I’m up early, so I’ll join Farid’s roommate, Eliot, in the kitchen for some caffeine and conversation. When Farid wakes up, he makes us breakfast and more coffee. We have no set plans, just to get out and see the city. We stopped for a hot cuppa from Variety Coffee and took a break in the nearby park after exploring for two hours. Father Studzinski Square is nearby to honor a pastor who served this community for over 19 years.

There is more architectural history in this city than we have time for, but a few buildings stand out. The Woolworth Building, nicknamed the Cathedral of Commerce, which opened in 1913 and maintained the title of the tallest building until 1929, the one with no windows that opened in 1974 and is still used today by AT&T, and the elaborate honeycomb-like 80-landing viewing platform for tourists called the Vessel that opened in 2019.

To get a closer view of some of these buildings, we took the East River ferry to Manhattan and returned hours later via the Brooklyn Bridge, on foot. The bridge was opened in 1883 after 14 years of construction. Just a week after opening, with over 150,000 pedestrians (not Barnum’s 21 elephants), a stampede broke out and twelve people were trampled to death. The cables are made of 19 strands that consist of 278 spun wires. These are bolted to eyebars that are encased in a 23-ton anchor plate.

King Nyani, the largest bronze gorilla on the planet, holding Farid

Cable cars would take people over for 5 cents vs one cent to walk across. In 1907, sixty trains were crossing per hour. The pedestrian toll was repealed in 1891 and roadway tolls by 1911. Legend has it that George Parker sold this bridge at least twice a week, once for $50,000, to new immigrants with money to invest, until their toll booths were shut down by the police. George spent the last eight years of his life in Sing Sing Prison. In 1950, the 2 three-lane roadways replaced the trolley tracks.

Brooklyn Bridge

We have a burger around 3pm after walking the High Line (a rail-trail project created in 2009), shower when we get home, and Farid will make us spicy pasta to go with a documentary-filled evening about octopuses and Rajasthan Gypsies.