The “pause” on travel to New York due to COVID-19 was an enormous letdown for millions of travelers, as well as 300 volunteers who are passionate about showing the city to first-time visitors. Manhattan resident Jesse Richards, a technology executive who is married and raising a seven-year-old daughter, is one of those volunteers, known as Greeters. They’re the heart of Big Apple Greeter, a small nonprofit organization with a mission to enhance New York City’s image around the world and enrich the New York experience by connecting visitors with knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteers.
A meeting with a Greeter, affectionately known as a Greet, is different from a tour with a professional New York tour guide. It’s intended to show New York City as only New Yorkers know it. Greeters act as “volunteer friends” and meet with no more than six people at a time. The model is so successful that it’s been replicated around the world and many Greeters and visitors stay in touch long after their Greet has ended.
Growing up in New Jersey, Jesse didn’t fall in love with New York City until after college. Until then, he was unaware of the vast amount of culture, diversity and art there was to explore in the city that he previously visited just a handful of times. As a result, he is determined that people from near and far know about the wonders of New York City. He wants to make the case for the city to non-New Yorkers from around the world; to let travelers know that the city he loves is so much more than Times Square or other well-known places. He wants to convey a truth about New York City and the people who call it home and have others know the obscure, sometimes off the beaten path places that New Yorkers love. Volunteering as a Greeter provides a way for Jesse to do that, one visitor at a time.
Meetups Lead to Greets
Volunteering with Big Apple Greeter is well-aligned with the sketching Meetup that Jesse has been leading for 13 years. The group has 7,000 members and approximately 40 to 50 of them meet once or twice a month to draw obscure spots in the city. These little-known places often become experiences that Jesse shares when he meets with visitors.
Although being a volunteer Greeter is an ideal retirement job, retirement is far in the future for Jesse. In addition to his commitments to his family, Big Apple Greeter and Meetup, he is Vice President of Product at Voxy, an English language learning platform that provides personalized instruction for global corporations, major educational institutions and governments worldwide.
A Greeter for nearly a year, Jesse had been on five Greets before the pandemic put the entire city, and the travel industry, on an indefinite pause. He had an additional two Greets scheduled for the spring, both of them canceled because of the pandemic.
Showing NYC, Virtually
The pandemic hasn’t diminished Jesse’s commitment to sharing the wonders of the city, even if not in person. In May, Jesse and long-time Greeter Lester Barnett each created virtual Greets, a first for Big Apple Greeter. It’s a format that’s still being evaluated, but has the potential to become yet another way for the organization to raise awareness and enthusiasm about New York City.
Jesse’s virtual Greet was held for 20 active Greeters and featured a walk around the Gramercy Park and Union Square neighborhoods. The technology needed to make this work was simple, according to Jesse. He used Google Street View to virtually “walk” down the streets via his laptop computer at home and simultaneously share his screen via Zoom. As Jesse “walked” along the neighborhoods’ streets he paused to describe interesting landmarks and places, just as he would during an actual session with visitors. A second virtual Greet focused on Brooklyn Heights.
Advice for Prospective Volunteers
“Two to three hours a month to meet visitors is not a big commitment, and the satisfaction from seeing visitors’ excitement is priceless,” says Jesse. When he became a Greeter he found the time spent planning his first few Greets was much greater than the actual time spent with each group of visitors. After the first few Greets, he had an itinerary and format for future Greets. Another benefit of Greeting is the opportunity to meet travelers of all ages from around the world, to hear about their home countries and to see New York City through their eyes.
Jesse and all of Big Apple Greeter’s volunteers are preparing for the day when travel to New York City is possible once again. They know that the city they love is strong and that New Yorkers want to share this love with the world. Learn more about volunteering with Big Apple Greeter.
A Walk Up Fifth Avenue, Past And Present
Greeter-Historian
How lucky are we to have our own Big Apple Greeter-Historian: the adventurous Tom Keating. A true sleuth, he explores different parts of the city with camera clicking…and we get to savor his slide show.
Fifth Avenue has more famous buildings than any other street in the city. Tom started at Washington Square Arch in Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan. This marble triumphal arch was built in 1889 to celebrate the 1789 centennial of President George Washington’s inauguration.
On to The New School built in 1919 at Fifth Avenue and West 12th Street. It was founded by university professors as a progressive, free school for adults. Today it is one of the city’s bastions of art and design, with 5 divisions including the Parsons School of Design, the Mannes School of Music, and the School of Drama.
What New Yorker isn’t proud of our iconic Empire State Building at 34th and Fifth Avenue? Built in 1931, this 102-story Art Deco skyscraper was the tallest building in the world for forty years. Today, it is only the 45th!
As Tom headed uptown, we saw the original B. Altman Department Store, and Rockefeller Center, often called “The greatest urban complex of the 20th Century.” It includes 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st Streets.
The largest single family home – with 128 rooms – was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1883, at 1 West 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. 43 years later, it was sold and demolished, and today the luxurious Bergdorf Goodman has taken its place.
The procession of famous buildings continued as Tom walked farther: the Louis Vuitton store, The Plaza Hotel, and The Apple Store, known as the Glass Cube.
The Frick Museum, at 71st and Fifth Avenue, has world renowned art and a bowling alley! It is part of Museum Mile, which also includes the Metropolitan Museum at 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue — the largest museum in the country and one that’s revered by the world.
Tom ended his presentation with a statue of Duke Ellington at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street. Designed by sculptor Robert Graham in 1997, the imposing statue is 25 feet tall and a fitting tribute to the celebrated musician. But you can’t get there on the A train!
Museum of Natural History: A Thrilling Journey Through Time, With Animals As The Stars
When we met our guide, Greeter Doug Pirnie, at Theodore Roosevelt Hall, he promised we would get to see a Show of Superlatives: the fiercest, heaviest, biggest, smelliest, and boy did he deliver.
Doug’s narrative was riveting and fun. He started us out 65 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The fiercest of them all? Tyrannosaurus rex: 47 feet long, weighing 6 or 7 tons, with a hole in their hip socket that helped them hunt faster.
The teeth of T.REX were serrated like a steak knife, especially handy when tearing into your fellow dinosaurs. The crushing power of their jaws was between 8,000 and 12,000 pounds and when they broke a tooth, a replacement could show up in 35 days.
On to the animal with the widest wingspan: Pterosaurs, a flying reptile with claws in the middle of its wings. The claws were actually feet when the reptile landed on ground. Its wingspan was 39 feet, not bad, considering the span of an F-16 fighter jet is 36 feet.
The biggest turtle that ever lived? Appropriately named Stupendemys, it was over 5.9 feet long. The largest shark that ever lived? Megladon, 8 feet by 5 feet, but all that survived were its jaws and teeth. It lived to its late twenties, often going through 12,000 replacement teeth in its life.
Somewhat nervously, we came across the most poisonous species on earth, one that has killed over 54 billion people: the Anopheles mosquito. The female mosquito (males don’t sting) had its heyday in New York City in the late 1800s, causing malaria and a mortality rate that skyrocketed.
There were so many other “ests!” to see. Rafflesia is the biggest flower in the world, from Sumatra, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. It is 40 inches across and 7 to 30 pounds. No sweet aroma though, it smells like rotten meat. The heaviest animal that ever lived? The Blue Whale, found in Antarctica in 1925, weighs 200 tons, and there are only 12,000 to 20,000 thousand Blue Whales alive today. The scariest species for elephants? Man… who kills them for their ivory tusks.
As we left, we decided one word described what we had just seen: Superlative!
Historian Lloyd Ultan: Mad About The Bronx
As we filled the Big Apple Greeter conference room, historian Lloyd Ultan took us to the Bronx through his exuberant words. He grew up and still lives there. He’s been the Bronx Historian since 1996, and the minute he started talking, you could tell the Bronx was the love of his life.
Lloyd had so many interesting and funny anecdotes. For example, did you know the Bronx is the only borough attached to the North America – which means (he said snobbily) “We’re the only true Americans in the city!”
The Bronx is 42 square miles, the same size as Paris and San Francisco. There are 1,400,000 residents who come from every continent, including the penguins at the Bronx Zoo who are from Antarctica.
A little more than 50% of residents are Latino, 30% are black, and the rest are different ethnic groups: Koreans, Italians, Arabs and Israelis (who get along very well), Irish, Albanians, and European Jews, among others.
The Bronx is welcoming to everyone. Lloyd told the story of a congregation of Jews who couldn’t afford the upkeep of their temple anymore, so an imam from a nearby mosque invited them to share his sanctuary.
What is there to see in the Bronx? Lloyd started with The Bronx Zoo, The New York Botanical Gardens and Yankee Stadium.
The Bronx Zoo sits on 265 wooded acres and has more than 6000 exotic animals. It is the largest urban zoo in the world with habitats resembling life in the wild. Only a glass wall separates you from the animals.
Photo credit: interiordesign.net
The New York Botanical Garden is America’s premiere urban garden. The 250-acre landscape supports over 1,000,000 living plants in 50 different gardens. There are tropical, temperate, and desert flora, a cascade waterfall, and a 50-acre original New York forest.
The current Yankee Stadium opened in 2009. If you take a tour, you can see the locker room, sit in the dugout, or visit the Yankee Museum.
Near Yankee Stadium is Arthur Avenue. The avenue is filled with Italian restaurants offering true pasta – which is soft and made by hand. You can visit Mike’s deli where you’ll see a demonstration of how to make mozzarella.
Photo credit: pinterest.com
Then there’s the Grand Concourse, brainchild of Luis A. Riise, a French engineer. In the latter 19th century, he envisioned a grand highway (in the middle of rural countryside) and he modeled it after the Paris Champs Elyse. During the Great Depression, developers built apartment buildings in the Art Deco style. Today the Bronx has the largest collection of Art Deco lobbies in the world.
After such an entertaining presentation, we all felt the same way: mad about the man, Lloyd Ultan.
Marino Marini: Master Sculptor of Female Nudes
In a small, residential building at 421 Broome Street in Manhattan, we arrived at the fourth floor and were ushered into a large kitchen by four young Italian women who served us Italian coffee.
This was the home of CIMA, Center for Italian Modern Art, “home” being the key word. We felt comfortable right away – where else are you offered coffee and cheerful conversation before a tour?
Our passionate guide Claudia, who shared her vast knowledge, took us to through the gallery, a jewel- box space, both intimate and expansive.
As we walked, Claudia shared Marino Marini’s history, a sculptor considered to have brought a new aesthetic to the very nature of sculpture.
Marini (1901-1980) started out as a painter. At age 16, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. He also learned drawing and woodcuts – all in the classical style.
Then he discovered what he loved most: sculpture. At this point, he left Florence. He felt there were too many masterpieces everywhere he turned, and he wanted to find his OWN way through art.
In 1929 he went to Milan and as Claudia showed us his work, she spoke so lovingly about each piece, it’s as if they were her children.
In 1939, Marini created Giovinetta (Young Lady) in bronze. Plump and voluptuous, in stark contrast to classically prefect bodies, he made cracks and imperfections along the surface, recognizing her humanity. Her arms are missing; this is Marini’s way of commenting on the brutality of World War II.
Next, the imposing, muscular Pomona, 1945, named for the Roman goddess of fertility, gardens, fruits, and orchards. Walk behind Pomona, and you see she is hiding a piece of fruit in her hand.
An inspired touch was the addition of paintings of female nudes. One was by Wilhelm de Kooning and another by Giacometti.
But the hero of the day was Marino Marini, whose 30 female nudes had protruding bellies, sagging breasts, and even thick thighs. He had the ability to humanize them, while still showing their timeless beauty.
The exhibit is open through June 13, 2020. Don’t miss it! $10 during open hours. Free for students. For more information, go to italianmodernart.com
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