NYC – 3 days in May (3)

Enough of museums; this is a beautiful, warm, sunny day, and things will happen outside! So we went for crossing the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge.

This is, as I recall, the first serious bridge built between Manhattan and Brooklyn. I remember seeing a documentary on this, flagging the engineering prowess its construction represented. This was at the end of the 19th century. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world for some 20 years, since its inauguration in 1883. The bridge has a pedestrian pathway built in its center, above the automobile traffic level. At times of public transportation strikes or catastrophes (such as nine eleven), it is the main means of crossing the river, to the point that it may sway, or “wobble”, when too many people are using it! Not today though! People, mostly tourists but also lots of locals, are walking or running it, or biking it. A bunch of school kids stopped us, and Cynthia answered their questions, in response to some school assignment.

Once crossed over, off to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is inaugurating this week a new visitor center, a 22,000 square-foot, plant-covered roof top building! garden in the middle of this humanity – so quiet, so pastoral! I must admit, for an agglomeration that is often described as the largest in the world, between Central Park and this Garden, there is a lot of green! A walk in the middle of a rose garden, all colors and smells, in such glorious sunny weather, what a delight (much more for sure than the excuse for lunch we had at its café!)

Returned to Manhattan, in the East Village, to see the girls and have a coffee at the (very rococo) Bowery Hotel, where Eric, Laurence and Béatrice are staying. Across the street where Core 77 has elected to erect its pavilion and make its contribution to NYC Design Week! Then time to for the airport – not an easy task to secure a taxi on the streets of New-York at 5 on a Friday…even less easy to leave the island in this traffic! (Ehud Barak, currently minister of Defense of Israël, did not help the situation with his “walk in the ‘hood”…along with his considerable security detachment!) NYC, May 18, 2012