In Amelia's Footsteps

A few years back, I spent a day in Lower Manhattan. I had driven with Mandy across the country to her new residence in Queens and while she reported to work for her first day on a new job, I took the subway to the City for a quick walkabout.  I rode the Staten Island Ferry, walked to the site of the World Trade Center and generally enjoyed being in that wonderful and historical place for a few moments. The next day, I got on a plane and came home.  It was the only time I have ever spent there – and as it was extremely limited (and as I was sick as a dog with a sudden cold), of course I am planning a return trip someday. There is more to see of New York City.

I have recently been reading much about Amelia Earhart.  I am reading about her and I am reading the few books she wrote herself.  She’s such an icon that few today know who she really was.  Even in her own time, her public “face” was carefully constructed and deliberately controlled to the extent it could be.  But in reading her own words, I feel I am getting to know her to a degree.

Whitehall Building in 1930

Tonight, while reading in her book The Fun Of It, written and published in 1932, she wrote of having visited the Head Weatherman of the USA (in those times), a man who collected and disseminated the National Weather Service’s forecasts to interested parties.  His name was "Dr. Kimball." She had made use of his services while she was involved in planning and executing the 1928 transatlantic flight in the Friendship with Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon where she was the “first woman to fly the Atlantic” (actually as baggage, as she put it, but that's another story).  This was about one year after Lindbergh flew to Paris in the Spirit of St Louis. 


Earhart’s profession, after that first Atlantic flight, was “promoter of aviation and its possibilities.”  Up until that flight and the doors it opened for her, she was not a career aviator.  But in this new role, as America’s ambassador of flight, she went to see this nationally-renowned meteorologist in his headquarters atop the Whitehall Building near Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, he whose information was indispensable to the aeronautical adventurers of that day.  There, she learned how each day’s weather data was collected, plotted, and predicted, and what this weather guru thought should be the future needs of his profession and its work, as it grew.  Much of what they discussed has come to pass in the subsequent years.

Whitehall Building as it looks today!

This Whitehall Building, where Amelia visited at some point between 1928 and 1932?  It is at 17 Battery Place across the street from Battery Park.  I looked it up on Google maps to see if it is still there.  It is.  I saw the satellite photo, and tonight, I looked at the front doors that Amelia walked through on her way to her interview upstairs (I love Google Street View).


I walked right past those front doors as I walked about Lower Manhattan that day a few years back. I am sure I looked at that building – because I looked at them all while letting the sights and sounds of Manhattan soak in.  So I discovered this evening that I have stood where Amelia Earhart stood and walked where she walked!  You know how I love to do that, live history.  Bliss.