Around the Boroughs of New York City

After spending most of Friday in Manhattan, son-in-law Sean drove us from Brooklyn up into Queens where we stopped first at the Museum of Moving Images.  I've mentioned here that Pam and I were big fans of the Mad Men television show and so were Rebecca and Sean, so we were all interested in the exhibit about it.

Here is the set for the Drapers' family kitchen:

 

We then went to the PS1 branch of the Museum of Modern Art, also in Queens, where our favorite exhibit turned out to be Cabaret Crusades by Egyptian artist Wael Shawby.  It tells the story of the Crusades from an Islamic point of view using marionettes.  This may sound odd, but it was really quite compelling, and we all wished we had the time to see the entire film. These are some of the glass marionettes used, and some of them are hundreds of years old.

 

 

We then walked to a Philippine restaurant in honor of 1/2 of Sean's ethnic background (from his mother side. Irish-American from his father). Virtually everyone in that area of Williamsburg is between 20 and 40. The one other gray-haired man we passed did a double take when he saw me probably because he was shocked to see someone else his age.

After dinner we drove through the eastern part of Williamsburg which is all Hasidic Jews. Since it was past sundown, their Sabbath was over and they were all out on the streets taking advantage of the pleasant weather. Among the scores of those families, all dressed in black and white, males wearing hats and women in long dresses, there were two young women, one in shorts and the other wearing a very short skirt, who obviously were not Hasidic. My daughter said that the Hasidic men often call out to such women to request that they dress more modestly.

Leaving Williamsburg, we passed through the edges of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood which remains almost all African-American. The border between the two areas looks fairly distinct, and I understand that the two groups live quite separately. Further south in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn where my daughter and son-in-law live, the area is more diverse: hipsterish (although my daughter resents that stereotype) young people mostly white, Blacks usually of Caribbean background, and Orthodox Jews.

Here are Sean, Rebecca, and Pam taking a break at the Museum of Moving Images: