Pictures 25: The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

Backing up a little, getting caught up again on photo posts, we venture way back to June 15 to our jaunt into the Hudson to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (which, if you want to get picky, are the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island National Monument [part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument], both National Parks System sites in New York). Yep, they are part of the NPS, so we got to check a few more off our list of NPS sites to visit!

We decided to go on a weekday because we figured the crowds would be easier to handle - and while we were probably right in some regard, we made the sore mistake of choosing a weekday in June. Anyone with any experience with public schools in North Jersey will know that there are a few places notorious for being the destination of many schools' end-of-the-year field trip, and the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island is one of them.  (Various resorts in the Poconos are other top choices, as are art museums in the city and historic Philadelphia - and once I even went on a June field trip to Amish Country [Lancaster County, Pennsylvania], which was definitely the best end-of-the-year field trip ever.)

So while we missed the weekend crowds, we were inundated with hordes (no, seriously - hordes) of middle-school-age kids bouncing off the walls, screaming, running back and forth, and generally being obnoxious and terrible. I can understand the impulse of taking kids that age to Ellis Island, but you really would be better off taking kids of a high school age to the site - they would probably understand it better and actually read the trillions of text-based exhibits. The kids who were there seemed to have been given a scavenger hunt to find facts and information around the site, but they seemed to better enjoy running from clue to clue than actually learning about what they were finding.

That being said, the first two hours of our jaunt into the river was pretty rough, but once the school kids cleared out just after lunch time, things quieted down and we were left with mostly fellow adult tourists, which I can deal with much easier.

A few words to the wise about visiting the Statue of Liberty (which I always want to call "Shashoo Liberty" for some reason) - book your ferry tickets early, your pedestal tickets earlier, and your crown tickets months in advance.

You must take a ferry to get to Liberty and Ellis Islands, of course, but many people (including me!) don't realize that you need to advance-purchase tickets to the observation pedestal under the statue (they are typically sold out one to two weeks in advance), and if you want to climb all the way up to the statue's crown, those tickets need to be bought three to six months in advance. Crazy! I don't know why I didn't realize these things, but at least we were able to get ferry tickets online ahead of time.

So, without further a-blah-blah, here come some pictures. I am starting out with pictures from the visit my dad, Patrick and I took to Liberty State Park the day Patrick arrived in New Jersey.


I like this one.

26 more images below; click any one to make it bigger in Photobucket.

Pictures 24: General Grant National Memorial and Riverside Church

On our last stop of our pictoral tour of Manhattan, we have made it all the way up to Morningside Heights (122nd Street, to be exact) in Riverside Park, home of General Grant National Memorial, also called Grant's Tomb. Just down the block from Grant's Tomb is the ever-impressive Riverside Church, which we visited in the same trip, so I've included those pictures here as well.

A Civil War hero and America's 18th President, Ulysses S Grant was pretty well-liked among the public - over a million people attended his funeral in 1885. His tomb is the largest tomb in North America - I guess it's like an American pyramid. The national memorial currently houses exhibits in the main room, but an extra pavilion is being built across Riverside Drive to house the exhibits, so that the memorial itself can exist without too much extra distraction. I think this will be a great move, and I'm excited to visit the tomb as it was intended to be: A "simple" monument to Grant and his wife.


What would a new site be without the thumbs-up from Patrick?



19 more images below the jump.

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 22: Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site

There are a few recurring themes that come up as you travel around the Northeast's National Historic Sites and National Monuments, and it's fun to piece them together as you travel along. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has come up a lot (more on him when we get to the Hudson Valley), of course George Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt are three of the big ones.

My first acquaintance with Teddy Roosevelt was at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in Manhattan. Roosevelt (called "Teedie" as a kid) grew up wealthy and weak - he was a small and very unhealthy child, so he often sojourned to the country to help his lungs (he also drank gallons of coffee and smoked cigars when he was about 6 years old onward, but that's another story). As a result, he grew to love the outdoors and became the burly, strong and wilderness-obsessed 26th President that we know him as today.

I really enjoyed this historic site. It is tucked back on 18th Street and blends in seamlessly with the buildings around it - so much so that the rangers there said they have had visitors who tell them, "I've lived on 20th Street my whole life and never knew this was here."

The house had to be entirely reconstructed. Roosevelt lived there until age 14 (that's 1872, for anyone who's keeping track), but after the Roosevelts moved out, the building changed hands many times. It was completely unrecognizable when the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association acquired it after Roosevelt's death in 1919. Over the years, the organization pieced the house back together by calling relatives and friends, painstakingly tracking down pieces of furniture, decorations and art, and somehow figuring out what wallpaper hung in each room and precisely how each room was laid out.

Now, about 90% of the furnishings are original to the family. The entry level is more like a museum exhibit about Teddy Roosevelt, including memorabilia and a collection of political cartoons, and when you take a tour upstairs you get to see the house itself.

Touring this site was awesome. Since the tour groups are small (there were only 5 people in our group), the site is set up so that you can walk right into the reconstructed rooms - they simply ask, "Don't lean on anything," because most of it is original and, if it's not original, it's probably a just-as-old period piece. There is no Plexiglas, no railings, no velvet ropes. I can understand this layout not working so well for larger tour groups and larger homes, but for this situation it was really great.

Without further ado, here are some images. We visited this site on June 17, 2010.


The outside of the building.


Downstairs - in what would have been the basement/kitchen/servants' area back in the day - is the museum-like exhibit of countless documents and artifacts.

21 more images below the jump...

Pictures 21: African Burial Ground National Monument

This was one of the coolest National Monuments we have been to so far. The African Burial Ground National Monument is a memorial to all slaves - more specifically, those kept in Manhattan - more specifically still, those who were buried under the monument's location on Duane Street. The bodies were discovered in 1991, when construction of a federal office building uncovered hundreds of skeletons.

New York City (nee New Amsterdam) was mostly a farming community in the century-ish before the American Revolution. The slaves on those farms were allotted a space in the no-man's land just north of the city proper to bury their dead; the area is believed to span about seven acres in what is now Lower Manhattan, near City Hall. Between construction, the building of the subways and the building of roads, most of the grave sites were obliterated over the centuries.

When the skeletons were discovered in 1991, there was an uproar from the community about how to respectfully deal with the remains - not to mention an uproar from developers who wanted to build on the site. Eventually, a compromise was reached, which included designation of the site as a National Monument and the ceremonial re-burial of the recovered skeletons after archaeological review.

The monument is especially cool because it's so new, I think. The visitors' center is very cool, with tons of information about the history of slavery in New York City. An informational video is re-created with spookily realistic life-sized sculptures of the actors in the film. After studying African-American and post-colonial literature out the wazoo in college, it was really cool to visit this site and increase my knowledge.


i wuz heer.

Find 9 more images below the jump, including the visitors' center as well as the outdoor memorial.

Pictures 20: Irish Hunger Memorial and Castle Clinton

While tooling around Lower Manhattan, we went to the Irish Hunger Memorial, which my mom first showed me back in May, as well as Castle Clinton National Monument in Battery Park. As you will see, they are two very unique and very different monuments, both of which I liked a lot. We visited these sites on June 16, 2010.


Approaching the Irish Hunger Memorial from the west.

7 more images below the jump. Click any image to see it larger on Photobucket.

Pictures 19: World Trade Center

Virtually everyone in America had their own intense experience on September 11, 2001 - some more potent than others. I will never claim to have been deeply personally affected by it, since my concept of "deeply" is based on seeing people whose spouses, children, parents and friends were killed in the attacks. Meanwhile, compared to someone in Idaho, perhaps I could be considered "deeply" personally affected.

Living in New Jersey - and northern New Jersey, at that - at the time of the attacks automatically made my experience more immediate than the experience of 99% of Americans, and visiting the World Trade Center site and thinking too long about the whole thing is always an unsettling experience.

Having studied creative writing (namely poetry) in what I deem a pretty rigorous undergrad program for five years, I think I have a pretty strong aversion to abstract quasi-patriotic words/concepts like "courage," "bravery," "freedom," "tragedy" and the like - but talking about 9.11 is a strange exception in my literary brain. It's as if I can't use concrete words. I can only refer to that day in terms of abstractions, in terms of words you can't necessarily define - as if to be able to define it would be too painful, too raw.

I don't quite feel like getting into it here, so I'll let some pictures suffice.

The PATH (Port Authority Trans Hudson) station at WTC obviously closed shortly after the attacks and re-opened only a few years ago. Thousands of people use it every day - and I might even say it's my favorite PATH station. Hopefully this image can give you an idea of its size.

The best place to view the "reconstruction" of Ground Zero is in the World Financial Center just west of Ground Zero. You can see they have made a lot of progress. (End sarcasm.) Personally, I think the whole site should just be turned into a simple park, but who am I to decide.

In addition to simply thinking about the attacks, the way the site has turned into a tourist attraction is unsettling as well. I appreciate that people from all over the world want to see where this event took place, but what I cannot forgive is the commodification of what is essentially a graveyard. While Patrick and I looked at the site through the World Financial Center's large glass windows, a woman with a European accent came up to me, asked brassly, "Is this where the attack happened?" and pointed out the window. I said yes, and she then turned to her group of friends and spoke loudly in her native language, gesturing to the scene. It was like she was asking, "Is this where King Kong was?" while pointing at the Empire State Building. I wanted to tell her to shut the hell up. But it wasn't worth it.

7 more images below the jump.

Pictures 18: Midtown

June 18 found us wandering Midtown (we spent one day in Lower Manhattan, one day in Midtown and a half a day way up near Grant's Tomb - that photo post is coming later). We skipped most of the touristy stuff for lack of funds (no adventure to the top of the Empire State Building - it's $18 a head to stand in line for three hours! What?!) but did manage to see everything that we could see that was free. And now you can see some of it too.

Click any image to make it bigger in Photobucket.


Nerd! Sometimes being a tourist is fun. We lamented that we couldn't go to the top, but then again, if we were inside it, we wouldn't be able to see it, now would we?

17 more images below the jump.

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.

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

17 more images below the jump...