Day 4, Part 1 - St. Paul's Chapel, World Trade Center, Wall Street, etc.

Sunday morning we got another sandwich from the food truck & ate it on the train headed waaay downtown.  We first went to St. Paul's Chapel.  Again, long before we even thought about coming to NYC for sure, I had used the book about St. Paul's and 9/11, "The Little Chapel That Stood" to introduce the whole horrific day to Kyla.  It's an amazing book, I'd highly recommend it.  The area is still under some pretty major construction, the subway station is temporary and had lots of plywood walls & temporary signs up, but everything was definitely labled and had better signs & directions than any other part of NYC by far, so it wasn't bad to navigate.  The small choir was rehearsing when we got there, so that was neat, and made it even more moving.  I didn't expect to be that emotionally impacted really, but I'm tearing up just looking at these photos, it was quite moving.  They do have some services there still, although they have a couple different campuses that are really their main church campuses (they're Episcopal).  The outside edges of the small chapel are a sort of exhibit.  Bottom right is Kyla looking at a fire bucket from St. Paul's from the great fire of 1776 (I think that's the year, close....), as well as a drawing of that day, right above is a photo of the steeple of the church with the dust cloud from the attacks coming, and above is the towers on fire......

If you don't know the story, it was considered a miracle by pretty much everyone that the chapel stood, without even a single pane of glass broken, given that the twin towers were pretty literally in it's backyard, and everything around was heavily damaged.  It became a place for the rescue and emergency workers to come lay down, on the pews and then eventually they got cots, and eat a meal.  They had thousands of volunteers, all just really amazing.  You can google it to read more, or look at their website, of course.

They even started using George Washington's pew again in the aftermath (normally it's roped off) where he used to sit.

This was the part that really got me, all of the 'missing' posters of people looking for their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, etc. after the attacks.  And this was just a small portion of them.  Kyla stood there for a looooong time reading them all and was quite solemn also of course.

343 on the fire helmet for the number of firemen that died that day.

They have replaced the pews with chairs recently, the pews were all scratched up from the emergency workers boots & stuff when they slept on them, but they had a few on display.  They actually used the chapel full time in the recovery effort for over a year.

You've probably seen photos in the news and stuff, this cemetary (the headstones were from the 1700s all that I saw) was covered up to the top of them with papers and debris.

This is from the back door of the chapel, with the new World Trade Center being built in the background.  You can see that it's framed, but not even the outside is finished all the way.

 reflection of the chapel in a building next door....

Like I said, lots & lots of construction down there. 

 Love this one too.  We were actually there when they were ringing the church bells also, which was neat, I believe they only ring them once a week now, and on special occasions.

 This is actually at Trinity Church at the intersection of Wall Street & Broadway, a ways away from the WTC site (about 3 blocks).  This sculpture is one that an artist made of the tree root (sycamore I believe?) that fell at St. Paul's in the attacks from a 70 year old tree that scienctist have said absorbed a lot of the huge shock waves from the attacks & helped save St. Paul's from the attacks.

 It was cooold and windy this morning, so I bought Kyla a cute hat on the street to go with her hood :)

 Rebuilding....

Liberty Plaza.  There were NYPD everywhere here.  Like crazy everywhere, every 10 feet at least, tons of them.  They had this little lifeguard stand type thing also set up facing the WTC site.  We did see one of these at Times Square also.  And more ornamental cabbage stuff, ha!

We took these pretty quickly as we were walking to the Subway, Wall Street, American Stock Exchange.

And, the good old train!!