Monday, February 21, 2022

Hike #399; Liberty State Park to Manhattan

2/15/9 Hudson River Waterfront; Liberty SP-Manhattan with Jillane Becker, Shelly Janes, DJ Ray Cordts, Jason Itell, Jason Kumpas, Kyle Zalinsky, Matt and Justyna Davis, "Amish Paul" Hassler, Iannis Garafalo, Christina Manley, Bernie Lieberman, David Noble, Jim "Mr. Buckett" Mathews, Larry Butler, Eric Pace, Harris Torres Salcedo, and Cory Salveson.


This was yet another hike journal that was lost in the fire, and then rewritten, and lost again by facebook. Many of them come up on searches but they do not in the search or note category. I just have to try to remember details enough to post something, and maybe something will come up. Maybe someone will have one of the discs I passed out with the journals on them or something.

This was another hike in the NJ Perimeter Series, and one of the most enjoyable urban sections.
The Hudson River Waterfront Walkway was coming along very well, with a nearly connected pedestrian route all the way from Liberty State Park up to the NY line. I'd already followed much of the perimeter up from Perth Amboy and had a couple little places to fill in, and this was one of the most substantial stretches toward NY.

The plan was to use the train to get back to the Liberty Park light rail station at the end, but we would follow the walkway to the George Washington bridge and cross. I'd never walked the bridge before, and the only way I'd done the hikes into the city at this point was connected by ferry and train.

We met at the south end of Liberty State Park, near the former location of the pier that was known as Black Tom. There's a little visitor center there and a good start to the walkway with a big lot.

There were outstanding views of the Statue of Liberty, Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and all of Manhattan and the Empire State Building. The paver walkway was pleasant and the water beautiful. The skies were clear and it was a wonderful day.

We headed north along a little foot bridge section and then to the Central Railroad of New Jersey terminal, where so many immigrants over the years were brought after processing on Ellis Island. We went into the terminal, had a look around, chatted with someone at a desk, and then moved on to the north. The terminals are now vacant, where the trains used to come in. It was famously shown in the movie "Funny Girl" but was in bad shape. The "train sheds" as they were called are falling apart badly.

We made our way from here to the Morris Canal Big Basin. The "little basin" was where the main canal exited the tide lock into the New York Bay, and the "big basin" was sort of a boat parking lot and remains so to this day.
We turned left along the edge of that and along the paver street along it to the west.
The walkway continues to the north and across the inlet to the big basin over Jersey Avenue. At the time, the road was abandoned between the two and there was only a ramshackle footbridge across the site. We then cut to the right and back out toward the waterfront. 
We reached a 911 Memorial made of a piece of twisted WTC steel, and there was a view directly across to the World Trade Center site where there was a new building going up. It looked like a match for the World Financial Center buildings. Maybe where building 7 was.

We made our way through the Newport section of Jersey City, where Henry Hudson moored the Half Moon in 1609, and established as the community of Pavonia in 1630. We passed a frame of an old power plant that I'm not sure if it was demolished or rehabilitated. 

There were a lot of displays, markers, statues, and a little light house with Where's Waldo stripes. We also saw the vent area for the Holland Tunnel.

At the time, we couldn't continue into Hoboken on Hudson River Waterfront Walkway. The good walkway there had not yet been constructed. We had to go out and around the terminal in order to do it. 

We went around and then into the Hoboken Terminal, a beautiful Lackawanna Railroad terminal opened in 1907. Of course, we had to go inside. It retains all of its beauty from when it was constructed, an amazing piece of architecture that still sees over fifty thousand users per day.

The walkway mostly was continuous to the north of here, with old railroad piers and remnants visible th entire time.
We soon reached Sybil's Cave, which had a prominent ornamental gate structure in front of it.
The cave is a folly created by the Stevens family around a natural spring in 1832, making it the oldest man made structure in Hoboken today.
It was gated off well enough that we didn't bother to try to go over to it this time. I'd ready about it a lot in Weird NJ, along with all of its local legends, so it was cool to finally get a look at it.

The walkway ended at this time around Frank Sinatra Drive and we had to do a little sidewalk stuff, but it wasn't bad. We were soon back on the waterfront. 

The area of Sybil's Cave was where the Palisades Formation becomes more prominent.
The igneus extrusive basalt formations travel as far as the southern end of Bayonne where the Morris Canal circumnavigated it, but the cliffs don't really become obvious until the north side of Hoboken on the waterfront. They have expensive, stately homes perched on their top through this area.

We could see the prominent step walkways down the cliffs to our left, and even more old ferry landings and docks of all sorts to the right. Sometimes they were just the pilings remaining, some docks were cut off from the shore but still in place on the Hudson.
In one case, a dock was cut off but an easy enough jump if we were to go from the railing onto it and out to the end. Jason and I hopped the thing and ran all the way to the end of the pier on the Hudson. The wood was in rough shape, we had some fun with it.

We headed back to the shore and continued north.
Another interesting point was the old Ferryboat Binghampton. It was abandoned in the river, moored since 1975. It was built by the Hoboken Ferry Company and launched in 1905. It could hold 986 passengers and several cars. It served the Hudson crossing between Hoboken and Barclay Street Manhattan for 62 years until the closure of that ferry in 1967. It was then a floating restaurant for several years. This wouldn't be the last time we'd see it, although it was eventually torn apart and removed despite being on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982.
It drives me crazy that people think something is protected because it's on the national register. That designation means absolutely nothing except to acknowledge it's old, and that it is eligible for grants.

We continued along the walkway as best we could, but it got a bit more interspersed because there were some private communities, there were some stores, and there was other stuff under construction. At those times we had to go out to the road or through parking lots.
During this stretch, we fawned over sale Sham Wows and we procured a shopping cart which DJ Ray pushed me in for a while. We hung onto the thing for quite a while. When I did get out of it, it became a receptacle for all of our backpacks for a bit so we didn't have to carry them. As I recall, we left the cart at the entrance of one of the very posh private communities that at the time barred entry to the waterfront walkway. It's since been completed through most of it.

We headed from Edgewater area onto River Road into Fort Lee and the NJ side of the George Washington Bridge.
There is also Fort Lee Historic Park on the right, which used to be the southern terminus of the Long Path, a long trail that was intended to connect New York City with the Adirondacks, but they have since officially designating it starting in Manhattan and those blazes were to be painted out.

There are walkways on both sides of the George Washington Bridge, but only one is ever opened at a time. Usually it is the south side, and I've still never walked the north side that I can remember.

There were still no suicide railings on the bridge at this time, so we had an uninhibited view of the river and the cityscape from the middle, and just as the sun was setting.
It was a celebratory moment, and so we popped some champaign bottles on the bridge for the occasion.
I forget where they came from for certain, but I might have had two of them with me because I procured a whole lot of booze from an abandoned house in Sussex County with permission. 

Iannis popped the cork on the bottles off onto the river, and we passed the bottle around those of us who remained far enough back to enjoy them. Much of the group hurried ahead across the bridge and missed out. 

Once we were in Manhattan, we were hungry. We had to figure out what we were going to do for food. I still to this day don't know the best cuisine in Manhattan and it's always a mess trying to decide on something so I usually leave it to everyone else, but that has a tradition of being a crazy mess.

I don't even remember what the restaurant was that we ended up taking, but we did end up riding the subway for a very long time after several blocks of streets, and we ended up on the wrong train in a longer route to get further south to where we could get back across. It ended up being a really late night because we ate, then had to get back across to New Jersey, to Exchange Place, which required a bit more walking, and then down to the light rail, and then we had to walk in the dark back through Liberty State Park to the south to reach the lot off of Morris Pesin Drive where we started!

Quite a long, crazy day, but a really great one!

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