Manhattan: Sept 29th & 30th

We took a hop-on hop-off bus tour just to get orientated. In quick succession we saw the landmarks: Flatiron Building, Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, Times Square etc. Most awe-inspiring and wonderful architecture, but brilliant photos are available in any guidebook or on the internet. Let’s look at Ground Zero:

Several massive buildings are rising up on the cleared site. It’s all very chaotic, with construction works and memorial areas generating conflicting flows of traffic. Perhaps this turmoil represents the chaos of the tragedy itself so is keeping the memory current. When it’s all finished, and the memorials and the structures are in place, when it’s all neat and tidy, the incident will recede into history. You get the impression that New Yorkers don’t want to let go of it just yet, it’s still raw 10 years on.

New York is razmataz. In Times Square this lady is promoting something or other, maybe herself, and happily posed for me. Also, in amongst the bustle of people in the Square, there was a live choir, the Nasdaq Choir, performing.

Within all busyness of Manhattan, the City has created some ingenious breathing spaces, in the first example out of an old high-level railway line, which looks like this from the street:

It’s a walkway now, completely away from traffic and planted with shrubs. Loads of people were using it, as the photo shows.

The main leisure space has to be Central Park, a surprisingly varied, undulating and large area. It’s the countryside with a skyline. It looks like a photoshop merge of two separate photos.

About half way up the park is a landscaped area called Strawberry Fields, a memorial to John Lennon who lived in an apartment block nearby and where he was shot dead. Yoko was instrumental in getting this area created and also paying for it, and she still lives in that same apartment that she and John Lennon shared.

There were all sorts of activities going on in Central Park as well as the more obvious ones of walking and jogging. There were good sports facilities, being well used, and a few eccentrics like the artist with the giant canvas below whom Jane watched for a good 10 minutes. She was a small old lady who never looked up from under her wide straw hat, so we didn’t see her face. Could it indeed have been Yoko? I could have tied my wishes to her hat instead of her tree in Washington.

Nice view of the Hudson River? Nothing remarkable, maybe, but I waited here for ages hoping for a plane to land, just as it did at about this point in Jan 2009. It was one of the best feats of airmanship ever, and all 155 passengers survived. Despite the potential as a tourist event, it’s difficult to see how you’d stage a re-enactment.