The Hudson Yards is the name of a spectacular new skyscraper complex built on the far west side of midtown Manhattan on top of the Pennsylvania railroad train yards by the Hudson River. It’s billed as the “most ambitious new skyscraper complex since Rockefeller Center was built in the 1930s.”  According to Jim Dykes, private NYC tourguide,  Rockefeller Center is 19 skyscrapers covering 22 acres—currently Hudson Yards is approx. 26 acres and so far 6 skyscrapers are constructed with more planned. Eventually 13 of 16 planned structures will sit on a platform built over the Hudson River train yards. The first of its two phases, opened in 2019, comprises a public green space and eight structures that contain residences, a hotel, office buildings, a mall, and a cultural facility called The Shed. The second phase, on which construction has not started yet, will include residential space, an office building, and a school. It’s built by the RELATED COMPANIES and OXFORD PR...

Recently the tourguide became the tourist! I took a few days off and travelled south to Washington D.C. (the swamp, as they say); it’s been a few years since I visited the nation’s capital and it was fun to enthusiastically play tourist. We visited the Capitol grounds and the memorials such as The Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial and others. D.C. is a city of statues, memorials, wide boulevards and elegant green spaces with huge stone government buildings scattered all over the place. Apparently when the city was laid out by famed French architect Pierre L’Enfant, he specifically laid out extremely wide boulevards everywhere because he fully expected that eventually it would develop into a grand capital city with processions and military parades, etc. This happened but it took more than 100 years. In the early days, apparently, people complained that D.C. was nothing but big, empty streets full of mud and horse manure EVERYWHERE which must have made strolling impossible in most...