Waking up in the city that never sleeps
Trip Start
May 24, 2009
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19
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Trip End
Nov 05, 2009
New York City, New York
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
First day in New York and we decided to head for Times Square, the neon mecca of New York. Being a Saturday it was pretty rammed with people just as you might expect, and they'd closed off Broadway for a street market so the hustle and bustle was even more intense. Everything has a neon sign, from the subway to the police station!
After stopping off for some lunch we decided that the best way to see a lot of the city in a short time would be to sign up for one of the open top bus tours.
We managed to find a 72 hour ticket which allowed unlimited use of the hop on hop off tours, a cruise on the river, the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, access to the Empire State Building and a night tour of the city. Tickets in hand we took a walk down to the ferry terminal to river cruise which was really nice as the weather was good and we got some excellent views of the city, some of New Jersey and the Statue of Liberty (hence the 101 pictures!).
Day 2 we decided to make the most of our bus tickets and took both the uptown and downtown tours, which, combined, cover the vast majority of Manhattan, including Harlem, Chinatown, Greenwich and the East Village, Soho etc. We got to see all the famous landmarks of the city as well as some of the huge variety of architecture within the city. Some of the older skyscrapers are really beautiful and the scale of them is ridiculous. You really do have to crane your neck right the way back to see the tops of them! Because of the hop on hop of nature of the tours we ended up taking a few different buses which meant we got to listen to several different tour guides which was good as each of them gave different bits of information about the various sights, including one lady who came to New York in the 70s as an aspiring artist and had lived in all the various art neighborhoods over the years.
On Sunday night four of us (Nutmeg and I and two British guys we'd met at the hostel) decided to head out into the city for a few drinks. We found a place called McSorley's Ale House, apparently the second oldest bar in New York. As I walked up to the bar I could tell that it was a bit idiosyncratic as they had no obvious fridges, optics or taps, so I asked what the had on draft. Faced with the answer 'Light or dark ale' I decided to risk the light and was presented with two glass mugs of what looked like chilled tea with a large frothy head. Luckily it was quite a nice larger, apparently brewed just for that bar. What a find!
The next day we headed up the Empire State Building, luckily jumping a large section of the line as we already had our tickets. I didn't have my hopes up too much as I suspected that the huge amount of tourist hype surrounding it could well lead to disappointment but I have to admit I was wrong! The interior of the building is beautiful art deco with loads of original features and the views from the top are breathtaking (if a little busy). The sheer scale of the city is beyond comprehension, all you can see all the way to the horizon is New York.
Next we hopped on one of the buses to take a tour across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn (buses aren't allowed over the Brooklyn Bridge itself). Formally a separate city of it's own accord Brooklyn is now one of the boroughs of New York and home to the well known 'Brownstone' houses that are an iconic feature of New York life.. Having taken the last Brooklyn tour of the day we got back to Times Square in time to take the night tour around the city.
Our last day in New York we'd planned to take the ferry over to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The tickets that we had were just for the ferry as you need to pay extra to actually climb the statue itself, that is until we had a word with one of the reps selling tickets for the company we'd booked with. We managed to upgrade our tickets to monument access for another $5 each! The Statue itself was ok, quite a lot of steps to climb up to the pedestal that lady liberty stands on, It is now possible to climb right up to the statue's crown (it was stopped after 9/11) but tickets sell out months in advance and getting to the top of the pedestal was effort enough! Unfortunately the weather, which had been really hot and sunny earlier in the week had turned overcast on Tuesday so the views weren't as nice as they night have been.
Jumping back on the ferry we headed over the Ellis Island, formally the main immigration station for New York and the USA as a whole. The centre was closed in 1954 and abandoned for several years but restored and reopened in the 1980s. We only had time to visit the main building but that was interesting. They have a short film on the history of the immigration centre with interviews of people who arrived at the island for processing and then a large section of the building has been restored to how it would have looked during the peak immigration years of the 1930s. This was pretty interesting as it took you through the immigration process step by step. In honesty it sounded pretty horrific, particularly the idea of families being split up as one or more of them was refused entry!
For our last evening in New York we'd decided to treat ourselves to seeing a show on Broadway, and having both read the book we picked Wicked (for those not in the know, it's the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, before Dorothy arrived). Tickets were pretty pricey but we managed to get some up in the gods for $55 each which isn't bad for Broadway. Really glad that we did it, the show was amazing! I'm not really a huge fan of musicals but this one was pretty good. They had to change the story quite a bit to make everything fit into a short timescale and tie up some loose ends but if you'd never read the book you wouldn't know.
