This is my first time visiting and even hearing about the Museum of the City of New York. The first thing that caught my attention was the location of the Museum. Located in East Harlem, Spanish Harlem, or El Barrio as it was called during my days of growing up (in contrast to “SpaHa” due to gentrification), I was quite surprised to find a Museum about New York in this neighborhood. As we make our 10 minute walk through East Harlem, underneath the Metro North, and through the government housing apartments, we arrive at the Musem of the City of New York. The museum is facing the upper east side of Central Park, and the main entrance have a university main campus building vibe with its white color and large pillars. Upon entering, the main attraction was definitely the Nathalie Pierrepont comfort staircase. With its abstract hanging lights, it creates a very comforting and homey experience. Our first exhibit was the film “Timescapes”, located in the basement level of the museum. Timescapes is a short documentary that explores how New York City grew from a settlement of a few hundred Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans into the metropolis we know today, and features animated maps and archival photographs, prints, and paintings from the Museum’s collections. Now expanded and updated, the film’s final chapter captures the astonishing , if sometimes challenging transformations the city has experienced in the first decades of the 21st century. WOW! That was my reaction after viewing the documentary. It was very informative and detailed in such a short duration. It depicts on how certain neighborhoods got their names, and how the city developed into what it is today. New York City started around FiDi, which is how many major civilizations start off, by being close to a body of water. The documentary also shows how developers started to plan the city blocks and grid like streets many years ago, with only 100k population, but with a plan to fit a million people in the city. It also shows how certain areas of Manhattan are unchanged and are developed into what they are nowadays. The broadway area was always an entertainment district, 5th avenue is the shopping district, LES (Lowe East Side) is the working class immigrants that came in abundance from overseas, Wall Street got its name because there was an actual wall that was built by the Dutch back in the day, seaport area was the trading district as it imported and exported goods from all over the world. The film also showed the hard times New York City was under, with the events of the Bronx fires, and 9/11.
Located on the top floor of the Museum, there is an exhibit called “Cycling in the City”. It features a physical stationary Citi Bike, which then transmits your actions on a virtual bike on a screen on your biking journey around New York City. The exhibition also features more than a dozen vintage bikes, a virtual reality cycling video game, and plenty of neat artifacts, including early cycling “costumes” worn by female riders and the badges once required to pass through Central Park. And there is a much appreciated focus on the activist battles waged by past cyclists, and often forgotten victories like the bike messenger uprising of 1987, in which thousands of delivery cyclists protested and successfully sued Mayor Ed Koch for attempting to ban bikes in Midtown during business hours. Nowadays, we are just so used to bike lanes throughout all of Manhattan and even areas of Queens and Brooklyn sprouting up overnight, that we forgot how dangerous it used to be for bikers and the history of cyclists in New York City.
In my personal views, this visit was definitely a cultural landscape. A cultural landscape is defined as “cultural properties that represent the combined works of nature and of man”. The nature of New York City, with its calm body of water (Hudson River) which opens up to a larger body of water up north, and the natural island of Manhattan, combined with the work of early settlers in New York (New Amsterdam), is defined as a cultural landscape. Although it required architectural insights and overviews, everything was influenced by the cultures of a variety of New Yorkers. I believe that these properties serves the interests of the public. Born and raised in New York, I know the city have a long history, but I never cared for nor question why some things are the way they are now. This visit helped me open my eyes more on the development and cultural impact New York City have.
