July 5, 2013
12:55 EST. Room 905, Hotel Pennsylvania.
Regarding July 4, 2013
>>Empire State Building
I walked over to the ESB from my hotel on 7th Avenue, and stood in the serpentine line to pick up my NYC City Pass Booklet (well worth the expense, especially when you get the voucher off Travelelocity). More serpentine lines later, through the 30s art deco marble flooring and interior that time warps the interior denizens to that era, you get to the elevators, which after your stuffed with about 20 other people, whisk you to the 80th floor, where stands a gift shop and a plethora of historical information about the building, and another elevator which takes you to the 86th floor observation deck. This deck is structured such that you can walk outside and around, and even on busy days like July 4th, there were plenty of opportunities to get good pictures of the signature skyline and boroughs of the city, as well as parts of Long Island, New Jersey, and on a clear day, the eastern mountains of Pennsylvania.
Be warned - it's a tourist trap. There are two souvenir shops within, and a single ticket is a quite pricy $50 for adults. But if purchased as part of the City Pass, it then becomes a more reasonable proposition.
>>Central Park and Columbus Circle
If you're willing to hoof it from downtown Manhattan, it's not that far of a walk. I took the subway there - the #1 from 34th to 59th Street/Columbus Circle and the southern end of the Park. On this day, the southern tip was full of life - food cart vendors everywhere, serving up the usual hot dog/kabob/gyro faire, as well as the ice cream which was especially in demand on this humid day. Bike rental stalls, which are becoming increasingly common throughout the city, were getting plenty of business this day, even with the expense of $15-20/hour. There were horse-drawn and bicycle drawn carriages for hire, at varying prices between 2.50/minute, to the $40/hour which I paid for my bike carriage. It seems a bit pricey,but on this day where I did a lot of walking already, and in an unfamiliar area, it was a worthwhile investment. I got a bit of a guided tour of the park - what was on the West Side, what was on the East Side, where the Dakota Apartments were located and the exact apartment where John Lennon lived, the Strawberry Fields section which contained the "Imagine" circle on the pavement, the artificial lake where electric sailboats danced along the surface, the various bridges, and the rowboats. And all of the statues and sculptures.
Central Park is truly the urban oasis that it's depicted to be. Even with the large crowds that appeared for this Independence Day, there were still plenty of all-green spaces where one or two can lay out a blanket and watch the overcast pass by. I was struck by how winding the paved paths were, not only "on a plane" but up and down as well - if you take a bicycle or jog through the park, be prepared for a big workout, in large part because of the changes in grade.
I liken Central Park to be much like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, but on steroids.
>>Fourth of July Fireworks (Macy's)
To give you an idea of the type of crowds you can possibly deal with in a city of this magnitude - the Macy's 4th of July Fireworks Display drew an estimated 3 million people, many of whom got to the 11th Avenue sight lines nearly two hours prior to the event (as I did.). Two hours of waiting for a 25 minute show - kind of like Beatles fans back in that day. There is a more apt metaphor to use for the procession out of this event - forget the sardine can, think of yourself as a cell within a piece of living tissue. You're bumping along, squirming along with the others in the moving crowd as it moves in generally the same direction, and as you look ahead, the people are so compacted that the distance begins to resemble various skin tones, without any discernment - they all melt together, the melting made easier by the humidity of the day. Very few cities can claim to handle crowds like this - New York's finest kept things in order, to where as I'm typing this, nothing made it to the news that was directly related to this event.
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