A WEEK IN NEW YORK - PART FOUR : MoMA

APRIL 18, 2025

                                                                  THE MUSEUM THAT ATE 53RD STREET - THE NEW ENTRY IS ALMOST HALD A BLOCK FROM THE ORIGINAL BUILDING IN THE DISTANCE.

I reserved one of our days in New York for a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, ostensibly to check out the new (for us) addition and remodeling to the museum. Fran’s not much of a museum gal, but she agreed to one museum visit for the week. One of the clues that you are of a certain age is when you realize that a building that was remodeled when you were an adult has now been remodeled AGAIN. We went to visit one of the greatest museums in the world to see how it had been transformed by its latest modernization.

I realized the second that I emerged from the subway that I was really engaged in a trip back to my youth. The “neighborhood” that I understood best in Manhattan had been the area that I had visited as a teenager when I journeyed to “the city” to have fun while I was supposedly engaged in serious research for schoolwork. I was really just asserting my independence that was otherwise confined to endless games of stickball, poker, and trips to the ballpark.

                                                                  ONE OF THE "XYZ" BUILDINGS THAT OVERLOOKED OUR OFFICES ACROSS SIXTH AVENUE, SO CALLED BECAUSE THE THE THREE TOWERS WERE NEARLY IDENTICAL. THE INHUMANITY, THE INHUMANITY!

Later this became the scene of my only real stint as a New York office worker. I had spent a semester in London, and returned to Binghamton so disappointed in my return to reality that I moved heaven and earth to make sure that the fall semester would be my last upstate. My dissatisfaction with school was only heightened when I somehow was allowed to take a graduate seminar in History. I so loved being treated as a graduate student that I completely revised my dreams of what to do with myself after school. Of course I didn’t realize that this class had really been a lark for me and had no relationship with what graduate school would really be like. But that’s another story.

So I graduated without graduation and went back to my childhood bedroom while I applied to grad school. My father asked an old friend to pull some strings to get me a job in his office, and suddenly I was commuting to Midtown to become the worst secretary in all of New York. This job was as close as I ever got to “working a no-work job” like a young mafioso on a construction site. The real problem was not that I was totally unqualified, but that there was no real job - despite my total lack of proficiency at being a secretary, I still didn’t have enough work to ever really fill the day. But I was only let go when the boss cashed it in and sold the firm to an agency from London. There were now two problems. My accent obviously didn't fit with an English travel agency, even in New York. And when I visited our new prospective digs across the street for the first time, I realized my days were numbered. This was 1977, and every office in the building opened off the elevator in exactly the same way - glass doors fronting a glass desk with one receptionist holding forth. It really didn't matter if the receptionist was as unqualified as I was - my legs just didn't make the grade.

                                       MY FAVORITE BUILDING NEARBY, ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS SO DIFFERENT. NICKNAMED "BLACK ROCK" FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, IT WAS THE HOME OF CBS AND A SYMBOL OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM. THE FACT THAT IT IS NOW OWNED BY CHARLES SCHWAB REALLY SAYS IT ALL ABOUT HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED.

This office was one of the last real travel agencies, as well as being a Broadway ticket agency. We are talking the dawn of time here people. I would answer the phones and type up the itineraries of people who were taking cruises around the world. I soon realized that I knew where most of the best-selling authors of the day were a lot of the time since I was typing up there book tours. The big boss was literally such a bastard that I also had to walk around the theater district to visit box offices to procure tickets since the boss had so rankled every theater in town that his ticket agency could only purchase tickets on the sly.

There were only three things that received the boredom of this non-job. Amazingly I enjoyed the commute on the subway, which allowed me both glorious views of the skyline and a slice of the world’s population that I had never experienced growing up in Bayside. The highlight of my day was lunch, which I couldn’t afford but allowed me almost an hour walk around Midtown after I ate my sandwich at my desk. Each Friday I allowed myself an actual lunch out, which allowed me to sample my first real gyros and sushi, among other things.

                                                                   THE NEW WORLD. THIS IS THE NEW TOWER DOWN THE STREET FROM THE OLD TOWER. OH, BY THE WAY, A PERFECTLY FINE TEN-YEAR OLD SMALL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN CRAFT WAS TORN DOWN FOR THIS MoMA EXPANSION.

But the real highlight of my days became the excuses I found to just not go home right away after work. I realized that most of the museums in New York had one free night a week that would allow me to sample some real culture. My favorite became the Museum of Modern Art, just a short walk from work. Once a week I would literally close the place at 9:00 P.M., having spent a good three hours exploring the entire museum. At that point the Museum was small enough that one could really develop a relationship with the entire collection. And it was free! When I was fired from this non-job my father’s friend took me aside and handed me two vouchers for basically free round-trip tickets to London that Summer. I was so happy that I skipped through Midtown like a Broadway dancer on the way to the British Airways office.

A few years later I was now an architecture student visiting New York frequently enough to acquaint myself with the “new” MoMA, now grown twice the size after a skyscraper condo addition that paid for the expansion. Yes, it had some aspects of a retail mall, but it was a really fancy mall. The five stories of escalators were a bit excessive, but at least they overlooked the sculpture garden, still one of the best public spaces in any city on earth.

                                                                  ONE OF MY OLD FRIENDS, A SIKORSKY HELICOPTER THAT COULD BE STRAIGHT OUT OF MASH, STILL FLIES  ABOVE, BUT SEEMS TO HAVE LOST IT'S PRIDE OF PLACE IN THE DESIGN COLLECTION.

                                                                  AT LEAST THE SCULPTURE GARDEN IS STILL INTACT. IT'S JUST HARD TO FIND IT, SINCE THE MUSEUM'S LAYOUT OBSCURES IT FROM THE GALLERIES. YOU CAN STILL SEE IT FROM THE VARIOUS EATERIES, MOST OF WHICH ARE NOT AVAILABLE TO THE HOI POLLOI  LIKE YURS TRULY.

There aren’t too many images of the latest version of MoMA, since I found the new layout a real disappointment. Another condo tower addition to the West provided the money for much more exhibit space at it’s base - the Museum had basically swallowed almost the entire block of Midtown where it had started just before WWII. The only problem was that there now was a giant black block of no-entry space right in the middle of all of the floors of the museum. The bank of escalators was still there, but they overlooked nothing, blocked away from the sculpture garden and the city beyond.  Most of the overlooks that allowed for some decompression when entering another part of the collection were now gone or very much compromised.

                                                                   A PORTRAIT BY A  CZECH ARTIST NEW TO ME, FRANZ KUPKA. I WONDER IF THE SUBJECT LIKED IT AS MUCH AS I DID.

And of course part of the problem was the intervening years of my acquaintance. Instead  of having the Museum mostly to myself on a weekday evening, the crowds, even on a random afternoon, were totally overwhelming. The steps were seemingly never-ending, and those Breuer benches had gotten way too low after almost 48 years. The only thing that was refreshing was that the collection was displayed very differently than in the past, with the “greatest hits” interspersed with contemporary art of the time that was very new to me. This I enjoyed immensely.

                                                                  THIS IMAGE SAYS IT ALL TO THIS CRITIC. AN IMPECCABLE WHITE CONCRETE COLUMN FRONTS PART OT THE MYSTERIOUS BLACK BOX THAT CUTS OFF THE MUSEUM FROM THE SCULPTURE GARDEN. NOT TO BE CONSPIRATORIAL, BUT PRAY TELL, WHAT IS HIDDEN IN THAT BLACK BOX?

So you can go home again.  And MoMA will always be there, and it remains one of the greatest museums in the world. I only hope that they get it right the next time it eats up another part of 53rd Street.