Touring New York City and New Jersey by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Touring New York City and New Jersey by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Madison (Wisconsin) is such a child-friendly city that I was happy to just stay home most of the time and take Florence out and do outings (mini field trips with her).

However, when I had the opportunity to do a cultural vacation in New York City with Florence, I jumped at the chance.  I began to do some research, so we would see a few key artworks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Our hotel was located on the corner of 48^th Street and 8^th Avenue.  The streets in New York run East-West and the avenues run North-South.  We walked along 8^th Avenue when we arrived.

There are lots of little markets with produce proudly displayed out front in New York.  People like to eat well in New York City.  (Italian, Puerto Rican, and South Carolina legacies.)  We walked up to Columbus Circle and walked along Central Park.

We bought some ice cream cones and sat in Central Park eating them.  We returned by walking down Fifth Avenue.

We visited St. Thomas Church, which was splendid.  Nobody was there except for a small group, so we could walk around.

I bought a flyer about the Episcopalian faith.  We left and visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  It was packed for mass and had lots of milling tourists as well.  We joined the milling tourists.

Six-year-old Florence and I watched Spanish-language television.  I did not speak any Spanish at the time, but I thought the cockroach ads with operatic death scenes were really funny.

Florence and I watched Plaza Sesamo (Spanish-language Sesame Street).  We learned how to add and subtract in Spanish:

-Uno mas uno son dos.

-Dos menos uno es uno.

Spanish lessons came to an end when we had to take a French tour of town.

For dinner we went to Eddie’s, because I read that New York University students liked to eat there.  It was a good-food-at-a-reasonable-price spot.

When we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I took Florence with me to see two paintings and would then let her play in the museum.

I had a map, and we soon found Velasquez’s Juan de Pareja and El Greco’s Toledo.  (Juan de Parja is the subject of a young teen book entitled I, Juan de Pareja: The Story of a Great Painter and the Slave he Helped Become a Great Artist by Elisabeth Burton de Treviño.)

Both paintings are important for Americans to see.  Juan de Pareja was an African slave dressed up in Renaissance finery as a courtier. (Painters were considered courtier artisans.)  Isabella d’Este of Italy also had African slaves. 

Slaves were dressed nicely to be in the castle and not as farm hands.  The same was true of the American plantations in the South.  (This difference in slave fashion was based on occupation and gave rise to the expression – in the house.)

The city of Toledo was important, because it was a center of learning in Spain for the Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  I explained the paintings to Florence and then went off to play “Magic Room” with her.

I closed my eyes and would let Florence take my hand and lead me from gallery to gallery.  In each new gallery, she would say, “Surprise!”

I would open my eyes and say things like “Wow. This is beautiful.  Tell me what is here.”

Florence would then lead me around showing me flowers, horses, dead birds, graveyards, and pretty people.

We had fun, especially when I made comments such as “That lace looks scratchy” when we looked at the portraits of the Dutch people, who founded New York.  Amsterdam Street is still the main thoroughfare of New York.  The Dutch are still in New York; they own all the Hudson River mansions that are featured in Architectural Digest magazine.

On another day, we went to see the Cloisters on the bus.  Going to places on the bus is one of the best ways to sightsee in a city.

It takes longer, but is more fun to do.  We bought bus passes and used them to go from the World Trade Center (it was still standing then) to the Cloisters.

The Cloisters Museum literally houses sections of medieval French abbeys.  I was gearing up for the post-visit comment-commute with my French in-laws:

“The Americans should really return what’s French to the French…”

To which I had my reply ready:

“Sure, we’ll do that once the French return all the Louvre’s Egyptian antiquities to Egypt, the Mona Lisa and the Raphaels to Italy (the Vatican has room), and all the Near Eastern antiquities to Iraq and Iran.”

We still had not made it to the Cloisters and were enjoying riding through Harlem.  We lived in Wisconsin at the time, and Florence asked, “Why are there so many Black people on the bus.”

I mimicked the Wizard of Oz and said, “We are not in Wisconsin anymore.”

Florence was satisfied with that answer, but the bus was laughing, including me.  Someone said, “Yeah, and Harlem sure as hell ain’t Kansas” and started hee-hawing really loud.

My in-laws asked what was funny.  I had to translate all the cultural subtleties in French, which made the bus riders laugh even more.  Someone even made a comment along the lines of, “Thank God, we have a Mage d’Oz interpreter on board.”

I knew they were making fun of the UN and said, “English, French, and Spanish can get you a six-figure admin or janitor job at the UN, which is union.”

Maybe I am not the angel of Harlem as in the U2 song, but I know my cheap tourism transportation got some well-educated people to add French to their Spanish and obtain decent employment in New York, who might not otherwise have had it.

New York has high educational standards and they do a good job meeting them with multicultural, multilingual, multiracial, multi sexual gender kids, reformed drug addict parents and reformed alcoholics, millionaires, suburbanites, and orphans. 

Maybe the nation should look at what New York State has done right to create highly literate and creative businesspeople with good lawyers despite flawed parenting.

I would like it if all neighborhoods had street cleaning, though, because respiratory diseases do float in the air with bacteria.

On our last day, we took the ferry to New Jersey and ate in a Greek restaurant there.  Florence thought the ferry was great and ran all around looking at all the scenery. She had sea legs in here genes.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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