day 15: new york, ny – atlantic city, nj

when we woke on our last day in new york, linda had already made sandwiches for us to take on the road with us, not to mention a couple generous baggies of the brownies we had already sampled the previous day. we said our goodbyes, thanking linda for her incredible hospitality, and made a trip to the corner grocer for some ice.

we drove to brooklyn to park our car in a garage for the day then took the subway into manhattan toward the guggenheim. before the museum, we decided to look for a place to have a late breakfast and rounded the corner past the russian embassy (where there was some to-do out front) to find the jackson hole café. m ordered the bagel with lox and a shot of juice (apparently this is a new york convention), and r ordered a breakfast combo of some sort, though he immediately regretted not having chosen the famed and enormous seven ounce burger he saw delivered to another patron at a nearby table.

back at the museum, r opted for the free audio tour while m decided to pass, reasoning that r would share any tasty anecdotal morsels and preferring to react and interpret the objects without any official interference. the exhibition was called ‘frank lloyd wright: from the inside out’, and we realized that, along with our earlier visit to fallingwater, our trip was assuming an unintended architectural focus, specifically around wright’s works. in this particular instance, we were glad that the museum of his design was filled with his works. it proved to be less of a distraction. the space is such a dynamic one that it may have been difficult, at least for m, to fix on the art. m also decided to view the exhibition backwards, so we rode the elevator to the sixth floor and walked up to the seventh to begin.

wright originally intended for the museum to be lit by natural light from the concentric windows crowning each storey, and from the glass dome at the top. m was perplexed to find, however, that an opaque glass covered the dome, and that a synthetic, garish light shone down through opaque plastic plating where the windows should have been. when she asked a guard, she was told that the museum had covered both the windows and the dome to reduce the amount of light and control its quality in the interest of the works on display. we think wright would have been mortified, more with the method rather than the masking itself.

nevertheless, the building was a pleasure to experience. the slope of the spiral was gentle, the alcoves created a private space in which to interact with one or a few works, the curving walls created an unobtrusive and protective space between the viewer and the piece (thereby removing the need for motion-sensor alarms or guard interventions). looking over the railing into the center of the spiral, we felt that the flow of the spiral and the telescoping concentric circles diffused our sense of height and vertigo. once again, m thought, ‘drift.’

throughout the exhibit, what m has called the tyranny of wright’s idea was truly manifest. he was not content to limit his architectural ability to specific projects, but had the real audacity to dream up an entirely new landscape for america as a whole. in wright’s vision, an average person’s home is a personal space that meets the unique needs of its occupants, is inexpensive and energy efficient. in situation, the natural landscape is privileged: in his community plans, there is always more green space than structure. we found that he had designed a mile-high skyscraper, a plan for the entire city of baghdad designed to meet all its cultural and municipal needs, a magnificent and rejected plan for a civic center at the point in pittsburgh (which r was particularly taken with, exclaiming ‘all they have instead is some dumb fountain!’).

in the museum gift shop, r stopped dead in his tracks before a table stacked with boxes of tiny replicas of the museum. out of legos. witness the magic.

we crossed the street from the museum and entered central park, which is massive and infinitely variegated. the day was warm and new yorkers were out in abundance, sunning their pale skins, their bodies spaced at even intervals on an open lawn. we passed through the shakespeare garden, featuring tiny plaques with horticultural quotes (ex. ‘there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. pray you, love, remember. and there’s pansies, that’s for thoughts’). we also walked through strawberry fields, where lennon fans dressed an ‘imagine’ mandala with fresh flowers and, smiling, had their pictures taken. we came out of the park in lower manhattan, determined to have a piece of cheesecake before we left the city.

on our way out of new york, we saw the statue of liberty from afar. m recited the words of emma lazarus to r, who at first thought she was making them up:

—give me your tired, your poor
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
i lift my lamp beside the golden door!

we agreed that these powerful words are pretty radical. imagine it, america, a proud and promising invitation to immigrants writ large on one of your most enduring national symbols! (we notice no similar colossa graces our southern gates, only a steadily expanding wall…)

we arrived in atlantic city around dinner time and checked into our hotel, the trump marina. everyone we met in the elevators and in the casino wished us luck. we had a wide view of the atlantic from the twenty-seventh floor from which to watch the sunrise in the morning, and because the hotel was located on the opposite side of the bay than the boardwalk, we were obliged to take a jitney to the action. before the driver had roared to a stop at the curb before our hotel, he had already clapped open the doors. we hopped on, handing the driver our fare as he was speeding away from the curb, the doors not yet closed. the rickety little bus lunged around corners and barreled down the straightaways. we held on tight in order not to bounce out of our seats while the driver cracked jokes via cb with his fellow drivers. r had a huge smile spread over his chops every time the driver hollered out the name of the next stop: ‘bor-gada!’ ‘cee-zuhs!’ at our stop r passed him a tip, to which the driver replied, ‘hey, you da man! tanks a lot!’
after steak and crab legs and a bottle of wine we took the same jitney back to the hotel and fell asleep on our most comfortable bed yet, but not before we had set our alarm for five am.