Walking Lower Manhattan

Yes, I know, this is the vacation from two years ago.  But it was a fascinating vacation.  Any time you spend a week in New York City, you take in a lot.  On May 28, 2009, we took the subway down to the Broadway and Nassau station; we thought we'd look at the World Trade Center site, and then walk around the financial district and see where we ended up.  Since we had gotten up late, we were past the commute, and the train was pretty empty, except for us and a solemn young man of twenty-something who spent the entire trip tying his yellow Spongebob Squarepants tie in a full windsor, without bothering to button his collar or tuck in his shirttail (at least before he left the train).

Here is a link to the photos from this day - doesn't the New York subway have the most gorgeous tile work you ever saw?



There wasn't much to see at Ground Zero;  the visitors center was closed the day we were there (closed Thursday and Friday, if you think of going).  I think I got one photo of the construction site, with the usual fence, surmounted by the tops of cranes.  But the first thing you see out of the subway is the graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel.

I didn't realize until I got there that St. Paul's was the rest stop cum sleeping barracks cum medical station for all the rescue workers in the pit, around the clock for weeks.  Volunteers fed the workers, bunked them, hugged them, gave them massages (thousands of masseurs and chiropractors), played music for them.  This is right across the street from where the towers came down.  The dust and debris are gone, of course, but the memory, as they say, lingers on.  And on top of this, St. Paul's Chapel is the oldest surviving church building in Manhattan, completed in 1766, and the tombstones in the graveyard look it.  This place was built before cemeteries out in the rolling countryside; if you went to this church, when you died they gave you a funeral, and then they took you out the back door and buried you in the yard.

Well, after that start the rest of the day was interesting but kind of anticlimactic, especially since it was a gloomy and overcast day.  We walked around the financial district, saw Wall Street (which I was amused to see is now a pedestrian mall) and Broad Street.  We stepped into Trinity Chapel, where a local orchestra was performing in the nave, and glanced at the tombstones in its churchyard.  Trinity Chapel's valiant little spire among all the skyscrapers reminded me of our trip to New Zealand; when we toured Dunedin on the south island, we noticed that the church spires were still the tallest buildings in town.  We walked down to the Fraunces Tavern (didn't go in), which was reputed to have been a hangout of the Sons of Liberty.  We stopped to look at the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where I got a photo of a blackbird splashing in the fountain.  We took a brief tour of the New York Police Museum, just because we ran across it.  It's a gorgeous old building, three times higher than it is wide and built of stone.  I got one really good photo of the Brooklyn Bridge but after all that walking, I wasn't up to tackling it.

We took a look at the South Street Seaport, but it was just a tourist trap without any interesting restaurants, so we took the train over to Tribeca and found a restaurant called Max.  You know it's genuine when you can hear the waiters arguing in Italian.  The food was excellent.

Random memories of New York

Checking some incidents in my travel diary, I found this note from one of our subway trips, which I just have to share verbatim:

Our trip down was enlivened by a young man (18? 23?) who spent the entire trip tying his yellow Spongebob Squarepants tie in a full Windsor, without bothering to button his collar or tuck in his shirttail.

Greenwich Village

One of the first places we went in New York was, of course, Greenwich Village. I have to confess, here, that my mental images of the Village stem from a book called The Butterfly Kid, a stoner alien invasion fantasy written in 1967 by one Chester Anderson, who is also the narrator of the book. The book is theoretically set in "the future" - actually, probably about now, and of course there is no resemblance! But I enjoyed The Butterfly Kid enough to buy a second copy when my first one began to fall apart. Believe me, the Village in that book is Very Strange.

I liked Greenwich Village. We arose from the subway to find ourselves looking at (a) a pickup basketball game, and (b) a garden, locked and walled, with a plaque commemorating a long dead pub where Eugene O'Neill used to drink. This seemed appropriate. Like the rest of New York, Greenwich Village is very dense; but it isn't very tall. Most buildings were about 5-6 stories, with some 10-15 story exceptions; no skyscrapers. There is no space between buildings here - that would be wasteful. We strolled through the Washington Mews (converted stables, and not always very completely converted either) and Gay Street (a name which predates the current usage). Gay Street is curved, and lined solid with 5 story dwellings.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon, and Washington Square (a central location in The Butterfly Kid) was boiling with people and dogs of all ages. Also pigeons. I sat on a bench to rest, and a woman near me yelped, and complained that a pigeon had just shat on her leg - I think that's the first time I've ever seen that happen. We passed a group of folkies with a bass fiddle added to the usual guitars, singing Good Night, Irene - all the people sitting and listening were singing along softly. A few yards farther along we passed a 5 piece jazz combo playing some extremely hot licks, especially the sax player; they were surrounded by a small intent crowd. The fountain was full of kids; the lawn was littered with sunbathers in bikinis.

Being in the Village, we thought it appropriate to go and look at the Stonewall Inn, and the monument to the Stonewall Riots in Sheridan Square. One memorial statue was wearing an old LinkSys router for a hat; by the time we left, a maintenance man had removed it, but I got a photo. The entire memorial is viewed with grim disapproval by the bronze equestrian statue of Gen. Philip Sheridan, at the other end of the square. I wonder what he disapproved of before they installed the Stonewall statues.

We wandered around looking for a place to eat; I don't know why this is always so hard in a strange town. I have an Internet enabled phone, and I used Google maps to try to find a place near us, but every one we went to look at had something we didn't like, or was closed; in the end we wandered down a street and saw sign reading Home. We looked at the menu, it looked interesting, we went in and dined; the food was good, rather in the Alice Waters style.

Walking around New York City

In every novel I've read set in New York, everyone is always hailing taxis, and God knows 5 out of every 7 cars on the New York Streets are taxis; but with a couple of exceptions, we traveled the Big Apple by subway (and, once, by train) - we got unlimited MetroCards. We traveled by subway, and of course we walked; I thought my feet were going to fall off the first couple of days. We stayed in the Essex House hotel (now the Jumeirah Essex House), on Central Park South, so we had several nearby subway stations to choose from.

Subway stations in New York have stairs. There may be an occasional dark, hidden elevator; there are no escalators. There are stairs, often several flights, but separated - you think you're done with them and then you find another flight. I haven't climbed so many stairs since we visited London in 1996 and the Tube people were repairing all the escalators in Victoria Station.

New York is beautiful. The buildings are beautiful; unexpectedly among the glass towers, you find a 5 or 10 story gem with delicate architectural details. The houses on the side streets go up 4 and 5 stories, and come right out to the sidewalk, except for an area to access the basement - yards, if any, are in back. God help you in New York if your knees go out.

Our first morning there, we were looking for a place to have breakfast (I never eat breakfast in a big city hotel, there's always a cheaper place a block or two away), and I suddenly realized I was looking at Carnegie Hall! Now explain to me why I took a couple of photos, but never bothered to find out what was playing there and whether we could get tickets. I haven't figured that out.

So where did we walk? We walked through midtown to Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. The decorations on the buildings are astounding - gorgeous bas-reliefs (not painted), bas-reliefs painted in brilliant colors, decorative designs just painted on the wall. We saw the Prometheus statue, and more statuary around the skating rink (converted to a restaurant for summer) - and, we saw a procession of Fox News supporters, marching around Rockefeller Center, waving signs advertising their patriotism, and suggesting that Keith Olbermann should be sent to Guantanamo Bay. I never did find out what he said.

We paid to go to the Top of the Rock and see all of southern Manhattan Island, spread out on a brilliant sunny day. Rockefeller Center is gorgeously, outrageously Art Deco, which I adore. The observation platform is protected by the usual suicide barriers, ten foot panels of thick scratchy glass - conveniently spaced just far enough apart to fit a 50 mm camera lens between the panes! Only on the very top level, which is a setback (so you can only fall about 8 feet), can you see and photograph over the glass panels.

I'm doing a new thing with photographs, we'll see how it goes. I've signed up for SmugMug, and here's a link to a photo gallery with some of my New York photos. If you like them, check back - I'm nowhere near done uploading!

Touring the East

Having ranted (see last post), I want to share some of the oddities I noticed while traveling. We did an urban vacation this year - New York City and Philadelphia, separated by a few days in Cape May, NJ.

Given that it's almost impossible these days to get rare meat from a restaurant (they're all terrified of being sued for salmonella), why do the restaurants in the Atlantic coast states turn their air conditioning down so far you could hang meat in the dining room? They can't be afraid of it going bad, they've cooked it through. The weather was very muggy while we were there, mostly too warm to carry a jacket; and I'm still surprised I didn't catch a chill from the air in those restaurants.

This being the first time I've ever driven through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I had my first experience with Wawa. If you've been there, you know. It seems like a perfectly competent convenience store chain; but the name floored me. If you go to their web site and look at the Milestones section, you'll see the history and it actually makes sense: wawa is a Native American word for a Canada goose in flight. I foolishly assumed that Wawa, Pennsylvania was named after the firm, but I was wrong.

I was also startled to find that a dominant provider of gasoline in New Jersey is: Lukoil. When we drove down the Garden State Turnpike from New York to Cape May, Lukoil had the concession at practically every turnpike rest stop. With all the noise we hear about the U.S. energy companies, how did a Russian firm get to be so wide-spread in New Jersey? Wikipedia tells me that Lukoil bought Getty Oil in 2000 and rebranded some of the stations. I kept looking for Pikov Andropov.