All of lower Jersey City within a 3 or 4 block of the river was cordoned off by police blocking every intersection. They hadn't realized at first they could  get through the blockades by showing ID and had been trying to avoid the blockades. I'm guessing the alert was connected with Yom Kippur [I had chosen that weekend to go up to get lower hotel rates and better ticket availability for the Broadway shows] but no on ever said that officially.

We had a Cobb salad [= $10]; a very fancy and garnished hamburger [$9]; and a mixed seafood medley [$14]; all were good and were presented beautifully, with an orchid on each plate [next time I'll take a picture of the plates before we start eating], by a correctly attired and attentive staff. 

After my sister and cousin went back to Kearny, I took the Tube uptown to the Technology Branch of the New York Public Library on Madison Avenue, which had an exhibit "General Parsons and the Birth of the NYC Subway".  Parsons was  the main engineer for building the NYC subway [this is the centenary year]. I liked the exhibit but most of it consisted of pictures and papers, not objects, and would have been better presented in a book rather than a physical exhibit. The main museum exhibit I wanted to see this trip was at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights. Since that closes at 4pm and is a long subway rode from midtown, I decided to save it for Saturday and took the bus down Broadway to Bowling Green.

In the past city busses were dirty and their lexan windows were so scratched you could see little out of them. Now the busses are clean , the windows crystal clear and they're good for general sightseeing.  I'm still amazed when I'm on the section of Broadway between the Village and Downtown;  in my mind it was always an amorphous part of Manhattan, filled with garment sweat shops and small import /export companies when I was growing up. Now the artists and speculators and retailers have changed it back to the flashy shopping street it had been 150 years ago.

The post office inside the Cunard Building at Bowling Green is shut down and gone and hope it's just temporary; because now you can't see the spectacular ticket hall in the Cunard Building with the paintings of the ocean liners.

A few weeks before I had read Waterfront : A Journey Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate who had walked [in stages and over many years] around Manhattan's shore. So I decided to walk  a part of the shore that's been changed a lot recently, Battery Park City, to see what he saw.

It was difficult running across the Brooklyn Battery tunnel entrance since it was the beginning of rush hour but less than 2 minutes after the hectic masses and traffic at Battery, I was at quiet peaceful river views and breezes and parks where I walked for awhile. The breeze seemed brisk and refreshing on the shore but I was watching this Circle Line boat going up river and it seemed to be getting ready to keel over and capsize at any moment, you can see that clearly if you double click the picture [ Jersey City skyline as background]. Although it was the height of the rush hour when I took the Tube back to Exchange Place, it was packed and crowded but not jammed; maybe because of Yom Kippur.

After getting washed at the hotel, I took the Uptown Tube to Herald Square and walked up to the TKTS Booth at Times Square where I got a ticket to Here Lies Jenny. It was relatively cool and I had an hour until the show so I walked around Hell's Kitchen to the Little Pie Company  which is listed as making the best cupcakes in the world. 

But since the other thing they're famous for is their sour cream walnut Dutch apple pie, I got that.  It was great. The atmosphere of the place is like a McDonald's attached to a factory because their main business is not eat-in customers but sales to restaurants. If you're going to a play in the Broadway district, stop here [424 West 43rd St. between 9-10th Avenues] for a dessert. Then I followed along the river to the convention center and turned inland to the theater which was in a really odd location.

It was the Zipper Theater on West 37th Street off of 9th Avenue; there are no other theaters around it. Instead the neighborhood has numerous taxi cab garages, car repair shops, and is where the street vendors have the storage units for their carts. As I was walking to the theater I was passing dozens of them bringing their carts back.

The playbill said the building was a renovated zipper factory but from the outside it looks like s a slightly seedy office building from the 1920s; you would never guess there was a theater in it. Then you enter the lobby and it still looks like an office building; then you make a sharp turn and are in a very seedy and decrepit bar -  maybe done up that way for this production because you then make another sharp turn and are in a "performing space" with the stage jutting out and the audience on three sides, which WAS a cheap decrepit bar, the setting for the show.

It wasn't a play but a cabaret of Kurt Weill's songs, about 40% from his German period, 40% from his Broadway period and the rest from his exile in France. The "names" were Bebe Neuwirth, the lead, known most for situation comedy on Cheers and Frasier, but who began as a Broadway dancer, and also Ann Reinking, the choreographer. There were two men/thugs, a barkeep and a piano player who was in character. 

If there was any linear flow in the show, I missed it. I saw it as a collection of songs illustrating a downtrodden woman who is so desperate for companionship that she accepts any behavior from a man and winds up as low down at the end as she was in the beginning.

Both thugs sang and danced well but one of them was a Broadway song and dance man playing a thug; but the other one looked and acted as if he'd fit the description of "a lone drifter the police are searching for" . The [older] barkeep was fine dramatically and musically - he didn't dance, - but when he sang German he had an opera singer's pronunciation and jarred the illusion. Neuwirth / Jenny did very well in song and dance; when she sang 1? 2? songs in the original German she was technically right. Each sound was correct; but taken all together it didn't sound like German.

After the show I walked down to Christopher Street to take the Tube back to Jersey City. Maybe it was a quirky night but there were strange /surprising crowds. 

Instead of the middle class, mixed homosexual clientele you used to see on Christopher Street [this was 10:45 or 11 at night], there were loud, vulgar, low class African American women. On the other hand, two blocks away on West 4th, the street was crowded with walkers and people at the many outdoor cafes with a clientele that was young, European American and middle class, heterosexual couples.

As for most of the weekend, the air conditioning in the restaurants had been turned off and  the restaurateurs had moved their tables onto the street. It was stifling warm and [when I checked later at the hotel] still 71 degrees with oppressively high humidity. When I reached the street at Pavonia Avenue in Jersey City three or four minutes later, it was noticeably cooler with breezes blowing off the river. 

Saturday morning I was up and out too early to go to any museum so I decided to follow more of Lopate's book, walking along the Manhattan shore.

I took the downtown Tube to the World Trade Center - it's still a strange feeling to be 80 feet underground and yet see daylight as the train pulls into the station - and re-started the walk at the World Financial Center, the point I had left off the previous day; first going northwards to the  level of Chambers Street, the unofficial boundary of downtown, but on  inland Greenwich Street. 

I stopped at the farmer's market on Greenwich Street near Vesey where I got a yogurt for breakfast [and where the owner of the stall threw in a  bottle of chocolate milk for free]; it's a dairy called Ronnybrook which I vaguely recall from food articles. I think it's most well known for its fancy ice cream. 

Then to my first stop at the  federal townhouses Harrison Street Row from around 1800  at the border between downtown and Tribeca. It's a very attractive [and very short] residential street but I think much of it may have been reconstructed not just restored.

At Chambers Street I headed southwards along the river, retracing my route on a different section than I had used the day before. The river promenade was lively but not crowded and the weather wasn't too warm this early in the day. Chambers Street to the Battery / Castle Garden is about a mile, approximately the same distance as Lackawanna Terminal to the Morris Canal  on the New Jersey side  where the promenade is far far less complete than it is on the Manhattan side. But the Jersey City skyline keeps you company on the walk.

Around Rector Street I cut a block inland to go down South End Avenue, the main shopping street of Battery Park City. Lopate was right; the street and its architecture do fit the Manhattan scale and building style [such as that up on Riverside Drive and especially on West End Avenue, for example] but for some reason the street feels dead and artificial. Even though there are stores and people and the facades of the buildings are theoretically like the Manhattan apartment buildings from the 1920s. The facades are some sort of pre-cast stone and the overall impression is very cheap and artificial and I'm not sure if that's what gives the artificial feeling.

From Chambers down to the Battery the river promenade was lively with people but peaceful. That changed when I cut from South End Avenue back to the shore  at the Battery and Castle Garden.  I ran into a wall of tourists waiting for the ferries to the Stature of Liberty and Ellis island and scores of vendors and sandwich board men. 

Also there was a big demonstration of Falun Gong, protesting the Communist dictatorship's persecution of their members in China [I had encountered more of the demonstrations the day before] with living statues of torture scenes. It was slow and actually difficult  to get through the crowd, even though the distance was less than a block. Right after the crowded block, at the Staten Island ferry, things got quiet again and I started up the East River shore and into the  South Street Seaport.

It's been years, if not decades, since I've gone to the Seaport. I had remembered it as being commercialized and expected it in the meantime to have gotten more historic items besides the 2 or 3 sailing ships. Instead it's Baltimore's Inner Harbor complex and a million other "festival halls". Except for the setting, under the Brooklyn Bridge with the Manhattan Bridge as a background, it's very disappointing. On the other hand, it was popular with the tourists.

I had intended to get to Brooklyn and the Transit museum by walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, But since I only know the route to the museum from the subway, I wasn't sure how long it would take to find my way. Since I didn't want to run the risk of getting lost and wasting time, I walked up Fulton Street towards the subway stop, passing the site of first major power plant in Manhattan.

There IS an history museum on Fulton Street that's somehow connected to the Seaport, and they're having an exhibit on Nieuw Amsterdam: Dutch New York   which I hope to see, if I get back before it closes. At Fulton Street [and Nassau ??] there's either a new location of Strand Books from 4th Avenue or else a branch which I intend to go back to.

I arrived a little early for the transit museum opening and walked a few minutes around downtown Brooklyn; very decayed but MAYBE coming back in spots. 

The New York Transit Museum is in an abandoned IND subway station, I think Court Street, which along with a short stretch of its tunnel entrance is sometimes used for subway scenes in movies and television. You enter through what looks like a normal subway stairway. The special exhibit on the centenary of the subway was interesting but not as extensive as I had expected and I enjoyed more the ongoing displays of subway passenger cars and other rolling stock from the 1920s. 

Although models don't particularly appeal to me, there was a new, large and impressive display of [100??] hand built models of Brooklyn trolley cars. 

For after the museum I had scheduled a Municipal Art Society walking tour [they also have some on-line virtual tours] of "Vinegar Hill" and DUMBO [down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass] which originated about a 10 minute walk from the transit museum. On the way over I again passed through part of downtown Brooklyn and the edge of Brooklyn Heights. As I was approaching Brooklyn Heights I passed by Saint James Cathedral,  which now is also a basilica.

The tour guide was a local resident of Vinegar Hill whose accent  I thought was Dutch. Later on in describing her background it turned out she was Dutch and she used the Dutch pronunciation - as a gimmick - for the Dutch place names like Breukelyn and Vlissingen. 

On the one hand, I admired her and her fellow residents' tenaciousness in fighting for preservation and getting historic designation for her neighborhood. On the other hand, they had 30 or 40 houses out of about 1,500 that had previously existed in the neighborhood and it seemed close to pointless. The biggest number of the houses had been ripped down for  building the Manhattan Bridge approaches and for an immense Con Ed plant on the East River.

The neighborhood had been developed after the War of 1812 as a working class speculative development for people working mostly at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and was named Vinegar Hill [after a battle in Ireland I hadn't heard of] to attract Irish immigrants.

It was basically 3 story brick tenements in simplified Federal style, each one of which had housed 4 families. [This house behind the motorcycle is the one the guide lived in.] The remaining 30 or 40 houses now have one family. Later on more and more factories came in , some wiping out the houses, and around the Civil War it was the single largest industrial complex in the United States.

The reason the residents were able to get historic designation wasn't so much the architecture, since so much of it [99%????] had already been destroyed, but rather that the houses had been designed uniquely as a working class neighborhood and had had a uniform style.

Before they got the designation there was an arrangement with the bishop of Brooklyn to maintain the last Catholic church in the area; but a few years ago he was replaced and the new bishop was concerned with funds for charity rather than historic preservation. No one - except "that family" - had the money to buy the property and the church was demolished. There's now a junkyard on the site [a step up from the garbage recycling center that had been there right after the razing].

The guide made several references to "that family" which had bought up a lot of the land and was redeveloping in an "insensitive manner". As we walked around passing a Buddhist temple and a lot of workmen laboring and wearing straw coolie hats, it came out that it is some Chinese / Hong Kong / Taiwanese family that she was referring to. 

She pointed out a building that "that family"  had recently built that did not fit the neighborhood. On the one hand, she was right: the architecture is completely different than any of the surviving three dozen buildings. On the other hand, the new building is in the right scale, and material and style appropriate for an urban setting and is aesthetically pleasing [the picture I took didn't come out]. Later on I pointed out to her some other new buildings that she had praised for their "sensitivity" [the builder had used brick for the facing] but which otherwise were not too consistent with the neighborhood and which shouted "cheap", Although she agreed with me about these not being that sensitive, she still held that the fine looking building which was in scale and which was urban-appropriate was insensitive.

I've always seen the big Jehovah's Witness building at the edge of Brooklyn heights but she said that the Witnesses were now the single biggest property holder in the area and that there were many neighborhood disputes with them.

Perhaps the most interesting stop to me was a tiny vacant lot that had been the site of a memorial over a mass grave to the American prisoners of war on the British death/prison ships during the Revolutionary War. I knew there had been prisoners and extremely high mortality but hadn't know  that the number was over 12,000. The treatment was so bad it's easy to see why the Loyalists were driven out of New York after the British lost the war.

The monument had become decrepit by the end of the Civil War and Walt Whitman had organized a movement to have the bodies disinterred and moved to a cemetery. When they began excavations for a building here a few years ago they thought they might find some of the bodies that hadn't been moved but none were uncovered. The lot is about to get a small memorial replacing the lost one.

Vinegar Hill by itself would have been too specialized to attract a big audience [there were about 25 people on the tour] so the tour also included DUMBO and Fulton Ferry. 

I've read other places that DUMBO is now replacing Williamsburg as hipster heaven, after the hipsters had left Chelsea and SoHo for Williamsburg.  The DUMBO section is filled with industrial buildings from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. DUMBO does have a lot of art galleries but it looked to me like most of the studios in the old factories have already been converted to expensive Yuppie residences so I guess the artists are on the move again.

One of the converted factory buildings - now a museum, artist co-op and  art gallery - was the Grand Union Building. It was interesting that Grand Union had imitated the A&P, Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, by calling themselves the Grand Union Tea Company before they too began specializing as a supermarket. This is a mosaic from the floor of the building's entrance - click it.

The last part of the tour was to Fulton Ferry, the former location of the East River ferries  to Manhattan.  It's almost right under where the pedestrian walkways of the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge meet over the Brooklyn shore, with a spectacular view of the Lower Manhattan skyline - a view much  more impressive here since the East River is so much narrower than the North River. While we were there a Chinese wedding party came to take pictures with the skyline as the background. 

This is where the famous/expensive River Cafe is located. It's also the location of the Brooklyn Ice Cream Company which has a big reputation but I found  the ice cream just ordinary.

I took the train back to Manhattan and, luckily, called up the nightclub where I was to see Blossom Dearie, she does unusually early shows, to double check on the time. I found out that the performance was cancelled because of "Blossom's indisposition" and that all her shows were cancelled indefinitely. Since she's in her high 70s, I have a feeling that I might not see her perform live.

I could have changed my plans and hurried uptown to get a half priced ticket for a show. I also considered going to the Paper Mill Playhouse, far out in the New Jersey suburbs in Milburn, where there was a revival of the Gershwins'  show, Of Thee I Sing, that I've always wanted to see. Theoretically, I could take a commuter train out from Hoboken and walk to the theater; but the problem was returning. I'd have to either leave the show  before the final curtain or else kill an hour after the show before the last train of the night returned to Hoboken. Instead I decided to do some other things downtown.

I walked up First Avenue to Teresa's Polish Restaurant for supper. It had gotten hot again and Teresa's , like all the other restaurants, had the air conditioning turned off and the storefront removed to turn the entire front of each restaurant into an outdoor cafe. I suppose every one else liked it but I was hot and uncomfortable.

The meal, roast pork sandwich and cucumber salad, was good but the service was slap dash and absent minded [they forgot the cucumber salad] .

I then walked over to Alphabet City through Tompkins Square Park. Tompkins Square Park has changed from 15 or even 10 years ago, when people in it were offering me drugs; or else maybe I looked as if I was so high on drugs that I didn't need any more.

The Tompkins Square Bakery on Avenue C is now closed. Avenue A was even more eye opening than the park. Instead of swaying and spaced out drug addicts the crowd was sleek, young, nifty looking, many pushing baby strollers. There still are odd/alternative aspects: for example, within three blocks I passed two hookah dens. I also noticed this couple having their supper on the fire escape to avoid the heat.. 

I was walking over to Avenue A for the Rheingarten Biergarten; the inside was crowded, hot and stuffy; so since the weather was good enough, although warm, I sat  in the outdoor cafe section. The crowd was in their 20s with a very few above 30. It wasn't too beergardenish since the two young women at the table next to mine ordered a bottle of wine. [They were some sort of junior television producers connected with a show called something like Race .... ] I had ordered a small Jever pils [$5.50] and a Brezel [$1.50].

Once in Bochum, a beer city, I'd been told that you could judge a well-drawn Pils by the foam crown on its top: the foam had to be thick enough that you could float a pfennig piece on it. This beer had a concave head that might have had trouble supporting a small scrap of paper. The Brezel was mediocre to not so good. Even though the beer was small, I noticed its effect as I began walking down the street.

I then cut over towards the West Village and began browsing through some used CD, DVD and book stores. Unoppressed Books has had many positive things written about it but it was just an ordinary medium sized left-wing used book store. 

Sunday I took the trolley from the hotel over to Hoboken so I could ride its new extension up to Weehawken at the foot of the Palisades [three stops]; on the way back, I got off at 9th Street [at the bottom of the cliffs but technically already in Jersey City] and took the elevator up to Hudson City at Congress Street. I walked over to Central Avenue to Gehrig's Bakery where I wanted to buy some of their black and white cookies which have the tender cake base rather than the hard base you find in New York. But they were sold out. Next time I'll call before I go.

On the return trip to DC I had decided to pay more money and upgrade to the Acela, described as Amtrak's best and fastest service. On the Acela the tray was broken [conductor: "that's as good as it gets"] and the plugs to plug in laptops were set up so that if two passengers used the plugs, wires would entangle each other's legs. 

The train was coming from Boston and wasn't cleaned up during the long layover in New York; the cafe car was closed from Manhattan to past Newark, after which the line was never shorter than 12 or 15 people until we were far into Maryland at the Susquehanna when the line was 11 long; then the cafe car was shut down at BWI airport. Its seating was the long narrow "snake" seating used on the French TGVs and not the more comfortable seating in the German ICE and regular American trains. There were standees at Newark and again at Metropark, with several boarding passengers complaining about the high fare and not getting a seat. [I'm sure they did get seats but it took a lot of looking and wandering between cars.]

The train was as good as a European train 15-20 years ago. It was not really faster than the conventional/cheaper trains but made less stops and so it made the NY DC trip in as little time as the first Pennsylvania Railroad Metroliners did 40 years ago. There was far more shaking and vibration than on the top European trains.  It was difficult to write or to type because of the vibration [even reading was a minor problem because the vibration made focussing difficult] . Since the train does get priority over other trains and is less likely to be delayed than regular trains, I might take it in a emergency but it isn't worth the steep price difference for normal travel without an expense account.

Because of the  shaky tray and the dangerous electrical connections I decided against using my laptop  on the train to write up notes of the trip. Instead,  I was putting together some impressions and mental images I had been getting from Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn the past 2 days. One was positive:  compared even to a relatively sophisticated place like Washington, how lively and vibrant Manhattan is, pulsating with street life. One was neutral: the extremely high proportion of Asians in the crowds I passed on the street or rode with on the subway and busses.