A Greyhound on the Hudson River line

It's time for another post. I know I've promised a discourse on the philosophical significance of The Great Gatsby, and I also still need to explain how my reflections on the end of John's gospel disprove the Protestant Reformation. But those are fairly weighty subjects, and I appreciate your patience.

For now, it's come to my attention that I haven't blogged at all yet about New York itself--this city that I've already come to love. I've had the opportunity this weekend to see a bit more of it, so this seems as good a time as any. The following observations have no particular unifying theme, and I promise that any prescient nuggets of sociological or philosophical wisdom that may emerge are completely accidental.

Riverside Park: Probably my favorite place in the city. My apartment is on the far west end of Manhattan island (around 63rd street), so I have a very nice view of the Hudson River when I stick my head out my window. I'm a short walk away from Riverside Park (the park along the river, if you haven't figured it out), which is a wonderful place to go for a stroll, especially around sunset. Stroll out on one of the piers, and you have a clean view of the George Washington Bridge to your right and downtown Manhattan to your left. It's just sweet.

Although maybe I misspoke. Riverside Park is best known as the place where all the beautiful liberal yuppies on the Upper West Side go to walk their dogs and push their strollers. It's a wonderful park, to be sure, but it technically only starts north of 72nd street. The area I'm more stricken with is the Hudson River Park, which stretches intermittently along the river from 72nd street down to lower Manhattan. I haven't explored the length of it, but at least the part near my place has a more, well, romantic quality to it. It's still pretty and safe (so far as I can tell), and there's lots of nice places to sit and look at the river, but there's also more of a gothic element. There's the waste treatment facility right next to the old creepy-looking parking garage, the basketball hoops and bike path directly underneath the raised highway, and a decaying wooden half-sunken structure of some sort sticking out into the water. I just wish the benches weren't so new.

Governor's Island: May give Riverside Park a run for its money. I just visited today for the first time. It's a national monument on the site of a former fort, military barracks and arsenal about 800 feet southeast of Manhattan island. It's also the best view you can find of the lower Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn Heights skyline, the Jersey City skyline, and the Statue of Liberty. And it's completely free, including the ferry to get there.

Currently only the top half of the island is open to the public, but the city recently decided to develop the rest into some kind of recreation area. They've narrowed the proposals down to five, some of which look really weird.

A side note: even though I grew up in Connecticut, today was the first time I'd ever seen the Statue of Liberty. It actually gave me goosebumps. My only previous experience with Lady Liberty had been through movies about turn-of-the-century immigration, notably The Godfather, Part II and An American Tail. There's something both comforting and challenging in realizing that she's still there.

Speaking of which, here's an article by the beautiful Peggy Noonan on her family's immigrant experience. For all her weaknesses in straight punditry--or perhaps because of them--this is the kind of piece that Peggy can write as well as anyone else alive.

And speaking of the lower Manhattan skyline...

I've had a few opportunities to pass by ground zero in my comings and goings around the city. It's a strange place, and I think it would do me good to linger and pray there one of these days. Quite soon after it happened, I filed 9/11 away in my mind as a significant historical event, but it's hard to escape the physical reality of what happened when you're standing right next to a big pit. Hmmm. There used to be two giant towers here.

It's especially good perspective given what's been going on in Britain recently. I may be in the news business, but it's so much more that just news. This is a perspective I've sensed in some of the real New Yorkers I've gotten to know, especially at the Post editorial page, and it says something about journalism as a vocation. Perhaps more on that later.

Also relevant to the physical reality of ground zero is that it's still right in the middle of the downtown financial district, so there's thousands of people passing by every day just in the normal course of their own business. And there's finally construction going on there--and just in time, because downtown is booming and it needs more office space. Which seems appropriate, although I'm not going to pretend I can speak to how until I've lived here a lot longer.

But one final comment on ground zero. So far as I understand it, there's really no good reason why construction of the new tower couldn't have started years ago, and I've heard it suggested that the delays and all the fights about memorials and the new tower's design and such have gradually transformed ground zero from a monument to American heroism and toughness into a monument to American bureaucratic incompetence.

I don't know about that. I'm reminded of one of my many favorite lines from my favorite movie, Casablanca. The evil German Major Strausser and the unscrupulous Vichy French police chief Captain Renault are in Renault's office talking about Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine and the stolen letters of transit they know he has. Renault tells Strausser that Rick is far too clever to let him find the letters. Strausser disagrees: "You give too much credit to this Mousier Blaine. My impression is that he's just another blundering American."

"One musn't underestimate American blundering," Renault coolly replies. "I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918."

Casablanca is a movie about the American doing the right thing--after he's exhausted all the other options. And as frustrating as it may be to the rest of the world (as it has been in the past), there's something fundamental about the American character there. We may try our best to slink into ignobility, but we also refuse to let the sins of our past hold captive our aspirations to goodness and greatness. There's a persistent sense of youthful innocence about America, and that comes, I think, from an understanding of itself that transcends history.

Ground zero is being rebuilt, which is as fitting a monument as any to what happened there. Ten years from now, no one will care whether it was a few years late in coming.