SC - Going to NY

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Tollhase1 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In a message dated 10/24/00 11:34:56 AM Eastern Daylight Time, troy at asan.com
> writes:
> 
> <<  Pierpont Morgan Library >>  Better known as the Cloisters?
> 
> Frederich

Whoa, no, different animal altogether. The Cloisters is a branch of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is located in Fort Tryon Park near the
northern tip of Manhattan Island. It consists of several medieval
European churches and monasteries that had been dismantled in Europe,
and reassembled here, like William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon estate
(I forget, but Hearst may have been responsible for this, too).
Essentially it functions as a medieval studies branch of the MMoA. Among
other stuff you'll find the original Unicorn Tapestries there.

The J. Pierpont Morgan Library is considerably further downtown, on
Madison Avenue and, I believe, 36th Street. At one time it was the
largest library in New York, before the Astor and Vanderbilt collections
were merged to become what is now known as the NY Public Library (the
lion statues currently looking very spiff with their Mets and Yankees
caps). The Morgan Library functions primarily as a research library and
a museum; recently they had an exhibition on gold jewelry unearthed by
Heinrich Schliemann and various successors from sites across Asia Minor
and Mesopotamia. They also have Ms. Buhler 19, recently published in a
translated edition by Terence Scully.

Whenever I think of the Morgan Library, I remember a line from the
novel, movie, and stage versions of Doctorow's "Ragtime", where the
Police Commissioner Waldo of the City of New York decides to summarily
hand Auxilliary Fire Chief Conklin over to the armed terrorists holding
the Morgan Library, acceding to their primary demand: "Listen, Conklin,
it's nothing personal, but that library over there is worth millions.
And people keep telling me you're a worthless piece of slime." 

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com