Christmas Eve, Northern Manhattan

"St. Michel-de-Cuxa is all fixed up in a special and considerably tidy little museum in an uptown park, in New York, overlooking the Hudson River, in such a way that you don't recall what kind of city you are in. It is called The Cloisters. Synthetic as it is, it still preserves enough of its own reality to be a reproach to everything else around it, except the trees and the Palisades."
- Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) 

Christmas Eve, 2013. Top (Cooper Street, Inwood, with The Cloisters in the distance); bottom three: Inwood Hill Park, shortly after sunset.