangers. Children’s squeals of delight echo throughout the armory as their parents push them higher and faster on the swings. Couples take turns giving each other a joking push as they revel in a childhood pleasure. Other patrons can have a less involved role and sit on the benches on the side walls, reflecting quietly. All levels of movement converge and are beautifully framed by the squares of light pouring through the filtered fixtures from the ceiling.
Pictured above is the artist Ann Hamilton in front of her installation.
I spoke briefly with the artist herself and snapped her photo. I was very fortunate to have met her while she was orchestrating her exhibit. She delighted in the patrons who were laying on the floor and looking upwards through the sheet – the light dancing on the wrinkles in the fabrics. She took a few photos of this participation on her i-Phone and mentioned that there would be a singer performing from the balcony of the space later that evening. She then retreated to survey the live action installments of her exhibition as pictured below.
Aforementioned, Hamilton draws the history of the surroundings into her pieces. As a nod to the Park Avenue Armory she brings the voices of the past to the voices of the present. The actors were positioned at opposite ends of the space and represent the written versus the spoken word. The woman labors over sheets of lined paper, scribbling texts from the likes of Aristotle with a charcoal pencil while the man dictates shorts texts into a radio microphone, seated before several homing pigeons encased in wooden cages. They symbolize the importance of language and how it has evolved over time as well as how we use language to freeze time or form a memory of our ephemeral life experiences.
I also spent some time wandering throughout the first floor of the Park Avenue Armory as it was open to the public and it is part of the New York City Landmarks Commission. It was completed in 1881 and was built by the National Guard’s Seventh Regiment. The Armory embodies the Gilded Age of New York City Society. The Armory was utilized as a reception hall for military as well as social gatherings. You can read more about the history of the Armory and its reception rooms here.
For information about visiting Ann Hamilton’s “the event of a thread” exhibit, you can find general visitor information here. To learn more about Ann Hamilton’s background and other projects, visit her website here.
