Walking in New York

Started off yesterday by meeting an old friend for breakfast near his apartment on the Upper West Side. Some splendid architecture around there:

We walked from there across Central Park…

…to my first meeting of the day, in a particularly ornate embassy (which I won’t identify here, though it’s probably easy enough to work out).

My camera’s batteries then ran out and I wasn’t able to get new ones until after I’d finished work. However I found what claims to be the largest used book store in the world, on 14th and Broadway (though I’m sure I’ve been in bigger ones in Berkeley):

Unfortunately my jet lag was at its peak and I felt I had to keep moving rather than browse; so I set off down to Battery Park, to see if there are any remnants of the colony of New Amsterdam. Plenty of monuments, including the dented sphere salvaged from the World Trade Centre:

and a distant view of the Statue of Liberty:

but the only trace of the original colony is this monument with inscription in Dutch:

Finally I walked through the Stone Street Historic Neighbourhood (historic in that some of the houses date back as far as 1835) to Wall Street, where John Adams presided over the first ever sessions of the United States Senate, and George Washington was sworn in as the first president in 1789:

By now the light was fading, but the World Trade Centre site is only a couple of blocks away and I was able to take one last picture:

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