Since I’ve just started a project to write about every metro station in Warsaw, I felt the need to comment on the new metro map that has been released in New York, the first new design style in decades. Here’s a PDF of it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.
It’s beautiful. End of.
I’ve departed from Penn station in New York on Amtrak services before, but this is the first time that I’ve used Moynihan Train Hall, which opened at the beginning of 2021. I can’t say that I expected a great deal from the project, but any money put into rail in the United States should be applauded.
Arriving just one hour early and so cutting it fine (for me) my service was the 125 to Newport News, although I was only going as far as Richmond.
Now, I think this is bloody lovely. This was the James A Farley building which was a Post Office, but requirements change and it’s now Amtrak’s main facility for the city. It’s named after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a politician who had championed this idea for some time.
From a different angle, but I very much like all that brightness flooding onto the concourse.
So much colour and so much clarity.
A plan of the railway station, with the platforms below ground, then the main concourse and then there’s a floor above which is partly still used as a Post Office.
The luggage carousel where they’ve made something of a feature wall of the station’s history. Note the quote from Moynihan which reads:
“In the old time, you arrived at Pennsylvania Station at the train platform. You went up the stairs to heaven. Make that Manhattan. And we shall have to again. Praise all”.
And the people of New York do have it all again, the destruction of everything above the platform level at Pennsylvania Station was a disaster, but this Amtrak station has clearly rectified many of the wrongs. This is a good time to requote Vincent Scurry as it’s in the same vein:
“One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat”.
There’s a lovely waiting area at the rear, with everything being clearly signed.
And here it is, although you have to show your train ticket to get in. Lots of comfortable seats, power points and wi-fi, it has an air of calm about it. Indeed, so does the entire railway station which now has a food court with plenty of seats, information points and a shininess about it which should make passengers want to use trains. It reminds me of how calm Helsinki airport feels and to achieve that with a railway station in the middle of New York is what I consider to be a design miracle. For those reading between the lines of this post, they may gather that I like this railway station and it is far better than anything I can think of in London. The design of St. Pancras is impressive, although that’s mostly down to the Victorians, but they’ve crammed so much retail into it that there’s rarely sufficient seating available. And they might as well knock Euston down, a dreadful station.
I’ve digressed into complaining again though, so let’s get back on track (see the pun there?). After charging my devices ready for my train journey, an announcement was then made to go down to Track 13.
I took this photo with suitable care, but I spent a lot of time during my few days in New York looking at street views like this and waiting to be able to cross the road. At first I waited patiently for the green man, but New Yorkers don’t do that and I got to understand the flow of traffic on the city’s grid system and jaywalking like the locals. I find street views like this inspirational and they would be even more so without all the traffic, but that’s just the walker in me saying that.
Einstein loves New York apparently.
I’ve walked along the High Line before, but it’s such an inspirational idea for walkers and so well delivered that it seemed a useful way to spend the time before my Amtrak train departed the city. In short, the High Line is a former elevated railway line which had started to fall out of use by the late 1970s. Nearly demolished in the 1980s, it was saved and some visionaries arranged for some sections to be turned into an elevated park.
Some odd things happen in this elevated park, but they’re exciting, as crime is very low and misdemeanours much lower than in other city parks. It is also though very well funded compared to other parks, it’s got something of a charm and talking point nature that isn’t easily replicated.
A sign handily showing the scope of the walkways and that new bit in darker green towards the top is new to me (which is an excuse for a separate post), so I wanted to have a walk to there. There’s a handy “you are here” sign on the map to show where I was, so towards the southern end.
Anyway, enough text, now I have lots of photos….
And this is now the Hudson Yards development that I wrote about earlier on during the week, with the Vessel building just in short towards the right of the photo. It is a really quite invigorating walk and there’s talk of creating a 1.2 kilometre version in London between Camden Town and King’s Cross. For anyone interested there’s more about that project at https://www.camdenhighline.com/, but all credit to them for wading through the amount of documentation they need to read and produce, some of which are explained in the technical feasibility study section.
There’s more of the High Line now open which bends around the left in the above photo, and so that means yet another post is coming soon. Woooo!
This is the photo that I left my loyal readers (or reader) with in my last post, where the High Line meets Hudson Yards. This is as far as I got last time that I came to New York as this section only opened in 2019.
The extension means that the railway line now heads off in the direction of the River Hudson.
It had been rather warm so far on my little walk, indeed perhaps a little too hot. Not that I’m one to complain about the heat of course. That situation changed when walking down here, clearly it’s some form of wind trap from the Hudson, although it was certainly refreshing.
Lots of little rail features remain, although I imagine most of these aren’t original.
These are the Pershing Square Beams, and congratulations for anyone who noticed that from the photo, and this is actually a little playground for children. Industrial and with a secret tunnel, this is a creative idea which I can imagine children would enjoy. Although they won’t at the moment as it’s shut.
Looking back towards Hudson Yards and look at all of those trains!
For this to make more sense, this photo from Wikipedia is useful as it shows the site before Hudson Yards was developed. The trains, which are at what is known as West Side Yard, are still being stored in the same place, but they’ve built the entire Hudson Yards complex on top of them. That’s some considerable feat of civil engineering and it’s no surprise that this project is expected to cost $25 billion, the most expensive real estate work in the United States at the moment, given all these challenges.
So all of that shiny new retail development is sitting on top of some rail tracks.
As with the older sections of the High Line, there’s plenty of floral arrangements about the place.
I confess that I didn’t walk all the way to the end, as I wanted to end up at Hudson Yards so that I could walk to Penn station to get my Amtrak train out of New York.
The Freedom’s Stand art installation by Faheem Majeed which was unveiled earlier this year and it takes its name from from the first black owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal which was founded in the city in 1827. It didn’t last long, only until 1829, although it inspired The Rights of All newspaper, although that didn’t last much longer either. But, it was still an important principle and there’s more about this at https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/freedom-s-journal-1827-1829/.
With that, it was time to walk to Penn station and I mention that as there are plans to install an elevated walkway, called the Moynihan Connection, to allow pedestrians to walk there.
These emergency exit doors on Subway stations struck me as odd as they’re effectively a free pass through the ticket barriers. I was travelling a couple of stops between two bars (of the drinking kind) and a number of people just walked into the station without paying (in New York, there’s no payment system to exit and travellers can legitimately just walk out) in what strikes me as a design flaw. An alarm does sound, but it’s mostly entirely ignored by station staff.
It seems that Janno Lieber, who runs the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, agrees:
“A lot of the riders who want to play by the rules are feeling like they’re suckers because they’re paying the fare and they see people sail right past them through the emergency gates.”
That same article notes that $500 million is lost per year to fare evasion across the city’s transport network, a quite ridiculous sum.
As I was still feeling a little sluggish following my cold, I only visited a couple of bars in the evening. Even that I thought was a sign of my remarkable bravery, but I’m not one to dwell on that or mention it to others. My visit was to Kings County Brewers Collective (KCBC) in Brooklyn, a few stops down from Grimm Artisanal Ales, which opened in 2017. The brewery themselves note:
“Once dubbed “the beer capital of the Northeast,” Bushwick was home to a large German immigrant population and a thriving brewing industry in the late 1800’s. Local beer was everywhere–in particular, on “Brewer’s Row,” where there were 14 breweries operating within a 14 block area (beat that, Portland). By the turn of the century, a whopping 10% of the beer produced in the US came from Brooklyn, and the majority of that beer was brewed in Bushwick. Then came the New York State hop blight and Prohibition. Ughhhhhh. Only a handful of the Brooklyn-based breweries survived and continued to operate afterward. When Rheingold and Schaefer breweries both closed their doors in 1976, Bushwick was left without a local brewery…”
Until KCBC came along and brewing in the area was back.
The bar set-up and this arrangement felt suitably comfortable, so I took a seat by the bar itself rather than at one of the nearby tables. The service was personable and helpful, with a regular supply of customers coming in to purchase takeouts.
The brewing equipment visible behind the bar and there’s been some care with the layout of this whole set-up.
The beers that I went for, and I faffed about for a while choosing which four to go for. As can be seen from my beautiful writing (whilst trying to lean on a bar at an angle anyway), I went the Claw & Order, the 6th Birthday Zombie, the 6th Orbit and the Lurking in Depths, which they carefully presented in the order that I had written them down. I always appreciate that, in the same way that I think a glass should be presented with a logo facing the front. But, I digress.
The four beers were all excellent, my favourite was the 6th Orbit IPA that was loaded with fruit taste and flavours of grapefruit and coconut, although I didn’t get the ‘gummy peach rings’ that were mentioned in the description.
It’s not that bad a taproom, so although it had space on a Thursday evening, I can imagine that it must get quite packed on weekend evenings. It’s an interesting part of Brooklyn as well, it had a vibrant and youthful feel to it with numerous other restaurants and bars in the vicinity. Although was very convenient is that the bar was just around the corner from the Jefferson Street Subway station and a train that went straight back to near my accommodation in Manhattan.
I’ve already mentioned how much I liked the new Amtrak station at Penn in New York and I left that post as the announcement to board was made.
This is the queue for the train, which wraps around in front of the 13/14 gate sign before then going around it and then down the escalator. It was just as long behind me and it’s the most organised queue that I’ve seen at a railway station. Staff were ensuring people were waiting in the correct line and double checking that they were boarding the appropriate train. In the UK there would be a mad dash for the train, but perhaps the United States just know how to queue better.
This photo is taken from the opposite direction to the previous one and shows how long the queue still is.
Blurry unfortunately, but there’s the train.
The train was only busy for the first section of its journey between New York and cities such as Baltimore and Washington DC. On nearly all Amtrak trains I haven’t got anyone sitting next to me, but for the first half of this one I was sitting next to a lovely lady. She kept giving me grapes which was kind of her.
The space available on these trains puts the UK ones to shame. I can use my laptop because of the drop-down table that comes down and have plenty of legroom.
I didn’t order anything as I had acquired packs of Cheetos for my journey in advance, but here’s the menu for the buffet car.
That’s what it looked like later on during the journey, very peaceful and quite industrial.
One of the most delightful elements of Amtrak travel is seeing so much of the United States. Much of this doesn’t look as impressive in photos as in real life, or the exciting views passed before I had time to take a photo of them, but my 6.5 hour journey went by so quickly. I’m not sure that I’ve ever said that about travelling on UK trains, but this is a very stress-free way of getting about the United States. I had purchased these tickets some way in advance when the exchange rate was better, this trip cost around £25 which I thought was quite reasonable. Amtrak trains go relatively slowly and so it would have been quicker to get the bus, which I think was around five hours, but this is just a more decadent way to travel.
Disembarking at the Amtrak railway station in Richmond, my first time in Virginia. One of the joys about rail travel, as opposed to bus travel, is that you can actually see the countryside rather than just seeing endless roads, and I got off feeling more refreshed than when I got on. Amtrak should use that as a marketing slogan.
I decided to have a little walk around Central Park, unfortunately cut rather short by a deluge of rain, but it’s the rapidly (well, relatively) changing views of the skyscrapers around the edges of the park that I found the most captivating. If I’ve got my skyscrapers correct, of the tallest two, that’s Steinway Tower to the left and Central Park Tower on the right.
I think that Steinway Tower, or 111 West 57th Street as it’s officially called, looked very odd in the skyline because of just slender and thin it is. The development has 60 luxury apartments, of which only 46 are located within the main part of the tower. How much space do people really need in a city of such homelessness? The apartments cost from between $7.5 million to over $60 million, although the views are really something impressive judging by the photos at the official web-site at https://111w57.com/.
As an aside, look at the rainy skies….
Given that, I went to hide in a covered area and got there just in time.
Along with two police horses and their riders who also wanted to avoid the rain. New York has one of the largest number of mounted police in the United States, there are over fifty.
And a post-rain view of the skyscrapers.
Riverside Park is a four mile long park which is located by the Hudson River and I don’t have much to note about my meanderings around some of it. It was odd being able to hear an underground railway line underneath the park, which is the Freedom Tunnel in which 100 homeless people used to live before it was thought a good idea to remove them. One of the entry points is visible in the above photo and there’s more information about this rather fascinating tunnel at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Tunnel.
The biggest disappointment was to discover the below.
There were raccoons in the park and I didn’t see any ?
The first brewery of the evening was Grimm Artisanal Ales, although I had to faff about in a local park for fifteen minutes as I turned up at 16:45 and hadn’t realised that the taproom element didn’t open until 17:00. The brewery was founded by Joe and Lauren Grimm and this is their main taproom, located in Brooklyn. They were founded in 2013, but it took them five years to get a brewery set-up of their own, relying on using other breweries for the first few years.
It’s another organised and even quite alluring brewery set-up, with the brewing equipment off to the left. There’s plenty of seating as well, including an outside area for those who like to sit by traffic fumes and insects. Sitting at the bar was popular during my visit, but there were some lower chairs available as well. The staff members were friendly and pro-active in explaining the options, it felt a welcoming venue to visit. I visited on an early evening on Thursday and it was getting relatively busy, but I can imagine that it must soon hit its capacity on a Friday and Saturday evening.
The menu is on Untappd, but there’s a printed version as well which is always handy. It’s a well balanced menu in terms of the different beer styles and there are also plenty of ciders on there as well.
I tried five different beers, this is the most colourful, the Lilt fruited sour. My favourite was the bottle pour Memory Palace, a 12% imperial stout. That beer had some coconut and chocolate flavours and was very smooth for its ABV, a rather lovely way to end the visit. A very passable bar and one that I’d visit again.
