an aggregate of all things Johnson

I love the Tenement Museum. I wrote about my first visit to the museum two years ago and I’ve been a member of the museum ever since.

Since Chelsea and Scott were going to be in town visiting, I jumped at the chance to buy member-only tickets to the brand new Taste of the LES Walking Tour on Saturday. The tour promised to feed us local food while also “exploring the immigrant experience and some of the ways immigrant foods have shaped American food.” The LES is one of the oldest neighborhoods in New York and at times has been one of the most densely populated and ethnically diverse places in the world.

We showed up at the museum hungry and ready to expand our food horizons. Our tour guide was fun and friendly and gave us bottled water for our journey. Throughout the tour we got to taste nine different foods…

• First, we tried a soft pretzel which represented the earliest history of the Tenement Museum, when the neighborhood was called “Little Germany” (Kleindeutschland) and there was a saloon in the building’s storefront. Our tour guide told us that the saloon owners sold salty pretzels in an attempt to get their thirsty patrons to buy more beer.
• Next, we had delicious “new pickles” (my favorite) which represented the neighborhood’s Jewish heritage and past identity as the “pickle district.” The Pickle Guys is the last exclusive pickle vendor in the neighborhood now… and sadly it was closed on Saturday.
• Our next stop was El Castillo de Jagua, a latin food restaurant where we got to try a fried plantain. I believe the restaurant is technically Dominican, but our stop represented all of the Latin influence on the LES, including the large number of Puerto Rican immigrants.
• Next, we stopped by Economy Candy and tried their best selling item, chocolate covered pretzels. Yum! A family owned candy store that was originally opened in 1937 as “Economy Shoes” but soon found more customers in the candy business. They have a huge selection of hard-to-find and international candy.
• Next, we explored the concept of “fusion” and tried delicious mini creampuffs with green tea filling made by a second generation Chinese American bakery owner. I loved them (and had two) but not everyone liked the unique filling.
• My least favorite taste test was of the cured, sliced beef – sort of a cross between prosciutto and beef jerky. We tried it outside the University Settlement Neighborhood House where we discussed the role of reformers who came into the neighborhood to try to better the lives of the poor, but often added to the forced assimilation into “American culture.”
• We continued on to Essex Street Market, the one-stop shop for LES residents. From the website: “Essex Street Market began in 1940 as part an effort by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia to find a new place for street merchants to do business. At the time, pushcarts and vendors crowded the city streets, making it difficult for police and fire vehicles to easily pass. To ease congestion, Mayor LaGuardia created the Essex Street Market and several other indoor retail markets throughout the city.” The market contains both artisinal vendors and local specialties. We tried both the Latin Queso Blanco (seen above) and a locally made sharp cheddar cheese.
• Not pictured are the dumplings we sampled from Vanessa’s Dumpling House. The Lower East Side borders (and sometimes merges) with Chinatown to its South and you can find unending options for asian food of all kinds. Vanessa’s serves some of the best deals, with dumplings costing as little as six for a dollar!
• Since it was Saturday, many of the Jewish stores were closed, including Kossar’s Bialys. I have never tried a Bialy – something like a Polish bagel – and would have loved to, but instead we got to sample donuts from the nearby Donut Plant. I suppose that the Donut Plant represents the current wave of gentrification in the LES and the young entrepreneurs who are creating new businesses centered around nostalgia for an older way of making things by hand.

We sampled a wide variety of food, just like the wide variety of neighborhoods in Manhattan!

The food was all good and the four of us had a fine time on the tour (despite the heat). Our tour guide was great and it was fun to explore the Lower East Side on foot, but I came away slightly disappointed by the tour. I guess I was hoping that we would get to go into more of the shops and meet more owners. I was also expecting to get to taste larger portions of the food… but maybe then we would’ve all been way too stuffed! (As it was, Chelsea, Scott, Travis and I were still a little hungry afterward and continued on our own personal food tour to Tiny’s Giant Sandwich Shop and then to a brand new macaron store.)

Overall, the tour was truly a great experience, but I think next time I have family in town I may just plan my own LES food tour. There are so many more places I would have loved to have stopped at, like Russ & Daughters deli, or the 100-year-old Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery, or even the vegan Babycakes cupcake bakery. There is a lot of amazing food in such a diverse place!

Related posts:

1. NYC Tourist Spectacular #2
2. found: dill pickle relish
3. tons of fun in the big apple!

Travis and I traveled to Queens yesterday for the Makers Faire in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. I am working on a full article about the Faire for CraftCritique.com – so stay tuned for that! – but I was completely fascinated by the park in general and felt compelled to do some research when we got home.

Queens is the second most populated NYC borough (after Brooklyn) and it is the most diverse county in the entire country. Nearly half of Queens residents are foreign born and over 130 different languages are spoken in the borough. Pretty amazing! The 7 line of the NY subway system has been deemed the “International Express,” a national living heritage trail recognized for its importance to American immigrant history. I wish I could say we took the 7 out to Queens, but instead we hired a car…

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was the site of the 1939-40 and 1964-65 New York World’s Fairs, previous to which it was a dumping ground for ashes. I am so fascinated by the World’s Fairs. It just seems so crazy that these entire huge complexes were created and now there is almost nothing left…

The 1964 NY World’s Fair had the theme “Peace through Understanding” and it was dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” – very Space Age. (NASA and the Department of Defense both sponsored exhibits.) You can view original photos of many of the Fair exhibits in this postcard collection, like the Tower of Light and the The Plaza of Astronauts. All of the exhibits seem so optimistic and triumphant – and they REALLY liked utilizing the wondrous material of concrete!

The Unisphere (the world’s largest global structure, rising 140 feet and weighing 700,000 pounds) is the most recognizable relic of the Fair, but a few other structures remain. The Queens Museum of Art, The Hall Of Science (seen above), the super-weird Terrace on the Park, which was the Fair’s helipad, and the Queens Theater in the Park are all structures built for the fair that are still in use today.

In my opinion, the most interesting remnant from the NY World’s Fair is the now derelict NY State Pavilion (seen in the left hand photo above, and in its original state in the postcard below). The NY State Pavilion — or the “Tent of Tomorrow” — was the largest exhibit in the Fair. It was designed by famed modernist architect Philip Johnson, sponsored by Texaco, and decorated by relatively unknown artists of the time, including Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol!! It contained three separate structures, a fiberglass covered pavilion with a tiled state map of NY (which is said to have cost one million dollars at the time!), three observation towers with elevators, and a circular theater (now the home of the Theater in the Park).

The pavilion area and the observation towers have been left to deteriorate for the past 50 years and the result is a strange and eerie structure that could be used in a movie about the desolate, dystopian wasteland of the future. I wish I could get in them and explore! It just seems so incredibly sad to me that these structures were the best and most innovative creations of their time and now they are abandoned and forgotten. I wish I could travel back in time just to see what the World’s Fairs were like… of course, I shouldn’t romanticize history too much. I have been to Epcot in Orlando, and I assume that it is similar to the World’s Fairs — full cultures and societies condensed into happy, cheery, stereotyped exhibits.

Queens is such a culturally rich and historically interesting place — I wish more could be done to tell its story! I definitely plan to explore it more and at least check out the Queens Museum of Art. What else should I add to my Queens Site Seeing List?

Related posts:

1. to portland!
2. oregon country fair
3. dc

I met my friend, Suzanne, at the Whitney Museum on Saturday to see the 2010 Biennial. The Biennial, for me, has been a somewhat mythic art event ever since I learned about it as an art student in undergrad. It was always touted as a crazy, contemporary, magical exhibition where artists’ careers were made – If you can get into the Biennial, you are golden. Collectors will be knocking down your door. That is the myth, anyway…

There was no way I was going to miss viewing this year’s show in person! I considered this first visit with Suzanne as a preliminary scouting mission. I wanted to browse the entire show (consisting of 55 artist – less than in the past) and get a general feel for my likes and dislikes without stressing over studying every single detail. My plan was to get an overall impression. I was excited to learn that for the first time ever there were more women than men represented in the Biennial. As I expected, there was a lot of video, installation, and performance pieces, but also plenty of paintings, photography, and textiles. There was only a handful of sculpture.

I may be old fashioned, but I liked the paintings the best. My very favorite (at least after this first viewing) were three pale oil paintings by Julia Fish of the floor, entitled “Thresholds.” (The two paintings above are hers, but not the exact ones in the show.) They are nearly abstract paintings, showing transitional spaces between two types of flooring. They reminded me of Agnes Martin – one of my favorite painters. I am drawn to washed out palettes. I think they calm me. I also loved the small, simple landscape paintings of Maureen Gallace which were displayed in the same room with Fish.

I was excited the see Ellen Gallagher in the show. Gallagher’s “DeLuxe” was one of my favorite contemporary pieces when I worked at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Oregon, but I must admit that I did not understand the collaborative installation she created with Edgar Cleijne for the biennial… Something about space inside a big plywood box with a hologram of JFK’s head in the middle… I may need to revisit that one.

I also enjoyed the full room of flower paintings by Charles Ray. I had kinda thought he was a sculptor – he has been in the biennial before with sculpture – but the full room of flowers was pleasing. There were more than a dozen of them and I think they may have been drawn with magic marker…

Other favorites included the beautiful, wall-size tapestry by Pae White and the watercolor/drawings by Storm Tharp. I think my favorites represent the most tame pieces in the show. There was plenty of much more controversial, heart-wrenching, and strange items… and maybe I will grow to love them in time. Each and every piece was definitely thought-provoking! I’ll let you know if my favorites change after a second, more in-depth viewing.