A gorgeous day on Sunday allowed us to get out to the Morgan Library and Museum and do some walking along Madison Avenue.
The library is a fantastic mix of new and old.
We experienced the new first, sitting for lunch in the reflections of light gallery. A fantastic changing display. The display changes as the sun moves and the display acts as a calendar, complex, but still a calendar. We sat for an hour or so and watched the light change as different panels were illuminated. Pretty cool.
We also sat and watched the family day activities as characters from A Christmas Tale appeared before us. We also met Charles Dickens.
We then ventured into the original part of the building and Morgan’s original study and library. A rich, plush, dark space. An amazing array of books, the Gutenberg bible, the original Dickens manuscript for a Christmas Tale. We also located the secret staircases that led to the upper levels of the library collection. An amazing engineering feat given the library is over 100 years old.
After we finished at the library we walked to the Rockefeller centre to look at the tree and venture to the top to check out the view.
The weather was perfect and the view would be spectacular. But wow. The crowd around the tree was insurmountable. Normally a wide thoroughfare between a couple of the buildings allows for easy access, but today not so. The crowd was a seething mass, impenetrable. We battled for a few minutes. A little way in and we became person locked in a massive crowd. We could not move in any direction. Such is the popularity of the Rockefeller tree. Eventually we battled our way out, almost toppling an Elmo and Mickey Mouse character on the way. We gave up on the tree and thought the observation deck might be better. But it wasn’t. We found the ticket queue and the lift queue and again became crowd locked. So we gave up.
We’d see the tree another day, maybe late at night one day and do a tour up the building during the week.
We caught the subway up town and parted ways. Mardi went off to find a small gift for my birthday and I ventured off to take some dusk photos.
After taking some photos I walked the 14 blocks back to the hotel.
Mardi arrived shortly afterwards and we decided to have a night in. We were pretty tired after a crowd fighting day so stayed in and watched a movie.
