Governors Island

Last Saturday I visited Governors Island for the first time since 2006. Not too many visitors were out there, perhaps because a thunderstorm earlier in the day discouraged them. I was amazed at how much it cleared my head to spend a couple of hours spent wandering along the waterfront, peering in the windows of deserted officers’ houses, and listening to the cicadas.

Since my last visit, more ferries have been added, so you can stay on the island until 7 pm on the weekends. The ferries are also running later in the year, until early October. And more areas of the island have been opened up. You can now get close to this monumental structure, which looks rather beautiful and stark, like a Holocaust museum, but is actually the ventilation building for the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. You can walk through the admiral’s house, inaccessible before, and some interesting outdoor sculpture is on display in Nolan Park, near the house.