Franklin Avenue

Visit to Ground Zero
Maria and I hadn't really intended to visit Ground Zero while we were in New York. It's not that we were adamantly against seeing it, but the site of the nation's worst terrorist attack doesn't seem like something you put on your sightseeing itinerary. We passed over it last year when we were in New York as well.
This time around, though, we planned to take the Staten Island Ferry (the best deal in all of New York, by the way-- it's free!) and decided to walk through Battery Park to get there. So we exited the Subway (the N/R line) at Courtlandt Street-- which happened to be smack, right at the Ground Zero site.
The Port Authority has erected a huge fence around the site, with some placards explaining the events of 9/11. Walking around, it's still eerie and still emotional. Some of the buildings around the site are still being reconstructed. The site itself, though, now looks like any construction pit. Workers were driving around bulldozers in the pit the day we were there, but it was tough to tell what they were trying to do.
The oddest thing were the people taking pictures of each other in front of Ground Zero. Isn't that just a tad odd? Do you really want to stick that in your photo album? Isn't it still a little too new for that?
Later, walking through Battery Park, we stumbled across the remains of the steel sphere that was once the sculpture between both towers, and the focal point for the World Trade Center. It's now twisted and punctured and a mess. But the basic shape of it survived. As a temporary memorial, it now sits in the park.
Later, while riding the Ferry to Staten Island and taking in the skyline of Manhattan, it was still jarring to see it without those two towers. What's more, you can see the empty space where the towers were-- it's like, building-building-building-jarring empty space-building-building-building.
It's amazing how New York has gotten back to normal. But every once in a while, walking around New York, you realize that "normal" isn't what "normal" used to be.