the Winter Garden

The Winter Garden, Lower Manhattan, October 2010.

A question that has plagued me since I started a life of travel is "where was your favorite...?" Sometimes it is simply unanswerable. At times I find myself trying to think what place I liked that the questioner could relate to. We all have favorite everything in life, but these things might change over time. They are lists that are added to and deleted from. The whole concept annoyed me because I felt I was never giving a sincere answer. I was just saying "something" to tick some invisible box. That being said, and I am now quite sincere, if I have favorite places in Manhattan, they are at the antipodes - Fort Tryon Park [See: Fort Tryon Park] and Battery Park City. For me, the crown jewel of Battery Park City is the Winter Garden.

I arrived in New York shortly after Battery Park City was completed. In the late 80s, it was this sterile no-man's land along the Hudson overlooking Jersey. Most people gasped at the very idea of living there. The concept of the place was born out of making more affordable housing in NYC (which it did not do) and of finding a place for all the dirt dug out of the foundations for WTC 1 & 2 (which no longer exist). Now you have an exclusive neighborhood built on the fill from two buildings that are longer there. "Back in the day", when I first visited, the Winter Garden was just an oddity in a place that no one knew too much about.

Living in Manhattan in ones late 20s is really a dream come true - at least it was for me. I found a decent job; I was in a relationship; and I lived in a decent apartment. That being said - New York giveth and taketh away. It requires a LOT of energy to live in New York. I sometimes craved a quiet place with no people that was still expansive. Besides a huge church, where would such a place exist in Manhattan? Then I stumbled upon the Winter Garden.

The Winter garden is a large, vaulted glass atrium with a stately grove of live Mexican fan palms. The floor is stunning polished marble laid in an intricate pattern. It contains a grand stairway to its base. It was built to impress (it did impress me at least). After its completion, it was almost always empty. I often went there, especially in the cold months, to marvel at a large, empty "tropical" space in New York City that no one knew about.

My life moved on from New York.

My life moved back to New York after eight years. This time I was living in the Financial District which had recently begun to convert old office buildings into very funky apartments. I was no longer living a long A/E Train ride away from the Winter Garden - I could walk to it! Battery Park City had been discovered and was even somewhat "chic". There were yachts in the small marina on the Hudson in front of the Winter Garden. A temporary stage was sometimes set up inside the atrium for performances. It had been discovered, yet it still was not thronged. If I visited outside of lunch time, it was largely empty. The palm trees had grown more robust. I could still find some solace there.

Less than a year later the world ended and I left New York City yet again.

I heard that the Winter Garden had been destroyed by the falling debris of the Twin Towers. I wondered if it would be reconstructed at all. I followed the story in the news and heard that it was in fact to be rebuilt and the government of Italy had even agreed to replace all the marble gratis. It was the first thing at the WTC site to be rebuilt and reopened. The reopening was presided over by GW Bush himself. Still, I did not return.

Almost a decade later.

I went to New York with KP, a young Indian guy in my small town of Milford, PA who had never been to Manhattan. We did all the tourist sites and of course he wanted to see "Ground Zero" - a place I had avoided totally. We took the train, got out at the WTC station, and passed by the new tower being built. We crossed the rebuilt bridge over West Street which now overlooked the then-under-construction 911 Memorial. We entered the Winter Garden and it was just as I remembered. The new trees were scraggly as they had been when I first moved to New York. They needed more time to fill in. It reminded me of my very first visits there. My favorite place had been reborn - not everything was totally destroyed.

My favorite places in New York City remain - Fort Tryon Park and the Winter Garden at Battery Park City.