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There’s an unexpected Jewish story to note at this annual attraction, where style trains pass through a small New York City made of plant-based materials.
Exploring the amazing variety of greenery at the New York Botanical Garden is a magical experience. This is even more true during the holiday season, when the Bronx Garden Holiday Train Show makes its annual appearance, bringing a multitude of styled trains traveling through a miniature New York City was erected inside the lush Enid A Conservatory. Haupt of the garden.
Each year since 1992, the exhibit has featured an increasing number of New York City landmarks, from City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge to the Statue of Liberty and the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island. The trains pass by more than 150 iconic new buildings. York City’s monuments, designed by Kentucky-based art studio Applied Imagination, are made from genuine forest materials: tree bark, acorns, flowers, nuts, pine cones and more.
“This is old world,” the garden’s president and chief executive Jennifer Bernstein told The New York Times. “This is a from-the-earth experience.”
I visited the train show recently and kept an eye out for the Jewish sites featured in the show, which runs through Jan. 20, 2025. Here are five of them.
27 West 72nd St.
Even if you don’t know Nathan Straus’ name, you probably know the two department stores he co-owned, starting in the late 19th century: Abraham & Straus and R.H. Macy & Company (which now just goes by the far more familiar Macy’s). Straus’ Jewish family immigrated from present-day Germany to Georgia before the Civil War forced them to rebuild their lives up north, where the Straus family business launched by selling crockery to R.H. Macy & Company. (Macy’s completely took over the Abraham & Straus brand in the 1990s.)
Straus and his wife Lina were staunch early Zionists, visiting then-Palestine multiple times. His legacy continues there, as the Israeli city of Netanya is named after him.
For decades, Straus and his circle of relatives lived in this space on West 72nd Street, built in 1896 and described as a “brownstone. “It was later transformed into a condominium building.
1109 Fifth Avenue.
The Jewish Museum, which has the largest collection of Jewish objects and artworks in the world outside of Israel, was originally a Châteauesque style mansion built for Jewish financier Felix Warburg. Warburg was very active in Jewish organizational life, heading for a time the 92nd Street Y (then the Young Men’s Hebrew Association) and helping lead the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the wake of World War I.
The Jewish Museum moved into the space in 1947. You can by drop by IRL and check out the Tel Dan Stele, the oldest archeological evidence of King David (through Jan. 5); an exhibit by a Black artist and a Jewish artist that mocks the KKK (through March 30) or simply grab a bite at the new kosher cafe, Lox at the Jewish Museum.
1071 Fifth Avenue.
The Guggenheim, as it is commonly known, is one of the most famous museums in the world, known for its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Ring Building and the innovative art it houses. The museum’s founder, Solomon Guggenheim, a wealthy Jewish miner who became one of the world’s best-known modern art creditors, built an eponymous foundation in 1937 to maintain modern art. His niece Peggy Guggenheim built her own impressive collection, which today is housed in Venice as a museum and is one of the city’s most popular attractions.
The Guggenheim style presented in the railway exhibition stands out, with its multicolored bark and mushroom-shaped façade.
At the New York Botanical Garden, the Bronx
This factory, founded as the Lorillard Snuff Mill, is the oldest tobacco factory of its kind in the United States. Of course, it’s no longer a tobacco factory: it was incorporated into the botanical lawn in 1915 and now houses offices and even a restaurant. service.
Lillian Goldman, one of the country’s most prominent Jewish philanthropists at the time of her death in 2002, with a net worth of nearly $400 million, thanks to her backward real estate investor husband, Sol Goldman. His daughter Amy is a well-known ancient plant conservationist who has written several books on crops and vegetables.
central park
The Naumburg Bandshell, the only Neoclassical structure within Central Park, is the brainchild of merchant, banker and philanthropist Elkan Naumburg, who was born to a Jewish family in Bavaria and pioneered the idea of free classical music for all New Yorkers in 1905. The Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, “the world’s oldest continuous free outdoor classical concert series,” continue to this day.
The Holiday Train Show runs through Jan. 20, 2025, at the New York Botanical Gardens (2900 Southern Blvd., the Bronx). Click here for tickets and more information.
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