Wednesday Walk #1 - Around Lower Manhattan

I recently visited New York City for work so my next few Wednesday Walk posts will be from my walking tours around Manhattan Island.

Today's walk takes us around the Lower West Side of Manhattan. You can view the lovely Statue of Liberty from the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

My nephew and his boyfriend live in this area and the picture above is from their balcony. Such a lovely thing to be able to poke your head out of your own apartment from and just see standing in the water. They have gorgeous views of boats in the harbor all the time. I didn't take many photos of those but they were fun to see.

We started our walk by walking down to a river walk area that took us by Battery Park. From along the water we could always see Lady Liberty.

This is a good broad view of the whole harbor. You are looking at New Jersey across the river from us.

As we continued past Battery Park we headed towards Wall Street where we came across the New York Stock Exchange. This included a seeing "The Bull". There are two lines at the bull - one to take a photo with its balls (yes - those balls) and one to take a picture with its head. We decided to avoid both lines and simply take a photo in front of the bull. This is me with my nephew Andrew.

I also posed for a picture with Fearless Girl - a sculpture by Kristen Visbal. I love the story behind this sculpture.

We continued on to Trinity Church. I'm not sure if anyone else sings Hamilton lyrics in their head as they walk through New York City, but I immediately wanted to go into the grave yard and see if we could find both Alexander and Angelica Skyler's graves. Sadly we couldn't go in, but Alexander Hamilton's grave is easy to see from the side of the cemetery. In this photo, our next stop - World Trade (specifically 4 world trade is in the photo) is shown in the background.

We headed on to the World Trade area. My nephew works for Spotify on the 64th floor of 4 World Trade.

When I last visited the area, Freedom Tower was just being finished. It is now done. One of the interesting things about the architecture is that as you look up the building, it appears to come to a point.

We were not able to get right up to the 9/11 Memorial, however I loved this photo of the memorial with the sun reflecting off of it. Even not being able to walk up to the memorial I was overcome with emotion.

I also missed seeing this memorial to first responders when I was here the last time.

We popped into the Oculus mall for a bathroom stop and to pass through it to get back to the harbor area to finish our walk.

As we exited Oculus and turned the corner along the river area, we came to this gorgeous display of tulips - they were incredible. A beautiful way to remember that New York was originally New Amsterdam.

My sister was also here in the city and so we enjoyed this walk together and got this great photo together.

We headed back to my nephew's apartment and went up to his roof to take in the sunset while we waited for the amazing dinner from Kiki's Greek to arrive. So, so beautiful.

And, then, it was off to my hotel. This was my first time riding the NYC subway on my own. A very easy experience this time since I just had to take a quick walk from my nephew's place to the station and it was a quick train up to my hotel.

Thanks for coming along on my quick journey around part of Lower Manhattan.

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