New York City (Part 4) NY USA

New York Court House Buildings

After spending much of the morning of Sunday 14 October at ‘The Top of the Rock’ we decided to finish off our shore-based New York sightseeing with a walk out on Brooklyn Bridge, a wander through Wall Street and a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Views from Brooklyn Bridge. (Left) back towards Manhattan; (top right) up the East River towards Manhattan Bridge; (bottom right) across towards Brooklyn

We had expected to have a nice quiet walk out along Brooklyn Bridge with good views back towards Manhattan and across to Brooklyn and up and down the east River.  With the latter half of that sentence in mind, we should have known better about the first half of it!  The bridge was heaving with pedestrians, not helped by the fact that the first few hundred metres of the pedestrian walkway are half blocked by stalls selling tourist tat: fridge magnets, ‘I love NYC’ hats, copies of pop art posters, dodgy paintings of views from the bridge and the like.  Getting through the melee was a major undertaking, and the 2 NYPD cops in mini golf buggies trying to drive through the crowds made matters even worse. We had assumed that they were trying to reach someone in crisis but, when we eventually caught up with them, they were having their pictures taken with the punters, so it’s obviously the NYPD means of walking the beat!

1 World Trade Centre

We took the time to press through the Sunday crowds to the first set of piers, which meant that we got to walk on the famous wooden planks of the bridge (stop too soon and the bridge’s footpath is all concrete and tarmac).  And we sharpened our elbows sufficiently to jostle for position to see the views too.  However, despite the reported attractions of Brooklyn, we weren’t minded to go the whole distance across only, presumably, to have to wade through the crowds at that end too and repeat the process at each end on the way back.

Despite the crowds it was a fun thing to do and, for us, a good recce of the landmarks because we hoped to sail under the Brooklyn Bridge in a few days’ time.

Federal Hall

Back in Manhattan we headed to Wall Street, which, of course, was closed for business as it was a Sunday.  We weren’t the only people out sightseeing though and we were pleased to find that the area around the New York Stock Exchange was pedestrianised (perhaps only for the day) so we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of traffic as well as the myriad other tourists.

The New York Stock Exchange

The New York Stock Exchange is certainly a very impressive building from the outside, though it would look better without the enormous fabric advertising hoarding covering its columns. Our guide book says that during the working week it is possible to go inside to watch the trading floor in action which could be fascinating but may no longer be the case.  Our guide book is so ancient that it references the events of 9/11 as a very recent occurrence!  Interestingly, the reason Wall Street is so named is because in the early days of the city of New Amsterdam, the citizens built a defensive wall from east to west across Manhattan Island on this line.  New Amsterdam was to the south of the wall; the feared natives (and Spaniards?) to the north.  When you look at a map of Manhattan today, the street layout south of Wall Street is conspicuously ‘olde worlde’, a rabbit warren of small streets on angles and curves presumably fitting the original shape of that tip of Manhattan (pre the reclamation schemes).  To the north, the street layout is a much more regular grid, except for Broadway which cuts through the island with a flourish on a sweeping diagonal.

The Alexander Hamilton US Custom House which houses the National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Centre

The Alexander Hamilton US Custom House is an elegant and imposing building, quite close to Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange.  It now houses the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Centre, named after the man who founded the Museum of the American Indian in 1916 after gathering one of the world’s largest collections of indigenous objects from tribes across the Americas.  In 1989 the museum became part of the Smithsonian; the collections today total nearly one million objects.  The museum itself is in 3 parts: the George Gustav Heye Centre in NYC, a building on the National Mall in Washington DC and a separate research centre.

We were running short of time and could only visit one of the 3 galleries, so we decided on the permanent exhibition ‘The Infinity of Nations’.  However, en routeto the gallery through the impressive rotunda, we got side-tracked by a temporary display relating the involvement of American Indians in the country’s military from the Revolutionary War onwards.  We were somewhat surprised to see that a good number were prominently involved in the Civil War, rather expecting that they might have been happy to sit on the sidelines and watch the invaders of their country battle it out.  But by that stage they were too connected to people, groups and towns by trade and through other relationships to be able to take a totally disinterested or neutral role (and ancient tribal antipathies probably also came into play here too).  But 2 boards that we found of particular interest both related to WWII.  Firstly, Native Americans found important military roles in the arena of communications, with their spoken languages being considered better than using code on the radio – faster to send and translate and near enough unbreakable by the enemy of the time.  Secondly, in the iconic image of the US flag being raised at Iwo Jima, one of the marines in that picture was an American Indian.  That he was there at that time is entirely a coincidence – no-one was looking to put a positive media spin on that picture by carefully selecting the individuals involved.  Sadly, history relates that he found the media pressure related to his being in that picture too much of a strain to bear and he committed suicide shortly after the end of the war.

Ceremonial costumes and headdresses – a much greater variety than the movies would have you believe!

‘The Infinity of Nations’, is a large exhibit, comprising around 700 objects, all collected by George Gustav Heyes; an awful lot to take in in the hour or so we had available and we by no means did it justice.  The exhibition includes artefacts from all areas of the American continent, including items from S American and Inuit tribes, with the objects grouped into displays based on geographical regions.

A small sample of a huge and varied collection of artefacts from Native Americans
across the whole of the Americas

The displays focus on the collected artefacts, highlighting the beautiful artistic work in the majority of the items.  Though many of the objects were intended for ceremonial use and, as such, could be expected to be so highly decorative, a significant number of them were ‘just’ day to day items but still featured, for example, fabulous beadwork and stitching detail.

(Top left and bottom) peace pipes. Most of the peace pipes date from the 19^thcentury but the bottom 3 pipes in the top left picture are much older and, from left to right date from AD600-1100, AD100-600 and 200BC-AD400.  (Centre right) These Clovis arrowheads date from about 11,000BC

And, for a country where so many people have said words to the effect ‘we don’t have history like you do’, the museum showed that, in many ways, the Americans do.  It’s just that ancient American history is not architectural and much of it has rotted away and/or been lost by frail memories.  Plus, of course, it isn’t the ancient history of Caucasian Americans, it’s the ancient history of the Native Americans.  We were surprised to see some truly ancient peace pipes on display and even more amazed at the age of the Clovis arrowheads (or, more properly, Clovis points), which date back to 11,000BC!  The blurb with the display also highlighted that arrowheads of this age have been found in many areas of the Americas, stretching from Alberta in Canada to Venezuela in South America.  More impressive still, is the fact that research has shown that the technology for making this design of arrowhead spread across the Americas in just 200 years.

We could have stayed far longer at the museum but we just did not have the time.  So, regretfully, we left before we had seen much of what we would like to have viewed and that for only fraction of the time we wanted to spend on it. But it was an excellent taster to round off our final day of sightseeing in New York for this visit.  And that’s the great thing – there’s far more to see in NYC that we managed to fit in this time around, which means that next year we can certainly justify coming back this way again.

New York, New York, USA