Today was a busy day. I am going to divide it into two blogs as tomorrow will be a much quieter day. I started today out with a breakfast with a old colleague from Pfizer days. We didn’t overlap that long at Pfizer but we continued our friendship outside of Pfizer and it was fun to just pick right up our conversation about all sorts of topics as if 8 years had not passed. He will be a great resource for the next stage of my life.
I then caught the bus to Manhattan – in the midst of the hardest rain of the day. While I had a rain jacket I hadn’t really packed for rain and 40 degree weather but managed to layer well enough for the day. Once in the city, I went to the home of one of my first women in urology friends that I met in 1986 or 87. I visited her apartment many years ago – long before I would have imagined I would eventually live in Manhattan. At the time I was so shocked that anyone could live in such a small space and it is a generous 1 bedroom apartment by NYC standards. She has completely renovated it and has created more custom storage space that I could imagine. It no longer feels small to me. She has created beautiful space with more storage than I have in my 2 bedroom apartment. We then went to lunch and had a great crab curry and Fish Cheeks on the lower East Side.
We then went cross town to the new location of the Whitney Museum. From the Whitney, there was a good view of Little Island, a new park built over the Hudson River south of Chelsea Pier. The first photo is the view from the window of the Whitney and the second is an official photo that shows the full park which is much more than I could appreciate from what I was able to see.
One of the exhibits in the Whitney gave me some new ideas for my kitchen renovation. I had been thinking of more of a black/white/gray theme but this was pretty interesting.
We left the Whitney and went to the south entrance to High Line Park. While I had heard a bit about the park before I left NYC, I had never visited it. I lived on the east side and High Line Park is on the west side quite a ways south. This was built on an unused elevated rail line. The designers used the original rail structures in many aspects of the park.
As we got about midway along the walk in the park, our next destination was visible – The Edge. The platform jutting out of the tall building is The Edge located at Hudson Yard.
Up until this visit, I had never heard of Hudson Yard. It was built over rail tracks between 10th and 12th Ave and 30th-34th Streets. Construction started in 2014 after I left Manhattan. A video describes it as: The Hole; The Platform; The City; The People. Amazing that so many buildings can be built on a platform over train tracks and according to the video, the trains never stopped running during the construction. Between Little Island and Hudson Yard, I was truly impressed by all that had to have transpired between the vision and the reality. Stay tuned for Part 2.
Tamara Unleashed 