By RALPH GARDNER JR.

Joel Cairo for The Wall Street JournalGreg Gurenlian, a midfielder with the New York Lizards professional lacrosse team, gives some pointers on the faceoff.

Is one ever too old to learn a new sport, to exalt in the art of athletic movement, to play with the ecstatic joy and abandon of a child? Well, actually, yes. That revelation came to me recently when I tried to pick up lacrosse. It happened the day after my lesson. Or maybe it was that evening. If I was being honest with myself, it happened as I became winded while jogging up and down the field with Greg Gurenlian, a star midfielder with the New York Lizards who is affectionately known as “the Beast.”

What possessed me to attempt lacrosse at my advanced age? For those unfamiliar with the sport—as I was while growing up in the city, until I got to college and saw preppies playing it—it’s sort of like soccer. But instead of moving the ball up and down the field with your feet, you cradle it in a mesh basket atop a stick, lobbing it to teammates while maneuvering for an opportunity to score. (The professional lacrosse season runs from late April to early August, and the Lizards’ home games are played at Icahn Stadium on Randalls Island and at Hofstra University’s James M. Shuart Stadium.) Contact with your opponents is acceptable—hence the helmets, gloves and shoulder pads.

Joel Cairo for The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Gurenlian is also a strength coach and teaches lacrosse to children.

In the same way that there’s pleasure in making contact with a tennis ball, in bending the laws of physics to your will, there’s something about throwing and catching the small, rubber lacrosse ball. Maybe a better analogy than soccer is baseball—that ying and yang of launching the ball and the equal if not greater pleasure of having it land in the center of your mitt with a satisfying pop. Except there’s no pop with the lacrosse stick.

Part of the intellectual rush of lacrosse—and feel free to take my words with however many grains of salt necessary because I’ve handled a lacrosse stick perhaps a half dozen times my whole life, and only for short intervals—comes from the sense of control one can experience when a piece of sports equipment becomes an extension of the body. That’s the reason I signed up for a lesson with Mr. Gurenlian: to attempt that mind/body/lacrosse stick unity. And also as an excuse to play catch during office hours.

If you have as much interest in lacrosse as in quantum mechanics and have already considered stopping reading and moving on to the financial pages or the real-estate ads, and if you are a younger parent, here’s something to consider: According to “the Beast” (actually, it might just be “Beast,” a moniker earned not just because of his body mass index but also due to his ability to wrest, or rather wrestle, the ball from opponents—but more about that later), the sport may help get your kid into college.

“If you put the time in to get your stick skills down, you can be a great player,” explained Mr. Gurenlian, a strength coach who also teaches lacrosse to kids. “There are guys of crazy different dimensions who are crazy good players.

“With lacrosse,” he went on, “parents are looking at it as an investment. You can be any shape or size and get a college scholarship.”

Lacrosse is bigger than football at some schools—Johns Hopkins, for example; well, maybe only at Johns Hopkins—but it’s also played in the Ivy League. “My kids will go to Cornell and get money for it,” boasted Mr. Gurenlian, 28, who attended Penn State on a lacrosse scholarship.

Getting my children into college wasn’t on my agenda when we convened at an indoor field in the Bronx, and not just because one is in college and the other already out. The younger one was actually a decent tennis player with a killer instinct, but decided, as had her older sister before her, that there was something uncool about being competitive. Don’t ask me where that idea came from. Certainly not from me.

The competitive juices were definitely flowing as I faced off against the Beast. His talent, as I may have mentioned, is winning face-offs. “My specialty is popping it forward for a fast break,” he explained. “I’m unique because I like to shoot off the face-off.”

One could be forgiven for thinking that the athlete’s brawn has something to do with his success; he resembles a better-looking version of the Incredible Hulk. “My position is probably the roughest,” he reported. “Essentially, I’m fighting for the ball 40 times a game against some other guy. As soon as we hear the whistle, it gets pretty brutal.”

It’s akin to a wrestling match. In fact, Mr. Gurenlain has a high school wrestling background. “In high school, in college and in the pros now, if I’m having a game it’s lights out. It’s special.”

However, he added, “I can’t just dive on the ball and hit him.” (He might have said “hurt” him; I can’t read my own handwriting. You try taking notes when facing off against the Beast.) “Last year I led the league in face-off win percentage. It was still only 62%.”

I liked to think Mr. Gurenlian and I were relatively evenly matched. He’s 6-foot-1 and 225 pounds; I’m 6-foot-2 and 190. Of course, his weight is pure muscle, while mine is a combination of beer, cake and chocolate.

Needless to say, he won every face-off, though his success seems due as much to technique as to upper body strength. It’s difficult to describe his signature move, but it’s sort of like getting the inside rail in a horse race. It’s about positioning your basket and then working it with your wrist and stick, to gain a split second edge over your opponent.

I think I deserve credit for even thinking I could win a face-off against the Beast. But as I said, I’m competitive. That was never my problem when it came to team sports; the fear of life-threatening injury was. When playing soccer, I always thought you had to be nuts to launch yourself into the air and head the ball. I like my head.

Mr. Gurenlian said part of the appeal of lacrosse is that it’s safer than football. “The severity of the concussions aren’t anywhere near the severity of football,” explained the athlete, not wholly persuasively; he came back two years ago from a knee injury and has cracked ribs and suffered a fractured vertebrae over the course of his college and professional career. “Every year when you get done in September, I’m useless until my body heals up.”

“The draw for me,” he continued, “is that I wasn’t allowed to play football as a kid. When I got the opportunity to play a contact sport that wasn’t as violent as football, I got the best of both worlds: my parents got a sport that wasn’t as violent as football, and I got to hit people.”

— ralph.gardner@wsj.com

By RALPH GARDNER JR.

One of the first things I did after I quit my job as acting director of public affairs at the New York City Department of Correction many years ago—part of the reason I quit was I knew that becoming the full, permanent, official director of public affairs wasn’t in the cards—was to attempt to write a screenplay or novel based on my experiences there; it might have been both.

These were allegedly humorous works; the unadvisability of setting a comedy in the prison system perhaps as much the reason the projects failed to generate enthusiasm as the lame plotting, superficial characters, etc.

But it would have been difficult to produce a serious drama based on my experience. As they say, you couldn’t make this stuff up. One of the first acts of the commissioner of correction, a highly colorful guy who was a former prison guard, when he took the job was to have a regal uniform custom-made for himself with five stars on each shoulder. He looked great. The only problem was that somebody neglected to inform him that commissioner of correction was a civilian position.

And, after he mounted a late-night, highly publicized “raid” on Rikers Island, ostensibly to test security, the correction officers union mercilessly pounded him as a “strutting martinet.”

Among my personal accomplishments was to produce the Pen, a monthly newspaper for the several-thousand-member staff. (Get the double entendre?) It was printed on an ancient press in some low-slung factory building behind the House of Detention on Rikers Island.

I also mounted a joint art show at department headquarters—then at the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street—that featured the work of both prison inmates and downtown artists.

Nobody came—not for lack of interest, but because the security-obsessed commissioner refused to open the show to the public.

I knew my career at the department had reached its apex and it was time to move on when the Daily News ran as the cover of its night-owl edition a photo that I orchestrated of a correction officer gingerly helping a kindergartener onto a DOC van during a school bus strike. It doesn’t get any better than that when you’re in prison public relations.

Another reason I possibly thought my experiences at Correction might lend themselves to humor was because of my interactions with some of my civil-service colleagues. Let’s just say they gave lethargy new meaning. Like mountains whose antiquity makes subtle mockery of the human life span, they’d seen commissioners and mayors come and go and knew that becoming swayed by the goals and ambitions of political appointees could come to little good.

There were exceptions, however. Perhaps the reason they stood out was because the prison system didn’t lend itself to excellence. Or rather, there seemed far too few mechanisms to acknowledge and reward excellence. So that those who achieved tended to be supremely self-motivated.

I was thinking back on those times and wondering how much things have changed, or haven’t, as I sat in the NYPD’s Traffic Enforcement Division offices on West 34th Street last week, watching Cheryl Hodge, a traffic manager, honored as one of six recipients of the Fund for the City of New York’s 2013 Sloan Public Service Award.

The fund has been bestowing this honor for the last 40 years, and, at least in recent years, has been doing so in a novel way. A bus bearing the members of the awards selection panel travels the city—starting in early morning and ending in the evening with an official ceremony that includes the mayor at Cooper Union’s Great Hall—and stops at each recipient’s place of work for a presentation ceremony.

There, in front of their co-workers, their bosses offer witness to their excellence. Then they get presented the award by Mary McCormick, the president of the Fund for the City of New York, and Bishop Joseph Sullivan, the chairman of the distinguished selection panel.

Finally, a member of the panel, whose own work may offer special insight into the recipient’s accomplishments, makes a brief speech. In the case of Cheryl Hodge, it was two panel members: Liz Neumark, the founder and CEO of Great Performances, one of the city’s leading catering companies, and Paul Dolan, the executive director of ABC News International.

“Traffic is the great equalizer in New York,” stated Ms. Neumark, whose trucks negotiate the city daily and whose success depends on getting deliveries to their destinations in a timely fashion.

Mr. Dolan, whose work takes him around the world, noted that in cities such as Moscow, there are special fast lanes for the military, high-ranking government officials and the rich. “New York is a democratic city,” he said—meaning, I suppose, as did Ms. Neumark, that all of us at one time or another, and often daily, have experienced the profound impotence of sitting in stalled traffic in Midtown, on the FDR Drive or on one of our celebrated bridges or tunnels.

Ms. Hodge’s seemingly impossible task is to keep traffic flowing smoothly. With six commands and 365 traffic enforcement agents reporting to her, she’s the person in change when an unanticipated situation arises—as it routinely does in this city—with the potential to bring entire neighborhoods to their knees. These include fires, water main breaks and speeches at the U.N. by the president of the U.S.

“I could listen on the radio to Hodge deploying people at the scene of various emergencies—frozen zones, explosive devices—making clear, decisive decisions,” Inspector Michael Pilecki, her commanding officer, explained to an audience that included dozens of blue-shirted traffic enforcement officers. They seemed genuinely happy for their boss, who, as if she were not busy enough, helps them study for civil service promotion exams on her own time.

Inspector Pilecki compared Ms. Hodge, who grew up in the Bronx, dropped out of college when her son was born, but eventually went on to earn a B.A., as a “masterful conductor,” her traffic enforcement agents the members of her orchestra.

But you didn’t have to take the Inspector’s word for it. Ms. Hodge hardly seemed overawed by the occasion. As the ceremony was about to commence, she appeared to be quietly directing it from the sidelines with the same steady authority she has since, as a 26-year-old traffic enforcement agent, she motioned rush hour buses across the 59th Street Bridge.

Awards are great, but even better is when they come with checks. In this case, it was an oversize one made out for $10,000. (The actual, depositable checks were to be distributed later that evening at Cooper Union.) Among the other recipients on this day were Joseph Lazarus, the deputy director of facilities at the Department of Education; Linda Pantages, the director of payments at the Department of Youth and Community Development’s Contract Agency Financial Division; Jeanine Thomas-Cross, the manager of the Mott Haven branch of the New York Public Library; Phillip Gleason, the assistant commissioner of waste management engineering at the Department of Sanitation; and Stanlee Richards, the director of nursing at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp.’s Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on Roosevelt Island.

Ms. Hodge’s comments were, as one would expect, succinct and to the point: “I’m going to Costa Rica with my money,” she announced.

—ralph.gardner@wsj.com

By RALPH GARDNER JR.

Think of it as Glade air freshener for billionaires. I first detected the scent when I did a column involving the Mark hotel in 2011. I noticed that the hallways smelled, well, luxurious. They reeked of wealth. Not in a garish, but in a discreet, sophisticated way. If they could speak they’d have said something like, “You’re to be complimented for having the intelligence and good taste, not to mention the discretionary income, to be able to afford our place, and to choose us over the Carlyle across the street.” Not that there’s anything wrong with the Carlyle.

I asked the manager, who was showing me around, whether it was my imagination or if the corridors actually smelled yummy. He said I wasn’t hallucinating, that the scent had been custom-made for the Mark by perfumer Frédéric Malle. And that one could acquire a bottle at Mr. Malle’s boutique.

I think that was the first time I’d heard of Frédéric Malle, or scented hotel corridors, for that matter. But I made a mental note to purchase some of the fragrance the next time I passed one of his stores, or at least determine whether it was in my price range.

I don’t think ours is any better or worse than other households. We don’t spend a lot of time sweating the scent of our apartment. Indeed, ideally I suppose it wouldn’t smell at all. But if it does you’d rather it radiated freshness than cooked fish fumes or wet dog.

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be wonderful to know that all it took to feel like you’d awakened in the morning after your IPO went public and discovering you’re worth a billion bucks was a perfume gun?

As luck would have it, I happened to be walking down Madison Avenue recently, passed the Frédéric Malle boutique, and stopped in to see whether the staff was familiar with the Mark hotel scent. They directed me to a shelf with several serious-looking, gray industrial spray bottles.

I asked the price: $150. (I don’t know if it’s just because I’m cheap or out of touch, but it’s a safe bet that things invariably cost triple what I think they should and double what I’ve decided in advance I’m prepared to pay.)

I said I’d think about it, but asked if I could test what it smelled like. It would be a bummer, I’d go so far as to say suicidal, if I’d spent the price of a prix fixe dinner at Le Bernardin on air freshener, only to get it home and discover it didn’t live up to expectations, that my apartment smelled not like spring in Provence but a Parisian bordello.

Rather than spray a little on a card or your wrist—I suppose it wouldn’t do to shower the inside of your wrist with air freshener—they directed me to what Frédéric Malle, when I met him a few days later, described as a “smelling column.” The device, a transparent cylinder about 7 feet high, resembles something you’d find in a “Star Trek” episode; you enter it, press a button, dematerialize, and show up in the 25th century.

Indeed, I had to staunch my disappointment when I was told I wasn’t allowed inside the container. A sales associate simply sprayed a sample inside the column, which circulates the fragrance, and directed me to stick my head through an opening.

It smelled good. Nonetheless, I still wasn’t ready to close the deal and told her I’d be back. When I returned a couple of weeks later, Mr. Malle confirmed that the scent was called Jurassic Flower and that he’d made it exclusively for the Mark. “It’s a reproduction of a magnolia tree scent,” he explained. “It’s really true to the scent of magnolia.”

I’d have to take his word for that. As I’ve said, it smelled like money to me.

I asked whether scented corridors were the next thing in luxury hotels or unique to the Mark. “There are some places—some casinos in Las Vegas that are scented,” he reported. “But most hotels are not scented.”

He said that Izak Senbahar, the Mark’s owner, resisted the temptation to introduce Jurassic Flower to the hotel’s ventilation system and thus guests’ rooms, limiting it to the hallways. “He wanted people to have a choice.”

Of course, high-end air fresheners—Frédéric Malle makes four scents in addition to Jurassic Flower—constitute only a small part of his business. The bulk of it is men’s and women’s fragrances distinguished by the creative process. He gives perfume-makers free rein to do their thing, then applies his nose and marketing prowess to help refine the scents.

He’s got the pedigree. Mr. Malle’s grandfather, Serge Heftler-Louiche, founded Parfums Christian Dior, CDI.FR +0.51% and his mother, Marie-Christine Sayn Wittgenstein, worked at Dior for 47 years, including as its development director and was involved in the creation of the legendary perfume Eau Sauvage.

He said that he resisted the temptation for many years to join the family vocation—he studied art history at NYU, labored as a photographer’s assistant after college, then went into advertising.

But there are probably few disciplines that are more smoke and mirrors than fragrance creation, and that Mr. Malle’s skill set seems ideally suited for. He says he’ll work late into the night on packaging. “I suppose I was destined to do this. It didn’t feel like working to me.”

He also knows his perfume, having studied at Roure Bertrand Dupont with legendary perfumer Jean Amic. “It’s a lab supplying all the major fragrances,” he explained, “Opium, Oscar de la Renta. He asked me to become his assistant and taught me the drill.”

He doesn’t credit himself with any particular olfactory gift—such as the one possessed by Grenouille, the homicidal perfumer in the novel “Perfume,” who is blessed, or perhaps cursed, with the planet’s most discerning nostrils. (If you haven’t, it’s a stunning read.) “I have an educated nose,” he explained. “I don’t see better than other people. When I smell a fragrance my approach is similar to an art historian.”

Meaning that, like a connoisseur able to recognize a Rembrandt across a museum gallery, through a combination of education, experience and deduction Mr. Malle can recognize the component parts and knows what to add or subtract to create something special.

Even though one of the walls of the Madison Avenue store is hung with photographs of famous perfumers he’s worked with—the same way a restaurant or deli might display 8-by-10 autographed glossies of movie stars—he counts only one man who actually possessed a supernatural sense of smell.

“Edouard Flechier,” he stated, referring to the creator of scents such as Poison and Acqua di Gio. “Guys who were at perfumery school with him always told me the guy smelled like an animal, like a dog.”

Not that he smelled bad, but that his sense of smell was as acute as a canine’s.

“We make fragrances to make people desirable,” he said. “The endgame is to make people sexy. Anybody thinking otherwise is doomed to fail. You have to make people more sexy than they are.”

But does that also apply to air fresheners? “You don’t want a sexy home,” he said.

He didn’t explain why not.

—ralph.gardner@wsj.com

By RALPH GARDNER JR.

The first time nature evoked awe in me, I was indoors. It was at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of North American Mammals when I was 4 or 5 years old.

Andrew Hinderaker for The Wall Street JournalArtist Tony Faranda in the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History.

That thought occurred to me when I was about halfway through a tour of the hall with Tony Faranda, one of the painters who worked with the great James Perry Wilson on its dioramas of the late 1940s and early ’50s, and Steve Quinn, who just retired after leading the hall’s restoration.

Perhaps as a child I’d projected myself into the diorama where bison roam the plains of Wyoming and Montana as far as the eye can see, or the one with two jaguars admiring the sunset in the Sonoran Desert. “There’s no other media that conveys the direct encounter with nature in this 3-D form quite like natural history dioramas,” Mr. Quinn observed. “That part is just as powerful as the science it conveys.”

Obviously, he’s prejudiced. He helped restore these masterpieces of art, science and illusion to their original grandeur. So am I. As I said, I was raised on the dioramas. Central Park was my backyard. But when it was cold or raining, with caregiver in tow I escaped to Northern Minnesota, where wolves hunted by the Northern Lights, or to the lush slopes of the Congo, where mountain gorillas dined on vegetation in the shadow of volcanoes.

It borders on presumptuousness to suggest that, in our media-saturated age with all its “Avatar”-level special effects, dioramas constructed so long ago can still hold sway over our imaginations. But when you think about it, why should they fascinate us any less than a Vermeer, whose astonishing use of illumination to tell stories still draws crowds because it rings true, connecting the 17th and the 21st centuries through our common humanity?

 

Andrew Hinderaker for The Wall Street JournalA beaver habitat diorama.

Obviously, there’s a difference between a young woman reading a letter in Delft and white-tailed deer reacting to a foreign sound in an upstate forest. But what they have in common is that, because of the virtuosity of the artists, we accept completely their renditions of reality.

Apart from Tony Faranda’s own accomplishments—he worked at the museum from 1948 to 1954 before going into advertising (he said he was responsible for the Fruit of the Loom logo), and contributed to the fisher/porcupine, beaver and Canada Lynx dioramas—at 87, he’s one of the few people left who worked under the direction of James Perry Wilson.

“He was the Babe Ruth of diorama painters,” Mr. Faranda stated. “When we were painting the beaver group, Dali came to watch him paint; I didn’t even know who he was, and that week he had three pages in Life magazine and the cover.

“Dali’s reputation was as a master draftsman, and Wilson was a master draftsman,” Mr. Faranda went on. “He had his cane and cape. James Perry Wilson just went on painting. Dali sat there and watched for two days. When Wilson was painting, he was in his own world.”

Mr. Faranda, who joined the museum shortly after he was discharged from the Navy following World War II, said his mentor would take him take on local field trips. “My indoctrination was to go to Central Park or the Hudson River to look at the coloration of the sky from the bottom to the top,” he recalled.

On one occasion, the great man offered the honor of driving him to the country, where they would paint together. “He didn’t own a car,” Mr. Faranda explained.

They drove the student’s 1938 Chevy to Pound Ridge, where Mr. Faranda, upon glancing into the rear seat as he was unloading their equipment, discovered that Mr. Wilson took the notion of communing with nature literally.

“He was sitting in back with a straw hat and nothing on,” Mr. Faranda remembered. “He was nude.”

“He enjoyed plein air painting in every aspect,” Mr. Quinn deadpanned.

I asked Mr. Faranda whether he thought removing that final barrier to the natural world might have helped unleash Mr. Wilson’s talents. “I never discussed it with him,” he said. “It didn’t affect me. When I first saw it, I was shocked. But I saw a lot of nude people in my life. I was on an aircraft carrier.”

Mr. Quinn, who joined the museum in 1974, never worked with Wilson, who died in 1976, but corresponded with him. “He saw his role to be totally faithful to nature,” he said. “The hand of the artist” should not be visible. “There should be total humility before nature.”

That’s easier said than done—not the humility part, but making the artist’s contribution invisible. Particularly when the medium is a diorama, which is a spectacular illusion. Mr. Faranda said Wilson accomplished his effects by first visiting the actual location to be portrayed in the diorama (he was disappointed when, at the last moment, he was bumped from a field trip to Mt. Albert on Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula to research the real-life setting for the Canadian Lynx diorama), where he produced color sketches and shot lots of photographs. “He knew exactly when he took the pictures how it was going in the diorama,” Mr. Faranda said.

We took a tour of the Hall of North American Mammals, stopping to admire Wilson’s work at the American Bison and Pronghorn Antelope diorama. Mr. Faranda particularly appreciated the puffy clouds drifting across the sky. “Wilson could be on a weather show,” he claimed. “He was an astute weatherman.”

Even more impressive is that he created a sense of infinite perspective on a curved, 27-foot wall. The American West that’s portrayed isn’t the one of today or even of Wilson’s time, but of mid-19th-century America, when an estimated 60 million bison roamed the plains largely undisturbed.

“The real magic of a diorama is to merge 3-D and 2-D and convince the viewer that there is great space in the vista,” Mr. Quinn explained. He meant blending Wilson’s backgrounds—and those of fellow artists such as Matthew Kalmenoff and Frederick Scherer—into a foreground where taxidermied animals, made by experts in that field, roam a manufactured habitat of rocks and bushes, flowers and, in the case of that lynx, artificial snow. Those foreground artists constitute a third discipline.

“You can divide a diorama into three arts,” Mr. Quinn went on. “Background painting. The taxidermy. And the foreground—all the other 3-D objects that suggest the animal’s habitat.” He added: “The American Museum of Natural History is one of the few museums that still maintains an in-house staff of artists. The methods Tony is talking about you can’t learn anywhere else. The protocol set by these artists is still used.”

We made our way to the fisher and porcupine diorama, which portrays a trail leading to Tuckerman’s Ravine in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. “This was the first one I worked on,” Mr. Faranda remembered. “My wife’s initials are painted on one of those birch trunks.”

—ralph.gardner@wsj.com

By RALPH GARDNER JR.

It’s taken about five decades, but I think I’ve finally figured out how to make a name for myself—how to rise above the journalistic hoi polloi, the unemployed screenwriters, the poets toiling in near-perfect anonymity.

Rob SheppersonRalph Gardner Jr. was quoted in an ad for the movie ‘Koch.’

It started when I reviewed the movie “Koch,” a documentary about the late mayor, on these pages a few months ago. Only I didn’t review it: I used the film as an excuse to reminisce about my relationship with the great man and to muse about what makes a mayor for the ages.

I’d attended a screening in November and wrote the column in January. By the time the movie opened in February, I’d moved on to other topics. So it came as a surprise when I was browsing the newspaper one day and saw an ad for the documentary featuring my words of praise.

“Highly entertaining,” the ad said I said, “and at times quite moving.”

Below me were equally complimentary quotes from the Huffington Post and New York magazine.

To be accurate, my encomium to “Koch” wasn’t attributed to me but to The Wall Street Journal. I didn’t care. They sign my paychecks, or rather direct-deposit them. Also, I was under no illusion that the reason I was being quoted was because of my vast knowledge of cinematic history, my exquisite movie-going palate. It was only because I was associated with a reputable national publication whose name carries weight.

Nonetheless, if I’d known I was going to be referenced, I might have crafted my words more carefully, or at least more cogently. “Highly entertaining”? Couldn’t I have come up with something a bit more rarefied, some phrase that transmitted a sense of refinement, of higher education? “And at times quite moving”? What about the rest of the time? Was I bored? Dozing off? Waiting my turn at the popcorn stand?

The experience made me wonder whether actual reviewers weigh their comments knowing that movie studios will use them in advertisements.

I’m sure they’d say they don’t, that their only goal is to portray the movie as impartially as possible. But they’re human. It’s got to occur to them that their observations, along with their names and affiliations, might end up running in full-page newspaper ads, on TV, on subway billboards ripe for defacing, and on the sides of buses. And in the process give the reviewer, who is probably ignored by his peers when he punches into work each morning, and by the general public who may not know his name from a hole in the wall, Brad Pitt or Beyonce-level recognition. Indeed, his name will probably run above theirs, at least if he has something nice to say.

It’s got to be addictive.

“Koch” was one of only two or three, or maybe it was one or two, movies I’ve addressed in this column. But another opportunity arose recently when I visited the Metropolitan Museum with Gilles Bourdos, the director of “Renoir,” a French film that was set to have its debut a few days later.

We traveled the museum, looking at pretty paintings, talking about the famed Impressionist, and even more so about the adrenaline rush of visiting a world-class museum. I wasn’t thinking of the sound bite that might result from our interview or from watching the film, which I’d just seen.

There’s a simple reason why. It has nothing to do with modesty. I’m not especially modest. It’s that I know next to nothing about film. Certainly, I’m not one of those who believes only professional reviewers are worth listening to. As a matter of fact, I consider it a privilege occasionally to attend screenings before the movies are released, and with it all the accompanying hype, because I get to make up my own mind what I think—which is often less histrionic than the pros’ opinions.

But I assume that members of the general public, who are considering spending their hard-earned $12 or whatever it costs to go to the movies these days (it seems to have risen a buck or two every time I step up to the ticket window), would prefer the opinion of somebody with greater depth, someone who probably sees more, rather than fewer, movies a year than they do.

When “Renoir” came out, I opened the newspaper—probably on the way to some heart-pounding story about sequestration, or the hipster neighborhood of the moment—and spotted an ad for the movie. I was quoted again. This time by name.

“Renoir is everything you’d expect in a French film,” I’d stated.

Did I sound sophomoric, or like someone who knew what he was talking about? I got third billing to the New York Times’s Stephen Holden—”Gorgeous”—and the Los Angeles Times’s Kenneth Turan—”Lush and Engaging.”

My quote didn’t seem that out of line.

I’d made the big time. I even clipped the ad. It wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t tiny either. I read it to my wife as I was taping it to the refrigerator door and asked her what she thought.

“It sounds like something from a Christopher Guest movie,” she said.

Mr. Guest makes mockumentaries.

Despite her effort to put me in my place, I was by now rather impressed with myself and my flowering authority as a film critic. I saw another opportunity to burnish my reputation when I wrote about “What Maisie Knew,” a new film based on a Henry James novel starring Julianne Moore. I wasn’t going to write to a future ad; but on the other hand, I was now aware and slightly self-conscious that my words could be used to promote the thing.

The column was less about the film than about my friend Nancy Doyne, one of the screenwriters, and raising children in the city. The only thing I said that was vaguely quotable was: “The movie expertly captures the way children take life as it comes.”

Not exactly the sort of endorsement that would make you want to camp out in front of the theater in a sleeping bag.

Nonetheless, I now couldn’t keep myself from checking out the movie ads opening weekend, to see whether I’d scored a hat trick—”Koch,” “Renoir” and finally “What Maisie Knew.”

I hadn’t. It was all Rex Reed.

“…One of the best films of 2013,” the celebrated critic intoned, his words in typeface almost bold enough to be seen from outer space.

I was disappointed I hadn’t made the cut. But I still have my integrity. I’ll strive to remember that the next time Hollywood, and the siren song of pseudo-fame, comes knocking.

—ralph.gardner@wsj.com

By RALPH GARDNER JR.

First came the wheel. I think we’d all agree that was a great invention. It’s certainly superior to the Internet. The Internet can crash, and probably will sooner or later. But the wheel is free of bugs, free of flaws and weaknesses.

Next came the child’s stroller. I think we’d also concur—kids and caregivers alike—that it’s pretty great, too. As comforting as it is to be strapped to mom or dad’s chest in a Snugli, the view isn’t great. From the cockpit of a Bugaboo or a Maclaren, the world is your oyster.

Finally came the kitty stroller. I’m not sure what I think of cat strollers. On some level, I believe that if cats, who have been around a long time, had wanted a baby stroller they’d have invented it themselves. There are certainly few creatures able to locomote as gracefully, without wheels, as cats.

On the other hand, why should domestic cats be confined to the house any more than the rest of us? What makes us think they’d prefer to be outdoors on a lovely spring day any less?

These were some of the questions on my mind recently when I visited with Lise and Jeff King, the owners of Kittywalk Systems pet products, at their handsome Long Island home. Lise claims to have come up with the idea of adapting the child stroller to cats in 2003.

“It’s like Lise captured something deep inside the soul of a cat,” Jeff explained as we sat at their dining room table.

“I’ve always had a good understanding of what motivates them,” Lise acknowledged. “One of my cats, when she’s hungry, she rings a bell. It gives her a sense of power. She’ll ring it very lightly.” If Lise doesn’t respond promptly, “She’ll whack it. They think very similar to the way we do.”

To be accurate, at that moment we weren’t even discussing the kitty stroller, but an earlier invention—the Kittywalk portable outdoor pet enclosure. It’s a tube made of green netting that allows you and your cat to enjoy the outdoors together without fear of the feline escaping—the cat in its airy shelter, you outside (it’s too small for an adult, though not perhaps for a small child).

Necessity, as the Kings tell the story, was the mother of their first invention. It wasn’t as if they’re crazy cat people (though perhaps they are) who thought it would be cute to let their cat enjoy nature. They’d inherited a cat from their daughter, who couldn’t keep it at college. One day they discovered the animal scratching at the door to go out—like a dog might.

“Lise said, ‘This cat needs to go out,’” Jeff remembered. “She put the cage by the pool. The cat hated the cage.

“One day I came home and there’s this big vat of bubbling green liquid on the stove,” continued Jeff, who’s in the printing business. “She said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not dinner. I have an idea.’”

The broth contained fish netting that, once dyed and dried, she took to a welder in Hicksville to fashion wickets to give it structure and also to allow her to stake it into the lawn. A deck and patio version, trade show acclaim, and large orders soon followed. In fact, the resulting tube-like structure was but the overture to a major symphony of cat-related outdoor enclosures, a veritable pet Disneyland, if you will.

Other options, all of which can be attached to each other, include the “Penthouse,” a vertical enclosure that gives cats, like Russian billionaires who plunk down millions for apartments at places such as One57 and 15 Central Park West, unparalleled views; the “Gazebo,” a hexagonal structure large enough for your pet to entertain visiting Siamese and Maine Coons in comfort; and the “Clubhouse,” a handsome canvas-sided sleeping parlor, not to be confused with the canvas-topped “Kabana,” which boasts sunshade and a hammock. There’s also the conical “Teepee,” a multi-level dwelling for discerning kitties.

The strollers were inspired by Missuka, one of the Kings’ cats, who became envious when Lise walked Carcher, their other cat, who was harness-trained. Lise went out and bought a conventional child stroller, covered it in netting and took Missuka for rides around the neighborhood. “She was happy as a clam,” Lise remembered.

“It was a heady experience,” she went on, referring not just to the sense of well-being she felt providing her pets fresh air, but also the fame when Hammacher Schlemmer, among others, started carrying her inventions.

“When they started advertising in the magazine SkyMall,” Jeff said of the stroller, referring to the in-flight publication, “it became the longest-running product in SkyMall history.”

“We were on the ‘Today’ show,” Lise added. “‘Martha Stewart Living.’ ‘The View.’”

“Lise was on the morning show with Charles Osgood,” Jeff said proudly. “Mo Rocca and Lise walked the neighborhood talking about the stroller.”

However, the Kings said they’ve had to fight every step of the way to protect Lise’s kitty-inspired patents from copycats, no pun intended. “I said, ‘We’re going to have 100% of the stroller market for three years, and then we’ll be lucky to have 5%,’” Jeff predicted, and his prophesy came true.

Jeff, whose job has been to figure out how to get the inventions made and then mass-produced, recalled how he confronted, at a trade show, a large competitor whom he said had ripped off the stroller. “He said, ‘That’s what we do. We copy hot products. I’ll change four screws and put it out that way.’”

The Cozy Climber was also copied, the Kings contend, by a major pet retailer. I haven’t even mentioned the Cozy Climber. Made of mesh, it mounts to a door so that cats can reach new heights without knocking over books or priceless antiques.

The Kings—accompanied by Missuka and Carcher—took me down to the basement, where the animals, as if on cue, scampered into the combination penthouse, carousel, ferris wheel, teepee, clubhouse, gazebo, etc. (It was too early in the season, and with the pool still closed, to set it up outdoors.)

The basement is also stocked with spare parts and a cat-related device or two that didn’t meet with the uncritical acclaim of some of their other products—for instance, the combination handicapped walker/cat stroller.

“This is a product I thought I’d be able to sell; I haven’t,” Lise conceded. “It’s the ‘Wheelie Wonderful’ because it’s wheelie wonderful!”

It probably is, but even I, who am allergic to cats and have never owned one or had any desire to, could probably have predicted this invention wouldn’t fly. People who use a walker already have their hands full remaining upright without the added burden of providing their cats a fun adventure.

Other inventions to make a house cat’s life magical, or rather even more magical, are on the way. “We’re working on a carrying bag,” Lise confided. “We don’t want to tip our hands. We have a very different concept.”

“It’s very exciting,” Jeff agreed. “Want to tell him the name?”

“No,” Lise stated firmly. “That will give it away.”

—ralph.gardner@wsj.com

Hockey doesn’t quite rank at the top of my list of favorite sports. But it should. It’s one of the fastest-paced, most exciting games on ice, or any surface for that matter. The problem is that it’s entirely possible to miss the game-winning goal—not because you weren’t paying attention or because you were at the refreshment stand scoring another beer, but because the puck is so small and moves so damn fast.

Perhaps that’s why I harbor such anticipation for the more civilized pace of the pre-game and between-periods entertainment. I’m speaking, of course, of the Zambonis that methodically groom the ice during those intervals.

Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

The columnist speaks with ice crew member Paul Curtis while sitting on a Zamboni at Madison Square Garden.

If anyone is unfamiliar with these mechanical marvels, think of them as cousin to the New York City street sweeper. Except that the debris they scrape and direct into their bins is damaged ice rather than garbage, and the surface they spray and polish is frozen water rather than asphalt.

Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

Ralph Gardner learns the mysteries behind the zambonis that clean and cut the Rangers ice rink in Madison Square Garden.

There are few experiences that appeal to my sense of order and neatness as much as watching these vehicles circle the rink at Madison Square Garden, transforming ice damaged by the blades of hard-charging, and occasionally violence-prone, professional hockey players into a pristine surface that, until play once again resumes, serves as metaphor for the perfectibility of the human species and the triumph of order over intergalactic chaos.

OK, so maybe I’m going a bit overboard. But they’re a lot more fun than the light shows, loud music and fan giveaways (with the notable exception of the T-shirt cannons) that pass for entertainment at sports arenas these days.

So when the opportunity arose last week to pay tribute to the talented gentleman who operate the Zambonis at the Garden and will, no doubt, further distinguish themselves as the New York Rangers march inexorably toward their first Stanley Cup since 1994—the playoff series against the Washington Capitals starts Thursday night; but the first Rangers home game, where the ice crew will get to strut its stuff, isn’t until May 6—I jumped at the opportunity. Or rather, I climbed aboard for a ride.

This occurred not between periods of last Saturday’s victory against the New Jersey Devils—I wouldn’t have wanted to distract the operators from their essential work, the team consisting of Jack Durkin, ice foreman; and Alan Blagman and Paul Curtis, ice crew—but on Friday morning as they prepared the ice for the game.

“We’ve had a few days to work on it,” Mr. Curtis stated as he proudly surveyed the ice. “We built it up a bit.”

I wondered whether the crew suffers performance anxiety. If the average fan is anything like me—and I hope for the crew’s sake they’re not—he or she is paying strict attention to make sure that no rough or damaged spot remains unaddressed, and that by the time the machines leave the ice we’re suffused with a feeling of well-being.

“If you make a mistake, you’ll hear it,” Mr. Curtis conceded. He was thinking back to his inaugural voyage in 2000 when, nervous about operating in front of 18,000 fans, he forgot to raise the equipment as he left the ice and damaged the arena floor. “The next time when I came out and did my job properly, I got a sarcastic round of applause.”

“It’s a lot of confidence-building,” said Mr. Durkin, who has skippered a machine for 28 years and also piloted one at the Salt Lake City Olympics. “You start real basic, learning the pattern. There’s no thought process anymore.”

He’s being modest. Indeed, he promptly amended himself. “It gets a little more involved—putting water down and cutting the ice. It’s a matter of how much water to put down and how much blade: how chewed up it is.

“Generally,” he went on, “you take a little more off after morning warm-ups. You’ve had every single player on the ice all at once.”

Another factor that affects the calculus is the outside temperature. “Sometimes it gets a little warmer in the building; it may take longer to dry,” Mr. Durkin explained. “By the end of June, it’s going to be 80 to 90 degrees.”

“Notice he said ‘end of June,’” Mr. Blagman observed, meaning that the seventh and deciding game of the Stanley Cup Finals—assuming that the Rangers will triumph in the earlier rounds—is scheduled for June 28.

The crew is also responsible for keeping the ice litter-free, the most common projectiles being hats tossed onto the rink after a player scores a hat trick—a third goal in the same game. On at least one occasion, an octopus flew out of the stands when the team was playing the Detroit Red Wings. The cephalopod is a Red Wings tradition, though one too arcane to address here.

The Garden ice crew’s resources may have been most brutally challenged during a game a few years back that included a free cap giveaway. “They had a hat trick that night,” one of the crewmembers recalled. “It rained and it rained and it rained.” Hats. “We went out there with shovels. You’re crying and laughing, it was so much fun.”

During my youth, only one Zamboni was employed to condition the ice. That changed during the 1994 championship season, when, Mr. Durkin said, a second machine was added to complete the job faster. “We had so much entertainment we came out with two machines,” Mr. Durkin remembered. “The next year, the league ruled everybody had to go that way.”

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’ve always thought of the Zamboni as a single-warrior sport—a challenge that falls entirely on one person’s broad shoulders, along with the accompanying pressure and acclaim. The crew apparently doesn’t share my heroic sense of their obligations.

“It’s easier,” Mr. Durkin said. “You’re only doing half the job.”

Nonetheless, exquisite choreography is obviously required as one machine tackles the perimeter, the other the center of the rink. “They’ll do a mirror pattern,” the crew foreman said. “One is going towards Seventh Avenue and one is going towards Eighth Avenue.”

The time had come for my Zamboni ride. That’s another innovation since my era. My recollection is that the machine didn’t come equipped with a passenger seat. Or if it did it remained vacant. But these days kids, including those with Madison Square Garden’s charity, the Garden of Dreams Foundation, get to ride shotgun between periods.

As thrilling as that undoubtedly is, I fear it could distract the driver. Indeed, as we rode around the ice, Mr. Curtis confided that he has recurring nightmares regarding his job. “Awful, awful dreams,” he told me. “I’ll drive out in the middle of the ice and there’s not water in the Zamboni. Or the game is starting without me and they’re on bad ice. I always tell the boys the dream I had last night. They never admit to it.”

Game days start at 7 a.m. and run as late as 11:30 at night. The crew is so busy during the game—when they’re not on the ice they’re refilling the Zambonis with water or entertaining the Garden of Dreams kids—they estimate they see no more than three or four minutes of the action.

They do watch away games on TV, however. “We’re all fans as well,” one of them told me. “We’re on the phone to each other like three teenage girls watching the game.”

—ralph.gardner@wsj.com

By RALPH GARDNER JR.

Jin Lee/Bloomberg NewsDaniel Craig, actor in the James Bond film franchise, attends the unveiling of the Range Rover Sport vehicle in March.

I’ve seen all sorts of sales pitches for cars, but the one Range Rover pulled at the recent New York International Auto Show might have been the most elaborate yet. And it was aspirational—especially if you relate to James Bond and sincerely believe that if life had shaken out differently you, too, could have been a secret agent and a crack shot, had six-pack abs, been catnip to women and possessed a heart of gold, even if you were required to put your feelings on hold while you killed evildoers with your bare hands.

The only thing that prevented me from suspending disbelief completely (as I and several hundred guests at the Moynihan Station watched a video of an incognito Daniel Craig get behind the vehicle’s wheel on the Brooklyn docks, negotiate the sort of Midtown obstacle course that would humble anyone but a NYC cabby—stalled traffic, standing water, construction barricades—and, thanks to nifty editing, finally roll into the party live and in person) is that I don’t love the lines of the new Range Rover.

I always thought the car’s allure was in its unfashionably boxy profile: half tank, half living room. But lately the company has been tinkering with the rear windows, pinching them and making them more aerodynamic or whatever, and in the process sabotaging the function-over-form ethos that was the brand’s hallmark.

At least that’s my opinion. I can talk because I can’t afford one anyway. “It’s faster, more agile and happily it will be here any minute now,” an announcer intoned as Bond turned onto a blocked-off 33rd Street and, with heart-thumping music reaching its apex, elided through what I suppose was a mail truck entrance and into the middle of the party.

To his credit, Mr. Craig thoughtfully turned off the ignition before he exited, looking as debonair as ever, though perhaps slightly perplexed as there was no one to save, disarm, kill or beat at billion-dollar-a-hand blackjack and save the world.

Allan ZepedaAn event at Skylight at Moynihan Station in September 2012

In short, he was little more than a chauffeur, though undoubtedly a highly compensated one. Actually, I’ve always thought of his looks more that of the driver/bodyguard type than of the unbearably seductive secret agent. But what do I know? Sean Connery will always be James Bond to me.

My other issue is: Why did Range Rover rent out the post office in the first place, rather than, say, a discotheque? They didn’t even take advantage of the Beaux Arts building’s great bones, blocking out the skylights.

“The fashion designers get it,” said Jennifer Blumin, the head of the Skylight Group, the event-management firm that manages Skylight at Moynihan Station as a party space. She served as a liaison between Range Rover and players such as the post office and the Empire State Development Corp. Ms. Blumin was referring to other clients, such as Theory and Phillip Lim. “That was the most carved up that space has been.”

The 36-year-old had nothing to do with Range Rover’s unveiling concept—of using the streets of New York as the backdrop and Daniel Craig as the deliveryman; nor with the redesign. Nonetheless, the British carmaker probably couldn’t have pulled off its post office debut without her and her company’s expertise. Skylight currently manages five venues for events, including Skyline One Hanson at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, and produces all private events at the High Line.

“We take the city’s forgotten treasures and turn them into high-end event spaces,” she explained. “We’re not party planners. But we work with them.”

For some reason, I assumed the post office had long been closed to make way for the new Penn Station (not that I’m holding my breath). But it’s still running, if slightly the worse for wear. “Twenty-four hours, 365 days,” Ms. Blumin said.

In the moments before Mr. Craig’s reveal, we made our way through the bowels of the building, past the 41,000-square-foot former mail-sorting room where, at one time, 90% of the mail in the U.S. was processed. More recently, it’s doubled as a catwalk. “My company has become the third biggest player in Fashion Week,” she said.

We continued to a backstage area where mail trucks shared space with production crews at banks of monitors tracking the party already under way, as well as Mr. Craig’s progress. “We’re walking into the postal dock,” Ms. Blumin explained. “This is where all the mail trucks drive in. One of the things we have to coordinate is the delivery of the mail with the delivery of Daniel Craig.”

She seems to have the pedigree for the assignment. She co-wrote “Power Sleep: Preparing the Mind for Peak Performance.” ( I didn’t know it at the time, or I’d have asked her the difference between power and the sort of normal sleep I practice.) And her father, Stuart Blumin, an emeritus American urban history professor at Cornell, where Ms. Blumin graduated, inculcated a respect for history and provenance.

It was on display a few days later as she showed me the painstaking restoration work at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, a mosaic- and marble-decorated cathedral of thrift and immigrant aspiration where Skylight now hosts weddings and parties for the likes of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and JetBlue, JBLU -3.05% and the winter Brooklyn Flea.

“Our guiding light was not to touch a hair on its head,” she said.

That may be easier said than done when people want to drive cars into a party—though Moynihan Station was obviously equipped for that—or, in the case of a Kanye West concert at the Williamsburgh building, ascend toward the 63-foot ceilings on a hydraulic lift, the accompanying smoke effect created by carbon dioxide canisters.

“They’re freezing,” Ms. Blumin explained. “They put them right up against the table.” She pointed at the thick-glass tables with shaded antique lights on wrought iron legs, where customers once endorsed checks and signed deposit slips. “As soon as they did that, we’re, like, ‘No!’ in show motion. The second they did it, it shattered into pieces.

“This was 100-year-old double-glazed custom glass,” she said. “It can’t be made. Doesn’t exist. The event ends at 2 a.m. Thursday. We had a wedding that Saturday. We had a piece of acrylic made and had to work with Landmarks to make sure that whatever was made followed Landmarks guidelines.”

The tables have since been replaced with glass matching the original.

“I don’t think you should touch history,” she added. “There’s enough new buildings.” Nonetheless, she conceded: “No matter how respectful you are, you’re still changing something.”

I suppose that’s preferable to letting these urban gems lay idle and off-limits. The irony of Ms. Blumin’s job is that the reason she’s hired in the first place is to attract attention, excitement and ultimately buyers. The Wiliamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, for example, has been converted into luxury condos by a group in partnership with basketball Hall-of-Famer Magic Johnson. “It’s a battle I’ll inevitably lose,” she stated wistfully. “My business is a place holder.”

— ralph.gardner@wsj.com

By RALPH GARDNER JR.

New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CTThomas Cole’s ‘The Clove, Catskills’ (1827)

My summer plans are set: I’m going to follow the Hudson River School Art Trail. Actually, it’s not quite as ambitious an undertaking as it might sound, such as traversing the full length of the Appalachian Trail, which runs between Georgia and Maine. I suspect I can do it in an afternoon or two.

Starting at artist Thomas Cole’s house in Catskill, N.Y., the Hudson River School Art Trail includes Olana—Frederic Church’s Persian-style mansion overlooking the river—and wends through Catskill Mountain landscape that served as inspiration for some of the most iconic images in the history of American art.

Besides, I’ll be traveling by car; I may not even need a cooler.

It’s probably unconscionable that I haven’t undertaken the expedition before, especially since I have a place little more than half an hour away. But I like to think I’m paying homage to the landscapes of Church, Cole, Asher Durand and Sanford Gifford by loitering at my own place and ignoring civilization as much as possible.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Hudson River School, it was a group of mid-19th-century artists who painted often idealized landscapes—at a time when civilization and industrialism were already encroaching—with great passion, realism and attention to detail. There’s also something peculiarly American about them. Unlike much European landscape painting, which favored images of domesticated nature, the work of the Hudson River School feels more visceral, as if a boulder could come crashing down on you at any moment, or a river swell and sweep you away.

Nature called the shots in these paintings, not man.

I feel it necessary to offer this brief tutorial only because when I mentioned to a couple of otherwise highly educated friends that I was attending a lecture on Albert Bierstadt at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site last weekend, it became apparent they’d heard of neither Bierstadt nor Cole.

Cole is considered the founder of the Hudson River School. He was also Frederic Church’s teacher. While the subject of the Bierstadt talk was his New York and New England paintings, which are on exhibit through Nov. 3, he’s best known for his monumental paintings of the Rockies and Yosemite that served as metaphor for the notion of American “Manifest Destiny.”

According to Betsy Jacks, the Thomas Cole site’s executive director, one of the reasons Church situated his mansion overlooking the Hudson, directly across from Cole’s home—though what remains of the Cole property faces the Catskills and includes no river frontage—was to be near his mentor’s property.

“There are a lot of paintings where it looked like they were painting side by side,” Ms. Jacks stated.

That spirit of cooperation extends to this day with Olana, a State Historic Site. “We collaborate on lots of things,” Ms. Jacks went on. “It’s so great these sites happen to be two miles apart.”

Cedar Grove/The Thomas Cole National Historic SiteCole’s ‘Falls of the Kaaterskill’ (1826)

I don’t want anyone to think I’m feeling smug that I’ve heard of the likes of Albert Bierstadt and they haven’t. Though, I don’t see the point of going to college if you don’t take art history. I remember my introductory course freshman year. I couldn’t believe I was getting credit for looking at slides in the dark.

Indeed, I learned something I didn’t know when I attended the standing-room-only Bierstadt lecture, delivered by Annette Blaugrund, a former director of the National Academy Museum. While Church or Bierstadt might have celebrated nature, they did much of the actual painting in the Tenth Street Studio Building in Manhattan. (You try nailing an eight-foot landscape while perched on a rocky promontory with mosquitoes the size of buzzards dive-bombing you decades before DEET was invented.)

Situated at 51 W. 10th St. and designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the Tenth Street Studio was demolished in 1956. But during its time, it boasted state-of-the-art studios—they were heated and well-lighted—and a domed exhibition space where, in 1859, Frederic Church showed his monumental “Heart of the Andes,” now one of the jewels of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing.

After the lecture, we meandered over to the Main House, built in 1815, where one can well imagine Cole and Church, mentor and student, admiring the view of their beloved mountain range from the porch over a glass of claret procured with Church’s apprentice fees.

“Church was a young man from a wealthy family in Hartford,” Ms. Jacks explained. “Church’s father arranged for Church to study with Cole.”

Even though Thomas Cole, by then in his 40s, may have been America’s most established landscape painter, he wasn’t wealthy himself. “In later years,” Ms. Jacks went on, “Church hired Cole’s son Theodore to manage Church’s property—probably because he really needed the money.”

The site, which was restored and opened to the public in 2001, also has Cole’s original studio. Though, apart from the exposed brick, mortar and pestle used to grind pigments, and an easel with Cole’s doodles etched into it, much of the contents aren’t original to the studio. “When I came here in 2003,” Ms. Jacks remembered, “the floor was covered in linoleum. It had been turned into an apartment” for the property’s caretaker.

“We had good documentation” to restore it, she added. “Thomas Cole wrote to Asher Durand,” a co-founder of the Hudson River School, “‘Did you know that I have got into a new painting room? The walls are of unplastered brick, with the beams and timbers seen in every hand: not a bad color this pale brick and mortar. I am engaged on my great series.’”

He was referring to “The Voyage of Life,” a series of allegorical paintings about childhood, youth, manhood and old age, a set of which resides at the National Gallery in Washington.

There’s even documentation for an ancient tree situated below the front porch. “It’s a 198-year-old honey locust,” Ms. Jacks reported. “We have the receipt. They purchased it in 1815.”

Just as I was leaving, a docent was unlocking the site’s outhouse, an elegant three-seater approximately the same age as the Main House. “I am told the family did not go in together,” Ms. Jacks reported in a follow-up email, “but rather, they left two lids closed and opened the next one when the first hole was full.”

My only disappointment was that none of the views faced the Hudson River. Ms. Jacks speculated that was because back then the river might have been considered the equivalent of a modern interstate, development already starting to seed its banks. The Catskills, on the other hand, remained pure, retaining their primordial majesty and romance. At least from a distance.

— ralph.gardner@wsj.com

John Taggart for The Wall Street JournalArtist Monika Bravo, center, practicing her tai chi principles, while walking on Canal Street.

Every mode of urban propulsion has its pros and cons. Shall we take them one at a time:

• The bus. It’s preferable to be retired, or at least have an abundance of free time, because that’s how long it can take to get from one point to another. On the other hand, if you manage to score a window seat, your view of the urban experience is unparalleled. And I always feel virtuous taking the bus, not so much that I’m reducing my carbon footprint than because I’m saving at least five or 10 bucks on a cab.

• A cab. As far as I’m concerned, this is the mode of transportation of last resort. It’s costly. But more than that, I suspect I never come closer to a coronary than sitting in a traffic jam and watching the meter tick skyward, while wondering what I was thinking by not taking the subway. On the other hand, if it’s 3 a.m., 15 degrees below and the world is swimming before your eyes, settling into the back seat of a warm taxi can feel like crawling back into the womb.

• Horse-drawn carriages. My wife has a thing for these attractions, especially in foreign countries. I could see paying premium for a chariot ride in Rome. But what’s so characteristic about a horse and buggy to travel between the Forum and the Spanish Steps? Ditto New York for that matter—animal-welfare issues aside—about supporting transportation that was anachronistic a century ago and produces feces? And it’s even costlier than a cab.

• A pedicab. I’ve never taken one, and doubt I will unless I’m hard up for a column. I think I’d feel embarrassed having people assume I’m a tourist. Also, I’d probably be uncomfortable and guilt-ridden having another human being drag me around town just because they couldn’t find a waiter job, so what if they’re in better shape than I’ll ever be.

• The subway. If it’s running efficiently, nothing gets you around the city faster. I can reach anywhere in Manhattan and even parts of Brooklyn and Queens in 30 minutes or less. The problem is that you’re underground, in a confined space, at the potential mercy of calamities and fellow passengers who may not share your peerless hygienic standards. But it’s worth the risk.

• Walking. This is far and away my favorite way to get around the city. It’s free and good exercise. No other mode of locomotion better allows you to be the master of your own fate—as long as you remember to look both ways before crossing the street, even when you have the light. Because these days, with everybody talking and texting behind the wheel, all bets are off.

The only problem with walking is that it’s time-consuming if you have to travel long distances. Also, you might arrive exhausted, sweaty and unable to focus for the first 30 minutes or so of any meeting. And it’s hard to make a good first impression when your clothes are dripping with perspiration.

But walking increasingly has another drawback, and it’s the reason I consulted Monika Bravo on a recent afternoon. Ms. Bravo isn’t a competitive walker, or even an instructor at Exhale. She’s an artist.

I don’t even know how the subject first came up—it was upstate, in the middle of a field, no less—but she told me she brings the practice of Zen, or rather tai chi, which she’s been studying for eight years, to traveling the city by foot.

I was intrigued because lately I’ve found myself more and more often in pedestrian crowds so dense—Times Square primarily, but also on Fifth Avenue and throughout Midtown—that it almost defeats the purpose of walking.

I’ve wondered about the proper etiquette in such situations. Do you barrel through and risk an altercation? Take to the adjacent roadway and invite being creamed by a bus or cab? (Usually, I do.) Or simply slow down, even stop, telling yourself that five or 10 years from now nobody will remember you were seven minutes late to whatever appointment you’re heading to?

“I use my hands to move around,” Ms. Bravo stated as we sat in her studio overlooking Canal Street, one of the city’s most congested thoroughfares.

She showed me what she meant. She held her arm in front of her, bent at the elbow, the hand gently extended. It’s as if she’s politely letting fellow pedestrians know, “This is the direction I’m heading; this is the corridor I’m calling my own.”

Sometimes it’s accompanied by a smile: it’s self-assertive without being confrontational.

I tried it on a cab the next day and it worked. You know how cars turn the corner and consider you a threat to their manhood because you’re preventing them from rushing to the next corner, where they’ll have to wait for the light to change anyway?

Were you to put up your hand, palm fully exposed as if making a stop sign, that could put you at a distinct disadvantage: impersonating a law-enforcement officer, or at least a crossing guard, without any weapons to back it up, and the driver—for all you know with unaddressed anger-management issues—behind the wheel of a 7,000-pound Escalade.

On the other hand, by simply raising your arm and hand slightly, palm pointed sideways or downward, you’re addressing their better angels while subtly adding, “By the way, even though it’s none of my business, when you have a free moment why don’t you work on becoming a better person.”

Yielding is another concept Ms. Bravo’s tai chi master, Sat Hon, taught her, and it has proved helpful in negotiating the city. “To yield—I never understood that concept,” said Ms. Bravo, whose commissions include, perhaps not coincidentally, a permanent 58-monitor video montage at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal of crowds moving through public spaces. “To yield has a lot of strength.”

She used the metaphor of bamboo, which possesses both strength and flexibility. It bends but doesn’t break.

Yielding should probably be the default mode of any New York City pedestrian eager to avoid confrontation or blood-pressure medication. “It’s about being effective with your energy,” explained Ms. Bravo. A feisty 5-foot-1 Colombian, she admitted that even prior to becoming enlightened—and occasionally still to her husband Juan Luque’s alarm—she found herself compelled to educate fellow New Yorkers in proper public etiquette. “It took me a while to understand it didn’t have a negative connotation. People think if you surrender you’re giving up. You’re not. It has nothing to do with passivity. There is action in yielding.”

—ralph.gardner@wsj.com