Manhattan Photowalk: Midtown South To The Staten Island Ferry

As the title of the post indicates, in this post I’m going to take you on a walk through the streets of Manhattan, New York City from Fifth Avenue, west to the Hudson River, then down the shoreline by the piers and tunnels, past the One World Trade Centre, around Battery Park, and onto the Staten Island Ferry.

With this post being a snapshot in time of our visit to America’s most populous city late in 2011 there will be things in this post that no longer exist or that look significantly different. You’ll see, for instance, that we visited while the One World building was still under construction. If you want to see photos of it being constructed then you’re in luck, but if you’re using this post to fuel your construction sites fetish and rush off to New York in anticipation of some hot, hot, incomplete building-work action then you are in for one hell of a disappointment. All travel-related content on the web is like this, of course, and that’s why I don’t find those Top 10 Things To See In New York-style articles terribly useful or engaging, since who knows when someone’s going to be reading it and what will still be around or have changed beyond recognition or improved or been bumped from that list? None of that is to say that this post will be useful or engaging, either. In fact, I can almost promise it won’t be.

A tiny bit of background, then, before the post commences. These photos were taken in late November, 2011. We were in America to see and stay with my wife’s sister who lived in Virginia, not far outside Washington, D.C. at that time. While we were there, and hitherto unplanned, we decided to book a bus from the nation’s capital to New York along with a hotel stay there for two nights so that we could spend a day looking around. We travelled up on a Saturday afternoon and returned on the Monday morning which gave us a Sunday for exploration. With no real preparation and limited time we opted to skip looking for the sorts of things we might otherwise be interested in – museums, obvious tourist traps, etc. – and just get a feel for whether we’d like to come back and see New York in depth at some future date. Our Sunday in New York would be spent on foot.

This is the first of three posts covering our New York photowalk, taking in the first half of the Sunday’s pedestrian activities. In part two I’ll cover the second part of the day, while the final part concludes with some Monday morning meandering ahead of our scheduled return to D.C. As always, I’ll point out anything historically or architecturally interesting (to me) or anything we saw that was memorable for some other reason, but you can consider these mostly to be just posts full of photos of New York City if you like.

Our hotel was just off Fifth Avenue so we started there and headed onto West 33rd Street because that’s where the Empire State Building was. We decided not to go inside and up to the viewing platform but to simply admire the Art Deco lines of its architecture from street level. One interesting thing about the design – again, to me; you might find this quite the opposite – is that the tapered, stepped, symmetrical look of the Empire State Building, which you look at and instantly say “Yes, Art Deco, obviously” while stroking an imaginary beard on your all-too-real chin (apologies if you’re chinless), a classic design you’ll find around the world from buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, actually owes its origins to New York’s 1916 Zoning Resolution code.

You aren’t going to mention city zoning codes, are you?

Yes, yes I am.

With new building techniques and bigger buildings appearing, a resolution was passed in New York early in the twentieth century to prevent large blocks appearing that would prevent sunlight and air reaching street level. The solution for architects was to implement setbacks in the design to change the angle from the top of the building to the middle of the street. On the Fifth Avenue side, a building with the base area that the Empire State Building held would have been limited to just twelve stories so as not to block out all daylight, but by stepping in from the base, taller central tower areas were possible. Much taller. The Empire State Building owes its design to the zoning regulations, and its height and global fame took that design and integrated it back into other skyscrapers constructed during the Art Deco period, even where no such rules restricted buildings in the same way.

In case you’re wondering about modern building designs then, yeah, they changed that resolution. Hey, you can’t give consideration to people getting light and air forever, you know.

We pretty much just continued heading westwards from there, shifting one street up to West 34th Street at some point. Occasional photos of buildings, shops, people, and yellow taxi cabs were taken because we were tourists, after all, and that’s what tourists do.

The New Yorker Hotel below, as you can probably guess, was a contemporary of the Empire State Building, completed in 1929, with similar setbacks in the design. At the time, and for some time after, this was the largest hotel in New York City, boasting two and half thousand rooms, each with a radio!

At Ninth Avenue we turned southwards in order to cut out what looked like some less-interesting buildings ahead. We would eventually come out on the western side of Manhattan by the Hudson River around 16th Street.

The Marine & Aviation Pier 57 building that caught my eye was built and opened in the early 1950s. It was a replacement for a wooden pier on the same location that had burned down in the decade prior and served mainly for cargo shipping purposes, although its use as a temporary detention centre in the wake of protests at the Republican National Convention in 2004 earned it a nickname of Guantanamo on the Hudson.

We were not surprised to discover that the Hudson wasn’t the cleanest-looking stretch of water. You don’t think of New York or even New Jersey – the city and state visible across the water – and think “Yeah, those are clean places”, and while that’s a terrible generalisation that is likely only mostly true, and while the water colour may have had more to do with backwash, silt, and the general geology than the huge amount of industrialisation and high numbers of piers along this shoreline serving cargo, fishing, and pleasure vessels, there’s no getting away from the fact that you probably wouldn’t want to swim here.

The big question is: did we see Vladimir Putin walking the streets of New York City?

The big answer is: maybe. He is fond of baring his torso.

Unless you’ve got terrible short-term memory or you simply skipped the paragraphs at the top because words are hard and pictures are easy, then you might remember that this walk took place in November. In fact, it was just a couple of days before December, but to allay any concerns that we’d found a complete weirdo to wander behind – I mean, it’s still a distinct possibility what with this being New York City – I can confirm that it was surprisingly warm. Even though we saw plenty of people in coats throughout this day, we wore nothing more on top than t-shirts.

We reached the site of the construction of the One World Trade Centre. At the time of writing this, it is the tallest building in the United States of America, but at the time of our visit it wasn’t quite finished. The architectural firm responsible for the design were also responsible for the design of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It was, of course, pretty sobering to stand there and know the history of the spot, to imagine the former buildings at that location crumbling following the attacks of a decade earlier.

We took this opportunity in our New York photowalk to stop for a drink and a bite to eat. This took place in Brookfield Place and my overwhelming memory of this was thinking “I’ll get a sandwich with mustard on it even though I’m pretty sure I don’t like mustard but I’m in New York City and I think they like mustard and oh no what have I done my nose my nose oh the mustard fumes are burning all the hairs in my nostrils oh the water does nothing why did I do this!?” while my wife laughed.

The southwestern tip of Manhattan is a residential area with a number of parks, generally known by some variation of Battery Park overall, that name deriving from the military batteries that were installed in this area of the city in the late seventeenth century. The park was built in the middle of the nineteenth century after the area had attracted some theatres and become regarded as a destination for entertainment, and prior to the more well-known entry point for immigrants of Ellis Island being used, it was here at the Battery that arrivals were first processed.

If you’re a fan of sculptures – we are – then this area hosts a number of them in what’s generally given the name Monuments Walk. We weren’t aware of this at the time and our walk clearly skipped a lot of them but we did stop and stare at the rather odd piece by Louise Bourgeois.

Boobs, we thought.

Eyes, apparently.

Louise Bourgeois, as you might know, is more widely-known for her Maman sculptures (even if you don’t know the name then you almost certainly know the pieces), and I’m happy to say we’ve seen one of them at the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

The building in the photos below caught my eye for its overall orange hues but also its blocks of colours on the facades. This was the Whitehall Building, a very early twentieth century office block, incredibly simple in its design, but still striking, and likely quite a sight for those approaching New York’s Manhattan borough from the water.

Our walk around New York was taking us in an anti-clockwise direction around the southern tip of Manhattan now, and the next point of interest to catch our eyes was the East Coast Memorial. This monument commemorates American servicemen who died in coastal waters during World War II. The names are arranged on granite blocks in two rows, in the centre of which – you can see this in the second photo below – is an eagle cast in bronze, facing the harbour and the Statue of Liberty.

Despite us not having any firm plans for what to do on a Sunday in New York, as explained earlier, we did know that the Staten Island Ferry service between Manhattan and Staten Island (obviously) ran every day of the year, regularly, free of charge, and would take us past New York City’s most famous landmark. This was 2011, before our big love of cruising really took off, but we’ve always had a fondness for being on or near the water, so a chance to take the weight off our feet and enjoy the scenery from the bay had been in the back of our mind before we’d even set foot outside the hotel that morning.

Our trip out and back again – 25 minutes each way and requiring disembarkation, then re-embarkation during the turnaround – was aboard the MV John F. Kennedy. At the time of writing this she is the last of the Kennedy-class vessels on the Staten Island run.

Sometimes you see something in real life and think “Wow! That’s a lot bigger than I thought!” The Statue of Liberty was exactly the opposite of that. Making allowances for the fact that it was far away (thanks, Father Ted) it still didn’t strike either of us as that impressive seeing it for the first time. I suspect that if we’d visited it and stood at its base then we may have come away with a different impression, but I wonder if the isolation and lack of nearby features against which to compare it had an impact here. It was still great to see it – an iconic sculpture is an iconic sculpture – and it’s a great feat of design and engineering, but I was expecting just a little more… something. If we return to New York City then we’ll try to have a more extended visit and we will, of course, give it another chance to make our mouths go Ooh!

For the remainder of the time on the ferry we contented ourselves to watching the various land masses of New York and the bridges connecting them rolling by first in one direction, then the next, along with a fair amount of people-watching. You could tell the tourists from the locals easily enough and one particular local inhabitant was intensely entertaining: a girl in her early-twenties with headphones on stood in front of us, eyes closed, completely lost in her music, dancing, shaking her hips, clicking her fingers, twisting, singing a little bit. That her backside was roughly level with my face and only a few feet away was what stopped me from taking any photos, but I was happy to smile at the sight and we could see other people around grinning too. The ones who were ignoring her were, I suspect, used to the spectacle.

That brings this first part of our Manhattan photowalk travelogue mini-series to an end. In the next part we’ll head through the financial district and on a mostly direct route through New York City; a chance for me to lose myself as just another tourist taking way too many photos of people with more of an emphasis on street photography.

Tags