Years, perhaps decades, had passed since I had walked up that huge flight of steps leading to the front entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tom and I headed to the glass enclosed Temple of Dendur, where the walls open through glass to the fields of Central Park.
The scope of the museum had so greatly expanded since I last roamed its halls and galleries. Many of the new galleries and additions were glass enclosed, opening the vast inner rooms to alternating courtyards of sculpture and architecture (entire facades of buildings built into the sides of soaring atriums). The “traditional” galleries also filled with light…lighting up the faces of people, especially the children, who had come to enjoy the lavish collections that the wealth of New York provides for the world.
Tom and I wandered up to the roof sculpture garden where “Big Bamboo” was under construction…a work “in progress.” The flexibility and strength of bamboo allow creation of pathways up into the structure; small groups of tourists thread their way up and around the poles which appear to be growing out over other portions of the museum’s roof top. Workers (or are they architects) add new elements to this growing organic work….quite unlike the finished stone and metal works in the galleries below. Beyond “Big Bamboo,” the city rises along the southern rim of Central Park.
Tom and I drink mojitos from the bar on the roof garden and share a ham and cheese sandwich, watching the bamboo unfold its wings above us. We stand up and look over the edge of the roof to the skyscrapers along Central Park South. No other place is quite like this on this sunny spring morning.
