Pictures 23: Federal Hall National Memorial

Call me daft, but a lot of Revolutionary history is just too distant for me to truly grasp. I have known people who get just as jazzed about Revolutionary history as I would about something that happened yesterday, but I just can't do it. I think part of that may be because much Revolutionary history happened in the Northeast, and so much of the Northeast has changed irrevocably since that time, so it's hard to get a sense of what the landscape was really like back then.

That being said, Federal Hall National Memorial was still cool. It's down in the Financial District, just a stone's throw from the New York Stock Exchange, and is the site of George Washington's oath of office. It also originally housed the first Congress, Supreme Court and Executive Branch offices. Must have been a little crowded.


I was here. See? There I am!

7 more images below the jump. Click any one of 'em to make it bigger in Photobucket. Go ahead, click it!

Pictures 17: Summer in the city

Having grown up in New Jersey, I think I'm a little blase to the city - well, I'm kind of blase to any city.

You know how there is always some "big city" of your childhood? Like, if you grow up in Nebraska, maybe it's Omaha, and if you grow up in eastern Washington perhaps it's Spokane, or if you're from Florida it's Tampa. You can be used to going to Omaha or Spokane or Tampa and still be totally blown away when visiting New York. But it's hard to be used to going to New York and be blown away by Omaha or Spokane or Tampa or... anywhere, really. So when New York City is "the city" of your childhood, you're kinda hard to impress sometimes.

That's not to say that I'm city-savvy. I think I was pretty good when I was in high school and during the first half of college, but now that I've lived away for seven years and haven't spent an extended amount of time at home for five of those years, I find myself getting "misplaced" (I prefer to use that word rather than "lost," because I think "lost" connotes hopelessness, whereas "misplaced" implies that I've only gone slightly off-course and will be righted soon) more often than I ever used to.

One thing I can definitely recommend to anyone visiting New York is that you should have a plan. Have places you want to go and know where they are. There is always a time and a place for spontaneity, and I'm hardly saying you should put a chokehold on your schedule, but I've done New York both ways - wandering around aimlessly and going in with an agenda - and personally, I prefer the latter.

It's especially useful in New York because, since the buildings are so tall and there are just so damn many streets, it's very easy to miss what you wanted to see. For example, we had to basically spiral around inward on streets around in order to find the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site - there's no way we would have found it if we didn't know it was there. Had we just wandered around the city, we certainly would have missed it - and I'm glad we made it there, because it was pretty awesome.

But anyhow, I promised you pictures, so here are some pictures - these were all taken on June 16 (wow, that was a long time ago!). I present you with a random sampling of lower Manhattan before I move on to more specific locales.

Click any image to make it larger in Photobucket.


Buildings. I like buildings. This is somewhere down in the Financial District.

17 more images below the jump...

The Value of History - Morristown, NJ

The second day of Patrick's visit - the first full day he spent in New Jersey - we decided to waste no time in starting our exploration of New Jersey's participation in the National Parks System. New Jersey only has four sites that are part of the NPS - five if you count the Statue of Liberty (which is considered in New York) - and two of them straddle state lines, so we had some looking around to do.

First on the lineup was Morristown National Historical Park, which I've visited a hundred times before but have never really appreciated as a part of the NPS. My town, Chatham, is right next to Morristown, so as kids we always went on field trips to the area - especially to Jockey Hollow, which is the area where Washington's troops spent their most horrid winter during the American Revolution. We visited the park on Sunday, June 13, which was a slightly cool and overcast day in the morning, but turned into a day of torrential downpour as time went on. But that's later.