6/7/10 The best way to experience New York City is on foot, and today we began doing just that. Our tour guide was the engaging and personable, Ed O’Donnell. He has lived in NYC for the past fourteen years and began doing walking tours in 1991 while doing his graduate work in history. We all boarded the subway and took the short ride to lower Manhattan. Our first stop was Foley Square where city, state and federal government buildings surround the Square (now will be familiar sights when watching Law and Order). We found out that you may no longer take pictures of an entrance to a Federal building since 9/11, and they notice. Karin was stopped and had to show them her pictures; she was actually taking pictures of some of the artistic features near the doors, and not the entrance itself. Once security had reviewed her pictures, they let her go and she passed the word to the rest of us. Increased security is a post 9/11 by- product and some of the features are not obvious to the casual passersby Huge, heavy planters are actually in place to keep potential destructive vehicles at bay.
St. Paul’s Chapel was a most moving experience. This little chapel has survived two major fires in the last 200 years, and amazingly though it sits across the street from Ground Zero, it also survived that attack and became a place of refuge for firemen and other rescue workers. The chapel provided food, a place to sleep, and comfort for those helping with the catastrophe. The atmosphere is one of reverence, and it is very humbling to see the pews where the firemen actually slept, and the examples of support that came in from around the world. The drawings children had created and their words of comfort brought tears to my eyes. From then on, I could never look at the skyline of lower Manhattan without noticing where the Twin Towers once stood.
We visited Federal Hall National Monument where George Washington took his first oath of office and the first U.S. congress met, and walked past the New York Stock Exchange from where the financial pulse of America is reported each day on the news. Heightened security is very obvious in this area. In front of each building, there are posts, some decorative and some not, placed to keep a car bomber from crashing into a building. These posts actually can be lowered into the ground to allow vehicles with authorized clearance to pass through. At one point on our tour, we heard rumblings of a truck. The next moment, the posts near where we were standing disappeared, a truck came up from a parking garage and was allowed to exit, and the posts immediately returned to their upright position. Fascinating!
The area around Wall Street was noticeably cleaner than any other area of the city that we saw, and this included the subway station nearby. We grabbed a quick lunch at McDonalds and were serenaded by a singer playing a grand piano in the loft above us. Only in New York!
I bought a book called The Little Chapel That Stood to help explain 9/11 to younger students. The fact that St. Paul’s Chapel was still there to be of service is a miracle in and of itself. This will be of great use in my classroom, and I also got some pictures of the NYC skyline, pre- and post-9/11. The pictures will say a lot to young students about that horrific day in our recent history.
Ed is a fountain of information and he explained a lot about the impact of cast iron on the city’s ability to build upward. The competition between architects and owners to build the tallest building was on and skyscrapers became “money-making machines.”
Walking around the city is the way to go whenever possible. The sights, sounds, and flavors surround you: sounds of traffic, honking horns, sirens, a multitude of skin colors, dress, and languages, various aromas- pleasant and not-so-pleasant, high-end stores to street vendors, and the pace of New York City.
