The train up was less than half filled; I took it through to Penn Station and then backtracked on the Tubes to Pavonia Avenue. Since I'm still not walking the way I used to, besides buying a Tubes/PATH flash pass for crossing the river, I also got a daily pass for the subways and busses in New York.

I'm not going to try to keep things in chronological order, just in the order they occur to me. Besides photographing the Tubes stations, some of the things I did / sights I saw / things I noticed were:

Manhattan was different than when I had been there in October. Then the residential parts, like 9th and 2nd Avenues, were normal but the tourist sections like 5th Avenue and Times Square, were pretty empty. This time the residential sections, where I spent most of my time, were still normal and the tourist sections, although not jammed shoulder to shoulder, were closer to normal. Rockefeller Center, the Channel Gardens, 5th Avenue in the 40s and 50s with the department store window displays were lively and crowded. A side note, when I stopped in at the cathedral, the confession line was half a block long. It was lunch time but still it was several days away from any Holy Day; I wondered if there was any connection to the terrorist attacks,

 The Dahesh Museum of Art. is a relatively new art museum and I suspect most of you haven't heard about it. It's a small private museum on Fifth Avenue above the fancy Scribner's bookstore and it focusses on academic art, art before the impressionists and expressionists. It's blurb says it's the "only museum in America dedicated to collecting and exhibiting 19th- and early 20th-century European academic art, which is the continuation of the great Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo traditions in the visual arts". It's a small museum which, at least when I was there had a comfortably small crowd. Art students seemed to be in the majority. It displays Bierstadt - David - Ingres - Delacroix type art. and the special exhibit was "Telling Tales II: Religious Images in 19th-Century Academic Art ".

I took the Madison Avenue bus up to 86th Street since I noticed that you actually get out on 85th, I walked over to Regis. This was the side with the student entrance to the school, where you walk through the tunnel into the inner courtyard, feeling like you're going into a state prison. On the other hand, now that I'm an adult and don't have to go there, I can see that going to school in a neo-renaissance palazzo is certainly aesthetically more pleasant than going to the glass and  brick boxes people have to use now. And it was a surprise to see was how much nicer the block and the building looked. The little saplings have grown into trees and more have been planted so it looks like a street in London or Paris. 

At 86th and 5th, in one of the former mansions, is a new museum that I think just opened a few days before my visit: the Neue Galerie. Honestly, I went to it , as well as to the Goethe Haus later on, to stake my claim to an IRS deduction for the trip. But it is an interesting museum. It's German and Austrian art from the Sezession to [almost] the present: Blauer Reiter, Brücke, Beckmann, Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, etc. There's a klein aber fein gift shop with a deep collection of Central  European art books and a cafe called something like Sabarsky which, as far as I can figure out, may be the name of one of the founders [although the museum is mainly supported by the Esteé Lauder company - I had thought it was the Austrian Lauda Airlines --- and was corrected] . The cafe looked very Viennese-y and I wanted to have coffee and cake, but not only was there a line to get in, there was a waiting list to get onto the line. Except for me, the clientele at the museum appeared rich and glitzy. 

It was only a few blocks walk down 5th Avenue to the Goethe Haus, during which I was greeted by several doormen [they didn't do that in high school or - Gene - did they??] and found out it was the Goethe Haus' staff usual 3¼ hour lunch time and also that the person I normally deal with had just retired. So I just got some material for my classes. 

The day was sunny and in the very high 60s but I decided against walking back downtown through the park the way I usually do and took the cross-town and downtown busses . Passing by Lincoln Center on a bus, instead of the usual way on the subway, I remembered how ugly and cheap I had found its architecture when it was first built. It hasn't gotten any better. 

I went to another branch of the German restaurant Hello Berlin, this is the one they call the beer garden, on 10th Avenue just above 44th. Because I was going to be having a full supper I just wanted large bowl of soup. I was really longing for the Blumenkohlsuppe which you seldom get here but this wasn't the day they made it, so I ordered the potato soup with wurst: Brat, Weiß, Bock and Wiener, all mixed up and I had a small Bitburger Pils. The cafe version off 9th Avenue is physically nicer [the food is the same] but this branch is larger and would be less hectic with a crowd. Luckily I was there past normal lunch time and it was quiet. 

You know about the three or four new North River ferries and the ones from Atlantic Highlands and the shore that have begun running to Manhattan over the last few years. They're not the large, romantic, double ended, wooden, railroad ferries that we were used to. These are relatively small, maybe 300 passengers, cabin cruiser-like boat. Two new ferries from the foot of Pavonia Avenue had just gone into service this week and were free for the first week. That was especially nice, since although the hotel I was staying at is only about 25 to 50 feet from the Newport Pavonia Tubes station, the fare, even with the discount, is a buck 36 and going back and forth to Manhattan several times a day, as I was doing, can start adding up. So I took advantage of the free ferry service whenever possible. They start, theoretically, at the Marriott and the Tubes station but because of construction you have to walk about 2 blocks to get to the pier and then out another two blocks to the end of the pier where the boats tie up. You're next to and almost as far out as the airshaft for the Holland Tunnel. Since the weather was nice quite a few mothers were pushing strollers and walking toddlers out for a ferry ride. 

 One route runs to West 38th Street near the Javits Convention Center where there's a series of free shuttle busses that run from the ferries stop to the near West side and the East 50s by Rockefeller Center. The downtown ferry doesn't run to the usual destination at the World Financial Center marina because of all the work being done on the World Trade Center. Instead it goes down the river past the fireboat station at the Battery and ties up on a large long long [long] barge that has five or six slips. Since it crosses almost all the way over the river as it leaves Jersey City, you run down very close to the Manhattan shore and get a different perspective of the skyline.

After getting washed and changed at the hotel, I crossed back to Manhattan on the downtown line and experienced the first problem that was caused as the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. I had intended to take a bus up to the Village, since I knew the Westside IRT was closed below Fulton Street. But there was bedlam at the Battery; there weren't any busses I could find [it was dark by now] and I decided to walk up to Bowling Green and get a subway there. I figured all the rush hour traffic would be going out from Manhattan to Staten Island so it wouldn't be too bad. I was wrong.

At Bowling Green the police were lined up keeping people from climbing over each other to get into the IRT; after waiting on line about 10 minutes, I gave up and started to walk uptown; the BMT station was only a few blocks but that line wouldn't take me where I was going so I wound up at hectic Fulton Street where I was able to get on the IRT. If anyone had asked me what are the most complicated New York stations, I would have said Union Square, Times Square and Grand Central. But this reminded me of all I had forgotten: Fulton Street is as messy as those three are and when I was photographing at 14th Street that junction of the Tubes, the IND and the 14th Street BMT was also a mutileveled warren.

I went to my "usual" restaurant on W 4th Street where I go out of tradition and had the special manicotti dinner with which, for some reason, I wound up with three appetizers, besides the desert and the tea. I find the place pleasant and comfortable but I think most of you would not be wild about it. I go to it out of tradition . It was uncrowded since it was early; I was eating early because my show had an early curtain.

Again it was annoying not to walk to the theater, because the short distance from 7th Avenue and West 4th Street to 1st Avenue and 14th street took forever by bus. The busses were jammed and made a lot of stops so I got to the theater with only about 5 minutes to spare.

It was a concert version [costumes but no scenery, actors holding script books and not dancing] of Cole Porter's "50 Million Frenchmen" at the 14th Street Y. There was cast of 18 [all Equity] actors, none of whose names I recognized. Instead of an orchestra there was just the piano which still actually sounded like an orchestra. There were both songs that had been cut from the score before the original production opened in 1931 as well as the songs that had replaced them and some songs that had been interpolated after the opening, so there was a lot of music.

Probably the only songs that most people would be familiar with were "You Do Something to Me", "Let's Step Out", "Find Me a Primitive Man", and "The Tale of the Oyster". The performers were all good, although not all especially attractive. One reason the show was being presented in a concert version is that the book was so so terrible that it probably couldn't succeed as a full-scale Broadway production without a different book. A corn-fed Indiana family goes to Paris where a rich American boy falls in love with the daughter but because of a bet with his best friend has to make believe he has no money and becomes a gigolo. The family is accompanied by the loose girlfriend of the daughter who wants to become depraved in Paris and run away from the boy back home who is chasing her. A nymphomaniac tries to outdo her in the search for sexual depravity. It has a happy ending.

The show ended around 10:30 and I decided it would be too much to do anything more so I went back to the hotel for the night.

The next day was almost exclusively devoted to photography but I'll tell some of the non-photographic things.  Because of the problems with the subways and even the Brooklyn battery tunnel after the terrorist attacks on New York, the city is now running a free ferry service between Whitehall and the Brooklyn Army Terminal. . It runs down the east side of Governor's Island, not the west side as we're used to from the Staten Island ferry and the excursion boats; so it was like seeing the dark side of the moon. On the left is the Brooklyn waterfront, ugly and industrial, but the East side of Governors Island, like the West side is green, filled with little white houses houses with picket fences, right out of Middle America. And the ferry run so close to it that you get an extremely attractive view. A minor drawback is that it's the fairly long walk from the Brooklyn ferry landing up to the subway station to get back to Manhattan.

On the boat a woman, wearing an orange safety vest festooned with a lot of medals and gewgaws and a toy construction helmet began talking to me. Because of her outfit I first thought she was unbalanced but it turned out her clothes were from her profession. She was an executive / operative with a big labor union in the construction trades. She'd come to NY from the Midwest about 30 years ago and was very emotional about the terrorist attacks. She really surprised me by saying that she had voted for Gore because he had promised a stronger OSHA than Bush would promise but that now she was glad Gore had lost. She said every time Bush came on television, she thanked God that Gore had lost since she believed Gore would have been talking and negotiating and dealing. She said the only thing that frightened her was that Bush might weaken.

Since it was a long ferry ride back to Manhattan and I'd be downtown when I wanted to be uptown, I decided to walk from the ferry to the 4th Avenue BMT in Brooklyn. Right after I got back from new York,  I was talking to Gene about the trip and we both noted that although we had a great advantage in growing up in that we could go anywhere we wanted and do what ever we wanted without having a car, there was a price we paid [and New Yorkers still do] that I had forgotten about. Inconvenience of transferring from one mode of public transportation to another [and maybe to yet another].

For example, the walk from the Brooklyn ferry to the BMT station was about a quarter of a mile and up hill; the walk from the street to the ferry landing at Pavonia Avenue was about three blocks out along a pier, nice on the days I was there but lousy in the cold or the heat or the rain. Then you transferred to a subway and then maybe to another subway. My cousins tell me they think nothing of commuting 2 hours each way to work in Manhattan. When I was doing that commuting, it was 20 to 30 minutes but I'm out-priced now. The [40 story] apartment buildings on Pavonia Avenue had efficiencies for $1,600 a month and 2 bedrooms in the $3,000+ range. Also I had never noticed all the walking that I had done automatically and unthinkingly when I was living there and going to high school. I have been really spoiled by the ease of commuting and getting around in Washington area -- except. of course, that you pay the high price of having to drive a car.

And speaking of high rise and high priced apartments: When the ferry pulls out from Pavonia Avenue you see about 6 to 8 buildings ranging from 25 to 40 stories, then about 8 blocks to the south at Harborside there's a lot of construction of equally high buildings and then about 4 more blocks south a half dozen thirty story buildings at Exchange place with an equal number of new ones going up. All this was underway even before the terrorist attacks. What's odd is that in the past when you looked west from the river you saw the end of the palisades and Jersey City Heights. Now they're obscured by the skyscrapers.

But I'm wandering off whatever vague topic I was on. While photographing the Tubes stations , I noticed that the crowds in the non rush hours were less than they had been in October. But in the rush hours the trains still run through Christopher Street southbound in the morning without stopping and northbound in the afternoon without stopping, the way they used to do under the Soviet sector of Berlin. You can't get into the station in the morning and you can't get out of it in the afternoon. Cops are stationed to prevent people from getting trampled by the crowds getting in and out of the station. As you remember, Christopher and Ninth Streets each have only one exit/entrance: Ninth Street is through that long narrow winding tunnel; Christopher exits through the one narrow stairwell with several turns. You've got to add that on to your commute, even in normal times; it really slows things up in abnormally crowded times like now.

The second afternoon, after going to the Ukrainian Museum on East 7th, I passed by one Polish restaurant, the Polonia, but I had lunch at a second Polish restaurant on 1st Avenue, around 7th Street, Christine's. It was wonderful; a smallish place, with a little bar in the back. Cheerfully but not kitchily decorated. Talkative and beautiful blonde Polish waitresses. Although there was golumbki and pierogi on the menu, the lunch specials were spinach pierogi as well as spinach blintzes, I really wasn't in the mood for them right then. So I  got cream of mushroom barley soup and a roast pork sandwich, both very good. The clientele was old schlumpy people, local shoppers, businessmen working at computers, out of work [apparent] actors.

Walking up First Avenue after lunch, I passed a deli selling homemade pierogi, golumbki, barszt, kiszka and kasha but I knew that I would worry that it wouldn't keep for the 8 or 9 hours until I reached home and a refrigerator. Maybe the next time, if I go by car.

Earlier I had stopped at some bakeries and bought a babka at one of them. But something came back to me. Several of the butchers and delis  had small fresh bakery sections, but the items hadn't been baked on the premises. I began thinking, yes, that was in NYC but not in Jersey City. But then I remembered there had been a few butchers and delis in Jersey City that also had these trucked-in bakery items, a "New York style" bakery ,  but my family didn't patronize them; we went to the regular bakeries.

Later in the afternoon I took an 8th Street cross-town bus back from photographing the Tubes to 1st Avenue and had tea and a snack in a small cafe on 1st around 10th Street. I was sitting at an open window looking over the side street - the weather was clear and in the 60s looking at the passing scene. The tea was ordinary, although a big pot, but the pastry was wonderful: something like a soft coconut macaroon covered with the filling that's in banana cream pie.

 As I said, there has been a really big building boom at both Pavonia Avenue and at Exchange Place and now the stretch between them is also filling up. The Newport shopping mall, just opposite the hotel, is much bigger than I remembered it, they must have expanded it. It's really a very large suburban shopping mall dropped into Jersey City at the Tubes station; the only negative thing about it is the ugly uninviting outside, but it looks like the plan is to have buildings built up abutting it so you won't even see the outside walls of the mall in a few years. Henderson Street is now called Manila Boulevard; Washington Street has been extended northwards from Newark Avenue under the name Washington Boulevard and that's where the Marriott and the Double Tree Hotels are located: the Marriott at the Pavonia Tubes station, the Double Tree about 2 blocks further down; the Candlewood Inn Suites about 3 or 4 blocks further down on 2nd Street, about 2 blocks from the Grove Street Tubes station. The federal rate at the Marriott was $89; at the Double Tree it was $79 and the Candlewood, which is an apartment with a kitchen, was $99 as a federal rate. I doubt that the prices will stay that low when the tourists start returning to NY. [Henry/George: If you go by car it's $4 to park at Double Tree but $12 to park at the Marriott. Henry: the Polish restaurant on Grove Street is called Tania's .] You can also use the trolley which runs from the Marriott and the shopping center to Exchange Place [and on to Bayonne and the West Side].

The train back began in NY instead of Boston but it still looked mobbed. I used the back stairs to get on the train early [which also avoided security which many other people were doing --- o, the farce of our security checks and safety] and got a seat. But many people didn't. There were standees who I thought would get off at Metro Park, since I thought they probably were commuters. They didn't get off. Then I thought they'd get off in Philadelphia, they didn't but more got on. The train had standees until after Baltimore.

The conductor told me they need 7 or 8 cars minimum and that Amtrak only supplies six cars.Iasked him, if I could have gotten an emptier train by leaving earlier or later but he said that on Fridays there was no way to get a comfortable regular train since Amtrak was shorting cars on all the trains. To be guaranteed a seat on a Friday or Sunday, you have to use the Acela Express which charges around $249 !!! for a round trip. The temperature in all the cars was hot and humid all the way down; the conductor said that ifIhad taken an earlier or later train the chances would have been 50-50 to get an overheated train or a cold drafty one.

As I said, my main purpose was to make photographs for my website. I've gotten half the pictures back and expect the second half in a few days. It will take awhile to optimize the pictures and to re-write the text. When everything is posted, I'll let you know.