Lopez Travels: New York, New York

When I started to plan my trip out and look at my flight options I realized that most of my options, in particular the more affordable ones had me stopping in either NYC or DC. I decided to exploit that and turn that “layover” into a 3 day layover. I had never been to NYC and I have a good friend who recently moved there, so the cards just somehow fell into place.

I was only there for 2 full days of sightseeing, and exploring seeing as how I arrived there late night and although my flight was in the afternoon on the third day, I had to be at the airport around noon or 1 which meant that morning was devoted to packing.

After planning this part of my trip, two more coincidences fell into place. A co-worker of mine in San Diego knew that my fellowship was on studying waterfront cities and asked me if I had heard of a guy named David Grahame Shane. Professor Shane teaches at Columbia University in that Architecture and Urban Design Program and is very well educated when it comes to cities and architecture on the waterfront. He was originally going to come to San Diego as part of the AIA Lecture Series, but was unable to due scheduling conflicts. Anyways, she gave me his contact info and advised that I should pay him a visit while I was in New York. His schedule worked out great with my very limited version and was able to meet with me for about an hour and a half and provided me with some great insight and tips to look at while visiting the cities I was going to.

On a somewhat related note, but unrelated to my fellowship was me meeting with Mr. Robert Ivy, the editor-in-chief of Architectural Record. While there was no relationship to my fellowship it was still professionally related and I couldn’t pass up a great opportunity.

About a month prior to my trip to New York. I was attending the Alpha Rho Chi 60th National Convention in Memphis, Tennessee, where part of our agenda there was to initiate Robert Ivy as an Honorary Member. Before he left Memphis, he was kind enough to extend an invitation to all brothers of Alpha Rho Chi, to visit him and his office if we were ever in New York. This had to be too good to be true, but upon exchanging emails with him he was also able to meet with me briefly while I was in New York. Needles to say visiting him and the Architectural Record Office was quite exciting. I even got a sneak peak at some projects going into the May issue.

As for the rest of my visit to New York I was able to do some of the standard tourist stuff; the top of the Empire State Building, the Guggenheim, Lever House, the Seagram Building, Times Square, Battery Park, etc. But I know that I definitely must come back to this great city and spend at least 5 days there. Hopefully I will get a chance to do so when I come out to the east coast next fall to visit grad schools.