I survived the great blizzard of October 2011. Snow is bad everywhere, but in New York, where you expect to be able to walk all over the city, slush sucks.
The next day was perfectly clear and windless, and off I went.
Among the many virtues of New York is the plethora of museums and other cultural institutions located in buildings converted from residences. I’m not talking about house museums, on the order of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio or Philip Johnson’s Glass House. I mean places like the Cooper-Hewitt, once Andrew Carnegie’s house and the Jewish Museum, once Felix Warburg’s house, and the Neuegalerie. And of course the Frick Collection, once the residence of Andrew Clay Frick.
The Frick is showing a fine assemblage of Picasso drawings in its basement galleries [not, IMO, the most pleasant place to look at art], but it’s really the Frick house itself that is the treat; you realize those robber barons really knew how to live.
Continuing with the photography ban theme, the guards are vigilant here, but I managed to take a few stealth shots of the Garden Court - a wonderful spot for quiet contemplation.
The Whitney Museum has two excellent shows: Real/Surreal, full of great paintings from the 30s - 50s of mostly American surrealism, including a few pieces I’d never consider surrealism - like Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning
and work by several artists with whom I was completely unfamiliar:
Henry Koerner, most of whose work reflects his experiences as a Holocaust survivor
Mabel Dwight
and Peter Blume
which of course is far more of a reflection of my ignorance than the relative obscurity of these artists.
I actually was able to take a few stealth photos of the installation
But at the Whitney’s excellent David Smith show, where there were more guards than museumgoers in the gallery, one of the guards was so focused on the photography ban that he followed me around the room and told me to put my phone away.
It wouldn’t be hyperbole, though, to say that my visit to MoMA was the cultural highlight of the trip. I only had a morning to spend there, which just wasn’t enough.
That said, I arrived in time for a “Gallery Conversation” at the deKooning exhibition, which is huge and comprehensive — precisely what I would have expected. I learned a lot, including these facts: that he left Holland as a stowaway and remained an undocumented foreign national [known in some circles as an “illegal alien”] until the 1960s; that he had been trained as a “commercial artist” and worked as a window dresser and as a WPA muralist; and that Marilyn Monroe was a primary influence, which helps explain those women with big red lips.
Although there was the usual photo prohibition, people in my group kept snapping photos and our guide didn’t say anything. Of course when I took a picture with my phone after the tour was over, the guard came over and told me I couldn’t take any pictures.
Additionally, MoMA’s got a fascinating show about digital communications design, with lots of video
And a terrific architecture show called 194X - 9/11, which is all about visionary urbanist planning, much of which spoke to me personally, for various reasons. There’s a lot of Mies material, because the archive of his work is housed at MoMA — perversely, I’d say, rather than at some Chicago institution. So there are some great pieces from IIT. 
I enjoyed seeing a model of Louis Kahn’s Richards Research building at Penn, which was what I saw outside the window of my dorm room in the Quad freshman year.
It’s also great to see the original presentation models for both the Seagram Building and Lever House,
and then go out on Park Avenue and see them in the flesh. 
And one more random observation about MoMA: I am guessing that, with the exception of the United Nations, you cannot find a place in the Western Hemisphere where you can sit in one place and hear the largest variety of languages spoken around you — and probably not one of them would be English.
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