[I'm putting it up as a web page http://www.hudsoncity.net/temporary/exchangeplacetripjune2003.htm since some AOL people still can't get embedded images in their mail.  Most of the pictures open full size when you double click them]

Normally I wouldn't consider going for a trip to Jersey City or New York in the summertime because of the heat and my desire to do a lot of walking. But the Exchange Place tube station was being re-opened on June 29 and I wanted to take pictures of it for my Tubes website.   I wrote to the Port Authority, who "owed" me a favor for letting them use my website as a source for their restoration website, and after prodding them several times, I  got permission to take pictures of the station on Sunday morning at the official opening. Normally it is technically illegal to photograph the Tubes; I thought this might be my only good opportunity to take pictures under official auspices. So I went up on a weekend even when the temperatures were in the 90s.

I had intended to park my car in my office garage which is only a few blocks from Union Station; but this morning the 24 hour guards were missing and I parked instead in the garage on top of Union Station. Left Washington at 6:20 AM on train No. 162 which was going on past New York to Boston. The train was about 90% filled and, as usual, didn't have a quiet car, was short one regular car, and didn't have the snack car open for the caffeine addicts  until after BWI airport. It arrived on  Newark at 9:40, about 20 minutes late. Switched to the Tubes at Newark, rode to Grove Street and walked the last ½ mile to Exchange Place [the station wouldn't be open until midnight.]

Since it was early, I expected that I couldn't check in and just went to the hotel to drop off my valise. But they did have a room ready, on the second floor north side with views of the midtown skyline, the Washington Bridge and the Palisades. I made a few phone calls to relatives to arrange some meetings with them, got washed and set out for Manhattan.

Under normal circumstances I would have walked about 25 feet from the hotel to the tube station and been in Manhattan at the World Trade Center in 3 minutes; but things still aren't normal after the terrorist attacks. So I took the shuttle van over from the hotel to the Pavonia tube station [the van also runs to Hoboken and to Liberty State Park for the Ellis Island and Statue of Liberty ferries, where a large foreign family was going].

The driver who was Spanish background and had a Jersey City accent and I discussed the changes in his job after the station opened that night. Pavonia Avenue wasn't crowded and the Tubes, except for  one night,  were much less crowded than they have been in the past, even though this was a shopping day and the station is at Newport Shopping Mall .

Up to 33rd Street where I got a day fare card - which Bloomberg has raised from $4 to $7- and took the BMT up to 49th street. At the Times Square TKTS booth there was the usual  one block double line - double-click the picture to get an idea of the line's  size. The temperatures were already in the 90s and I didn't want to stand there for an hour and then find out that the tickets for the shows I wanted were sold out when I got to the head of the line. So instead I walked over to the Shubert Theater where the revival of Gypsy is playing to get a standing room ticket. They weren't SRO so I couldn't get a ticket.

I started out for the Museum of the City of New York on the upper East Side for the Richard Rodgers and Central Park exhibits by walking cross-town. But the heat was enervating and when a downtown bus came I jumped on it, putting off the museum for the next day.  Since it was vaguely lunchtime and since I had read the previous week that the "Best Salad Bar in New York' was at the City Bakery on West 18th Street just off Fifth Avenue, I went there.

As the name tells, this had begun as a bakery; I don't know the details but apparently the force behind it is someone famous: chef? socialite? real estate tycoon? and it's gotten cachet from that as well as from the variety and quality of its cakes and pastries.  The salad bar selection was large but there are many ordinary salad bars in DC with larger selections. What made this one special was the unusual salads they were offering: many marinated and specialty salads that were out of the ordinary [and lobster rolls at $12 apiece.] What I had expected and what they didn't have, however, was a big selection of salad greens and raw vegetables and fresh fruits.

Since I had had my mouth set on that kind of salad, I gave up the salad idea completely and went instead to the pressed sandwich bar,  which also looked like it would be quieter.  I ordered a cilantro chicken sandwich which was very good and very inexpensive and a lemonade which was exceptionally good. I felt obligated to get a dessert since the place had begun its fame with that and had a crème brulée [spelling??]. It was high quality and very rich and good but I found it too bland - which I know crème brulee is supposed to be - and wished I had ordered one of  the tarts which had fresh fruit added to the crème brulee. The dessert cost slightly more than the meal. I tried to leave a tip for the  man behind the pressed sandwich  counter  but he refused to accept it.

I walked around Union Square for a while because a walking tour of the neighborhood was scheduled. But it would have been a very long wait until it started so I decided against it. Off of Union Square  I had noticed Blue Water Grill, a restaurant/jazz club converted from an ornate bank. Two things struck me: I've read about other restaurants - one, Capitale, apparently top price and, ironically, in the Bowery - that also are in converted bank headquarters. The other thing I noticed, probably because of this, was that almost every "real" bank I saw in midtown Manhattan and the part between 14th and Canal looked, from the outside, tacky, shabby and embarrassed to be a bank.

I made a second attempt for the uptown museums and headed  to the exhibits at the  Museum of the City of New York and the Goethe Haus on 5th Avenue. The Goethe Haus exhibit, " Carry & Marry" turned out to be a "multimedia installation" and  was  uninteresting to me. The afternoon heat and humidity were making walking unbearable; my undershirt was completely soaked through with sweat and it was beginning to seep into my shirt. So I gave up Richard Rodgers and Central Park at the MOCNY and instead took the east side IRT and then the Tubes to Journal Square and began photographing the station. 

There's been a major redo of the lighting and the station is no longer as gloomy as it was after the Port Authority ripped down the old station and put in this one. On the train back to Lower Jersey City I was trying to take a picture of the entry to the tunnel and was stopped by the conductor.

Back at Exchange Place I began photographing the exterior of the station - it's in two separate buildings. The air was very still and the river was quiet. But all of a sudden I heard a lot of water noise behind me and saw good size waves breaking against Exchange Place. When I turned around I saw the cruise ship  Zenith, 700 feet long with 47,000 tons displacement, heading down to the Narrows starting a cruise to Bermuda and making the major  waves against the shore. [The second picture isn't mine, it's from their website.] 

My sister and one of my nephews were driving from Kearny to meet me at the hotel; normally a 12 - 15 minute drive. But something had happened with traffic to delay them and we began supper much later that we had planned.

Comment on delay and accident

I seldom make restaurant reservations but because of one of my third cousins' comments on the crowds for the big gay rights parade the next day in Manhattan, I had made a reservation, just in case there was any spillover. We drove to the north end of Hoboken to the German restaurant Helmer's. Since my sister still has a knee problem, my nephew left us at the restaurant  door and parked the car near the Hoboken Museum. There turned out to be no need for reservations since the place was un-crowded even though we didn't get there until almost seven.

We had Wiener schnitzel, Jaeger schnitzel; chicken something; one serving of apple strudel and some sodas. My sister and my nephew liked their meal and mine was good but the egg on the "wiener schnitzel", really a Holsteiner Schnitzel, had been cooked too hard and the potato dumpling which is supposed to be bland was too bland. It wasn't as good as a meal I had had there a few months ago.

Although the restaurant's door was open to its outdoor cafe, it wasn't uncomfortably warm because of the air conditioning that was also running. I think we spent about 2 hours eating and talking and walking back to the car.

After dropping me off at Exchange Place my relatives went back to Kearny and I headed by tube to Manhattan to go to Unoppressive Bargain Books  which is supposed to sell a large selection of publishers’ overstock and review copies and to a jazz club. Unfortunately both are in the Village and as I was walking, the crowds got bigger and bigger and the heat got more and more oppressive; so I gave up and took the tube back to the hotel and spent the time until going to sleep checking e-mail.

Sunday morning was  the main reason I had made trip, the time for re-opening of the Exchange Place tube station.

I first went out a relatively early to take some more exterior pictures of the station and of the skylines of both Manhattan and of Jersey City. But the heat was starting to build up and there was a lot of haze from the humidity so I went back to my room for a while.

I had been told by the Port Authority to be there at 1130 to meet Steven Coleman  who would arrange for me to be able to take some pictures. I got to the lobby of Exchange Place on Sunday a little bit too early, 10:45 AM, and began talking to some of the  Port Authority officials. One of them said that Coleman was with the governor and arriving on the tube from Journal Square. He would take me down into the station and let me photograph before the ceremonies started. He did do that but after a few minutes he came over to me and said "everybody is taking pictures so the police will leave you alone" and went back up to the street.

While I was photographing on my own, a reporter from radio station WINS who was interviewing people as in this clickable picture at the bottom of the escalator interviewed me and I got a plug in for the website's URL; but I don't know if they actually broadcast my interview.

Basically I was able to take almost all the pictures I wanted of the interior of the station before the ceremonies even started at 11:30. The heat was building up and the  Port Authority had begun preparing a buffet lunch of sandwiches, cakes,  fruit skewers, and various kinds of sodas and iced teas. During the wait I was both listening to the people around me  talk to each other and also spoke a little bit with them.

There was one group of man who were burly, wearing suits and ties, looking somewhat uncomfortable in them and also looking something like old-fashioned gangsters or the stereotype of the Russian mafia. Later on when the ceremonies were about to start I realized that the was security personnel for the governors of New York and New Jersey.

The overwhelming majority of people at the station were  Port Authority maintenance people and police. You could see the institutional traits and customs and style that they had. For example, around here in DC, goatees and mustaches are out of style; but there most of the  Port Authority men had goatees and mustaches. If they were wearing dress shirts and khaki pants, presumably supervisors, they were thin goatees and mustaches. If they were the workers they were wearing thicker goatees and mustaches.

Eavesdropping on and speaking with the people around me I could still hear  Jersey City accent which, of course, is not  the stereotypical "dem and dose boidz"  but, among other things, still has the plural you as "yiz" instead of  "all of you" or "you guys" as well as the different Tonfall from "standard" American..

The Governor of New Jersey [and, presumably, all the other politicians] were boarding a train at Journal Square and taking it to Exchange Place. All during the waiting period before the ceremonies the crowd was small, consisting almost exclusively of Port Authority personnel. There was a group of stationary cameramen and microphone men set up on a podium facing the entrance to the station.

All of a sudden the doors of the station exploded open and about two dozen additional cameramen and reporters barreled out in a frenzy. At about the same time the PR people of the Port Authority were coaxing a few spectators to close in and to move in to make the crowd look  big for the politicians. It wasn't too successful because there were probably only about 50 or 60 people there and  30 or 40 of them were media people. In this clickable  picture the small crowd is obvious; the main entrance to the station is on the left, the head house entrance in the skyscraper on the right and behind the New Jersey's governor head is the East Berlin river promenade I'll mention below.

The first speech was by the mayor of Jersey City, Cunningham. I found it very heartwarming to hear him speak with a Jersey City accent instead of with a black accent. America overcomes race. The New Jersey governor looks as rich as he is and ended with a really lame booster joke about the people who worked in New York but wished  they could live in New Jersey. The two New Jersey senators and the head of the Port Authority said nothing of real substance but the head of Port Authority operations did give some information about what it had taken to re-open the station and why it had reopened even before the temporary downtown Manhattan station was ready.

There are still two train tunnels at Exchange Place, looking very much like a London tube station, connected by  two cross tunnels for the passengers,  one wide tunnel, one narrow one.

The narrow one at the west end of the station has two exits: one a very short elevator going  up about 8 to 10 feet; the other a stairway up that same distance. Both then lead into an elevator which has a six or seven story rise and exits  into the head house which is across the street from the current station in a skyscraper. The head house  appears to be the location of the original exchange place station entrance when it was run by  the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad. 

The other cross tunnel, which is somewhat wider, is at the foot of a triple bank of escalators with two flanking staircases running up 70 feet up. It isn't, however, as long or overwhelming as the Washington subway escalators at Dupont Circle and Rosslyn. The escalator shaft is decorated with bright / garish neon tubing which looks as if it will date very quickly.

My sister Loretta and my cousin Carol were coming in from Kearny  to meet me at the hotel to have lunch at its Vu Restaurant. I had been moved from a room on the second floor to one on the 7th floor and had made a point of asking if any phone calls that would come into the old wrong would reach me in the new room. The staff assured me that would happen. It didn't, and Loretta and Carol were in the lobby for half an hour calling me, while I was in my room not getting  phone calls.

The Hyatt Regency Jersey City on the Hudson , the hotel I was staying at, is approximately where the Pennsylvania Railroad ferry and the excursion steamers to Rye Beach used to put in. But in the meantime both the bulkhead line and the pier head line had been extended out into the river, maybe by two blocks. The hotel is essentially build on a pier extending out into the river from the bulkhead line. The restaurant is on the main floor and has spectacular views to the south of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Jersey City from Railroad Terminal, the Narrows Bridge, lower Manhattan skyline, and -- I am not kidding or trying to make fun -- the Jersey City skyline. The north side of the restaurant, also floor-to-ceiling windows, has views of the midtown skyline, the Washington Bridge, and the Palisades. It is certainly a place to go to.

Since the parking for the restaurant/hotel is $30 a day I originally was going to have us go to the Polish restaurant Tania's on Grove Street. But then I found out that if you eat in the restaurant the parking was reduced $5 and I'm glad we did eat here.

Since I had had quite a bit of the free port authority buffet I wasn't too hungry and decided to order a Cobb salad which I expected to be small. My sister had black pepper linguini with mussels and my cousin got crab ravioli with -- -- -- --. When the food came I was surprised and happily surprised.

My salad was a full meal as was each of the two other entrees. On top of that, all three were very beautifully presented by waiters in uniform. On top of that all three dishes were extremely good. We had one glass of wine [we did not order three straws] and three servings of tea. Each one of us received a separate teapot each with a full tea service, very nicely designed and very well presented.  Unfortunately bagged, not loose tea.

Most of the time we spent talking about all sorts of things but since we were at Exchange place and the Colgate clock was behind us, my sister [and -- I think -- also my sister-in-law] had both worked at Colgate's after Catholics were allowed to work there. So  we talk to little bit about the "old days". Also for that reason to I took a picture  of my sister with the Colgate clock [which has been moved from the top of the demolished building down to ground level] behind her. You can see the clock and the details when you double click this small picture to the left. Also in the background of the picture behind my sister and my cousin you can see in the large version a little bit of the Exchange Place area but, more importantly, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Liberty State Park, and the Jersey Central Railroad terminal.

Of the four possible  hotels along the Jersey City Tube stations this hotel, Hyatt Regency Jersey City on the Hudson, was the cheapest   -  because I had come by train and was not driving; if I had driven the parking charge would have made it the highest priced one. Since Exchange Place station was not open until Sunday, it also wasn't the best situated of the four for going to Manhattan [that's still Pavonia  Avenue]. Even with the ferries Exchange Place hasn't the best connection to Manhattan, until the downtown line is re-opened in November. There are no delis or grocery stores in the immediate area, it's commercial, and sodas were $2 a can from the hotel vending machines.

And with all those "buts" it still is a good hotel to stay at.  The rooms are larger than in more expensive hotels in Manhattan; the views are spectacular. As in the restaurant the views to the north, south and east are spectacular, and even a little better since you are higher up than the restaurant is. From my window - which interestingly could be opened up a little to let in natural air - the view to the north was  to mid town and the Washington Bridge, while from the [southside] room I was moved into -- there was a water leak problem in the first room -- the view was this one of Lower Manhattan. [The brown bar to the left is the edge of the open window.]

Interestingly, there was another flash back to the Soviet sector of Berlin: the decor, layout, colors, lighting  of  the lobby and of the restaurant had brought back vivid memories of the layout and decor and colors of the Palazzo Prozzi, the Party's Palast  der Republik in East Berlin.

There were at least two wedding receptions in the hotel while I was staying, one of which was held in the open air cafe out in the river. A very high percentage of the guests seemed to be wealthy South American families. 

Exchange Place, as long as you stay within two or three blocks of the river, is also consistently beautiful [if you go further inland it is spotty, switching from restored elegant brownstones to un-restored rundown brownstones and parking lots].  I must admit that a few of the low [ = 7 or 8 story] buildings at the ferry landing do look architecturally like what was the "show-off" building style in East Berlin or Rostock under the Communist dictatorship , when the Communists were impress the tourists. I took this [double click to see full size] picture because it shows both entrances to the station. The three low buildings in the background are what I mean by remembrances of the Communist dictatorship.

But the assemblage of the buildings, the riverfront, the skyscrapers are all very impressive. 

Monday  Since I was heading for the Skyscraper Museum on Wall Street, I intended to take the ferry from Exchange Place [there are at least three different routes] that goes up the East River and lets you off on Wall Street. [Another time when I go up I want to try the route from Liberty State Park to downtown; the yellow catamarans look so small they probably give an adventuresome ride over the river. The same kind of catamarans also seem to run as a taxi service along the North and East Rivers.] But since I had just missed it and there was a 20 minute wait I took the regular one straight across the river to Barclay Street. 

Both on the ferry and also looking from Manhattan the Jersey City skyline is very impressive now. Of course it's only about two blocks deep but the height and the expanse up and down the river make it surpass any European city that has a commercial skyline, like London or Paris or Frankfurt. It also looks more impressive than the skylines of most US cities except for Chicago and New York. This picture doesn't do it justice.

The Exchange Place ferry leaves you off  exactly where the Lackawanna ferry used to, between Barclay and Vesey Streets. There is a difference though: land fill has extended Manhattan to the west and you land about 2 - 3 blocks further out than where the Lackawanna ferry had it's terminal. Walking up Vesey Street to Broadway you walk alongside the World Trade Center site which, without the buildings, looks very small, 2 blocks by 2 or three blocks. Just a big hole in the ground with all sorts of construction underway. 

Walking from the ferry on the land fill section I passed by  the Embassy Suites on North End Avenue at Barclay / Vesey streets; I'll keep it in mind for a future trip.

Came back on train No. 133 leaving Newark at 1:50 PM and scheduled to arrive DC at 4:50 PM but it was about 20 to 25 minutes late. Very crowded and I had to sit in the snack car where there was table that I could write on. The car was filled with young businessman and others speaking nonstop and loudly into their cell phones.