Daily Blague

Last Friday, summer hours took effect in New York offices with a creative bent. The owners have given up resisting the irresistible pull of summer weekends, and many offices close at lunch. So, this afternoon, Ms NOLA and I are going to pick up where we left off last summer, with a visit to the Cloisters.

I hadn't been to the Cloisters in years before last August's junket. I noticed a few changes, but it was still what was my favorite place to be when I was eighteen or so. Now that I've explored authentically medieval sites in London and Paris, I remain rooted in Manhattan when I visit the museum, even when I'm crossing the reconstitution of stones that is the Chapter House. I am very much aware that the structure is about ten years older than I am, a gift of the John D Rockefeller, Jr. The ancient, but very familiar objects - familiar because I stared at them so hard when I was young - remind me of me, as I was long ago; like hit songs from the past, they conjure up expectations and misconceptions alike.

No, the draw to the Cloisters is Fort Tryon Park, in which the museum is situated. Blanketing some of the highest elevations on the island, with trim perennial gardens and dense woodlands, the park will serve as a satisfactory substitute for the hardly less faux countryside in which I grew up in Westchester. You can hear the city bustle if you try, but the summer insects make more agreeable music. The panorama of the Hudson is majestic, almost primeval, thanks again to the Rockefellers, who bought up the New Jersey bank north of the George Washington Bridge (before there was a bridge, I think) and then presented Palisades Park to the State of New Jersey. The only structure clearly visible from Fort Tryon Park is a rather routine religious looking building, an Episcopal monastery I am told, endowed by the grandees to provide an visual echo from across the river.

If I'm lucky, it will have rained (and stopped raining) before we arrive, and the air will be heavy with earth. That is the smell I miss most in Yorkville. Even in Central Park, there are two many internal combustion engines in the neighborhood for the smell of earth to come through.

Continue reading about Summer Hours at Portico.