Dr. Seuss Exhibit, Updated

I went to see the exhibit of Dr. Seuss's hats  at the Children's Center at 42nd Street, located in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building on Fifth Avenue, known to my children as the "wide library," the other day.  My 5-year-old refused to go and it was just as well.  The exhibit consisted of one display case with the dozen hats.  As I had suspected, it was certainly more interesting to adults than to children!   I took a few pictures before being reprimanded and told not to do so.  I hadn't seen the tiny sign forbidding it - honest!

The Children's Center itself, however, as I may have mentioned before, contains a beautiful mural of New York City landmarks, including the Schwarzman building itself.  Note it is not drawn to scale and landmarks that are next to each other on the mural are not necessarily next to each other in reality.  The Children's Center also contains the real stuffed animals upon which the Winnie-the Pooh stories were based, which are also  probably of interest to adults more so than to kids.

Have you been to the Children's Center?  I want to get around to taking one of the free tours of the Schwarzman building, with its lion motifs throughout.  

The One Dozen Hats of Dr. Seuss

There is a new exhibit at the NYPL of a dozen hats that actually belonged to Dr. Seuss himself!  An article in the New York Times gives more details about the exhibit which will be on view only through next Monday February 11!  I wish the exhibit lasted longer and was bigger!  Dr. Seuss apparently had hundreds of hats and I wonder why only such a small fraction will be on view.  The hats were an inspiration for many books, particularly the The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, which is the one place I think fewer hats would have been better.  That book needed a little more editing... 100 hats would have been enough!

Lunch at the Library

Today I met my husband for a brief date and we had lunch at the library, both figuratively and literally.  First we checked out the NYPL's exhibit about lunch in New York.  I loved it!  From pushcarts to a re-created (but sadly not operational) Automat, from delis to pretzels, from pizza to Chinese take-out, from the power lunch to school lunch, the exhibit was fascinating.  Somehow we missed the part about that quintessential New York lunch, the hot dog, but this review assures me it's there.  To top it all off, a different food truck will be serving lunch every weekday on the south side of the library through Labor Day.  I lucked out today with the Rickshaw Dumpling Truck. 

We also visited the famed Reading Room, which embarassingly I think I had never been to before.  It has an amazing view of the Empire State Building, among other charms, of course.  And I discovered that tours of the Schwartzman Building (aka the "main library") are given twice daily on weekdays and once a day on Saturdays. 

Do you plan to go to the lunch exhibit or tour the Schwartzman building?

Find Your Inner Artist (or Stop-Motion Animator)

On Thursday, I took my girls to our local library branch for this program on the works of Ezra Jack Keats.  We all (including me!) had a chance to make Keats-inspired collages, ostensibly of our neighborhood.  Can you guess which one of us did which collage?  Here they are:

The workshop was run by an educator from the Jewish Museum in connection with its exhibit, The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats. The woman who led our program, who is an artist herself, did a fantastic job.   It looks like the museum is doing the workshop at one more branch, so go check it out!

Then today we went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, to see the exhibit Jim Henson's Fantastic World.  It was absolutely fascinating and the fact that there were plenty of TV clips allowed me and my husband to take turns viewing the exhibit while the other of us would watch the TV clips with the kids (on comfy beanbags!).  Not to mention that we got to make our own stop-motion animations!  I know this doesn't involve books but since Henson is known, at least in part, for educational television, I figured I'd throw it in.

What book-related exhibits or activities have you been to lately?