Good morning. It's Monday. We'll tour a city within the city, built with acorns and tree bark and other plants. We'll also get details on the State Department of Labor's inquiry into Shen Yun Performing Arts.
This is about a New York City that is different than the one you know and love. Or know and find infuriating. Or some combination of the two. In this one, the Woolworth Building is right in front of the Empire State Building, which is next to the Chrysler Building. And you can see the George Washington Bridge from the Hell Gate Bridge. But these structures weren't built with steel, stone and glass. They are part of a botanical metropolis, a miniature New York created with acorns and tree bark. It's the backdrop for the holiday train show that opened over the weekend at the New York Botanical Garden. There are freight trains with hulking engines and mundane boxcars. There are passenger trains, even trolleys. But even for train lovers, the buildings command the attention. "It's the buildings we know and love and see in a different way," said Jennifer Bernstein, the garden's president and chief executive. "It's a misnomer to call it a holiday train show. There are trains, to be sure, but the star is the landmark buildings." There are nearly 200 of them, and a half-mile of railroad tracks. "It's almost like a postcard," said Laura Busse Dolan, whose father, Paul, started Applied Imagination, the company that makes the buildings and lays the tracks. And, Bernstein said, "it's so wonderfully analog." "So much these days is about screens and computers," Bernstein said. "This is old world. This is a from-the-earth experience." The building materials came from forest floors. The Empire State Building has horse-chestnut bark for walls and reeds for window mullions, along with crosscut walnuts and pine cones, Busse Dolan said. The Chrysler Building is crowned with palm leaves, not the stainless steel that reigns over 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue. The gargoyles on the building's 31st and 61st floors are made of mahogany pods with the ends of pine cones. Like the real New York, the replica city is a work in progress. The newest building, a model of the Hearst Tower on Eighth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, hasn't arrived yet. "We're still working on it," Busse Dolan said. It will take its place on Dec. 6. Her father, a landscape architect from Kentucky who spent much of his career building fantasy landscapes, staged the first train show in 1992 after the garden asked him to design a layout. To show what was possible, he created a sample, a model of the cottage in the Bronx where Edgar Allan Poe lived in the 1840s. The plant-based city has been growing ever since. Busse added City Hall in 2003, in response to a question from Michael Bloomberg, the mayor at the time. "So where's City Hall?" he asked after looking around. The one that appeared the following year, and has been part of the cityscape ever since, has cattails for the stonework and honeysuckle for the columns. Busse Dolan, 43 — who took over in 2017, after her father's Parkinson's disease progressed to where he could no longer work on the replica buildings and the model locomotives — said that modern buildings present challenges for model makers working with plant materials. "Old, ornate ones lend themselves" to such replicas, she said. One World Trade Center was "the most difficult to conceive," she said, "because how do you make a large glass building out of botanicals?" She and the artists at Applied Imagination built a tower of acrylic panels and applied birch branches that appear to grow up the side "to celebrate the regrowth and rebirth that building is for New York City." WEATHER The sky will gradually become sunny, with a high near 65 and a strong breeze. Tonight, expect a mostly clear sky with a low near the mid-40s and a gentle breeze. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving Day). The latest New York news
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Shen Yun's labor practices draw regulators' scrutiny
The New York State Labor Department has opened an inquiry into Shen Yun Performing Arts, the global dance company that operates from a guarded, 400-acre campus in Orange County. The agency began the inquiry after questions from The Times, which in August documented numerous instances of what legal experts and former performers describe as questionable labor practices by Shen Yun, which is operated by the Falun Gong religious movement. The group earns millions of dollars from the shows it stages every year but pays its underage performers little or nothing. Former performers say the tour schedules that they had to follow were grueling and that the conditions under which they trained were abusive. Shen Yun appears to have spent years violating a state law designed to protect underage performers, The Times has found. The law requires performance groups to obtain state certification before using performers younger than 18, and it requires those performers to have work permits. The law also governs working hours, rest time and education, and includes provisions for employers to provide time during the workday for academic instruction. It also specifies that 15 percent of an underage performer's earnings should go into a trust account, though it doesn't address whether or how much the performers should be paid. Former Shen Yun performers said their schooling during their months on tour largely consisted of writing in journals between shows or filling out homework packets. They were not aware of having work permits or trust accounts. Shen Yun has used underage performers for nearly 20 years but had not been certified by the State Labor Department before applying in late September. The application was approved, and Shen Yun must now give the department a 30-day notice if it plans to use children in a performance in New York, officials said. Shen Yun's leaders denied breaking any laws and said that the youngest performers are not employees but students who receive a learning opportunity and often get a stipend. "The vast majority of students will tell you this is their dream come true, and the parents rave about the positive changes in their children," Shen Yun and Falun Gong representatives, Ying Chen and Levi Browde, said in a statement. METROPOLITAN DIARY Dive Bar
Dear Diary: When I was in college, I traveled with a small group of people from Ohio to New York to attend a conference at Columbia University about left-wing politics and progressive activism. After a long day of teach-in sessions and listening to different speakers, my friend Jackie and I decided to get away for a bit. We wandered down Amsterdam in search of a drink. We found a dark dive bar and grabbed stools among the dozen or so patrons who were there. We ordered the cheapest draft beer available. The bartender, correctly sizing us up as out-of-towners, asked what had brought us to the city. We told him about the event at Columbia. "We're socialists," Jackie told him. "Oh, cool!" the bartender said. "That's awesome." He continued the conversation, asking us more questions about the conference, what we were studying in college and what the trip from Ohio to New York had been like. I gave him a $20 bill to pay for the beers, and he went to the register. A minute later, he came back with a handful of singles. "Now," he said, "do you want your change or should I evenly distribute it to everyone in here?" — Jonathan Rose Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: The concrete jungle in bark and acorn
November 18, 2024
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