A Grand Tour of New York City's Theater World: Going Home

Heather Bailey is the winner of the Heritage Travel Reviews Contest, which we held back in the spring on our pre-launch website, GoWithaPurpose.com. She won a grand tour of New York City’s theater world - complete with special backstage tours of New York’s most famous venues, tickets to Broadway shows and a stay at New York’s oldest hotel. This is Heather’s final report on her experiences for the Go With a Purpose blog. You can read previous posts from Heather here.

On day six of our New York theater trip, we got ourselves together and crammed all of our souvenirs into our suitcases. We then set out to make our way back to the airport. We decided to take a different subway line into Harlem this time, so we walked to Grand Central Station. I confess that I felt a little important rolling my suitcase amid the crowd at that station. Everyone else was dressed for work and on their way to conduct business, and I felt like I was a part of their world. We navigated our way to the correct train and eventually got off at 125th Street. From there we found the stop for our bus, but ended up having about ten minutes to wait.

So in that time, I ended up not being able to help myself, and I took a few more snapshots of the sights around us. Just as with the rest of the city, Harlem is undergoing a renaissance and a shift in demographics. What was once a largely Jewish neighborhood became the center of African- American culture, and now another layer of history has come to the area. We saw several signs of that shift, but the best one just screamed for me to take a picture of it. It showed that in Harlem, Malcolm X and El Barrio mean history.

Our bus arrived, and we were able to see the city pass by as we made our way to LaGuardia. Airport processing is always a bit of a circus, but eventually we made it to our gate and had a chance to talk to several of the people heading out on the same flight. One was a marathon runner, sporting her medal with pride, who agreed to take a final picture of my mother and me before we boarded the plane. In honor of Gozaic, which made this entire trip possible, we were sporting our Gozaic T-shirts. We were actually asked what Gozaic was by one of the airport customer service staff people, so the word is spreading.

While we were both a little sad that the trip was coming to a close, since there was still so much to see, it was exciting to see Nashville through the windows and hear the country music performers welcome you to the airport through a series of public service announcements. I am going to spend some time going back through my pictures and rehashing the lessons about cultural conservation and historic preservation that I learned on this trip. It was truly inspiring.