The high ground is where the light is

Vision

2016 New York New York South Mission

I am SET APART from the world as a representative of the Lord, JESUS CHRIST.  I am here to serve HIM with all my heart, might, mind and strength during the HASTENING of HIS work.

Through my exact OBEDIENCE, true FAITH and willingness: to act in all DILIGENCE; miracles in others will happen.  By studying and applying Preach My Gospel, I am FOREVER CHANGED.

BAPTISM is the gate.

The TEMPLE is the goal.

The MEMBERS are the key.

The DOCTRINE OF CHRIST is the path.

The ATONEMENT is the only way!

This week 19 of our missionaries went home.  I was blessed to attend the devotional at the mission home on the eve of their departure.  Their testimonies and strength and love of the Lord bring me to tears of joy for them.  They will be missed but I am happy for them to begin new chapters in their lives and to bless their families and the people in wards at home.

I started with the 2016 Mission Vision because a mission does FOREVER CHANGE a person.  I personally will be changed forever.  My testimony of the Savior and the truthfulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ burn bright in my soul.  The missionaries, the people in my ward, the investigators and the people on the street all have had an impact on me.

Sisters Lewis, Robinson, Urizar

Sisters Bandeaux, Anderson, Jenkins

Elders Voorhees, Lee, Selfaison, Young, Paterson

Elders Shirts, Joo, Resinelli, Sewell

Elder Messenger

This has been a fun week!  I was please to spend 5 days with dear friends from my home area:  Teresa, Melissa, Olivia, and Natalie Prater.  It was a big slumber party staying up talking and giggling until the wee hours of the morning. (It was like I was 12 years old all over again.)  Olivia arrived on Tuesday morning and since I was busy welcoming new missionaries and helping at the mission home, she went into Manhattan by herself.   She managed to get there and back and didn't get lost.  I'm totally impressed.

Teresa, Olivia, Natalie

On Wednesday, we went to Flushing for lunch at Mizumi where we had our fill of sushi and other tasty tidbits and then we topped it off by picking up Sisters Fitt and Yu to go to The French Workshop Bakery for a Duke.  Sister Fitt is from the Nashville area where Olivia will be serving her mission.  It was great to watch them, with so much enthusiasm, as Sister Fitt told Olivia about her home area.  Of course one can never lack enthusiasm when there is chocolate involved.

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Back in Rego Park, we hopped on the train and went to the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge so that we could walk across it into the DUMBO area of Brooklyn to have pizza at Juliana's.  I have attached geographical info on DUMBO and the Bridge at the end of this blog.

City Hall Manhattan

Horace Greeley

Brooklyn Bridge

Olivia Prater

City Hall

Olivia and the Bridge

Looking at the Manhattan Bridge

Big cables

Traffic on the lower level of the bridge looking into Brooklyn

he Locks on the Brooklyn Bridge—Graffiti or a Symbol of Love?

Lower  Mahattan

Brooklyn

Lady Liberty

Midtown Manhattan

Bronze plaque

DUMBO

Lower Manhattan sunset

More sunset

DUMBO rooftop gardens

Fires on the street. Some kind of exercise/drill for the fire dept

All of the Prater's had planned on arriving together.  Olivia had a ticket and the other 3 were flying standby.  With the Delta fiasco/delays, they were bumped for Delta passengers so they arrived late Wednesday night.  They all went into Manhattan on Thursday and Friday but duty called for me.  I don't know how they did it.  It has been beastly hot here.  Temps at 90-100 but with humidity 60 to 75% it feels like 106 according to the Weather Channel app. When you walk out the door, the humidity slaps you in the face and almost take away one's breath.

I was sad to see them leave Saturday afternoon.  I don't have private rooms for you but I do have beds and I would love to have anyone come to stay with me. 

Our mission has recently been authorized to use social media, such as Face Book, for proselyting.  After each transfer, President and Sister Reynolds hold a mission-wide conference via phone.  This week they talked about using social media in a responsible way and they talked about the dangers of going on line and using the web for other purposes.

They based their "lesson" on Alma 47 and 48.  In these chapters, Amalickiah gains control of the Lamanite army by lying and through deception, gains control of the entire Lamanite Kingdom.  In the way that Amalickiah little by little deceived the Lamanite people and gained control of them, Satan can deceive us and gain control over us. 

He doesn't ask us to commit awful crimes but entices us to come his way one tiny step at a time:  It's ok to do something just this once.  No one will know.  It won't hurt anyone.  It will be pleasurable and will make you happy.  Whatever the "something" is that will bring us to sin once will be easier and easier to do again.  Before you know it, you are addicted or led away from the light. 

Just as Amalickiah persuaded Lehonti to come off the mountain top, some people try to seduce us to leave the high ground of light and truth.  The high ground is where the light is.  It's where we see the first light of morning and the last light in the evening.  It is the safe ground. It is where we find truth and knowledge.  Beware of the subtleties of Satan.  I thought it a good reminder.

I love you my family and friends.

Dumbo (or DUMBO, short for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It encompasses two sections: one located between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, which connect Brooklyn to Manhattan across the East River, and another that continues east from the Manhattan Bridge to the Vinegar Hill area..

The area was originally a ferry landing, characterized by 19th and early 20th century industrial and warehouse buildings, Belgian block streets, and its location on the East River by the imposing anchorage of the Manhattan Bridge. The entirety of Dumbo was bought by developer David Walentas and his company Two Trees Management in the late 20th century and remade into an upscale residential and commercial community first becoming a haven for artist galleries and presently a center for technology startups. The large community of tech startups earned DUMBO the moniker as "the center of the Brooklyn Tech Triangle". In that time, Dumbo has become Brooklyn's most expensive neighborhood, as well as New York City's fourth richest community overall, due in part to the large concentration of technology startups, its close proximity to Manhattan and the prevalence of converted industrial buildings into spacious luxury residential lofts.

The Brooklyn Bridge is a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge in New York City and is one of the oldest bridges of either type in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River. It has a main span of 1,595.5 feet and was the first steel-wire suspension bridge constructed. It was originally referred to as the New York and Brooklyn Bridge and as the East River Bridge, but it was later dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge, a name coming from an earlier January 25, 1867, letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and formally so named by the city government in 1915. Since its opening, it has become an icon of New York City and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1972.

Although the Brooklyn Bridge is technically a suspension bridge, it uses a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge design. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement. The limestone was quarried at the Clark Quarry in Essex County, New York. The granite blocks were quarried and shaped on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, under a contract with the Bodwell Granite Company, and delivered from Maine to New York by schooner.

The bridge was built with numerous passageways and compartments in its anchorages. New York City rented out the large vaults under the bridge's Manhattan anchorage in order to fund the bridge. Opened in 1876, the vaults were used to store wine, as they were always at 60 °F (16 °C). This was called the "Blue Grotto" because of a shrine to the Virgin Mary next to an opening at the entrance. When New York visited one of the cellars about 102 years later, in 1978, it discovered, on the wall, a "fading inscription" reading: "Who loveth not wine, women and song, he remaineth a fool his whole life long."

History
Construction

John Augustus Roebling

Early plan of one tower for the Brooklyn Bridge, 1867

Construction of the bridge began in 1869. The bridge was initially designed by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, the Waco Suspension Bridge and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky. While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes he developed a tetanus infection which left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son Washington Roebling in charge of the project.

The bridge's two towers were built by floating two caissons, giant upside-down boxes made of southern yellow pine, in the span of the East River, and then beginning to build the stone towers on top of them until they sank to the bottom of the river. Compressed air was pumped into the caissons, and workers entered the space to dig the sediment, until the caissons sank to the bedrock. The whole weight of the bridge still sits upon a 15-foot thickness of southern yellow pine wood under the sediment.

Many workers became sick with the bends in this work. This condition was unknown at the time, and was first called "caisson disease" by the project physician Andrew Smith. Washington Roebling also suffered a paralyzing injury as a result of decompression sickness shortly after the beginning of construction on January 3, 1870. Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand.

Roebling conducted the entire construction from his apartment with a view of the work, designing and redesigning caissons and other equipment. He was aided by his wife Emily Warren Roebling who provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Under her husband's guidance, Emily studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years assisting Washington Roebling, helping to supervise the bridge's construction. When iron probes underneath the caisson for the Manhattan tower found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the aggregate overlying the bedrock 30 feet below it to be firm enough to support the tower base, and construction continued.

The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in the 1972 book The Great Bridge by David McCullough and Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first PBS documentary film by Ken Burns. Burns drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with accompanying book.

Opening

 

"New Brooklyn to New York Via Brooklyn Bridge", 1899

Newspaper headline announcing opening

The bridge-originally referred to as the New York and Brooklyn Bridge and as the East River Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display.

On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches.  The bridge cost US$15.5 million in 1883 dollars (about US$380,946,000 in today's dollars) to build and an estimated number of 27 people died during its construction.

On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a rumor that the bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed. On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability-while publicizing his famous circus-when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.

At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world-50% longer than any previously built-and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".

At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh-by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive beauty.

Renovation

After the collapse in 2007 of the I-35W highway bridge in the city of Minneapolis, increased public attention has been brought to bear on the condition of bridges across the US, and it has been reported that the Brooklyn Bridge approach ramps received a rating of "poor" at its last inspection.  According to a NYC Department of Transportation spokesman, it wasn't necessarily dangerous in the state it was then in, but a poor rating implied a renovation. A US$508 million project (equivalent to US$551 million in 2015) to renovate the approaches began in 2010, with the full bridge renovation beginning in spring 2011, and was originally scheduled to run until 2014, but project completion was later delayed to April 2015.

As part of this project, two approach ramps were widened from one lane to two by re-striping a new prefabricated ramp; clearance over the eastbound Interstate 278 at York Street, on the double-deck Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, was increased; and seismic retrofitting, replacement of rusted railings and safety barriers, and road surface replacements were performed. Due to the nature of the work, detours were necessitated for four years.

In August 2016, after the renovation of the bridge had already been completed, the New York City Department of Transportation announced that it would conduct a seven-month, US$370,000 study to verify if the bridge could support a heavier upper deck that consisted of an expanded bicycle and pedestrian path. As of 2016, about 10,000 pedestrians and 3,500 bikers use the pathway on an average weekday.