Next up: Abingdon Square, site of the gruesome, tragic murder of actress Adrienne Shelly in 2006.
Mari had scrambled eggs at Cafe Panino Mucho Giusto, and we then made our way to 74 West Charles Street, where native Oklahoman Woody Guthrie lived between December 1942 and May 1943. That's not very long, but it was the first apartment lease in NYC that Woody signed alone. It was also his 11th address in 3 years. He lived here with Marjorie, a dancer with the Martha Graham troupe. At the time, they were both still married to other people. He called the apartment "Rancho del Sol." They got married in 1945. Woody spent 27 of his 55 years living in New York City.
Woody lived on the same street where another enemy of fascism, Sinclair Lewis, lived between 1910 and 1913. In 1935, Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, a novel about the election of a fascist to the US Presidency. We visited the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, 50 years after the Stonewall riots.
And then we made our way to the house on Grove street, where Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, died in 1809.
For a time, the street was named Reason Street after Paine's Age of Reason.
Above: the exterior of the Friends apartment.We also walked by the apartment at 65 Morton where Julius Rosenberg did spywork and Cafe Wha?, where 19-year-old Bob Dylan (Zimmerman) had his New York City debut on January 24, 1961, one year before he released his first LP. Dylan had come to NYC to meet Woody Guthrie. Jimi Hendrix was 24 when he was "discovered" at the Cafe on August 6, 1966.
After walking down the street where Edgar Allen Poe lived when he published "The Raven" after moving here in 1844, we walked through Washington Square Park.
Built in 1892, the Washington Square Arch was built to commemorate the centennial of George Washington's inauguration as President of the United States in 1789, which took place in New York City, then the nation's capital.
Before leaving Greenwich Village, we walked by the one-time homes of Emma Lazarus (whose poem "The New Colossus" is engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty) and Mark Twain (1900-1901--when he wrote the Anti-Imperialist "To the Person Sitting in Darkness") and the townhouse that the Weathermen accidentally detonated on March 6, 1970 when they were working on a bomb. Dustin Hoffman was their next-door neighbor.
We took a taxi to Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side.
It has been 30 years since "When Harry Met Sally" was released. It includes a famous scene, filmed at Katz's, in which Sally shows Harry how easy it is for a woman to fake enjoyment. While we were in the restaurant, a Sally look-alike was recreating the scene a few tables away from us.
After lunch, we took a bus up first avenue to the Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was the first time either of us had been there. We saw an exhibit of work by Simone Leigh (my birth-year peer) who won the Guggenheim's 2018 Hugo Boss prize. Leigh created the sculpture "Brick House," which we saw on the High Line Spur.
We also saw an exhibit built around Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Defacement," a protest against police brutality that he painted on the wall of Keith Haring's studio after the death of artist Michael Stewart in 1983.
This summer six of the floors of the Museum have been dedicated to the museum's "first artist-curated exhibition." Six contemporary artists used the museum's collection to create a distinct thematic presentation.
This part of the Museum was curated by Cai Guo-Qiang, who was born in 1957 in Fujian province in China, where Mari and I lived for the first four years of our marriage, 1994-1998.
After we left the Guggenheim, we walked through Central Park. The 30-story El Dorado, behind Mari and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reservoir, was built in 1931. Lots of celebrities live and have lived there.
Before heading back to the airport, we stop at the Neue Galerie where we see an exhibit called "Eclipse of the Sun: Art of the Weimar Republic," featuring work by George Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad. The permanent collection includes important works by Klimt, including a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. No photos were allowed.
We took a taxi to La Guardia and although traffic was a headache, we got there much earlier than I'm used to.
We were surprised and happy to find that Pablo and Emilio and Grandmother and Granddaddy were still up when we got back to the house after midnight. Nina had been safely delivered to the Chickasaw Arts Academy, and all the kids had enjoyed a grand time during our absence.
We immediately began fantasizing about going to New York to celebrate the one-year anniversary of our 25th year anniversary. If we went, we'd stay at the Jane again, but we might fly into Newark next time and take the AirTrain into Penn Station. We could also visit the renovated Modern, which is currently being renovated. And it would be great to see Sujata and Arun again--this time we'd pay for dinner!
