Monday Part I: Bad Food and Unexciting Sights at the South Street Seaport

For reference, the second post in this series will be titled, "Monday Part II: Good Food and Even Better Food"

Monday I decided to explore the south street seaport. I didn't make it there during my long explorations of the civic center in the same district on Saturday and I wanted to finish up that area. I grabbed a sad-looking muffin at the deli where I bought panini the prior weekend.

After getting off the train downtown (to walk to the seaport), I opened my bag and took a bite of the muffin. It was awful. Like the stuff used in (white) cakes but stale. I cut my losses and threw it away. (!)

The first part of the Seaport I visited smelled, unsurprisingly, of fish. There is apparently a very bustling market there for restaurants buying fish right off of the ships (and refrigerated trucks) before dawn. Needless to say, I didn't see it as it was nowhere near dawn; I just smell the remnants thereof.

There is also a mall on one pier that was very very empty. (Actually the whole district looked fairly empty and run-down.) The food court in the upper level had lots of fast food restaurants and practically no customers, and it appeared so competitive for the few people that wandered through, various places were giving out free samples. The whole mall had the stench of death (as in, no one would make a profit there, not as in the smell of fish). But maybe I just hit it at a bad time; maybe it fills up with businessmen looking for a quick bite to eat while overlooking the east river?

Incidentally, the east river is much less pretty than the one on the west side (the hudson). I'm not sure why...

The south street seaport museum was scattered over a number of blocks of the historic district with lots of revolutionary-era architecture, and a few old ships. I kept peeking but nothing looked exciting enough to make it worthwhile to buy a ticket and explore more. Except possibly the small workshop where one guy makes ships in a bottle. But I peered through the window for a while and felt like I got my fill; I didn't have the energy to buy a ticket to the museum just to go in and be the only visitor this poor guy has had all day.

It being monday, there were some other museums that were closed (police museum, fraunces tavern/museum, which was famous was being a stop George Washington sometimes drank at) but nothing that looked like it merited returning just to see.

Only two things made this whole journey not an entire loss. One was an electrical substation that had a big mural on the side that was painted to make it look like a row of townhouses, windows and all, in order to fit in better with the neighborhood around it. Very cool. (I can't find a picture of it on the web; sorry.) The other was the Vietnam Veterans Plaza. At the risk of sounding callous, this was a memorial very much like any other vietnam memorial you've been to (names, quotes on walls, etc.). But it had one unusual feature. They had a fountain that, through some trick of water pumping speed and fountain shape design (I don't know if it was intentional or not), sounded quite a bit like the sound of lots of machine gun fire and helicopter blades.

This means I've officially explored (in the tourist fashion for sights, not in the bar/restaurant fashion) about a third (or a little more) of Manhattan, covering entirely all the districts south of houston (soho, lower east side, tribeca, civic center, downtown, wall street, chinatown, little italy, jewish quarter, and the south street seaport). (The only place I wanted to return to in that whole district to explore more was the New York Stock Exchange but apparently that's been closed indefinitely since 9/11.)