Ultimately the we ended up at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, but before out hussle and bussle there, we got off the subway and made our way through Central Park. Luckily, it was a beautiful Autumn day and very pleasant to walk through! Central Park, as we saw during our trip to the City of New York Museum, while watching the Timescape was carefully planned, making it a multidimensional experience. We walked through a path that led us to a beautiful lake, overlooking sweet romancers rowing on their boats.

After passing the romancers on the lake, we took a hike through the park, passing the The Obelisk, also known as Cleopatra’s Needle which arrived in Central Park more than 130 years ago. It is more than 3,000 years old, it stands 69 feet high and weighs 220 tons. The hieroglyphics on the Obelisk’s surface are a glimpse into its ancient history. It was one of two obelisks commissioned circa 1450 BCE to commemorate Pharaoh Thutmose III’s 30th year of reign; each was carved from a single slab of quarried rose granite. Somehow all the years of coming to Central Park, I never came across it! The interesting part is it’s completely uncovered and exposed to all weather conditions, it’s a beautiful piece of art and history but it endures our crazy NYC weather! I couldn’t help but think why it’s not cover or why it was never moved indoors, or even why there was never a structure built around it to protect it! The picture of it follows below.

History of the Obelisk provided by by https://www.centralparknyc.org/attractions/obelisk

After I went home, I was curious to know how Robert Moses influenced Central Park, since I know it’s hard to come across any piece of land in NYC he has not touched. And while researching, I discovered by the time Moses was done with Central Park, he had enlarged the recreational facilities to provide “leisure de luxe,” as a newspaper headline put it. In 1934, after seventy-five years, Central Park still had only a single playground, the Heckscher Playground in the southwest part of the park. In just three more years, it had twenty-two, including seventeen (twenty by 1941) “marginal playgrounds” dotted along the park’s outer rim — each equipped with slides, swings, jungle gyms, playhouses, and sandboxes and circled by benches for mothers and nurses.

Moses was a lover of parks but it couldn’t just be trees and landscape, he was obsessed with use and creating space for activities to take place. Until he was placed in charge of NYC Parks by LaGuardia (mayor), he couldn’t have full control as he pleased, so when given this post he fired everybody in the department and replaced it with men and women to his liking (his soldiers that would accomplish all he sets out without any interference)!

https://www.centralparkhistory.com/timeline/timeline_1930_newdeal.html

Finally we arrived at the MET, which makes me think of the show “Gossip Girl” since almost every episode it showed the school girls eating their lunch on the MET steps! The grand structure of the building never seizes to stop amazing me! It is so grand in every way, and to think that the MET was in such deficit is also pretty absurd! The deficit is what caused them to no longer operate by “pay as you wish”, now there is a $25 per person/entrance fee for all non New Yorkers. If you ask me, thats very excessive but it didn’t stop the amount of people at the museum. If always found that unless you arrive when the museum is opening, it’s very crowded and annoying to be around so many tourist!

While touring around, we really focused on the layering of new construction on top of old construction. The MET was built in 1870 and was opened to the public  in the Dodworth Building at 681 Fifth Avenue. On March 30, 1880, after a brief move to the Douglas Mansion at 128 West 14th Street, the Museum opened to the public at its current site on Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street. The architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould designed the initial Ruskinian Gothic structure, the west facade of which is still visible in the Robert Lehman Wing. The building has since expanded greatly, and the various additions—built as early as 1888—now completely surround the original structure.