Two special tours in New York

Although I try to get to every corner of the world, there is a city that draws me back again and again. New York is so full of exciting attractions that it can always show you plenty of new experiences beyond the well-known tourist sights. In order to discover the hidden treasures, it’s worth joining special tours in New York, just as I did.

One evening, I was sitting in a basement bar in one of the back streets of Harlem. A former guitar player specializing in jazz tours took me there with two fellow travelers. Apart from us, there were only regulars, mostly black people, enjoying the amazing jazz concert.

During the break, one of the saxophone players came to our table and welcomed my guide as a good old friend. I was introduced to him right away. “Where are you from?” the musician turned to me, in a very friendly manner. I answered a bit reluctantly, thinking he would hardly know where Budapest was, but hearing the name of my hometown, the musician’s face lit up. “Wow, I just came back from the jazz festival in Veszprém,” he told me. I’m Jason Marshall.

A night at Harlem’s jazz clubs

So how did I find myself in Harlem, late at night, on a week-day in the basement of Colonel Charles Young Post #398? I joined Gordon Polatnick’s Harlem jazz tour. Gordon himself ran a jazz club in the neighborhood for a long time, and now he guides numerous jazz tours in Greenwich Village and Harlem, with his company “Big Apple Jazz”.

Don’t think of a big group, led by someone holding an umbrella, and talking into a microphone – that freaks me out, too! There were just three of us on that warm summer night who joined the Harlem walk, which introduced us to three clubs in the neighborhood. It turned out to be the most exciting night of my two-week vacation in New York.

How did I pick the tour?

It’s hard to imagine a better host for this kind of tour than this gentleman, who founded his company in 1997. Before organizing jazz tours, his whole life was filled with adventurous travels, tour guiding and a passion for jazz.

He founded Harlem’s first jazz club, and one that was open during the day as well, in order to provide a venue and platform for a number of musicians to perform. He organized jazz festivals, wrote articles in professional periodicals, taught beginner musicians, and now he leads informal, relaxed, and friendly walks at night around two districts in Manhattan, each crowded with jazz clubs.

Since I’ve been to the Village many times and I knew where to find the exciting clubs, I picked the Harlem tour. I wouldn’t dare to go there late at night by myself and I wouldn’t know how to find the best musicians. This is what Gordon is really great at: he knows exactly who’s playing where each night.

Amazing history

We met at Columbus Circle, an easy reference point for any tourist, and then took the subway to Harlem. Of course we rode the A train, made famous by jazz legend Duke Ellington. While strolling the streets, Gordon talked about the history of the neighborhood during the past few decades. It was fascinating how natural it was for him to point to various houses, casually dropping in world-famous names: Scott Joplin lived here, Arthur Miller there. Louis Armstrong used to play in this club. Duke Ellington was performing there. Billie Holiday lived just a few blocks from here. Our heads were dizzy, just imagining how exciting musical life could have been here, especially in the golden era, between 1920 and 1945.

In the first club we heard a young band of four members playing in front of just a dozen in the audience. In most clubs of the neighborhood, musicians don’t receive money for their performance, but they can pass around a hat for tips and they get a share of the bar’s income.

We also left a few bucks in the hat, and then we headed to the Colonel Charles Young Post #398 veteran’s club. Guests used to come here only to chat and have dinner, until a few years ago someone left a Hammond organ here. One evening a few musicians came by, played throughout the night, and a tradition was born. These days there is free, live music almost every evening, often with especially well-known musicians.

We had such a great time that it was already past 11pm when we moved on, so we just popped into the last club. Nabe is a Japanese-African restaurant where various bands give concerts. By the time we arrived, most guests were euphoric listening to the amazing band. We joined their enthusiasm until midnight, when our guide escorted us back mid-town.

Art is an integral part of the New York subway

Probably only a few tourists would look into whether there is a guided tour about the New York subway stations, but I came across just such a walk, and immediately decided to join it. There are many reasons to love or hate the New York City subway. In summer the stations are terribly hot and suffocating, while the cars are ice cold, which can easily lead to getting a chill. I always carry a jumper with me to avoid that. The stations are dirty and noisy, and it is not rare to see a rat sliding around the tracks. Nevertheless, using the extensive subway network you can get almost anywhere in town, it runs 24/7 and, on top of that, the range of passengers is amusingly diverse. The same applies to the decoration of coaches and platforms.

Among the city’s 486 subway stations, almost 250 can boast a piece of artwork.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has put aside one percent of its income for this purpose since 1985. As a part of this project, they select street musicians who can play with a permit in the subways, they ask poets to write short poems to be posted inside the coaches, and they also put out to tender the chance to decorate the stations.

The artists have to meet only two conditions: their work should be relevant to the surroundings of the station, and it should be made of long-lasting material resistant to vandalism. As more and more interesting mosaics have appeared on the stations, increasingly tourists couldn’t help but wonder: what is this depicting, and why is it right here?

The idea

Bronx-born Darryll Reilly guided tourist groups to the Statue of Liberty for years. He took the subway with his clients from downtown Manhattan, and, as he was often asked about the art pieces, one day he had the idea of establishing his own sightseeing company to discover them.

He started the NYC Subway Tour in 2013, and since then he has been guiding three-hour tours underground. In our group, besides me, there was an Aussie girl and a native New Yorker who lives on 51st street, where we started our tour. This also shows that it’s not a typical tourist program but a walk which locals are also happy to pay for too.

During the three hours, we covered about a dozen subway stations. At 8th street we were able to take pictures depicting the building of New York University and Washington Square park, while on the mosaics of Times Square we discovered characteristic figures of the crowd celebrating New Year’s Eve.

My personal favorite was 14th street, where there are 130 tiny statues planted in the labyrinth-like station. The little figures depict everyday scenes from life, mainly focusing on the difficulties of building the subway, and the gap between the rich and the poor.

Whose hat it is?

At 23rd street subway station we saw 60 mosaics, showing hats, women’s scarves and caps, with tiny notes from the people who once wore these items. This neighborhood was the heart of the theatre district before the appearance of Broadway, and every hat belongs to a famous performer from the 1880s to the 1920s. While waiting for the trains, it is great fun to guess which hat belonged to whom.

Union Square subway station is also special, as it’s where the old subway signs, tiles and wall pieces are framed – sometimes only symbolically – by the artist. The aim was for these not to disappear into the depth of a museum, but remain here in their usual old place.

Whenever a station is to be renovated, an art tender is announced, and the winners receive 20% of the construction costs as an honorary fee. A number of famous artists take special pride for being picked, and they often forego the honorarium. One such example is Roy Lichtenstein, the artist of the huge mosaic in the subway station of 42nd street.

Hungarians everywhere

When I spread the news on my blog’s Facebook wall that I had joined a subway art walk, a reader drew my attention to the work of art of a Hungarian artist that can be seen in one of the stations in the Bronx. Needless to say, I promptly took the subway there, and visited Andrea Dezső’s glass mosaic, which is apparently very popular in the neighborhood, as I saw a father taking a picture of his daughters right there.

Masstransiscope

There is an extremely interesting piece of art which hardly anyone knows about: the Masstransiscope. If you take the subway or walk across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn, and then return back from De Kalb Avenue station to Manhattan with the B train, you can observe a very special movie. Back in 1980, an artist (Bill Brand) painted a picture sequence among 288 columns, which basically works like movie frames. The difference is that here it’s not the movie that runs in front of the eyes of the audience, but the viewers on the subway who glide in front of the frames. The work of art was reconstructed in 2008, then, after its destruction by hurricane Sandy, it was repainted in 2013, so now it’s in mint condition again.

These are just two examples of the many great possibilities offered by the city, waiting for the curious visitor who is beyond hop-on, hop-off buses. All in all, you cannot possibly get bored with New York City. Whenever you get back, you always find something new and exciting there.