New
York City
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Ground Zero
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Working on repair to subway
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New Yorkers still say that they
expect to see the Twin Towers when they look up
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Fire Department patches
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Breakfast in NYC
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Statue of Liberty
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On Liberty Island with NYC skyline
behind us
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Ellis Island
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Registry Hall where immigrants
waited to be processed
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A little Dixieland on Ellis Island
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Brooklyn Bridge from Harbor Cruise
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Yankee Stadium
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Empire State Building
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Hazy view from top-it is smoke
from fires in Canada
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At the top
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Doesn't King Kong look fierce?
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Chrysler Building
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Boys will be boys!
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And girls will be girls!
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Robot elevator in FAO Schwartz
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Central Park
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A lovely carriage ride
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Very nice wildlife center
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He was tired
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Upside down walrus
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Sister-in-law Lorraine Mann with
Fred and Lois
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Our trip to Big Apple began
trying to decipher the ins and outs of buying train tickets.
Someone told us; "just call this 1-800 number and you can buy the tickets
over the phone." We did that; the only
problem was that you had to travel 30 miles away to pick them up. We called another number and got a real person
who told us - what train to take, what time it got to our station and to just
buy the ticket from the train conductor.
Bags in tow, we got on the
train headed to New York City and 3 hours later we were in Penn Station right
in the middle of Manhattan. We took a cab to our hotel and called Jim and
Lorraine. We took a walk and went down
to "Ground Zero", it was only about 4 blocks away. They have closed the observation deck, but
you could still see much of the area. They
have almost completed the repair of the subway tunnel that ran under the WTC.
You really can't comprehend what happened that day; it just looks like
a new building under construction. The
impact gets stronger when you realize the many buildings just across the street
are still being repaired and are covered with black canvas because all the windows
are missing. The people from NYC that we met are still talking
about how they have visions that the WTC will be there when they look up to
the sky. Our hotel was just a block
from Jim and Lorraine's apartment so we walked on over to meet them for dinner.
Our first impressions of New York grew as we walked to meet them, shops
of every type owned by people of all nationalities.
New York is really like "old America", the melting pot of the world.
Our first dinner with Jim and Lorraine was at the Tribeca Grill, owned
by Robert DeNiro; he has a production studio on the top floors of the building.
The next morning we went down
to a neighborhood store and bought a container of mixed fruit and ate it sitting
on their steps. Our real adventure began after breakfast; we
entered the subway, bought our "transit card", a credit card that gets you into
all the subway gates. Each time you
enter a gate it costs $1.50 for each person.
We traveled to Battery Park and took the ferry over to the Statue of
Liberty, the interior is closed again, they fear not being able to get people
out quickly if there was an emergency. It
is a beautiful site, but the real images begin when you realize that the people
that saw it when they first entered the harbor were the people coming from Europe
on their way to America. Their destination
was Ellis Island, just a mile or so across the bay.
That was the next stop for our ferry and you could spend many hours in
the museum that they have created. Ellis Island is a compound of buildings with
one large three story building used for the main processing point with other
buildings for dormitories, hospitals, etc.
There is one large room in the entry of the building where everyone stacked
their baggage as they left the ships. Upstairs
in the Registry Hall the people stood in line to be processed.
During the height of the immigration era they processed 5,000 people
a day and that included legal paperwork and a medical exam.
If a member of a family was not going to be allowed to enter for medical
or legal reasons, the whole family was sent back to their country of origin;
that is the reason Ellis Island is known as the "Island of Tears". The main years of the flood of immigrants were
1880 to 1924 and during that time over 22,000,000 people came to America to
gain their freedom. One man is quoted
as saying "The streets of New York are not paved with gold, they are not even
paved and they expect me to pave them". Still,
this was better than the oppression they left in Europe. After WWI there began a feeling of fear of
the Europeans and the administration began to put more restrictions on the number
of new immigrants allowed to enter the country. By 1924 it had been slowed to a relative trickle
and Ellis Island was closed as a processing station. It was allowed to deteriorate until the late
1970's when decisions were made to rebuild it and to make it into a museum.
It is a beautiful building, but has many haunting pictures of what the
people went through to get here to begin their new lives.
If you get a chance, every American needs to visit to understand in more
detail how we became a nation of many peoples.
We walked around the tip of
Manhattan to meet the boat for our harbor tour. This
tour took 2 hours and went completely around the island of Manhattan. Manhattan, being an island, is connected to
the rest of NYC by bridges of all types, suspension bridges, vertical lift bridges
and bridges that have a center span that turns to let the big vessels continue
on up the Hudson River. The main reason
for the bridges is so people can get to work, approximately 7,000,000 people
cross the bridges everyday to come and go to work. We learned how the Brooklyn Dodgers got their
name; there were so many trolleys in Brooklyn that people there were called
the 'dodgers' for always having to dodge trolleys, and the name stuck. The other amazing fact is that Manhattan is
the top of a mountain and that is very evident as you round the north end of
the island and see the tree covered cliffs of solid stone. Much of Manhattan is or has been owned by the
Rockefeller family at some time. Much
of the area that was owned by them has been developed, but there are huge areas
that are owned by them with the specific purpose of maintaining the trees and
keeping development from happening; Central Park is one example that was donated
to the city, 840 acres of trees and trails.
The next day we had a late breakfast with Jim and Lorraine and headed to Central Park. It is an amazing place when you realize that you are right across the street from 5th avenue and the famous stores like FAO Swartz toy store and hotels that cost $750 a night. It is certainly an island of relief for the people of NYC. The very first sight we saw upon entering Central Park was a man calmly changing clothes. No, we did not get a picture!! While there we took a carriage ride with a wonderful guide from Ireland, a very pleasant tour of the park. Of the 68 carriages around the park, only one guide is a natural American, the rest are from Ireland. To finish the afternoon we walked about 20 blocks back up 5th avenue widow shopping and visiting churches. St. Patrick's Cathedral is beautiful, it is probably 80 yards from the front door to the altar and about 100 feet to the top of the stained glass windows. We ate dinner with Lorraine and then went to the hotel and crashed. The next morning we took the subway back to Penn station and then took the Amtrak back to the area of our RV park. A wonderful weekend with just a glimpse of NYC, a fascinating place with many wonderful people. Unlike what I expected, everyone we met was friendly and went out of their way to make us feel welcome.