Visit New York - Day Three

I caught the PATH to Wiley on my own and sat with Michelle again, who showed me how to check in manuscripts online, before I went for my second training session with Michael. Tom then took me for lunch at the cafeteria, and let me leave after I'd taken a few photos of Manhattan from the 7th floor gallery windows.

Back at the hotel I collected my sightseeing things together and headed uptown along 5th Avenue to The New York Public Library (left), a beautifully grand building that puts most libraries I've seen in England to shame.

The Library (on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street) opened in 1911 and is one of the great knowledge institutions of the world, its myriad collections ranking with those of the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It is a privately managed, nonprofit corporation with a public mission, operating with both private and public financing in a century-old, still evolving private-public partnership. Entry is free but as the Library put it, there is "one criterion for admission: curiosity".

A lot of people say America has no history, but this place felt rich with culture and history. I took lots of photos, mainly to show my Dad who would love to have any of the reading rooms as an annex to his house!

After the library I went to Grand Central Terminal (right) where I tried (and failed) to recreate THAT famous picture. Grand Central Terminal (42nd Street and Park Avenue) opened in 1913 and at various times housed an art gallery, an art school, a newsreel movie theater, a rail history museum, and innumerable temporary exhibitions. All the while, it remained the busiest train station in the country, with a bustling Suburban Concourse on the lower level and famous long-distance trains like the Fast Mail, the Water-Level Limited, the Wolverine, and the Twentieth Century Limited departing from its Main Concourse.

Over the decades the area and terminal declined and in the 1970s the station was almost demolished, but thankfully the Landmarks Preservation Commission saved it and it was restored to its former glory during the 1980s & 1990s. It was pretty amazing to be in such a beautiful and iconic location.

Feeling tired I walked back down 5th and to my hotel, picking up some sushi takeout from a deli and a pint can of beer (wrapped in a brown paper bag by the clerk as if drinking is somehow shameful seedy!). I phoned Dave and then went to sleep, ready for a long day of sightseeing the next day.

See my New York photos here