A Postcard from New York
Documenting my favourite bits of my recent trip to NYC. Or the parts I remembered to photograph.
It is a cliché, but New York really is a city that is striking and that captures your imagination. There is so much to see, do, eat and observe that nothing feels like enough. This was my second trip to New York and I wanted it to be the perfect combination of visiting old favourites and exploring new ones.
Seeing the city through my best friend’s eyes
One of my best friends is a poet, aerialist and photographer extraordinaire - you can find her on Instagram as morethankohl if you’d like to see her brilliance. She has lived in New York for the past two years and has seized every opportunity the city provided her with to explore and grow. One of the ways she has been doing this is through poetry - something that she has always done but has only recently started sharing with the world.
I was so excited to join her in a poetry workshop hosted by the wonderful Leilani as a part of an initiative called sakura.series. The theme of the workshop was grief and while this is an incredibly difficult topic to think about, reflect on and write about, the space that was created was warm, safe and welcoming. It was wonderful to see my friend be so accepted and celebrated by such an incredible community. A true highlight of my trip.
Revisiting favourites
The next time I am in New York, I would love to explore more parks that the city offers but this time, I only visited Central Park. It was a gloriously sunny day and so the park was really alive and vibrant and the leaves on the trees had only just started to change colour. As we walked through the park, I loved reading again the dedications people had left for loved ones on park benches. I discovered some new ones but have also left some pictures of favourites from my last trip below.
Another favourite is the Bethesda Fountain, which I found out later has one of the first public pieces of artwork by a woman in New York City. It is the “Angel of the Waters” by Emma Stebbins. See below for a slightly blurry picture
I obviously had to go back to The Met. The Met has an interesting past and is still grappling with the challenges that a lot of other similar cultural institutions deal with, it also does not have the heaviness and baggage of a colonial past, which makes it quite unique. Its collection is staggering - we of course couldn’t cover all of it. I always appreciate the effort put into trying to contextualise the pieces and bring them to life that the Met makes beyond just showcasing them to the public. This time, we were able to go look at the Egyptian Wing as well as an exhibit called the African Origins of Civilisation - where again, I was too focused on soaking up all the information to take good photos. What I loved so much about the African Origins of Civilisation exhibit was that it featured a completely non-Eurocentric timeline of history. This opened my eyes to so many historical events I had not heard of that now go on my list to read more about.
This is the value that cultural institutions like the Met can bring, where they expand our knowledge that we are given through the formal education system and can do their best to plug in the gaps and bring it to life. My thoughts on the responsibilities of museums are probably best covered in another post, though.
We also had time for me to see some paintings - below are the ones that I really enjoyed this time.
Another iconic New York institution I had to revisit was the New York Public Library, which is unique in that it is one of the 3 research libraries within the 5 boroughs of New York City. I know that if I lived in that city, I would take my book over to read in the Rose Reading Room and always visit the exhibitions that were put on. This time, we were able to browse through three of the exhibitions they had in store.
My favourite one was The Polonsky Exhibition of the NYPL’s Treasures, which allows us to see just some of the artefacts that the Library has been able to acquire in its 125 years. These treasures include among them George Washington’s handwritten Farewell Address, the Gutenberg Bible, The Complutesian Polyglot Bible printed in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic, Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the original toys that inspired A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and the first edition of ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’, a seminal work in Economics by Adam Smith.
The way to my heart
I would be remiss to not show you just some of the amazing food I ate and restaurants I visited. We didn’t photograph everything because sometimes we were simply too hungry, but I’ve done my best to give you an idea of the array of cuisines we covered.
Would I be me if I didn’t visit bookstores?
I must have ended up in a bookshop almost every single day of my trip. New York has so many incredible stores, where the staff curate diverse, interesting and wonderful collections of books to choose from. It was difficult to hold myself back from purchasing something from every shop and again, I wasn’t successful in getting a picture of every single one because I was too excited about the books I had just seen or was going to see.
I did end up picking up some books and taking photos of many others, but I will leave that for another post.
I hope you have enjoyed this postcard and I hope to send you many more in the future.