A Rainy Day, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA

 

It was a cloudy, humid, rainy day so an uptown trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) seemed a good way to spend it mostly indoors. I took a brief detour into this Upper West Side neighborhood for this street scene - it reminded me of the Back Bay neighborhood in Boston - but Boston has broader sidewalks - which I prefer.



I rode a "C" train the 50+ blocks uptown to 86th street and then walked the half mile across Central Park, umbrella overhead, to the Museum.

And even on mid-day in mid-week, the MET was full of people. Not unpleasantly full but still, plenty of humans.



I'm not really a big museum goer and frankly, I found this one just plain overwhelming and the floor layout and galleries were incomprehensible to me. The collection includes works of art among the finest in the world and it was difficult to take it all in for my fine art challenged brain. 

Most if not all of their collection is online so I took very few photos with my camera but, as every school kid in my generation likely recalls, this picture of George Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze in 1851 caught my eye just for its size and scale and deja vu of youth. (And yes, for you literary types, I knowingly missed the diacritical marks on my use of "deja vu").



After the MET, I walked east through part of the Upper East Side neighborhood to catch a subway ride back. Passing down this street, I was struck by this beautiful awning. It seemed so French I thought for a moment I was in Paris.



I took a "6" train down Lexington Avenue the 50+ blocks to 33rd street and then walked back west to my starting point. I am particularly enamored of these delightfully artistic inlaid small tile station names on the white tile walls.  I'll have a separate blog post about them in a few days.

I think they used chocolate brown colored paint combined with rust for this look.

Speaking of age, I haven't noticed very many older folks like me on the subway when I was riding. And no one else had shorts with black socks. Just sayin.'  (They were low socks, not knee socks, I'm not that old yet).