What a glorious day! About 11C today and gorgeous sunny skies for a change. Still cold with the wind coming off the Hudson, but so much better than a couple of days ago. We thought we’d head up the iconic Empire State Building today to see what we could see. The observation deck on the Empire State Building is 86 floors up and it has been a major attraction for many years. Who hasn’t seen Sleepless in Seattle or King Kong? 
I love the Art Deco everything that you encounter in New York. The architecture and the statuary around the place; plaques and flooring and ceilings all have that Art Deco feel to them. This must be the only place in the world were Art Deco and Broadway fonts don’t look stupidly twee.
Something else we have been enjoying since arriving here (and in DC) has been every tourists dream – empty rope lines. As much as I have been cursing Mr K’s work for seeing us travelling in March rather than April because that was going to suit the needs of the office more, there has been one upside… hardly any tourists compared to what these major attractions are obviously built to deal with, so we have had hardly any waiting for most things. Except for security screening processes but I guess in this modern world that is a bit unavoidable now.
Within the Empire State Building there is an attraction called the New York Sky Ride, and you can’t get near the building without hawkers attempting to sell you tickets to try it out. As luck would have it, tickets to this particular attraction are included in the New York Pass that we bought so we thought we’d give it a try. The ‘ride’ leads you through three briefing chambers where you get an awful lot of ‘New York fuck yeah’, and these are really staging areas designed to make you feel you have 1) gotten your moneys worth and 2) make the experience seem longer and more worth while. Once you get into the ride, it is a nasty jerky seating platform with a smallish screen showing a helicopter flight through New York, that was obviously filmed in the mid-90s, and is narrated by Kevin Bacon. Woefully out of date and jerky and low resolution in image quality I would have felt very ripped off if the two of us had paid the $84!!!! it costs to go on this experience. Thankfully it cost us nothing extra. I would not recommend this thing to anyone and especially not if you have limited time in the city… hell, I don’t even think children would enjoy it. We were sitting in the front row and had an unobstructed view of the film and I still thought it was crap – I guess that is why out of 824 reviews, Trip Advisor rates it 1.5 stars out of 5… time to rethink that shit guys.
After that we headed up for the observation deck on the 86th floor, such a long way up. But the views were totally worth it:
Some obligatory American flags at the top, keeping company with this one high flying but very fat, one legged pigeon. 😛
After coming down from our lofty vantage point we wandered a little further downtown and saw the famous Flatiron Building near Maddison Square Park, which was very pretty and also the first time I have had anything other than hard concrete under my feet, since we left Cocoa Beach two weeks ago! Quite a pretty little park in what appears to be a nice area.
We then thought we would check out the Museum of Sex. It is in the book (the New York Pass guidebook) and as such wasn’t going to cost us anything additional to go in, so we thought what the hell. It was actually a lot more interesting and less salacious than I was anticipating.
There is an exhibit on at the moment which is called the ‘Eve of Sex’ which is all about the First Woman of Porn, the quixotic Linda Lovelace. There was a lot of information as to her beginnings in pornography, her abusive relationship with her husband/manager and her later life claims that she was unwillingly performing in porn. I didn’t know that much about her, so I actually found reading some of the contrary stories about her to be quite interesting.
Additionally there was a large education gallery upstairs that housed a few sculptures that complemented a lot of informative panels and videos on mating habits of a wide variety of species, giving a lot of weird and wonderful information on various animal species’ sexual reproduction systems etc. This gallery also included material on the social aspects of many animal behaviours and how they don’t necessarily differ that much from human sexual experience.
I found this picture which was from a past exhibition and thought it looked interesting, if a little confronting for some, and thought I might try and google that stuff up later. Skeletons in various sexual positions have appeared on t-shirts and coffee mugs since I was a teenager, but I had never seen someone make artworks to replicated the same!
The last exhibit that I found quite interesting was a small artwork called ‘Robot Love’, by Michael Sullivan. His work makes use of small robot looking figures (about the size of an artists articulated model – about 12″ tall) and places them in explicitly sexual situations, culminating in a room full of robots watching robot pornography on a little screen in a little robot cinema. It was a very unusual piece.
After this, we decided to head back to the hotel for a few hours off our feet before we brace ourselves and head off into the outer suburbs tonight – Flushing Meadows in Queens!