Eric, Andie and I took the A train to Fort Tyron Park, two stops before the line ends at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, where we ate our lunch of Eric’s Dagwood-style sandwiches and watched boats and jetskis pass by on the Hudson. Afterwards, we walked over cobblestone paths up a hill to The Cloisters, built by John Rockefeller Jr. in 1938 to resemble a monastery and serve as an exhibition space for some of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval art and architecture.
It’s a dim, stuffy museum of small Gothic chapels and halls, packed with statuary, ornamental windows, tapestries and other relics.
Most intriguing were these spooky oak reliquaries from early 16th century Brussels. At first glance they seem to be busts or ornamental cookie jars. But reliquaries often took the forms of the body parts they were made to contain, so these were designed to store skulls. Some churches assembled large numbers of them within their sanctuaries and paraded them about town on particular feast days.
I hadn’t expected to find open courtyards within the Cloisters, containing fountains and small, lush gardens of spices, flowers and fruit trees. Andie and I decided this is a place our moms would enjoy visiting.
Here’s a quince tree, which I’d never seen before.
As we were leaving, Andie was surprised to find that a girl who works at her bookstore also works as a cashier in the Cloisters gift shop, putting in 13 hours a day to make ends meet. I asked her if she could grant us access to the Cloisters’ tower, which seems to be off-limits to visitors and mysteriously has curtains in its windows, but she said she couldn’t and that the only thing in there was the office of the museum director, who she assured us is a jerk.