Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
inexpensive, good restaurants. If you are with kids, the Ferris wheel
in the
Toys “R” Us
store makes a visit to Times Square worthwhile.
Subway: 1, 2, 3, 7, N, Q, R, S, W to Times Sq.; A, C, E to 42nd St.-Port Authority.
Wall Street & the New York Stock Exchange
Wall Street—it's
an iconic name, and the world's prime hub for bulls and bears every-
where. This narrow 18th-century lane (you'll be surprised at how lit-
tle it is) is appropriately monumental, lined with neoclassical towers
that reach as far skyward as the dreams and greed of investors who
built it into the world's most famous financial market.
At the heart of the action is the
New York Stock Exchange
(NYSE),
the world's largest securities trader, where billions change
hands. The NYSE came into being in 1792, when merchants met
daily under a nearby buttonwood tree to try to pass off to each other
the U.S. bonds that had been sold to fund the Revolutionary War.
By 1903, they were trading stocks of publicly held companies in this
Corinthian-columned Beaux Arts “temple” designed by George Post.
About 3,000 companies are now listed on the exchange, trading
nearly 314 billion shares valued at about $16 trillion. Unfortunately,
the NYSE is no longer open to the public for tours.
20 Broad St. (between Wall St. and Exchange Place).
&
212/656-3000.
www.nyse.
com. Subway: J, M, Z to Broad St.; 2, 3, 4, 5 to Wall St.
Whitney Museum of American Art
What is arguably the
finest collection of 20th-century American art in the world belongs
to the Whitney thanks to the efforts of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whit-
ney. A sculptor, Whitney organized exhibitions by American artists
shunned by traditional academies, assembled a sizable collection,
and founded the museum in 1930 in Greenwich Village.
Today's museum is an imposing presence on Madison Avenue—
an inverted three-tiered pyramid of concrete and gray granite with
seven seemingly random windows designed by Marcel Breuer, a
leader of the Bauhaus movement. The rotating permanent collection
consists of an intelligent selection of major works by Edward Hop-
per, George Bellows, Georgia O'Keeffe, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper
Johns, and other artists. A second-floor exhibit space is devoted
exclusively to works from its permanent collection from 1900 to
1950, while the rest is dedicated to rotating exhibits.
Shows are usually all well curated and more edgy than what you'd
see at MoMA or the Guggenheim. Topics range from topical surveys,
such as “American Art in the Age of Technology” and “The Warhol
Look: Glamour Style Fashion” to in-depth retrospectives of famous
or lesser-known movements (such as Fluxus, the movement that
