Staten Island Ferry. Late Summer 1988
Working Boy
The iconic views of lower Manhattan taken from the Staten Island Ferry set to Carly Simon's song "Let the River Run" in the film Working Girl appeared in December 1988. I must have predicted the impact of this shot a few months before the release of the film, although I recall no musical accompaniment. Ha ha! That first Fall in the City was an amazing time of discovery on the weekends for me. I explored a lot of it - mostly alone.
New York City was always filled with activity. In the days when my friends and I were poor and living in Washington Heights [see: Magaw Place], everyone joked that no one really needed money for entertainment in Manhattan - just walk the streets and watch the flow of humanity all thrown into that crucible below the towering buildings. Strange people and happenings were bound to emerge from that mix. People watching was great entertainment. Always on the look out for cheap/free things to do, the top of my list was the Staten Island Ferry. In the time I lived in New York it was either free or extremely cheap - just walk on. The views over lower Manhattan from the ferry were movie-esque. It was the easy way to view the Statue of Liberty, too. A must for anyone visiting me in New York meant taking the ferry back and forth to Staten Island - it was hard to top.
Other things discovered on those early walks? The Roosevelt Island Tram was second only to the Staten Island Ferry. I would have never believed at the time that a few years later Brian and I would be gliding across the East River daily to that slender island and our own apartment. The Little Red Lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge was also an unexpected find in Manhattan. Walking in Chinatown was as close to an "ethnic experience" as one could get in those days [see: dim sum]. SoHo and Canal Street at the time were a bizarre collection of shops from "old New York" and trendy galleries of "new New York". The Esplanade in Brooklyn Heights and the piers over in Hoboken, New Jersey gave great views back over the City. So much was just waiting to be "discovered".
In my travels, some of the best city experiences have been the free or nearly free activities commonplace to residents. Most of them I discovered by roaming around -- the Abra across Dubai Creek , the riverside paths along the Chicago and Singapore Rivers, the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and Khan Al Khalili souq in Cairo, Avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires and Unter den Linden in Berlin, the boat to Stanley across Sydney Harbor and the Star Ferry in Hong Kong. New York taught me that wandering without much money in one's pocket did not preclude having a good time. Many cities in the world could be thoroughly visited by only paying for public transportation and a few coffee/snack breaks. The modern and easy version of this is the big red tour buses that perform endless loops of big cities with stops at all the tourist places. Although not necessarily cheap, they do shuttle visitors around the highlights of a city - free, expensive and in-between. An old friend, Kelle Hankins, swore by taking a red tour bus as the first activity in any city she visited just to understand the lay of the place. Not my style, but I understood.
My relative poverty in those early years in New York prepared me for a lifetime of exploration on foot or by metro (or in the case above, by boat). Simple experiences in youth can have long lasting effects on life. I am ever grateful for starting out in New York "on the cheap".