passing the taxis heading for Grand Central Station to search for the morning's first fares... Further west coming to the Hudson, new apartment complexes catch the early rays...
As does the river itself and the ferries coming to their Manhattan port from Jersey City, Weehawken, Edgewater...Jersey towns providing part of the workforce that fills the city's streets...
Only five passengers, including myself, heading west...to the towns along the Palisades, the cliffs that range along the Hudson's shores.... When I was a kid growing up on those cliffs, the apartments along the boulevard were just beginning to be built...and those now further south in Jersey City were not even a gleam in someone's eye...and those in lower Manhattan had yet to be built and destroyed and built again.
Getting up and around the cliffs was always child's play...swinging on the ropes strung on the girders underneath "suicide bridge," for example, was part of that play....but now there are fresh stairs and, even, yes a light rail that connects to Bergenline Avenue.
Bergenline...one of my first jobs working as a bus boy at Tedesco's, a restaurant with "great mussels"...shopping for "good" clothes at Schlesinger's with my Mom...for a long time has moved to a Latin beat...you get a bit more English above 60th Street but generally it speaks Spanish with all of its flavors.
I walk from 51st Street where the elevators lift passengers from the light rail's deep tunnel to the sidewalk, wander past my elementary school on 74th street, its students filing under the portals that still proclaim "Girls" and "Boys." But the boys and girls line up together now.
But why the walk? Ahhh...meeting friends at a restaurant at 79th and Bergenline. Tapas de Espana. Friends from the same elementary school...class of 1958.
After lunch...walk back through North Hudson Park...along the boulevard that runs atop the Palisades...stopping off to see the Mom of a friend who still lives in her apartment...
Take that long stairway back to the ferry...crossing with the late afternoon sun against the high walls of the skyscrapers...
And then back along 39th street...now heading east...to the hotel...a late afternoon drink...that stretches into the evening.
I love hiking in the mountains of Colorado...but this, this was a great hike.
Location:manhattan--new jersey
