I don’t know how many more times I will say “today will be a little lighter, and we won’t walk 12 miles” and then we do anyway–but this was definitely another one of those days. We did start it a bit later than yesterday but we were still back on the train across to Manhattan by 9 am, this time heading Lower Manhattan. We arrived at the PATH World Trade Center station, the Oculus, which was what was built after the 9/11 attacks in place of the station that was destroyed, and completed in 2016. At first sight, we experienced the awe of this enormous, gleaming, shiny-white futuristic station design–before it sunk in why it is there and why it is so new, and that was very hard to process. And then we stepped outside, looked up at the new One World Trade Center, and walked to the 9/11 Memorial. It was intense. I knew about the overall design, but it was much more emotionally overwhelming than I had imagined. The water running down from all sides into the “empty” footprint of the buildings and then on to where you can’t see where it ends is very powerful symbolism. I was surprised I seemed to be the only one who was crying.
We walked from this spot past the Wall Street Bull (where people were lining up to take photos and selfies) and the former Custom House, now the Museum of the American Indian, but with a super racist “evil Indian” sculpture by Daniel Chester French attacking the allegorical “America” from behind in front of it!) to Battery Park, and looked out at the harbor. We only had to walk a few hundred more feet to get to the Staten Island Ferry, which is a free ride for pedestrians across the harbor, and not too busy on weekends–that is, we were only about 1,000 going aboard, mostly tourists, rather than the 4,500 regular commuter that fit into the ferry and that ride it at rush-hour every weekday! It was a bit of a cloudy day, but we still joined a bunch of others on the outdoor observation deck to look at the statue of Liberty, Ellis Island in the west, and then also Governor’s Island on the east side when we came back. One of the security guys on the ferry told us that the “glamping” tents we could see on the shore of Governor’s Island are $500/night!
After our ferry ride, we continued on along the water’s edge until the Brooklyn Bridge. We had to walk back a bit to get to the stairs that lead up to the pedestrian walkway, where we joined a gazillion tourists and a busker every 2 minutes or so, almost all along the bridge, which is just over a mile (or 1.8 km) long and was a blast for walking and gawking. The views of Manhattan behind us and of Brooklyn ahead were fun, but of course it’s mostly the Manhattan skyline people are looking for!
The other continents (Europe, Asia, Africa) are just as horrible in their expression of racist prejudice, by the way. I just learned about these last year on a zoom lecture.
Once we were across the bridge, we kept walking, because we were meeting a friend and colleague and her kid at the New York Transit Museum, about a half hour walk into downtown Brooklyn. That was an unexpected delight. The museum is in an old subway station (technically still in working condition, but only used to let the historic cars “out” on special occasions like Christmas) and was originally just meant as a temporary exhibit on the NYC subway system. But people understandably loved this so much that they made it a permanent exhibit and expanded it to include buses as well. We wandered through historic subway cars, from 1907 to the 1970s, including some very futuristic-looking and some very old-fashioned designs, got to look at the evolving turnstyles and subway tokens (as well as the fake tokens, called “slugs”), with a very excited seven-year-old. It was so much fun–I love transportation history and design, and of course in the case of the NYC subway, even the map and signage design is historically important and can get you drawn into long conversations about fonts, design concepts, and so on (HELVETICA, anyone?).
We stayed there for almost 2 hours, and then Jody and her kid took off and we met with another friend, a former student named Rob who had seen that we were in NYC and messaged me to see whether we’d have time to meet. He’s lived in NYC for the past 12 years (and had spent several years before that mostly in Rhode Island, so not far). I hadn’t seen him since the early 2000s, although we stayed loosely in touch via Facebook, and we had such a great time catching up! And since he is broadly in computers (now a web developer) he also immediately clicked with Mark. We spent several hours walking along the Brooklyn promenade and through the newly gentrified waterfront area known as DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass–I was glad to get that explanation from Rob, because I was very confused about the NYC connection with a Disney elephant). We also sat for a bit on various park benches, had delicious ice cream, and eventually a fantastic Chinatown meal at a place called Joe’s Shanghai. We ordered way too much food–but it was so good, and the soup dumplings were amazing. I should have just had the soup dumplings, and then some more of those. Instead, we walked out with enough leftovers for tomorrow (strangely enough, the soup dumplings were all gone…); Rob took the subway part of the way with us, and then we made our way back home to our Airbnb by about 9 pm.
What an awesome day! It was a bit cooler and overcast, but that was actually very nice for all the walking we did! And having two New Yorkers show us some of their favorite areas and give us tips was such a wonderful privilege, and–as with Louise in Boston–one of our very favorite things. It’s fun to discover things on your own, but learning what people love to do and see who live here and love it here each and every day is the absolute best.