Author: elainehayesblog

We thought we would start with an easy day, especially as Joanna had a long journey yesterday.

There are lots of different tourist ticket schemes here, and we have New York Explorer Passes loaded with several chosen activities and first up, we stopped here at the Rockefeller Centre to exchange our voucher for a timed ticket to visit the Top of the Rock later in our stay.

We continued down 7th Avenue, passed all the huge billboards and hoardings to Times Square, which was pretty quiet this early.

It was also really a bit early to be tucking into New York Cheesecake, but we passed Juniors, one of the city’s oldest bakeries and picked up a couple of treats.

We continued to the shore of the Hudson River, to find the Circle Line boat which will take us for a cruise and give us our first taste of Manhattan from the water, and munched cheesecake while we waited for it to leave.

Chris went for brownie explosion and Joanna and I picked strawberry and blueberry. We were pleased we tried it, but the portions were very large, it was very sweet and quite solid and we probably won’t have any more! In fact it was so filling, we skipped lunch!

It was a shame the day was a bit grey as the photos have all turned out a little moody but the trip was great, helping us to get our bearings. As we set off down the Hudson River to to the tip of Manhattan, the Empire State Building was instantly recognisable and seemed to be in every shot.

Turning the other way we saw another Circle Cruise boat …

… and also Ellis Island which was the busiest US immigrant port and processed over 12 million immigrants from 1892 to 1954.

Next up, The Statue of Liberty came into view, standing with her torch in the air and has welcoming visitors to New York since 1886. She was created in Paris by a French sculptor called Bartholdi and is made of sheets of copper which were taken apart for shipping then reassembled over a framework made by Gustavo Eiffel.

And yes … we were all there!

Returning, we got a good view of Manhattan dominated by The One World Trade Centre which was built as a memorial to the Twin Towers and at 541 metres, the “Freedom Tower” is the tallest building in the Western hemisphere.

The bright orange Staten Island ferry setting out certainly brightened the photo!

We turned up East River to a parade of bridges. Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States, and connects the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Next up is Manhattan Bridge …

… and the Williamsburg Bridge.

A shot of the Empire State incongruously caught between chimneys and then finally one with my favourite, The Chrysler Building which is another Art Deco landmark and held the record as tallest building for nearly a year before the Empire State Building was completed.

We turned and concentrated on the other bank as we passed DUMBO, which stands for ‘Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass’ with cobblestone streets and converted warehouses and we will be returning here on foot a day or so.

A pair of bridges – Manhattan and Brooklyn …

A final photo of the tip of Manhattan with Battery Park in the foreground and the Empire State peeking through behind.

Once back on dry land, we made our way to the Highline, an elevated urban greenway made from a disused freight railway which extends 1.45 miles above the district of Chelsea. An increase in trucking made it obsolete by 1980 but rather than being demolished, in 2009 it was reopened as a public space.

The first part circled Penn Station with the huge new Hudson Yards development above with a red structure in front. This is Vessel, created by Thomas Heatherwick, as a new kind of public landmark: engaging and interactive, meant to be climbed and explored. Comprised of 154 intricately interconnecting flights of stairs with 2,500 individual steps and 80 landings – ‘Vessel will lift the public up, offering a multitude of ways to engage with and experience New York, Hudson Yards’.

We admired the views and the art installations as we wandered along.

We stopped at Chelsea Market, housed in the old National Biscuit Company (aka Nabisco) factory and the legendary home of the Oreo cookie … today home to a huge collection of speciality shops and restaurants where you could probably buy any food your heart desired! We had a quick look round, but still weighed down by cheesecake, we didn’t linger.

With almost 8 miles walked, we headed back to the B&B for a rest and later found another local restaurant called The Edge for dinner. It was billed as cozy and rustic with a menu reflecting their British and Jamaican heritage, spiced up with a healthy dose of New York. It was exactly that with Joanna enjoying mussels, Chris a vegetarian pie and me delicious spicy lamb shank.

Our first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline was from the plane as we landed at Newark airport. The most memorable part of the journey was the two and a quarter hours we waited in line for passport control! After that we took a bus and the subway and arrived at our apartment just minutes before Joanna who had made her way from La Guardia – a journey of 26 hours from Sydney … all so exciting!

We are staying at the San Fermin Apartments in Harlem, just north of Central Park and we were welcomed by Bernardo who showed us up 3 floors to our lovely two bedroom apartment complete with a kitchenette for breakfast.

Later we headed to the nearest place to eat, a tapas bar called Peque where it was warm enough to sit outside as we caught up over sangria and beer and a selection of little nibbles which hit the spot perfectly then picked up a few groceries on the way back before an early night.

There is always a history spot, so here is a little bedtime reading if you are interested.

Giovanni da Verrazano was the first European to discover New York Harbor in 1524, but it wasn’t until Henry Hudson, sailed up the Hudson River in 1609 exploring on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, that the The Dutch started the first permanent trading post in 1624. They bought the island of Manhattan from the Native Americans for goods worth 60 guilders, often said to be worth US$24 and the name Manhattan comes from Manna Hata meaning Island of the Hills. The Dutch built a town called New Amsterdam which flourished and in 1664 the English renamed it New York after the Duke of York.

Around a century of British rule was brought to an end by the War of Independence and the inauguration of George Washington as America’s first president took place in 1789. Business and trade increased in New York and immigrants followed, first Irish and German, then Italian, Chinese and East European. The city sided with the Union of the north against the Confederates of the south in the Civil War which ended in 1865 and afterwards, New York became the wealthiest and most influential city in the country, expanding to include Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens and The Bronx as well as Manhattan.

The turn of the century saw expansion, the population reached 3 million and the first cast iron buildings heralded in a skyline of skyscrapers and the Jazz Age. Many changes followed with The Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, WWII and postwar years of social and economic challenges followed by reduction in crime and urban regeneration. In 2001 the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center killed almost 3000 people, but in the wake of the disaster, the city remained a major financial and cultural capital with over 40 million tourists visiting the city each year.

New York, New York, so good they named it twice, yet this will be our first visit and high time we saw all those skyscrapers for ourselves. What’s more, we are thrilled that Joanna is travelling from Sydney to spend the week with us.

There is so much to do – sights to see, buildings to climb, boats to ride, art and architecture to admire and neighbourhoods to visit.

In a city of five boroughs, we plan to see plenty of Manhattan and pay fleeting visits to Brooklyn and Staten Island. Joanna will pass through Queens from La Guardia but The Bronx will miss out completely – a week is just not long enough to see everything!

And we must leave time for taking photographs and culinary sampling … bagels … New York Cheesecake … pastrami on rye … New York Pizza …!

With luck the weather in September will be just right for plenty of walking and we will be arriving with our comfy new shoes on the 19th September so watch this space …

Journal Entries

Arriving in Manhattan

Harbour Cruise & The Highline

Central Park & The Met

Lower East Side & SoHo

Greenwich Village & The Whitney

Financial District & Brooklyn

Midtown & MoMA

Map