BRIDGES OF NEW YORK – from a Circle Line cruise

The Brooklyn Bridge - a mighty engineering feat of 1883.

A Circle Line Cruise of Manhattan is a touristy experience. well, of course it is. If you weren’t a tourist, you wouldn’t be doing it. Its whole raison d’etre is to give visitors a snapshot history of the city, and allow them to take their own snapshots of the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty.

We expected all that, but it did have one element that pleasantly surprised us.

YANKEE STADIUM – the ballgame experience

Of course when in New York we had to go to a ball game. Yankees are the team all the other fans love to hate, we heard. They bought Babe Ruth from the Red Socks, er, some time ago now. They have an obnoxious owner, too much money and think they can buy a World Series.

They also have Derek Jeter and A Rod, Alex Rodriguez, two of modern baseball’s biggest stars.

THE HIGH LINE – recycling, New York style

Once a railway, now a wonderful walkway.

At last, there’s something to do in New York after climbing the Empire State Building, snapping the Statue of Liberty and falling asleep with jetlag during The Lion King…

New York’s High Line is quite simply a fabulous, visionary idea that will surely repay its cost many times over.

Turning a disused overhead railway line into an urban park has given the city a whole new ‘must see’ tourist attraction as well as providing a facility for locals.

Here’s the story…

NEW YORK STREET ART – graffiti, only smarter

 

I spent a very interesting afternoon as the guest of Matt Levy of The Levys’ Unique New York! tours, as he led a group of Australian art students around the backblocks of Brooklyn and Queens, admiring the street art.

There is no shortage of graffiti of course, scrawled on every available bit of wall, but there are also many places where artists have been given permission to create large-scale public works.

APPLE STORE – NYC’s most photographed spot?

Disclosure: Our son-in-law recently began work at Apple, Sydney, so he sent us on a mission to investigate how Apple does things in the Big Apple.

According to Apple’s publicity, the glass cube on 5th Avenue by the corner of Central Park has become the most photographed spot in New York, beating the Statue of Liberty.

This is possible, when you think about it, since many thousands of customers each day try out their newly-purchased Apple equipment by taking a few shots.

BROOKLYN – doing it tough

The writing's on the wall in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

After booking affordable New York accommodation online, we find ourselves staying in a lovely brown-stone apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, on the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard.

Across the street garbage is piled high by Toni’s Pizzeria and the New Hope Healing Series (‘Space available for Worship’).

Toni dispenses his pizzas from behind bullet-proof glass. In the Liquor Store by Kosciusko St Station we order a bottle of Chilean wine, feed the money in through a slot and the Korean proprietor reaches around his defence shield to slip us a screw-top bottle. We sense that all is not well in Bedstuy.