This is New York

The day began with a visit to my favourite art collection in the world, the Frick Collection.  Henry Frick seems to me to be well described as a latter day robber baron, but he had exquisite taste in art and the money to acquire it.  His house was built with a comparison to Andrew Carnegie's mansion in mind.  I've read that he said he was going to make Carnegie's place look like a miner's shack.  As Carnegie had recently built the most modern and opulent dwelling in New York, that was quite a challenge.  But on his death Frick left the house and the art collection to the city.  I guess there was enough in his estate for the value not to be missed too much.

You can get round in, say, two hours.  Unlike most art collections it does not leave you feeling daunted or exhausted.  And the art is wonderful.  I particularly like the Turners, which seem to have a light from within, the Gainsboroughs, and the Holbein portraits of Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell, which flank the stunning St Jerome by El Greco.  My very favourite, Ingres  Comtesse d'Haussonville was away on loan.

No matter how you enter the Frick, you leave calmer and with raised spirits.

We then walked across Central Park.  I've never been in the park when it did not look good.  Today the leaves were in technicolor and the autumn light was perfect.  We walked from East to West, and from 70th to 80th, heading for the Natural History Museum, which is between the two buildings across Turtle Lake that you can see here.

It is a very pleasant stroll.  You just keep the East side behind you and eventually the West side appears.  In the middle you can't even hear the New York traffic, and there is an abundance of wildlife, along with runners, joggers, walkers, people exercising their dog, people sitting and relaxing, courting, and generally making use of the city's breathing space.

No, we didn't get lost.  It was a convenient sign to lean against while Bonnie took a couple of pics.  The little red bag contains my Frick souvenirs.

Entering the Upper West Side is, for me, like going home.  It's my favourite part of the city.  The restaurants and shops, and the wonderful dwellings, combine to make it the place that I would live if I had the choice.  We found some very affordable Real Estate.  There was a 15 room apartment going for a mere $24.5m for example.  More reasonably priced was a very nice studio apartment for $350k.  So I think I'd better start buying the Euromillions tickets.

That left us at the doorway into the American Museum of Natural History.

AMNH is about as unlike the Frick as anywhere could be.  It's enormous, and one visit could not possibly be enough.  There is enough there to fill your time for a week at least, maybe a month.  We spent most of our time in the geology section, and afterwards I felt much the same as I do towards the end of a 10 week Open University course.  We learned a lot, and we marvelled at a piece of rock containing some zircon crystals that were 4.627 billion years old - right from the time the Earth was being formed from the disk of debris around the infant sun.  One small treat was a screen showing all the earthquakes since 1960 - they appeared one by one.  After a while there was a clear pattern and there was revealed the outline of the earth's tectonic plates.  Quakes mostly happen where they meet.  Light inside made photography very difficult, but with any luck we'll get some images on Picasa later.

The newest exhibit is the Hayden Planetarium.  We actually started there with a program about the history of the solar system which was incredibly well done, and narrated by Whoopi Goldberg.  It was, of course impossible to photograph from the inside.  But on the way to eat Bonnie managed to get this great image of the globe that houses the planetarium from the street outside.

We made our way to Amsterdam Avenue - please can I live not more than 200 yards from 80th & Amsterdam?  Bonnie spotted a pleasant-looking restaurant, and we decided to look along the block.  That led us to Savann - and we needed to go no further.  A great place, a local business and doing well in the hardest place in NYC for a restaurant to survive.  So we ate there and brought a wonderful day to a perfect conclusion.

Too stuffed for anything else, we got a cab and were driven back to 45th down 5th Avenue.

There was traffic, but this is New York and I don't care.