On my own again

I bid farewell to my lovely traveling companion Roberta. Yesterday we walked Greenwich and the West Village, Chelsea and the High Line Park. After a Nanna nap we dressed for dinner and went to a cafe by the river to see the setting sun over our frozen cocktails, then had a great dinner at 'The Fatty Crab', Malaysian fusion. The crispy pork belly with watermelon pickles was amazing.

Today we fitted in a spot of shopping in Soho before Roberta amused me with her packing technique, which consists of stuffing things in and sitting on them. I then wandered Central Park and managed to emerge at an almost but not completely different spot to the one I imagined. Snow Globes are not to be had for love nor money, but Josh is not forgotten in a trip to FAO Schwartz. I did like the $24K Barbie Foosball table.

Roberta also took her laptop and so this will probably be my last post for the trip as the pictures are the best part.

Grand Central, New York Public Library, Bryant Park, East Village, Soho, Oh my!

Grand Central Terminal

As Roberta wanted to take it easy, I started off my solo day at Grand Central, which is impressive and, like a TARDIS, bigger on the inside. Two tiers of platforms, a soaring celestial blue ceiling in the concourse, marble and chandeliers. Took a stroll through the fresh food market, with the best mouthwatering ingredients: pity the hotel room doesn't even have a microwave.

I had a few of my newly-purchased '50 adventures on foot' cards and so made my way to the New York public library, another impressive building and one which houses some great treasures: a draft of the declaration of independence, Charlotte Bronte's travelling desk, Virginia Woolf's walking stick and Malcolm X's briefcase, as well as books. An elephantine copy of Audubon's life-size renderings of American birds was open on Carolina parrots. A 15th century illuminated manuscript and a copy of the Gutenberg bible were also on display.

New York Public Library

Bryant Park

Around the back of the library is Bryant Park, at which I briefly rested and finished off my soft serve vanilla ice cream in a sugar cone. It is a lovely space and used for the film festival.

Then it was on to the East Village. A huge market had shut off four or so blocks of an avenue, so I had a stroll along there. It was pretty much simply a bigger version of our own markets, but more room to move as it was well spread out. I might have made a gift purchase.


The East Village is rather hip, with hip young things sitting on stoops smoking cigarettes. I purchased another 'sweet' gift. (That's a hint for you Justine). Sipping an organic iced lemon tea, I meandered along, finding my way to the lighting shops, which of course don't have things in stock for avid tourists to take away. This I found out after a fair amount of deliberation and going into all the shops. It wasn't wasted time, though, because it was quite amazing to walk amongst acres of chandeliers and I took the details of a model (not a chandelier) I liked.

Then along Spring St into Soho, where the shoppers were out in force. On this warm day, they seemed to be expending a lot of unnecessary energy. Got Mark's Levis for $64 for two pairs. Not sure about the wash etc, but for that price he can wear them up the farm. I resisted a lovely pair of Camper red clogs for $139, found a good bargain store up near the hotel and got two pairs of trousers and a pair of shorts for $82. Forgive the descent into consumerism, but that is part of the city experience.

The market

One other major part is people watching: there is an amazing parade of characters everywhere.

New York again

I forgot to pack my camera today, so text-based post. After a Starbucks breakfast with free wifi, we stroll across a Central Park washed by the previous night's rain to the Guggenheim. The entry fee is reduced to $10 because they are setting up an exhibition and we are unable to descend the famous spiral ramp. The available areas are still rather good, and we spend some quality art time here. We almost go into the German and Vienna gallery, but I'm turned off by the bag search that wants to confiscate my water (the Guggenheim did no such search!), plus the $15 entry fee. We also skip the Frick collection in favour of going back on their 'pay what you think' Sunday.

So it's then off to the lower east side to see the tenement museum. We stopped in Little Italy for a scrumptious vege pizza, which we didn't finish, and a huge drink of ginger ale, which we did. The area is looking pretty hip but also community-focused. I stopped to look in a lighting shop and looked up at Roberta's prompting to see at least ten lighting shops all on the same street. I may find something for my kitchen light if I go back later. (I went back the next day and of course everything takes weeks to order.)

The Tenement Museum was rather amazing: the people who started it found a building that had remained untouched since about 1941, as it had been used as storage by the businesses that occupied the ground floors. It was very atmospheric, with peeling walls and ceilings. The tour guide gave an interesting account of two of the families, the garment industry and how the building changed over the years, from 4 outdoor privies for 20 families to one indoor convenience between two families later on. When the apartments were used for outwork, the stoves were kept running through both summer and winter to iron the clothes.

We then went on to Macy's, where we stayed till after nine, again experiencing a certain sensory overload.

Newport

Sarah Kendall House

From Providence, we caught a $2 one-hour-twenty-minute bus ride out to Newport. Along the way, saw some nice green countryside and a lovely historic town called Bristol along the way. Once arrived at the info centre and all knowledged-up, we rolled our cases over to Washington Street along the waterfront to our BnB, Sarah Kendall House, a lovingly restored and furnished 1871 three-storey house with a turret. The late afternoon/sunset photos were taken from a jetty across the road from the BnB. We'd already decided to stay at least two nights and set on staying three once we realised how much there was in Newport to see and had tasted the cooked breakfast included in our room fee.

We amazed ourselves by visiting three of the famed Newport mansions or 'cottages' as they were known, two built by Vanderbilts, The Breakers and Marble House, and another that was owned by a Colorado silver heiress and a great party-thrower, Rosecliff. The house was the backdrop for the 1970s film of The Great Gatsby. The houses, especially the Vanderbilt ones, were absolute sensory overload. You aren't allowed to take pictures inside the houses and I guess that's because cameras would blow up with the amount of gold leaf, marble, silks and crystal chandeliers. Our favourite for the day was Rosecliff, because it was a bit more 'normal' and had a lovely ballroom with doors on either side leading out to terraces and the garden.

Some of the mansions had been pulled down to make way for shopping malls etc (if you wanted some open space, there seemed no option but to knock down someone's over-decorated white elephant, because so many litter the area and most were left empty for decades), but there was a concerted effort from the 1960s to preserve the ones that remained.

A lot of the interiors were designed and assembled in France by the same popular decorator. They were then disassembled and then reassembled in Newport. Everything was copied or inspired by some European palace or manor house, so I did feel that the 'gilded age' was indeed all on the surface, without anything particularly original or American. The one house that offered some new architectural ideas for the time - more open plan and including the outdoors - was unfortunately closed. 

However, we were happy to be gobsmacked by the numbers, extensive grounds and grandiosity of the area. 

We took a tour around the very pretty and occasionally sublime Ocean Drive, and looked around two more mansions the next day, The Elms and Chateau Sur Mer. The Elms was again rather grand, but gave the feeling of a rather loved family home, as much as such a place can. All the mansions except Chateau Sur Mer offered audio tours as part of the entry and they were invaluable. The Elms was originally owned by a couple who had their nieces come visit often and they all seemed to be quite jolly. The sister of the man who built it inherited it and was something of a character. She would let the local children play on the lawn and sent cookies, milk and lemonade out to them. She kept the house running as it always had up until her death in the 1960s.

View from the cliff walk

Chateau Sur Mer was one of the older cottages, built around 1852 and extended in the 1870s. It was amazingly dark, though maybe darker than originally as the wallpaper and other decorations would have tarnished over the years, and emphatically late Victorian, with no surface left undecorated. Some of the decorations, by themselves, were exquisite, but the final impression was busy, busy, busy, with a side order of ornament.

It was amazing that the later mansions, built for vast sums of money and expected to be used by dynasties, only had very short lives as family and social summer houses. The Breakers, the most stately, was built in 1895 and the last summer the family spent there was 1937. Women used to spend around $1.2 million per season just on clothes. Then came income tax.

Our second full day in Newport finished with around three miles of the Cliff Walk, a scenic walk around the shore and across the lawns of many mansions. It was quite rough in places and Roberta had to negotiate it clutching her shopping bag from earlier in the day. We hobbled our way over long country lanes to find the first bus stop back. This was the most tiring day yet and, though we didn't bicycle the Ocean Drive, felt that we had put a good measure of work into our Newport experience. The bus driver was a bit heavy on the brakes and accelerator, so I felt a bit queasy in the end and only ate half a chopped salad for dinner. That left me nice and hungry for our cooked BnB breakfast. Mmmmm.

Back to Providence and Amtrak to New York, New York. We are staying next to the Natural History Museum at the Excelsior Hotel, which turns out to be clean and well-furnished.

Sunset from across the street from our BnB

The $10 million houses in previously lower class area

Sunset on the harbour

The Atlantic was smooth

Roberta bravely carries her shopping over the rough cliff walk

Breakfast

Providence, RI

We stayed in the 1922 Biltmore Hotel in Providence in quite a nice room. I liked the mailing slot next to the elevator, which ended up in a post box in the lobby.

We wandered over to Federal Hill, a little Italy, with the now ubiquitous several-storey wooden houses, but as Roberta and I noted, not so pretty with the eminently practical but ugly cement surrounds. Not a window box to be seen. Because there was not much to see, we cut our time in Providence short to go onto Newport, which we reached about one hour and twenty minutes later on a $2 bus trip. Bristol, on the way, looked like a nice little town, but Newport is rather special.

We are very happy with our Newport digs, a bed and breakfast near the water - http://www.sarahkendallhouse.com - and also happy to have a room each to ourselves. We spent some time out on the porch reading and eating the provided snacks, variously whiling away the time, grateful for some time off our feet. Because tomorrow is the cliff walk and sumptuous mansions, for which we will be fuelled by our full cooked breakfast. Stay tuned to see if we actually do the scenic drive of 11 miles on bicycles.

Biltmore lobby

Providence

Kennedy Museum, Beacon Hill

Kennedy Museum

Today I went off to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. It is situated rather dramatically overlooking the water and the building itself, with a soaring glass atrium, is impressive. The exhibition was informative without overwhelming, evoking the era and issues of the times. I hadn't known that Kennedy had won a Pulitzer prize for a biography about political courage. The museum had a lot of his reading notes from speeches, including his handwritten phonetic notes for 'Ich bin ein Berliner'. I did get goosebumps when in the last 'legacy' section there was a huge piece of the Berlin Wall. The museum gave a good and often intimate overview of the man and what he did (of course leaving out the scandal).

Central atrium taking up heat,  Gibson House

Back near Boston Common, I clicked a quick snap of the Cheers sign and Roberta and I went for a tour of the Gibson House. The last scion of the Gibsons fancied himself as a writer and started treating his family home as a museum, that it might one day be a pilgrimage destination for literary fans. He never won fame, but his house is a pretty complete example of a Victorian mansion in Back Bay.

I spent the rest of the day wandering Beacon Hill, the area in which the upper crust lived before they filled in the swamp flats in Back Bay. Like Back Bay, the gardens and window boxes were lovely.

Quickly looked in on the Kings Church that both royalists and revolutionaries attended. Then off by train to Providence, Rhode Island.

Boston Library and ornate T subway entrance, Back Bay

We stayed here at Buckingham Apartments

Entry at Buckingham Apartments

Back Bay

Commonwealth Ave, from in front of Buckingham Apt.s

Beacon Hill

Rare garden in Beacon Hill

Original 17th century pulpit and pews, Kings Church

Salem: much more than witches

Salem Harbour

While there seem to be witch museums around every corner, we managed to avoid all of them, only buying some spooky souvenirs for a certain Halloween-loving friend.

The temperature was a fresh 17C with intermittent rain, which we thought enhanced the sombre history of the town. Salem was a great seaport and so has some great architecture, often sea captains' homes. The houses are almost all wooden, many in the colonial style. Later Victorian houses look a bit Munsterish in their gothic styles and those with the plain eighteenth century houses added bay windows and other decorations. Then again in the early nineteenth century, the Colonial revival style meant that people then took off the Victorian decorations added earlier.

Of course, we went to the House of the Seven Gables, or the Turner-Ingersoll mansion, made famous by Hawthorne's novel and built overlooking the harbour in the seventeenth century, forty or so years after the area was settled in 1629. I was surprised to learn that Hawthorne never actually saw the house with seven gables, as eighteenth century tastes had led the owners to demolish four of them and a back lean-to. He stayed at the house often at the invitation of his cousin, Susannah Ingersoll, who inherited the house when her father, a sea captain, and brother died of yellow fever on a voyage. She was unusual in those days, an unmarried businesswoman. The house was rescued from dereliction by Caroline Emmerton in 1908, who re-applied the original seventeenth century architecture. She also added some fictional details related to the book, including a narrow hidden staircase behind the chimney. Several of the rooms are decorated in the Georgian style as they would have been for the Ingersolls. In the attic we saw original beams and floorboards of the 1668 house.

The House of the Seven Gables

Right next door was the Nathaniel Hawthorne birthplace house, transported by truck in the 1950s to its present position. It was seemingly quite common even in previous centuries to move houses. We visited one house that was the product of a bitter divorce in the nineteenth century. The husband inherited a third of the marital home on the death of one of his daughters. He actually sawed off his third and had it transported to its new location, where it eventually became the Phillips House, decorated in the Colonial Revival style around the start of the twentieth century.

The Phillips House
The front two bottom and upper  rooms were cut from another building after a divorce.

Had a great tour of the Phillips House, which is furnished as it would have been in 1919, with amazing old cars in the converted stables. The chauffeur chose the 12 cylinder rather than the 8 cylinder limousine when consulted at the showroom. Our guide was a young guy doing his very first tour: he'll have plenty of time to get his patter down over the summer. The table was set for a particular meal in 1919, when the family of little Stevie's friend Bunny came over. Little Stevie went to Harvard like most of his male relatives, but was wealthy enough to have an occupation of 'Philanthropist' and continue his parents' extensive touring.

Looking back over the burial ground to the memorial for the victims of the witch trials
(stones set in wall in background)

Chestnut Street is very pretty, leafy green with a long row of historic houses

The houses are close together and sometimes at different angles.
The gardens are well-tended and very green.

Concord

Not Orchard House, but The Wayside,
The Alcotts lived here briefly and
Nathaniel Hawthorne added the turret as his study.

As an early devotee of Little Women, the visit to Concord and especially Orchard House where the Alcotts lived was a great highlight. I got to see the half-circle desk at which Louisa wrote the novel and rescued her family from genteel poverty. It was very interesting to hear about the Alcotts and the transcendentalist movement; they were great friends of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lent Louisa's father some money to buy the house. Louisa's grave is in the Alcott plot in Sleepy Hollow cemetery on Writers' Ridge, not far from the Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emerson plots. Louisa went to nurse in the Civil War, contracted pneumonia there and recovered, but was poisoned by the cure, which contained mercury. A tomboyish, athletic woman before this, Louisa was sick for the 25 years till her death.

The Old Manse, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived at different times.

The place was awash with eighteenth century houses and buildings related to the revolutionary war. Of course, the Old North Bridge was where the first shots of the war rang out after Paul Revere's night ride to warn the leaders of the rebellion - a ride he didn't finish as he was arrested before he got there. Another man brought word.

The very peaceful Old North Bridge

Side view of where John Jack lived and worked

We saw the house that a slave from Africa, John Jack, worked in and earned his freedom. His gravestone had this epitaph:

God wills us free.man wills us slaves.
I will as God wills Gods will be done
Here lies the body of
John Jack,
A native of Africa who died
March 1773, aged about sixty years
Tho' born in a land of slavery,
He was born free.
Tho' he lived in a land of liberty,
He lived a slave,
Till by his honest tho' stolen labors
He acquired the source of slavery
Which gave him his freedom;
Tho' not long before,
Death the grand tyrant
Gave him his final emancipation,
and set him on a footing with kings
Tho' a slave to vice,
He practiced those virtues
Without which kings are but slaves.

Harvard and MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Back of the Gehry building

Front of the Gehry building

Harvard

These trees were in flower all over the place. I think they are Chinese dogwoods.

Some of the 4400 glass flower specimens at the Harvard Natural History Museum

Yes, they are all made of glass.

They were made by a German father and son team over a period of around 50 years. The idea was that botanical students would have lifelike representations for their studies.

One of the most astounding things I've seen.