A Day in New York

While the days have been jam packed and stressful, we have still found time to get out and see the city.  We started the day by walking over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.  The bridge was scattered with graffiti and several key and combination locks that were hooked on whatever part of the bridge was possible.  After walking across the bridge we continued to the St. Paul’s Chapel which has stood in Manhattan since 1766.  St. Paul’s church backs up to Church Street, the east side of the former World Trade Center.  The Chapel served as a place of rest, refuge, and recovery after the 9/11 tragedy.  Condolences sent from around the world were hung on the fences surrounding St. Paul’s.

The three of us on the Brooklyn Bridge

Inside St. Paul's Chapel

After getting our tickets to see the new World Trade Center memorial which opened in 2010, we traveled to Central Park to get lunch and walk around.  After some classic New York style pizza from Patsy’s, we headed to the hotel where John Lennon was brutally shot by a man who had read J.D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye.  We walked through the strawberry fields in Central Park and into a main plaza where a man was making huge bubbles and even putting kids inside.  We sat and watched for a short time (partly to catch our breath because we had been going non-stop all day).  The park was beautiful, and we wish we had more time to actually spend there.

Giant Bubbles!

We took the subway back to the 9/11 memorial, and it was breathtaking, to say the least.  Two magnificent fountains which cratered into the earth were inscribed with the names of all the victims from September 11, 2001.  Perhaps most touching and symbolic, was the survivor tree.  After the wreckage and during the cleanup in the immediate aftermath, a worker transported a tree which had been reduced to an 8-foot stump to Central Park to be planted.  It stood there until 2010 where another storm in NYC had uprooted it.  But as before, the tree survived and persevered.  It was then transported back to the new memorial where it serves as a centerpiece between the two identical fountains.  Today it thrives and has grown many feet taller.  Despite an eventful day, we headed to the subway towards the next leg of our New York journey – the New York Yankees.

Survivor Tree

The fountain