A DAY AT GOVERNOR'S ISLAND

Yesterday we planned to go to Governor's Island with Martha, but she was not feeling well, so we ended up not going.  Fortunately for her, as it turns out.  We went today and had a wonderful time, but there was a LOT of walking and few places to sit and still fewer restrooms.  All important things for people our age.
Anyway, I'm starting this out with a happy picture of us on the ferry going to Governor's Island.  We decided that this was the trip we thought Staten Island would be but which it so definitely wasn't.

Governor's Island started out as the residence and political center for the Governor from  from England before the revolution.  After the Revolutionary War, it was eventually ceded to the U.S. Government and was a military base, changing in the 1950s or 60s to a Coast Guard station, and now given back to the City of New York.  It's served by a free ferry that runs every half hour each way -- about a 7-minute ride.  The island is only open Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  They have lots of things for kids, a number of permanent buildings, some of which have been converted into art galleries and are there all the time. 

mass yoga

On of the special events there today was some sort of an all-day yoga event.  There were several large areas where people were doing yoga in enormous groups.  I think that at least 300 people were there for the yoga, but the place is quite big, so it didn't seem crowded. 


The next place we went to after watching the yoga was to have lunch,
of course.  There was a nice place that was near a combination sculpture and play area.  It was made up of large sculptures that kids


 were encouraged to touch and interact with, but at the same time not climb on.  But really there weren't a lot of children there, considering the weekend had sort of been billed as for children.  So we interacted with the art, but didn't climb on it because we were being good boys and girls.  The following pictures are various things that were in the kids' sculpture area:  An inflatable fish, trees with knitting around them, (the knitting was done with plastic from plastic bags) a stealth bomber made of something covered with green indoor outdoor carpet, and a giant thing I can't name that was made out of a gazillion bottle caps and looked like beads from a distance. 


stealth bomber




inflatable fish



knitted tree trunks

After our quickie lunch, we moved on to another part of the park where there were buildings with art galleries and the like.  One of the things that is going on for the summer is an electronic art show.  There were several variations on this, but the pictures are of something called Blue Images or something.  We went into a church, and they had curtained off the front of the church and there was this hanging cloth sculpture.  The way to view the art was to put this cloth sculpture on your head (they had little caps like they use in hospitals for you to put on your head), and sit on this lighted box and watch the screen.  I found I could also see my hand shadow on the screen, which is why I'm waving my arms around in these pictures.  It was pretty interesting.  I look like I'm sitting up on something, but it's actually flat, but lighted up.



his master's voice

  Another part of the island had some sculpture.  I'm posting some pictures of that. 


rock sculpture, i.e. painted rocks



the set

figures

Another interesting thing they had was a lab for kids which apparently runs during the week.  While we were there they were showing a video (uncompleted as yet) of a claymation project the kids had done.  They made the sets and the clay people and then did all the posing of the clay features for the video.  It was quite good but their computer guru wasn't happy with it yet and hadn't posted it to their blog.  Here's a picture of the set and the figures. 

And finally, there was a building which housed a painting program for kids.  The most interesting thing about this, is that there was such a program under the auspices of the WPA back in the 30's and they still had some of the kids' paintings from the 30's with the subject matter "my life in NYC" and they had them hanging side by side.  In this fairly bad photo, the pictures on the top are modern, the pictures on the bottom row are from the 30's.  We noticed that in general the ones from the 30's weren't as bright.  Because the world wasn't, or because they had a limited palette of paint?  Or both?

We stopped at Trader Joe's on the way home and made it to the apartment just five minutes before it started pouring down rain. 

Tomorrow I want to go to Rockaway, which you can actually reach on the subway line, but which John is somewhat balking at, because apparently you can walk to a beach where people surf from the subway.  There was an article in the paper that mentioned a couple of people who go out there on the subway and surf before they go to work.  Of course one of them was a chef, so presumably he doesn't go to work all that early, but it still seems like a lot of work.   The pictures in the paper didn't exactly show giant waves.