A Weekend in New York City

Mom had a COMAP board meeting in New York, where Damian and I joined her last weekend. He and I flew in on Friday evening just in time for a deluxe hamburger dinner at Rare followed by a walk over to the J.P. Morgan Library (the only museum in NYC that's open and free on Friday nights).
After looking at some rare books, manuscripts, and musical scores, we were offered free $45 tickets in the front row of their auditorium to see the St Luke's Chamber Ensemble, a Grammy Award-winning classical music group. Such accidental intersecting encounters with culture happen only in places like New York! Finally we repaired to the Fitzpatrick Hotel on Lexington and 57th St for the night.

The next morning, armed with MetroCards for the subway, we toured the Lower East Tenement Museum, where 16-year-old Victoria Coffino took us back to 1916 to welcome us to her 3-room 350SF tenement apartment where her family of 8 lived, ate, and slept for $15 in rent per month. A bonus was the fantastic gelato shop next door (current day, at $5 for a medium cup). Then we went up to Times Square and joined Mom and several of her COMAP colleagues to see "Billy Elliot" at the Imperial Theatre. It was FANTASTIC - great story, sets, choreography, singing and dancing. The young man who played Billy was unbelieveable. Finally, we all had dinner at the Solera tapas bar near our hotel, where the waiters kept mixing up our orders but we nevertheless enjoyed dishes like soft shell crab and lamb chops.


On Sunday we checked out the Rose Space Center at the AMNH, watching the "Cosmic Collisions" planetarium show and "The Big Bang" exhibit. Then we picked up Mom, checked out, and took a cab over to Flushing, Queens to visit the New York Hall of Science. This is a totally hands-on science center on the site of the old 1964 World's Fair, Shea Stadium (and now Citi Field), and the US Tennis Center where the U.S. Open championships are held every year. We wound up our visit by having soup dumplings at the original Joe's Shanghai in downtown Flushing (where half the population is foreign-born) before heading home from nearby LaGuardia Airport.