New York City

Brooklyn Bridge

Times Square

Freedom Tower (under construction)

Arlys eating of hot dog from NYC vendor

New York City skyline

Statue of Liberty

Ed and Arlys at Liberty State Park

(where the immigrants went when they were finally released from Ellis Island)

After a rainy night we took a tour into New York City today. Thank goodness we decided to take a tour. We would never have been able to manueveur the freeways into the city. We are camped 46 miles from the city and had an excellent driver. The city is huge! You hear about Texas being so big well New York City is that and  more. There are of course all the tall buildings, but also so many people and so much traffic. It is a very clean city though as they hire the homeless to clean up the streets. They are all dressed in coveralls and do a great job. If a hotel or a place of business needs extra help they just go outside and approach one of these workers and offer them a job at a higher rate of pay. It works really well for the workers and for the employers. Good idea I think. Some of the places we visited are: The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Ground Zero, the Theatre District, Times Square, St. Paul's cathedral and much more. We were gone for about 12 hours. Ellis Island was very interesting to see and imagine all the people that passed through to get into the US back in time. The people certainly had to go through  lot and you have to feel sorry for the poor immigrants and how they were treated. Also Ground Zero is very emotional. They are putting up a new building called Freedom Tower in place of the twin towers. It is about 1/3 complete and will be very impressive. It will be a great monument in the memory of those that were lost. An interesting fact is that in a very large area all of the buildings were damaged in some way. Many had to be torn down and rebuilt or had at least all the windows broken, except the three churches, which were really close to the towers. They didn't even have a single thing broken on the buildings. Makes you wonder.They have pressure washed or sand blasted most everything in the area to clean it up. But after 10 years some have not been cleaned and are still blackened with soot. It makes one imagine how black the city must have been if after ten years and all the rain, snow, etc some soot still remains. Times Square was very busy. It is too bad we didn't have time to go to a show but it is so difficult for us to get back there we will have to pass this time. Also we had thunderstorms all day and it is predicted to continue. Luckily we were inside whenever the rains came today. All in all a place to visit. I would like to come back some day and stay just in the city in a hotel and take in some shows, etc.