Friday, 12th December.

Luckily, I had packed my business clothes in my hand luggage ,as I had an apointment at the New York Library for the Performing Arts that afternoon at 2p.m.
After breakfast, to my delight, my suitcase had turned up, so after ringing the apartment agency through which we had booked our accommodation we headed into the city . We caught the shuttle back to Federal and then the air train to Jamaica and changed to a metro to get us to 50th St. I won't comment on the difficulties with luggage, but believe me, it was not easy.
But, we made it to our apartment on the cnr of W52nd and 8th Ave, and the apartment lady was waiting. It was a great location and a very nice studio apartment so we dumped our bags and rushed a few blocks up t the Lincoln Centre for my appointment. David decided to come with me, to see what it was all about. 9and as a musician and a music teacher , he was literally 'blown away' by it all)
The Deputy Director of the Library Service, Kevin Winkler, met us and after an introductory tour, left us to be with various head of dept and see how the place functioned. It was wonderful and is the world's most extensive combination of circulating, reference, and rare archival collections in its field, covering music, dance, theatre, recorded sound, and other performing arts.
http://www.nypl.org/research/lpa/lpa.html
These materials are available free of charge, along with a wide range of special programs, including exhibitions, seminars, and performances. An essential resource for everyone with an interest in the arts--whether professional or amateur--the Library is known particularly for its prodigious collections of non-book materials such as historic recordings, videotapes, autograph manuscripts, correspondence, sheet music, stage designs, press clippings, programs, posters and photographs.
It is a branch of The New York Public Library which comprises simultaneously a set of scholarly research collections and a network of community libraries, and its intellectual and cultural range is both global and local, while singularly attuned to New York City. That combination lends to the Library an extraordinary richness. It is special also in being historically a privately managed, nonprofit corporation with a public mission, operating with both private and public financing in a century-old, still evolving private-public partnership. The research collections (for reference only, and organized as The Research Libraries, with four major centers) resemble the holdings of the great national and university libraries, and the community circulating libraries (organized as The Branch Libraries) resemble classic American municipal libraries.
I will be explaining in more detail, in my report the vast amount of things we saw in the three fascinating hours we spent there , but many thanks go to Kevin and his wonderfully dedicated staff for the time they spent with us.

By this time we were absolutely exhausted and went to dinner at a Diner across the road from our apartment , which was not particularly exciting.