The Westside

As I made my way on the subway to Penn Station I knew that our adventure to the Westside of Manhattan would be a lot better than last week. I arrived late to Penn Station everyone was already huddled up for the roll call. Mike began his same routine calling attendance and telling us the game plan for the day. We were given the menu for lunch. As Mike told us we were going to walking a lot more to make up for last week. All I could say was “Oh Boy I won’t be able to do this”. HAHA I was so wrong.

As we left Penn Station we head towards Times Square walking up the pedestrian path that the city has created. We stopped at 42nd street and Times Square. Times Square was known for theatre and entertainment in the 1940s and 50s, by late 60s and 70s it became marked by drugs, prostitution, and pornography. Time Square was once known as Longacre Square that was dominated by hors exchanges, carriage factories, stables and blacksmith’s shops. This crippled the area for some time until Mayor Rudolph Giuliani enforced strict regulations in the 90s that cleaned up the Square and welcomed a family-friendly crowd.

We then walked a couple of blocks over to the GE building to go check out Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller Center, a complex of commercial buildings, theatres, plazas, underground concourses, and shops developed principally during the Depression, is the world’s largest privately owned business and entertainment center. The first architecturally coordinated development in New York City, and a milestone in urban planning, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1987 (BG, 243). From Rockefeller Center we then walked to M.O.M.A – the New York Museum of Modern Art. As we weaved through traffic to get to the MOMA we received our tickets and headed up to the 6th floor for a tour of the permanent collection, which has famous New York artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jackson Pollock. The Museum of Modern Art is one of the city’s premier cultural institutions, one of the great repositories not only of modern painting and sculpture, but also of drawing, design, photography, and film (BG, 260).

By the time I was done with all the exhibitions at the MOMA I was starving. We then had to walk yet some more blocks to get to Hell’s Kitchen where we had lunch at Yum Yum Bangkok.  The shrimp soup was okay kind of upset that there was only one shrimp. I had the white rice with sweet and sour chicken which was really good. After lunch we walked back to the 2 or 3 train headed for Harlem. I've never been to the boogie down Bronx so I was really curious to see what it was like.

 I walked out of the station to my surprise I felt like I was back at home in Jamaica, Queens.  Harlem is currently undergoing a gentrification process to restore the area to its beauty. Bounded by the East and Harlem Rivers, the cliffs of Morningside Heights and St. Nicholas Terrace, Harlem is the most famous center of African – American life and culture in the U.S. (BG, 437). The Depression devastated Harlem, revealing the poverty behind the glittering exterior. In the 1970s, as the city fell into fiscal difficulties, Harlem suffered even more. Since the late 1990s, the northward spread of gentrification in Manhattan has reached into Harlem (BG, 438). We walked by the Apollo Theatre. The Apollo Theatre was once for whites only and as the neighborhood changed, so did the Apollo. The theatre fell on hard times during the 1970s and became a movie theatre. In 1991 the state of New York bought it, and the Apollo is now run as a not-for-profit foundation (BG, 440). We continued walking towards Morningside Heights, from there we had to walk up these very long flights of stairs. The song Survivor-Eye of the tiger was playing in my head while running up those stairs. I was the first one to get to the top but it was a killer. Silvia-1 Morningside heights steps-0.

We visited the Grant Memorial. The General Grant National Memorial, familiarly known as Grant’s Tomb, is the imposing resting place of the victorious commander of the Union forces in the Civil War. It contains the remains of the General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia Dent Grant (BG, 434). We walked by the famed Riverside Church. The Riverside Church occupies a commanding site overlooking the Hudson River (BG, 432). Through Columbia University everyone was in awe on how stunning the campus was. Columbia University, one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most respected of all North American universities (BG, 427). Then by the end of our day we stopped at St. John the Divine Cathedral. It was upsetting that we couldn’t go inside the cathedral we were a few minutes late because it closes at 6pm. Next class is again Eastside part 2…To be continued!!