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We’ll Take Staten Island

New York’s suburban borough is a surprising spot for art, architecture, gardens and food.

By: Lauren Otis, TIMEOFF
   As my car traverses the Outerbridge Crossing, descending into Staten Island, I pop "Enter the Wu-Tang" into the tape player. The crazy, loopy sounds of one of the greatest rap groups of all time, who improbably emerged from this, the quietest and most enigmatic of New York City’s five boroughs, seems appropriate on an afternoon devoted to seeking out some of Staten Island’s unheralded pleasures.
   Growing up in Manhattan, I considered Staten Island to be more apart from than a part of New York City. Reachable by car only from Brooklyn and New Jersey, and by the ferry from Manhattan, New York’s least populous borough seemed sleepy and uninteresting. It was an anomaly in New York — a piece of the suburbs in this most built-up and urban of cities.
   Windows down to the breeze, myself and a fellow explorer are soon cruising up Richmond Avenue on our way to a destination as quiet and bucolic as the sounds of Wu-Tang Clan are jarring and discordant: the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art.
   We pass through Historic Richmond Town, a restored 17th Century village worth a stop on its own, and head up steep San Francisco-like streets into the Lighthouse Hill neighborhood, named for the 140-foot lighthouse perched above the tony landscaped homes. We park on Lighthouse Avenue — there is no museum parking — and walk down stone steps into another world. Tibetan prayer flags flutter overhead. A large stone patio wraps around a building constructed in the style of a Himalayan Buddhist temple, all perched on the side of a steep hill. Here is the museum Jacques Marchais opened in 1947 to permanently house her collection of Tibetan and Himalayan art.
   Yes, Jacques Marchais was an Ohio-born "her," not a French "him." So the story goes, her father was both set on a son and the name Jacques Marchais, and wasn’t deterred by the birth of his daughter. Ms. Marchais’ name came in handy, according to Jim Harding, a volunteer at the museum, when she opened an antique store in Manhattan. "A woman wouldn’t have been taken seriously but people assumed there was a French man behind the antiques operation," Mr. Harding tells us.
   A temple to Himalayan art, the Jacques Marchais museum is also a temple in its own right. "This is the only place in New York City designated a holy site by the Dalai Llama," says Mr. Harding. The Dalai Llama consecrated it in 1992.
   On one side of the museum’s main hall sits a large Tibetan Buddhist altar flanked by several large metal alloy sculptures of Bodhisattvas, or those who are enlightened but have forgone Nirvana in order to help others on Earth. Most of the large room is given over to the museum’s 60th anniversary exhibition, titled From Staten Island to Shangri La: The Collecting Life of Jacques Marchais.
   The exhibit features a good selection of the museum’s Tibetan holdings plus historical photographs and objects surrounding Jacques Marchais’ life and her construction of the museum on Staten Island. Of note are a kapala, or skull bowl, a ritual bowl made of tooled metal and a human cranium; sculptures of Yamantaka, a wrathful Buddhist divinity, and Arhats or Buddhist saints; and a set of 13 small metal figurines of deities of the old Pon religion of Tibet. Ms. Marchais played with these figurines as a young girl, and upon rediscovering them in her mother’s belongings after her death in 1927, credited them with sparking her interest in Tibetan art.
   Near the altar sits a sand mandala, painstakingly created in 2005 by a visiting Bhutanese monk in celebration of Losar, the Buddhist New Year. Most sand mandalas are dispersed after completion as a sign of devotion, but this one "is the only one in the U.S. to be allowed not to be dispersed," says Mr. Harding.
   Emerging from the museum, we stroll to another of Staten Island’s unheralded treasures: Crimson Beech, the only residence in New York City designed by world-famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
   Named for several large copper beech trees on the original plot, Crimson Beech was a prefab kit purchased and assembled at its current site by Catherine and William Cass in 1959, the year Wright died. It was bought by the current owners, Frank and Jeanne Cretella, in 2002.
   My fellow adventurer lingers by the curb but I can’t resist walking up to the front door. Maddy Cretella, the owners’ daughter, opens the door.
   So what is it like to live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house?
   "It’s cool, it can be annoying, but it’s cool," is Maddy’s reply.
   Annoying because you can’t remodel your historic bedroom any way you want and you have to answer the door for the likes of me? Maddy nods and smiles.
   Back on Richmond Avenue, we head to Staten Island’s gritty north shore, for centuries home to the borough’s harbor-focused industry. Our destination is Sailors Snug Harbor, a 19th Century former home for retired sailors, on Richmond Terrace. Now a National Historic Landmark, incorporating 26 buildings in Greek Revival, Beaux Arts, Italianate and Victorian style architecture on 83 acres, the grounds and structures of Snug Harbor have been reclaimed and now house a variety of arts and cultural institutions, including the Snug Harbor Cultural Center — which hosts contemporary art exhibitions and theater productions — and the Staten Island Botanical Garden.
   The weather is too good to linger inside and we stroll the botanical gardens, heading toward the New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden, an authentic classical Chinese garden.
   The "scholar" sat atop ancient China’s social, political, intellectual and economic order, and many traditionally built gardens where they could seek out beauty and serenity. Incorporating the elements of wood, rock, water and plantings, the gardens sought to create many-faceted spaces, ever changing perspectives and views, and multi-textured stimuli for the senses.
   Strolling the walkways, rooms and chambers of Staten Island’s scholar’s garden, or just sitting at any of the many points of contemplation, is truly a serene and transporting experience. The sight of elaborate stone constructions, the earthy smell of hewn wood beams, the rustle of sculptured maples and other vegetation engage us as we progress. On a weekday late-afternoon we have the scholar’s garden to ourselves.
   Finally, botanical garden employee Cecilia Li Kitts rouses us from our reverie and tells us it’s closing time. The tranquil atmosphere of the garden feels so much a part of a different era that we are shocked when Ms. Kitts informs us the garden was built in 1998.
   Ms. Kitts tells us all the components of Staten Island’s scholar’s garden were designed and manufactured in Suzhou, China — a city famous for its scholar’s gardens — and shipped in pieces to the United States. A team of 40 Chinese artisans assembled the garden in six months, she said. At the time it was the only authentic Chinese scholar’s garden in the U.S., but today others have been built and many more are planned.
   Back out on Richmond Terrace a neon sign beckons and before we know it we are sitting at an outdoor patio at R.H. Tugs restaurant, sipping cold drinks and looking out over tugboats and barges plying the Kill Van Kull as the sun sets over the gas storage tanks in Bayonne. Maybe not a view for a Chinese scholar, but this Staten Island vista suits me just fine, and I’m sorry when darkness falls and we head back to the Goethals Bridge and New Jersey."
Information on Historic Richmond Town can be found at www.historicrichmondtown.org. The Jacques Marchais Museum is located at 338 Lighthouse Avenue. Information can be found at www.tibetanmuseum.org. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Crimson Beech house is located at 48 Manor Court. Information on Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1000 Richmond Terrace, can be found at www.snug-harbor.org. Information on the Staten Island Botanical Garden (and N.Y. Chinese Scholar’s Garden), 1000 Richmond Terrace, is at www.sibg.org. Located at 1115 Richmond Terrace, R.H. Tugs restaurant’s Web site is www.rhtugs.com