It's in the Name

The Museum of the City of New York

            It can be to no one’s surprise that I declare New York City a metropolis worthy of study.  But then, it can be to no one’s use either, as historians even today, with or without my say-so, would go so far as to clamber over each other for glimpses of the rust from Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg, if they knew it would teach them something about the greatest city on Earth, a city that has been built by and, in turn, inspired the greatest minds of our time.  It is a city that has raised majesty to the next level, convenience to an art form, and incorporated the accumulated brilliance of generations into its every move.  And the city that never sleeps, as one could imagine, spends very little of its time immobile.

            It is because I love New York City so much that I love equally altars to its greatness.  One such altar is the Museum of the City of New York, at 103^rd Street and 5^th Avenue, in a beautiful neo-Georgian mansion overlooking Central Park.  Within, MCNY contains some of the most interesting and diverting exhibitions one is likely to find anywhere up and down Museum Mile.  For just a few examples, the museum details the inception of the New York City grid, a triumph of engineering and metropolitan planning almost universally rejected in its earliest stages but, of course, coming to successful fruition despite the almost impossible task of leveling hills and chopping up farms for miles around in an attempt to modernize New York.  The exhibition dedicated to the grid is itself separated into blocks in a room with mirrored walls, creating the illusion that one is in the center of a smaller network of streets within the larger one outside.

            The museum deals with this and other topics with nimble and tasteful precision.  Stories of the activist causes of New York’s history are displayed, ideas for improving both the grid and the East River Esplanade are shared, and unabridged histories of the city are exhibited in multimedia.  NYC’s past is recreated through transportation toys from all eras, as well as recreated furnished rooms to represent all imaginable family styles and classes from the four-hundred-year history of the city. 

Art, too, is given a fair place.  Hyperrealist paintings by New York native Stone Roberts adorn the walls of a small but aesthetically pleasing gallery.  Roberts lays out bustling street corners, a somehow peaceful, brightly lit Grand Central Station, and New Yorkers hailing cabs with equal exactitude, and there is something calming about the utter quiet that accompanies them, as if Roberts has frozen moments in a New York day and put them on display.  His beautiful works certainly do look almost photographic.

But photographs share space with all the rest, in this case the work of video and pictorial artist Neil Goldberg, who takes New York moments most take for granted—the elbows of truck drivers protruding from their windows, the uncertain faces of visitors to a salad bar and the same anguished faces of those missing their trains—and increases them, makes them more visible, to the point where it’s clear that they are the true souls of New York City: the people.  The people who built it from the ground up just as much as the people who live in it, embodying it, becoming it, until they, too, are New York, and their hustle and bustle is its.  No other city in the world can claim that kind of connection with its inhabitants.  Maybe, as they say, it’s something in the water.