little tara

And so, after a fairly lengthy hiatus, I’m back again! The last couple of weeks in New York have been a rip-rolling ride and I figured that I was better off being out and about and living the stories rather than being stuck inside writing about them! My mornings have been early, and my nights have been late, but now I finally find a window of opportunity to sit and catch up!

Where were we? Ah yes.

Tuesday May 1st – Another early rise on the Yankee ferry, but this time there is no sunlight coming through the windows. During the night I heard the rain thrashing down, and when I woke up the sky was metallic grey. The Manhattan skyline was misty, and the tops of some of the skyscrapers were shrouded in cloud. Eurgh. Still, I have to keep reminding myself that New York is the kind of city that can be explored in rain or shine…!

The living room aboard the Yankee Ferry,
Hoboken, New Jersey, May 2012

We met up with Victoria at 9/9:30ish, as she had kindly offered to make brekkie for us. The three of us went into the galley (kitchen) of the ferry and Victoria made poached eggs (from the boat’s chickens!) with some home-made bread. Yum! We sat and chatted for a fair while before we realised that the day was racing away from us; Victoria gave us some great suggestions for pizza places etc before we ran to the Turning Point Cafe to check emails and addresses, and then returned to the boat to collect our things and say goodbye to everyone… including Pinky and Mr Brown, the little dogs, who seemed rather unperturbed by our departure! I have the feeling that I’ll be seeing Victoria again, somewhere, so saying goodbye wasn’t that difficult! 🙂

We had found that the quickest way to get to our hotel in Manhattan was to get the ferry and then use their free shuttle bus, so that’s exactly what we did. In the end, the shuttle dropped us off right outside our hotel door – not a bad deal at all! Our home for the next two days was to be the Chelsea Savoy Hotel, on 23rd Street in Chelsea. I’d stayed there before in 2006/2007 and found the place to be minimalist but clean, friendly enough, and the location was priceless. On 23rd between 7th and 8th Avenues, it’s smack-bang in the middle of the action in Chelsea, surrounded by great cafes and restaurants, and if you look down 7th Avenue from the hotel entrance at night, you can actually see the lights of Times Square! So it was a bit of a no-brainer when I was looking for somewhere for me and Charlie to stay on Manhattan. I was a little bit concerned because the recent reviews on Trip Advisor have been less than glowing, but I can honestly say that I had no issues with the place this time at all. Something tells me that some people go to a 2-star hotel expecting 5-star service… it just doesn’t work that way! Our room was clean, there were no bedbugs, the staff processed my booking right away and offered help when it was needed. Yeah, our room was a wee bit noisy, but for Chrissake it’s New York! And you’re in a busy area! Suck it up, people!

Anyway, we checked in with no problems (even though we were fairly early, they still let us straight in), and went to our second-floor room. It directly overlooked the crossroads of Seventh Avenue and 23rd Street, so we had a birds-eye view of all the goings-on at the Chelsea Papaya hot dog stand…! We dumped our bags and headed out again almost immediately. We went west, aiming for the High Line.

The High Line park is a piece of true civic awesomeness. Once a busy elevated train line ferrying goods in and out of the meat-packing district, it fell into disrepair when other modes of transport turned out to be cheaper, and when the area became less industrial. The last train ran on it in 1980, and from that time the weeds took control and it was abandoned. In the late 90s/early 2000s, a group of neighbourhood enthusiasts petitioned against its demolition and somehow managed to convince the city of New York to turn it into an elevated garden. It is now one of the highlights of NYC, attracting visitors from all over, with a thriving community calendar and a highly enthusiastic staff. It runs parallel to 10th Avenue and runs between (and through!) apartment blocks, businesses and The Chelsea Market. The original train tracks are still there as a reminder of it origins, but winding walkways and carefully-thought-out gardens, shrubberies, water features, art works and even birdhouses have turned the whole place from an eyesore into a joy. I hadn’t been to the High Line before (it opened to the public in 2009, which was after my last visit), but I’d followed the whole process with great interest; Chelsea is one of my favourite neighbourhoods in New York and I wanted to see what they’d do with this opportunity. I just love the fact that the structure was given to the community, and that the community have welcomed it with such gusto; it gives me hope for the human race!

We entered the High Line from the 23rd Street access stairs and started our little walk downtown. The day was still fairly grey, so there weren’t a lot of people out in the park, but you could still see how amazing the whole concept was. At various intervals there were wooden seating areas with large communal benches, and behind the Chelsea Market there was a deck area, where on warmer days they have cafe-style food and food stands. At one point the pathway opened into a large, staggered… well, I suppose you could call it an amphitheatre, except not quite as grand or curved, suspended over 10th Avenue. The focal point of this amphitheatre was a large sunken window that gave an uninterrupted view down 10th Avenue, a peaceful interlude overlooking all the traffic and activity. Providing spaces like this in a big city like New York… genius. Central Park is really being given a run for its money!

From the High Line, we got a subway downtown to one of the places that was high on Charlie’s list, and indeed mine: the 9/11 Memorial, former site of the World Trade Centre, formerly known as Ground Zero. Excuse the following digressions into past New York memories; I think they set the tone for how I was feeling when we made our visit.

Everybody has their story to tell about September 11th, 2001. Mine was fairly simple; I was at home in my room in Queensland, Australia, studying. I got a call from my mother, who told me to go to the TV immediately. I went into the living room in my sharehouse to find some of my housemates gathered on the sofa. The first plane had just hit the North Tower (8:46am, New York time). We watched in horror as the second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03am; confusion was high, but with the second hit there was no doubt that it was an attack and not an accident, as some at first assumed. I’m not sure at what point they announced it, but somewhere along the line we discovered that one of the flights was a United Airlines flight bound from Boston to LA. My housemate, Jeff, was from Boston, and his mother was supposed to be on a United flight from Boston to LA that day. One of my lasting images of the evening was Jeff, in his shorts and wrestling shirt, on the carpet on his knees, phone in one hand, desperately trying to call his family, staring at the television and hoping, praying that the flight that hit the tower was not the same as his mother’s. We watched the Pentagon get hit. Then we watched in total disbelief as the first and then the second tower collapsed. How on earth was this possible, and what the hell was going on? Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. People kept turning up at our house, despite the late hour. By the end, we had a small crowd in the living room; friends who lived nearby, and their friends. I think we all wanted to be together, to reassure each other, to witness with each other. Eventually, in the wee hours of the morning, Jeff finally got news that his mother was safe (her flight had been scheduled for later in the day), and nothing new was coming from the news networks, so we dragged ourselves to bed, bewildered.

The next morning, the university was full of people; everybody had come in, whether they had classes or not. We all wanted to exchange news, consolidate, and console. I’m not sure exactly when Al Qaeda took responsibility, but I do remember that very early on, the Islamic Students Group at the university became very proactive in offering their support and separating themselves from this awful terrorist act. They were smart; they saw the storm that was coming in the shape of anti-Muslim sentiment. It was an early reminder that ‘Muslim’ is not the same as ‘Terrorist’, a thing which far too many rednecks seem to forget.

Anyway, I’ve seen the World Trade Centre site in a couple of different stages of its development since September 11, and I wanted to see what had finally been done with it. The first time I saw it was in May/June 2002, not long after the attacks and when the recovery operation was still in full swing. I hadn’t actually intended to visit the site; I had deliberately avoided it, in fact, because I didn’t really want to be part of the ‘war tourism’ movement. However, I was trying to find my way to the nearby Fulton Street Pier, and with all the chaos from the destroyed subway lines, I somehow popped up out of the ground right outside the site, next to St Paul’s church. The first thing I noticed was the church fence; it was absolutely covered with t-shirts, stuffed toys, messages, tiles, notes, candles, flowers, dolls, religious icons, cards, posters and offerings of all kinds. I went to take a closer look and it was only then that I noticed that I was right next to a giant hole in the ground, and that people were standing around, lighting candles and offering prayers. How could I have missed it? I spoke to the gentleman in charge of the viewing platform, and even though I didn’t have a ticket (available free nearby for timed intervals) he admitted me onto it, because it wasn’t very busy at the time. I was surprised by how moved I was. The people on the platform with me were holding each other and crying, and it was only then that the enormity of the thing struck me – this giant pit in the ground, about 16 acres in size or more, used to have giant skyscrapers in it, and nearly 3,000 people died in this place. A list of the dead and missing, peppered with photographs left by family members, was posted nearby as you exited the platform; of course, sadly, the ‘missing’ were added to the list of the dead. Dust still seemed to envelop the downtown area; the cleanup operation was on a massive scale and would continue for years. I left the site with a renewed appreciation this event had on the soul of New York. It would never be the same.

On the same trip I passed through Grand Central Station and came across a message board just off the main concourse, again lined with flowers and lit candles. On the board were posters of the missing and the lost. My heart broke at numerous posters which read along the lines of, “Missing: John Smith. Last seen 8:15 am, Sep 11 on the XXXth floor of the North Tower WTC. If you see him, please call XXX-XXX-XXXX.” All I could think was that these people were not coming home; it was 8 or 9 months since the event and they were simply not coming home. But hope springs eternal; I saw one poster for a missing man with a note scribbled on it: FOUND. Apparently in the aftermath, he had gotten lost and, without his diabetes medication, had somehow slipped into a coma. He had run from his office without his ID, and was admitted to hospital with no identity, only to be found some time later. Miracles do happen. Sadly, not enough on that day.

The feeling I got from New York on that trip was one of sadness; deep, deep sadness and loss. But I also felt a kind of hope, and of community – people were banding together, and trying to get through it together. It was elsewhere in the country that the hatred seemed to be brewing, an unadulterated hatred for Islam in general and the outside world. And I seem to remember thinking, “Surely it’s the New Yorkers who have the most right to that kind of thinking, and yet they are trying to turn this into something more cathartic.” It was a bit of an eye-opener for me.

A few years later I visited the site again, this time with my mother – I think it was in 2007. By this time, the recovery effort was finished and Ground Zero was basically a building site surrounded by mobile construction trailers and chainwire fence. You couldn’t actually see in to the site, but there was a display showing a timeline next to the subway station. Unfortunately, sites like this often draw the nutters – the shouters, the touts, the religious zealots waving their religious tome of choice and telling us that we would all go to hell if we didn’t do whatever it was they were doing. A site that should have been a place for quiet reflection was more like an ugly carnival; a man playing Amazing Grace on his flute was drowned out by a large woman screaming at the top of her lungs about how 9/11 was punishment from God for all the bad Christians out there, and a bunch of guys selling 9/11 t-shirts – complete with images of the burning towers on them – were shouting out their wares. The final straw for me was an Indian family I spotted next to the fence. The four of them lined up against the fence, put their arms around each other, and gave big, beaming smiles for the camera. And I thought, “Are you freaking kidding me? You’re going to go home and show your friends a picture of you SMILING next to the fence at Ground Zero?!?” They were not terrorists; they were not America-haters; they were just bloody ignorant. I think it’s difficult for some people to differentiate between a tourist site and a memorial, you know? I see it all the time, and from people of all nationalities, including Americans, Australians, you name it. You go to New York, you see the Empire State Building, and you smile for the camera. You go to the Rockefeller Centre, and you smile for the camera. You go to the World Trade Centre, and you smile for the camera. Except you don’t. You shouldn’t. Sigh.

Well anyway, it was with these previous experiences in mind that I went to the memorial. I had been terrified that it would have been turned into some over-nationalistic display of “WOOOH! YEAH! AMERICA! SCREW YOU GUYS, LOOK WHAT WE CAN DO!” Some of the original plans for the site had been to build two more towers, only taller, in a gesture of defiance. I’m happy to say that whoever made the final decisions had their head screwed on right. The combination of the memorial pools and the new skyscraper (now the tallest building in New York, and still on its way up) is one of taste and respect; respect for the victims, respect for the visitors, and respect for America at large, but without a whole bunch of over-wrought Americana. Thank goodness. (Although I wonder if the multi-billion dollar price tag might not have been better spent elsewhere, say, helping poor families or pulling America out of its debt crisis…) It is easy to become cynical about the events of 2001, especially in the wake of George W. Bush’s hate-fuelled foreign policy rhetoric and the messy, unwelcome and unsuccessful wars that followed, but I mustn’t forget that nearly 3,000 people died that day. People who were just following their daily routines, drinking a coffee or whatever, and then the world crumbled down around their ears. Terrible.

A memorial pool at the World Trade Centre Memorial, set in the ‘footprints’ of one of the towers,
New York, May 2012

Hmmmm. I promised myself I wouldn’t wax lyrical about this, but here I am. Stop it, Tara! Moving on… our visit to the memorial. Until the whole site is completely finished, numbers are limited, so in order to get in one must book one’s free tickets online OR go the the Preview store on Vesey Street, next to St Paul’s church. We did the latter, and were lucky enough to get tickets for the next entry, only half an hour away. I grabbed fries at a Burger King, and Charlie grabbed a Cinnabon (his first!) to tide us over as we hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and then ran for the site. We went through a fairly simple security screening, and then… there we were. The footprints of the two original towers (about 8 acres in total, if I remember correctly) have been turned into giant, square pools, descending into smaller and smaller squares; each side is a waterfall, pouring into the middle and eventually disappearing into the void at the bottom. The squares are lined with bronze panels, each with the names of the victims punched into the metal. The names are grouped according to whether they were first responders, on a certain plane, or in a certain building; allowances were made where family members asked for names to be put next to each other. So many names. The waterfalls are surrounded by a swathe of trees, including the ‘Survivor Tree’, which was just a stump when discovered in the ruins at Ground Zero, but was taken to a nursery, cared for and nursed back to health. It was then knocked over by a storm, but true to spirit it survived – it now holds a place of honour in the mini-forest on the site.

One World Trade Centre, still under construction but already Manhattan’s tallest building,
New York, May 2012

By this time, the sun had come out and it was actually warm. Charlie and I wandered around, fairly subdued, and watched the crowds react in different ways. People taking a moment of silence, families walking around looking for a particular name, and kids oblivious to that running around and playing. I don’t begrudge them that; their parents will fill them in when they’re old enough to understand. I tried to ignore a woman and her husband (by their accent, from California or somewhere West) posing and smiling by one of the tower footprints, and we just sat for a bit. Hard to imagine the horror in that tranquility, really; that’s probably a good thing. Happily, the ticket system seems to have kept the nutters out, and a large security presence also helps people remember how to be respectful… mostly!

We left the site with our tummies rumbling, so we jumped on a subway headed for Harlem and for Amy Ruth’s soul food restaurant. Ah, Amy Ruth’s. Yumyumyumyumyummmmm. Previous visits have brought a spectacular feast of good, old-fashioned comfort food, and this visit was no different. I was so preoccupied with my meal that I can’t even remember what Charlie had; I can tell you, though, that my fried chicken with crispy waffles and maple syrup, with a side order of buttered corn, was criminally delicious. The music playing there was great, too – a bunch of Motown classics with a heavy dose of Sam Cooke, one of my favourites.

After eating, we decided to take a little walk through Harlem. We only walked from 116th street to 125th, but already I could see changes since the last time I was there. 125th Street had already been ‘revitalised’ when I last visited, but one thing I spotted that surprised me was yellow cabs. In 2005 or 2006 I went to Amy Ruth’s for dinner with some friends; we were planning to head to the Apollo Theatre afterwards and wanted to catch a cab. I asked the restaurant manager where we could find one and he looked at me with something that seemed like pity for my misunderstanding. “Honey,” he said, “We don’t get no yellow cabs up here. This is Harlem.” He was so matter-of-fact about it. I was very surprised. He went out and found us a ‘gypsy cab’; he negotiated the price for us and told the driver to look after us… or else. So seeing yellow cabs on the streets of Harlem told me that maybe things continue to look up for the area. I’m sure that, like any neighbourhood, it still faces its share of problems, but it’s very hard for me to marry my mental image of 1980s Harlem (crime-ridden, scary, dangerous, mostly negative) with the Harlem that I see today, which seems quite the opposite.

125th Street, as always, was a hive of activity; 2 guys had a boom box and were dancing to jazz on the street, and there were stands and stalls stretched along the pavements. Charlie and I were exhausted, and decided to head downtown. On the subway I spotted a man in black trousers, a black leather jacket, and with a peacock feather stuck on his lapel. Natty dresser – I loved it! We got off the subway at Times Square – I think that after the initial shock had worn off, Charlie really liked it there! We sought out a few of the unmissable ‘I HEART NEW YORK’ t-shirts for Charlie and then decided to walk home in the hope of getting our dinner to settle. Just next to Madison Square Gardens we discovered a multi-storey comic book store (Midtown Comics), so of course a visit had to be paid! I was surprised to find that there is a series of novels based on the TV series Supernatural… how did I not know this?!? I resisted temptation but may have to give in at a later date. I just hope they’re not rubbish. The gospel of Sam and Dean, eh? Ha ha ha.

We walked through the Fashion District and passed a bunch of little bakeries before reaching 23rd Street. I finally took Charlie to see one of my favourite places in New York, and one of the reasons I love Chelsea. Just a few doors down from the hotel is a small market store called The Garden of Eden Gourmet. Inside, it is a beautifully-lit wonderland of delicious food and tantalising treats; each apple is wrapped before it’s stacked (terribly wasteful but very attractive), each tomato looks hand-picked. Their chocolate selection is drool-tastic; their salad bar is divine. Charlie’s first response: “Why the hell did you wait so long to bring me here?!?” And that’s why he and I will always be friends; a shared interest in the good stuff!!! 🙂 The man behind the cake counter asked us if we needed any assistance. “No thanks, we’re just drooling.” He replied, “Ha! I do that too!”

We went back to the hotel and spent the rest of the evening just relaxing; after more than a week of running around and having to be friendly in hostels (and to the crowd at the guest house in Philadelphia), it was nice to just be able to hang out together somewhere quiet with no disturbances. We read, we wrote, and we went to sleep. Charlie’s last night, boo!

Just a thought to round off the day: I keep seeing advertisements on the roof of cabs for ‘Flashdancer’s Gentlemen’s Club’ or ‘Sparkles Gentlemen’s Club’, etc. Why are they called Gentlemen’s Clubs when the kind of people who go there are generally the antithesis of a gentleman? The mind boggles.

Thanks for stopping by,

Tara.

Tags: 9/11 memorial, amy ruth's, food, new york, new york city, soul food, travel