Blitz Visit to New York City
I visited a 99-year-old aunt in Manhattan before departing for my summer migration to Bavaria. She along with my uncle is the last survivor of my father’s brother and sisters who sponsored my family’s immigration to the United States. It was a nostalgic visit combined with showing Christl a few notable sites in this mega city including the Statue of Liberty. I pretended to recall my first visit, as we took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis islands. From the deck of the ferry, I imagined a ten-year-old on a troop ship — the Marine Carp — passing alongside the statue on the way to a Manhattan pier.
On the way Battery Park, we passed my first apartment house in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood and the unforgettable nighttime view of the blinking red light atop the George Washington Bridge from my bedroom. I also stood on “home base” at the corner intersection below the apartment house where I first learned of Baseball. The game was called Curb Ball and played by throwing a pink rubber ball against the curb and running around the three other curbs at the intersection before the opposing team tagged you “out.” The “hitter” had the option of striking the curb at the correct angle for a fly ball or grounder toward right or left field. It was a fun game, traffic permitting, a block away from Broadway.
The trip was also an important reminder of a sailing adventure with my brother on his boat Imagine, eighteen years ago. We anchored in the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis islands after sailing the Atlantic coast from St. Augustine on the way to Buzzards Bay. It was a well-deserved rest before attacking the busy commercial shipping lanes headed into Manhattan, New Jersey, and Brooklyn. We were anticipating a challenging sail up the East River and through the tidal currents of Hell Gate before being released into Long Island Sound. But before all that, we enjoyed the evening and the Manhattan skyline. It was only three months before 9/11!
Back to our blitz tour of Manhattan. The weather was chilly with intermittant rain. We took subways and walked. I found it amusing and a sign of the times that a Muslim woman in a hijab said, “Follow me,” when we could not figure out how to cross the tracks for a train headed downtown instead of uptown. Also thankfully, in a sign of the times, there are countless Starbucks coffee shops in Manhattan with free wifi, toilets, and of course, steaming coffee.
We walked-the-walk along the 5th Ave shopping district, the ritzy apartment houses lining Central Park, the Bull of Wall Street, the new World Trade Center, and the former Fulton fish market on the waterfront. From there we ordered an Uber for Laguardia Airport, ending our blitz tour. At the airport we were greeted by another sign of the times — a waiting lounge with dozens of stools and tablet computers flashing “Play-Drink-Eat” on their screens. You simply whiled the time away until your boarding by ordering drinks and eats, which were delivered to your seat, and played board games or gambled. Fortunately, they also had the New York Times newspaper.
