Manhattan: West Side

   Our first stop of the day was Herald Square, to get there we walked through crowds of people walking the city sidewalks and crossing the very busy streets filled with taxi drivers.  Herald Square, officially named Avenue of the Americas.  Herald Square has been operated by the 34th Street Partnership, a Business Improvement District operating over thirty one blocks in midtown Manhattan.  The 34th Street Partnership provides sanitary and security services, maintains the trees, gardens, and planters, and produces events, product launches, and photo shoots.  They are also responsible for adding movable chairs, tables, and umbrellas, to the parks.  This area is famous for its retail, the most notable is the Macy's flagship department store, the largest in the United States.

   We then headed a few blocks up to the heart of Manhattan, Times Square.  Before 1904, Times Square was known as Longacre Square.  It was dominated by house exchanges, carriage factories, stables, and black smiths'.  In 1904 the subway arrives along with the New York Times, whose Publisher persuaded the city to rename the are for his newspaper, perhaps in competition with Herald Square(Our first destination).

The Depression devastated Broadway.  Many legitimate theaters converted into Burlesque theaters on to movie houses whose offerings deteriorated from Hollywood hits, to second-run movies, to X-Rated Pornography.  The turn around began in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The state took over several historic theatre's on 42nd street and formed the New 42nd street, a non-profit organization, to oversee their redevelopment.  Today Times Square is cleaner, safer, more profitable, and much more visitor friendly( as many as 20 million tourists visit annually), than it was a decade ago.

   New Year's Eve in Times Square celebration have been a feature of city life since 1904, when Times Publisher Adolph Ochs celebrated the papers' arrival along with the New Year with annual ll day festival and a street level fireworks display.  Two years later the Police Banned the fireworks display.  Adolph responded by lowering a wooden and iron ball illuminated with one hundred twenty five watt light bulbs from the buildings flagpole.  During the 1980's the ball was converted into a Big Apple, with the addition of red light bulbs and a green stem.  The present crystal ball, built like a geodesic sphere, was inaugurated in 2000 for the coming of the new millennium.







We walked over to Rockefeller Center, a complex of commercial buildings, theatre's, plazas, underground concourses, and shops.  It is the world's largest privately-owned business and entertainment center.  Today it remains a visual icon and a major tourist attraction destination.  The first building constructed at Rockefeller Center is still its most famous, The GE Building.  Major tenants are the conglomerate General Electric and NBC, one of its divisions.







The''Cycle of Sound'', part of Lee Lawrie's famous Wisdom relief (1933), outside the entrance of the GE Building.

Also their is the Rainbow Room on the sixty fifth floor.  The nightclub opened in 1934, the first dining spot at the top of the skyscraper, and through the years celebrated for its view and handsome decor. Another landmark across the street is Radio City Music Hall was the largest theater when it opened in 1932.  It remains a masterpiece of Art Deco decoration.



The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is one of the city's premier cultural institutions, not only of modern painting and sculpture but also drawing, design, photography, and film.  Three panels of Claude Monet's Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond stretch across one wall.  Between the earl 1890's and the end of his life in 1926, Monet was preoccupied with several series of paintings of the pond in his garden at Giverny.






The Starry Night, by Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh.  The painting depicts the view outside his sanitarium room window at night, although it was painted from memory during the day.

We then stopped for a delicious Thai food lunch at a restaurant called Yum Yum located in Hell'sKitchen.  I has the steamed dumplings which were very good, and for my meal I had the chicken fried rice that filled me right up, for our next part of the day, Harlem.

In the 1920's, great artistic activity, as writers, artists, and intellectuals made the pilgrimage to Harlem, by then the capital of black America.  The Harlem Renaissance, usually considered the brief period time from 1924 until the stock market crash of 1929, saw the flowering of black literature, art, music, and political thinking.  During the cilil rights era of the 1950's and 60's, Harlem was a focus of political and social activity.

In 1934, The Famous Apollo Theater opened to black audiences.  The same year the theater began offering its famous Amateur Nights, which launched the careers of Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, and Diana Ross.  In the 1970's the theater fell on hard times and in 1991 the state of New York bought it and the Apollo is now run as a not-for-profit foundation, drawing more than a million visitors each year.

After visiting Harlem we ran through Morningside Park.  The park occupies about thirty acres, including a rocky cliff of Manhattan Schist, which plunges down to the Harlem Plain.  After running many flights of stairs we all decide to sit at the top and take a nice breather.

Then we walked a few blocks down to see the General Grant National Memorial.  Also known as Grant's Tomb is the imposing resting place of the victorious commander of the Union forces in the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia Dent Grant.











Our last stop of the day was to Columbia University, where we took a nice walk around the campus.  The University was founded in 1754, it is a private Ivy League University.  It is known for its professional schools- medicine, law, business, education, journalism, and architecture.  Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States.