A Melancholy Stroll (Fourth Day, Third Leg)

As we continue our trek along the Hudson River on this absolutely gorgeous fall day, we found time for moments of tranquility...

...and a few scant areas along the riverbank still under construction.

When we lived in the Village, up until the early 1990s, Battery Park City didn't start until just below Chambers Street...except for the lone building that went up a few blocks north, right on the river.  It was Stuyvesant High School, named after the first mayor of New York City (New Amsterdam, as it was called then) Peter Stuyvesant.  The public school for New York City's "gifted" students, it was uprooted from it's long-time Gramercy Park address, just below that lovely (but sadly) private park, and plunked down on this barren stretch of landfill, cut off from the rest of civilization by the West Side Highway, surrounded by weeds, parking lots and vacant spaces.  While it was always a known entity and boasted famous graduates like Jerry Seinfeld, it really became famous when one if its long-time English teachers, the Irish writer Frank McCourt, recounted his days working there in his last book "Teacher Man."  In those days, you really could call it a "shining outpost" of education as it was the only building there.

Now, I didn't even recognize it as our intrepid walking triumverate (Upstate Annie, the Old Guy and I) leave the beautifully arranged "dunes-like" walkways described at the end of my previous entry.  All we see is a large group of people milling about outside this building that is the obvious start of a large park area...

Never shy about asking, we learned that some sort of exams were being given inside the school...and these were the parents, siblings and friends waiting for the test to end.

We opted to continue to the back of Stuyvesant, where Hudson River Park begins in earnest.

What a lush expanse of greenery, flowers and gracefully flowing granite and stone, spilling right down to the river's edge.

What a backyard these apartments have!  This beats the hell out of Scarsdale...the view...the landscaping...

the amenities...the outdoor pool table...the outdoor pool table!Yup..as demonstrated by our lovely models, Miss Upstate Annie and the ever-dapper Old Guy.  The OG was plainly tickled with this find (but, I'll wage, probably still not enough to move us back to Manhattan). We kept walking south, out of this special urban oasis, still strolling right next to the river.  To our left, a heap of turf and a high stone wall covering some kind of urban cave caught our collective eyes.

Turned out to be Irish eyes, as this is the recently completed "Irish Hunger" museum.  A recreated Irish cottege from the mid-1800s, surrounded by authentic turf and stones from "the old sod" was, without doubt, the very last thing I expected to see during this walk!

It was only fitting for a son and daughter of Ireland to happen upon this alternatively beautiful and sad monument to the potato famine that probably brought the ancestors of both Upstate Annie and the OG (and millions of others) to our bountiful shores. 

I beleive the promise of better restaurants brought my Italian grandparents here.

It is a dignified, quietly moving remembrance...right next door to the offices of the World Hunger Organization.  Right across the way from the Irish Hunger Museum is a monument of another kind.  I believe this is this Ferry Terminal (pictured below) that was an instrumental escape route for people fleeing the collasping Twin Towers on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.  We are just coming up to the part of Battery Park City (then, the northern most devleoped part of the area, also called The World Financial Center) that was enjoying an equally cloudless, sunny September sky that ordinary morning when "all hell broke loose" in this corner of our great city.   

Others more eloquent have written about the horrors and heroics of that time.  I'd like to focus, instead, on how quickly the World Financial Center and Battery Park City physically recovered from the structural devastation of that day.

Actually, given that the Twin Towers fell virtually across the street, is it remarkable how little damage was done to the buildings on the west side of the West Side Highway.  I remember aerial photos and video taken during  those weeks following the attack and marveling at how relatively unscathed the office and residental business in this area looked (except for the broken glass ceiling of the Winter Garden -- one of my favorite parts of the complex).
Though I never spent much time in the Trade Center buildings, I vividly recall walking through the lower concourse of one of the towers (I don't know that I ever knew which number tower it was), from the #1 Train to the escalators that provided access to the glass bridge over the West Side Highway to the wide, inviting stairs down to into the Winter Garden.  Pre-9/11, I was a frequent Winter Garden visitor (for the annual Orchid Show; for Christmas holiday concerts; dance and jazz recitals; photo exhibits and other museum-quality shows).  I often brought Brazilian cousins and other out-of-towners through to show them the glass-domed space and the "way upscale" boat basin just outside. 

Nature Girl, her infant daughter (Junior Miss, or NG the Younger, who you may recall as a participant in the second day of this walk) and I grooved in the hot summer sun to the soothing and, by that time, nostalgia-inducing sounds of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, just in front of the yachts and racers (an admittedly odd setting for these "hard blues" rockers).  The OG and I braved Fourth of July fireworks with some San Francisco friends from here.The crowds were too much for the claustrophobic OG and he bailed before the display lit the sky.  Of course, when we lived only a few short subway stops north, bailing was much easier to do.  The entire World Financial Center complex, save the aforementioned glass bridge, looks eerily exactly as it did before the world exploded. 

There is some very personal comfort in this for me, as my mother (who passed away in January of 2001) loved this area -- she often said it was the only part of New York City she'd ever consider living in.  It would have been doubly sad for me if she and the part of the city she actually admitted to liking had disappeared so soon one after the other.

I promise a more upbeat chapter next time in the recounting of our last day of the now legendary stroll from the top to the bottom of Manhattan along the Hudson River.