photo: keiko niwa / tenement museum
The Tenement Museum of New
York provides an essential perspective on America’ s immigrant history. If you dip from the European gene pool, it’ s pretty likely some relative in your past spent time in what was New York’ s teeming Lower East Side. For outof-towners, the museum demonstrates how so many millions suffered tough conditions just to be American. For New Yorkers, it’ s a way to understand how tenement structures became such a staple of city architecture. tenement. org photo: chris devers / creative commons
New York CITY
The big museums— the Met, MOMA, the Whitney, et al— are wonderfully absorbing, but nowadays I more often head for the smaller places that I’ ve missed.
1.1 miles from Penn Stn.
The Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows is a NYC-must, if for no other reason than to see the Panorama of the City of New York, a gigantic, 3-D mapping of municipal geography. This massive exhibition was created for the 1964 World’ s Fair and features a dawn-to-dusk lighting scheme and landing airplanes, as well as the opportunity to adopt your own piece of island real estate for a $ 50 donation. What a bargain! queensmuseum. org
The New York Botanical Garden is a Bronx classic. Calvert Vaux and the Olmsteds— the designers who created Central Park— laid out this verdant, 250-acre landscape 125- years ago on behalf of botanist Nathaniel Lord Britton, who believed New York should have its own version of London’ s Royal Botanic Gardens. Indeed, the grandeur and elegance of the buildings and esplanades transport you to a more graceful era. But walk in the oldgrowth forest, a last vestige of virgin east coast wood land, to experience what the wilder ness was like before Gotham was born. nybg. org
58 minute subway ride from Penn Stn.
The Louis Armstrong House
Museum is the place to begin your Satchmo education. Armstrong was one of the fundamental artists of American jazz. Take the short subway ride from Grand Central to visit the home in Flushing, Queens where he lived and died. It’ s packed with memorabilia that helps in the understanding of this influential trumpeter and the great music he created. LouisArmstrongHouse. org
31 minute subway ride from Penn Stn. 36 minute subway ride from Penn Stn. photo: library of congress
long island
Sagamore Hill National Historic
Site sits upon a grassy rise near the beaches of Oyster Bay. Home to one of my real heroes— 26th President Theodore Roosevelt— it’ s an elegant yet understated Victorian structure that remains in much the state that Roosevelt left it when, in 1919, he died in the upstairs guest room. TR’ s legend has grown larger-than-life during the last century so it’ s refreshing to walk through this comfortable home, sensing the simpler man behind the myth. Yes, there is much that is iconic: dozens of animal-skin rugs, trophy heads, and elephant tusks, gifts from heads of state and historical memorabilia, but even more impressive is the poignant and bookish truth of the man. TR was an astonishing reader and writer, a devoted husband and father, and an American patriot. nysm. nysed. gov
35.6 mi. from Penn Stn.; 55 min. via LIRR; 5.4 mi. from Syosset LIRR Stn. photo: mick hales / new york botanical garden
The Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, Long Island celebrates man’ s glorious but turbulent journey to the skies and beyond, and com memo rates the burgeoning aviation industry that once flourished on Long Island, develop ing much of the fundamental technology that made modern flight possible. The guides are enthused, the exhibits fascinating. And I had no idea that the Apollo Lunar Modules were constructed twenty minutes away in Bethpage! The Cradle of Aviation displays the LM-13, slated for Apollo 19. For a moon-child like me, who watched in awe as Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969... what a thrill. cradleofaviation. org
26.2 mi. from Penn Stn.; 45 min. via LIRR; 2.0 mi. from Garden City LIRR Stn.
Long Island’ s Historic Gold Coast Mansions were created by the wealthy industrialists of the early 20th century and were immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’ s The Great Gatsby. Tour grand estates like Oheka Castle in Huntington, Chelsea Mansion in East Norwich, Coe Hall and Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay and Falaise in Sands Point. historiclongisland. com
33.9 mi. from Penn Station; 55 min. via LIRR; 4.5 mi. from Garden City LIRR Stn.
Coe Hall
NY MUSEUMS BY RAIL 3