DAY #6: LOWER MANHATTAN & CHELSEA

        As I headed to Penn Station I was a bit nervous and I didn’t know what to expect since Mike said we were headed to the Wall Street Protest. Before heading to Wall Street, we made a stop to Trinity Church.

Trinity Church is probably New York’s most famous house of worship, because of its dramatic setting (BG, 65). The first Trinity Church building consisted of a modest rectangular structure with a gambrel roof and small porch that was constructed in 1968. Also, the church is 79ft wide and 166ft long; its tower including the spire stands 281ft above the ground and for many years it was the highest point in Lower Manhattan (BG, 65). In front of Trinity Church was the root of a tree sculpture created by the falling towers of 9/11.
The tree itself was ripped out of the ground. The artist made a sculpture of the tree and made a large sculpture called Trinity Root to stand as a testament to life, humanity and the positive response to the catastrophe.

                               We later headed down to Wall Street and the Occupy Wall street protesters. Wall St is a short street, about a third of a mile long, which runs between Broadway and the East River (BG, 64). Wall St gets its name from a wall, erected in 1653 during Peter Stuyvesant’s tenure, which stretched river to river at the northern edge of the settlement, ostensibly to protect the Dutch town from its British neighbors (BG, 64).
Mike’s good friend from college gave us background information on what was going on and the reason why protesters are upset. He stated capitalist shift to working people and the poor. Also, I was surprised to hear that the protest was small until the police enforcement got pepper spray on some of the protesters.This made people angry and got more people to gather and protest and it continues to grow. He gave us statistics that I was extremely surprised about, he said the government states that the richest 1% of this country owns more than the bottom 95%, which means only that 1% own so much power. He also stated how 26 million people in this country are unemployed.

These statistics scare me because I will soon be graduating from college and I am afraid I will be in the pool of people who are unemployed due to our economy. My classmates and I got to speak to an extremely passionate protester who explained to us the meaning of banks. He said that usually the more people that give money for the bank the lower the fees. He stated that banks use 4% from our banks interest, which ends up losing the value of the money and people need to be protected from currency. He finished with saying how capitalism works and if you make mistakes in the market you end up failing. He was wearing a Capitalism is freedom shirt and suggested us to look for more information on the website.

        We then headed to the world trade center area and observed the construction and the new buildings in the area. The World Trade Center takes New York City’s skyline.

We got to go inside the World’s Financial Center, where I viewed the beautiful palm trees inside the building and the view of where the Twin Towers were located was extremely sad. The hub of Battery Park City is the World Financial Center, whose five towers were designed by the firm of Cesar Pelli between 1985 and 1988 (BG, 61). We made a quick stop to St Paul’s chapel which was an emotional tribute to 9/11. I couldn’t imagine how it felt watching this horrible memory from the towers falling right in front of the St Paul’s Chapel.

St Paul’s Chapel opened in 1766 as Manhattan’s oldest public building in continuous use and a place where George Washington worshiped and 9/11 recovery workers received round-the-clock-care. After the World Trade Center disaster, the chapel served both as a place of refuge for workers at Ground Zero and a temporary memorial for visitors, who attached messages and memorials to the fence in front of the church (BG, 77).

        After our exploration around the World Trade Center area we headed towards Chelsea. Our walk to Chelsea was long and exhausting, especially since many of us were hungry and I was wearing rain boots which was slowing me down because the weather out of nowhere warmed up. We made our first stop to the Poets House which is national poetry library and literary center that invited poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry. Our poetry resources and literary events document the wealth and diversity of modern poetry, and stimulate public dialogue on issue of poetry in culture. Our class got to sit down and relax to read some book in the Poet House.

We later walked through the piers of Chelsea to finally be able to grab something to eat. The original deep-water Chelsea Piers were designed by Warren & Wetmore; the architects of Grand Central Terminal, to accommodate the large transatlantic liners build around the turn of the 20th century (BG, 188). We got to get something to eat in the Meat Packing District. Our professors explained how The Meat Packing District in the 80’s and 90’s had a reputation of having drugs and prostitution and is now gentrified and developed. The meat packing industry remains and still gives the neighborhood its working class edge, it gentrified rapidly during the 1990’s with stylish bars and restaurants, high concept clothing and design stores, and art galleries spilling south from Chelsea (BG, 184). After finishing our lunch we head to the High Line.
The High Line was originally constructed in the 1930s, to lift dangerous freight trains off Manhattan’s streets. The High Line was built not directly over the avenue but mid-block, between buildings or right through them (BG, 188).

                                        Our last stop of the day was to the Chelsea art galleries. Like the Meat Packing District, Chelsea has undergone rapid change in the past decade, its western reaches transformed from an industrial neighborhood once blighted by both street level and elevated railroads to the city’s new Soho, its street enlivened by art galleries, which consists of more than 200 of them, and chic shops (BG, 186). We stopped at about 10 different art galleries, each one consisted of different art work, unique and very strange looking.

Art galleries are not only to be able to buy the art work but also analyze the meaning and hard work behind it. After exploring some of the different galleries it was time to head home. I was glad to be able to explore so many things in one day, and I can’t believe I learned so much in such little time, next Friday is our last class which is extremely upsetting.