The Fairytale of New York (Day 2)

On Monday morning we visited our vendors plant in Jersey City. This is the view from outside their front doors. I'm going to make this picture large so you can see the specific building that I'm going to write about:



The background is the Manhattan skyline. Near the middle of this picture there is a thin lightpole. To the very left of the lightpole, is a building with a pointed green roof. Please let me know if you aren't able to see what I'm talking about. This is the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913. At that time, this was the tallest building in the world. However, this building was not visible by the employees of the Jersey City plant until September 11, 2001... obviously because the twin towers were in front of it. The morning of September 11th, an employee driving to work noticed that one of the towers was on fire, so he ran into work and had everyone come out and look. The entire staff was sitting in the parking lot looking at the burning building, when they heard a very loud rumble. They looked up, and the second plane was on it's way to Tower 2. They stood there and watched the plane crash into the building. They had to close the plant down for 3 days and have grief counselors readily available for the staff. I can't imagine being right there and witnessing such an event.

We spent the morning at the plant, then we took some of the employees to lunch at an authentic Italian restuarant in Jersey City. It all felt very Soprano's, I loved it. Then we spent the afternoon touring our companies Distribution Center, which is Northern NJ. Our vendor couldn't tour that with us, so he sat in the cafeteria with his virtual office and said he'd make reservations for us to eat at Sardi's that night. When the tour was over, he told us that Sardi's is closed on Monday nights because it's part of the Theater district, so he made reservations for us at Tavern On The Green instead. WHAT?!?! You mean the restaurant made famous in Breakfast at Tiffany's??? The one and the same:

There was an event there the day before which is why there are tents around it. Bummer that I couldn't get a better picture.

That evening we drove into Jersey City to take the Path into the Financial District. This drive in was too incredible for words. The skies were clear, not a cloud to be seen. The moon was full and orange, and was right above the skyline. I tried to get pictures, but pictures do not do the moon or the buildings justice. I promise you, this was the biggest moon I have ever seen, and the view was magnificent:






The Path (like the subway) actually wraps around Ground Zero at the bottom, so I got to see the whole thing from every angle. Unfortunately I couldn't take pictures on the moving train, so that's just going to have to be images for my own memory. Everything else is surrounded with netting and fences so the pictures I got are very few and not very good or detailed, but I did what I could:





After looking at Ground Zero and the building that my company is headquartered in, we caugh a cab to take us to Central Park, where Tavern On The Green is located. The cab driver says "Where to?" "Tavern on the Green at Central Park!" Jeff, my vendor, said.

Cab Driver: Tavern On The Green? That place is expensive! And the food is not very good, it's just impressive to people from places like Alabama or Missouri.
Me: Or Utah.
Cab Driver: You're from Utah? They have a very liberal Mayor in Salt Lake City!
Me: yes, Rocky Anderson is a liberal. He's done some good for the city, but he's getting out of politics soon. How do you know about Utah's politics?
Cab Driver: I read all about it in the New York Times. They don't have a lot of African American's in SLC, do they? (he was African American)
Me: No, they don't. It's a pretty whitebread place.
Cab Driver: You know they have that LDS church there, and Hinckley. Hinckley keeps all of the money of the Pakistani's and Saudi's.
Me: Oh really? Now that's something I haven't heard of.
Cab Driver: Oh, it's true! I read about it in the New York Times!
Jeff the Vendor: Speaking of Mormon churches, look, there's the Temple!
Me: Huh? Oh. Are we at Central Park soon?
Of course at this point I was giggling and had to send text messages to my husband to let him know about this conversation. It was too funny to find a NYC cab driver that seemed to know all about Utah's politics and even facets about the mormon church that I never heard of.

After our fabulous dinner, we walked outside of Central park and around the south end. Apparently Macaulay Culkin lives in this building:


Lucky bastard.
Immediately after taking this picture, I looked right in front of me and saw this:

One of many horses just waiting to take you on a carriage ride through Central Park. Would have been fun, but not this trip.

After we were done walking past the park, we walked down 5th Avenue. Our escort, Vendor Jeff, thought he'd just show us a few of the shops and then we'd catch a cab back to Penn Station. But he kept thinking of more and more that he wanted to show us. We took a detour over to Grand Central Station, with the stunning view of the Chrylser building behind it:



Our ultimate destination on this walk was to get to this beauty:



If you're familiar with NYC (and so many of you are!) this means we walked from the south end of Central Park, down 5th Avenue, over to Grand Central Station and back to 5th Avenue, past the NYC public library (my picture of that sucked), over to the Empire State Building, in front of Macy's, where eventually we got to Penn Station to catch the Path back to Jersey City. I'm bummed I didn't get a picture of our train conductor. She was an adorable girl from New Jersey complete with attitude. The conductors hat barely fit on her head, she couldn't be more than 19. But she was doing her job and doing it very well. She put up with a lot more shit than I would any day, but she did it with New Jersey girl attitude.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about my day trip into the city without vendor Jeff as our escort, where I met Meg Slate and had a chocolate orgasm. You know you want to stay tuned for that!