When we got to the Manhattan side, we got off the boat and walked along the basin into the lobby of the Winter Garden. It was there my sense of wanting to be a tour guide took over. I figured if anyone among us could give a decent walking tour of lower Manhattan and the financial district, it was surely yours truly.
Outside of my paying work, I get so rare opportunities to feel that I'm actually providing a gift of value to people around me, outside being around of a few people close to me. This at least was a situation I could be useful in an entertaining way. I resolved to be light in the frequency of my patter doing the tour, so as not to overwhelm people with too much, and to try to steer our footsteps in a gentle arc that would encompass both personal sites, for which I could furnish recollections from a era of New York that was now in the past, as well as from different history that had learned along the way from the books I'd read, and Wikipedia articles I'd written using my New York reference collection.
In the Winter Garden, I remarked how the glass in the ceiling had been broken during 9/11, from the falling parts of the North Tower across the street, but they had repaired it fairly quickly and it had actually become temporarily the locus of activity in that part of the island, because it had been relatively spared, and it also afforded a new ferry connection across to Jersey City to replace the ruptured train line.
K. seemed to appreciate this fact, and so I figured my walking tour would be appreciated and enjoyed, which turned out to be correct.
We ducked into a food court in the lobby of the Winter Garden where all the mini-restaurants had French names and served French food. Folks at the wine bar were watching the final of the Women's World Cup soccer match in. The U.S. was playing the Netherlands. K. had wanted to watch it, and had seen a bit of it in the hotel room in Jersey City, but she didn't care about seeing the ending. When it was over, there was mild applause at the wine bar.
It was then I remembered that the last time I'd been in the Winter Garden was in 2002 when I came into the city to see a public exhibition there, of architectural designs proposed for the new World Trade Center to replace the destroyed towers. Some of them were very weird. One looked like a wire trash can. The design they went with and built was among them, and was one of the simpler ones. I took a bunch of digital photographs with my Nikon Coolpix 990, which are still on a memory card somewhere, along with so many photos I took of the City back then.
I used to blog a lot back then too, about the City and my life there. Somewhere the archives of that blog are on a disk too. Thankfully the vast majority of my emails have disappeared into the ether, where they belong. Some communication was not meant to endure.
At one point, during my blogging, my friend Randy, who is a bonafide architect, arranged for me to meet up with a friend of his in the city, who was interested in starting a portal of architecture bloggers. I went into Manhattan to meet her. She was about ten or fifteen years older than me. We hit in off. I described my writing and interests about the city. She thought I'd be perfect as a regular contributor. I knew it wouldn't mean money, but it would be the precious coin of exposure.
Within a week, I'm composed a few pieces about the City, in the same style I'd been writing. It was a disaster. She was cold and unfriendly after that, as if I had wasted her time. It was a great humiliation to my ego to realize just how ridiculous some of my pretensions had been, regarding my own way of writing about the city. This is still true. I had no business being anywhere near a "mainstream" architectural publication or medium. I am still this way, and more conscious of it. It is no longer a source of humiliation that I am not that kind of person, who would be able to write like that.
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