On a rather short time budget, I visited Inspiration Point, a structure on the Hudson River Greenway. You might remember I wrote some about this in my Billings Terrace post, but didn’t get to go see it at that time.I parked far west in Washington Heights and even my walk from there to the Greenway was interesting and beautiful. It’s extremely hilly with step streets, old architecture, and great views. I walked towards the water on West 181st Street.

The street dead-ends into a beautiful vista of the Hudson River including the George Washington Bridge. There’s even a little lookout point built out from the sidewalk. Just around the corner to the right is an entrance to the pedestrian bridge over the northbound Henry Hudson Parkway.Even the retaining wall holding Manhattan back from the Henry Hudson Parkway was intriguing.

I think I have a thing for beautiful, old, New York stonework, and something about the scale of the wall was quite striking.I walked north along the Greenway, making sure to watch out for bikes and runners. It was sometimes exhilarating, sometimes scary, to be in proximity to both pedestrian/bike and car traffic like that. Conceptually it was very cool though, me sandwiched between layers of infrastructure: the river, then train tracks, then southbound lanes of the parkway down to my left – the northbound lanes and all of Manhattan to my right.