Down Town

Getting Started

We started our day by walking 6 blocks to Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee (the address is 286 8th Ave New York). I picked this place out because:

• Many have rated it as having the best bagels in New York, and 
• Its right next to the subway station to take us downtown.

The first thing we had to face was the daunting choice of 6 types of bagels and 20 or so flavours of cream cheese and other spreads. For the adventurous, they nominate a cream cheese 'Flavour of the Week'.

The bagels were huge, and they came served with cream cheese an inch thick, and sliced in half (both horizontally and vertically) which made them a bit more manageable. The orange juice was freshly squeezed and came in generously large cups.

Wall Street Tour

We hopped on the subway at the 23rd St station, took the A line to Fulton St (10 mins, 6 stops), and walked about 5 mins to our destination, at 15 Broad St, right across from the New York Stock Exchange. We selected The Financial Crisis tour run by The Wall Street Experience, after reading many great reviews. It was freezing cold, and we had a hard time keeping warm. So, to give us some relief, our guide stopped longer than usual in the Federal Hall to tell us the history. We enjoyed some of the stories, and seeing the sites we were familiar with from various movies based on Wall Street.

However, having read The Big Short and Too Big to Fail (which is a fantastic read - its hard to believe both the events and the detail captured), and after reading some rave reviews on the tour, I was expecting a bit more.  I also left feeling the US$50 plus tip was a bit steep (especially for a family with some kids 15 or older). You only enter 2 buildings, both of which are free freely accessible, so the tour company has no costs to absorb. If you have younger kids, they are going to find it pretty boring. Fortunately, we all left with $1 million dollar notes, so there was a smile in the end.

My plan was to get the subway over to Brooklyn, walk back across the bridge and then grab a quick bite at Ruchi's for lunch (which has great reviews, and a 50% lunch special). Unfortunately, I foolishly trusted some directions from our tour guide rather than my own well prepared notes, and we took the wrong subway line (there are multiple lines heading to different parts of Brooklyn). By the time we got back to Manhattan, Ruchi's was overflowing and we were running out of time, so we grabbed some pizzas at the Blue Planet Grill. The pizzas were OK, but nothing too memorable - I suggest your try Ruchi's and let us know what we missed.

9/11 Memorial

We lived in Boston in 2001, and I took those same cross-continental flights numerous times and visited a client in the World Trade Center just a week before 9/11. As such, our memories of the day and weeks that followed are strong, and I was pretty keen to visit the Memorial.

We pre-booked our tickets at the 9/11 Memorial Web Site, which is a good idea. You will still get in without doing this, but the lines are much longer. As you'd expect, you do have to pass through security, but it does move pretty quickly. At the time of our visit, neither the Museum or the new One World Trade Center building (formally "Freedom Tower") were open, so the main reason to visit was to see the reflection pools. These stand on the footprints of the Twin Towers, with water spilling into the pool, and then deeper still into another chasm – a second square hole – without a visible bottom.

Regardless of your memory of 9/11, if you read the names, and look into the pools, you will be moved. But I suggest you take the time to read through the Web site before you go, including how the names are placed around the Memorial, and the events of the day. If you do this, the experience is all the more powerful.

Brooklyn Bridge

After a quick coffee, we set off for our second assault on the bridge. The correct route - following my notes this time - is to walk back to Fulton St station and take the A line. You can then get off at High St (1 stop), and head North East. The path is well marked, and even in the middle of Winter on a freezing afternoon, we weren't the only tourists following the path.

While I wasn't too excited about walking the bridge, I must say its a worthwhile experience. Its an amazing old structure, with wooden planks on the pathway, contrasted against the steel and concrete skyline. You need to be careful of not getting bowled over by bicycles, which zip past at ridiculous speed. There are also a few souvenir vendors at the end of the bridge, selling framed photos, etc (the prices are negotiable, and I suspect they may have lookouts posted).

On this trip, this was also as close as we were going to come to the Statue of Liberty. I was keen to go back to Ellis Island Immigration Museum, which we had visited on a previous trip, but we only had so many days, and five people to satisfy. Also, the ferry ride in the Winter did not sound like a great deal of fun. Still, seeing the Statue from the bridge, along with the Manhattan skyline with the new Freedom Tower, is a great perspective I'd not previously seen.