17. First Police Precinct Station House

AKA: First Precinct Police Station; New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Offices
Location: 100 Old Slip
Built: 1909-1911
Architects: Hunt & Hunt
National Register Number: 82001193
Listed: October 29, 1982
Visited: August 5 and 26, 2007



A great number of modern thinkers I respect, ranging from Christopher Lasch and Norman Mailer to Tom Frank and Simon Reynolds, seriously bug out -- vomit coming to the throat and all -- when people adopt discontextual historical styles for seemingly fuck-all purpose, airily referring to ironized mix-and-match as a peculiarly modern sickness. OK, OK, so if this is true, answer me this: what's a distinctly pre-modern New York City police station doing decked out as an Italian Renaissance palazzo? Don't look at me, I don't even know what a palazzo is.

Wikipedia says it's "a grand building of some architectural ambition that is the headquarters of a family of some renown or of an institution, or even what the British would call a 'block of flats' or a tenement." The AIA Guide to New York City is no more specific: "the super town house of Italian nobility (i.e., palace), later a description of any big, urbane building in an Italian town." NOT HELPFUL! Especially when (concerning the latter definition) the First Police Precinct Station House is not especially big, nor in Italy. Ah well. (Today I find the thicket of architectural terminology intractable. One day I won't.) But this I know: It looks like it was covered in giant peppermint Chiclets, which apparently means the surface is "rusticated."



The building housed the 1st Precinct of the New York City Police Deparment until 1909 to 1973, when a merger with the 4th Precinct necessitated a move into bigger quarters. (It is somewhat staggering to think criminals were ever processed in such a handsome building -- were they contemptuous of such fancy, or was it viewed as just another old-looking building in a city crowded with them?) The station house was left fallow until 1993, when it was used as the offices of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.



Since 2001, the building has housed the New York City Police Museum. You have to wonder how video displays and artifacts in glass vitrines could possibly communicate anything of value. What the police do strikes me as being essentially social and psychological in nature, and hance maybe better described by a work of the imagination like a movie, a TV show, or a book. And yet the museum is compelling, intimate. Its features -- a documentary about pioneer women officers and the preposterous crap they had to deal with; mugshots of hoods long dead; a portrait of a uniformed office with icy blue eyes and a leather jacket; uniforms; weapons; a motorcycle; a police car -- have enough evocativeness to fuel a museum-goers' own, entirely private, work of the imagination about police life.

16. International Mercantile Marine Company Building

AKA: United States Lines Building; Washington Building
Location: 1 Broadway
Built: 1883-1884; reclad 1919-1921
Architects: Edward H. Kendall (1883-1884); Walter B. Chambers (1919-1921)
National Register Number: 91000108
Listed: March 2, 1991
Visited: August 18, 2007



The big plaque on the corner of this building says:

Adjoining this site was the first Dutch fort on Manhattan Island, known as Fort New Amsterdam.

OK, let's stop here for a second. Fort Amsterdam was the giant four-pointed star on the earliest maps of New York. It was there at the founding of New Amsterdam, a settlement of a couple hundred, and it changed hands several times in the dizzying back-and-forth between the Dutch and the English and the Americans (not to mention Jacob Leisler) before demolition in 1790. More about the this site when I do the entry for the U.S. Customs House. Onward...

The first house was erected here before 1664.

Sort of a vague fact, this. The Castello Plan shows the site with a house and farm four years earlier, in 1660. 1664 might've been used because that was the year the British seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York, and originally the date enshrined on the city flag and seal.

In 1771 Captain Archibald Kennedy built here his residence which was used in 1776 by General Washington as his headquarters...

Well, this place and like a thousand others during the Revolutionary War: Washington moved around a lot.

and later by General Howe during the British occupation. It was later used as a hotel.

OK, adaptive re-use, can't front on that.

It was replaced by the Washington Building...
Now this blows my mind. Did anybody in 1881 complain about this? Didn't it irk people that somebody razed a site with a clear historical connection to The Father of Our Country and replaced it with an an office building? And that in some kind of sick joke, the new building was named after Washington? Well, OK, the idea of historic preservation is still a bit avant-garde at this point. And I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the freakish naming -- I come from the suburbs, and there's a long-running joke that suburban housing developments are always named after the things they destroy: Shady Grove, Cedar Creek, Whispering Pines, Tasty Meadows, and so on.

Jokes aside, the replacement was actually rather fine. A picture in King's Handbook of New York City 1892 shows a brick feast of mansards, cupolas, and corner bay windows gaping southward. The views must've been a key selling point; King's book also includes thrilling panoramas taken from the building of Battery Park and the Harbor, as well as a somewhat less edifying view of industrial buildings and tenements facing north.

which was transformed in 1920-1921 into this building for occupancy by its owners the International Mercantile Marine Company and known as NO.1 BROADWAY.

"Transformed." Sounds absolutely magical, doesn't it? It was reclad in limestone and largely de-ornamented, that's all, and as such, it's largely not much to look at, though they did think to include seals of the cities the IMMC serviced at the time. I like that. (The U.S. Customhouse across the street has something like that, too, though it features scultpural personifications of great port cities and the continents.)

Oh, and the IMMC owned the Titanic.

15. Battery Park Control House

AKA: Bowling Green IRT Control House
Location: State Street and Battery Place
Built: 1904-1905
Architect: Heins & LaFarge
National Register Number: 80002669
Listed: May 6, 1980
Visited: August 19, 2007



Today in the annals of New York City lostness: the subway entrance. For the IRT, New York City's first subway line, the architects Heins & LaFarge designed handsome iron and glass kiosks and masonry control houses. None of the original kiosks remain. Not one. (The one at Astor Place? A replica from 1985.) Somewhat more substantial structures, three control houses still exist, two still functional. This is one of them. (The other is at West 72nd Street).

Much like our friends at 13 and 15 South William Street, its rounded gables were inspired by the local buildings of 250 years earlier. After all, what better way to dress up the most technologically-advanced municipal facilities of 1908 than with the architectural styles of the Flemish Renaissance?

Thing is tiny, uncomfortably so. Sure, it looks quaint on the outside, but with only two turnstiles, it takes any sizable crowd of people far too long to exit from it. And given that it's the subway exit closest to the Statue of Liberty ferries, there's always a crowd. Sometimes the crazy Statue of Liberty people park in front and the tourists stop and gawk, further blocking the flow of people. Luckily there's a larger entrance between Bowling Green Park and the U.S. Customhouse; otherwise, I'd worry more about people getting crushed should fires (or worse) break out on the platforms below.

14. Bowling Green Fence and Park

Location: Broadway and Beaver Streets
Built: 1733 (Park) and 1771 (Fence)
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 80002673
Listed: March 9, 1980
Visited: August 19, 2007



It's New York City's oldest park but the fence gets top billing. It's an actual honest-to-goodness relic from colonial New York City, erected a few years before the Revolutionary War to protect a statue of King George III against vandalism. Once news of the Declaration of Independence hit the city, New Yorkers ripped that fucker right down, hacked off the fence's crown-shaped tips, and in a fine bit of Patriot irony, fashioned the lead into ammunition for use against British soldiers. (Parts of the statue were somehow spirited away by local Tories, eventually making their way to the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society.)

In another fine, fine irony: according to legend, the park is the site of Peter Minuit's purchase of Manhattan for $24; today, it faces the New York City branch of the National Museum of the American Indian. Oh and yeah people used to bowl here, just like the ghosts of Irving's "Rip Van Winkle."

Save for a homeless man sleeping on a bunch, the park is empty on the Sunday I visit. It's well-kept, full of geraniums in bloom and liatris (I think) leaning over the fence, and has a kind of wildness that it lacked only a few years ago, but still, such a tiny spot of green especially compared to the nearby Battery Park. And yet there's enough of a habitat to warrant a Parks Department sign on the fence noting the presence of peregrine falcons in the area. The tourists avoid it, preferring instead to take pictures of Arturo Di Modica's Charging Bull: they want to see what they've already seen on the tee-vee.

13. City Pier A

AKA: Pier A, Liberty Gateway
Location: South end of Battery Place at Hudson River
Built: 1884-1886
Architect: George Sears Greene, Jr.
National Register Number: 75001203
Listed: June 27, 1975
Visited: August 19, 2007



While I don't intend to pay for the New York Times article this realdeal.net story is based on, it seems as if something is FINALLY going to happen to this pier, which has been under scaffolding as long as I can remember. And as long as I can remember, its immediate surroundings have been growing in beauty and utility. Robert F. Wagner Jr. park, where I took most of the pier photos, was always pleasant to begin with, but today, the rows of trees that once seemed like a token effort towards greenery when I first knew them now form a canopy -- it's dark underneath! -- and the gardens were filled with buzzy insects, a sure sign of an intelligently designed habitat. (Take care of the insects and the rest will follow, I say.) Compared to all this, the unrefinished pier is an oasis of visual confusion.



The NYC Economic Development Corporation's plans for the pier using it for ferry service to and from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; after spending nearly a whole hour in the heat on a line for these ferries a few weeks ago, all I can say is godspeed.

12. Stone Street Historic District

Location: Bounded by Stone, Pearl, and South William Streets and Mill Lane
Built: 1835-1929
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 99001330
Listed: November 12, 1999
Visited: August 4, 2007



A tiny collection of commercial buildings built after The Great Fire of New York in 1835. Next to Sniffen Court, it is the cutest little historic district you ever did see.

A few words about the Great Fire seems appropriate here. It started a short walk away in a warehouse at what's now 25 Beaver Street, and after three days, finished off much of Lower Manhattan, including most of island's colonial-era architecture. The estimates I'm seeing for the damage vary widely, with numbers ranging between 500 and 700 buildings demolished, but multiple sources, including George J. Lankevich's New York City: A Short History, tell me the fire could be seen in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is a hundred miles away, motherfucker.



The buildings erected to replace fallen comrades were mostly Greek Revival in style and fairly simple in construction. Later, a couple of them had their facades altered to match the whims of owners and the architectural fashions of the day. The most charming of these are 13 and 15 South William Street, redone by C.P.H. Gilbert to make them look a little something like the step-gabled (and long gone) Dutch Renaissance buildings of Nieuw Amsterdam.



Next door is 9 South William Street, seven stories of human-scaled neo-Gothic office building that's now the Wall Street Inn.

When I first saw the Stone Street area in what must've been the fall of 2002, it immediately struck me as a little gem, its small buildings and narrow streets giving it an intimacy few Manhattan blocks could provide. Unfortunately, it was also so empty that its intimacy flipped over into claustrophobia: I can remember getting anxious when another person walked down the street, only to realize that they lived there. This in turn flipped my anxiety into alienation: well, this is somebody's home, practically their backyard -- what the hell am I doing here? Thanks to a redevelopment plan by the Praedium Group and Beyer Blinder Belle (them again), it's now a row of bars and restaurants, with crowds of people on tables spilling out into the street. This is a delightful and satisfying turn of events, even if the clientele is maybe a little too Wall Street for my tastes, especially after 5:00.

11. American Bank Note Company Building

Location: 70 Broad Street
Built: 1907-1908
Architects: Kirby, Petit & Green
National Register Number: 99001436
Listed: November 30, 1999
Visited: August 4, 2007



You'd almost think that an engraver of currency, stamps, stock certificates, and checks would've wanted a building as overloaded with ornament as their product. Instead, their former headquarters displays not the complexity that aggravates counterfeiters but the stability and solidity that reassures investors, packing in as much Neoclassical volume as the tiny plot of land can hold without becoming a towering beast of a building.

The scaffolding? It's a sign of new ownership: the Maharishi (yes, the Beatle guy) now uses it to do whatever it is the Maharishi does nowadays.

10. Castle Clinton National Monument

Location: South Ferry
Built: 1808-1811
Architects: Lt. Col. Jonathan Williams and John McComb, Jr.
National Register Number: 66000537
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: August 4, 2007



Castle Clinton is about as wide (200 feet) as its sister, Castle Williams, but for some reason not quite as tall and as imposing. Time has tamed it, anyway. If it ever looked fearsome, it looks largely harmless now; maybe not ready to crumble (though the open roof, a modern addition, sags a bit) but cracks show it to be mortal. Little bits of stucco still left on the pimple-cratered sandstone attesting to better uses, better times.



Better times? OK, OK, I know this stuff by heart now. Bear with me here. Like Castle Williams, Castle Clinton (originally called "West Battery") was built between 1808 and 1811 to defend New York against the hostile British, even though neither fort ever saw war. Then when the military was done with it, it became a fancy restaurant and entertainment center called "The Castle Garden." Then it became an opera house. Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, sang there. (Oh, you don't know about Jenny Lind? Whatever.) Morse demonstrated the telegraph there, too. They added a roof. It looked fucking amazing. Then it became the "Emigrant Landing Depot," processing about eight million immigrants between 1855 to 1890, all in space about less volume than a Staples. Then the infinitely more commodious Ellis Island took over its immigration duties. Then it became an aquarium. (McKim, Mead, and White designed it.) It looked like this:



Then after it closed, Robert Moses demolished all the pretty additions and nearly the whole thing, too, because he wanted to build a bridge on top of it, and also because he was a gigantic crybaby douchebag who always had to have his way. Then it was declared a National Monument by Congress. Then, for almost 35 years, nothing. Then in 1975, hooray, it opened back up, right in time for the Bicenntenial, hooray! Hooray!



Today it's uh um well IT EXISTS, which is nice. People come here to buy tickets for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It's also a very nice venue for free concerts during the summertime: I saw the Magnetic Fields there in August 2000 before a tremendous thunderstorm ended all the fun.



I suppose this is not nothing. I suppose this is nice. After all, hundreds of thousands of people pass through its walls every year. But undeniably it's playing a second banana role to it younger, sexier, leggier National Monument cousins. I was the only tourist on one of the NPS' guided tours two Sundays ago. No surprise there -- who wants to tour of what amounts to a really historical ticket booth? The aquarium was a more noble use. A mini-Ellis Island would be keen. (Eight Daddinos and four D'Addinos passed through this place!) Hell, I'd settle for a skatepark at this point.

9. Municipal Ferry Pier

AKA: Battery Maritime Building
Location: 11 South Street
Built: 1906-1909
Architects: Walker & Morris
National Register Number: 76001246
Listed: December 12, 1976
Visited: July 21, 2007



Manhattan used to be lousy with piers, just lousy with 'em. They were once the linchpins of turn-of-the-century New York's transport infrastructure. Now they're not. First the speed of car and subway travel made interborough ferries a poky option for most commuters; then a post-war economic shift away from manufacturing, not to mention containerization and competition from New Jersey, killed off the commercial usefulness of NYC's waterfront. So by the 1970s and 80s, once-bustling piers were left abandoned in the river to rot away, or serve as meeting places for furtive gay sex (waaay before my time, don't you dare look at me like that).

The Battery Maritime Building was blindsided by these changes. It served commuters going to and from Brooklyn until 1938, a mere thirty years. Afterwards, it was subject to decades of use -- and underuse -- as home to several city agencies, and launch-point for ferries traveling to Governors Island. When I first saw it in 2002, it looked a magnificent wreck, rusting and painted a sickly blue. Since then, Jan Hird Pokorny and Tishman Construction gave it a fitting restoration that reconstructed much than had been lost and recovered the building's original color scheme of pistachio, lime, and strawberry ice cream.



The colors aren't the only interesting thing about the building, mind (I mean, look at that decorative rivet work, for one!) but they compel me because they seem so queerly modern: they wouldn't be out of place on a product from Target or IKEA, and yeah, I mean that as a COMPLIMENT, mofo. And yet I can't think of many contemporary Manhattan buildings that really run riot with color the way the Battery Maritime and a few maverick cast-irons do. Even the stuntiest of post-modern stunts usually work their tomfoolery on a building's profile or massing or detailing. (The Westin New York at Times Square and Schnabel's "Venetian" [yeah, sure] apartment repainting comes to mind as exceptions.) They all seem stuck with black, white, or glassy grays and blues that evanesce into the sky under some weathers IF they're lucky to be so graceful.

Only a few weeks ago, the NYC Economic Development Corporation announced the building would be transformed into a food marketplace/event space, ferry terminal, and hotel complex. Now it's a deserving place, don't get me wrong, but color me skeptical: where's the foot traffic going to come from? There's been explosive residential growth in the Financial District lately (as we'll see, a LOT of landmarked commercial buildings in the area are now fancy-schmancy apartment buildings), but from what I've seen, it hasn't made the pier's immediate surroundings any livelier. The best it can hope for is capturing some of the folks coming off the Staten Island Ferry or the tourists headed for the Statue of Liberty.

8b. Statue of Liberty National Monument, Ellis Island and Liberty Island (Part II)

Location: Ellis Island
Built: Primarily 1897-1909
Architects: originally Boring & Tilton; later James Knox Taylor, Chester Aldrich.
National Register Number: 66000058
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: July 28, 2007



In contrast, Ellis Island hits me in the gut the moment we step off the boat, and keeps on hitting. Lately there have been moments when I turn around and catch a hunk of City Beautiful building unawares, and find that the word "ooh" has escaped from my mouth. This is one of those moments. I'm just itching to get my camera in front of the main building: the monumental scale; the copper and glass windows; the arches, great gobs of limestone icing on a Beaux Arts cake. Sumptuous.

Inside is a low stack of luggage and steamer trunks. It is educative -- it shows the museum visitor how much an immigrant had to haul ass to get here -- and yet it is as cool a gesture as an installation by Beuys. We race through some of the other ground floor exhibits emphasizing how-we-are-all-immigrants because we really need a decent meal.



After a walk through the Registry Room, which is beautiful but lacks function, we angle our way through the sides of the building. For a second, we're confused. On the floors and walls, white tile, imperfect and abused, marks this room as one used for intimate public purposes: the kind of place where fluids flow freely. Have we wandered into an unusually large bathroom area? No, can't be, as the bathrooms are to the side. Maybe, I dunno, a janitor's closet? Here? In the middle multi-gazillion dollar Beyer Blinder Belle renovation? Uh. Well, there's no indication we should go ahead, but no indication we shouldn't either, so we forge ahead anyway.



There is a chain of small rooms with no doors. Exhibits under glass detail the bureaucratic parade that determined the fitness of an immigrant as an American citizen. Yes, we are in the right place. The genius of the renovation was to leave some of the sordidness of the process intact. From the vantage point of the 21st century, the evaluative tests used seem all too simple, all too quick. They have the quaintness of discredited science, of science cloaking what is arbitrary. The exhibits juxtapose the tests with photos of the test subjects, looking frightened and alert like a baby bird in your hands.



A detail burns a hole in my mind. One exhibit details how immigrants were asked to copy a lozenge shape as a way to measure their cognitive development ("Children who are developmentally about seven years old have learned to draw a diamond, which is the culmination of many factors in physical, brain and visual development."), and casually mentions that such a test would be many immigrants' first experience with a pencil. My mind runs wild with the implications of this fact. My God. They came from a Europe of filthy and fabulous cities surrounded by slumbering blankets of village life unchanged for centuries save for, you know, war, progroms, disease, famine, slavery in all but name, things like that. And that Europe is just gone now. It feels about as distant as Dante and Chaucer. An unfathomable number of parallel lives reached over from this Europe, risking every stable thing they knew, to intersect in this one place. And why? To restart their lives. To exist free from the blood-red jackboot history. To live out the promise contained in "all men are created equal" and "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Like the pencil, these former Europeans may not have known Jefferson's words before coming to America -- but even so, they instinctually knew that this is what our country meant. What an amazing responsibility for any country to have, and what an impossible burden, perhaps one a country can't even pretend to carry for very long. (I hope otherwise.)

It may be corny to dwell on textbook patriotism like this, but for once, I am stunned into silence. It is too enormous to casually think about. I have nothing to say to my friend.

We silently walk through the remainder of the exhibits covering the "what-happened-next" of Ellis Island's visitors, then walk outside to see what else there is to see. But there really is nothing else to see. It turns out that the rest of the island, perhaps its majority, still hasn't been renovated. But as it is, Ellis Island feels so complete, I'm not sure what extra facilities could add to the experience.

8a. Statue of Liberty National Monument, Ellis Island and Liberty Island (Part I)

Location: Liberty Island
Built: 1871-1871 (Liberty)
Architect: Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (Liberty Sculptor); Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (Liberty Engineer); Richard Morris Hunt (Liberty Base Architect)
National Register Number: 66000058
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: July 28, 2007



There are perfectly fine reasons to visit Battery Park for its own sake. On the southernmost tip of Manhattan, it has camera-appropriate views of New York harbor and a wide swath of New York sky, and Castle Clinton, about which I'll discuss in its own post. Probably a few locals use its paths to jog or talk their dog for a walk, and employees of 17 State Street and One New York Plaza lunch under its trees. But sadly the most remarkable feature of the park are its lines, endless lines of tourists using it as a point of departure for ferries to Liberty and Ellis Islands -- no 21 acres of park could survive that responsibility with its own identity intact, no matter how charming the vista or ambitious its master plan.

Today, for sake of my crazy idea, I'm one of those tourists, as is Paul, who's accompanying me. Back when I worked downtown and found myself thisaway, I could only look at these lines and I think these folks suffered from a lack of imagination: why, of all the places to see in the city, would you want to see that? Not that I had any first-hand experience with which to judge. Before I came of age and started going on my own, I'd been taken to see New York City maybe about thirty times without the State of Liberty once being on the agenda...except maybe for a sail-by on a Circle Line tour boat back around 1985, when it was under scaffolding.

Once we get out tickets from Castle Clinton, our line lasts a good thirty to forty-five minutes. Given how the ferries depart every twenty-five minutes, I'm surprised that the line moves at a constant speed, rather than stasis punctuated by moments of rapid movement. There must be no slack at all in their people-processing system. It makes the the wait less of a bore. Paul and I use the time to talk about what's been happening in our lives -- but for every captive audience out in the open, there are the street entertainers enduring indifference and fascination alike: we get a steel drummer, a guy who did one-handed handstands, and another guy so annoying I've blocked out of mind what exactly he did, other than prevent Paul and I from talking. And then there are the living statues. Even with the summer heat, there are five Liberties in green make-up and flowing robes, and they form a gauntlet outside Castle Clinton to ensure that any Liberty-bound tourist gets a face full of their neediness. God, five of them! How they must hate each other! They likely fill their days with turf protection and muttered insults, all while trying to put their best freaky-green face forward for the Oklahoma and Osaka tourists. It makes a fella wonder: why must you exist?

Before boarding, we come to a security checkpoint. We remove all metal items into a bin and walk through one of those chromosome-shredding electromagnetic gates, exactly like in an airport. I remark how odd it is that neither Paul nor I think this is odd at all. I know that people blowing themselves up on Liberty Island is within the realm of possibility, but these precautions don't make me feel safer. Or less safer, or much of anything, really. I just assume this is something that, y'know, the government does and if you want to do certain things like see a tourist attraction or fly a plane, you just hafta humor the government every once and while.

Off the boat, the first thing on our minds is food. Neither of us had a decent breakfast, cuz we're dumb. But there's no decent food on sale, it's all grease and sugar with a few "health" options thrown in. I settle for a vitaminwater, hardly the best option because I feel like fucking crap after I gulp the whole thing down. We make our way towards the back of the statue. Next to a glorified tent that sells souvenirs, there's another temporary structure that looks another security checkpoint (or an abattoir) and through there is the entrance to the pedestal and museum, currently the only parts of the structure that people can enter since 9/11. (Liberty's torch has been closed to the public since the Black Tom explosion of 1916.)

My friend takes a long call on his cell related to work. I try wandering away to allow a modicum of privacy but he unthinkingly follows me and I end up soaking up some the details in spite of my better instincts. Meanwhile, somebody left a red cooler unattended. One of the park rangers notices this, asks around if anybody owns it, gets no answers, and clears the area. He is patient, but annoyed, much as I'm annoyed, that there are still people so carefree, or absent-minded, or stupid, they can leave behind a hunk of personal belonging out in the open and not think of the panic that might ensue. I lead my friend away, and towards a shady place to sit down in. When he gets off the phone, he has no idea what just happened. He apologizes for the phone call taking up some of time we're spending together, but I tell him it's OK. Patience is a key part of this kind of experience, I knew that going in, and if I couldn't tolerate a five-minute call, I'd totally lose my shit at a 45-minute line. Problem is, after overhearing a conversation between a park ranger and a tourist, it looks like we can't get into the statue. We need some kind of pass that has to be purchased in advance argh. So much for spontaneity. Or maybe we can get in, neither of us bother to investigate, we're already tired, I feel crabby and bloated from the stupid vitaminwater I drank so we settle for a walk around the island perimeter.

People around the perimeter clump together for what, from a distance, looks like some common purpose, such as a line for souvenirs, but a closer look reveals they're taking pictures of LIberty at all the best angles, just like countless photographers have done before them that day alone. I've got my opportunity for Statue of Liberty money shots, and yet I feel no urge. No matter where we are, Liberty never feels close. With no trees in front to block the tourist view, I can't get a feel for how tall it is. I notice for the first time how graceful Liberty's gown is: every fold overdetermined, every fold simple and natural in feel. But it's a curiously unaffecting moment, and I don't whether to blame myself or the crowds or the alignment of the planets. I come away knowing that nothing I've seen of the statue today has been striking enough to supplant my memories of it from pictures and TV. Or, in what amounts to the same thing, it's almost as if all I did was just watch it on TV again. I treat it like it was the world's biggest advertising icon: so big I've known it since birth, so big it's impossible to feel anything for it.

7. Joralemon Street Tunnel

Location: From Bowling Green to beneath the East River
to Joralemon St. and Willow Place
Built: 1903-1907
Architect: William Barclay Parsons
National Register Number: 06000015
Listed: February 9, 2006
Visited: August 1, 2007



The list of Manhattan sites on the National Register of Historic Places includes a small scattering of hardcore irregulars that aren't buildings or concatenations thereof: twelve boats (including two aircraft carriers), five bridges, twenty-five subway stations, and two tunnels -- the Holland Tunnel, and the one under the microscope today, the Joralemon Street Tunnel. 1.5 miles of wormhole under the East River, its claim to greatness is that in 1908, it helped connect New York City's first underground subway line into Brooklyn. For all that, I'm not sure I've ever been through it before. The Joralemon carries the 4 and 5 trains; if I go to Brooklyn, I typically use either the 2 and 3 trains or the M and R trains, and they go through the Clark Street and Montague Street tunnels. More typically, though, I don't go to Brooklyn at all.

Down by the nearest train station, I let a few trains pass until there's one empty enough, not that people blocking my view is going to be my main problem. For all of the subway trains on this line, a small portion of the front car is dedicated entirely to the train conductor. Thus any good head-on view of the tunnel has to be seen through two windows, at least one of which features a kind of distorting glass that prevents a person from seeing much of anything around its perimeter. Plus my digital camera -- eight years old and two measly megapixels -- is absolute shit when it comes to darkness, even when supplemented by a flash. So I get on the train knowing and accepting that any photograph I take of the tunnel isn't going to be remotely illustrative, just a token effort at best.

You know, I'm OK with this. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been rather hard-assed lately about personal photography on the subways, having made overtures towards banning it entirely not once but twice in the last few years, and according to Wikipedia, they still don't allow flash photography. (Uh, oops.) God forbid anybody detains me I can always show them my blurry and indistinct pictures of not much. Still, I can tell the other people on the train are a little skittish seeing me take pictures: they too are thinking about bombs in tunnels. One guy sitting down is muttering something under his breath. It probably doesn't help that I have a mid-sized beard and thus look OMG possibly potentially "Al Qaeda" or maybe just "crazy-ass" to those not hip to the hipster trends in facial fashion.

OK, so what does the Joralemon look like? Well, it looks like any other subway tunnel ribbed with tracks and supports that prevent the East River from crashing down onto us. If it has any grace that marks it as being something other than a wondrous feat of engineering (the way that, for example, the Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge make it stylish, maybe even witty), this is either lost on me or lost in the dark. It is not completely dark, mind, but outside of the odd shape of the tunnel walls (almost keyhole-shaped -- I must be remembering this wrong), what I can see best are the chromatic blue and green lights.