Sunday in New York City

We had another 6am breakfast at the Applebee's up the street from the Crown Plaza and boarded buses at 7:30 for the trip to Brooklyn Tabernacle for the morning worship service at 9:30am.

Unimposing on the outside, Brooklyn Tabernacle is nevertheless a very special place for musicians. Our choir has done several pieces composed by Carol Cymbala, the worship minister there. That choir has won many awards. Carol's husband Jim Cymbala is pastor of the large non-denominational church which showed a refreshing friendly mixture of many nationalities and ethnic groups.

A couple from Norway sat beside us and a friendly group from France behind us.

We arrived early, so we could look around the interesting sanctuary. It looked very old but well constructed and preserved. The side boxes were being used for some of the musicians and the technology, but the construction of those boxes looked like the fancy box seat locations in some theaters.

Out whole tour group may have been a couple of hundred people and we spread out all over the sanctuary. This portion of the Mableton First Baptist group settled in the right front section of seats.

Front row Denette Harris, Margaret Williamson (Karla's Mom), Karla and Chris Ayers. Behind Ricky and Becky Ridgway and Brenda Nave.

By the time the service started, the entire sanctuary was packed.

Part of our tour package was tickets to the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tour, so we had decided to have a go at it. We are on top of the tour bus at the corner of 46th Street and 7th Avenue, right at Times Square.

I was again impressed with the saturation of the area with big high resolution video billboards.

The top of our bus shows at left as we move out into the crowded vehicle and pedestrian traffic on Broadway at Times Square.

Note that they even have trucks with video billboards running around the streets, as if we didn't have enough on the sides of the buildings.

Hemmed in by the closely packed, super-tall buildings, I again had the feeling of traveling down the bottom of canyons.

The building in center is One Times Square, the location of the New Year's Ball Drop.

The ball is in place with the year 2017, but that won't last much longer.

From my position at the back of the top of the bus, this is the view back north to the upper triangle of Times Square. The crowd is amazing, and the number of yellow cabs also. But after seeing the traffic, I'd take one of those yellow cabs rather than drive!

We have moved from 47th Street down to 39th Street and the presence of the yellow taxis is even more pervasive. I've read a lot about New York taxis, but this had to be seen to be believed.

You hear so much about New York City that many things you encounter have names you have heard all your life. And Penn Station is an example. Positioned here at 8th Avenue and 31st Street, it is the busiest passenger transport hub in the Western Hemisphere. The above-ground structure houses Madison Square Garden, and the Penn Station is underground, servicing 21 tracks fed by seven tunnels!

Off to the side of our route we got several views of the Empire State Building. This 102-story building was the tallest building in the world between 1931 and 1970. As of 2017, it is the fifth-tallest building in the United States and the 28th tallest in the world. It is located between 33rd Street and 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

Heading further south into Lower Manhattan, we passed the Wyndham New York hotel. Brenda had considered booking us there since we have Wyndham points, but it would certainly have been inconvenient to Carnegie Hall and the rehearsals at the Crown Plaza. It was interesting to know where it is. In the picture with that sign is our narrator and guide for our tour.

The above picture has no great significance that I know about, but I found it interesting. I'm presuming that those buildings were early apartment buildings, and I was impressed with their being built so high and attached to one another. I was also interested in the multiple water reservoirs on the tops.

This also reinforced my awareness of the New Yorker's penchant for massive billboards, and I found this one very amusing. You are assuring people that there are no GMOs in your Vodka?!! We have no hard evidence of the harmfulness of GMOs, but we have centuries, even millenia, of evidence of the harmful effects of vodka!

I was continually amazed at the crowds of people on the streets. This is at 34th Street and 7th Avenue. I took the hotdog stands as commonplace until I heard that there was a fee of something like $150,000 a year to be able to operate a hotdog stand! it depends on the popularity of your location, and the highest was $289,500 at 5th Avenue and 62nd Street!

I was very pleased that our tour took us by Macy's on 34th Street to see the turkey that we have seen on so many Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parades.

I snapped the two frames below on November 23 when we were home watching the parade with the granddaughters.

I was also interested in the extensive steel structure that was being constructed on the opposite side of the street for the television coverage of the parade. Not only were there railings for lighting, it looked like there were structure on which to run cameras to follow the action.

I was surprised to see this kind of crowded street market in Lower Manhattan.

I was surprised and impressed with these ornately constructed, solid old buildings. I understood these to be part of the old Garment District of New York City. The historical district was bounded by 34th to 42nd streets and 5th to 9th Avenues. This was a bit south of that I think, but we heard descriptions of the manufacturing of clothing in the early 1800s when there was no electricity.