A Walk Up Broadway

So...back to New York. This was the view when we emerged from the Fulton Street subway station in lower Manhattan; that's the new building at the World Trade Center site in the background. It's incredibly tall, and looked almost unreal in the early morning light.

Two spires: St. Paul's Church in the foreground. J. and I stopped in a deli for a bagel and coffee, and then we split up; he went off to a camera store and then to visit a cousin whose office is nearby, and I decided to walk uptown on Broadway. I was headed for 12th Street, about 30 blocks north, and we planned to rendezvous at our friend's apartment in Greenwich Village around 2 pm. The only problem was the heat, which was beastly. My solution was to walk until I couldn't take it anymore, then step into an air-conditioned store for a while, of which, of course, there are many. But the focus of my walk was the street.

Pretzels.

Construction. Always. In the middle of everything. 

Suddenly, upscale retail: this is a window display at Kate's Paperie, SoHo.

Street scene looking north, Chrysler Building in the far distance.

Street fashion and make-up.

Typical, incredibly beautiful building facades of lower Manhattan. When I reached Canal Street I took a detour to Utrecht Art Supplies, where I bought some blocks of Arches watercolor paper in interesting sizes, and stood letting their big fan blow on me for a while. Then I headed back to Broadway and resumed my walk.

And we've got some for you...a whole store devoted to Converse All-Stars.

At Dean&Deluca, an ultimate deli. I went in to cool down.

Some of their fancy cookies. Those purple octopi are $4.50 each, but they're certainly cute. I didn't buy anything to eat, but somewhere around here I bought a loose black tank top, much cooler than what I was wearing, on sale for ten bucks, and changed my clothes in the store's dressing room.

Houston Street, the dividing line between SoHo (south of Houston) and Greenwich Village.

Grace Episcopal Church, Astor Place.

And its interior.

Finally, my destination: The Strand: "18 Miles of Books." I had a quick sandwich across the street, and then went in to browse. A whole huge store of English language books!

Ahhh.

 

(next post: back down to Washington Square, and a long walk back home across the Brooklyn Bridge.)