Day 4 in New York City

Our flight left Monday at 7:30 PM so we had most of the day before we had to make our way to the airport.  After breakfast we walked back over to Rockefeller Center.

I thought this needle and button looked cool, this was the Fashion district.

I was soaking in all of these views

It is funny to me that people don't really follow the lights.  People come to the crosswalks and they look and then go if they can, no matter what the lights say.  Sometimes people cut it way too close.  The drivers are not shy about honking so you hear honking all day. If you get in some ones way they are not afraid to tell you about it.

I love that there are random fountains and water throughout the city.

This guy was dressed up outside FAO Schwartz. 

Our next stop was top of the Rock, or top of Rockefeller Center.  Here is Rockefeller Center, it is so tall! 

You take an elevator to the observation deck on the 67th floor.  

You can walk up to two more observation decks on the 69th and 70th floors. 

You get a great view of the city.  I'm glad we did one during the day and one at night, it was fun to see the city at night and during the day.

It was crazy windy and very cold at the top.  Kristin had her hat on so we didn't get another awesome comb over shot! 

I like walking around the deck and seeing the all the different views of the city. 

I was always confused on what building I was looking at.  Luckily, Kristin was very patient and would point everything out for me. 

It is cool that you can see New Jersey and New York from this height. 

What a beautiful city! 

I tired to get a picture looking down to show the cars on the road to give a better idea of how high we were. The cars looked tiny. 

I grabbed one last picture before we went inside to escape the bitter, cold wind. 

We grabbed some lunch and then walked around outside of Rockefeller Center.  This was one of my favorite places that we visited so I was glad we were visiting it again.

The ice rink was empty. 

It's a beautiful area with the flags surrounding the buildings. 

Kristin wanted to take the NBC Tour so we got tickets that morning.  It was interesting and fun to see the different studios.  We saw the MSNBC studio, Saturday Night Live studio and the Tonight show with Jimmy Fallon.  We learned that Jimmy Fallon put the same leather that are used on the seats of a  Lamborghini on his studio audience seats.  They said he wants his audience to know how much he appreciates them and wants them to have a great time.  I thought that was cool.  At the end of the tour they take us into this studio and have us do our own night show.  It was pretty funny.  Kristin was a one-man band because no one else volunteered.  I volunteered to help in the booth, I'm much more comfortable behind the scenes.  While we were watching a video Chris Matthews came and stood next to us and watched it. Kristin was pretty excited to see him.

After the tour we took the subway over to the upper West side to see the temple.  It is different to see the temple in the middle of much bigger buildings. After that we walked over to a bakery and decided we should try some banana pudding because we had both heard that it is so good in New York.  Neither one of us thought we would like it that much, but it was delicious.  I probably should have discovered this earlier in the trip.  They had tables and chairs across the street from the temple so we sat and ate and people watched for a while.  It was a great way to end a fabulous trip.  After that we went back to the hotel and picked up our bags and went to the train station to head to the airport. The weekend went by so fast.  I'm so grateful I was able to go and for everything that I was able to see. 

Empire State Building

After dinner we took the subway over to midtown Manhattan and walked over to the Empire State building. They had some displays and interesting facts about the building on the main floor. 

We took the elevator to the 84th floor.  It is crazy how fast the elevators move, especially compared to the one at our hotel.  On the celling of the elevator they had a video playing that made it look like you were outside on top of the building.  

The 84th floor was inside.  You had to take pictures through a window, but the views were amazing. 

We walked around and looked at the view from each side. 

We finally realized that we could go up two more floors to the 86th floor that had an outdoor observation deck. 

I'm glad we did this one at night.  I loved the view of the city lights. 

I keep saying this, but it is crazy how many buildings they fit in New York City. 

I'm not sure why my camera turned me red. 

We could pick things out, but I couldn't capture them in the pictures.  It was fun to see the Statue of Liberty from up here. 

The weather cooperated with us all day.  It was cold on the top of the building, but there wasn't the cold wind that made it miserable.

I love the view of the water surrounding the city. 

We walked by Macy's on 34th Street on the way home.  We were so tired when we got home.  We fit in so much sightseeing that day.

Brooklyn Bridge, Chinatown and Little Italy

After the museum we took a cab to the Brooklyn Bridge.  We decided I needed to experience a cab and we still had a ton of walking left to do that day, so it was great to sit for a minute and eliminate some walking. 

The bridge was packed. You are always in a crowd of people, wherever you go. 

There were vendors along the bridge selling souvenirs.  The prices were excellent compared to Times Square so I bought a few things.

The views were great, but really hard to capture, especially because it was overcast.  

There were a few people biking on the bridge.  That looked like a terrible idea to me.  It has a steep incline so it would be tough on the way up and then on the way down it would be hard not to go fast, which is a problem because there are people everywhere.  The people ridding their bikes would ring their bells, but people were very slow to move.  

We walked from the Manhattan side to the middle of the bridge and then we turned around and went back.

Great view of Manhattan. 

I love being near water.  

Next we walked over to Chinatown.  This was the only time we were alone on the street, it felt a little eerie. We must have walked on some back roads, it was the only time we were not surrounded by people while we walked.  Chinatown had a lot of souvenir shops.  It reminded me of San Francisco.  I liked going in all of the shops. I finally had to stop because I kept buying things and there are tons of shops and we were running out of daylight.  I got a lot of great souvenirs and gifts for the kids in Chinatown.

Little Italy is right next to Chinatown.  It had a lot of restaurants and not as many little shops.  We were hungry so we stopped at a restaurant for dinner. We beat the dinner rush which was nice.  I got a really good margarita pizza and they brought out complimentary scones at the end of the meal.  It felt great to sit down and relax for a while.

9/11 Museum

I was so impressed with the 9/11 museum.  I'm sure it was a very tricky balance to be respectful and not commercialize this tragedy.  I thought it was very well done.  

The museum had different displays, but one of them was a time line.  Here is a picture of New York City at 8:30 AM, just before the attacks. 

This wall has a map and an explanation.  It says, "On September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists who were members of al-Qaeda, an Islamist extremist network, hi-jacked four California-bound commercial airplanes shortly after their departures from airports in Boston, Massachusetts; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. In a coordinated attack that transformed the airplanes into weapons, the hijackers intentionally flew two of the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and another into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Learning about the other hijacks through phone calls the passengers and crew members on the fourth plane launched a counterattack.  When the passengers tried to breach the cockpit, the hijacker pilot, who had changed course toward the nation's capital, crashed the plane into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, near the town of Shanksville.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day, the single largest loss of life resulting from a foreign attack on American soil, and the greatest single loss of rescue personnel in American history. Approximately, two billion people, almost one-third of the world's population, are estimated to have witnessed these horrific events directly or via television, radio, and internet broadcasts that day." 

They had pictures and videos playing of that morning.  They also had voicemail messages left by the victims from the planes and the towers before they fell playing over a speaker.   

Here is the view after the attacks. The North tower was struck at 8:46 AM. At 9:02 AM the South tower was hit.  Everyone was trying to figure out what was going on and news was reporting the airplane hitting the North tower when the South tower was hit. At 9:37 AM an plane crashed into the Pentagon.  At 9:59 the South tower collapses, 57 minutes after being hit.  The North tower collapsed at 10:28.  I can't even imagine the horror and chaos for all of those people in the towers and those outside watching them collapse. At 10:03AM an airplane crashed in the field of Pennsylvania, they think that they were targeting either the United States Capitol Building or the White House.

This fire truck was recovered from the World Trade Center site.  There was a plaque in front of the truck that said, "FDNY Ladder 3 Company is located in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. On September 11, 2001, led by it's highly decorated captain, Patrick "Paddy" Jonah Brown, the company asked a dispatcher to deploy its members to the World Trade Center disaster.  After they parked their rear mount aerial ladder truck on the West Street near Vesey Street, 11 members of the company, some of whom had just gotten off duty after completing over night shifts, entered the North Tower.  They were among the thousands of uniformed responders who collectively formed the single largest dispatch of nonmilitary emergency personnel in the history of New York City and the Nation."

"Assigned to aid in the evacuation of civilians in the North tower on 9/11, members of FDNY Ladder Company 3 are known to have reached the 35th floor by 9:21 AM.  Captain Patrick "Paddy" Brown unable to communicate directly with the lobby command post, used a functioning office phone to call a Manhattan dispatcher.  He reported that the burn victims and numerous others were making their way down the stairs and he understood the fire to be above the 75th floor. In his last recorded transmission Captain Brown said, 'Three truck, and we are still heading up'. All 11 responding members of the Ladder 3 company were inside the building and killed when it collapsed at 10:28 AM."

This is the "Survivors' Staircase." It was the last visible remaining original structure at the World Trade Center site. These stairs served as an escape route for hundreds of evacuees from 5-World Trade Center, a 9-floor building adjacent to the twin towers.

This is The Last Column: Marker of Loss.  A plaque below it says, "At Ground Zero, Column 1001B helped support a temporary haul road, known as Tully Road, laid close to where the South Tower's elevators had been located. Many first responders who were killed in the tower's lobby were believed to be buried nearby. In March 2002, after the remains of some missing members of FDNY squad 41 had been found in the area, a squad member painted "SQ 41" to mark the recovery. The marking is still visible at the center of the column.

There were so many hero's that day and in many days and years to come while they undertook the overwhelming task of finding bodies and cleaning up the city. 

I remember seeing pictures like this of walls in New York lined with pictures of missing people that their loved ones had posted.  There were only 20 survivors pulled out from the wreckage at ground zero.  The last one was rescued 27 hours after the building collapsed.  

This a segment of the antenna from the top of the North Tower.

 

I loved this tribute.  The plaque says, "This art installation, created in 2014, is composed of 2,983 individual watercolor drawings, each a distinct attempt by the artist to remember the color of the sky on the morning of September 11, 2001.  Commemorating the people killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993, every square is a unique shade of blue, combing to create a panoramic mosaic of color. Finch's work centers on the idea of memory.  What one person perceives as blue might not be the same as what another persons sees.  Yet, your memories, like our perception of color, share a common reference."

"No Day Shall Erase You From The Memory Of Time. This quotation from IX of The Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil suggest the transformative potential of remembrance." 

Two years later on September 11, 2003 families of the victims killed in the attack gathered at ground zero for a ceremony. 

It took 9 months to clean up the wreckage at ground zero.   This is a quote from Joe Bradley, operating engineer and recovery worker at ground zero when they finished the clean up in May 2002.

There was a big portion of the museum that you couldn't take pictures in.  They had a lot of videos from that day in that area.  Seeing the pictures and videos took me right back to that day.  It is still hard to believe that kind of evil exists in the world, but we know it does.  

This monument and the new World Trade Center are a reminder to me that good will triumph over evil.  It is a reminder of the goodness of humanity and how people are ready and willing to help where they are needed.  Osama Bin Laden, who was the leader of al-Qaeda and responsible for these attacks was hunted down and killed on May 2, 2011.   He may have taken many precious lives that day, but he did not succeed in his mission to destroy the United States of America.  We are too strong for that and I hope and pray that God will continue to bless America.