LOWER MANHATTAN & CHELSEA

As I made my way on the subway to Penn Station for the second to last time I knew that our adventure to Lower Manhattan and Chelsea would be kind of interesting. Our first location was the Trinity Church at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. Outside is a huge sculpture that is actual roots from a tree that fell on 9/11 and was preserved which was interesting and intrigued all of us. We went inside the Church and it was gorgeous, but what I first noticed was that there was a wedding going on! A bride and groom were taking their pictures in the church.  The famous Episcopalian parish, Trinity Church, was our first stop. Despite its modesty in size and conception, Trinity Church is probably New York's most famous, and of the wealthiest houses of worship (BG, p.65). We then walked back outside to the cemetery there were some very well known people. “Robert Fulton, whose Clermont proved that steamboat travel was economically viable; Alexander Hamilton; William Bradford, the publisher of the New York Gazette; and Captain James Lawrence, whose nautical tombstone brings to mind his famous remark about not giving up the ship” (BG 66).

We then followed Mike to Zuccitti Park to see the Occupy Wall Street protests which was certainly not a peaceful site. We felt like packed sardines walking by the protesters and the police officers had to keep everyone moving. People were holding up cardboard signs and preaching their beliefs. Before we walked through it we got some information on the protests from Tom Trottier, one of Mike’s friends, who gave us some interesting statistics. An example, “the richest 1% in this country owns more than the bottom 95%.” After his speech we walked through the protest in the park. While walking through I felt like it was the depression era just seeing people sleeping there for a month now. While some of the people there are there for a good reason, a lot of them are not.


After spending some time at the protest, we walked past the New York Stock Exchange and went to the Federal Hall National Memorial where George Washington was sworn in as our first president in 1789. Wall St is a short street, about a third of a mile long, which runs between Broadway and the East River (BG, 64). Wall St gets its name from a wall, erected in 1653 during Peter Stuyvesant’s tenure, which stretched river to river at the northern edge of the settlement, ostensibly to protect the Dutch town from its British neighbors (BG, 64).
I always pass the Federal Hall but actually never been inside, but it was pretty neat to be standing where George Washington stood. Before the Federal Hall National Memorial, there was the British City Hall where John Peter Zenger was tried for libeling the royal governor with his New York Weekly Journal. “Zenger’s acquittal established a precedent for freedom of the press” (BG, 69). There is an exhibit that is dedicated to him in the memorial.

From there we walked by the World Trade Center site it was amazing to see all the progress they have made. We went into St. Paul’s Chapel across from the site which is where the workers from Ground Zero slept. There were several dedications to those who died on 9/11 which was touching to see. After the World Trade Center disaster, the chapel served both as a place of refuge for workers at Ground Zero and a temporary memorial for visitors, who attached messages and memorials to the fence in front of the church (BG, 77).  I tried to hold back my tears being inside the chapel it just made me sad and picturing how it was when 9/11 happened. As I wiped my tears away we then walked along the Hudson River and saw the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

We stopped at the Irish Hunger Memorial which gives awareness of the famine of 1845-1852. We walked through and up the landscape and experienced a piece of Ireland in New York. Next, we made a quick stop at the Poet’s House, dedicated to writers and readers of poetry. The Poet’s House contains “over 50,000 volumes of poetry it includes books, journals, chapbooks, audio and video tapes, and digital media our collection is among the most comprehensive, open-access collections of poetry.” 

I sat down and read a couple of poems from “The Poem of Idioms”. I thought the poem were pretty interesting.

We walked all the way to Chelsea Market on 16th street which was a very long walk. We ate lunch and looked at the Halloween scenery. After a delicious sandwich, we talked about the High Line, The High Line was actually where trains used to run, and “was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. It lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air.” Now, the High Line is a beautiful path for the public to enjoy and see the city from a different view.We later walked through the piers of Chelsea to finally be able to grab something to eat. The original deep-water Chelsea Piers were designed by Warren & Wetmore; the architects of Grand Central Terminal, to accommodate the large transatlantic liners build around the turn of the 20th century (BG, 188). Our professors explained how The Meat Packing District in the 80’s and 90’s had a reputation of having drugs and prostitution and is now gentrified and developed. The meat packing industry remains and still gives the neighborhood its working class edge, it gentrified rapidly during the 1990’s with stylish bars and restaurants, high concept clothing and design stores, and art galleries spilling south from Chelsea (BG, 184).

Chelsea has undergone rapid change in the past decade, its western reaches transformed from an industrial neighborhood once blighted by both street level and elevated railroads to the city’s new Soho, its street enlivened by art galleries, which consists of more than 200 of them, and chic shops (BG, 186). We walked for a little on the High Line to 20th street in Chelsea where we looked at a couple of the art galleries. These art galleries were very strange and even harder to understand than some of the pieces at the MET. There was one that just had a parachute attached to a huge fan that would turn on every four minutes. Another one was filled with weird sex stuff and other had all these weird life size creatures that looked like something out of a nightmare. The only normal and decent gallery was the one with pictures of the city. Seeing the art galleries in Chelsea was definitely an interesting way to end the day.