Half Way Round the World...

Blog 2 - New York City

New York City - what can I say?  It's the heartbeat of America, people are on the streets day and night, it's vibrant, it's ethnic- and I've never heard so many non-English speaking speakers anywhere in the US.  Yes in Chinatown - any Chinatown - you hear lots of Chinese but most everyone else is speaking English.  The same with East LA  - they're all speaking Spanish, or some form of English.  In New York City, you hear just about every language under the sun.  French, German, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Lithuanian, Arabic ....  And you really feel like a minority at times just walking down the street. 

View from the Brooklyn Bridge

We went to the must sees - The Empire State Building, Ground Zero, The Brooklyn Bridge, a Broadway play, then we started trying to see sites we'd not seen before.  There are many Art Museums in NYC.  Want to see one that's not nearly so crowded?  Go to the Frick.  It's a one block square site with a mansion in the middle built by Henry Clay Frick to house his art collection.  It was eclectic but tasteful.  He had statues, artwork from many centuries, including Chinese Art from the Sung dynasty and Renoir.  It's a lovely, quiet palace of art. Or if you're into books, go to the Morgan Library.  Among other rare treasures, it has THREE Gutenberg Bibles.


Want to see NYC from the ground?  We took a walking tour of downtown New York.  Six hours - and we only scratched the surface.  We saw St. Paul's Chapel - where the victims and rescue workers of the 9/11 disaster were brought in or rested.

Badges of police officers from around the world who have visited Ground Zero left in tribute

And at Trinity Church we found the gravestone of one of Larry's more famous antecedents William Bradford, and were celebrities for a minute - the Israeli girl on our tour even offered to take our picture in front of him. (Even on our tour we had French, Chilean, Russian, Israeli and even American tourists) We visited So Ho, No Ho, Tribeca, Little Italy - where we had a great pizza lunch with Cannoli for dessert, then China Town, the High Line Railroad Park and finally ended up back at the subway for the train ride back to our hotel. Did I mention we stayed out in Jersey?  A very nice Hampton Inn in Linden that provided free van service to the train station for the 35 minute ride into Penn Station, NY.

We tried to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, but.... the line was more than 3 hours long.  After you had a ticket.  I talked to the Park Rangers a bit about Castle Clinton (where the ticket window was for Ellis Island and the Statue) while Larry browsed the few exhibits inside the castle and discovered that this was actually the site of Castle Gardens, the precursor to Ellis Island, that they kept very loosey goosey records and any that might have gone to Ellis Island would have burnt to the ground when the first Ellis Island did, so other than for historic reference neither Larry (who's relatives came over on the Mayflower or with the French trappers) nor I (whose relatives mostly came through New Orleans or Castle Gardens) had any chance of finding anything of genealogical importance there. Instead we took the Rangers' advice and headed for the free, half hour or less wait, Staten Island Ferry.

We spent the last day there checking out Teddy Roosevelt's childhood home and walked through Central Park to the Met stopping on the way for lunch at one of the street stands, which we ate  watching the bikers and runners and horse drawn carriages vie for space on the walks.  The Met had a crowd -  it's only April and already you felt like a sardine in the European exhibits.  Walking through them, they were worth the crunch - the Met has some gorgeous Renoirs, Sisleys and Van Goghs on exhibit,  I was entranced with an unknown (at least for me) painting of Salome. 

Two special exhibits caught our fancy, the Gertrude Stein travelling exhibit and the visiting exhibit of Japanese Scrolls.  Hardly anyone was in that section and we were able to stroll past several Buddhas and other exhibits before entering the special exhibit.  What a nice way to end your visit in New York, appreciating the art collections available there.

From the Gertrude Stein Collection

From a Japanese Scroll

Our next blog will cover the attempt to reach JFK and the short stay we had in Istanbul - we wish it had been longer.

Hope you enjoyed some of the pictures and are having good times and good thoughts back home.

Larry and Patrice Stevens