Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


If the rains, cloudy days, warnings of storms and tornadoes have soured you on this summer, don't give up. Come to the Stuyvesant Square Park to enjoy the rich plantings that have thrived, despite the strange weather we are experiencing.


In the East park, facing Beth Israel, the circle around the fountain is overflowing in tall spiky fragrant cleomes, also called spider flowers, their reddish blooms lording it over the busy low growth. Below, what look like thick masses of whitish impatiens surprisingly thriving in full sunlight are actually vinca, a ground cover. Their blue blooming neighbors are ageratum, another low grower. Both flowering plants are surrounded by the ornate purplish-brown broad leaves of perilla. That is an Asian food plant, and the leaves serve to wrap food. Nearby grows catmint, a gray-green leafy plant that produced lavender blooms early in the season. The rich rose bushes that brought forth a bounty of red blossoms in the Spring are now quiescent, until September, when a new crop of blooms will appear. So assures us Parks and Recreation Department gardener Constance Casey, who has been responsible for this rebirth of the two parks (the floral pattern is repeated in the West park).


Another of her innovations, liriope or lilyturf, a agrasslike groundcover, the leaves longitudinally striped, light and dark, has been planted in individual tufts, all over the park. You can see the established tufts, merged in a solid groundcover, along the South fence of Gramercy Park, looked after for by another gardening enthusiast and a member of the Bronx Botanical Garden's board, Sharen Benenson.


But not all areas of the park are flourishing. I interviewed Mrs. Casey on the run, while she was digging and mulching the disaster area to the left of the east gate of the Park, facing Beth Israel Hospital. Nothing of value grows there, except weeds, she observed, gingerly lifting a dead rodent on her spade and stuffing it into a black garbage bag. Fortunately, these parks have no destructive animals, such as woodchuck, and the Parks Department's official exterminator looks after the rodents in a manner that does not affect the squirrels and visiting dogs. The whole subject makes this observer shudder, remembering the wars of Gramercy Park. Let us enjoy the peace, now that the law suit has been settled.


An ailing silk lilac to the left of the bad spot is Mrs. Casey's next project. On the good news side, we have tall hardy London plane trees, their smooth, newly peeled-looking skins giving them a youthful appearance, like dowagers after plastic surgery. A true city dweller, the plane tree withstands both weather- and human- inflicted hardships quite well. So does the flowering Callery pear and its cousin Bradford pear, the smaller trees planted on side streets throughout the neighborhood, whose white Spring blossoms fall in profusion on the sidewalks, much to the chagrin of the building service people. Inside the park, the blooming trees doing well are cherries, hawthorns and crabapples, concentrated along both sides of Second Avenue.


If you are pining for a gardening fix, to enrich your sedentary citified lifestyle, the gardener has a solution for you - come on any Wednesday, 5-7PM, to the Stuyvesant Square Park, to volunteer your services in weeding, spreading of mulch, improving the soil, uncoiling the hoses and watering the plants. Watering is still the most important function to keep the park alive. You may even do some planting if she succeeds in getting the funds to buy 3000 tulip bulbs for the fountain areas, 1500 for each park.


Mrs. Casey is responsible for six gardens in Parks and Recreation Department's District 6, which stretches from 14th to 59th Streets, and does her work with the aid of two women , members of the job training program started during the Giuliani years by Commissioner Henry Stern and continued by Commissioner Adrian Benepe, to provide job opportunities for people removed from the welfare rolls. The other top garden beautifiers in our area are Yamila Fournier, who cares for Union Square and is also responsible for the Washington Square Park, and Kim Wickers, who runs the large Madison Square Park with a staff of 12 and a grant of some $3 million, which includes the funds for the restoration of the playground..


Stuyvesant Square Park has also received the benefit of some donated monies, beyond those provided by the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and the Dvorak American Heritage Association. New plantings have been noted around Ivan Mestrovic's bust of Antonin Dvorak, in the East Park and the statue of Peter Stuyvesant by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the West, courtesy of a grant from Greenacre, a Rockefeller foundation. Many thanks! But the park still needs major sums for the restoration of the historic East fence. Hint, hint.


Internet adepts can read a five-day diary of a Parks gardener by Costance Casey (who turns out to be a member of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's board) in Slate. Interested parties can also view Looking Ahead columns of past months online. Enter the www.dobelis.net website and follow directions to the blog. Keep checking, more old columns are added to this website practically daily.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

If the rains, cloudy days, warnings of storms and tornadoes have soured you on this summer, don’t give up. Come to the Stuyvesant Square Park to enjoy the rich plantings that have thrived, despite the strange weather we are experiencing.

In the East park, facing Beth Israel, the circle around the fountain is overflowing in tall spiky fragrant cleomes, also called spider flowers, their reddish blooms lording it over the busy low growth. Below, what look like thick masses of whitish impatiens surprisingly thriving in full sunlight are actually vinca, a ground cover. Their blue blooming neighbors are ageratum, another low grower. Both flowering plants are surrounded by the ornate purplish-brown broad leaves of perilla. That is an Asian food plant, and the leaves serve to wrap food. Nearby grows catmint, a gray-green leafy plant that produced lavender blooms early in the season. The rich rose bushes that brought forth a bounty of red blossoms in the Spring are now quiescent, until September, when a new crop of blooms will appear. So assures us Parks and Recreation Department gardener Constance Casey, who has been responsible for this rebirth of the two parks (the floral pattern is repeated in the West park).

Another of her innovations, liriope or lilyturf, a agrasslike groundcover, the leaves longitudinally striped, light and dark, has been planted in individual tufts, all over the park. You can see the established tufts, merged in a solid groundcover, along the South fence of Gramercy Park, looked after for by another gardening enthusiast and a member of the Bronx Botanical Garden’s board, Sharen Benenson.

But not all areas of the park are flourishing. I interviewed Mrs. Casey on the run, while she was digging and mulching the disaster area to the left of the east gate of the Park, facing Beth Israel Hospital. Nothing of value grows there, except weeds, she observed, gingerly lifting a dead rodent on her spade and stuffing it into a black garbage bag. Fortunately, these parks have no destructive animals, such as woodchuck, and the Parks Department’s official exterminator looks after the rodents in a manner that does not affect the squirrels and visiting dogs. The whole subject makes this observer shudder, remembering the wars of Gramercy Park. Let us enjoy the peace, now that the law suit has been settled.

An ailing silk lilac to the left of the bad spot is Mrs. Casey’s next project. On the good news side, we have tall hardy London plane trees, their smooth, newly peeled-looking skins giving them a youthful appearance, like dowagers after plastic surgery. A true city dweller, the plane tree withstands both weather- and human- inflicted hardships quite well. So does the flowering Callery pear and its cousin Bradford pear, the smaller trees planted on side streets throughout the neighborhood, whose white Spring blossoms fall in profusion on the sidewalks, much to the chagrin of the building service people. Inside the park, the blooming trees doing well are cherries, hawthorns and crabapples, concentrated along both sides of Second Avenue.

If you are pining for a gardening fix, to enrich your sedentary citified lifestyle, the gardener has a solution for you – come on any Wednesday, 5-7PM, to the Stuyvesant Square Park, to volunteer your services in weeding, spreading of mulch, improving the soil, uncoiling the hoses and watering the plants. Watering is still the most important function to keep the park alive. You may even do some planting if she succeeds in getting the funds to buy 3000 tulip bulbs for the fountain areas, 1500 for each park.

Mrs. Casey is responsible for six gardens in Parks and Recreation Department’s District 6, which stretches from 14th to 59th Streets, and does her work with the aid of two women , members of the job training program started during the Giuliani years by Commissioner Henry Stern and continued by Commissioner Adrian Benepe, to provide job opportunities for people removed from the welfare rolls. The other top garden beautifiers in our area are Yamila Fournier, who cares for Union Square and is also responsible for the Washington Square Park, and Kim Wickers, who runs the large Madison Square Park with a staff of 12 and a grant of some $3 million, which includes the funds for the restoration of the playground..

Stuyvesant Square Park has also received the benefit of some donated monies, beyond those provided by the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and the Dvorak American Heritage Association. New plantings have been noted around Ivan Mestrovic’s bust of Antonin Dvorak, in the East Park and the statue of Peter Stuyvesant by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the West, courtesy of a grant from Greenacre, a Rockefeller foundation. Many thanks! But the park still needs major sums for the restoration of the historic East fence. Hint, hint…

Internet adepts can read a five-day diary of a Parks gardener by Costance Casey (who turns out to be a member of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s board) in Slate. Interested parties can also view Looking Ahead columns of past months online. Enter the www.dobelis.net website and follow directions to the blog. Keep checking, more old columns are added to this website practically daily.

by M. C. Dobelis


This is such an intriguing title, and the story is so charming that our family decided to take the long drive (four hours from NYC) to Williams College in the rolling hills of the Berkshires to view the 70 paintings and sculptures on loan from the Musee Fabre in Montpelier, in the Provence.


Assembled by the not overly wealthy son of a local banker, Alfred Bruyas (1823-77), who cultivated all the painters of his day, the collection has a remarkable range of Academic as well as Romantic and Realist canvasses. Bruyas was a patron of Gustave Courbet (1818-77), whom he invited IN 1854 to stay in Montpelier as his guest for six months, in return asking that the works our artist painted be available only to Bruyas. Courbet, a largely self-taught painter who introduced Realism in French painting and was accepted by the Academy's Salon in 1844, produced several remarkable pieces, particularly the title painting, formally known as "The Meeting", portraying the country gentleman Bruyas, accompanied by his dog and a servant, opening his arms to greet the painter, who had been hiking. Now an icon of the era, the painting had been greeted with some snickers when exhibited, and became known by the popular title, much to Bruyas's dismay. The provincial collector was fond of having his portrait painted, in fact, the talented realist Octave Tassaert (1800-74) not only pained him as an honored guest in the artist's studio but also included him as in the magnificent large spread called Heaven and Hell, where nude maidens portraying sloth, drunkenness and, particularly, lust were trying to lure into their underworld some recently deceased souls on their way to Heaven, while angels were waving them on, upwards. The bearded Bruyas was of course one of the successful escapees from the pleasures of wickedness.


The exhibit has at least six portraits of the melancholy redbeard on show, including one by the romantic painter Delacroix (1798-1863), another favorite painter, represented in the exhibition with seven canvasses, several of exotic Algerian women and scenes. Alexandre Cabanel had more, ten canvasses, including portraits of Italian men and women representing virtue, love and agriculture. These are the cheerful subjects, along with the seven works by Courbet and four by Jules Laurens, the balance of the exhibit consists of mostly dark pieces of academic art, with dreary themes and brown trees in dark landscapes, not much different from what Ruisdael and Hobbema painted in the 17th century. Bruyas's chosen artists included such major names of the mid-19th century as Boulanger, Court, Delaroche, Isabey, Huet, and Guericault, Millet and Corot (one piece), most not well remembered, except for the last three. The School of Barbizon paintings (four pieces by Theodore Rousseau and more by others) are the perfect examples of the art that the Impressionists (hardly on the scene when Bruyas collected) revolted against. In fact, the elegant permanent collection of the Institute, collected by Sterling and Francine Clark in the 1920s, stands in complete contrast to the Bruyas exhibit. Here brilliant Pisarro and Renoir canvases dominate, the latter almost to an excess, with more ordinary Monet pieces in support. Most shining are the Sisley and Boudin sea- and beachscapes, and even a large Bouguereau nude, a Barbizon masterpiece, fits right well. There are some good paintings by artists who we see represented in the Montpelier collection by works of lesser quality. One feels sorry for Bruyas, who wanted to collect all that was good in contemporary painting in the mid-19th century, but could not afford too many masterpieces. The 70-odd pieces in the exhibit represent 29 painters of an era that was doomed by the arrival of the Impressionists who struck back at academic art with their Salon des Refusees exhibit in 1878. Had the enthusiastic Bruyas lived long enough, he might have assembled the Impressionist cache for the centuries.


The Montpelier exhibit was organized by the Musee Fabre, in conjunction with the Virginia Museum of fine Arts of Richmond, VA and the Clark Institute, The DALLAS Museum of Art and the Fine Arts museums of San Francisco. The Williamstown session will close on September 6.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

In conjunction with the Republican Presidential Convention, coming to New York Monday August 30 through Thursday, September 2, let's review the historical treasures of ideological interest that T&V Country can offer our visitors for viewing. We do have them.
First, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace at 28 East 20th Street, west of Park Avenue South, a National Parks site, open Tue-Sat 9-5.Roosevelt (1858-1919), sometime G. W. Bush's idol, was a sickly asthmatic boy, and used a backyard gym to strengthen himself. Through self-discipline and character force he toughened both mind and body, played sports, graduated Harvard, studied briefly at Columbia Law, at 23 ran for state assembly and was elected, at 25 became a North Dakota rancher, at 27 ran for Mayor of NYC, at 30 was appointed to help reform US Civil Service, at 37 became the president of NYC Police Board, rode to work on a bicycle and prowled the streets looking for crooks and delinquent cops. Assistant Secretary of the Navy at 39, he organized the Rough Riders and rode up St. Juan Hill in the war with Spain. Elected Governor of NYS at 40, he fought the spoils system and installed taxation of corporations. Two years later (1900) he became the VP of US and a year later, the nation's youngest President when McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz. He wrote 46 books, both for profit (the ranch went broke in the drought of 1886) and to express ideas. This site is not on the official tour list of the Convention, and neither are the other ones listed below; the radical Republicans in Washington would not approve of TR's unyielding stance in conservationism and his unyielding fights against giant trusts (he dissolved corporations that violated anti-trust regulations), "malefactors of great wealth," and corruption of politics by big business. TR also regulated railroad rates, secret rebates, established Pure Food and Drug Act and employer liability rules and, although militant in establishing America's role as a world power, was able to accomplish it with little bloodshed, earning the Nobel peace price (specifically, for mediating in the Russo-Japanese War).
Less known is the Roosevelt Building, a great terra-cotta castle on the NW corner of Broadway and 13th Street, named after Teddy's grandfather, Cornelius, the glass merchant, whose house was mid-block (Stephen Hatch, 1893). The posts on 2nd Floor are crumbling, and you can see what was underneath. Terra cotta and cast-iron were the building materials that made this neighborhood a preservationists' laboratory and exhibit hall.
We also have at least two Lincoln memorials. First, the former St. Dennis Hotel, once one of New York's finest, at 799 Broadway (11th Street), designed by the great James J. Renwick Jr. in 1851, after he built the Grace Church across Broadway, and before he received the St. Patrick's Cathedral commission. It is now a much-remodeled office building, with a rather imposing entrance door. The staircases and handrails still speak of the lifestyle of years past. Abraham Lincoln met and addressed New York's abolitionists in the 2nd Floor parlor in his 1860 visit, now a business office. President U.S. Grant is also known to have stayed there, and Alexander Graham Bell spoke the famous words "Come here, Watson, I need you" in the self-same room in 1877, introducing us to the telephone age. The interesting terra-cotta window decorations a long time ago, and only a few items and a poster in the manager's office remind us of the past.
Lincoln actually came to address NY Republicans, 1,500 of them, at Cooper Union, on February 27, hoping to show that an ungainly ill educated Midwesterner can speak and reason as well as their candidate William Henry Seward. The peacemaker candidate succeeded in establishing his point that a majority of signers of the Constitution believed that Congress should contain slavery and not allow it to expand into the territories. Thus, his Republican party would be no threat to the Southern states. He received New York's support and was elected, but the South attacked a few months later anyway, at Fort Sumter, and lost, with the world supporting the righteous position of the North.
In line with Washington's efforts to co-opt the world community in pacifying Iraq, the delegates should also visit the United Nation's headquarters, our neighbor to the north, and reacquaint themselves with the horrors of destruction that forced the nationalist nations of the world into giving up selfish principles in order to ban war. Unsuccessfully, but one must keep trying.


For general interest, the Convention is expected to bring 55,000 visitors to the city, with 18,000 rooms reserved in 40 hotels. The locale is Madison Square garden, with daily 10-1 and 8-11 sessions. First day speakers will be Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani and Senator McCain, second day Laura Bush and Gov. Schwarzenegger, third - the Cheneys and Zell Miller, the Dem Senator of Georgia, fourth will bring on Gov. Patak, i introducing President Bush, who will accept the nomination. During the day the delegates are offered pricey tours of the city and environs, none of which include the Roosevelt and Lincoln sites.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

In conjunction with the Republican Presidential Convention, coming to New York Monday August 30 through Thursday, September 2, let’s review the historical treasures of ideological interest that T&V Country can offer our visitors for viewing. We do have them.
First, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace at 28 East 20th Street, west of Park Avenue South, a National Parks site, open Tue-Sat 9-5.Roosevelt (1858-1919), sometime G. W. Bush’s idol, was a sickly asthmatic boy, and used a backyard gym to strengthen himself. Through self-discipline and character force he toughened both mind and body, played sports, graduated Harvard, studied briefly at Columbia Law, at 23 ran for state assembly and was elected, at 25 became a North Dakota rancher, at 27 ran for Mayor of NYC, at 30 was appointed to help reform US Civil Service, at 37 became the president of NYC Police Board, rode to work on a bicycle and prowled the streets looking for crooks and delinquent cops. Assistant Secretary of the Navy at 39, he organized the Rough Riders and rode up St. Juan Hill in the war with Spain. Elected Governor of NYS at 40, he fought the spoils system and installed taxation of corporations. Two years later (1900) he became the VP of US and a year later, the nation’s youngest President when McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz. He wrote 46 books, both for profit (the ranch went broke in the drought of 1886) and to express ideas. This site is not on the official tour list of the Convention, and neither are the other ones listed below; the radical Republicans in Washington would not approve of TR’s unyielding stance in conservationism and his unyielding fights against giant trusts (he dissolved corporations that violated anti-trust regulations), “malefactors of great wealth,” and corruption of politics by big business. TR also regulated railroad rates, secret rebates, established Pure Food and Drug Act and employer liability rules and, although militant in establishing America’s role as a world power, was able to accomplish it with little bloodshed, earning the Nobel peace price (specifically, for mediating in the Russo-Japanese War).
Less known is the Roosevelt Building, a great terra-cotta castle on the NW corner of Broadway and 13th Street, named after Teddy’s grandfather, Cornelius, the glass merchant, whose house was mid-block (Stephen Hatch, 1893). The posts on 2nd Floor are crumbling, and you can see what was underneath. Terra cotta and cast-iron were the building materials that made this neighborhood a preservationists’ laboratory and exhibit hall.
We also have at least two Lincoln memorials. First, the former St. Dennis Hotel, once one of New York’s finest, at 799 Broadway (11th Street), designed by the great James J. Renwick Jr. in 1851, after he built the Grace Church across Broadway, and before he received the St. Patrick’s Cathedral commission. It is now a much-remodeled office building, with a rather imposing entrance door. The staircases and handrails still speak of the lifestyle of years past. Abraham Lincoln met and addressed New York’s abolitionists in the 2nd Floor parlor in his 1860 visit, now a business office. President U.S. Grant is also known to have stayed there, and Alexander Graham Bell spoke the famous words "Come here, Watson, I need you" in the self-same room in 1877, introducing us to the telephone age. The interesting terra-cotta window decorations a long time ago, and only a few items and a poster in the manager’s office remind us of the past.
Lincoln actually came to address NY Republicans, 1,500 of them, at Cooper Union, on February 27, hoping to show that an ungainly ill educated Midwesterner can speak and reason as well as their candidate William Henry Seward. The peacemaker candidate succeeded in establishing his point that a majority of signers of the Constitution believed that Congress should contain slavery and not allow it to expand into the territories. Thus, his Republican party would be no threat to the Southern states. He received New York’s support and was elected, but the South attacked a few months later anyway, at Fort Sumter, and lost, with the world supporting the righteous position of the North.
In line with Washington’s efforts to co-opt the world community in pacifying Iraq, the delegates should also visit the United Nation’s headquarters, our neighbor to the north, and reacquaint themselves with the horrors of destruction that forced the nationalist nations of the world into giving up selfish principles in order to ban war. Unsuccessfully, but one must keep trying.

For general interest, the Convention is expected to bring 55,000 visitors to the city, with 18,000 rooms reserved in 40 hotels. The locale is Madison Square garden, with daily 10-1 and 8-11 sessions. First day speakers will be Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani and Senator McCain, second day Laura Bush and Gov. Schwarzenegger, third - the Cheneys and Zell Miller, the Dem Senator of Georgia, fourth will bring on Gov. Patak, i introducing President Bush, who will accept the nomination. During the day the delegates are offered pricey tours of the city and environs, none of which include the Roosevelt and Lincoln sites.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

One cannot help being impressed that MetLife, the major employer of the T&V Country, once the world’s largest life insurer now demutualized and slowly recovering its former status, is also a major sponsor of The Interventionists, Art in the Social Sphere, an art assemblage that attacks homelessness, genetically altered food, fashion and ridiculous social projects, in a tongue-in-cheek yet biting manner. Thinking about it, MetLife in its past incarnation has been a most effective agency of social reform, showing how industry can be the leader in creating effective habitat units by the tens of thousands, with the construction of housing in Stuy Town, Peter Cooper Village and their northern neighbor, Parkchester, in the 1940s. In essence, it led the way in pointing local governments to the planning of communities and the building of public housing. Whatever the present clashes between today’s management and tenants, Met’s historic role in social action cannot be gainsaid.

The current example of the Met’s social commentary, under the aegis of the MetLife Foundation Museum Connections Program, benefits North Adams, a mill town in the Berkshires fallen on hard times, for hours from New York. Its unique museum, Mass MoCA, is on the abandoned 27-building site of North America’s largest textile finisher, Arnold Print Works, gone broke in 1942, then Sprague Electric, gone to Juarez in 1985, the last action costing 4,000 jobs in a community of 18,000. Local and national fund raising matched, by the Massachusetts Arts Council, resulted in the creation of acres of white-washed and stripped-bricks simple museum space suitable for the invitation of modern artists with messages and followings that brought jobs and visitors to the town. Ah, the rehabilitating power of tourism!

The Interventionists’ most fascinating sub-show is the Nomads, highlighting street-level political realities. Michael Rakowitz’s inflatable shelters for the homeless (1998), made with plastic bags and tape that can be attached to the air vents of buildings, to tap free heat and provide ventilation, are almost practical. They comply with urban camping laws that prohibit domed and triangular structures over 3-½ ft in height. Kryzsztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle (1998-9) is a modified supermarket-shopping cart with sorting racks for can collectors that also converts to a shelter for the night. Those of us who are used to seeing the homeless men sleeping in cardboard boxes around St. George’s Church, across from Stuyvesant Square Park (the cardboard is folded and tucked into the park fence during the day), or observing the dwellers stretched out over the warm sidewalk gratings near Gramercy Park, cannot help being touched by these reminders.

Dre Birthenaar’s biting sarcasm goes further, bringing private events into the street life. Her Birthing Tent (2003) provides temporary shelter for labor, birth, delivery, and the celebration of life, with a bathing pool and seating for friends. Her Death Bivouac is a tent - oh, well, you can visualize. This is social planning for the future, to kick the complacent into thought. The Snail Shell System (from Denmark) is a hollow wheel with tracks, roll it to your site, then crawl in (it can also be used as a boat). It is not offered as can-collecting device – imagine the clanging along Third Avenue.

The Experimental University shows artists involved in science - biotechnology, sociology and anthropology. In a room that looks like part specimen collection, part souvenir shop, see-through plastic vials filled with debris from Mexico City, and North Adams show the difference in cultures. A collective of radical archivists/anthropologists named Spurse sends investigators who do randomized walkabout collecting, picking up whatever fragment is available and changing direction whenever a chicken crows (other sound substitutes permitted). The findings are presented in elaborate charts, photograph, interviews and computer sites. In the Free Range Grain exhibit, the CAE/daCosta testing lab was examining “organic” labeled foods for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) when the FBI raided MASS MoCA and carted off the gear, for suspicion of dangerous activities (a technician had died; see NYTimes of June 7, 2004).

The Ready to Wear sub-show has the piece-meal reexamination of the three-piece jacket by J. Morgan Puett. The latter takes reversible fragments of suits and equips them with buttons, enabling the construction of various raggy garment-like wearable clown suits in conservative colors. A semi-sincere saleslady in an almost-real tailor shop touts the product and offers fragments for sale (complete outfit is $600). An altered baseball-cap maker, Ruben Ortiz Torres, offers such items as the LA Kings hockey hat with the name Rodney added, to remind the viewer of the 1992 beating that fueled the LA riots.

Besides social criticism, MASS MoCA devotes an acre (imagine in NYC!) of factory floor to Ann Hamilton’s Corpus (closes 10/2004), with robots on rails plucking white coated paper in random sequence from stacks in the high ceiling, to flutter down to the floor, accompanied by speech defining “corpus” coming from scattered speakers, sometimes overhead, sometimes far away, and tens of light fixtures slowly dropping and rising from the ceiling. Even adults are prompted to run across the floor kicking and reaching for the snow-like light letterhead size flakes, a sheer joy. Then you enter a dark room with fixtures on rotating arms swinging around overhead, while soft minimalist music hums, almost urging you to harmonize or chant along, another joyful interlude.

Last, Matthew Ritchie, from New York, whose installation greets you as you enter, cheerful painting spreads of seemingly apples and fruit turning into eyeballs, and swirls that appear and vanish, all imbued with subatomic, mythic and biological subtexts. These rooms lead into a magic river exhibit, with huge black jigsaw puzzle pieces elevated to eye level on thin rods, like ice floes in a river that start out a n all surrounding painting covering the walls of the huge factory room and stop midfloor, a disappearing waterfall. Big Bang, risk analysis, alchemy and gambling are some more imbedded themes.

To enjoy this museum you must walk with one of their guides, whose almost serious presentation of the mystique adds an essential element to the interpretation and the show. Without her mentoring the visitor is lost.

This column has appeared weekly in New York's Town & Village newspaper since 1993. The column covers the local history of Manhattan East and matters of both local and general interest. Town & Village was established in 1947, when the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village apartments were built, and took its name from the names of the communities.