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So, on Saturday... Nancy and Jeremy and I went into New York for the day...
| IBM is sponsoring a special exhibit at Lincoln Center -- video on 42 big
flat panel monitors -- all about making a Smarter Planet -- then the monitors
all turn into touch-control computer screens letting you explore the topic. |
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Nancy took the above photograph of the rest of us... the hallway leaving the exhibit had a wall
listing various major achievements and inventions from IBM over the past 100 years.
(Jeremy, me, Adam, Sam, Milo, Leah.)
One of the things I learned -- watching Sam and Milo control the touch-screens
with absolute intuitive ease -- is that for today's children interacting
with the latest high tech gadgetry is like turning on a light switch was
for us when we were kids.
[A moment for grandfatherly bragging -- Sam was rotating an image of the
globe with his hands and as each continent came into view, he would tell
me "Now that's North America" and "And that's Asia"
-- and Milo was so slick and at easy as he controlled the action on a screen
that towered above him, but of course these were the same movements his
fingers would make on Adam & Leah's iPod or their iPhones. Okay, end
grandfatherly bragging moment.]
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| Sam & Milo & Jeremy by the fountains at Lincoln Center |
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| Milo & Jeremy (Jeremy had been really looking forward to spending time
as Uncle Jeremy |
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| They were having a good time together. |
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| Of course Grandpa had to get in the game as well... |
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And then -- after walking for miles and miles (okay, not quite
that far, but from around 65th Street down to 30th Street is a pretty good walk). We were
headed for High Line Park -- The High Line --
which is one of those totally marvelous things about New York City.
(The photo above -- taken from the High Line -- shows a roller skating
park that has filled a vacant lot at the intersection of W30th and 10th
Avenue. Underneath the section of High Line on the right of the picture
are several food vendor wagons and trucks and a lot of picnic tables for
their customers.)
From about the Civil War era into the early 20th century, this had been
a heavily industrial area of Manhattan, an area served by railroads that
ran at street level, across streets and along streets, with an astounding
number of accidents and a very high death rate from those accidents. In
1929, that was ended by having an elevated railroad built to replace the
street level train traffic -- at a cost of 150 million dollars (about two
billion in today's dollars). The elevated railroad did not travel along
the streets, putting them into daytime twilight; it ran through the middle
of blocks, just crossing streets, with siding tracks that entered factories
and warehouses more than thirty feet above ground. This was a great success
in its day, but by the 1960s competition from the trucking industry and
New York City factories relocating to less expensive places had caused
the rail freight business on this line to decline. The last train on the
High Line ran in 1980. In the 1990s there were proposals to tear down this
abandoned elevated railroad -- but then in 1999 Friends of the High Line
was founded -- and they proposed saving and restoring it for use as public
space. After several years of effort (and construction and repair, etc.)
section 1 (from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street was opened -- and
this June section 2, from West 20th Street to West 30th Street was opened.
(There is yet another section, still in the design and negotiations stage,
that it is hoped will be opened to the public in a few more years.) |
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Much of the High Line has plants growing on one side or the other -- or
both.
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Here Leah and Sam are near a very strange looking building. That is not
an optical illusion or a camera trick -- the building was designed with
those wiggles and curves in it. I must admit that, although I generally
find 19th century architecture to be more visually appealing than 21st
century abstractions, that building does amuse me..
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Where possible along the High Line, they have preserved some of the original
railroad tracks as a reminder of its origins... and that even though you
are three floors up, you are following train tracks.. |
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Down around West 23rd Street there is a wide area -- complete with an ice
cream sandwich vendor, whose wares are being enjoyed by our intrepid travelers...
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Sam and Milo and Leah -- and that is Jeremy stretched out on the grass
behind them. (Jeremy had been out very late Friday night.)
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And this is a view from the High Line looking down on West 23rd Street
toward the intersection with 10th Avenue. And this is where Nancy and Jeremy
and I said goodbye and went down the stairs to the street below to flag
down a taxi on 10th Ave. to get to Grand Central Station and start our
journey back home.
And on Sunday I made it through the CVS Downtown 5K faster than I had run the NK5K the previous
weekend and also faster than I had run the CVS 5K last year. (Note that was a comparison -- I
said I was faster than last time -- I'm not saying I was actually fast.)
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