A Guide Named Sue took a tourist guide's daze off to visit the train show at the NY Botanical Gardens. It will continue until Jan 15th. Truly excellent. All the buildings are made of plant matter. You should go sometime! (I bought my ticket a while ago and today was my first day out after being house bound with a bad cold for the holidays). Glad I went but I'm staying home tomorrow. Pictures speak louder than words.
NYPL.
The Sing for Hope pianos opening event takes place downtown at noon. Join A Guide Named Sue for a subway/walking tour to the event. Details here. Many Broadway shows have designed pianos this year and cast members will be performing.
Later in the day, you can work up an appetite for Taste of Times Square on this Central Park Walking Tour.
Two great NYC events for New Yorkers and visitors. Come on along. The more the merrier. One tour or both!
While both places will be too crowded on Mother's Day, This is the season of the Mummy in NYC. The Egyptian Galleries in the Met now have a scientific Mummy counterpart at Natural History (and spoiler alert, this exhibit includes Mummies from Peru - who knew and no pictures for good reason). And, the Mother female IMAX humpback whales are pretty amazing!
Membership has its privileges at Natural History. It's really nice to order your tickets for special exhibits and films and pick them up from the machine when you arrive.
While at the Met, when you've finished with the mummies make sure you visit the Rooftop and any other exhibit that interests you. (Photo has received over 2500 on Twitter. Amazing for me.). The Met has a suggested admission fee. If you don't pay the full fee, I encourage you to spend the difference by shopping, eating, or drinking during your visit.
Don't forget to visit Central Park in between. These are great places to go after waiting for Shakespeare in the Park preview tickets.
In honor of National Tourism Week, NYC Guides Association member A Guide Named Sue invites visitors on a "tourist guide's daze off" FREE tour from Grand Central Terminal to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
The tour will meet in Grand Central at 12:30. After a brief introduction to Grand Central, we'll visit the Transit Museum Annex to see the latest exhibit and buy MetroCards if needed.
We'll travel by subway to Queens and make a brief visit to the Fisher Landau Art Center. Then we will bus and/or walk to the museum on 35th Avenue.
The tour will end sometime between 3 and 3:30. Sue has a ticket for the 4PM performance of Peter and the Star Catcher at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts . You can buy tickets here if you wish.
Sue will provide an overview of after tour possibilities and directions. The Moving Image Museum is open FREE after 4PM. There are great places to eat and drink in the neighborhood including the Astor Room. You can visit the Murals at Welling Court and the sculptures at Socrates Sculpture Park . If you cut out early, you can visit the Noguchi Museum before 5PM. You can take a bus to Roosevelt Island and return to Manhattan on the Tramway .
The tour is FREE. Participants will pay for their own transportation and any pre or post tour expenses.
To RSVP for this tour, please email [email protected] for the meeting place.
If you wish to do a similar but custom tour on another day, here is my AnyGuide tour.
When A Guide Named Sue received a request for a 6 AM custom tour the next morning through AnyGuide that included Central Station and Madison Square Garden, she responded with several questions, checked on a few things, came up with a proposal and the next morning we left my guests' hotel in the West 30's at 6 AM. The tour was a bit (less than an hour) longer than expected because of unexpected events that enhanced the tour.
The Starbucks barista may have been a bit rude to the guest who asked for restroom directions without ordering (her friend ordered for both of them). However, the early morning security guard at the Empire State Building let us in to have a look around the lobby when we were peeking through the window.
Yes we passed the Drama Bookshop, the Times Building, Madison Square Garden, and Macy's. We saw many sleeping arrangements for the homeless and those who end up scammed by an apartment rental.
We saw Madison Square and the (where's that building that looks like a ship) Flatiron building and met the police in the Union Square train station near the Sept 11 memorial and said hello to Tom Otterness sculptures at Eighth Ave and 14th Street. Not knowing when the restrooms would be open on the Highline, we stopped to use the facilities at a beautiful hotel on 16th Street. Chelsea Market stores were not yet open but the guard allowed us to walk through the space en route to The Highline.
My guests hadn't heard about the Highline until I suggested it. At 7:30ish after a recent snowstorm the Highline was beautiful and empty. We managed to end at Grand Central terminal and my guests returned to their less mobile family. I went on to volunteer at a Senior Center (did I mention that Shake Shack had no line early in the morning and they have very good breakfast sandwiches)!
We could not touch anything. Nelson was free so I asked him to show me what looked like a piece of Mexican pottery I owned with a sex change. Speaking of change, Nelson didn't know what the hole in the top was for.
When I returned home, I found my version still sitting heavily and happily on top of my book cabinet near an ancient picture of my Guides Association tour guide friends. I've had the pottery (not the picture) for about 50 years I think.
Maybe I should write to the museum to see about a tour for guides. Hopefully, someday this stuff will be housed in a NYC Museum of Sanitation. More stuff here:
This morning was special thanks to Open House New York and Robin Nagle the Sanitation Department Anthropologist AND Nelson Molina chief collector and curator of The Trash Museum.
William B Helmreich might have walked 6000 miles in NYC and written the book The New York Nobody Knows but Nelson Molina spent his over 30 year career in the Sanitation Department working routes between his home on East 115 and the Sanitation terminal on East 99th Street. When Nelson saw things he believed should be saved, he brought them back to "the office". He did all of his work faithfully and he "saved" things. Mr Molina has retired but his saved "Treasures of The Trash Museum" are displayed in a sanitation warehouse that no longer parks trucks.
I normally don't take photos in museums. I would rather you visit on your own. However, this place is hard to visit so I took many photos. Here are a few. More in later posts like this one.
What is Central Park? The more I explore, read about, and share the Park with others the more I realize how much there is to know. I also realize that I will never know it all.
At the moment, I am planning a screening of Central Park - The People's Place for my fellow guides. This new documentary by Martin L. Birnbaum, park lover and sociologist who sees the Park as a place where people come together, is a great (holiday) gift for park lovers an park visitors who want to know more or take more than a bit of the Central Park home with them. The DVD is available from the website (link is above). All pictures are courtesy of the film's producers.
If you want to shop AND support Central Park any time visit the on-line shop of the Central Park Conservancy. Or, when you visit Central Park, do your shopping at the Dairy.
Last year, we had Halloween, the NYC Marathon and the World Series on the same weekend. This year, it is CANstruction and the Marathon EXPO. I have written lots about both the Marathon and CANstruction on this blog. This year, I have posted some Lower Manhattan tours to CANstruction on AnyGuide starting on November 4th.
On November 3rd, A Guide Named Sue is doing a Tourist Guide's Daze off journey from Grand Central to CANstruction via the new Hudson Yards 7 train stop, the Marathon EXPO, the Highline, Chelsea Market, the new location of the Gansevoort market and my favorite Tom Otterness Subway stop.
If I have the time and energy, I will head to Brooklyn to see friends and attend the Guides Association meeting.
If you would like to tag along for some or most of this, contact me and I will tell you where to meet me in Grand Central around 10AM.
What can I say. To stand anywhere (in this case on top of two former garbage dumps) on the ground in NYC and have 360 horizon views with no buildings in the way is a treat. Freshkills is evolving. I thought I was checking off a bucket list item when I snared an #OHNYwknd tour but now I want to return for a Freshkills Park Discovery Day next year. Come join me!