Day 3: Travel day
Nau mai
Yesterday we drove from Philadelphia to New York City.
Our tour continued with a thrilling travel day, a 160km journey across the state of New Jersey to get to our accommodation at the top of the island of Manhattan.
Hotel checkout was a breezy 12pm so Tristan and I eased into our morning with a run along the banks of the Schuylkill River. We explored the Schuylkill River Trail, a very fine piece of infrastructure, a broad and smooth asphalt roadway that was flush with joggers, cyclists, trundlers, and a good variety of canines.
We breakfasted on the way out of the city, making our way to a spot in an old industrial neighbourhood next to the Delaware River. John’s Roast Pork was a sandwich shop that seemed to possess purity in its name and purity in its mission statement. A menu that consisted of specialities only. I ordered a hot roast pork sandwich with sharp Provolone, and spinach, and sat with my bandmates in the sun with a backdrop of old warehouses and dockside cranes to enjoy this substantial meal.
The drive to New York was a relaxing three hours of cruising along the comfortable road surface of the New Jersey Turnpike, as well as several other lesser known but equally comfortable highways, and it was late in the afternoon when we crossed the George Washington Bridge and found ourselves in the neighbourhood of Washington Heights. The streets were busy, food trucks and other street vendors crowding the footpaths and brightly coloured shopfronts breathing life into streets of tired apartment building facades.
After checking into our accommodation, we enjoyed a couple of hours rest. Then in the early evening Tristan and I headed out to watch some live music at a spot in lower Manhattan. This was quite a journey from Washington Heights, and a great way to put this city’s mass rapid transit system to the test. To gain access to our subway station we descended a flight of stairs from street level and then entered a huge elevator, which took us down to the platform, 37m below the earth’s surface. This is an impressive station with long platforms and a tall, vaulted ceiling, decorated with intricate mosaics, and all drilled and blasted out of the hard rock under Washington Heights during the construction of the city’s first subway line, 120 years ago. I read a fascinating article written in 1902 by John B McDonald, the contractor responsible for this railway line and was extremely taken by his futuristic vision of a mass rapid transit system.
“In very few cases will passengers have to walk more than fourteen feet down stairs from the street to the railroad platforms. At stations, the waiting rooms, tracks, and platforms will be roofed with thick glass at the street surface, so that sunlight will abound. The air in the tunnel will be as pure as in the lowest story of any house built under the best hygienic regulations. There will not be one whiff of what is known as cellar air, nor will there be steam, smoke, or cinders. The trains will be moved by electric motors, capable of a speed of fifty miles an hour. The tunnel will be thirteen feet high inside, and its width will be fifty feet, except where there are side tracks, which will make it eighteen feet wider.”
The bulk of our evening was spent on this subway system. We hurtled underground down most of the length of Manhattan, catching a gig in a basement record store, hurtling across to Brooklyn for a drink, and then all the way back up Manhattan again. It was a long day that was both fun and exhausting.
