PlanetEye

If you pay a visit to Ground Zero, site of what was once the World Trade Center, you'll notice how the gaping desolate hole, now a massive construction site filled with enormous cranes is strikingly juxtaposed with the leafy green burial ground and majestic St. Paul's Chapel directly across the street.  Built in 1766, St. Paul's Chapel is Manhattan's only remaining colonial church and the oldest public building in continuous use. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, St. Paul's Chapel served as a place of rest and refuge for recovery workers at the WTC site.

For eight months, hundreds of volunteers worked 12 hour shifts around the clock, serving meals, making beds, counseling and praying with fire fighters, construction workers, police and others. Massage therapists, chiropractors, podiatrists and musicians also tended to their needs. Inside the chapel, an interactive exhibit, "Unwavering Spirit: Hope & Healing at Ground Zero", continues to serve as a shrine of this catastrophe, focusing on individuals involved and their personal stories  

On that fateful day, the collapsing towers sent tons of debris hurdling toward the church, including a large steel beam from the North Tower knocking over a giant sycamore tree that had stood for nearly a century in the church yard.  When the dust settled, the uprooted tree had miraculously fallen in such a way that none of the historic tombstones around it were disturbed, none of the wreckage reached the church, and not a single pane of glass was broken.  Today, the stump is all that remains. 

In 2005, renowned sculpture Steve Tobin, hearing the story of this sycamore, envisioned creating a metaphor of unity and strength using the tree's roots in a bronze sculpture.  Tobin with the help of tree experts, first painstakingly preserved the original Sycamore stump which is now on display outside the Chapel, and then created the massive sculpture based on castings of the tree's roots. Called the "Trinity Root", it is on display in the plaza of Trinity Church, located five blocks south at Broadway and Wall St.   

Check out the home of a star that once lived in Queens!  A typical museum this is not.  Louis Armstrong was wealthy enough to live just about anywhere in the world but chose to stay in working-class Corona. The Louis Armstrong House, truly a time capsule, offers an intimate glimpse into where this jazz legend and his wife Lucille lived from 1943-1971.  As soon as you walk through the front door and tour this red-brick façade row house, you'll get the feeling that Louis and Lucille just stepped out for a bit and will return shortly to greet you. In fact, much of the interior's lived-in charm such as the living room's woven patterned drapes and the funky silver-foil wallpaper in a bedroom remains almost exactly as it did when Lucille suddenly died in 1983. The bathrooms are decked out in marble, 24-carat gold-plated fixtures, floor to ceiling mirrors, and built-in speakers. The kitchen sports a state-of-the-art sixties vibe with sleek turquoise-colored cabinets, a custom-made double-oven, and recessed appliances built into the countertop. 

Louis loved his gadgets and was clearly fond of his reel-to-reel tape deck, a tech toy of the times, recording countless hours of life at home and on the road. When the house opened as a museum, a hidden audio system was installed.  Tour guides press buttons in each room playing various excerpts further infusing the house with Louis' presence.  In the dining room, he jokes about his favorite dish, red beans and rice and in his wood-paneled office; he's humming his own tune in time to a classical piece. Through anecdotes during the tour and small exhibits accompanied by a film in what was once the garage/basement, you'll discover the man behind the legend. Displays include pages from Louis' journals, collages, and an FBI file stemming from his refusal to represent the United States on a State Department tour of the Soviet Union in protest of 1957's Little Rock Nine crisis.

Despite leaving school well before high school graduation, Louis wrote and performed hit jazz numbers spanning 5 decades, authored two autobiographies, and penned more than ten magazine articles, as well as memoirs and letters numbering in the thousands.  His nickname "Ambassador Satch" (Satchmo) stuck as the result of appearing in over 30 movies and being on the road about 300 days each year entertaining millions, from heads of state to royalty.  Despite this success, he always returned to the kids on his stoop and sometimes practiced his trumpet outside on the tiny balcony off his den.   

The first warm days of spring have arrived, flowering trees and tulips are in full bloom, and you want to see some good art.  Not up for spending hours in the sanctity of the indoors plowing through gallery upon gallery of lengthy exhibits?

Then take the N or W train from Manhattan to the Broadway stop in Queens and walk eight blocks to Vernon Boulevard on the East River. Straight ahead, a large metal sign spans the entrance to Socrates Sculpture Park.  It's almost impossible to imagine that this 4.5 acre riverfront park with sunset views of Manhattan was once an abandoned landfill and illegal dumpsite. In 1986, a coalition of artists and community activists led by artist Mark di Suvero, transformed this wasteland into a neighborhood park with an outdoor open studio and exhibit space for large-scale sculpture. Here the process of creation is on display as much as the finished product.  You'll see artists in residency wielding power tools amongst piles of iron and wood creating their masterworks. Feel free to touch, photograph, and even climb on the sculptures or let your dogs run around them. Look closely because sometimes it's hard to distinguish the intentional art from intriguing river debris. A good example is The Peat Moss Sculpture; an enormous chunk of wood, wire and rebar covered in algae and gently submerged at the edge of the river, where it blends in with the nearby pilings and driftwood.

Based on the belief that reclamation and creative expression are essential to humanity and improving New York's urban environment, the park offers extensive outreach programs to local schools, summer activities including free outdoor film screenings, live music, and sculpture and art classes for all ages. Open 365 days a year from 10am to sunset, admission is free.

NYC's largest farmers market is open year round Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 8 AM to 6 PM sprawling over most of Union Square Park. During peak seasons, more than 250,000 customers visit per week but it wasn't always this way.

Believe it or not, back in the 1970s, New Yorkers had few fresh produce options with iceberg lettuce, unripe tomatoes, and unseasonable fruits being the norm. Regional farms were going bankrupt and getting paved over. In 1976, twelve farmers took over an empty lot with makeshift produce stalls setting the foundation for a city-wide Greenmarket system that exists today.  Now the largest regional food network in the country, this win-win arrangement helps small family farmers stay in business, preserves farmland for future generations, and supplies neighborhoods and City chefs with an ongoing supply of organic, naturally-grown local produce and other farm products.

Take a walk through and you'll see that this market doesn't just cater to upscale vegetarians. In addition to browsing over 1,000 varieties of fruits and vegetables including 8 to 10 varieties of potatoes, bushels of heirloom apples and pears, and a mind boggling selection of mixed greens like mesclun, red mustard, arugala, tat-soi, bok choy, broccoli raab, and broccoli sprouts, prime cuts of grass-fed beef and pork, breakfast sausage, pork chops, and spare ribs await. Try pairing some gourmet brick oven bread, sunflower millet, sour seeded rye, or exotic Focaccia with artisan farmstead cheeses like Brigid's Abbey (a nutty Belgian Trappist).  For some extra energy at breakfast, take home some maple or cinnamon butter, fine honey from the Albany-Saratoga region, or a poppy-prune coffee cake.

Best of all, you'll get a chance to meet the farmers behind it all at your own pace and know that end-of-day unsold produce is donated to City Harvest, a cooperative that distributes food citywide to pantries and soup kitchens.

Every year on April 13th, Jackson Heights' Southeast Asian community celebrates Vaisakhi.  Marked on the Punjabi Sikh calendar in the month of Vaisakhon, this ancient harvest festival, originally celebrated in the Punjab region of South Asia, gives everybody a break from toiling in the fields all year. The crops have been harvested, everybody just got paid, and it's time to party!  Sure, Queens is a long way from the festival's agrarian roots, but thankfully that doesn't stop the community here on 74th St. from carrying on the tradition.  In addition to the many food and sweet stalls, jewelry, and any kind of East Indian music imaginable for sale and blaring over gigantic sound systems at this raucous block party, Bhangra and Gidha dance performances take place on the main stage throughout the day.

Bhangra and Gidha, two forms of indigenous Punjabi folk dancing originally done by farmers in Northern India, are fusions of music, singing and the beat of the dhol drum, a single stringed instrument called the iktar, the tumbi and the chimta. Today, Bhangra survives in different forms and styles all over the globe evolving into one of the world's fastest growing dance and musical art forms. In addition to the traditional performances at Vaisakhi, you'll definitely experience this evolution with house and club variations permeating the air along with the aroma of roasted corn and festive pumpkin-orange jalebi frying in deep cauldrons.