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secular temple in Manhattan
Friday, January 17 2025
location: room 813, Hotel Indigo, Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York
[REDACTED]
In the middle of the night, Gretchen hadn't been able to sleep and hadn't brought anything to read either. So she went down to the desk and asked if they had any books. They didn't, but they did have a "newspaper." Gretchen took it up to our room and proceeded to read it. It was called the Epoch Times and looked like a well-funded newspaper with a decidedly right-wing slant. It made repeated claims not to have any slant and bias, though it kept attacking the idea of "socialism" and "Chinese communism." A newspaper like this will never tell you directly what it is trying to accomplish, so I looked it up in Wikipedia. Sure enough, it was the mouthpiece of the Falun Gong cult, which was run out of China in the 1990s. These days Falun Gong is anti-vax, anti-evolution, and pro-Trump. Not everything in the newspaper was kooky, though. In a Q&A article about health issues, some woman asked if she should stop fostering cats when she has her baby because of a concern about allergies. The person answering the question correctly stated that a baby exposed to cats is less likely to end up with allergies.
After drinking coffee and tea made my the Keurig robot and reading more of the Epoch Times, we packed up our few belongings and checked out of the hotel. We then walked some blocks southwestward to a little vegan deli/grocery store called Orchard Grocer, which is owned by our friend Erica (of Justin & Erica). There is only one place to sit down to eat there, and it was just being vacated as we arrived. Gretchen ordered herself some sort of fat deli sandwich, while I got their reuben, which ended up being about the best reuben I've ever eaten. Gretchen also bought a number of grocery items that would survive hours without refrigeration.
The original plan for today had been to see another museum exhibit, but that exhibit had already closed. So then the plan was to walk a good fraction of the High Line as far as it goes in the direction of Port Authority. But that was before the cold weather arrived. Today it wasn't as cold as it was yesterday, and maybe walking on the High Line would've been fine, but yesterday while we were riding the bus from the Met, we'd passed the main branch of the New York Public Library and Gretchen saw that they had an exhibit entited "Becoming Bohemia" about the rise of counter-culture in the West Village between 1912 and 1923. Now she wanted to see that. So we caught a subway north to Midtown, where the grand Beaux-Arts library structure is one of the few buildings less than 100 feet high. We entered the library through a revolving door that was doing a good job at keeping out the cold outdoor air and then stood for awhile in the entrance foyer, marveling at the grand structure from the inside. "It's like a church, but secular," I said. "That's what I love about it," Gretchen replied. We then went on something of a brief self-guided tour, going upstairs to the bathroom, which are down a hall past a rare pair of working payphones. (They were such unusual artifacts that people were taking selfies in them.) Gretchen wanted to go into one of the reading rooms, but when we joined a tour group, we were easily eliminated because we weren't wearing little red stickers. So we stood around in the hallway outside, marveling at a massive mural of a pissed-off Moses breaking one of his stone tablets in fury as he beheld the golden calf.
The "Becoming Bohemia" exhibit was in two small rooms on the first floor, though we initially thought the entire exhibit was in the first of these rooms. We looked at the hand-painted mock-ups of fliers and pages from a play written by Eugene O'Neil. Back in those days, America looked to the West Village with a combination of horror and fascination with how wild people were being there, and it makes sense, given this reputation, how it became such a mecca for those with non-conformist sexual preferences. But the story begins to wind down with America's involvement in WWI, when tolerance for hetrodoxy in American suffered something of a recession.
Next Gretchen and I went into the library's gift store, which has a small café, the only place we'd found so far where we could sit. While one of us would be sitting, the other would be off going to the bathroom or (in Gretchen's case) seeing the rest of the "Becoming Bohemia" exhibit. Gretchen also found a museum-like room where the library was showing its "treasures." And what a collection of treasures they had! This included a Gutenberg Bible in mint condition, a faded copy of the Bill of Rights, and a huge multi-page poster print made by Albrecht Dürer. She came back to get me so I could see these things as well.
By that point, we were ready to head back Upstate. It was still an hour and half before our bus was to be leaving, so Gretchen wanted to attempt to get on a bus leaving an hour earlier. She'd done this in the past without a problem, though she wasn't sure this was officially allowed. (She hadn't paid for the kind of ticket when gives this kind of flexibility.) As we boarded, the driver said Gretchen's ticket wasn't for this time. She asked if we could board anyway, and he said sure.
After we got off the bus in New Paltz, we drove first to Adam's Fairacre Farms to do some more shopping for a big birthday party we'd be throwing for Gretchen on Sunday. Then we stopped at Ray & Nancy's place to pick up Charlotte & Neville. They seemed genuinely lethargic when we arrived, as if they'd been playing constantly the whole time (which Charlotte's tracker seemed to indicate). Among the things Charlotte had done was destroy a green dog toy that looked like Gumby. Now he didn't have any arms and most of his stuffing was missing.
This evening, I continued both with my jihad of cleaning the laboratory and painting and repainting parts of the floor.
A view from our hotel room, with the Freedom Tower and the top of the "Jenga Tower."
Click to enlarge.
There's still a fair amount of graffiti in a few places in Manhattan.
Click to enlarge.
The New York Public Library's mint copy of the Gutenberg Bible.
Click to enlarge.
The New York Public Library's copy of the Bill of Rights. This copy was evidently folded up small enough to fit in a conventional envelope at some point.
Click to enlarge.
The New York Public Library's collection of cuneiform.
Click to enlarge.
Just some of the massive Albrecht Dürer print at the New York Public Library.
Click to enlarge.
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