And Not More (of the same)

This past weekend I was in a city that was not Philadelphia.

We went to New York to meet friends and we stayed two nights.  We had two great dinners and saw two great shows.  New York and Philadelphia are about the same distance from my home.  New York is a difficult city to drive into, and parking there can be costly... so, as for most of my previous trips to that amazing place, we took a bus.

By far, my best photos of the weekend were of One World Trade Center and a view from above the 16-acre World Trade Center site.

The tower and its spire are looking pretty near done, but if you look closely, you can see that a crane is still at the base of the spire.

Here was our incredible view of all that was below -- the 9/11 Memorial site.

The twin reflecting pools are set in the footprints of the twin towers.  Each one is nearly an acre in size and they feature the largest manmade waterfalls in North America.  The building behind the closest one is the 9/11 Memorial Museum.  (It did look like a giant motor home with a plastic slipcover.  I did not ask about that.)  In the foreground there is a concrete pad that will be a new subway station.  That fact interested me and I took this photo.

I have not talked about my own day job here, but it is an engineering kind of a job.  With so much work in progress on the pad, I knew that it would look very different there before too long.

We were on a 38th floor balcony of a hotel restaurant, and I kept thinking that I was hearing the waterfalls of the pools below.  My husband, who is a more technical hands-on engineering person, told me that what I heard was actually some kind of air hammer on a floor above.  I did not get to hear the waterfalls, or see the pools up close.  I will have to do that on another day.

It was my husband's friend who brought us to this place.  He is a construction engineering consultant who has been involved in the project for several years now.  He explained how the completion of the pools and museum by the tenth anniversary of 9/11 were so important to so many people, and yet, their presence now is somewhat of a daily hindrance to all the work that is still going on.

When we walked some of the streets below, I could not help thinking about all that had happened there.  There is a kind of spiritual presence, that can be felt all around that place.  It was quite a contrast with all of the activity at the site and the energy that is everywhere in the city.