JP and I have been exploring Manhattan by bike, and it has become one of my favorite ways to experience the city. You pass through so many different neighborhoods, under bridges and alongside the river, watching people running, walking, fishing, playing, exercising, sitting in the sun, being alone and being together. You can cover an enormous amount of the city and still be moving slowly enough to see it.
If you have never been to The Met Cloisters, it is totally worth it. It is spectacular to arrive by bike, after moving through contemporary Manhattan, and suddenly find yourself surrounded by objects and architecture from nearly 900 years ago. It’s far from downtown and that’s part of why it is so special. In fact, one of our favorite expressions is that it’s not about the journey or the destination, it’s about the company.
What I love about The Cloisters is how the art, architecture, and landscape exist together. Sculpture, tapestries, stained glass, and devotional objects are experienced alongside stone archways, chapels, courtyards, and cloisters. Moving through those spaces changes the way you see the art.
I am particularly interested in the gardens. The plants are dense, copious, beautiful, and also reveal how people lived. Plants were grown for food and medicine, for dyes and materials, and for their symbolic and magical properties. The gardens are living collections, and walking through them makes the distance between medieval life and our own feel unexpectedly small.
That juxtaposition is one of the reasons I love New York. You can spend the morning riding along the Hudson watching the city happen around you, enter a garden that evokes another world and another time, and then return immediately to the life of the city. We can move seamlessly, if not, actually timelessly between the past and the present here.
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