The main thing I have decided in the past few days is that I should pay more attention to Time Between Beds when booking flights - in other words, leaving in the evening, having a 23 hour 2 leg journey and arriving in the early morning means an approximately 48 hour Time Between Beds (TBB), which leaves something to be desired.
But I made it! Through not one but two ‘random' explosives checks at Sydney airport, a few hours' stop at Honolulu where I took photos of myself in front of pictures of palm trees (as well as a few real palm trees) and successfully muddled my way through transitting (you have to leave the airport completely and then go back in... I think... or at least that's how I did it?). We landed at JFK in early morning haze, which meant you couldn’t see any of the Manhattan skyline, but it cleared later in the day.
After a ride on the air train and then the subway, I got to the YHA near Harlem and dropped my bags off before finding a coffee shop near the north end of Central Park to finish off my conference presentation before the jet lag really caught up. I'd planned to get a new mouse and some walking shoes the first day, but when I wandered down Fifth Avenue my targeted shops didn't have what I was looking for. Instead I looked through the MoMA store (many things I wanted but did not need) and found the New York Public Library, which is pretty impressive with its marble staircases and soaring columns and fresco'd ceilings. They had an exhibition about Stonewall in two long corridors, and histories of the library above the main entrance hall.
I spent the rest of that first evening at the hostel attempting to stay awake, though made friends with a roommate who planned to go to the Statue of Liberty the next day. I tagged along, successfully navigating past the 'express ferry for $35’ ticket sellers to the proper $18.50 ticket office, where you actually stop on the island.
It was a beautiful day (though breezy and cool, especially considering I'd dressed for the 31 degree day the day before), and we got great views of the Manhattan skyline as we crossed to Liberty Island. I got an audio guide to tour around the island with, but I think it was set to the kids' tour (or I was pressing the wrong buttons), which was a little like walking around accompanied by overly-cheery early Saturday morning television. We checked out the museum and saw how they modelled the copper surface (which is only the thickness of a coin), enlarging it from the original model with a rig involving plumb lines, and the original flame set with stained glass, which was replaced in the eighties by the current solid flame due to wear and tear.
After the ferry back to Manhattan, we walked to the 9/11 memorial, passing the bull of Wall Street (which doesn’t actually appear to be on Wall Street?) and a man with a latex Trump mask reclining in front of some rubbish bins, panhandling with a can that said 'Wall Fund’.
I visited the 9/11 memorial briefly when I was in New York for the first time two years ago, and it's the kind of place that sends shivers up your spine. Later in the week I was lucky to hear one of the architects for the 9/11 memorial speak about his original vision for the memorial, which he'd seen as two voids cut into the Hudson, water pouring in but never ever filling. The names around the edges are grouped by building, flight or service, and they asked families if they had any requests for who they wanted their loved ones' names beside. They received 1200 requests, and were able to fulfil every one.
The museum is far below the plaza, with the main exhibitions in the same spaces as the towers' basements once were. You can still see the foundational box columns preserved, and the slurry wall that keeps out the water from the Hudson (they were worried it would cave in, but it held). The North Tower exhibition takes you through the events of the day as they happened minute by minute, and the South memorialises those who died. My hostel friend and I got separated (it's a very large museum, and there were a lot of people) so we met back at the hostel later in the evening and got dinner.
Day three (Wednesday) and it was time to check out of the hostel (a beautifully-restored old building by the way) and head down to Brooklyn and my conference. I was staying in student housing two minutes walk from the venue, which was great, and my 'shared' room had no one else in it, which was even better. I presented early on, and then was free to enjoy the rest of the time, including the banquet on a yacht around the Hudson, under the Brooklyn Bridge and around the Statue of Liberty. It was a little difficult to sit down long enough to eat, given the views that kept passing by, and there was a lot of ducking in and out to take photos or just drink in the sights from the roof deck.
When we returned to the dock, someone suggested we go and find Jane Jacob's house, so a group of us went on a late night mission to find it. It's on quite a busy main street, which surprised me, and currently has a real estate shop front on the ground floor. We took some selfies, as you do, while passersby gave us strange looks, then wandered through Greenwich Village. It's an experience at night, with very upmarket shops lit up in beautiful old shop fronts, some with quite 'out there' design like the one with the mannequin covered in green shrubbery from the waist up. We got gelato and sat in a triangular square eating it and discussing gentrification and square design, which was quite satisfying.
On the last day of the conference I spent a few hours walking through the relatively-new Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is very green, has winding paths, wetland areas and little meadows and hills and amazing views of the Hudson and Manhattan, as well as the Statue of Liberty. They've used the old piers as more meadow/garden area, or basketball/bocce/volleyball courts or soccer fields, and on this Saturday the whole place was filled with people, walking (often with their dogs) and cycling (sometimes with their dogs) and lying on the grass just enjoying the spring weather. Later I met my hostel friend at Times Square to see the lights in the evening, along with possibly half the tourist population of New York. I'm not sure how Times Square worked before it was closed off to traffic...
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