Our Trip Blog

Events of Tuesday, November 23, 2010

          This wonderful Tuesday began in what has become a daily ritual during our stay in New York/New Jersey. It is amazing that we have been here for only a week, and yet we have made a system, a habit, a schedule, a pattern. We thrive on the orderly life. Anyway, that schedule includes: making all the beds (rather than making some and unmaking others), dressing in layers for the day in NYC (rather than just dressing…), eating breakfast in Oma Janssen’s house (rather than out in the RV), washing our breakfast dishes (rather than waiting until the end of the day to wash all the dishes), packing backpacks with picnic lunches for the day (rather than traveling with our kitchen in the RV), and brushing teeth in Oma Janssen’s bathroom with unlimited water (rather than trying to conserve every drop of water in the RV). Next, we walk to the bus stop about a quarter mile away, which takes us to Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, which is situated atop a subway station, which is where today begins to veer away from being like all the other days we have spent in New York thus far.

          Today, unlike the other days we’ve spent in NYC, we descended down four stories in the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the subway station. Along the way, a number of people, ordinary New Yorkers, stopped what they were doing to help us. Evidently we must look a lot more like poor, helpless, lost tourists than we thought we did. Whoever said New Yorkers were stand-off-ish? Anyway, even though we weren’t really lost, these kind New Yorkers helped us out of the generosity of their hearts to find our way to the World Trade Center, where we visited a second-story viewing deck in a financial district building overlooking the construction site for the 9/11 Memorial. It was just a lot of dirt and construction workers and machinery. Then we tried to visit the 9/11 Memorial preview site, but it was closed until 12:30 for a private event. So we proceeded to the St. Paul’s Chapel (part of the Trinity Church parish), where volunteers from all over the country came together to help in the rescue efforts after the tragic September 11 incident.

          A brief side note: our memories of September 11, 2001 are varied. Daddy remembers Mommy running hysterically down the stairs and turning on the television (not a normal factor in our daily morning routine). Mommy remembers awakening to her radio alarm clock and hearing a live witness describe the second hijacked plane crash into the second tower on the radio. I remember watching TV on a school morning in my white collared shirt and navy blue jumper dress (to which my family says, “Of course she remembers what she wore!”). Ben remembers Mom running and watching TV before school. Ben and I also have vague memories of the outdoor memorial assembly we had on that first 9/11 and on every 9/11 after that in the front quad of our elementary school. Lindsey and Abby, however, have virtually no memory of that day as they were too young.

          After visiting the site of the 9/11 tragedy, we strolled to the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States, connecting the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn over the East River. We walked to the halfway point and then walked back again, and we learned a lot on the way. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world from its opening until 1903. It also was the first steel-wire suspension bridge and construction lasted thirteen years. One week after the opening, on May 30, 1883, a rumor that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which crushed and killed at least twelve people. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge. After that, critics no longer claimed that the bridge would not last.

          After our little jaunt across the suspension bridge, we strode through Chinatown, passing many herbal shops and a Chinese Hispanic Grocery Store (an unusual pairing), and Little Italy, before reaching the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Following a bit of exploration of the gift shop and the surrounding area, as well as the variety of tours offered, Mom and I expressed interest in a tour entitled, “The Moores: An Irish Family in America”, in which we would experience the 1869 home of the Moores, Irish immigrants coping with the death of a child. The rest of the family, however, chose the option of exploring the gift shop and watching the documentary film while Mom and I took the tour. As a result, we purchased tickets for the last two slots on the 1:45 Moore’s tour and went back outside to find a place to eat lunch. Walking one and a half blocks on Delancey Street, we encountered a miniature park on the street median, with benches, providing a good place to eat lunch. It was a narrow park, or a wide street median, depending on how we looked at it. So we sat down, essentially in the middle of a busy New York street, with construction happening everywhere around us, to eat our lunch.

          Then we sauntered back to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where we parted ways. While Daddy, Ben, Lindsey, and Abby read books in the gift shop and watched the movie over and over again, Mom and I met our tour guide Claudia, and embarked on our Irish immigrant experience. We first visited the backyard, complete with hanging laundry and four privies (flushed once a week – a luxury!), and then hoofed it up to the fourth floor of the tenement. It was truly authentic, with peeling wallpaper and creaking floorboards. Mom was comforted by the occasional appearance on modern safety precautions: the intermittent fire extinguisher, and sporadic smoke detectors. We first experienced a couple of Irish tunes, which portrayed the Irish way of life through moving music. The first two songs illustrated the plight of the Irish and how and why they needed to leave Ireland. The next song was a warning of sorts against the “swill milk” the milkman was selling. Milk coming from cows in Upstate New York, would begin to spoil during the three day journey to the city without refrigeration. It would start to turn yellow and to smell. So the milkman would add chalk to restore the white color and ammonia or formaldehyde to mask the odor and then dilute it with water to increase the profit margin. This Irish ditty warning was the first public service announcement of the time. Then we listened to a song lamenting the discrimination the Irish faced called “Irish Need Not Apply”.

          Next we toured the restored three room tenement apartment of the Moore family. This 325 square foot living space was comprised of a bedroom, a kitchen and a sitting room. At times up to 16 people at a time called this space home. The Moore family we were visiting today were Irish potato famine refugees handling the death of their third daughter in 1869. The sitting room was set up as an Irish wake complete with mournful keeling music playing. It was sad and touching and very enjoyable for us Irish ladies. At the conclusion of the tours, we put side by side the Moores’ great effort to maintain their family’s wellbeing with that of the Katz family, Russian-Jewish immigrants who left their 'mark' on the tenement building in the 1930s. It appears their eight year old daughter must have gone to school because she wrote her name on the wallboard in a childish scrawl.

          Following the ending of our tour, we found our family and headed for the subway again, which we rode to Herald’s Square, where elaborately decorated Macy’s Christmas windows told two separate, but equally moving Christmas tales. The first window story we experienced, entitled, “Yes, Virginia!” was about a little girl questioning the existence of Santa Claus; the second window story was “A Miracle On 34^th Street”, which is a movie we enjoy watching each Christmas season. We welcomed the opportunity to take in one of our favorite Christmas movies through animated window decorations.