Jane’s Walks (May 4 and 5, 2019)

Saturday, May 4
9:00am – Riverside Park – 72nd Street and Riverside Drive, by the Eleanor Roosevelt statue

The tour guide for this walk was very knowledgeable, and mostly easy to hear and understand. She did use one of those personal microphones and speaker, and used it to good effect. One interesting fact right from the start was that the Eleanor Roosevelt statue was sculpted by a woman, Penelope Jenks, and that Eleanor’s sensible shoes should always be able to be seen (no plantings near or around them). When we got to the spot in the park where the West Side Highway becomes the Henry Hudson Parkway, she explained how Robert Moses used legalities and semantics to get funding (railroad tracks were covered, river access, park—all different sources of funding, and he knew how to work the system). He even managed to get funding for a boat basin during the Depression! Apparently our guide had led this tour at least once on Friday and learned the name of one of the flowers along the way, Lily of the Nile. She told us that she’s always in teacher mode, so she figured she had to share that with us on Saturday. This was a great way to start Jane’s Walks weekend for me, even if there was a bit of drizzle. Our tour group was a shade under twenty people. One of the stops along her tour was the starting point for the next walk on my schedule, so with her blessing (she told us from the start that we could leave at any time and she would not take it as an affront), I stayed at 93rd and RSD while she and the group continued uptown through the park.

11:00am – UWS Monuments and Mansions – West 93rd Street and Riverside Drive, at the Joan of Arc statue

The guide for this walk was pretty good, just not as smooth and polished as the previous one. His walk had about forty to fifty participants, which made it a little unwieldy. His comments were interesting, especially that the sculptor of Joan was a woman, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington. Two female sculptors of two female subjects in one park in one day. Not too shabby. We saw a couple more statues, one freestanding mansion, and several nice examples of Art Deco architecture. Toward the end of the tour, we saw Riverside Church and the General Grant National Memorial (aka Grant’s Tomb). I’d seen and been in Grant’s Tomb, well, the building, not the tomb, before since it was my assigned volunteering station one year for Open House New York (another fun weekend that occurs in October, if I’m remembering correctly), but I realized that I’d never been inside Riverside Church before. So after the tour concluded, I took a stroll inside. It’s massive and very impressive.

2:00pm – Radical Village – Sheridan Square

This one was not on my original agenda. I decided to tweak it because the walk I’d planned ended on the Upper East Side at 3:00pm and I knew that if I was that close to home at that part of the day, it was very unlikely that I’d travel down to Chelsea for a 6:00pm walk. The guide for this walk was extremely knowledgeable and spouted out names and facts at a rather rapid pace and, at times, nonstop for a good ten to fifteen minutes. A lot of the people we heard about from him were associated with the Little Red School House at Sixth and Bleecker. Oddly, we never actually saw that site during the walk. And he breezed through so many names and the relationships that their children had with the children of other people that he had mentioned that it was almost sensory overload. The size of this walking group was more reasonable, however, at about fifteen to twenty again.

6:00pm – Gay Bars Gone – Limelight, 6th Avenue and 20th Street

OK, I’m not a club/dance bar kind of guy but I did go (at least once) to the Limelight. For my non-New York readers, this was an Episcopal church that changed hands quite a few times and at one point was a gay disco (though I’m sure straight people went as well). This was the kickoff point for a walk highlighting gay bars that are no longer in existence. There was a tag team of walk leaders and their shtick was amusing, up to a point. Oh, and the crowd for this one was huge—I’d estimate seventy to eighty. We went to a second bar site that was totally unknown to me. The third stop was Splash, which I had been to at least once, as well. Along the way, we were encouraged to contribute personal recollections. Outside of Splash, one young lady said that she and her mother had gone to Splash with her brother (moral support maybe?); she and her mother had gotten up on one of the boxes and danced together and then were asked if they were lesbian lovers (they were not, but it was a fun story). I went to one more site, but as we were leaving Chelsea and entering the Village, the narrower streets were getting harder to navigate because if the size of the group, so I bailed. But the other cool thing about the walk was that the leaders brought a stencil, and walker volunteers chalked up the sidewalk in front of each building we stopped at with Gay Bar Was Here. It made me chuckle.

Sunday, May 5
10:00am – rainout

The walk I was going to do was scheduled to meet at Columbus Circle. As I started to wend my way there, the rain was spitting just enough to make me turn around and go right back home. At least I got chores done.

1:00pm – Tour of City Center, West 55th Street

Ding-ding! This was the winner of the weekend as far as I was concerned. The walk/tour met in the lobby of City Center. Again, for my non-NY readers, do a search—the building is gorgeous inside and out. The lobby is very ornate, as is the inside of the theater. Fun fact: built in 1923, it was originally called the Mecca Temple, by the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Yep, it was the meeting hall of the Shriners! When we went in to the theater, we were on the mezzanine level, which gave us a good view of the orchestra level as well as the balcony level. Most of my experiences as an audience member have been from the balcony level, so I was unaware that the audience sections below are relatively shallow. That really came to the fore when we went onstage. Yes, I have now trod the boards at City Center. In fact, we saw the set of High Button Shoes close up, as its Encores production was starting the next week. The guide for the walk/tour was a City Center employee who had also been a performer there with various dance companies. As he explained it to us, for a theater that seats so many people, it was really a somewhat intimate feeling for performers because of the relative proximity of the audience, especially in the orchestra and mezzanine. We also went up to one of the dance studios that had an art installation in it. And the back wall of that studio still has the imprint of where the original throne was for the Shriners. All in all, a great tour with a leader who knew a lot and added personal touches without it being all about him.

3:00pm – Tour of Rockefeller Center – 30 Rockefeller Center, on the Plaza or indoors

Well, we met indoors because the weather was still iffy. The sound level inside 30 Rock was not very conducive to hearing a tour guide. It seemed like she had interesting things to say, if only we could hear them. Remember the first Saturday walk and the microphone that was used? That would have been helpful here. We did venture outside for a few minutes. The guide actually leaned against an outdoor sculpture on display and had to be admonished by a security guard. It was actually a little easier to hear her outside as opposed to inside. But inside we did go again, where she promptly led us to an area that was for residents only, and was admonished again. I promptly left the walk and went home.

Would I do Jane’s Walks again? Definitely. It’s always hit or miss but when you get one like the City Center tour, you know you’ve hit the jackpot. If you pair that with last year’s hands-down winner, the uptown Audubon Mural Project walk, next year, you’re guaranteed a good time, my NY peeps (weather permitting, of course). And my non-NY peeps, check out janeswalk.org; there may be walks near you next year, too.

ConcertMeister (WalkMeister, here)