So way back on April 19th I made a trip into the City again. I’m loving the independence of taking these short overnight trips to places. It’s so freeing. I look up something that I want to do in the City and then make plans. Usually I stay overnight at a friends house. But I’m not opposed to making the round trip in one day.
Anyway. On to the trip on April 19th. I was looking for something to do on the Upper East or Upper West side since I had plans on the Upper East side later in the day. So I googled exhibits in NYC. An Audubon exhibit showed up in the search results along with a Tiffany lamp exhibit all at the NY Historical Society. And the NYHS happened to be on the Upper West side almost directly across Central Park from where I needed to be. Perfect!
I had the best cab driver from Grand Central to NYHS. His name is Nicky. He was a chatter. We talked about all kinds of things, mostly importantly how important it is to slow down and enjoy life. We also discussed dinner and food. Nicky is apparently a pretty good cook. He was having fresh fish that night. When I told him I wanted a falafel from a food truck he said he would say two prayers for me! Nicky was such a nice guy, he even did a big U-turn in the middle of Central Park West to drop me at the front doors of the Historical Society! It was hilarious. And very kind.
The exhibits were pretty good. I was a little disappointed in the Audubon exhibits though. The first exhibit was Feathers: Fashion and the Fight for Wildlife. The exhibit was interesting in that it outlines the early movements of fighting for endangered species here in the US. What was disappointing was that the exhibit seemed to be set up backwards to me. When you first walk in you see all the fashion and some snippets of information. Then you walk into the next room and see these beautiful Audubon paintings with more detailed information of how that particular bird species was used in fashion. So then I walked back over to the first part of the exhibit to look more closely at the actual fashion. If you think about how amazing it is that people kept these parts of clothing and accessories for all these years. And the fact that women used to walk around with whole dead, stuffed birds on their head. Pretty crazy! The security guy and I struck up a conversation about that. The fan above is made out of Golden Eagle feathers! You won’t see that today!
There was another, much smaller Audubon exhibit that I didn’t share any pictures of. That was the original exhibit that I wanted to see but it was very disappointing. I also visited the Tiffany lamp exhibit, which was phenomenal! I will post more about that in another post. It was so good it deserves it’s own post. So stayed tuned.
After I visited the historical society I wanted to find my food truck and take a walk across the park. I had recently read a news article about the lamp posts in the park that has numbers on the base of the post that indicates where you are in the park. Essentially the article said that each lamp post has 4 numbers on the base. The first two numbers tell you which cross street you are closest to and then second two numbers tell you if you are on the east or west side (even numbers being east and odd being west). I believe the numbers on the lamp post above are 7727 which would mean that the nearest cross street is 77th and I was closer to the west side. It was fun to test that new found knowledge!
What else? Oh I shared 2 of the same pic. The one that is in Central Park looking over the pond with the city scape in the back ground. The one picture has the wooden bridge in it. I kept it in the picture for future reference on where I was when I took that pic. But honestly I like the second pic better without the bridge post in it. So I shared both.
Oh. Let me back up a minute. The pictures of paintings were another exhibit at the historical society. They were just a few of my favorites. I couldn’t not take a picture of the farm animals and the boat (umm…did I mention that I homestead at a fishing lodge?). And I love all things Americana so the pic of flags was right up my alley too.
I think that’s it. I’ll post about the lamps very soon. I seem to always be running out of time lately! More soon. I promise!