I was sitting in Caffe Reggio having a good think. I’d intended on spending the afternoon reading, but was distracted by the most confusing scene. As the server place my latte on the table in front of me, a young woman approached him and asked “What’s the theme of this café?” He and I looked at each other, exchanging a telepathic huh,? then turned to her for clarification. “Like is it from a movie or just aesthetic?” This did not clarify whatsoever. I blurted “It’s like a hundred years old” over the server “Caffe Reggio was the first café in America to serve espresso in 1927,” which seemed to confuse the young woman, who looked at us, then turned and walked out. “She could not have thought this is some sort of immersive experience type thing?” my brain hurt while I said it. He sighed and said “I can’t,” then turned and went to check on his tables outside.

I couldn’t either. The idea that someone could walk into an obviously historic place and not immediately register that it is simply old (and worse, assumed it was some kind of created set) sent me down some sort of existential spiral. I sat there staring at my book in a daze for a few minutes, wondering if that was a really fucking weird thing to ask, or if I am just old and this is completely normal. (seriously, which is it?)

With my focus completely blown, I decided to let myself sink into a good think. It had been awhile since I’d had one. I’d been great at distracting myself from the doomscroll with reading, but hadn’t had the deep, restorative soak of just sitting and being and observing in far too long. Sometimes it can be the best thing ever. Especially in New York. But first! My favorite table had opened up. I gestured toward the table with my pointer fingers and eyebrows to the server across the room. He mouthed “fine,” then went back to ignoring me. I picked up my latte and my bag and headed over to the table that faces the big painting on the back wall by a student of Caravaggio.

Caffe Reggio is probably the only coffee shop in the whole of America with a real live painting from the actual Renaissance (and authenticated by the Met). Sometime around the end of the 16^th century, Caravaggio sketched the three figures on this canvas, and then had one of his students fill it in with oils, mimicking his signature tenebrious style. The author has officially been attributed from the school of Caravaggio. When Caravaggio had time to teach is beyond me. He spent his life in and out of jails across Italy, engaging in violent fights followed by violent murder, in which he was sentenced to open bounty beheading- which meant anyone who recognized him could put his head on an impromptu chopping block and do the deed themselves, if they were so inclined. Can you imagine? This open-call chopping of his head freaked him out, and he fled Rome to Naples to Sicily to Malta, making allegorical paintings along the way. I saw twenty-four of these paintings, the most of his works ever shown together, at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome in May. It was one of the most incredible exhibitions I’ve ever seen. There were a lot of severed heads.

I let my eyes wander from the painting around the brown and green room, over the dozens of anonymous artifacts that hung alongside the masterwork, wondering where they were before gathered together in this very room. I wondered how many people sat at my same table and stared at the painting over the years. Thousands? A million? Ninety-eight years is a long time. Who was the last to sit here with an espresso from the café’s original machine, a fancy silver number from 1902 that has sat unused in the corner for as long as I could remember. Did Jack Kerouac sit here, having a restorative and sobering think over a double espresso from this beaut? Did the other writers and artists who arrived in New York from Europe during World War II find comfort among the Italian artworks and artifacts, feeling a bit of the old world in the new? What did they talk about late in the late nights after long hours of drinking at White Horse or Cedar or Minetta Tavern when it was divey and wonderful? I would give anything to have been there.

It was getting busy, so I asked for the check and wondered if Max Ernst or Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp or Fernand Léger had made it to MacDougal for a coffee while living in New York. Or were they as precious and fancy as Dali was, uptown in his suite at the St. Regis? Who would a generation of Greenwich Village artists be- Pollock, the de Koonings, Motherwell- if these European heavy hitters had not had to flee f -acism? If they had stayed put in their flats and allowed their influence to reach American artists only through books and articles and exhibitions?

I sipped the rest of my latte and reconsidered. Picasso had never come to New York and became huge in his lifetime, and commercially explosive posthumously. When he died, his estate was estimated at to equal $1.5 billion in 2025 dollars. Insane for an artist. Would it have been two billion if he had come to New York? It had surprised me when I first heard that he hadn’t. I assumed that any artist, especially one that was labeled a degenerate by the Germans, would have fled Europe on the first ship out. Instead, he decided to weather out the war in his Paris studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, despite the German occupation and stark conditions they brought with them. He saw his refusal to leave his home as an act of rebellion, but was lucky that his enormous fame kept him relatively safe throughout the war. Even after the war, he didn’t consider coming to New York. It’s not that he wasn’t invited. He consistently declined invitations for speaking engagements and exhibitions, pledging undying devotion to Europe, though no one had asked him to.

I paid my check and decided to walk over to the Picasso sculpture that is a couple blocks from Reggio on NYU’s campus. I love this walk for its remnants of New York before. Stopping to read the plaque on the pizza place that used to be San Remo. Wondering if I’ll ever have that glass of wine I’ve been meaning to have at Minetta Tavern since it got fancy, or at Monte’s Italian, which I haven’t been in even though it is even older than Reggio and that is usually my jam. Left on Bleecker past the Bitter End and the good Georgian place. Cross Laguardia and turn right after the mural of Greenwich Village bohemia on the supermarket and into the University Village complex, where the Picasso sculpture sits between IM Pei’s modernist Silver Towers condos. Pei himself chose Picasso, who in turn hired Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar to translate a 1954 bust of a young woman named Sylvette David into sixty tons of sand-blasted concrete. Picasso is not one of my favorites. It’s not even the egregious way he was a parasite to women (researching what he did to Fernande Olivier for I’m Not Your Muse required a cool down period after every session). Much of his work is not my thing. But since he was so incredibly varied in style during his long and lucrative career, I do have some faves, and this giant sculpture is one of them. I would like to credit IM Pei, the gargantuan head in concrete echoes the modernist lines of the buildings behind her. It really is an optical feast, especially when New York unfolds around it in children and dogs and soccer balls. It is really a sight.

I saw the original once. The Bust of Sylvette, cut from flimsy metal, displayed in a glass vitrine about half way up the Guggenheim spiral. It looked small and fragile. At this scale, the sculpture is unremarkable. The rumored tension between Picasso and the model, a beautiful young neighbor of his on the Côte dAzur who was not at all interested in his advances, was evident. He had not at all tried to make her look seductive. To hell with the male gaze. If he she did not look at him with bedroom eyes, she would not look at his audience that way. She looks unenthused at best.

But in large scale, Sylvette’s disinterest is lost in concrete. The focus shifts. I see her as a whole, lines and angles interacting with Pei’s masterpieces behind her. It makes for a dynamic tableau in this corner of Manhattan. It feels special, unlike the fragile portrait in the vitrine.

I sat there for a bit and watched the scene come alive. A French bulldog, walking from the direction of Washington Square Park, proudly showing off a very large stick between his teeth. Two kids playing soccer on the lawn, the base of Sylvette’s neck their makeshift goal that they kick the ball into over and over. It makes a loud thunk each time. A bicyclist bouncing along the cobblestones and across Houston down Wooster and out of sight. The arrival of dusk, when the cobblestones begin to sparkle with the reflected streetlight, and the windows of the cast iron buildings of Soho begin to glow. I can’t believe Picasso would choose to miss this.

Pablo Picasso/Carl Nesjar, Bust of Sylvette, 1968, University Village, 505

La Guardia Place

Caffe Reggio, 119 Macdougal Street

And I guess I sort of did. Living on Bedford Avenue in the aughts was perhaps the closest thing to the former scenario (enclave by circumstance) I have experienced. For a wonderful few years everything was outside my door- artists and galleries, musicians, writers and designers, walking, mixing, talking and supporting each other. Rent was cheaper than Manhattan, and there was a free beer or pizza to be had every couple blocks. I lived with an artist, so our apartment was often a gathering place of artists, musicians and writers in town. I would sit on my porch (across from one of those free pizza bars that kept us fed), and the world would come to me. I produced so many things during those years- articles and art shows, theme parties, book projects and mixers, costumes and crafts, and lists of ideas, of which some are only coming to fruition now. When the good times ended, meaning we all got priced out as Williamsburg morphed into luxury high rises and designer stores (I acknowledge my role in that gentrification, the “magic” era I speak of was a step of gentrification itself. I like to think the arty creative era we lead was more valuable to culture than the current capitalist luxury, but gentrification is gentrification.) I know there are still pockets of artists here, studio buildings in places like Bushwick and Gowanus, and perhaps the vibe is the same for them. But to me, that sense of artistic community is something I have not felt in a long time. It saddens me. So, I do what I always do- I take a walk in the past.

It is no secret that I love Paris, probably to the point of obsession. I just feel good there. I will likely live there someday. Although there are many things that draw me to that city (French butter being a major one), the thing I love best is probably their cultural respect for art and artists that has continued throughout time. Going back to my mention of planned artist enclaves, Paris is still thriving with them. As a culture, they have made spaces for artists to work and live a priority, seeing the cultural value of supporting creative endeavors. New York was once one of these places. There are a handful of studio buildings and neighborhoods, designed for artists to live and work, that were established around the city. Though, they are now just expensive real estate, they were initially created to attract creatives and allow them to thrive.

One of the earliest artist enclaves was in an unlikely place- East 19^th Street. When 19^thcentury developer Samuel B. Ruggles began planning the Gramercy Park area in the 1830s, the neighborhood was meant as a center for New York’s refined families. But by 1900, the townhomes building on the surrounding streets were beginning to decay- until the creatives moved in.

Leading the charge was English architect Frederick Sterner (he designed what is now the Explorer’s Club), who transformed the drab 1830s brick townhouse at #139 into the Arts and Crafts-ish stucco and mosaic façade that the current owners have preserved today. Others followed suit, and one by one the aging townhomes were giving artistic and ornate face lifts, that echoed the aesthetics and sensibilities of the (well to do) artists who were buying them up. By 1914, the stretch of East 19^th between Irving Place and 3^rd Avenue was simply known as the Block Beautiful, for the alterations and ornamentation that set it apart from neighboring blocks of brick rowhomes.

As I’ve droned on about in other publications, in 2009, after being let go from an intense Chelsea gallery job, I spent weeks upon months wandering the city, allowing myself to observe and study its art and architecture with my newfound time. I then went home and filed my findings on an excel spreadsheet. I happened upon East 19^thon one of these jaunts on one of those days when I was just choosing a street and walking its entirety from east to west, west to east, and quickly took note of several of the residences that would appear in my book Art Hiding in New York over a decade later. (I must say, although being fired was a real mind fuck, having this time to just explore and observe was probably one of the turning points of my life.)

Though I have written two absolutely excellent books since (even if today’s climate has ZERO interest in learning about amazing women), Art Hiding in New York has remained my hit, and my royalties earner. And so I’ve been revisiting my own work, in hopes of gaining inspiration from myself in this impossible time, when I turned a walk around town turned into a best seller.

Back to the past I go, both mine and the city’s. After rereading about the Block Beautiful, I wanted to experience it again as I first did. I got off the L at First Ave and made my way north where East 19^th is swallowed by the Stuy Town complex to the east. I crossed the unremarkable Third Avenue and immediately noticed a change in vibe. Swirls of wrought iron, flecks of stained glass, dappled sunlight casting shapes through thick trees, and a quiet serenity that contrasted the noise of cars barreling down the avenue. The Block Beautiful. I looked up and saw the townhouses topped with enormous windows- the art studios of the past. And with the National Arts Club just a few blocks away, it was the prime location for a pretty little artists enclave.

As I slowly (very slowly) made my way west, I came across the giraffed archways of #147 that began my intrigue so many years ago. At one time, this house was the entryway to the social center of the high society arts community in New York, the home of Robert Winthrop Chanler. Thought you probably haven’t heard of him, Chanler was mural artist who came from a long line of New York blue bloods-with family lines meshed in the Astors, Stuyvesants, Delanos, and Winthrops. After the requisite stint in Paris studying art in the 1890s, he moved to New York and set up shop, famously hanging his work at the first Armory Show in 1913. His success was largely due to his familial connections, his main patrons were also top society: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Mai Rogers Coe who commissioned murals for their Long Island estates. In 1911, he hired Sterner to combine the adjacent row homes on East 19th into his studio and residence that he called the House of Fantasy- the perfect setting for his legendary parties that would last sometimes for days. His guests would pass under the giraffes to join the company of caged sloths and monkeys inside his home, as ravens and toucans squawked along with the chatter, while angelfish, crabs, seahorses, eels, and turtles intermingled in his private pool. Not exactly PETA-friendly, but on par with Old New York eccentricity. Chanler’s work echoed these parties- he became known for painting elaborate animal scenes on large screens, one of which can be seen in the visual storage of the American Wing at The Met. He also sculpted the incredible fireplace at Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s studio that is now the New York Studio School.

I stood in front of Chanler’s former home, trying to imagine the outlandish outfits his guests must have worn to impress (oh to be at those parties!) and the conversations had, before meandering down the rest of the block until I hit Irving. I passed Sterner’s home at 139, and smiled that the mosaic work he had installed above the front door was still in tact. I gave an approving look at the jockey statues next door, wondering if they’d always been there or if they were relics from the 21 Club (I never made it there, so mad at myself), tried to get a good look at the Gothic-detailed house on the corner that is under construction (no dice), then crossed the street to take in the cute little carriage house that descendants of Winston Churchill are said to have lived in sometime after it was converted to a residence in the late 1800s. It sold earlier this yearfor $7 million.

Nearly next door at 128, I noticed a round red placard, indicating that Lincoln Kirstein, an associate of George Balanchine, lived there. (I truly wish New York would invest in these more, finding them all over Paris and London is one of my favorite nerdy things to do). I had never heard of him, so I leaned against a tree and did some googling. Kirstein was an all-around arts guy who helped to found the School of American Ballet with Balanchine, and the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, which later morphed into MoMA. Kirstein’s wife Fedelma Cadmus (her brother Paul was an amazing queer artist whose work reminds me a little of Tom of Finland) was supportive of her husband’s bisexuality, and invited his lovers to live with them here in their “midget mansion” as they called it in the 1950s. During the era of Chanler, famed vocal coaches William Nelson Burritt and his wife Anna Castle lived there, and are responsible for transforming the aging 19^th century brick to coincide with the Block Beautiful vibe.

When I was tired of looking at my phone, I kept walking. I wanted to see the doorway that Helen Hayes, Lillian Gish, Ethel Barrymore, and Theda Bara had walked through every day when each had lived in the Tudor-style apartment building in the middle of the block, also built by Sterner. As a kid I loved old movies, and was completely struck by Bara’s vampy style. I wondered if she ever wandered from her apartment over to Pete’s Tavern for a drink.

After loitering on that same block for probably thirty minutes, I noticed the flicker of curtains in more than one house around me, so I decided to let the neighbors relax. (If only they’d known I was a nerd and not trying to case their homes, maybe they would have let me in for a look?) My last stop was the home of painter George Bellows. I have always loved his work- he painted the starkness of New York City life in the early 1900s, but with a contrasting harsh vigor, and colorful softness that I have always found poetic. New York is both of those things. Bellows moved his family to #146 in 1910. Instead of prettying the façade up to go along with the Block Beautiful trend, he converted the attic into an art studio by opening it up and replacing a wall with massive north-facing studio windows. What a dream. It was here that he developed his style, painting both his city scenes that showed the struggles of the working class, and his later portraiture meant to show the ease of the upper class. Although he was popular, Bellows’ works were often criticized for being “too real” in his depiction of social and political themes-the critics felt that the truth hurt too much. Bellows lived and worked here with his wife and daughters until his death due to complications from appendicitis at age forty-three in 1925.

I was happy to see that his home also had a historical plaque with his name, and wondered what it was like to look out of his studio window onto the beautiful little block of fellow artists.

Whenever I need to clear my mind (or empty it completely), I head for a beautiful room. Some walk in nature, some meditate. I ogle history. Just a couple minutes spent in one of my faves- the Gallery of Tiffany Lamps at the New York Historical Society, the period rooms at the Met, the Red Room by Hildreth Meiere in Printemps at One Wall Street, the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library,the Venetian Room in Villa Albertine (technically you can only peak your head in), the atrium at The Beekman, the East Room Morgan Library, any room by Rafael Guastavino- and I am refreshed, inspired and dreaming about the past (instead of whatever mess I am dealing with in the present).

On a recent Saturday, I was having a particularly anxious Lonely New York Day. You know, the kind where you’re fully aware that you could step out your door and do just about anything- drink a spritz on a 1929 lightship, visit the grave of Duke Ellington, go to a free show in Tompkins Square Park, see Julio Torres emerge from a stage made of paper, visit the largest mausoleum in the United States, anything! The city is your oyster! But the idea of going by yourself somehow causes an anxious pit to form in your stomach, one so uncomfortable that you either spend the day in bed clutching your abdomen, or just fucking go out. On this particular Saturday, the stomach clutching was making me feel worse, so I flipped around the internet to find a beautiful room to go twirl around in and clear my head of the icks.

I decided on the National Arts Club, a favorite “free” spot that is one of the only publicly accessible (though much of it is restricted to members only) Gilded Age mansions that you may recognize from the cover of Art Hiding in New York. They also had an interesting show going on called Influence and Identity, Twentieth Century Portrait Photography from the Bank of America Collection. It promised 83 gorgeous black and white portraits of artists, writers, musicians and leaders of last century, by some of my favorite photographers, including Gisèle Freund, Yousuf Karsh, Imogen Cunningham and Brassaï. It would do the trick.

I got off the L at Third, and headed east to Irving Place, a historic and small street that connects Fourteenth Street and Gramercy Park along five historic blocks. Though it is short, it is mighty, lined with quaint row homes (one of which has a plaque claiming to have housed Washington Irving, though it has been proven it belonged instead to his nephew), the city’s oldest bar Pete’s Tavern, the concert venue Irving Plaza, glitzy cocktail bar Dear Irving, adorable Lady Mendl’s, Tea salon, and the “viral” gelato place where TikTok New Yorkers wait in line forever to make their required gelato content (to be fair, it is really excellent gelato). I tried to hide my scowl as I passed seventy or so of them waiting in line as I headed to Gramercy Park South.

When the swamp in the center of Gramercy farm was drained to build Gramercy Park in the late 1830s (it is said that it took over one million horse drawn cart loads of sludge to drain), Central Park was still years away. New York was slowly expanding north passed Fourteenth Street, and developer Samuel B. Ruggles saw the opportunity to use parkland as a lure for the wealthy. Elegant homes and apartment buildings were designed to line the gated garden that would become the city’s first private park (the only other being Sunnyside Gardens Park in Queens). Soon, the powerful and elite from politics, business, arts and letters began to populate or frequent the area around the par. They never left. Along with the National Arts Club, The Players Club (I’ve never been!), which opened in 1888 by the great Shakespearean actor and brother to Lincoln assassin Edwin Booth, added to the neighborhood social prestige in addition to its architecture. The apartments continue to be some of the city’s most coveted and most expensive, largely because they come with access to a coveted key to the park. Many of the rowhomes still look much like they did at the height of the Gilded Age.

I went in one once. I was cajoled into “curating” a charity event at the home of a well-known artist that I had kind of heard of. (This really meant finding artists willing to donate paintings in exchange for an invite to the party with a promise of the potential of meeting “important people.” The only “famous” person I recognized was Ross from Friends.) I said yes when I saw the address- a giant townhouse a couple doors down from the National Arts Club, that according to the internet had not been chopped up into smaller apartments. I had to see it.

When I walked in, I felt like I was on a movie set (this was pre-Gilded Age the HBO show, but the same vibes). Grand staircase, oversized sculpture, biggest crystal chandelier I’d ever seen- it was a time capsule. Gorgeous. I was pointed up the curving grand staircase for the event, where I found myself in literal hell (for a history buff like myself). The evening’s host, who I now assumed was an arrogant artist, had brazenly used every inch of the house as his painting studio. Thick paint splatters of all colors covered the original herringbone wood floors, the carved mouldings of fruit and flowers that outlined the wooden wall panels, the original Rococo doorknobs, even the sunburst-patterned cast iron floor grates. Paint. Was. Everywhere. It was not cute. It was not like wearing your painty pants to the bar to appear interesting. It was utter disrespect and someone who called themselves an artist should have known better.

Back on earth, I headed to the southeast corner of the park before going into the Arts Club. I’d made a habit of poking my head through the wrought iron fence to stare at Alexander Calder’s mobile Janey Waney, which was cruelly removed forever in 2021. It was one of Calder’s mobiles, splindly red-orange base, delicately balancing an orbit of two white dots and two guitar pics in blue and yellow. I loved to see it against the green of spring and summer, the grey of fall, and my favorite, glowing against the white of winter. There was no doubt I wanted to include it in my book Art Nerd New York, and I was excited when the Block Association told me that Janey Waney was a permanent installation, apart from the occasional loan to sculpture exhibitions around the world. And so, in the book Janey Waney went. One year after the book came out, the sculpture was sold and removed. I have obviously taken it personally (it irks me to the depths of my soul that my book is now incorrect, and don’t get me started on the Calder stabile on the back cover). So now, I metabolize my disappointment by paying my respects to its empty space whenever I am in the neighborhood. It is probably the closest to a meditation that my busy brain can muster. After a quick moment of silence, I skipped across the street, past the ornate balcony of The Players Club, and to my destination next door.

The National Arts Club has called the Samuel J. Tilden mansion at 15 Gramercy Park South home since 1906. Tilden was a former governor of New York, who had the vision to combine two granite townhouses built in 1845 into one massive mansion. So very Gilded Age of him. He hired Calvert Vaux to make the transformation, and spared no expense on the interiors or exteriors. Everything is heavily ornamented, carved of stone or exotic woods, finished with gilt, or made of stained glass. When the Arts Club moved in, they kept it intact.

Much of Tilden’s Gilded eye is reserved for club members only, but the public is invited to take a have a little taste. I always start in the modern, white-walled basement galleries which are usually rented by area art groups (on this day there was a lovely exhibition of chalk and pastel works). Downstairs, there are some hints of the past, but after Tilden, as he used the basement as a massive wine cellar. There are fireplaces, stained glass and sculptures to ogle, as well as a quaint vintage public restroom that reminds me of a strip club dressing room in an 80s movie, but in a good way (go see what I mean).

The upstairs is where the good stuff is (and the photo exhibition). The best pretty place the public can access is a gorgeous little lounge on the other side of the stairs. A seating area decorated with portraits of past club members, it is also flanked by a masterpiece commissioned by Tilden- a massive original stained glass wall by John La Farge. It may not be the gorgeous member rooms, but the little lounge is a beautiful consolation prize. And at that moment, it was mine. I took advantage and sat on one of the couches and zoned out for a few minutes, trying to soak up whatever art history ghost remnants I could.

When other visitors started to file in to take videos, I broke my trance and heading over to the ballroom gallery. I’ve seen some great shows in that room by young painters and independent curators, but I this was my first corporate collection in the space. I tend to grimace when I think about corporations hoarding art for investment. I realize I am unrealistic in my idealism that art should be for appreciation only. However, when it comes time for the glorious, mandated days when corporate collections have to share their treasures with peons like myself (to get their big old tax break), my grimace turns to a smile. Though corporate hoarding gives me the icks, these collections are always pristine, carefully preserved and restored, and usually full of gems. Sometimes I feel it’s a win-win. Sometimes.

The photo show was actually incredible- great portraits from a time when photography still had integrity that you could feel. I ended the exhibition by eavesdropping on the guided tour that was forming in the center of the room. I learned two cool things- that the ballroom was once lit by skylights that had been tarred over for black out drills in World War II, and that it was community day, which meant all of the private club rooms were open for the public to explore! Jackpot!!

I’d like to think I walked briskly, but I probably bounced into the member rooms when I heard they were open to little old me. It had been well over a decade since I set foot in their gorgeousness, during a time when I was probably more interested in the open bar party than the pretty room. Now that that had flip flopped, I had to take advantage- before the tour group ruined it.

For a couple minutes, I had the bar room to myself. I stood there and just looked up, staring at every inch of the insane stained-glass dome above. I think I’ve been telling people that it was by Louis Comfort Tiffany for years, but I stand corrected after reading the nearby wall plaque. Originally made for Tilden’s library, the exquisite dome of tiny pieces of colored glass in floral patterns was in fact by stained glass master Donald MacDonald (who I learned made the effort to change his surname from McDonald in 1877, but not his first?). It was even more impressive than the last time I saw it during an over-crowded party years ago. It was around a wacky time in NAC history when its president was on the verge of being outside for doing strange behavior. He’d been frequently spotted around the neighborhood in physical fights with his roommate/identical twin brother, that often resulted in bruises and injuries of both. They lived in one of the apartments upstairs for an extremely discounted rate, and had began using the other rooms and apartments to hoard antiques and junk. The final blow was probably when he dumped dozens of dead exotic finches (poor guys) inside Gramercy Park, which was found by a very upset neighbor while taking her morning walk with her dog. He did throw a really good party. The club has since straightened out its affairs.

I could hear the tour guide giving a summary about the show and knew I only had a couple minutes tops before they began to trickle in and ruin my solitude. I took in as much as I could; the paintings by past members (a great portrait of Gordon Parks from 1971 by Victoria Vanderbilt), Art Nouveau lamps and sculptures, carved fireplaces, and ornate ceilings that would have been called gorgeous if they weren’t under the same roof as Don MacDon’s masterpiece. The lounges were set up in groupings of Victorian couches and settees as if waiting for private conversations about art and history. I thought about sitting on one, then thought the better of it and walked to the front bay window to take in the view of Gramercy Park as members saw it a hundred years ago. A woman from the tour group appeared to my left, then another on my right, to see what I was looking at.

I left the arts club and found the gelato line had dwindled down to only five people. I had pistachio. Delicious.

National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South

Caffè Panna, 77 Irving Place

The last two essays are a part of a new series I am working on, New York Time Traveler- an exploration of the magic of the city combined with my vast research from my years of writing articles and books. Full of facts, yet casual, I’ll take you on a jaunt through New York City’s past, then pull you into the present. It will feature free content, as well as subscriber-only content in the months to come. If you are a paid subscriber to I’m Still Not Your Muse, you will have access to a free subscriber account for New York Time Traveler as well. I appreciate you.

Take a ride in my time machine. Coming with its own content soon. I’d love it if you subscribed here.

So, I got on the M. And then the B. An hour and six minutes later I emerged on an unfamiliar corner of 125^thStreet. I thought I was walking a straight shot west, but somehow found myself humbled by huffing and puffing up six flights of clunky stone stairs in Morningside Park. Still breathless, and reminded I need to exercise more, I stumbled my way across West 122^nd until I found an ancient Greek temple rising out of Riverside Park.

The plaza in front of the Tomb’s entrance was a chaotic tangle of four or five simultaneous kickball games, played in a frenzy by twenty or so neighborhood kids. Little legs and kick balls everywhere. I had to figure out how to best frogger through the pandemonium, and could not for the life of me see a path. I decided to wait for Matt from across the plaza and assessed my surroundings from a distance. I didn’t expect it to be so big*. It’s no secret that I love cemeteries; I’d seen my fair share of final resting places that looked like ornately gorgeous mini mansions, but this was ridiculous. This wasn’t a mausoleum. This was the Jefferson Memorial’s little brother squeezed onto a New York City block. Ulysses S. Grant must have had a lot of fans. This corner of Riverside Park is particularly beautiful- the Hudson River and a view of the Palisades is on the left, the sprawling Neo-Gothic Riverside Church to the right, and a thicket of trees, including Japanese cherry varietals and gingko, frame the scene. It felt perfectly serene (twenty years in New York also means I can tune out the kickball chaos that began to encircle me just fine).

With the kickball tangle in front of me, I scanned the building. A dozen or so spindly columns surrounded the base of a dome. They looked delicate- probably because there were so many, and the ceiling they met was riddled with large swaths of paint I could see flaking even from far away. As I traced them with my eyes past their curled ionic tops, I noticed there were even more- a frieze of inset columns, each topped with what I assume are eagles, decoratively supporting the dome’s peak. I let my eyes fall to the pendentive; a row of laurel wreaths at the base, with two figures sitting with their backs to some sort of plaque with words I could not make out, chiseled into the marble between them. By now, the kickball chaos had dwindled to just two children playing between the two large eagle sculptures on either side of the stairs. It was safe to cross the plaza to get a closer look at the plaque.

LET US HAVE PEACE

Grant’s message was clear. Just then, the seventy-two bells of The Riverside Church to my back rang out cinematically in a roar. I closed my eyes. Peace sounded really nice right about now.

When I opened my eyes, I tried to imagine the plaza on the tomb’s dedication day; April 27, 1897, which would have been Grant’s 75^thbirthday had he not died from throat cancer 12 years before. I’d read on that day, nearly one million spectators crowded the wooden grandstand bleachers that were set up along both sides of Riverside Drive that straddle the park, to watch nearly 60,000 West Point corps and veterans marching in a parade up the Upper West Side to the mausoleum for the dedication ceremony given by President William McKinley. A big affair. They wouldn’t have heard the medley of bells from across the street, the massive church was commissioned by John D. Rockefeller Jr in 1930, but they would have seen the same view of the Palisades that was over my left shoulder. As I tried to imagine the chaos of a million top hats surrounding me, I saw Matt walk into the mausoleum without spotting me. Time to finally go in.

Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? No one!

Although I repeated that old 1930s “riddle” many times as a kid (what can I say, I was an old soul into Shirley Temple and Betty Grable movies), I never truly understood exactly what it meant. I didn’t actually think it was funny either, but assumed that because Groucho Marx repeated it, it must be. I walked up the stairs and through the glass doors to find Matt completely alone, standing before a circular marble railing that ran along the perimeter of a very large whole in the floor at the center of the room. We hugged, then looked over the railing. There they were, Ulysess and Julia, in matching his and hers red granite sarcophagi, set on a plinth in a chamber below us, but not “buried”. Hilarious. A flash of light below made me jump. It belonged to the Parks Ranger assigned to the tomb, who looked less than enthused that we were interrupting his day. Access to the lower crypt chamber was closed by those stanchions that looks like stretched seatbelts, so we had to make do with the view from above. As the ranger shone his flashlight around, I could see that the tombs were flanked by several bronze busts, which I later learned were of Union Army generals, installed as part of the Federal Art Project in the mid 1930s. Looking up, I was met with more flaking paint (really, it was everywhere), several honey- lemon cough drop colored windows, and three half-moon shaped mosaics depicting important scenes in Grant’s life that were designed by Allyn Cox in the 1960s that I really liked.

We took our time and nerded out a bit, Matt flexing his architecture muscles, pointing out design elements and similarities to the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, which had been the inspiration for the winning design that John Hemenway Duncan had submitted to the architectural competition that the Grant Monument Association had staged in 1890. And then three people, a grandfather and his two grandsons, appeared out of nowhere- aka one of the circular antechambers that flanked either side of the forbidden seatbelt-blocked staircase that led down to the crypt. We made our way into each one to find clusters of flags from important battles that Grant fought, with corresponding hand painted maps on the walls and small domed ceilings crusted with flaking paint.

After we got our fill of mosaics, paint flakes and battle flags, we thanked the ranger on duty (who wordlessly gave us a nod) and went out the glass doors and down the stairs to see what the cough drop windows looked like from the outside. As we rounded the side of the building, we both smile-screamed at the sight of a glittering colorful mosaic bench that stretched like a lumpy snake all around the low wall that boxed in the plaza surrounding the tomb. My brief googling from the day before did not turn up any pictures of this! That rare dopamine felt when “discovering” something new hit us both, and we giggled as we ran to get a closer look. Scenes of Grant’s life bled into flowers and trees, an elephant in the jungle, penguins and eskimos, a princess and dragon before a castle, portraits of Munsee Lenape and Wappinger chiefs who had inhabited the area in the 18^thcentury, New York symbols like taxi cabs and apples, and a larger and life nude couple, glopped up and down around the perimeter of the plaza in lumpy glittering mirror chunks and broken tile. It reminded me of Antoni Gaudi’s Parc Guell I’d seen in Barcelona over twenty years ago. It was whimsical and special and felt even more so because we had not ruined the surprise by over-Googling before we got there.

We took our sweet time, talking at first about the different scenes along the bench, and then allowing ourselves to Google a little bit to find out it was a community project lead by artist Pedro Silva from 1972 to 1974 called the Mosaic Rolling Bench. It was four hundred feet long. As we made our way around, we talked about how it was strange that such a huge mausoleum (the largest in the world) was for one singular president. I remembered that the father of one of the women I researched and wrote about for my last book (I’m Not Your Muse, Morgan Library visionary Belle da Costa Greene,) Richard Theodore Greener, was the secretary of the Grant Monument Association. Greener was a pioneering African American scholar, activist and the first African American to graduate from Harvard. He had also personally brought in 90,000 donations for the construction of the Tomb for Grant. We concluded that Grant was probably worthy of this mausoleum of magnitude at the time.

After we examined nearly every inch of the mosaic bench, we walked ten blocks south and turned east and made our way to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, with a quick stop to find the dog sculpture that I’d recently learned on Instagram was named after my friend Martha Cooper on the façade of St. John the Divine (thanks Wven). We didn’t go in this time because the entry fee is $16.50, and with times being tough, we decided to save our pennies for something sugary and decadent. Over Hungarian Coffee (almond syrup, whipped cream, and a heavy shaking of cinnamon) and sweets (Napoleon for me, flourless chocolate cake for Matt), we read on my phone that Park and Cemetery magazine wrote in May 1897 that Grant’s Tomb was “an appropriate memorial to a man worthy of a nation’s tribute.” After we stopped giggling that there was a magazine called Park and Cemetery, we agreed that they probably had a point.

It was a good day.

Grant’s Tomb, W 122nd St &, Riverside Dr

The Hungarian Pastry Shop, 1030 Amsterdam Ave

St John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave

* that’s what she said