New York Trip part three

Monday 

 TS and family wanted to take the boat trip that goes around Statue of Liberty Island. TBH is not a good sailor and I suggested that we went to Washington Square instead and that we could meet up with the rest of the family after their boat trip. TBH agreed that a walking trip would be better than making herself unwell whilst trapped on a boat for an hour or so.   We all took the Hop on hop off bus and parted company close to Washington Square in the rather posh district of Greenwich Village, where I am proud to say my ancestors once lived.

We have just hopped off the hop on hop off bus

Washington Square is not dissimilar to many of the London squares in and around central London, that I am familiar with, but it has one major feature that differs from London.

There is a huge arch at one entrance, looking not unlike Marble Arch in London, but celebrating George Washington.

My maternal Grandmother was born in Washington Square, but I have no idea where exactly and likewise her family, my great grandparents lived in Washington Place, an adjoining street, and again I do not know exactly which house.    After walking around the square, we looked at Washington Place. It consists largely of what are described as Brownstone buildings which were surprisingly similar to the house that my great grandmother had owned in London. I suppose they were a standard design that was built all over the world around the same time.

Whilst houses like this in Greenwich Village may continue to be preserved, my great grandmother's house in London is now a grade II listed building and so will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
After we had walked around my ancestor's home grounds for a while, we decided to get a coffee and a snack to keep us going. Being a rather upmarket part of New York, there were some real fancy restaurants and we had a rather strange coffee in a French restaurant.  Once the inner person was satisfied, we got back on the hop on hop off bus and continued down to Battery Park.
Here we walked around, looking at the open water of the Junction of  the East River and the Hudson and watched the boats and ferries going back and forth.

One odd looking boat was a floating advertising hoarding which simply cruised up and down displaying advertisements on a huge display screen.

The same boat, with two of its repertoire of advertisements

This barge intrigued me, it did not seem to have any cockpit or anywhere for it to be steered from. It is piled high with containers with no obvious cabin.  I looked it up in the shipping registry and it is listed as a cargo barge, but it said nothing about how it was controlled.  There is a guy sitting on a chair at the front, but he does not seem to be doing anything with a steering control and has all the appearance of being a passenger.

We then walked along the Hudson side towards the place we were meeting the rest of the family.

One of the things about New York is the number of places and objects that you recognise from movies, Washington Square has featured in several movies I am familiar with and whilst we walked along the Hudson waterfront, the Staten Island ferry sailed past, which we had seen being chopped in half in a recent movie.

Of course one thing that you cannot miss is the Statue of Liberty.  This is large enough to get a good look from the shore and despite not going out on the water, we got to see it anyway.

 On the way to meet the family we passed several monuments and across the river we could see the old Railway Station that was the main entry point to Manhattan before all the bridges and tunnels were built, where you had to get a ferry to return to the mainland and get a train.

Further on we saw, what is billed as the largest clock in the world, advertising something or other.

 New York like London is full of monuments and further along the river, we found a monument to the Korean War.  The flags of all the nations involved were around the base and there were a surprising number of UN troops involved.  I grew up with this war going on and it seemed to consist of mostly British and American troops, according to the news reels I saw at the cinema, but it was much more of an international effort according to this monument.

We eventually met up with the rest of the family not too far from the Liberty Island tours landing place.

As we left the water front, we came across this, not something that fitted my personal image of the NYPD, but logical when you consider the traffic conditions and the maneuverability of such a small car.

There are some very striking buildings in Manhattan and this one caught our eye.  We had to pass by it and both TS and I took several pictures of it.

After some refreshments, we walked on from there heading for the 9/11 monument.
 I clearly recall the event as must many other people and remember in detail what I was doing at the time.  I was working in my office in Shrivenham College  when someone called us to look at a news stream they were watching and we saw the awful event unfolding.  Ironically, TBH had just booked our air tickets to visit the family that very morning, just before the news broke.

This was a very somber place, although crowded everyone was moving around silently, and I was surprised as to how much it affected me.  Actually being there, at the site of all those needless deaths, with all the names written around the rim of the two towers foundations was difficult to describe.
Each side had a waterfall symbolising tears and I was deeply moved and although fascinated by the whole affair, I did not want to stay for too long.

One thing that I found very sad but thoughtful of them, was that the monument organisers placed a white rose on the names of the victims, on the anniversary of their birthday, .

No relation, but no doubt because there were so many victims, you will find your own family names among those remembered.

Just some flowers, to cheer us up after this gloomy memorial.

New York Trip - part two

Sunday

 On Sunday, we decided to take the Hop on hop off bus and went along to the Natural History Museum.

A carriage spotted on the way

Some of the sets for the Movie trilogy Night at the Museum, is based on this museum and many exterior shots are of the doors to this museum, but the resemblance is superficial.

The statue of Teddy Roosevelt outside the main entrance and he does not look a bit like Robin Williams 

The museum has a wide range of exhibits, many of which are well over 100 years old.

 Whilst the idea of stuffed animal skins is somewhat abhorrent to me, the Africa dioramas are impressive and whoever did the taxidermy was a real artist because the animals look incredibly alive.

The rest of the museum is a predictable collection of dinosaur remains articulated into life size skeletons, much loved by children of all ages.

In one gallery the centre piece is the Willamette Meteorite, a huge chunk of iron.  For me this was the highlight of the visit because it is something I have included in my U3A talks about space stuff, so I know a lot about it and I was pleased to actually see the real thing. It is impressively large and must have made a bit of a mess when it landed several thousand years ago, but as far as is known there was nobody living near at the time of its arrival.

After wandering around the museum taking in the various exhibits, we decided that we had enough time left to visit the Metropolitan Museum which is on the opposite side of Central Park, so we it would be practical and interesting to walk across the park instead of taking the bus all around it.

A remarkably tame denizen of the Central Park

An entrance was right opposite the Museum of Natural History, so we wandered into the park and quickly lost our bearings.

Central Park

Another denizen of Central Park. Same price as the call charges for using a satellite phone.

Typical view of Central Park

Looking at a map did not help a lot and in the end we decided that it would be too far to walk and made our way back to the road, where we took the hop on hop off bus again.

A Park map, not too helpful

Something I noticed whilst we were on the buses, was that many of the traffic lights were faulty.  Not enough to make them useless, but because they were made from a matrix of LEDs, it seems they must have gone for the lowest tender because quite a number of them had dud lamps in their array forming different patterns of illuminated and dark lamps.

They are supposed to be round made up from a set of concentric circles of lights, but now and then a dud lamp or three breaks the pattern

Leaving the bus we walked past the Metropolitan museum, but did not go in, deciding that there was not now enough time to do it justice, and anyway some of us were getting a bit tired by this time.  A wise decision as it turned out, because that place is VAST!.
Looking for a hop on hop off bus stop, we passed the Guggenheim Museum, a distinctive building that you could not easily mistake.

From there were were able to get a bus back to the district where our hotel was.

New York Trip

New York - day one

Friday morning 

On the Friday morning we were up early, it being the day we had planned to fly to New York. I had two motivations to visit New York, firstly; like many people it was something on my bucket list just because it is so famous and should be visited at least once. The second reason was that my maternal grandmother was born in New York and I wanted to visit the place where she was born. I do not know the exact address, but information that I do have tells me that she was born in Washington Square and she and her parents lived in Washington Place, an adjoining street.

 That morning, we had an hour’s drive to the airport, where TS (The Son) had arranged for a parking garage with a shuttle bus to take us to the airport. Once at Kansas City Airport, even though it is an internal flight, we had to go through all the anti terrorist security checks before we could get into the departures lounge. Interestingly enough, I found out on this trip that once over the age of 70, you do not need to take off your shoes, so still shod but beltless we went through the process of opening our bags and fighting the other passengers for an empty bin to hold the items to be inspected. Once repacked and able to wear a belt once more we went into the departures lounge and sat and waited for our flight.

Shortly after our tornado excitement, we saw that New York was also having weather alerts and high winds were expected with heavy rain, so we were fearing the worst.  Not tornadoes, but just unpleasant weather.   On the Friday morning, all these events had gone away and so we were hopeful that the weather would improve whilst we were there.

It is a two and a half hour flight from Kansas City airport to La Guardia airport, where we were heading and it passed reasonably easily, reading and playing games on the iPad, with occasional views of the ground between the clouds. When we had booked the flight, the five of us were split up into separate seats but just as we checked in with or boarding passes, there was a change and TBH was given the seat next to me. This was helpful, since we share stuff on flights. Someone must have realised that two people with the same last name were likely to be travelling together.

So we arrived in the Big Apple – just in time for the Friday afternoon rush hour.

TS used his Uber app to find a cab and one was less than a mile away, but the jam at the arrivals pick-up was solid and it took a long time for the cab to arrive and get close enough to load up. It took a similarly long time to inch out of the airport and onto the very crowded streets of Queens. Not only was it the Friday ‘let’s get outa here and go home’ rush, but there was a lot of construction going on where La Guardia is being ‘improved’. No doubt, it will be a big improvement in the long term, but causes a lot of problems for someone arriving during the improvements.

 After a long long journey through the streets of New York, we finally arrived in the Garment District of Manhattan where our hotel was.

 We were staying at the Fairview hotel in 36th street and were on the 23rd floor or, as one of the hotel notices said the 23th. Because the floor numbers miss out floor thirteen and Americans call the ground floor, the first floor, we were actually only twenty one floors up. This is still quite high and your ears pop as the elevator goes up and down, but it was not twenty three floors off the ground. Many people believe that the thirteenth floor is unlucky, so most hotels do not call the thirteenth floor thirteen, but go from twelve to fourteen. Why people are happy to be given a room on the thirteenth floor that is labelled fourteen I do not know. Maybe they can’t count. The view from our window was not inspiring, but we were in New York!

The View from our hotel window

Saturday 

Because we were not too far from Times Square, one of the first excursions we did the next day was to walk there and have a look at the sights. And I must say, there were some sights.
You could if you wanted have your photo taken with various Marvel and other comic book characters and children were meeting Mickey Mouse and Sesame street characters, but for the older boys, there were two women with very little on in the way of clothing but with paint instead, who would let you have your picture taken in their arms for a small fee.

Times Square is not really a square, being more of a longish slightly more open area than the streets surrounding it, but all sorts of people gather there and all sorts of events take place there simply because it is Times Square.

Our first impressions of being on foot on the streets in Manhattan was noise, smells and crowds. A lot like London in the tourist areas, it was busy. Unlike London, you occasionally got a whiff of raw sewage as you walked along and the traffic was constantly hooting each other. There seemed to be a pattern to the hooting, some was impatient, ‘get out of my way’, but some short beeps said ‘OK buddy I am letting you through; go ahead.’

This rather poignant statute was not far from our hotel and we passed it regularly when we were going out.  It was erected here on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 disaster.

In the USA you can usually turn right on a red light if the road is clear and there are no pedestrians still crossing. Lights give pedestrians right of way over turning traffic on a marked crossing, so people would stream across once the lights changed and then a queue of right turning traffic would wait creeping forwards slowly whilst the flood turned to a trickle and they could turn. If someone was a bit tardy, the cars would hoot them impatiently adding to the chorus of hooting. We fairly soon got the hang of the pedestrian lights and sometimes could see it was safe to start crossing before the pedestrian lights changed and so get ahead of the mob waiting to cross. You could spot the local New Yorkers, they were always well ahead of the mob just before the lights changed.

These vendors pulling their trolleys around fascinated me, they took absolutely no notice of the traffic signals or the traffic and just went in a straight line across any kind of junction as the traffic steered around them.

There are so many things to see in NY that we rather overdid it that first day, and the second day and… Well we walked a lot.

Times Square

A model being photographed on top of an open top bus in Times Square

More Times Square

Some of the characters waiting to be photographed.  A slightly paunchy Spider man and an unfit looking Captain America among them

Times Square companions?  They seemed to be doing good business. 

That day, after Times Square, we went to The Rockefeller Center, via a Barnes and Noble book store, for a browse and a coffee. There was a Lego store by the Rockefeller Center and so TS and TG wanted a look in there, so, we did a quick tour and then went on.

A greeter outside a toy store

New York Police woman at the Rockefeller Center

A statue on 5th Avenue with the Rockefeller Center building in the background

We next decided to have a look at Grand Central Station, which was not too far away.

Grand Central Station is certainly very grand

We followed this with a visit to the Empire State Building.

By this time some of the party were too pooped to continue and so decided to wait inside the building whilst three of us we went up to the top.
We nearly overpaid and were only saved from getting ripped off by the tower ticketing system because their ticket machine did not work for us. The machine we encountered first was an express ticket vending machine that was supposed to get you to the head of the queue. Shocked at the outrageous price, we stopped and had a short discussion, whilst we allowed another family to use the machine, which gave then their expensive tickets. We then came to the decision, it was a once in a lifetime thing, so hang the cost and we tried to get our tickets, but the machine would not accept TS’s card. So after trying to get it to work for a couple more tries, we went further into the building and up a short flight of stars looking for another means of getting a ticket and found another machine which both took TS's card and cost about half the first machine's ticket price.  These half price tickets made little or no difference to how rapidly you got to the top of the building.
You go up in two stages, the first stop is really just a long queue for the final staircase, but whilst waiting you pass by several windows and you are pretty high by that time.  It was rather hazy on that day, so some of the more distant views were a bit dull looking,

Lower Manhattan

Liberty Island through the haze

 From the top the views are spectacular and we could see almost all the most prominent landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty and TS and I took endless photos. 

New York has some weird looking buildings

This one is known as the Flat Iron building because it is shaped like an old fashioned clothes iron

I noticed that many of the most recent buildings are very narrow and tall.  presumably in response to the cost of land in such a crowded city. 

Most of the buildings we saw under construction were very similar.

Meanwhile, the other members of our family were not having such a good time.  There were no chairs in the ground floor of the building and when totally exhausted with feet that are not often pain free from normal walking, TDIL and TG sat on the floor of the lobby. They were then told by an officious woman that sitting on the floor was not allowed and a slight issue occurred when TDIL indignantly pointed out that due to her arthritis, she needed to sit down and they had not provided any chairs and it was a bit heartless to expect tired aching people to remain standing whilst their family were visiting the tower (and incidentally contributing to paying this person’s wages) although that was not said out loud.

Meanwhile, once we had shuffled all the way around both upper floors that you are led to, we came back down and met up with TDIL and TG, who told us how they had been treated. After this we wended our way back to our hotel via a Starbucks for a loo and coffee break. That evening we ate in a nearby Italian restaurant and so that was day one.

This graffiti was inside the stairwell of the Empire State Building