The end of New York

Unfortunately the rain was back again the next morning but as one does when one is travelling, one goes for a walk in the rain anyway.  And I did really want to get out and about today, because today was the first of three days of the "Summer Streets" festival and I wanted to see what it was all about.

Summer Streets is in its 6th year, an annual celebration of New York City’s most valuable public space—their streets.  On three consecutive Saturdays in the summer (this year Aug. 3, 10 and 17), nearly seven miles (just over 11 kms) of NYC’s streets are opened for people to play, walk, bike, ... and breathe.  Summer Streets provides space for healthy recreation and encourages New Yorkers to use more sustainable forms of transportation.  The event is part bike tour, part walking tour, part block party--a great time for exercise, people watching, or just enjoying summer mornings.
Running from 7:00am to 1:00pm, Summer Streets extends from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park, along Park Avenue (and LaFayette Street in the south) and connecting streets, and participants can plan a trip as long or short as they wish.  All activities at Summer Streets are free of charge, and designed for people of all ages and ability levels to share the streets respectfully.
Of particular interest this year was a seven-block-long art installation in the Park Avenue Tunnel – which was open to pedestrians this year for the first time in history.

And so despite the rain I had to see what Park Avenue was like without cars:

 Looking north up Park Avenue from 49th Street

 The "vehicular" tunnel through the Helmsley Building

 Is this not 'New York'?

 The west side of upper Grand Central Station - walking along the road that is usually only vehicular access

The bridge over 42nd Street

On the bridge, looking west along 42nd Street

 The Chrysler Building

The south side of upper Grand Central Station

The entrance to the tunnel at 33rd Street

After leaving Park Avenue I went up to Central Park for a little wander around there, and thankfully the rain cleared for a little while so I was able to dry out a little bit.

While I was there this egret decided to come and say hello as well:

By this point it was time to head back to the hotel and get myself ready to head to the airport.  I was staying at a hotel called The Pod 51 Hotel, which is located on 51st Street between 3rd and 2nd Streets.  One of the things I like the best about this hotel is it's rooftop deck - a great place to rest your weary feet after all the walking I always seem to do when I'm in New York.  And because I had a little bit of time before I had to leave I figured this would be a nice place to relax and end the trip... enjoying the sunshine, a book, and the view.

"Ground Zero", the 9/11 Memorial and the new World Trade Centre

As I said in my previous post, the World Trade Centre is located within Manhattan's Financial District, literally just a a couple of blocks away from Wall Street and the NYSE.

It has been a few years since I went down to "Ground Zero" so this was definitely somewhere I wanted to go to again while I was here in New York.

In addition to the actual World Trade Centre there are a couple of other buildings in the area that are historically significant, and both, thankfully and/or miraculously, survived the attacks on Sept. 11th.

Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel, make up Trinity Wall Street.  Trinity Church has stood on this site in Manhattan, at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, since 1697.  The current building, the third on the site, was consecrated in 1846 and is a registered National Historic Landmark.

A beautiful French sandstone and Italian marble statuary wall, called a reredos, is within Trinity Church.  The crucifixion appears at the centre of the reredos with the twelve apostles on the right and left.  Above is a depiction of Christ in glory.  Surmounting the reredos are angels playing musical instruments.  The stained glass chancel window features Jesus in the centre with, from left to right, Peter, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul.

Beautiful but relatively new compared to the rest of the church, the pipe organ at Trinity Church was installed in 2003 after the dust, ash and smoke of September 11, 2001, rendered the previous pipe organ unusable.

On Sept. 11, 2001, debris from the collapsing World Trade Centre towers struck a large sycamore tree that had stood for nearly half a century in the churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel.  When the dust settled, the uprooted tree was found lying on a narrow path in the yard.  It had fallen in such a way that none of the historic tombstones around it were disturbed and none of the wreckage reached the Chapel.  Philadelphia-born artist Steve Tobin heard the story of the sycamore and envisioned using its roots as the basis for a bronze sculpture.  In Sept. 2005 the two-tonne sculpture was installed here. The Trinity Root serves as a metaphor for connectedness and strength.

In 1789 George Washington took the oath of office to become the first President of the United States.  Afterwards he made his way from the Federal Hall on Wall Street to St. Paul's Chapel where he attended services.  At that point, St. Paul's had already been a part of New York City for 23 years.
St. Paul's was first opened as an outreach chapel of Trinity Church and when Trinity was destroyed in New York's Great Fire (1776), St. Paul's miraculously survived thanks to a bucket brigade dousing the building with water.
St. Paul's Chapel is now known as "the little chapel that stood" because it survived a second brush with destruction on Sept. 11, 2001, when the World Trade Centre building collapsed just across the street.  Other than a lot of dust and debris there was no damage to the church.

Directly behind the rear entrance to St. Paul's Chapel is the Bell of Hope.  It was presented in Sept. 2002 to the City of New York by the Lord Mayor of the City of London as a symbol of solidarity on the first anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001.  It is rung annually on Sept. 11th, and on other special dates.  The bell was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London, the same foundry that cast the Liberty Bell and Big Ben.

The original World Trade Centre (WTC) was a 16-acre commercial complex built between 1966 and 1987.  It contained seven buildings, a large plaza, and an underground shopping mall.  The centrepieces of the complex were the Twin Towers.  Over 1,360 feet tall. they were the tallest building in New York City.  Both had 110 floors, approximately 35,000 people worked in them, and tens of thousands of commuters and tourists were at the buildings daily.  The complex even had its own zip code!

The fully redeveloped WTC will include a memorial and museum, commercial office space, retail, and connections to public transit.  The master plan for the site calls for a spiral of new towers around the eight-acre Memorial.

The 9/11 Memorial opened on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.  It consists of two pools set in the footprints of the original Twin Towers.  These are where the towers used to stand.  Thirty-foot waterfalls cascade into the pools, each then descending into a centre void.

 The south pool

The north pool

The nearly 3000 names of the victims of the 9/11 and 1993 attacks are inscribed in bronze around the perimetres of the two pools.

1 World Trade Centre, just beyond the north pool, at 1,776 feet will be the tallest building in the United States.

Just east of the south pool, 4 World Trade Centre will rise 72 floors and stand 977 feet tall.

All but one of the trees on the Memorial site are swamp white oaks.  The exception is a Callery pear tree known as the "Survivor Tree".  This tree was planted on the original WTC plaza in the 1970's and after 9/11 workers found the damaged tree, reduced to an eight-foot-tall stump in the wreckage at Ground Zero.  The tree was nursed back to health in a New York City park and grew to be 30 feet tall, and in December 2010 the tree returned to the WT site.  Standing just west of the south pool it embodies the story of survival and resilience that is so important to the history of 9/11 today.

Although still under construction, the 'new' World Trade Centre site is quite impressive - and I found the 9/11 Memorial pools to be very moving!

More in New York City

Friday I had the weather I wish I'd had the day before when I went to Brooklyn - so I decided to go back again and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge today.

I love this building in lower Manhattan - originally known as Beekman Tower and currently marketed as "New York by Gehry"; it's a 76-story skyscraper designed by architect Frank Gehry.   It is just south of the Brooklyn Bridge - impossible to miss when you're in that area.
At 265 meters high it is the 12th tallest residential tower in the world and the second tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere.  It contains a public elementary school owned by the Department of Education (the first five floors of the building), above that a few floors of retail, and then the tower contains only residential rental units (898 in total), a rarity in New York’s Financial District.

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States.  Completed in 1883, it connects the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River. With a main span of 486.3m it was the longest suspension bridge in the world from its opening until 1903, and the first steel-wire suspension bridge.  Since its opening it has become an icon of New York City, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a National Historic Civic Engineering Landmark in 1972.
The Brooklyn Bridge has a wide pedestrian walkway open to walkers and cyclists, in the centre of the bridge and higher than the automobile lanes.  More than 4,000 pedestrians and 3,100 cyclists cross the Brooklyn Bridge each day.

Looking back at lower east Manhattan 

Looking south along the East River towards Governors Island.  And if your eyesight is very, very good you can just see the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island off to the right. 

Midtown east Manhattan with a bit of the Manhattan Bridge.  Near the left side, the tallest building is the Empire State Building.

On the Brooklyn side with the Brooklyn Bridge Park underneath, looking north up the East River.

The Manhattan Bridge

Coming back now - from Brooklyn to Manhattan

The Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge is located very near to City Hall Park and some beautiful, old, historic buildings can be found here.  The Manhattan Municipal Building is a 40-storey building built to accommodate increased governmental space demands after the 1898 consolidation of the city's five boroughs.  Construction began in 1907 and ended in 1914, and this was the first building to incorporate a New York City Subway station into its base.  It is one of the largest governmental buildings in the world; it was designated a New York City landmark in 1966 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

New York City Hall is the oldest city hall in the United States that still houses its original governmental functions, such as the office of the Mayor of New York City and the chambers of the New York City Council.   Constructed from 1810 to 1812, New York City Hall is a National Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

City Hall Park is right in front of the City Hall building and as usual in New York City, it was a bustle of activity.

A cellist playing by the fountain in City Hall Park 

Some great public art 

And of course, a clown...

From here a short walk south takes you to New York's Financial District and Wall Street.

Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street was built in 1842 as the United States Custom House and later served as a sub-Treasury building on the site of the old Federal Hall.  It is now a museum commemorating the historic events that occurred there.  The original building on this site - Federal Hall - was built in 1700 as New York's City Hall.  It later served as the first capitol building of the United States of America under the Constitution, and was the site of George Washington's inauguration as the first President of the United States.  It was also where the United States Bill of Rights was introduced in the First Congress.  The original building was demolished in 1812.

I couldn't possibly be in New York's Financial District and not take a look at the infamous New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), sometimes known as the "Big Board".  It is located at 11 Wall Street and is the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies at US$16.613 trillion as of May 2013.  Average daily trading value is approximately US$155 billion.  The NYSE building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978.

As you may know, New York's financial district is just a couple of blocks away from 'Ground Zero' - the World Trade Centre.  I did spend some time there today as well - look for my next post which will be only about this area.

And then for the end of today, I figured I couldn't be in New York without showing you the Flatiron Building.   It is this modest, twenty-storey building, built in a section of the city which, at the turn of the 20th century was considered “uptown”, that quickly became a symbol of the skyscraper era and holds the distinction of being considered the nations first true skyscraper.  It was built in 1902, designated a New York City landmark in 1966, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and finally designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989.