New York, October 24 - 27, 2013

This was our fourth trip to New York since we first went there in 2005.  You can see all of our pictures here.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

• Checked in to the Marcel Hotel on 24th & 3rd.  Fantastic location!  We had a great view of the Empire State Building from our room.  They had a happy hour in their 10th floor lounge with free wine on weeknights.
  
• The Frick. They had just opened an exhibit of the Dutch Masters, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals, including Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring."  We have reciprocity with the Frick through the Milwaukee Art Museum so we always go there.
• We stopped for a drink at the Banc Cafe on Third St (lots of fun stuff on Third!).  Turns out Stella Artois was having a promotion of their "cidre."  I'm not a big fan of hard cider, but I had one anyway (it was free).  It was pretty good, sort of wine like.
  
  
  The Stella promoter came over and chatted with us for a while.  He had been at the annual Kohler food & wine event in Kohler, WI.  He bought us another cidre and a couple of fantastic hors d'oeuvres: tuna tartar with avocado and pork belly with greens.  A serendipitous stop!
• We wanted Indian food for dinner that night, so we walked around in Murray Hill looking at different menus.  On our second time around, we chose Bhatti, which turned out to be an excellent choice.  They didn't serve wine there, so Laurie ran across the street to pick up a bottle of a crisp Reisling.  We asked our waiter for recommendations and he suggested the lamb chops, chicken marsala, and a shrimp curry with naan.  We went with that and were delighted.  It was probably the best Indian meal we've ever had.
  

Friday, October 25th

• The big event of Friday was The Cloisters.  The Cloisters is a museum of medieval art donated to New York by John Rockefeller and is part of the Met.  A lot of the stuff is parts of buildings taken from Europe in the last 200 years.  I felt a little uncomfortable with that.
  The park leading to the museum, overlooking the Hudson River was beautiful.
  
• Grant's Tomb is run by the National Parks Service.  We do National Parks well, and this monument is no exception.  We had a nice chat with the guard, who was a big fan of U.S. Grant and the Grand Army of the Republic.  "We won, because Grant was better than Lee!"
  
• We stopped in at the beautiful Riverside church across from Grant's and heard a concert, then on to St. John the Devine Episcopal church, the largest church with the largest stained glass window in the United States.
  
• Dinner was at Goat Town, located on 5th Street and Avenue A.  It was a great little place we discovered on line.  Appetizers were grilled octopus and crostinnis, entrees were moulles and frites (Laurie) and pork sirloin (Matthew).  It was a great day.
  
  
  
  

Saturday, October 26th

• Green-Wood cemetery is a 550 acre wooded cemetery in Brooklyn, founded in 1838.  In 1980 a crate full of parakeets broke open near here and they all escaped.  they have been living at the entrance ever since.
  
  
  The cemetery has a Revolutionary War monument to the Battle of Long Island.
  Samuel Mores's grave was my favorite, Laurie liked seeing Basquiat.  It was cool to see Boss Tweed's, too.
  
• Saturday night we saw the play, 'Mildred Fierce," a parody of the Joan Crawford movie "Mildred Pierce" (1945), with most of the actors in drag.  Hilarious!  It helped a lot to have seen the move before.