Spring comes calling with invitations, in the blossoms, bursting buds, and blooms. Their message is clear: Come, don’t waste the moment. Look now. Enjoy this. Spring explodes in color bursts in the woodlands and along the streets that seem to exclaim a gay and riotous party that will soon settle down into summer’s hanging-around fullness. Many of its moments are brief and exquisitely pleasing and beautiful.

Take the rapturous show of crabapple blossoms. The tree’s color captures the juxtaposing messages of spring beauty that comes and leaves quickly but encourages us to slow our pace to savor it. First, its buds swell in the balloon stage into showy red-purple, pink, or white. Once the buds break, its delicate blossoms of pinkish white, light pink, rose-pink, and other variations burst forth. The flowering lasts just one to two weeks before a tree changes over to leaves. There is no waiting once this happens. Is there anything that expresses the beauty of a singular moment like the pink of crabapple blossoms against the deep blue sky or smooth water?

Spring possesses the quality of insistence in new life. The bud lies dormant through a winter’s long dark hours and its icy frozen days. Encased in each bud during the winter are the makings of the shoots, blossoms, blooms, and leaves of the following season. With increasing sunlight and warmer temperatures returning, that which the bud holds quickens and the bud bursts through. Its insistence in new life is based on natural cycles, regardless of our own sense of time and our life’s rhythms of growth and loss. Spring speaks of renewal, whether we are attentive and admiring, preoccupied, or deep in grief.

In this annual resurgence spring’s new growth and color tell us to trust that life comes forth in ways that we can depend upon. The new growth is a culmination of natural forces of the sun and earth’s rhythms, temperature and the soil. So it makes perfect sense in the natural world. But we also know it as a miracle to our senses and to our souls, one all the more glorious when we are open to its daily, seemingly sudden invitations found on hillside, lane, and pathway. The season doesn’t wait so it is up to us to follow the when and the where. Yes, spring has come calling!

Spring Explorations

Each year, Mindful Walker has focused on walking in the city, town, and country to find spring’s beauty and exuberance. To further explore spring on Mindfulwalker.com, take a look at the following:

The Glorious Palette of Spring Green

A Date With the Blossoms in New Paltz

Springtime at the Irish Hunger Memorial

This was the experience of a sunset on a recent brisk winter day at Brooklyn Bridge Park, as I watched the shifts of light, color, mood, and shape unfold, minute by minute. It is a glorious place to do this. Sitting at a distance from the moving traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the boats and ships on the East River and in New York Harbor feels like the stationary center of a quieter, calmer, more beautiful world. It is a world of sight and sound apart from the teeming city, a capability that this huge open space – an 85-acre site in various stages of development as a park on the East River – affords. Brooklyn Bridge Park, thus, joins the list of Mindful Walker “Great Sunset Spots” in New York City. (For the others, see a list following this column.)

Each sunset offers a certain unpredictable twist in color. When I first arrived at the park a short time before sunset, the sun was emerging from a deep bank of dark gray clouds, sending shafts of light-golden rays to the horizon below. Gradually, as the sun edged closer to the horizon, the gold became stronger and tinged with spots of red and pink. Silhouetted shapes and cloud strokes changed constantly. With each passing minute, the pink deepened to rose pink.

Finally, as the sun edged downward minutes before dipping below the horizon, bright rose-pink and gold flashed and were topped by deep lavender clouds above, all etching the roofs and treetops in the distance. As twilight darkened, the lights of Lower Manhattan came up and the skyline shimmered against the deep blue sky.

The park is an oasis tucked amid the towering city around, from the Brooklyn Bridge above at its north to Brooklyn Heights in the other direction and Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers across the river. Yet for all its intimacy with the city, it feels open to the world beyond when looking south and west to the waters of New York Harbor, Governor’s Island, the Statue of Liberty, and New Jersey. The sunset on this winter day lay across these waters, opening to the horizons beyond. The immensity of what one’s eyes can behold, from the commanding towers of the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan’s skyscrapers and the great harbor, made me feel like I was on a small stage gazing at a large, in-motion world around me.

From Bustle to Decay to Resurrection

This quieter world of strolling paths, grassy spots, and promenade was once a bustling part of Brooklyn’s industry, commerce, and transportation, stretching back a few centuries. Part of the park, where Old Fulton Street terminated, was the site of the original ferry linking Brooklyn and Manhattan, established in 1642. By the late 1700s and the time of the American Revolution, this area had shops, inns, breweries, and slaughterhouses.

The area’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, shaped by the transitions in commerce and transportation. After the building of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, the ferries were no longer in demand and died out. Then, at the turn of the 20th century and in the first-half of the century, plenty of the world’s cargo passed through a busy port here, with many piers and warehouses. Mid-century brought a time of decline, as the city’s port areas lost out to competition from other cities and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway cut off the waterfront from Brooklyn Heights. In those decades, the waterfront had the seedy atmosphere one associates with the 1970s movies set in New York.

But if New York’s waterfront spots have many lives, a glorious one lay ahead for these acres near the Brooklyn Bridge. For at least a couple of decades, many advocated restoring it for public use, especially once cargo operations ceased and the Port Authority said it would sell the piers for commercial development. The advocacy and planning led in 1998 to the creation of the Downtown Brooklyn Waterfront Development Corp., which began planning Brooklyn Bridge Park. Ten years later, park construction began, and the first section opened in 2010. By the time the park is completed in several years, the park’s designers and planners hope its green space and six open piers match the powerful, wondrous achievement that New Yorkers enjoyed when those with similar visions created Prospect Park nearly a century and a half ago.

Many people stop to look at the sunset or take pictures of a skyline becoming luminous with twilight. As they did this on the afternoon I was there, I witnessed how much it matters that people turn the once-abandoned, forbidden, and inaccessible parts of New York’s waterfront to places where a person can be near the river and harbor and seemingly touch the sky. As the sky turned deep blue with dark slate-gray clouds above the water and the lights twinkled from the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, I was in awe – remaining still as the final act after sunset played out. City dwellers know the value of these places – open patches where they can take in the sunshine and the starlight. It’s a daily, ever-varying, and priceless gift of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

View the slide show larger at Flickr.

New York’s Great Sunset Places

Check out Mindfulwalker.com’s other great New York spots for sunsets:

Gantry Plaza State Park, Queens

Walking has always been part of my life’s journey, a way to constantly look around at the world each day, no matter where I am. Through it, I discover more about my surroundings as well as develop my inner self. It’s a crucial part of my spiritual practice. Recently, I realized again – and very intensely – how much walking means to my life and how much more I want to share this gift with others. Feeling the loss as I became off-track and didn’t walk as much as usual, I reflected on how walking came to be one of my pathways to peace and appreciation of life each day.

These insights came in the midst of a chaotic, demanding time this autumn, one that has brought both major disruptions and blessings. If you are a regular visitor to Mindful Walker, you may well have noticed an interruption and much longer time spans between postings this autumn. My walking and my writing so often go hand in hand.

Several occurrences happened that disrupted my life’s usual patterns. First, in mid-October one of my sisters had a life-threatening medical emergency, suffering a ruptured brain aneurysm. She could have died, and I rushed home to Pittsburgh as she was undergoing brain surgery. Fortunately, the quick actions of family members who were with her at the time that the aneurysm ruptured – taking her to the emergency room immediately – saved her life. We are blessed that the doctors and nurses at Allegheny General Hospital, where an ambulance transported her from a community hospital ER, were able to save her life and that she has come through the surgery as well as she did, though full recovery will take some time. Still, the entire event and my concerns over my sister’s health and recovery have left me shaken.

After I returned home from staying in Pittsburgh and being with my family there, other problems came up. One of my two beloved pet cats, who is a diabetic, suffered two hypoglycemic (dangerously low blood sugar) episodes within a month. He had to be hospitalized for a number of days each time, and the vets are treating him for pancreatitis, a difficult condition. The same time as his first episode we lost our electrical power for three days in the late-October snowstorm. Throughout this time period, my walking – and my writing – went totally off-track as I dealt with these emergencies, worked hard on deadlines in my other work, and then felt exhausted and unfocused.

Even after some routine has returned, I feel difficulty in focusing – and this is where walking comes in. In the fog that inhabited my brain, I realized that I had hardly walked in many weeks. It brought home the ways that walking creates serenity, solace, happiness, and absolute delight.

Walking, Transformed

I’ve long been a walker, but I well remember the time in my life when walking went from pastime to a life-saving and affirming ritual and exercise – to spiritual and meditative practice as much as physical activity. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after the break-up of my marriage (as I think of it since, as a gay couple, we could not get married then), I went through several tough, turbulent years. I dealt with a new-but-difficult love relationship that needed to end; lost my communications job with a large national nonprofit organization; and encountered major financial difficulties.

For a time, things got very bad. I faced the threat of foreclosure on my house and was trying to sell it and move from Trenton to New York City. My life was full of telephone calls with banks and lawyers. It was a time of learning that external realities in many ways controlled the pace of solving problems and moving on. Yet I learned I could have some say over the way I responded to the difficulties, be grateful for my blessings, and have peace in the midst of this turmoil. Specifically, the inability to just get out of a house that I could no longer afford and that was “under water” mortgage-wise controlled how quickly I could change my circumstances, move closer to where I was working in New York City, and create a new life. I’ve often described that challenging time as feeling like I was swimming through Jello-O, and I needed to develop much more patience.

So what did I do? I began to walk, usually every single day. So often in life, a particular place speaks to us, and it’s not always clear why at first. I discovered a quiet school campus, Mercer County Community College, about six miles from my home in Trenton. Nearly every day, in the evenings before sunset, I went walking there. I grew familiar with its beautiful trees of many varieties; many contained small labels identifying their species because of the college’s ornamental horticulture program. I enjoyed the birds and small animals I saw and watched the sunsets and developing twilight skies. Not too many people were around on weekends and certain evenings, and this attractive campus possessed a peacefulness allowing me to slow down my mind and hear my inner voice and wisdom. Its grounds felt like my private estate!

Nature’s order and beauty, close-up while walking

In this period of turbulence, loss, and uncertainty, walking became integral on so many days, an activity of discovery and being in the present moment. I couldn’t dwell on a financial worry when I looked closely at the amazing array of needles on a branch of an unusual evergreen tree or spotted a fox darting at the campus edge. I didn’t escape my responsibilities, but the walking helped me not to be consumed by them. It brought relief, solace, and joy in the midst of stress and sadness. It helped build my inner strength in times of self-doubt. Something about nature’s beauty or humankind’s great creations, partaking of it slowly and mindfully as we walk, sustains our inner being.

The “Print” of Our Steps

One book especially made a difference. Peace Is Every Step, by Buddhist monk, activist, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, came into my life around that time. A gift from a friend, it changed my life with its beautiful, eloquent writing on the daily practice of mindfulness to be completely in touch with the present moment and heal our relationships and our world. In the book, Nhat Hanh’s thoughts on “walking meditation” taught me how to take mindful steps, breathe easily as I walk, and look around. Revelation!

We need to enjoy and savor walking, as Nhat Hanh explains, not just think of it as a means to get somewhere. Here I found a kindred spirit as I began to practice walking meditation. My own walks became more meaningful and enriching. (I plan to continue to write about various aspects of walking meditation in future posts.) “Although we walk all the time, our walking is more like running,” Nhat Hanh writes. “When we walk like that, we print anxiety and sorrow on the Earth. We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the Earth.” How fitting and powerful to consider our steps as an interaction with the Earth.

In the years since, Nhat Hanh’s words consistently have called me back. Breathing and walking – slowing my steps just a bit in concert with my breathing – open my heart and spirit. Joys come. Tears come. Excitement comes. Grief comes. Whatever I am supposed to pay attention to in the moment occurs. I need only be open.

Hello, My Old Friend

In Central Park on a recent late afternoon at dusk, I met up with my walking spirit again. Central Park is one of those sacred, beautiful places to walk where one can never have seen it all. Walking without a particular destination, I found a sweet little playground that had a small bow bridge of stone, child-size. No children were there as dark was arriving, yet I smiled envisioning how boys and girls must love to play and run on this bridge. Leaves of cranberry red and light golden yellow were dazzling signs of life’s autumn cycling that would soon disappear as nature readies for winter’s rest. The blue sky of twilight deepened, with banks of white twinkling lights and the undulating shapes of bare silhouetted branches creating a serene pathway near the Central Park Zoo. Just a 45-minute walk, through the park’s east side, felt restorative.

Walking at dusk near the Central Park Zoo

It stuns and dismays me that we have built so many places that are hostile to walking. Thankfully, many people are increasingly favoring the towns, cities, trails, vistas, and other settings that welcome it. The places where no one can easily walk foster dissociation from our Earth, must like the distance I feel from myself when I forget the importance and wonder of walking in my life.

Walking brings intimacy and balance with the Earth and within us, as I came to see this autumn. Take a step, breathe, take another step, and follow your breath as you do. Renewed tranquility follows. As we walk, our inner world and our outer world come together powerfully in the present moment. These are the steps toward our soul’s peace.

What does walking mean in your life? Do you have a place you walk (or walked in the past) that has particular meaning? Share your thoughts with mindfulwalker.com.

Kingston has many historic churches and temples, and Redeemer is one of its seemingly hidden gems. At 104 Wurts St., it is back in a residential section off the main avenues. From an approach walking south along Wurts Street, Redeemer Lutheran looks like it could be set in a town in the English countryside. Its light gray stone with beige trim gives an impression of stately simplicity. It represented one of the early 20th century Gothic Revival churches that broke from the more ostentatious mold of the Victorian era.

Redeemer Lutheran Church

In an important sense, breaking from the past matched the ethic of those who built this church. They were a new generation of Americans of German heritage who had been part of a nearby German-language Lutheran church that immigrants established in the mid-19th century, Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, located several blocks away on Spring Street. Their ancestors had emigrated during difficult times in Germany and had settled in Rondout, founding a church that provided services in their native language.

The younger generation wanted to worship in English. In 1897, a group of these congregation members founded Redeemer Lutheran – its formal name was the English Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Redeemer – and a century ago constructed their own church. Since then, it has been a peaceful refuge for its members through times of war and peace, prosperity and depression, and neighborhood neglect and revitalization. Imagine worshippers, subsequent generations of families, seated beneath the Good Shepherd window, decade after decade.

Architects From Brooklyn

The architecture neatly fit with this new English-speaking generation that started the congregation, a very English kind of church in its interpretation of Gothic. William Bannister and Richard Schell were the architects. Practicing in Brooklyn, Bannister and Schell designed a number of Lutheran churches, including St. Luke’s in Woodlawn, Queens, according to William Rhoads in his book, Kingston, New York: The Architectural Guide. Among the Gothic Revival-designed churches in Kingston, Redeemer Lutheran “is the closest to the designs of the leading Gothic Revivalists of the early 20th century, Ralph Adams Cram and Bertram Goodhue,” Rhoads writes.

Redeemer Lutheran is distinct from the Victorian-era churches in its lower proportions and light-colored stone, as Rhoads explains. The light gray stone is St. Lawrence marble, a rough-hewn rock popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries which workers mined from quarries in upstate New York. The marble is trimmed with beige Indiana limestone.

In its design, materials, and details, the structure has the feeling of a Gothic-style village church. It has a lower-height single tower and consistent Gothic details, from its steep-pitched roof and the interior ribbed vaults to the clerestory windows (the level placed high above the eye level, allowing in greater light). The church has a sense of majesty even in a relatively compact structure. Sometimes Gothic interiors can feel overwhelming, but this one is welcoming and charming.

The interior of Redeemer Lutheran Church

Next year will mark 100 years since the congregation placed the cornerstone for the church’s construction. It has survived as a house of worship and a place of beauty in the neighborhood, and that’s no accident. “We work hard to take care of this church,” says Patty Wolff, parish administrator. Indeed, it has the atmosphere of a well-tended home.

Tribulations and Triumphs

That a church’s flock also has proven resilient for those 100 years – and 114 years since the congregation’s founding – means it has had to survive the flowing tides of good fortune and difficult loss and trials. The first years after the congregation settled into its new church were tinged by the shadow of World War I engulfing Europe and ultimately drawing in the United States. Of 46 Redeemer Lutheran members who fought in the war, three church members lost their lives.

The church sometimes had financial difficulties as well. In June, 1927, church members discovered that under Pastor William Nelson, Redeemer Lutheran’s fourth pastor, the church had no money to pay salaries for the month. The minister refused to produce the Congregational Record, a church historical booklet notes, and subsequently he resigned.

With new leadership, however, Redeemer Lutheran endured and even thrived, despite the Great Depression enveloping the area and nation. The minister who accepted the call in 1927 to lead Redeemer Lutheran, the Rev. Oscar Brandorff, guided the congregation back to financial health and helped restore goodwill among church members. Redeemer Lutheran was able to pay off the mortgage for its fine church by 1932. Members established more programs for youth and community outreach, and church attendance grew. Then, however, Pastor Brandorff died suddenly in early 1934, a shocking loss for the church.

Its history has been full of many high points, too. Women over the age of 21 won the right to vote in congregational meetings starting in 1919. The church helped refugees who had fled the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia, when the Soviet Union invaded, to resettle in America and find a church home at Redeemer Lutheran. With IBM’s opening of a plant in Kingston in 1956 and other developments, the church attendance grew continually in the 1950s. In the 1980s, the church accepted its first female vicar, Peggy Sue Pfeiffer, in 1981. The 1990s brought the congregation’s celebration of its 100th anniversary. Despite the tough economic climate in Kingston with IBM’s closing in 1994, Redeemer Lutheran accomplished a major campaign to renovate the church and improve its exterior.

Today, Redeemer Lutheran remains – in a small city of many historic houses of worship – one of three historic Lutheran churches in the Rondout area, working together as the Tri-Lutheran Communion in Kingston. The other congregations, Trinity Lutheran, its predecessor, and Immanuel Lutheran, also date from the 19th century. Of these churches, parish administrator Wolff says, “Each one has its own charm.”

After attending Redeemer Lutheran since 1982, Wolff still appreciates the church’s special qualities. Looking around its interior, for example, she describes how the sun at certain times of the day creates striking shafts of light through its stained glass windows. Redeemer Lutheran, she says, “has such a peaceful presence.”

For many decades, members have come and gone from this serene place. If its past is a guide, future generations will partake of this presence, as a refuge that the American descendants of German immigrants founded carries on into its second century.

Here is a tour of some of Redeemer Lutheran’s highlights, plus a slide show:

Redeemer Lutheran has many stunning stained glass windows. Originally, the builders installed three large windows in 1912, plus a smaller one depicting the Last Supper a bit later. The church added all of its other stained glass windows after World War II, including The Good Shepherd window above.

This is a portion of the window depicting Christ’s ascension into Heaven. One of the original three stained glass windows installed in 1912, this window uses Munich glass from Germany, unlike the post-World War II windows that use American glass, according to church history. The American glass has bolder colors.

This mural, “Christ Blessing the Children,” has been in the church since 1914. Artist C. Paul Jennewein, who went on to become a distinguished sculptor, created this work during his early career as a muralist. A native of Germany, Jennewein moved into the parsonage while completing the mural. He used Pastor Howard Snyder’s children as some of the models. A church historical booklet states that two Snyder children, Monica, in green clothing, and Carolyn, the blonde girl, were models. One of the babies may be Mary Louise, also a Snyder.

Around the clerestory are triads of lovely stained glass windows, each containing religious symbols. This grouping represents the ideals of stewardship, putting talents, time, and treasure in service to the Divine.

Part of the Resurrection trilogy, the “Doubting Thomas” shows the vivid expression and color found in Redeemer Lutheran’s windows. The church has suggested Biblical verses that churchgoers can read to reflect on the meanings of the stories. This is one of the six large stained glass windows the church added after World War II, with pairs flanking the original three windows.

View the slide show larger in Flickr.

Google Maps location and directions to Redeemer Lutheran Church

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The light of the early day in New York City transformed in minutes to dark with acrid smoke, waves of debris and dust, and gray clouds that engulfed a large portion of the city. Looking back 10 years later, I think of that light and darkness of 9/11 as epitomizing the extremes of human nature caught in that event and its aftermath. The dark that came over a huge section of New York embodied the capability of man to commit incalculably terrible actions of violence and destruction. The light signified the power of human resilience, interconnection, compassion, and love. So many memories and images of that Tuesday and the days immediately afterward reflected one or the other.

The World Trade Center in July, 2001 (Photo Credit: Brandon McCombs)

The first hours after the attacks in New York and Washington, and the plane crash in Shanksville, Pa., felt very chaotic. In those hours so little information existed to confirm who and how many had escaped the Twin Towers, who was surviving in the rubble, and who and how many had died. The rubble and minimal skeletal remains of the North and South towers were the most tangible evidence of desperate hope for life or, conversely, of death.

Staying in our midtown apartment building, I watched in disbelief and shock on television as the buildings collapsed, in the same way that many worldwide saw it that morning. Yet we as New Yorkers needed to see further what had happened. My close friend Gerry and I walked to where we could get a view, from the Hudson River’s edge in Midtown Manhattan, and we watched the huge, dark clouds of smoke rising from the area where the towers were. The stench of smoke permeated the air. The horrific nature of the attacks began to sink in.

Like so many others, my family and my partner, Janne, and her family reached out as soon as possible that day to make sure that we could account for everyone. No one in our immediate family or circle died in the 9/11 attacks, but some endured traumatic and harrowing situations. We learned of friends and family connections who were in the towers and got out, including the father of my partner’s daughter-in-law. A good friend was supposed to be in the Windows of the World that morning for a financial technology conference, but she had overslept so never made it there. All who were in Windows of the World died. While riding on a ferry on the East River on the way to work, a dear friend witnessed one of the planes flying into one of the towers. One of my sisters saw the flames shooting out of the Pentagon walls as she rode out of Washington that morning. So many recollections remain of that awful day.

Seeking the Missing

In New York, the signs of death, of horror and suffering, and of a devastated city emerged. First there were the posters. Within the first hours and days after the towers’ collapse in New York, family members and others posted the handmade signs seeking information and help to locate those who were missing. Each poster contained the missing person’s photo, his or her name, age, place of employment, and the World Trade Center floor on which he or she had been.

Those hundreds and hundreds of posters around the city remain a prevalent image from those autumn weeks – a heart-breaking one. They instantly created a connection to each victim and conveyed the importance of each life. Those missing were fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, cousins, co-workers and employees, friends, neighbors.

For a person who loves walking in New York, as so many do, a crucial sign of the extent of the horror occurred immediately: The lower part of Manhattan became closed off. New York is an open city where someone can feel whole worlds accessible in its many neighborhoods in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But below a certain street in Lower Manhattan, authorities set up barricades (and rightfully so) that prevented people from going to the World Trade Center site and surrounding neighborhoods. I walked to the rim of those barricades and peered southward, only to find the streets empty except for authorized personnel or some residents. Those streets and the areas near the Hudson River piers were filled with police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and military vehicles. It was chilling.

To this day, I remember my first actual look at the remains of the World Trade Center. After the authorities pulled back the barricades sometime after 9/11, I walked south to the closest spot where the city let pedestrians go. I went to about two blocks east of the site, and I was among a large crowd. From there, I suddenly spotted the twisted metal of one of the towers for the first time. My knees buckled for a moment, and I felt like I could pass out. I felt sick at seeing the destruction man is capable of when hatred consumes.

A City of Memorials

In the midst of the aftermath came an acute sense of the suffering of those who had lost family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. As the first days wore on, I can remember the feelings of uncertainty and chaos changing to utter, horrible certainty that many had died – ultimately, 2,749 victims at the World Trade Center; 184 at the Pentagon; and 40 in the crash of Flight 93 at Shanksville.

In our collective community in New York, so many died who put their lives on the line each day for people in the city: 343 firefighters, 23 New York City police officers, and 37 Port Authority police officers. We saw the images of firefighters going up the stairs of the towers as others were heading down. From our firehouse in Midtown Manhattan for Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9, 15 firefighters raced to the World Trade Center and subsequently perished. A makeshift memorial of flowers and candles – like those at other firehouses – covered the wide sidewalk on Eighth Avenue for many, many days.

Like many others New Yorkers, my partner and I heeded the call of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to honor the firefighters. We attended the Memorial Mass for Lt. Kevin Donnelly in Wantagh on Long Island. His family members and friends spoke of Kevin’s dedication to being a firefighter, his bravery, and his sense of humor. The witnessing of sacrifice and heroism on 9/11 taught me never to take for granted what firefighters, police officers, and first responders do each day.

Each year on 9/11 and often during the year when I reflect on those who died that day, I especially think of the family of Chris Faughnan, someone whom I had never met. In New York in the days after 9/11, the degrees of separation quickly dissolved. Chris was married to the sister of a former colleague and work friend. He was only 37 years old. A bond trader, Chris was one of 658 employees of Cantor Fitzgerald who were killed in the North Tower. He and his wife, Cathy, had three young children. A New York Times portrait described how when Chris would arrive home each weekday from work, he “would get the kids all crazy,” his wife said, and “they would jump around him, laughing and kissing him.”

Thoughts and images of Chris and his family have stayed in my heart and mind since 9/11. Like many others from our former company, I reached out to my work friend and to his sister, Chris’ widow, to express sympathy. Not long after in the autumn of 2001, I received a gracious and beautiful card from Cathy Faughnan, an expression of amazing heart, dignity, and love for her family. The front of the card contained a family photo – of Chris, with his two daughters standing beside him so lovely and sweet and his son sitting on his lap, father and son having the identical eye twinkle and playful smile. Perhaps because my three sisters and I lost our father so young, to cancer at age 45, I have always thought of Chris Faughnan’s children. For a school collection three years ago, his daughter Siena wrote a very beautiful, poignant poem, “Whoever Says,” which questions, in the face of death and loss, the phrase “time heals all wounds.”

The World Trade Center Today

This year the 10th anniversary brought such a piercing emotional sense of the day and week. Two days after 9/11 I walked to the World Trade Center, to honor those who died. Hundreds were around, many pausing, taking pictures, and trying to look through the fences that surround the site. Still, the streets had an air of life proceeding and of invigoration. The National 9/11 Memorial, which has twin reflecting pools set within the footprints where the towers stood and the victims’ names engraved on the parapet, marks the sacred ground. Dozens of people stood at a huge window within the World Financial Center where they could get a view, from somewhat above, of the World Trade Center area.

Construction crews are working on new skyscrapers there. In time, we humans get up the next morning and we rebuild. We imbue and cherish the stories of lost loved ones each with the particular memories and qualities that sustain love, meaning, and the presence of that person over time. Question is, will we honor the memory of each of those who died on 9/11 by becoming better people and creating a more peaceful country and world? Will we go toward the light or the darkness?

Further Reflection and Tribute

The Poem, “Whoever Says,” By Siena Faughnan, daughter of Chris Faughnan

Let’s Not Abandon Healing: An Open Letter From a 9/11 Widow, By Cathy Faughnan

The 9/11 Tribute Movement

Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9: When September 11 Becomes Small

As it is with the sky, leaves, rocks, flower petals, waves, and other beauties of nature, so it is with the details and features of buildings, public spaces, and landscapes. The architects who have conceived of picturesque features and dynamic structures, the builders who have carried out their visions, the craftspeople and laborers who have painstakingly put in the tiles of a mosaic or carved wood or stone into distinctive, awe-inspiring shapes and figures, the muralists who have envisioned and painted explosions of color on blank spaces…all have worked to create something for our eyes. Their creations simply await our looking and our awareness.

If we open our eyes as we walk around a street in the city or a town, or down a country lane, and look at the buildings and landscapes, we not only will enjoy what our eyes encounter but we will change ourselves and our lives. I liken looking at architectural and design features to what Thich Nhat Hanh has said about eating a tangerine. In his seminal book, Peace Is Every Step, Nhat Hanh wrote, “If I offer you a freshly picked tangerine to enjoy, I think the degree to which you enjoy it will depend on your mindfulness.” In his tangerine meditation, he invited a group of children to each choose a tangerine, to think of its origins from its “mother tree,” and to peel it slowly, smelling its fragrance and noticing its mist. The children then each slowly ate a bite of the tangerine, savoring its texture and juice.

Taking in architectural or building features is like eating a single piece of fruit. We can enjoy the sight, texture, and wonder of each element. I have always loved looking at buildings and landscapes but for a long time I wasn’t sure why. Then it became apparent over time that the details (among other qualities) – a mosaic, a terra cotta figure, a soaring spire, a sleek curve, a mix of stone – have provided such pleasure. When I gaze at the cherubs on the exterior of the Alwyn Court building, I marvel at their expressions and their fingers, toes, and bellies rendered in terra cotta as soft as flesh. Similarly, I feel a world of creatures come alive in the mosaic “When the Animals Speak” on the 34^th Street/Penn Station subway platform.

The angelic figures look down from above at Alwyn Court

A segment of Elizabeth Grajales’ “When the Animals Speak”

Inviting Aimlessness

We often live in our heads more than in our surroundings. We walk with the purpose to get someplace, and our minds are filled with the next deadline, what we will do at our next meeting, what our conversation was with our spouse last night, what our plans will be for the evening or weekend. As I walk in New York and elsewhere, I have found that if I can introduce the slightest bit of aimlessness, slow down for at least a few steps, and breathe deeply, I see many exquisite details and shapes in the buildings and spaces. It is grounding and relaxing, and it creates many happy and serene moments. Something in looking at the eagle on the former subway powerhouse on 11^th Avenue, for instance, brings an instant and yet deep sense of power and beauty. Or, a mural that someone has painted on a door of P.S. 152, the School of Science and Technology in Brooklyn, creates a light, joyful feeling.

A watchful eagle on the former New York subway powerhouse

A mural of vibrant colors on a door at P.S. 152 in Brooklyn

This experience is available to us at any time, even with demands and difficulties or when one is filled with anger, sadness, or grief.  I remember the day during 1994 that I had to put to sleep my very beloved pet cat, who had been a cherished companion during some difficult times. The sun seemed blinding as I walked with a friend through Central Park. We sat in a gazebo, and I can still see in my mind’s eye the delicate, crafted wooden spindles of that gazebo. It was almost as if someone had created this seat generations ago knowing I would need it and find solace that day. Carefully crafted features speak across the ages and affirm eternity.

When we quiet our minds, details allow us to interact with buildings and landscapes, and we can sense their presence or have a vision from another time period. The building at 1 Broadway (known as the International Mercantile Marine Company Building) in Lower Manhattan prompts such a scene from another era when I look up at its mosaic and terra cotta shields, which have the names of international destinations on them – Liverpool, Gibraltar, Montevideo, Cherbourg, Melbourne, and others. I can sense the travelers who came to this building in the early 20^th century to buy their tickets for an ocean voyage. I feel the breezes coming off the New York Harbor and think of its connection to those faraway places. This is how the special touches on a building have a potential to transport us and enliven our imaginations.

A richly adorned shield at 1 Broadway in New York

Car and Consumer Culture

Often, I reflect on how different this is from the buildings we have created in the culture dominated by cars and shopping in recent decades, specifically on suburban roads. Recently, as I traveled by bus on Route 17 in the northern New Jersey suburbs, I noticed that for about 10 miles no features on the buildings, an unrelenting line of shopping centers, big-box stores, and gas stations, drew my interest, curiosity, or attention in the same way. The buildings were very sterile-looking. It is starkly different.

Surrounded by such places, so many of us have lost a reverence for building refinements, art, and even quirkiness due to these settings that are geared not just to speedier travel but primarily to shopping and buying. Not even a window that would entice someone, nor thought to art or pleasure! The contrasts are startling. Yet, thankfully, many people – architects, landscape architects, preservationists, planners, environmentalists, and others – are seeking to encourage the transformation to and support of places attuned to our mindfulness.

Fortunately, we have many beautiful, interesting, and amazing buildings and landscapes still available for our savoring and our constant reawakening. It takes only a few moments in a day to make a difference, and it can be very pleasing, refreshing, and inspiring. We can do it again and again – as long as we choose to look and take notice.

What buildings or landscapes does this bring to mind for you?

It’s almost mind-blowing that two such domes are in one building. They are in the Chicago Cultural Center, a place in the Loop of high energy and community where you’ll find in any given hour an exhibit in one room, a singer next door, an art opening in another area, meetings elsewhere, folks reading and relaxing, and much more. This is set amid a building that is a spectacular artwork in itself.

The City of Chicago constructed this palatial building on East Washington Street and opened it in 1897, at a time when many cities sought to outdo each other and boost their prestige and reputation by constructing the grandest public places. The city government converted the structure into an arts and culture center, once Chicago’s central library moved to a new home in the Loop in 1991. “Be sure to see the Tiffany dome,” a friendly security guard said as I walked through the entrance during a recent trip to Chicago, and he provided directions. Luckily, I took a wrong turn at the top of a stairwell and came into the Grand Army of the Republic hall where the Healy-Millet stained-glass ceiling is, or I may never have seen it. What a sight.

The Healy-Millet ceiling, Chicago Cultural Center

The Healy-Millet dome is both a marvel and a fascinating story.  It is a wonder of light, color, and pattern, and it’s very worth spending some time in its presence. Furthermore, the building and the dome reflect not only beauty and amazing artistry but history, telling of a city’s resurgence after a devastating fire two decades before and its desire to create a magnificent library for all of its people and a worthy place to honor Union veterans from the Civil War. Today, the stained-glass domes personify the continuing vision of some that it matters to restore and preserve such creations to their original dazzling form.

Seeing the Victorian splendor of the Healy-Millet dome brings to mind its beginnings and what led to the building of this “people’s palace,” as it became known. The Chicago public library arose directly out of the devastation of Chicago’s Great Fire in 1871, which killed some 250 people and burned four square miles of the city’s center. The fire destroyed thousands of books in the Chicago Lyceum’s public reading room. In the fire’s aftermath, a Londoner proposed that the English should donate a library-full of books to Chicago as a token of sympathy and kindness. Soon afterward, Chicago received approximately 8,000 books from England, which sparked leading Chicago citizens to begin a movement that culminated in the establishment of the Chicago Public Library.

A Chicagoan’s Library

It would be years before this trove of books and the thousands added to it would find a real home. Finally, after the city moved the library from location to location for more than two decades, the Library Board chose Dearborn Park to construct a permanent home. However, a sort of turf war erupted. The state legislature had donated part of this park to a Civil War veterans’ association. Ultimately, an agreement specified that the building would encompass two purposes: a new Chicago Public Library and a Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Memorial Hall honoring the Northern soldiers who had fought in the Civil War. The Healy-Millet dome resides in the former GAR rotunda.

Today, many buildings and wings of libraries come about through the largesse of the wealthy, and this was also true in the late 19^th century. Rather than look for philanthropic donations to fund the building, however, the city levied a special 1 percent tax on its citizens, so that it could be said that the library, indeed, belonged to everyone, according to the Chicago Cultural Center’s history of the library.

Chicago Cultural Center (Photo Credit: David K. Staub)

The Tiffany ceiling, Chicago Cultural Center

With the Great Fire as recent memory, Chicago sought to construct a library that would not only wow the public but endure for the ages as a solid, practically incombustible building. Its exterior had Greek columns and Roman arches, and its structure included three-foot thick masonry walls faced with limestone. For nearly a year, some 70 men drove nearly 2,400 wooden piles, on which the foundation rests, to an average depth of 74 feet into the hardened clay below the area’s sandy soil. Its interior includes marble from Italy, Ireland, and elsewhere; mosaics of Favrile glass; polished brass; and mother-of-pearl.

Then there were the great domes atop its beautiful halls, the Tiffany and the Healy-Millet ceilings, each of intricately assembled stained glass. On the Washington Street side, the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company fashioned the library’s stained-glass ceiling. It is huge, at 38 feet in diameter, and contains 30,000 pieces of glass. The dome sat above the library’s circulation delivery desk, with natural light that poured through its opulent fish-scale pattern of jeweled glass, creating perhaps a sense of a sacred space honoring books and literature. I can picture the library’s earliest patrons, eagerly receiving their books with the flow of light above.

Similarly, on the north side, the Healy-Millet dome within the Grand Army of the Republic rotunda conveys a sense of hallowed space and stateliness. At 40 feet in diameter, it’s glorious in color, with varied earth tones including reddish-orange, deep gold, corn yellow, green, and brown, in a Renaissance pattern of botanical motifs. It’s so alive that I felt like I was seeing changing patterns of plants and other nature forms, all as one’s eyes move around the dome. It’s mesmerizing.

The oculus, or circular window, of the Healy-Millet ceiling

Two masters of art glass design and manufacturing, Millet and Healy were responsible for this ceiling. Millet, educated at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, founded the Chicago School of Architecture in 1893 and was a force within the Arts and Crafts movement in Chicago, according to a profile in the Chicago Sun-Times. He and Healy created some of the most memorable, innovative interior design and art glass in Chicago in the decades after the Great Fire. Both worked with architect Louis Sullivan at various times and became renowned in the United States and Europe for their work.

Let the Sun Shine

Yet their work and that of Tiffany’s company on the library were almost lost for the generations to come. For a time in the early 1970s, Chicago officials considered whether to keep or demolish the building. Ultimately, they decided to save it. Furthermore, as beautiful as both of the stained-glass ceilings are, thousands passed under them for many decades without being able to see just how colorful and fabulous they are. Sometime in the 1940s, the Healy-Millet dome was roofed over and stunning daylight gave way to artificial light. This all but deadened its vibrant colors. During the decade before, the library had also replaced the outer translucent dome on the Tiffany ceiling with a concrete copper-clad covering, lighting the ceiling artificially.

Thankfully, this all changed in recent years. Through a pilot restoration project in the middle of the past decade, several companies worked together to restore the Healy-Millet dome, refinish its ornamental cast iron frame, and re-establish a diffusing skylight above the ceiling to bring back natural daylight. “The restored glass is sure to shock and awe anyone who walks into this space and has grown accustomed to the muted, somber tone of the covered portions of the dome,” wrote Neal Vogel of Restoric, LLC, one of those who executed the restoration.

The Tiffany has had its own piece-by-piece-by-piece re-emergence into brilliant light after some 75 years. Starting in 2007, the restoration team removed each art glass panel and painstakingly numbered all 30,000 pieces of glass. Botti Studio, located in Evanston, Ill., cleaned each one and repaired those in need of it (more than 1,800 pieces were cracked). Finishing up a seven-month restoration, workers replaced the copper-concrete covering with an energy-efficient translucent one. Now, those who walk through the Preston Bradley Hall can see the Tiffany ceiling in bright and shimmering colors, the way that Tiffany & Co. designed it and how the crowds saw it in 1897.

And if they are lucky, they will take the correct turns to see the Healy-Millet ceiling, too.

On Lispenard, a single building feature transports one to another era. Walk along Lispenard and look up at the elaborate bracketed cornice crowning 54 Lispenard to see the intricate inscription “Erected 1867” on the arched pediment at the center. It’s a building on the south side of the street, like many of the others along Lispenard and in Tribeca East a “store and loft” building – many four- and five-stories-high and about 25-feet-wide – where merchants in the mid-19^th century sold and transported dry goods and textiles.

It was this and another building just a little farther east, 60-62 Lispenard, that first caught my eye and set off an exploration that ultimately felt like I was back in the 1800s, sensing a place and time in which New York merchants created proud and beautiful palaces marked by cast-iron storefronts and the flourishes and details that recall Old Europe. The neighborhood then was the hub of an international trade in things such as fancy goods, notions, hosiery, linens, artificial flowers, and jewelry.

Ironically, 21^st century technology – combined with taking a few moments to stop, look up, and observe – put me in the experience of the 19^th century. On my smart phone, I found the 1992 New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report designating Tribeca East as a historic district. As I walked on Lispenard between Broadway and Church Street, I read about who designed and constructed a number of the buildings, who occupied them, and what their businesses were.

This block has no fancy restaurants or boutiques like other parts of Tribeca; it’s a mix of residential buildings, long-time businesses like a small barber shop, and a few worse-for-wear structures with peeling paint, graffiti, or crumbling facades. It’s easy to walk right by these places until one looks up and takes them in.

60-62 Lispenard Street

I was cutting across Lispenard Street on a walk, with the idea of avoiding Canal Street’s crowds, when I noticed 60-62 Lispenard St., close to the Broadway end of the block. It’s a beauty. With its Roman buff-colored brick, stone, multiple rounded arches, and classical detailing, the building has a sunny ambience, even with a little grime on it. For a moment it was easy to feel like I was in Italy.

60-62 Lispenard Street

The classical details and fine brickwork on 60-62 Lispenard Street

Gilbert Schellenger, the architect for many townhouses, apartment houses, and loft buildings in New York, designed this Renaissance Revival structure for the New York Building and Improvement Co. It was constructed in 1895, a few decades later than many of the remaining 19^th century buildings on this block of Lispenard.

Its design and materials are impressive. As my eyes moved from one element to another, I was struck by how its elements work together to be so eye-pleasing and harmonious. The archways are so graceful and fluid. The stonework is carved with beautiful, intricate classical motifs. All of this seems almost laced together by the “bull-nose brick” of the pilasters and arches, which are bricks with rounded, curved edges that give the building a softer, yet strong feeling.

The arches, stone, and “bull-nose brick” of 60-62 Lispenard Street

This building has had at least one very noteworthy resident during its 116-year history, according to the LPC report. One of New York City’s mayors once lived here after his days in office: William R. Grace, who was elected to lead the city twice in the 1880s. An immigrant who was poor when he arrived from Ireland as a teen, Grace made a fortune in international trade, primarily by forging commerce with South America. Grace founded a company in 1854 in Peru. After relocating to New York, he began triangular trade among the United States, South America, and Europe. He later pioneered direct steamship service between New York and the west coast of South America.

54 Lispenard Street

If you are walking east to west on Lispenard Street, no. 54 is among the first that reveals the street’s particular place in history. Seeing the “Erected 1867” inscription in the central pediment, I scanned the building tops along this stretch and discovered that many had inscriptions signaling people had built them within a year or two of each other, in the mid-1860s. These were heady times as America’s Industrial Revolution was taking hold, and Tribeca became an international center for shipping and selling dry goods. Merchants and traders replaced smaller two-story masonry buildings on Lispenard Street with larger four- and five-story structures with cast-iron storefronts and large lofts above for all kinds of goods. It was, thus, part of a boomtown for a time.

A list of those who occupied this building reflects the trading that was once centered in the neighborhood. Architect Isaac Duckworth, who was responsible for many buildings in Tribeca, designed it for Lewis Duhain, Jr., an importer of flowers, the LPC report notes. Its occupants have included a fancy-goods merchant; a company that did a business in white goods, linens, and hosiery; and two brothers who were exporters.

The building, with its cast-iron façade, appears much the way it looked in the mid-19^th century though somewhat neglected in its older age. Its storefront is virtually intact, according to the historic district designation report. Duckworth’s design has many elements of a Second Empire-style commercial structure of the era, such as the flat-arched huge window openings with rounded corners. It has a regal-looking cornice with the curved brackets and grand arch above the inscription showing the year of its construction. Comparing this building, and others like it along the street, with most of today’s warehouses and suburban stores makes all the more clear that the architect intended to create something not only useful but beautiful and memorable in the city.

54 Lispenard Street

The inscription – “Erected 1867 – on 54 Lispenard Street

46-48 Lispenard Street

Constructed between 1866 and 1868, no. 46-48 has a gorgeous, well-kept exterior. It is another store and loft building, though nearly twice as wide as most of its neighbors. Isaac Duckworth designed this building, also in the Second Empire style, with cornices at every floor and flat-arched window openings framed by pilasters with classical flourishes. The Architectural Iron Works foundry, one of the country’s top foundries, manufactured the cast-iron façade, as well as the one at 54 Lispenard St. The inscription “Built 1866” is visible on the pediment at the center of the light taupe-colored cornice.

46-48 Lispenard Street

The lovely proportions of 46-48 Lispenard Street

44 Lispenard Street

Even the language describing the goods that were once bought, sold, traded, and transferred in these Tribeca buildings conjures up a world of the past. The Berg Brothers, who operated out of 46-48 Lispenard St., were merchants of notions and fancy goods as well as jewelry. Emanuel Uhlfelder, the owner of no. 44 next door, was a Broadway merchant of fancy goods and trimmings. (Notions are sewing items such as buttons, hooks, and pins. Fancy goods refers to ornamental items, both household and personal.)

Duckworth designed this building, with its cast-iron front created in the Second Empire style and identical to the fronts for 38 and 54 Lispenard St. Underneath the bracketed top cornice is the inscription “Erected 1866.”

44 Lispenard Street

The graceful cornice of 44 Lispenard Street

42 Lispenard Street

This building painted in recent times in bright-red trim once housed Pearl Crafts, a satellite craft supply place for Pearl Art & Craft Supply on Canal Street. Perhaps the dash of red color fits in with its origin, as a place that David Straus had constructed in 1867-1868 for his flower-importing business. William Naugle, the architect, designed a store and loft structure that combined the Italianate and Second Empire styles. The one-story cast-iron base, metal bracketed cornice, and iron fire escape are all original elements, and the three-over-three sash windows give it an industrial feel.

42 Lispenard Street

The industrial-look geometry of 42 Lispenard Street

A Note of Gratitude

That so many of these buildings have survived is due, in no small part, to those who persistently advocated and fought for the establishment of Tribeca’s historic districts, culminating in their designation in the 1990s. Today, we can walk a street like Lispenard and appreciate the gifts of these buildings as well as understand their place in New York’s history. It is up to us to appreciate and continually keep such places alive and thriving.

If you would like to follow up and learn more about the architecture and history of Lispenard or other nearby Tribeca East streets, you can access the Tribeca East Historic District Designation Report (pdf) online at the Landmarks Preservation Commission site.