Just got back from a little break in New York with the family, the UK seems to be pretty much the same although the grass is browner and I hear that there was some football match or other last week that we seem to have missed? Anyway, I haven't been to NYC (other than flying visits on business) for many years and was looking forward to having a good old mooch around to see what's changed. First up we went downtown to see the 9/11 memorial museum and the various monuments, very impressive they were too! I hadn't quite prepared myself for the emotional impact of seeing it all repaired and re-built, last time I saw this view it was still a smoldering heap of steel. bodies and concrete it was a moving experience.
In the photo above is the new Cortlandt St. subway station with the re-imagined World Trade Center tower in the background, both beautiful new buildings. Then there were the monuments outlining the old twin towers. In the following composite you can see the fountains above (with the names of all the victims etched around them) and from below where the box-section steel foundations have been preserved as a centre-piece in the museum, they've done a really spectacular job.
Later in the week we all walked the "High-Line" which is a renovated 19th century elevated-railway line that's had a park planted along it and a boarded-walkway threaded in between the buildings. It's a fabulous 2 km walk on a sunny day, plenty to see and various watering holes to stop off at along the way. The re-generation going on at the end of the walk around the Hudson Yards is quite something, some interesting architecture and some very shiny new sky-scrapers to marvel at. I also spotted something that looked like an alien spaceship but which turns out to be a sculpture by British designer Thomas Heatherwick. It's essentially a set of interlocking staircases and escalators that go nowhere but provide a unique perspective on the city from every different point, a cynical New York barman described it to me later as the most expensive chunk of empty space on the planet, I guess art is what you make of it.
Later in the week we did some of the normal touristy things, we walked across the Brooklyn bridge and took a trip over to the statue of liberty and Ellis Island (both of which I'd never gotten around to visiting when I used to work in NYC back in the late 1990's)
Anyone visiting NYC should take the time to walk the Brooklyn Bridge, on a good day it's fabulous, take the subway under the East river and walk back (if you're staying in Manhattan) the views are spectacular. I resisted the urge to take the usual picture of the statue of Liberty, instead I opted for a rather disrespectful shot up her skirt! Anyway, I thought it was more interesting than the usual postcard image you normally see, you can see the copper sheeting covering the iron-skeleton much more clearly.
Finally I couldn't go all that way and not try the local beer, in the picture below we have a glass of an IPA from Finback a brewery based over in Queens, utterly delicious even though it looks a bit murky.
Craft beer is everywhere in New York, in fact its hard to find a bar or pub that doesn't have something tasty and more importantly made nearby, hopefully this is indicative of the way things will go in the UK although we're perhaps a little slower to embrace change than your typical New Yorker.
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