All this prepared me nicely for a couple of days at the International Wildlife Conservation Park, a k a the Bronx Zoo, which I hadn’t visited in decades. The cold-weather season is a particularly good time for adults to visit, I discovered, largely because the great herds of tiny cotton- candy eaters (a populous species of the genus children) are thinned out.
The zoo is open 365 days a year (where are the animals going to go?), but in spring and summer, it has up to 40,000 visitors on Wednesdays, when admission is free; last Wednesday, Christmas, there were 357. The local residents feel considerably less overwhelmed, and thus the possibility of encountering them closely is high. You can get near enough for long enough that, like pets, they reveal themselves.
Timmy, for example, the patriarch of the zoo’s gorilla clan, doesn’t care for hoopla; he tends to seek privacy when there’s a crowd. Unlike a number of his showoffy relatives, “he’s very, very shy,” a keeper in the gorilla house told me.
But there he was sitting in full view when I wandered in, his regal belly protruding, sheltering one of his granddaughters with a protective arm. He was true to form, though, when I was followed by a chattering family of Scandinavian tourists: he stood slowly and lumbered off.
Pat Thomas, the assistant curator of mammals, said the relatively small monkey house can be maddeningly busy and shrill in high season. “It’s not a good educational experience,” he said. “You spend more time jockeying for position than watching the animals.”
But on the day after Christmas, I was alone there. And I feel as though I left an impression, at least on the white-faced capuchins, many of which paused in their regular antics to regard me. One waited patiently until I tentatively reached out my hand and touched the glass. A gesture of friendship, I thought. But with a yawp that sounded like “Aha!,” he reacted as though I’d fallen into a trap he’d set, leaping immediately to his feet and pounding on the glass with both hands.
“You fool!” he said. Or so I thought.
Stay-at-Home SWB, 8, Into Fitness, Seeks Thrills
By JOHN KIFNER | July 2, 1994
Gus resting on a very hot day in the Central Park Zoo in 2006.
SO THE POLAR BEAR IN THE CENTRAL PARK Zoo has a therapist. Big deal.
Anybody who is anybody in Manhattan has a therapist, to say nothing of a personal trainer and a nutritionist. What is this bear’s problem?
He swims too much.
What?
Right. The polar bear, whose name is Gus, keeps on swimming in a tight little figure 8, gracefully pushing off his artificial rock pile with a huge hind paw, languorously backstroking, then turning a neat diving flip by the underwater window. Over and over and over, as if he were doing laps in the Yale Club pool.
“He’s not meeting our criteria for quality of life,” said the bear’s therapist, Tim Desmond. “We’re trying to perfect his life style.”
Naturally, Mr. Desmond is from California.
Everybody is very concerned about Gus at the zoo, which, by the way, is officially not a zoo anymore but the Central Park Wildlife Center. Once it was like Rikers Island, locking up lions, elephants and yaks like miscreants. But it was redesigned and reopened in 1988 as a state-of-the-art showcase for a few carefully chosen species in near-natural environments.
There had been, along the way, some unfortunate incidents, including one in which a prior polar bear ate a visitor, resulting in his (the bear’s) banishment to the Bronx. So there is genuine worry that a star attraction like Gus is not just having a bad fur day but is, well, you know, a little loony.
The problem, said Mr. Desmond, who is being paid $25,000 for treating Gus—which is not so bad considering he weighs about 700 pounds, four or five times the size of most neurotics—is that he really doesn’t have enough to do. In zoo talk, the result is called “stereotypical behavior,” in which an animal fills the void by doing exactly the same thing over and over again without any real reason. Hey, people who work in offices, sound familiar?
Gus’s media-age status was certified the other morning when a group of elementary-school-age children were told by their teacher, “This was the bear that was on television.” They went wild. Meanwhile, a photographer from People magazine, with an assistant taking Polaroids to check the lighting, was shooting a portrait of the bear.
Zoo people were solemnly spreading crunchy Skippy peanut butter over all kinds of plastic objects that they would toss into the environment to give the bear something to do. This is the main element of the therapy. Gus was backstroking, kicking off and flipping over. And he was smiling.
Lullabies of Broadway
ARTS & LEISURE
People who complain about New York can’t complain that it’s short on museums, concert halls, theaters and art galleries. It has more of them than any other major American city—so many that it is difficult not to think about the artists, writers and musicians who have built the city into their work, from Edward Hopper to William Rauschenberg, from titans of Tin Pan Alley like George Gershwin to stars of hip-hop like Jay-Z.
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New York has the studios for the artists and the stages for the performers. It still has everything from Carnegie Hall, where Tchaikovsky conducted on opening night, to Radio City Music Hall, where the Rockettes go high-kicking across a stage that is not that much wider. And it has Lincoln Center, where the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet and other resident companies put on more than 5,000 performances a year. It was at Lincoln Center that Pavarotti and Domingo navigated the high C’s and Leontyne Price and Marilyn Horne and Renee Fleming gave some of their finest performances. It was there, too, that another well-known soprano, Beverly Sills, took on a leadership role when her singing days were over, first as general director of the New York City Opera. Later, as chairwoman of Lincoln Center itself, she laid the groundwork for an ambitious, multibillion dollar renovation that has turned Lincoln Center into the second-largest construction zone in Manhattan, after the World Trade Center site.
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New York established itself as a theater capital even before the Civil War; the Philharmonic traces its origins to 1842. Later, other nineteenth-century stars like Edwin Booth brought Shakespeare to New York audiences well aware that his brother had assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
As the city spread north from Lower Manhattan, it set aside land for an art museum—a green rectangle at the edge of the then-new Central Park. The Metropolitan Museum’s collection contains far more than paintings and statues. The oldest items at the Met are a set of flints from the Lower Paleolithic period (300,000 to 75,000 B.C.). The Met also has the world’s oldest piano, a relative youngster from the early eighteenth century.
But the Met has added modernistic architecture that transcended its nineteenth-century formality, starting with a modern temple for an ancient one. In the 1970’s, the Met built a steel-and-glass addition to house the fifteenth-century B.C. Egyptian Temple of Dendur. Some museum-goers still find the juxtaposition of ancient and modern startling. The architecture critic Paul Goldberger said the addition slams into the museum’s original Beaux-Arts facade “with all the subtlety of a train collision.”
There was a time in the 1950’s when people registered a similar complaint about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum—a bright, white sphere—was, they fumed, incompatible with the townhouses and massive Fifth Avenue apartment buildings that face Central Park. Here, though, the critics disagreed. Goldberger called the spiraling ramp inside the Guggenheim “one of the triumphant creations of the 20th century.”
That word triumphant also comes to mind across town, on the other side of Central Park, where the heroic statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback dominates the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History. It has a collection of 32 million specimens. They’re not all on display, of course. But there are intriguing rare gems, rebuilt mammoths and a fierce-looking Tyrannosaurus Rex. And if you don’t want a glimpse of the
creatures that roamed the earth in prehistoric times, you can look to the sky from the jewel-like heavenly ball of the Hayden Planetarium—the largest suspended-glass curtain wall in the United States.
Broadway builds fantasies with greasepaint and dialogue and melody that draw big audiences every year, and big money. But Broadway’s glitzy surface masks deep troubles: fewer shows, smaller audiences, fewer jobs. About half as many new productions go on the boards as did a generation ago. Some critics worry that pop and rock have drowned out whatever it was that made Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals so enduring. “Rent,” a modern-day version of “La Bohème,” definitely wasn’t Rodgers and Hammerstein.
But the shows that succeed can go on and on: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” has run for more than 9,000 performances, which is 7,800 more than the original-cast run of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” (with a book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields). But “Annie Get Your Gun” is notable for the five-verse Ethel Merman showstopper that summed up why Broadway is magical, night after night: “There’s no business like show business.”
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MUSEUMS AND PUBLIC ART
The Opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
March 30, 1880
TODAY, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART will be opened with quite imposing formalities. Some 3,500 invitations have been sent out, and, doubtless, this, one of the leading events in the art history of New York, will be appropriately celebrated. On the 1st of April the museum will be open to the general public, and as in the former locality, on 14th Street, admission will be free on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. while on Monday and Tuesday an entrance fee of 50 cents will be charged—free, of course, to members and holders of tickets. What with the facilities the elevated railroads give, this museum in Central Park, on Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, is today most readily approachable.
Yesterday a private view was held, which was largely attended. The building itself, as far as the outside goes, is unpretentious, being built of brick with stone cappings, and is constructed more to give full admittance to light than with much idea of symmetrical proportion. Inside, its decoration is somber. The floors are of tessellated stone, the staircases are wide, not too steep, and the ventilation and light are excellent.
In the central hall are placed the loan collections, with the laces and embroideries; at the east end is a collection of Greek vases, while the Kensington reproductions are at the west end. Mr. Pruyn of Albany has loaned his carved Chinese Ivories; Mr. Drexel has sent his Egyptians antiquities; Mr. Prime shows his old volumes, as does Mr. How his many examples of fine binding. Here are collection of miniatures, Limoges emamels, old arms, Sevres, Dresden, and majolics. There are Oriental and Japanese stuffs, with silver repoussé in fine, an endless variety of strange, beautiful, or curious objects. In the north and south aisles in the east hall and the east entrance hall are the Cypriote antiquities—the vases, terra-cottas, bronzes, busts, statues of the Cesnola collection.
These, including a great number, which could not be shown in 14th Street, have all been arranged with excellent judgment and good taste. Falling down from the gallery above are suspended a number of tapestries, old French, Spanish, and Flemish ones, which are singularly effective. An excellent color has been used throughout for the lining of the cases, and, as the light seems to be evenly diffused from above, there is no reason to suppose that much fading of the material will take place.
A Panoramic Backdrop For Meaning And Mischief
By KEN JOHNSON | April 22, 2008
WITH ITS BREATHTAKING, PANORAMIC VIEWS of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, the Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art may strike you as an excellent place to mount a seasonal outdoor sculpture show, which it does every year. In truth, it is an inhospitable site for sculpture, as demonstrated by the 2008 display: three wonderful, previously unexhibited works by the celebrated Pop artist Jeff Koons. Each of these sculptures is a greatly enlarged, glossily lacquered, stainless-steel representation of something small: a toy dog made of twisted-together balloons; a chocolate valentine heart wrapped in red foil, standing en pointe; and a silhouette of Piglet from a “Winnie the Pooh” coloring book, randomly colored as if by a small child.
They are mischievously meaningful works. But placed on the architecturally nondescript patio, where there are also shaded areas for patrons of the Roof Garden Cafe, the sculptures too easily turn into benign, decorative accessories.
The biggest problem is scale. Seen in an indoor gallery, the elephantine, shiny metallic “Balloon Dog (Yellow),” which rises to 10 feet at its highest point, would have a weirdly imposing, slightly menacing presence. On the roof it appears dwarfed by the vast sky and by the open expanses of space to the south and west of the museum.
The intimacy of Mr. Koons’s sculpture is also diminished. Perfectionist attention to detail is one of his work’s most compelling aspects: note the exactingly formed knot that serves as the balloon dog’s nose, or the folds, pleats and stretch marks in the heart’s wrapper. The distracting outdoor environment, though, discourages careful, contemplative looking.
Their setting aside, Mr. Koons’s sculptures remain intellectually and sensuously exciting objects—“Balloon Dog” is a masterpiece—and they are worth visiting under any circumstances.
Private Lessons In the Halls of Old Masters
By DAN BARRY | December 20, 2003
IN THAT HUSHED HOUR BEFORE THE DOORS open to Fifth Avenue, a young man named Fabian Berenbaum enjoys private consultations with Rembrandt and Rubens, El Greco and van Dyck. They whisper across the centuries. Notice, they say. Learn.
On some mornings the great masters demonstrate the varied uses of light and shadow. Other mornings they suggest ways to convey emotion through the smallest details: purity of soul in a child’s eye, perhaps, or world-weariness in the arch of an old man’s brow. Their ability to grant a kind of everlasting life to those long dead—with paint, brush and canvas—can leave Mr. Berenbaum breathless.
These lessons end when the wooden floor says so. It creaks faintly under the weight of the day’s first visitors to the European Paintings galleries.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art employs hundreds of guards and supervisors to provide assistance to visitors and to protect its priceless collections. You may take photographs, but please, no flash. You may bring your face within inches of a Manet, but do not touch, do not brandish a pen, and please—please!—never use your umbrella as a pointer while making some profound observation about artistic technique.
If you do, you may hear from Fabian Berenbaum.
They whisper across the centuries. Notice, they say. Learn.
Mr. Berenbaum, 29, has worked as a guard at the museum for four years, and has stood in silence, eyes wide, in just about every section of the building. But years ago he requested that his primary assignment be in European Paintings, among the work of artists born before 1865.
He had his reasons. He is also an artist, with a master’s degree in fine arts.
When his shift ends, Mr. Berenbaum boards the 4 train to the 7, and gets out in Sunnyside, Queens. He walks up two flights to his small apartment, where he has converted his bedroom into a studio that is furnished with two easels. This is where he paints, often until well past midnight.
He does not listen to music. He has no television. There are just those whispers.
Where MoMA Has Lost Its Edge
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF | February 4, 2005
PHILIP JOHNSON DIED LAST WEEK WITHOUT having seen Yoshio Taniguchi’s completed expansion of the Museum of Modern Art. He was too frail to travel to the museum’s opening event and had stopped offering ideas to the Modern’s curators.
But his presence still haunts the museum. Whatever you thought of Johnson’s aesthetic agenda or impish charm, he never lacked a strong point of view. And it is hard to imagine that Johnson, the founding director of the Modern’s department of arc
hitecture and design, would have been impressed by the reinstallation of the department’s main galleries more than 60 years after he organized its inaugural show in the museum’s old Fifth Avenue home.
Under his guidance, the department’s early exhibitions on architecture and industrial design not only marked significant shifts in architectural thought, but also made the museum the nation’s most powerful platform for changing the way Americans viewed design. That role continued through the 1960’s and the museum’s publication of Robert Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” the first sign that cracks were appearing in the Modernist narrative.
The new installation, by comparison, is unlikely to burn a hole in our memories. Nor is it likely to shake up our view of the world. Tucked away on the third floor of Mr. Taniguchi’s elegant monument to classical Modernism, it is a surprisingly lifeless mix of design objects, often-superb drawings and architectural models. The bulk of the installation feels haphazard and lackluster; when it strives for a little originality, it stumbles.
Johnson’s best shows always managed to convey a sense of urgency. The Modern has lost that sense of purpose. Surely curators know that “good taste” is not enough to give coherence to an all-important installation, let alone to turn an audience on. The museum needs to find a bolder mission than defining who or what constitutes the mainstream.
Museum Acquires Its First Van Gogh
September 30, 1941
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART HAS JUST acquired one of the most important paintings to come into its collection—“The Starry Night,” by Vincent van Gogh.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 22