Park 24: Castle Clinton National Monument and Lower East Side Tenement Museum National Historic Site

8/8/13. We had two more days before Catherine leaves for Los Angeles, so we decided to take one more day to visit National Park sites in our area. Brad asked to join us since he's not working this week and it was great to have him join us. We were in the car going to his apartment when we realized we left our passports at home. Good thing Brad is so creative that he made us temporary ones to use today!


We caught an early train from Edison and got to the World Trade Center at 9 am. We walked down to Battery Park and found the entrance of Castle Clinton, which is the same area where you can buy tickets for the ferries to the State of Liberty. It was disconcerting to see Ellis Island the Statue of Liberty from the opposite than I am used to seeing it from Jersey City.

There's not much to the site at Castle Clinton, but we still enjoyed comparing this castle to the other fortifications we visited along the southeast coast in the spring. The most interesting part for me was the set of maps that showed the development of lower Manhattan over the centuries.








 We left Battery Park, stopped for coffee and snacks and then took the subway to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. We had a little while before our tour so we watched an excellent film about the tenement building and the various ethnic groups who immigrated in the area. Catherine was excited about the prospect of making such a good film one day.

 Our tour focused on the shops that would have been on the first floor of the tenement houses during the mid 19th century. We looked at three reconstructed rooms, then went into a larger room that used very clever interactive technology with individual touchscreens to explore primary source documents related to the time period. It was very engaging and we actually wished we had had more time with this technology.

After our tour, we went grabbed some fantastic gourmet popcorn next door, went to lunch, then stopped at Babycakes for goodies and walked back to the WTC to catch the train home. It was a terrific day and we are planning to return to  the Tenement Museum again for other tours. There is so much to see there that you could easily spend the entire day.