The Winter Garden Atrium and charity:water

The Winter Garden Atrium is a part of Brookfield Place, which is a collection of buildings just across the West Side Highway from the World Trade Center. 

There is currently a great daily event by charity:water going on in the Atrium from August 9-28, which is an 8 minute virtual reality film narrated by a 13 year-old girl in Ethiopia named Selam telling the story of her village receiving its first clean water source. Each set of yellow containers is its own little space for viewing the film.

I'm pretty new to virtual reality, and it was amazing. It was a 360 experience, so that I could turn all the way to the right or left, up or down, and see different parts of the landscape or new people in the scene. 

We see what life is like for Selam and her family in rural Ethiopia, including the dirty water source they are forced to use in their lives before the clean water pump is installed. 

There were signs around the event that illustrated how serious of a problem this is worldwide.

Just viewing the virtual reality film unlocks a $30 donation to the charity, which was previously made by another person. There were screens set up showing how much had already been unlocked, and how much was left to be unlocked.

The $300,000 total donated means clean water for 10,000 people, and the list of 10,000 donors scrolled by on the screen. Some people's names would appear consecutively next to more than one number, showing that they had given multiple $30 donations to the event. 

As my Mom pointed out, the concept of unlocking donations is pretty great because it creates even more people participating to the cause in various ways. Watching the film is in itself educational and inspiring, but to be able to unlock a donation by watching it only added to the importance of the experience. 

There was also an art exhibition on display at the Atrium, which featured 175 birds made of fabric that would occasionally flap their wings.  

The Winter Garden Atrium's name made me think of the famous Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway and whether they were related... it turns out they're paternal cousins. Actually I don't know if there's any connection but Wikipedia says that the Broadway Winter Garden was actually "the fourth New York City venue to be christened the Winter Garden," so I guess there's tradition in it. 

The Atrium is 10 stories tall. It was originally built in 1988 and connected to the World Trade Center by a pedestrian bridge. The September 11 attacks destroyed the bridge and badly harmed the Atrium, which was then rebuilt in 2002. There are now windows where the bridge used to be.



(Photo by Bri Rodriguez/FEMA News Photo, September 27, 2001)

The Atrium is a nice space that seems really big because of the high glass ceiling which lets in lots of sunlight, as does the big glass wall that faces out to the Battery Park City Esplanade, North Cove Yacht Harbor, and the Hudson River. I'm a fan of indoor trees, I don't know why. I hope the trees are okay with it too. 

There are high-end, super fancy stores around the edges of the Atrium, which I guess are for the Wall Street people and upper class folks who live in this upscale area. There are tourists who come here but I would imagine only the richest tourists could afford to shop in those stores. 

Anyway there is also a nice food court and gourmet-type grocery store. Although these pears needed to get their story straight:

Although there is no longer a bridge connecting the Atrium to the World Trade Center, they do connect underground through the network of shopping areas and transportation hubs that are part of the Oculus project. 

I wrote a post about the Oculus when parts of it were first opening, but coming back months later I could experience it closer to being fully finished, with many stores and more of the construction seeming to be complete. 

It's a pleasant area overall and the Winter Garden Atrium is definitely worth a visit, even if you're a local New Yorker looking to check out an area that you might normally leave to the tourists.

That's all for now, and thanks for reading.