Category: Blog

Costume Institute

One of the major collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is its collection of costumes held in the Costume Institute.  Officially named the Anna Wintour Costume Center (after the longtime editor of Vogue magazine), the Costume Institute concentrates on changing exhibits of costumes and gowns that help to preserve these unique objects and show the history of fashion.

The Costume Institute can trace its origins to the 1937 Museum of Costume Art.  While this institution was supported with contributions from the fashion industry (who naturally sought to bring awareness to the history of fashion and costumes), the museum merged with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1959, becoming the Costume Institute.  In 2009, the Brooklyn Museum donated its collection of costumes to the Costume Institute, bolstering its collection to over 50,000 objects (many of them rare).  The Costume Institute receives its funding through donations (via the “Friends of the Costume Institute”) and the annual Met Gala in spring, which not only raises money for the institute, but also shows off the new exhibit for the Costume Institute every year.

Famous exhibits at the Costume Institute in the past have centered on the fashion of U.S. First Ladies, Chinese imperial court wear, and works of the great European fashion houses among many others.  Being located at the flagship Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, the Costume Institute can easily be combined with a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or another museum along the world-famous Museum Mile.  This is the type of information you will learn on a Sights by Sam tour.

Full Steam Under the City

Any visitor or native to the city recognizes the plume of steam trails (often spouting out of orange-white smokestacks in Midtown) escaping from under the city and above the island.  This is the result of a vast steam power and pipe system that crisscrosses Manhattan.

The steam system is operated by Consolidated Edison, the local power company.  Utility customers from Lower Manhattan and Midtown Manhattan have access to the system.  Steam is generated at six small power plants in Manhattan and Queens and is used for heating, cooling, and some industrial processes—including dry cleaning.  It goes through 105 miles of pipes to customers all over the island. The steam is deemed as clean—some Manhattan hospitals use it to sterilize equipment.  The steam is generated as a byproduct of burning oil for power.  Every year, over 20 million pounds of steam is generated for industrial, commercial, and residential use.

The steam system has been in operation since the 1880s.  Although it is constantly being maintained, there have been several notable incidents, such as a major explosion in 2007, which caused a plume of steam to rise higher than the Chrysler Building (meaning it was higher than 1049 feet tall). These incidents are thankfully rare. Steam is used without incidence year round as it helps to alleviate pressure on the city’s power grid.   Natives and visitors to the city often come in contact with this fascinating aspect of Manhattan every day in an indirect manner.  This is the type of information you will learn on a Sights by Sam tour.

The George Washington Bridge

The busiest toll crossing in the U.S., the George Washington Bridge sees over 300,000 vehicles and takes in over $1 million in tolls every day.  The bridge forms an important link between New England and the Mid-Atlantic States.   Like our first president, this bridge is stately, unique, and has a firm place in the region’s history.

Designed by Othmar Ammann and Cass Gilbert, the bridge was constructed between 1927 and 1931.  Residents of New York and New Jersey wanted the bridge to be named the “Hudson River Bridge”, but the Port Authority overruled the people and named the bridge after our first president.  At 4,760 feet long, the span was once the largest in the world (until the Golden Gate Bridge was completed).  The bridge was originally supposed to have a stone cladding, but this was cancelled due to the Great Depression making the cladding too expensive.  The bridge originally had six lanes, but this was expanded to eight on the upper deck.  A lower deck carrying six additional lanes was built in 1962.  There is also a bus station that connects Upper Manhattan to nearby locales on the Manhattan side of the bridge.  To keep the bridge in top shape, the Port Authority is beginning a multibillion dollar rehabilitation project in the coming years.

With respect to the George Washington Bridge in popular culture, the bridge is the supporting star of Hildegarde Swift’s beloved children’s book, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.  The bridge is also the site of the largest free flying American flag, which is flown from the bridge in the mornings on certain federal holidays.  On random days of the year, the Port Authority also lights up the towers at night with lights (which I personally wish would happen more often).

Not only is the George Washington Bridge an important transportation link, but it also forms a stately entrance into the city.  In time, Sights by Sam hopes to add at least a view of the George Washington Bridge on a tour.  For now, this will be the type of information you will learn on a Sights by Sam tour.

The Brooklyn Museum

The Borough of Champions houses one of the largest museums in the U.S. that sadly does not feature on the itinerary of most visitors.  The Brooklyn Museum is one of the greatest overlooked museums in the city.

The museum’s current structure dates from 1897 and was designed by the firm of McKim,Mead, and White, with some structural embellishments by Daniel Chester French (the sculptor of President Lincoln’s statue at the Lincoln Memorial in D.C.).  After decades of deferred maintenance, the museum restored galleries and built a monumental glass entrance in 2004.  Other renovations and additions are still ongoing.

The museum contains an incredible collection of Egyptian art and artifacts that rival, if not exceed, those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  There is also an impressive collection of African art, early American portraiture, and impressionist art.  A wing of the museum is dedicated to feminist art and female artists.  Although rumored to have been constructed as the largest museum in the world, the entire collection is not displayed as it is too vast for the building.

One of the Brooklyn Museum’s best bargains is the Target First Saturday’s program.  Sponsored by Target Department Stores, the museum is free on the first Saturday of the month (excluding September).  These last from 5:00PM to 11:00PM.  As Admiral Chester Nimitz would have said about getting tickets before they run out on these dates, “Get there firstest with the mostest.”

The immediate neighborhood around the Brooklyn Museum is worth exploring as well.  The museum sits at the entrance to Prospect Park—Brooklyn’s answer to Central Park (it was even designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux as well).  Near the entrance to Prospect Park is the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, showing the sacrifice Brooklynites made in the Civil War.  The Brooklyn Children’s Museum is also a manageable 20 minute walk from the Brooklyn Museum.

Brooklynites have often sat in the shadow of Manhattan.  A trip to the Brooklyn Museum and the surrounding neighborhood give the people of the Borough of Champions reason to hold their heads high.  Sign up for a Sights by Sam walking tour to learn about the treasures of the city.

The Race to the Top

In large clusters in Lower and Midtown Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn, and Long Island City in Queens, there are skyscrapers.  The quintessential New York architectural form rises up all over the city.  A casual observer can tell the era a skyscraper was built in by its height and ornamentation.  This entry will give a basic history of the skyscraper.

The skyscraper is a perfect building for New York as it rises vertically from a sometimes small parcel of land.  It also allows a company to locate its offices together and for a landlord to rent out to many tenants to collect more rent for one building.  The invention of the safety elevator and steel in the 1800s allowed structures to rise higher than six or seven stories (what the average person can tolerate walking).  Other advances in mechanical technologies such as pumps to bring water up and sewage down, as well as more recent technologies such as solar panels and water recycling systems make the skyscraper desirable.  New York is also geologically fortunate in that there is good bedrock to anchor these massive towers into the Earth.

The first skyscrapers were built in Chicago after that city’s great fire.  The skyscraper first appeared in Lower Manhattan with many newspapers building skyscrapers along Park Row near City Hall.  Others, such as the Equitable Life Building in Lower Manhattan was one of the first to have features of being a skyscraper; the structure had elevators and a high floor count.  Many, including this building, had a Gilded Age/Beaux Arts style to them.  This structure stood from 1870 to 1912, when it burned down.  The company would build a much taller and larger building that would lead to a distinctly New York style.

The new Equitable Building was completed in 1915 and covered an entire city block, rising up to 40 stories and 538 feet.  It ended up casting a shadow over the surrounding blocks.  In response, the New York City Council passed the Zoning Ordinance of 1916, which required that skyscrapers adopt setbacks until the floor area matched 1/4 of the building’s site.  At this point, the 1/4 segment could rise as far as was feasible or profitable to build.  Many art deco-era skyscrapers in the city such as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building apply setbacks in their form. This same era saw a “race to the top” where skyscraper builders competed to have the world’s tallest building.  Since the end of World War II, there has been a trend toward glassed-in International Style and contemporary-style buildings.  Many of these rise straight up as they do not occupy the entire plot of land they are on (in compliance with the 1916 law) and have windows that reflect light down onto the streets below.

Although major building of skyscrapers still continues today, the tallest buildings are now located in the Middle East and Far East, where other countries are trying to pierce the heavens with taller and taller buildings.  With this said, New York is still graced by some of the tallest buildings in the world, including 1 World Trade Center, the tallest in the Western Hemisphere.  You will be able to see skyscrapers on any Sights by Sam tour.

American Museum of Natural History

I was once among people who believed that all natural history museums were more or less the same.  The Natural History Museum in D.C. and the Cincinnati Museum Center are two of the finest in the country, but their collections of natural artifacts and specimens are similar.  I was hesitant to go to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) with these thoughts in my mind, but put my natural history museum biases aside to come here.

I was rewarded immediately upon entry when I saw the memorial to President Theodore Roosevelt (former NYPD commissioner and the only president born in New York City).  A rich mosaic covering T.R. negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth, his African expedition (that netted around 4,000 objects in the museum’s collection), and the building of the Panama Canal takes up most of the entryway.  These three episodes are interspersed with quotes from T.R. and giant U.S., New York State, and New York City flags that make this the coolest museum entryway in the city.

The AMNH was established in 1869 and moved into its current location in 1874.  The building has two million square feet and contains millions of specimens of plants, animals, and cultural artifacts.  The museum is home to stuffed animals from habitats from every corner of the planet, the skeletons of dinosaurs and ice age mammals, and a collection of native costumed mannequins from indigenous cultures all over the world.  For those who prefer their science in outer space, the Hayden Planetarium is attached to the museum.

Due to the fact that children love to see dinosaur bones and animals, this museum has a high population of little ones during the day—and doubly so on a rainy day.  Rain or shine, Sights by Sam tours will show you the sights and attractions that make New York New York.

The Second Avenue Subway

One of the most commonly-talked about subjects among residents of a certain part of Manhattan is the Second Avenue Subway line.  First postulated in the late 1910s-early 1920s, the first section of this long-awaited line is scheduled to open by 2017.  This will not arrive a moment too soon for residents of East Harlem and the Upper East Side—where the Lexington Avenue IRT Lines carry more riders per day than the subway systems of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco combined.  The slow pace of construction has been lampooned on the show Mad Men and even is the subject of several popular blogs.

Originally conceived to be part of the city-owned IND Subway system, the Second Avenue Subway was to originally be built in the 1930s at a cost of $86 million, but halted due to the Great Depression and World War II.  After the war, the city had difficulty getting the project approved as costs continued to mount.  At the same time, elevated rail lines along Second and Third Avenues were torn down, creating the crowded conditions along the Lexington Avenue IRT Lines today.  In the 1960s and 1970s, bond issues were approved and federal funding was secured, but in 1975, the project was cancelled as the city’s financial condition deteriorated rapidly—leaving several uncompleted sections of tunnels under Manhattan.  Construction resumed in the mid 2000s, but has been beset by delays since.  As finances for the subway line have become more precarious over the years, a planned express configuration with three tracks has been reduced to two tracks up and down the entire line.

While the Second Avenue Subway is scheduled for partial completion soon, it is really anyone’s guess as to how long it will take to finish the complete line from Upper Manhattan to near the South Street Seaport.  The line continues along, constructed with a mix of cut-and-cover construction and a tunnel-boring machine (so that residents and business along Second Avenue are ideally not adversely impacted by construction).  The is the type of information that you will learn on a Sights by Sam tour.

Your City and New York: Cincinnati

Being my hometown, Cincinnati will always have a special place in my heart.  It shares many things with New York.  Some of the landmarks that make New York recognizable had their dry run in Cincinnati.

Although it may seem hard to believe now, Cincinnati was once the fifth largest city in the U.S.  The city was founded along the Ohio River near the confluence of this river and the Licking (you could say it would be similar to New York in that there are three rivers in the city if Mill Creek or one of the Miami Rivers were counted).  In its industrial heyday, the city was the destination for many Germans, people from the Appalachian Mountains, and African Americans from the South.  Before deindustrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, the West End neighborhood was the most densely populated section of an American city outside of New York.  To most people, Cincinnati is famous for being the home of the first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, as well as having the most touristed museum in Ohio (the Cincinnati Museum Center), and being the setting for WKRP in Cincinnati and a stand-in for Monticello on most of The Edge of Night’s run.

In terms of the connections between New York and Cincinnati, two of the most recognizable landmarks of the city, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, have their prototypes in Cincinnati: the Roebling Bridge (1867) and the Carew Tower (built between 1927 and 1931).  The Roebling Bridge has only two lanes, but demonstrated that the suspension bridge technology was feasible, and was the longest bridge in the world when first constructed—like the Brooklyn Bridge.  The Carew Tower was originally envisioned to anchor a Rockefeller-Center-like complex,  but the Great Depression put a stop to this plan.  Although it was not designed by the same architectural firm as the Empire State Building, the Art-Deco Carew Tower (believed to be the largest French Art Deco building in the world) was believed to be the design inspiration for the Empire State Building.  The Carew Tower was anchored by a department store and is still the site of one of the grandest hotels in the country, the Netherland Hotel.

With respect to other similarities, Cincinnati, like New York, is a treasure trove of Art Deco architecture: containing an Art Deco train station (Union Terminal), airport terminal (at Lunken Field, built around the same time as LaGuardia), and other buildings scattered throughout the area.  The designer of the Woolworth Building, Cass Gilbert, was also responsible for designing the PNC Tower (formerly the Central Trust Bank Building) in 1913.  In terms of more recent arrivals to the city, hipsters have begun to stage a Williamsburg-like transformation of the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood just outside of Downtown Cincinnati.  The cities also share an equal passion for baseball—with the Cincinnati Reds having met the New York Yankees in the World Series three times (1939, 1961, and 1976).

There are many other similarities between these two great cities.  If you are from the Cincinnati region and would like to see sights in New York that have a connection to the Queen City, you may be able to arrange this through a customized tour with Sights by Sam.

South Street Seaport

One of the great sources of wealth of New York has always been its harbor.  Allowing protection from the sea and connecting the city to a vast hinterland spread across multiple regions of the country, New York’s harbor has allowed for people and products to both enter and leave through its vast port.  Although the majority of shipping is done today in the modern harbor complex in Staten Island and New Jersey, the earliest port can be traced back into the East River and is commemorated in the South Street Seaport today.

Shipping on the East River has been important since the pre-colonial era when the Native American tribes would trade with each other up and down the river.  The Dutch commenced trading on the East River in the 1600s—later continued by the British and the Americans.  One of the supposed advantages of the East River was that it was more resistant to ice than the Hudson River.  The heyday of the port lasted from the colonial era until the early 1900s when the deeper Hudson River was better able to accommodate the increasingly larger oceangoing vessels.  The South Street Seaport was also famed for being the location of the Fulton Fish Market, which lasted from 1822 until 2005 when it was moved to the Bronx at Hunts Point Market and the Fulton Ferry, which joined Manhattan and Brooklyn between 1814 and 1924 (made obsolete by the East River bridges).

After the seaport fell out of use in the 1950s, the area began to decline.  A concerted effort was made to revitalize the area: first with a museum in the 1960s to commemorate the district’s maritime heritage and then in the 1980s with a “festival marketplace” style shopping complex that was pioneered at Fanueil Hall in Boston and the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.  The area also has kept and restored many early 1800s-vintage buildings, making it one the largest concentration of such buildings in the city.  In addition to many shops and a branch of the TKTS booth (where discounted Broadway show tickets are sold), there are several old ships such as the Wavertree and the Peking which show the types of ships which once called on the area.

Today, most ships on the East River are ferries to Governor’s Island, Staten Island, or other boroughs, some freighters, and a few pleasure craft.  Although the heyday of the cargo ports of the East River are gone now, the South Street Seaport recreates some of the history in which the area is steeped.  This is the type of information you will learn on a Sights by Sam tour.

The U.S. Open

Every year in late summer, one of the signs of the season is the playing of the U.S. Open.  Held starting on the last Monday in August and going through early September, the U.S. Open is the last in the “Grand Slam” tennis tournaments, with the others held in Melbourne, Australia, Paris, and in London.  Contestants play in one of the 33 courts at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center until the final is held at the (now retractable-roofed) Arthur Ashe Stadium.

While the U.S. Open can trace its origins back to the late 1800s, where it was initially held in the resort town of Newport, RI, the U.S. Open has been played in New York since 1915 (although it was played in Philadelphia for a short time).  Play was conducted at the West Side Tennis Club in Queens (and Forest Hills Stadium) before moving to the National Tennis Center in the 1970s  The current site of the finals, Arthur Ashe Stadium, was built in 1997 and seats over 23,000, making it the largest tennis stadium in the world.  In 2006, the tennis complex was named after tennis champion Billie Jean King.

With respect to superlatives for the tournament, the U.S. Open is unique as it is the only one of the Grand Slam tournaments to use a sudden death.  American Jimmy Connors was the first (and will remain the only) player to win the tournament while playing on grass, clay, and harcourt surfaces when the tournament was played in Forest Hills.  Due to the popularity of the event, major matches are often moved to prime time (and why the court is blue, so it is easier for spectators and TV viewers to see the green ball).  Three men have won the men’s singles tournament seven times while Molla Mallory has won the women’s singles tournament eight times.  Two men have won the men’s doubles tournament six times while Margaret Osborne duPont  earned 13 women’s doubles tournament titles.

It is estimated that over 700,000 attend the event every summer, making the U.S. Open a highlight for the city, and brings Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to the attention of millions around the world.  This is the type of information you will learn on a Sights by Sam tour.