June 2016 Anniversary Trip

Saturday June 11, 2016

I have always loved the general approach to Laguardia on Delta when you fly up the East River and get to see the Statue of Liberty and all of Manhattan.  I have seen pictures from a friend who had the best approach ever though...straight up the west side of Manhattan. I always wanted to fly in that way and had never been that lucky until Saturday!  I snapped pictures all along the way.

Here's a  good shot of the Financial District with the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.

The tall building in the bottom center of the picture is the World Trade Center.  If you zoom in or look carefully, you can see the 9/11 Memorial in the two footprints of the Twin Towers directly right of the new WTC.

Here's midtown.  The big round white object is Madison Square Garden and just above it in the picture (a bit east) is the Empire State Building.  You can also easily see Madison Square Park and the Flatiron Building in the upper right quadrant near the building with the gold top.

In the southeast corner of the park you can see a tall square building which is 432 Park, the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere.  Roosevelt Island is just above Manhattan here in the East River.  The bridge going across the river and over Roosevelt Island is the 59th Street bridge which connects Manhattan to Queens.

Here's Central Park with the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir.  The white building inside the park is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sunday June 12

Sunday we went to a documentary, had croque madames at Bar Boulud in the front with the windows wide open and a great breeze blowing in, checked out the American Craft show at Lincoln Center, went to the evening service at Redeemer on the East Side, and then had dinner at Sistina.  A very full day!  Not many pictures....  The Art Students League sold its air rights to a high rise going up (Nordstrom Tower) so it was covered again in scaffolding.  Students' art was all over the posts and available space on the sidewalk.  Here's one of the posts covered with original art.

Monday June 13

On Monday we had lunch at Jack's Wife Freda in SoHo and then walked over to see St Patrick's Old Cathedral.  It's closed for renovation so we couldn't see much but I would love to see the inside one day.  It opened in 1809 and was important to the Irish and Italian immigrants who came here and settled on the Lower East Side. Through the fence I was able to take these two pictures.  

 We then walked over to Bonnie Slotnick's Vintage Cookbooks, a little shop Tony had read about in the WSJ.  It was such a fun shop and we were able to visit for a while with the owner, Bonnie.  We checked out her garden too in the back with blooming roses and clematis.

Bonnie recommended we stop a couple of blocks away at Odd Fellows Ice Cream...which we did, of course!  Afterwards we were back home in time to rest and head out by subway to I Sodi for dinner.

Tuesday June 14

 It seems like we are always eating up here.  I had told Tony about Katz's deli from a couple of weeks ago so we headed over there for lunch where he got his fill of pastrami sandwich and matzah ball soup and where I had "only" the potato pancakes!  

I took him around to a few other places we had discovered on our recent trip...Economy Candy, CW Pencil.  We headed back uptown then where I went alone to Argosy Books.  

That evening we canceled our dinner plans and instead went to the Mandarin Oriental Lobby for the view and small plates.  The view down 59th Street and of the park is so fantastic especially wth the shadows cast over the park.

Wednesday June 14

We went to a play this afternoon after having lunch at Eataly at LeVerdure and getting our discounted tickets at TKTS.  We killed about 30 minutes at the window of the RLounge at the Renaissance Hotel where there is a wonderful view of Times Square.  I set up my phone to capture this time lapse video.