NEW YORK CITY: WORLD TRADE CENTER NEIGHBORHOOD

  May 11, 2023

We made a quick trip to New York City to visit our son Andrew and his girlfriend Michaela on Mother's Day weekend. We took the red-eye Jet Blue flight out of Ontario, and arrived in NYC early in the morning on Thursday. We had booked a room in the World Center Hotel, which is just a block or so from the 9-11 Memorial at One World Trade Center. There are a lot of different subway lines that connect in the neighborhood, and it is also a 15-20 minute walk from there to our Andrew and Michaela's apartment near Chinatown, so it was a good location for us.

I was hoping we would have a view of One World Trade Center from our hotel window since we were so close, but we were facing the wrong way. Still it was an interesting view of some other skyscrapers, and I loved the tile work on the apartment building next to us.

Judging by the fancy outdoor spaces, it costs a lot to live in the apartment building with the fancy tile work.

We were lucky to be there on a weekend with perfect weather and no pollution. The soaring obelisk of One World Trade Center almost seemed to blend into the sky. 

I recently heard someone from my area of the country say that they don't like New York City because the buildings are so tall that you can't even see the sky and its depressing. Honestly, I don't know what they are talking about. Yes, there are big buildings, but there are also a ton of open spaces. I love that about NYC!

We walked around the pool that memorializes the victims of 9-11. Almost 22 years later, it is still a heartbreaking experience.

There is a significant police presence around the memorial. These two men are just security guys, but there were several NYPD cars parked around the perimeter with some of NYC's finest inside. I didn't dare take pictures of them.

There's plenty of tourism  happening.

We were walking to a subway station and almost stopped for a snack at one of the many food carts lining the street, but we decided to hold off. I did stop to say hello this businessman. He dates back to 1982 and was originally somewhere near the Twin Towers. He is sometimes called "the survivor" because he was lifted from the dust and rubble of the 9-11 tragedy, scratched and bruised but intact. 

A New Yorker doing what a New Yorker does.

We passed St. Paul's Chapel, the oldest public building in continuous use and the only remaining Colonial-era church in Manhattan. It is hard to see behind all the trees, but it is there. This is actually a side view seen through the graveyard.

St. Paul's Chapel was opened in 1766 by the Episcopal Parish of Trinity Church and is where George Washington came to pray after his inauguration as the first President of the United States. The main church of the diocese and the more famous of the two, Trinity Church, is located just .3 miles away.  

This chapel survived both a fire that burned down the mother church, Trinity Church, in 1776, as well as the collapse of the nearby Twin Towers. It not only survived, but because a place of refuge for recovery workers.

You can see how close it is to One World Center.

On one of our trips to or from a subway station, we took a peak inside. We entered just as a young man was sitting down to play the organ. I asked one of the young docents who he was, and she didn't know, but said he comes every Thursday to practice.

His music was beautiful, but it was also fun to watch him. He doesn't pay that much attention to his hands but looks around quite a bit. I could have sat there for an hour, but I only made Bob stay about 15 minutes.

 

A few days later we did make it to Trinity Church, located on 89 Broadway opposite Wall Street (and yes, you can still see the sky here too). Constructed in 1839-1856, this is the third church that has stood on this site. At 279 feet tall, it was the tallest building in the United States until 1869 (when St. Michael's Church in Chicago beat it by 11 feet) and the tallest in NYC until 1890 (when the New York World Building eclipsed it by 69 feet). Today, of course, One World Center is the tallest building in NYC, standing a symbolic 1776 feet tall.

I was so disappointed that it was not open for visitors when we walked by. At least we had a somewhat decent look at this brand new stained-glass window, designed to be best seen from the outside rather than the inside and illustrating the Parable of the Talents.

Two other things caught my attention at the Trinity Church: The "Compassion Meals" (what a wonderful moniker) and the grave of Alexander Hamilton. (Tell me you didn't start to rap as soon as you read that name.)

Moving on. It is always easy to tell when it is trash day in New York City, isn't it? We are spoiled by our plastic cans that are picked up by mechanical arms on our garbage trucks. 

It's amazing to me that NYC is as clean as it is.

Our hotel was right across the street from Liberty Park, a one-acre elevated park built on top of the Vehicular Security Center, which is a complex for truck delivery and underground parking for the World Trade Center. Because it is significantly above street level, the park, which opened in 2016, provides possibly the best viewpoint of One World Trade Center and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. It's MY favorite photo of the building, but then that might be because that is my husband in the foreground, looking up up up at the top of the building.

We don't have dogwoods in California, so I had no idea was this beautiful tree was. I had to send a photo to my arborist son and have him identify it for me. 

Not quite as showy, this tree is nevertheless much more important than the show-off dogwood. This tree was grown from a sapling from the original white horse chestnut tree that grew outside the Secret Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid from 1942-1944 during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Anne Frank mentions the tree in her diary and the hope that it gives her. The sapling was planted here in 2016 and dedicated on June 12, 2017, Anne Frank's birthday. 

Liberty Park is also home to the Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed in the September 11 attacks. It was the only building outside the original World Trade Center complex to be completely destroyed. The new building was just consecrated last year on July 4, 2022. Besides housing the Greek Orthodox parish, it is a "House of Prayer for all people" that will serve as a community center and shrine. Unfortunately, it too was closed when we visited Liberty Park.

Liberty Park is full of objects that encourage contemplation and reflection. Another such object is The Sphere, a 25-foot cast bronze sculpture by German artist Fritz Koenig that stood between the Twin Towers. It was recovered from the rubble of the September 11 attacks, still intact by dented and scraped up.  It has become a symbol of hope and resilience, and when Liberty Park was completed, it was moved here from its temporary home at Battery Park.

One more monument in Liberty Park is this life-and-a-half scale bronze statue of a man on a horse. I thought it might have something to do with the Pony Express or perhaps the settling of the West, but I was not even close. America's Response Moment commemorates the actions of U.S. Special Operations Forces (Green Berets) who rode horseback into combat in October 2001 during the first few weeks of the War in Afghanistan. It was the first time in over 50 years that American troops rode horses in a battle. A piece of steel from the original World Trade Center makes up part of the base.