Lady Liberty and All the Tourist Things

August 13, 2016:

"Lady Liberty and All the Tourist Things" is a new comic I'm writing starring TessAndrea - the greatest superhero team of all time, probably!

We were excited for the chance to escape the heat on the water of the Hudson River and taking the cruise around the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island turned out to be one of the more satisfying tourist activities we engaged in.

While we walked from the subway station near Times Square to the ferry terminal, we crossed paths with a number of homeless people, and the heat at the time was unbearable. According to the NYC Coalition for the Homeless, "In July 2016, there were 60,456 homeless people, including 15,156 homeless families with 23,425 homeless children, sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. Families comprise just over three-quarters of the homeless shelter population." One of the most heart-wrenching moments was seeing a child laid out on the hot pavement with his eyes closed. Our hearts were so broken, and we were stuck in the bind that I always feel as a person privileged by financial wealth. Do we give money or food to temporarily fix the problem? Or do we condemn the delivery of services meant to be provided by our tax dollars in the hopes that our criticisms will improve their delivery? In other words, do we respond to the individual humanity of the person confronting our comfort? Or do we look at this as a systemic problems and seek further reaching fixes? And what happens when the economic climate created by inherent imbalances in capitalism increase poverty and make it impossible for social services to keep up with the demand for services? I have no idea what solutions their might be to these questions and I am open to perspectives that might be more suited to answering them.

We waited a while to board the boat with Circle Line Cruises, part of NYC Tourist pass, but the breeze coming from the river was divine and before long we were sitting on the covered deck at the top, preparing to see Lady Liberty. She was a gift from the French after the French-American friendship was established during the American Revolution. Long live the Republic! We consumed our cheese and hummus sandwiches, apples, trail mix and juice boxes greedily as the tourists around us took trips to the canteen to buy overpriced junk food. We heard tons about the different piers and buildings along the harbour that I can't remember because it was not particularly interesting or relevant to anyone who isn't a NYC building afficianado, no doubt.

Eventually, we ventured out onto the lower deck to take in some of the views.

You can tell by the genuine smiles that we could feel the oppressive heat and that we were genuinely enjoying our ridiculous hipster photoshoot. So #instaready.

In order to pass the afternoon in relative comfort, we decided to take advantage of our Big Bus Tour pass and do the Uptown loop that we hadn't yet done, so we had an opportunity to learn about the ways that gentrification had resulted in vacant tenement buildings in the neighbours to the North of Central Park. Basically, every upper class group lived to the north of wherever everyone else was living in NYC throughout history. And so basically, as the population grew and more and more people started moving into the homes in the wealthy part of town, the wealthy continued moving north. Eventually, speculators tried to profit from this trend by building massive numbers of tenement buildings north of the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side, but they were unpleasantly surprised when the trend didn't continue, and the wealthy stayed where they were. The property owners now had huge investments that were essentially worthless, so they divided them up and sold them very cheaply to the poor - predominantly Black and Latino citizens. Harlem was one of these communities where the Apollo theatre is located - I geeked out a bit because every amazing jazz artist played there, including Duke Ellington.

Not sure how I feel about his "muses" being a bunch of naked women, but Duke Ellington is bae.

We learned that the Upper West Side, while still wealthy compared to many other parts of NYC, is more of a mixed bag socioeconomically. Our tour guide told us that this is the neighbourhood where he grew up, and that kids from all different classes mixed at school without clear lines drawn the way they are painted in shows like Gossip Girl which are set in the Upper East Side.

 

Our final destination on this tour was the Guggenheim Museum, another house of modern art. (Poor Andrea.)

Unfortunately, we didn't understand that the fancy swirly part of the museum is the special exhibit, not the permanent collection, so we trudged from section to section wondering when it would stop being art by the same artist. We'd had our fill of this person on the very top floor and the exhibit was tedious. By the time we found the permanent collection, Andrea was getting pretty miserable, and I was also tired. My appetite for modern art is insatiable (maybe this will be my character's super power?) but I convinced her to do a "speed round" tour with me so that I could see what there was to see. We walked across Central Park back to our hostel and found some restaurants on Amsterdam Ave. 

I had the greatest mac and cheese of my life at the Amsterdam Tavern. This is saying something. I recently told a new acquaintance at a wedding that at my own fictional future wedding, everyone would be served mac and cheese. It would be my last meal on death row. But I would request that it be made by the chef that works at this tavern because it was sublime. Andrea's food might have been good, too, but who cares?

Our final trek for the day was the Night Tour to Brooklyn to see the Manhattan Skyline. We made it to the starting point for the tour in Times Square with more than a half hour before the "final" tour. 

 

The smile of someone who is actually just extremely sweaty and mad.

The line was two blocks long. We waited forty minutes in the heat which seemed to amplify as the sun went down. Everyone in line was miserable. When we finally got within throwing distance of the next bus, we watched impatiently as people refused to get on the bus because they wanted to be on the top level. We just wanted to be in the air conditioning. There were claims that they had been told they couldn't get on until that point when we decided to just skip the line and get on. We were met with indignation, but we were beyond caring about strangers at this point. The bus was fogged up, so despite the brilliance of our tour guide who made the downtown make so much more sense to me, we couldn't see much at all. Our only photos of the skyline were blurs of lights, but we were sort of able to appreciate how beautiful it was. When we got back to Times Square, the thought of waiting in line to get to the top of the Empire State Building (which did not include a fast pass option) was unbearable so we went back to our hostel and to bed.