The Transportaton Building

Quite literally, every foot of the City Hall area has enormous amounts of history attached to it. The challenge, particularly for young people raised on virtual everything, is to learn to feel that history when standing at a given site. For example, immediately across Vesey Street on the St. Paul's Chapel side of Broadway is the Transportation Building. This is a perfectly ordinary looking structure of early twentieth-century vintage. What it replaced was the Astor Hotel, the most luxurious hotel of the middle and late nineteenth century. It was on the steps of the Astor that Abraham Lincoln, on the way to his first inauguration, gave an impromptu speech to a New York street audience frightened about the impending dissolution of the Union. I think of this especially in these times when effective leadership seems so wanting. I sometimes ask my students to stand on the place where the Astor's steps used to be. Of course, I cannot know what they are feeling as they do this. Possibly, they just think they are humoring another of my eccentricities, but I like to think they feel something that ties their present to the nation's past.