The reflective surfaces on recent buildings in the vicinity of the World Trade Center can make it appear as if you are surrounded by fair weather clouds.
I made this belated discovery after catching the Beauford Delaney exhibit in Soho, where advertisers for the new Darren Aronofsky movie (poor Austin!) ignored the "no posting" signs.
Fall is just around the corner. I walked south on West Broadway, a route seldom taken.
"Masters of the universe" play jenga at 76 Leonard Street.
In Tribeca, a woman watered the community garden at Finn Square.
Many of the buildings look as they have for decades.
Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City put this restaurant on the literary map in the 80s. I wonder how much longer it can survive.
Change, baby, change. That's what gives New York its vertical energy.
The glorious Municipal Building, designed by McKim, Mead & White as part of the City Beautiful movement, marked the consolidation of the New York City's five boroughs shortly before the turn of the 20th century.
The weather was surprisingly cool for August.
This solid federal building--completed in 1938 and once described as "a boring limestone monolith that has trouble deciding between a heritage of stripped down neo-Classical and a new breath of Art Deco"--survived the collapse of the nearby Twin Towers.
Second millennial construction mostly looks a lot more vulnerable, although the cladding of the Perelman Center for the Performing Arts mixes things up a bit.
The novelty of the Oculus never diminishes. Is it a stegosaurus? A porcupine? No, it's a mall disguised as a commuter rail station.
A man relaxing with a book instead of a phone is a rare and encouraging sight, even if it does require three chairs.
The government officials, private organizations, businesses, developers and architects who re-imagined lower Manhattan after 2001 certainly had awesome, long-term vision. It really is both breathtaking and heartbreaking, a peculiar combo to say the least.
When I visited the area in 2011 with the Mayor's Office as the World Trade Center Health Coordinator, it was still very much a construction site. We had to wear hard hats. Fun fact: I'm kneeling below Scarlett Johansson's future mother-in-law! And the young woman in the light blue dress is the niece of former Mayor Ed Koch.
Here I am with former New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley.
Both of us were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
New buildings, new hairstyle, older face what can I say? My work life seems ages ago. I've been retired for more than a decade just about as long as it has taken for lower Manhattan to fully re-blossom.
The rebuilt Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church--the only house of worship to be destroyed in the 2001 terrorist attacks--was consecrated in July 2022.
There's an elevated plaza directly in front of it
. . . with spectacular views of the phoenix risen.
The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel turned 75 in May. I have a very dim memory of driving through it with my father sometime in the late 1950s, when the toll was just 35 cents. Today, it will cost you $11.19 without an EZ Pass to get from the southern tip of Manhattan to Red Hook--a distance of nearly two miles-- beneath the East River. If Robert Moses had had his way, the two-tube tunnel would have been a bridge but the land grab required for such a structure provoked a public outcry that forecast his diminished power.
I've added a ride through it to my bucket list, if only to get a clear view of the giant working clock that adorns the lower Manhattan entrance. I'd also love to see what I assume to be lights on the top illuminated at night.
Here's what the tunnel entrance looks like from the back. Even though it was named after former Governor Hugh Carey shortly before Hurricane Sandy flooded it for the first time, you would never know it from the engraving on the facade.
Late afternoon sunlight bathed the non-reflective Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, designed in the Beaux Arts style, on Bowling Green. A ten-minute stroll from the World Trade Center, it takes you back more than a century.
Battery Park had been my final destination under the misapprehension that it was home to the recently re-opened Wagner Park. A ranger informed me that it's actually located in Battery Park City, a little farther uptown. Next time--I'd seen more than enough for one day.
