"New York, If I Can Make It There..."

9 Sep 2014--Drove into New York/New Jersey on Sunday, and had helacious traffic getting to our destination.



This is the area we had to come thru...you can see in the 2nd picture that there were "Jersey Walls", appropriately named, so close together that we scraped our tires trying to maneuver thru them. Needless to say, there were no signs warning us of anything except at the  last minute, where they told us that any vehicle going thru couldn't exceed 10 1/2 ft...that's 126 inches and we sit at 108, so it was a squeeze the whole way.  The scraping happened because they didn't always have the walls lined up straight!  haha



Our RV Park is on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, directly across from lower Manhattan...we can see the statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center from here easily...but check out how squeezed we are in what would be better defined as a parking lot.  haha  We're not here much with all our sightseeing, so we don't mind...plus this is the only rv park within 50 miles of NY.




We took the subway over to the World Trade Center on Monday as the 1st stop of the week.  The signs said military got a reduced price, but they let us in for free...we think maybe because it's the 9/11 anniversary week?

As soon as you come up from the subway the new buildings are on top of you.  It makes it hard to get good pics...I couldn't get it all in one picture, so I took a pic of a pic displayed inside in the memorial so you could see "the big picture".  Beautiful!

 

There are 2 memorial pools outside, surrounded by both new and older buildings...hard to get a pic here also that captures it all, so I took a short video also.




The inside of the museum is a little hard to describe.  Big, but with lots of empty space, as seen in the pic of the "last column".  That column is in a huge, cavernous room that you 1st see from above and then walk down into, and the only other thing in the whole room is one of the walls from the original World Trade Center.  There are pictures throughout the museum like these before and after shots, and quotes from people who were there, like this from a professional photographer who ended up helping in the initial digging for survivors.




Although there were lots of people in the building with us, it was pretty quiet as we walked around...it was almost uncomfortable to be there.  One area that was particularly difficult to be in was a small, almost out-of-the way area where they had a couple pictures of people falling after having jumped out of the windows.  There was a quote from someone saying that she watched as a woman stood on the ledge, straightened her skirt, and modestly held it as she jumped.  She said that out of respect she felt she couldn't look away.  I read that one quote only, and promptly left that area.  Too sad!



This was a beautiful quilt of the areas hit that day and quilted pictures of every person who died that day.  It took up one whole wall, so I couldn't even get a full picture of it.



This was originally a plastic form of the Statue of Liberty placed outside one of the fire stations near the twin towers that was later donated to the museum.  Below that is the remainder of one of the responding fire trucks, followed by world headlines the next day.




I didn't take too many pictures in the museum, just enough to share some you might not have seen before.  I posted these 2 pics just to show you some different angles of the towers now.  1 World Trade Center is 104 stories and is the tallest building in the western hemisphere.  It seems that no matter where you are in Manhattan, no matter how far you walk away from the area, you can see these buildings.  It's nice that you can, I think.

 

We walked so many places this day...probably at least 40 blocks of NYC...but were thwarted a few times in our quest to see as many sites as we could in this area of town.  Listed on a list of "great places to see", the Federal Reserve building, St Paul's Chapel and the John Street Methodist Church were all closed to the public.  The Federal Reserve is supposed to be gorgeous inside, modeled on a Florentine palace, but since the time of the "Occupy Wall Street" crowds, you can only take guided tours and you have to make reservations far in advance to do that.  The Methodist Church was the 1st congregation in North America in 1766, and St Peter's is the oldest Catholic Church in NYC.  All 3 of these sites are on a handout we got here, but they were all closed to us...ugh!



Trinity Church, built in 1846, was open and was quite pretty inside.  It is the 3rd church built at this site and it is right at the corner of Wall St.  In it's cemetery are Revolutionary War soldiers, along with other notables like Alexander Hamilton and members of the Astor family.  I think it's a great example of the old mixed with the new here in the city.  The contrast with the World Trade Center in the background is beautiful.





Down from the church is the Wall St Bull...so many people are around you have to share your picture with a stranger.  haha



This area was really amazing.  Watch the video to see that you have, all in one space, the JP Morgan building, across the street from the NY Stock Exchange, which is one short block down from the Trinity Church, and across the street from the Federal Hall National memorial, where not only our legislatures met when NY was the capital of the country, but also where George Washington was sworn in as the 1st President of the US!  Crazy!!!






Leaving George behind, we walked over to St Paul's Chapel, built in the 1760s.  This is Manhattan's oldest public building in continuous use, where Washington was a regular and even had his own pew.



We saw this building peering over the treetops of a park in the distance so headed over here and then realized we were at City Hall...and a hop, skip and a jump from the Brooklyn Bridge.



So we headed out onto the bridge along with a whole bunch of people that were both tourists and people walking home from work at the end of the day.  They even have a bike lane on the bridge, and these people mean business...don't get in that bike lane or some of these riders will mow you down! haha




At the end of a long but great day, back to the subway guarded by a couple Army National Guard troops.  The last 2 pics are from our RV Park.  Notice in the 2nd pic that although on the other side of the Hudson River from us, right smack in the middle of the pic you can again see the World Trade Center!  What a day!