On a regular day, if you want to dip your toes into more than one borough, it might involve hours below ground, four subway musicians and three train transfers. At the Museum of the City of New York, on E 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue in East Harlem, you can get a taste of all five in just one dark room.
As a part of the museum’s centennial celebration, the interactive “Songs of New York” exhibit boasts “100 years of imagining the city through music” and allows visitors to see New York City through the music that has been written — in love, jest and distaste — about its five boroughs and their wonders and pitfalls. Though contained to a small wing of the museum, the exhibit explodes across decades, cultures and neighborhoods to show how “songwriters capture life across the five boroughs in a dizzying array of styles.” Geometric outlines of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx connected by subway lines are projected onto the floor in a dark room, and visitors are invited to step on a borough to hear the music inspired by it upon entering. Doing so triggers a different song and fact every time and begins a new musical journey.
A step into the Bronx might involve the salsa-flair of “Un Jibaro En El Subway,” a 1952 recording by Lopez Anguita that conveys the all-too-familiar feeling of being “like canned sardines” on a Bronx-bound subway. You might also hear Jennifer Lopez’s “Jenny from the Block,” or Regina Spektor’s “Don’t Leave Me,” which lovingly refers to “the Bronxy-Bronx.”
Taking a trip down I-95, Manhattan’s silhouette welcomes you with Merle Haggard’s “New York City Blues” from 1972, which pokes fun at the frowning faces and lonely nights of New York, while Haggard rejoices that he is “only passing through.” If you step out and back into Manhattan’s limits, Kirsty MacColl laments about the unpredictability of New York City life on “Walking Down Madison,” singing that “from an uptown apartment to a knife on the A train, it’s not that far.” Stepping two feet behind you ships you over to Staten Island, where Long Island native Billy Joel tells a secret that must stay “between you and me and the Staten Island ferry” in “Everybody Loves You Now.” Though admittedly, I did not stay for more than one song.
Fordham University’s own Lana Del Rey finds herself far from home with “Brooklyn Baby,” and the Beastie Boys stay up all night singing “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” Just above them lies the borough responsible for bringing us “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” “The Sound of Silence” and “The Only Living Boy in New York.” Queens boasts the meeting place of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, who once wrote “a heart in New York, a rose on that street, I write my song on that city heartbeat.”
A music map put together by Celebrity Cruises catalogs the number of chart-topping songs that mention cities worldwide, and New York falls at the top of that list with no close competitors — London comes in second place, with 102 songs to the Big Apple’s 161. Many of the songs in the “Songs of New York” exhibit refer to New York City as a whole, whether in Billie Holiday’s loving ode to “Autumn in New York,” or Karen O’s impatient “Subway” lament. In “Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block,” Ella Fitzgerald remarks on the rocky rivalry between neighboring states, “I’ve seen the charm of Jersey City, but first let me remark, I saw it from the Empire State Solarium,” with New York coming out on top.
The Museum of the City of New York invites locals and tourists alike to see the city through the influential lens of music and understand the borough behind the beat.
