Olana

Posted on May 21, 2013 by

Hudson River looking south_IMG_6936_edited-1I spent last weekend in the Hudson River Valley – not nearly enough time.   I saw the Dia Foundation’s modern art museum in Beacon, NY on Saturday; and, on Sunday, Olana – Frederic Edwin Church’s home on the top of a very high hill near Hudson, NY.

I want to return soon;  it was frustrating to drive north on the beautiful state Route 9 through Hyde Park and Rhinebeck and not to stop to tour FDR’s home, or any of the other historic sites along the river-side of the road.

But Dia and Olana were my priorities this time.  The collection at Dia is – mostly but not entirely – too conceptualist and minimalist for my taste.  (One exception was a beautiful big room lined with Andy Warhol’s “Shadows” series from the 1970s.)

Olana is anything but minimalist.  Church spent some of the money he earned as a very successful landscape artist to create a beautiful estate across the river from the home of his mentor and teacher Thomas Cole.  He designed the landscape to include a lake in a shape echoing the curves of the Hudson River just to the west.  He established a farm on the property that was a serious money-making venture.  But mostly . . . he had a splendid house built.

Although he used an architect, he did much of the design work himself.  Especially the interior design and decoration.  He and his wife had fallen in love with Arab and Moorish art and decoration during an extended tour of the Middle East in the late 1860s or early 1870s.   Olana – outside and in – was his effort to re-create what they had seen in Beirut, Jerusalem, and Damascus.  He designed the stencils used to decorate the walls, and mixed the interior paints himself.  The Church family moved in in 1872, but the house was always a work in progress.  It was mostly complete by 1891.  Church died in 1900.

The house is wonderful also for all the paintings by Church – still there, as they were during his lifetime.  (And the paintings have wonderful frames – Church designed his own frames, too.)   Olana stayed in the Church family until 1966, when it was acquired by a partnership consisting of a private foundation and the State of New York.

Photography is not allowed inside the house.   Above is one photo of the view from the house; another is below, followed by two of the exterior of the house – all taken on a very damp, foggy day.

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A Little Bite of the Big Apple

Posted on May 20, 2013 by

I stayed in Princeton two nights (see my last post), which gave me one day to spend in New York museum-going.

I caught a very early morning train – but not too early for the regular commuters – and returned late that afternoon.  The weather was perfect; it was a great day to be in Manhattan.  Here are some photos, starting with the Princeton Junction station in the morning, and ending with the announcement board at Penn Station in the afternoon:

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Going Back

Posted on May 18, 2013 by

It is curiosity rather than compulsion, I think, that is sending me back to a few places in my past.  Curiosity about change – in the places and in me.  Do the places resemble, in any way, the memories that float through my consciousness from time to time or color my dreams at night?

I went back to Princeton, NJ, where I attended graduate school in the early 1970s.  The town seemed even more affluent and un-realistic than I remembered, but the campus looks mostly the same.  When I lived there, however, I wasn’t much “in” the town and certainly not observant enough to have noted the degree of affluence displayed there.  Life was where I lived – a beautiful small group of stone buildings called the Graduate College, built in the early 1900s when Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton –  and in classrooms and the library.

The Graduate College (the second picture below shows the entrance to the dining hall):

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After Princeton, I drove north towards Morristown.  I was hunting for the small community (really just a crossroads) outside Morristown, in Mendham Township, where we lived for only seven to eight months when I was 11.  It would have been impossible to find our house since I did not have its address; I just hoped I could find the general area.   The house was the largest one our family of seven had lived in up to that time – three acres and a very long driveway which my strong young father shoveled by hand when it snowed – and it was surrounded by farms.

As I’d expected, I did not find the house.  But I did find the crossroads – aka the town of Brookside.   It seemed not to have changed at all.  Across from the very old but still in-business post office is a large field, including a baseball diamond, where the town’s Fourth of July celebration was held.  That, I clearly remember because it was the best Fourth of July I’d ever experienced (and still is).  The fun included:  pie-eating contests, flour bag races, and rides on the township’s fire engines.   There must have been fireworks, too.

The Brookside Post Office:

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Old Gardens

Posted on May 17, 2013 by

family_IMG_6907_edited-1May is a wonderful time to tour gardens, and this May has probably been one of the East Coast’s bests because temperatures stayed cool during the first half of the month, and rain was plentiful.

I haven’t actually put a priority ranking on the places I want to see on this trip, but if I had, Winterthur would have been towards the top.  For at least 20 years I’ve wanted to see what is generally regarded as the premiere or one of the premiere museum collections of American furniture, decorative arts and paintings.  The collection, which comprises approximately 90,000 objects (including paintings), covers the years from our colonial beginnings through approximately 1860.  It was assembled by Henry Francis Du Pont starting in the 1920s and displayed – privately, at first – in his very large home in Delaware’s Brandywine Valley.  In 1951 the house was opened to the public as a museum; Du Pont moved to a smaller house on his property where he lived until his death in 1969.

Another Winterthur claim to fame is that, with the University of Delaware, it has two masters-degree programs:  one in American material culture, the other in art conservation.  Many of the curators on the staffs of major American museums trained at Winterthur.

In addition to the art and antiques, Winterthur has 1000 acres of naturalistic gardens to visit. The property – like the entire Brandywine Valley area – is a hilly, pleasing combination of open fields and leafy woods.  Du Pont loved trees, flowers and other plants as much as he loved beautiful man-made objects.

I took two of the several different tours offered of the collections inside the house (which, despite their breadth and depth, only skimmed the surface), and was too wrapped up in every beautiful detail  to take any photos.

Instead, I took a few photos in the gardens.  Azaleas and rhododendrons were at their peak, lilacs were blooming and fragrant, and peonies were beginning to open.  Mature azaleas and rhododendrons are especially lovely, I think – looser, more relaxed, gentler, as if they know they belong here on earth, giving us pleasure.  Pictures of the flowers below  (one of a family enjoying the Koi fish pond is above):

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Bombay Hook Wildlife Refuge

Posted on May 14, 2013 by

The Bombay Hook area of central Delaware has had this intriguing name since the 17th century when an Indian Chief sold marshland to Dutch settlers called “Boompies Hoock”; the settlers found the name difficult to pronounce, and it soon became “Bombay Hook.”

In 1937, about 16,000 acres of saltwater marshland, some ponds, and woods here became a National Wildlfe Refuge.  Much of the construction (freshwater pools for wildlife habitat, gravel and dirt roads, buildings for administration) was done by the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

The saltwater marshes stretch far eastward, under open sky, to the Delaware Bay.  Streams (called “guts) meander through the marsh.  On the other – western – side of the gravel roads (which are, in effect, causeways) are several very large freshwater “pools” whose  levels are actively managed according to season and rainfall to encourage and enhance food supplies for the wading birds, shorebirds, and ground- and tree-nesting birds who either stop here on their migrations or stay here year-round.

There are woods, and brackish ponds as well.  And of course there are many animals in addition to birds:  deer, fox, muskrat, beaver, raccoons, snakes.

I spent several hours on each of two days in Bombay Hook.  Trail walks are short (the longest is one mile), but you can walk or stand for hours on the gravel and dirt roads watching the birds – plentiful at this time, when migratory birds are moving north.  There are also several tall observation towers giving wonderful views over the marshes.  The Refuge is a birders’ paradise.

But it is also a joy to someone like me, who is not a birder but who revels in the freedom of open skies, water reflecting the clouds, and air thick with birdsong.  I love to watch and listen to birds, but don’t have the patience ever to be a “birder.”  Having said that, however, I will end by saying that the highlight of my two days in the Refuge was watching American Eagles glide over Shearness  Pool,  then suddenly dive for fish.  That was special.

Photos that give some idea of the variety of scenery – call it habitat – at Bombay Hook follow.  My camera battery gave out early on the second day, so a few of the photos, taken with my IPhone, are of lesser quality.  (One of these is a funny one of egrets napping in a small tree-like shrub.)

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The First State

Posted on May 13, 2013 by

Taking it on the road again – my third road trip since I retired four years ago – I’m driving up the east coast from Richmond to southern Maine.  There are specific people I want to see, and specific things I want to see and do, but I hope to maintain a mostly improvisational spirit.

My first stop was Smyrna, Delaware.  It’s a town of less than 15,000 people, not far from Dover.  Though Smyrna lies in the schmeer of East Coast sprawl, there are large farms on its outskirts and the approach across back roads of the Delmarva peninsula was rural.  Mostly.  The closer I got to Smyrna and Route 1, the more developments of nearly identical houses and townhomes I saw.

The attraction for me was the wonderful Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, which is about six miles east of Smyrna – 15,000 acres of woods, salt marshes and fresh water ponds on the western shore of the Delaware Bay.  My next post will be about Bombay Hook.

But Smyrna itself – the original town, off the highways and away from the strip malls – is a quirky, wistful, somewhat run-down small town.  Several buildings date from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, were owned by Revolutionary War notables, and are on the National Register of Historic Places.  But most of them look in need of major repair; and whether Smyrna is holding it together and looking forward, or looking backwards through fraying paint and overgrown yards, is hard to say based on just one visit.  I saw few people in the peaceful “downtown” on a beautiful  Saturday afternoon.   Even the East Coast megalopolis is not as homogeneous as I tend to think.   We are not all keeping up with the latest consumerist trends.  Here are some photos of Smyrna:

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In contrast to the quiet town of Smyrna, the “action” is all on the highways (US 1; Delaware 13) and strip malls that bracket the town.  The only place to stay is a Best Western on route 13, overlooking a short strip mall.  On windy or rainy nights, looked at in the right way, even this is beautiful.

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Cedar Key People

Posted on April 6, 2013 by

There are short-term tourists who visit Cedar Key for a few days –

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– “snow birds” who come for stays of a few months –

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– and the real people of Cedar Key, who live there twelve months of the year, send their children to the small preK-12 public school, and work hard to support their families and their way of life.  Here are some Cedar Keyites:

Commercial fishermen, who go out every day on the Gulf and in the back bays and channels, no matter the weather, to tend their clam farm leases –

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“Kona Joe,” who, with his wife Edie, owns a coffee shop/breakfast and lunch place on the water with a good view to the east from the back porch.   They open at 6 am to serve the year-round residents who have to commute “off-island” to jobs in Chiefland or Gainesville.  Edie makes a super blue crab quiche, fresh every morning –

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Sandy, who with her husband, has a great produce and fresh seafood stand on the side of the parking lot at the Chevron station/convenience store.  They’re open Wednesdays through Mondays; on Tuesdays they get up at 2 am to drive to Plant City to buy wholesale most of the produce they’ll be selling that week.  I’ve never known anyone who works harder than Sandy does.  Much of the time she looks dog-tired, but she is always friendly and patient with her customers, no matter how many times she has answered the same questions about the different kinds of oranges, the strawberries, the onions, the jars of jam and honey; or whether the seafood is really fresh (it is, and it’s delivered to her daily by local commercial fishermen) –

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And Moe Beckham.  A 79-year-old waterman from one of the oldest families on Cedar Key, he still works the waters, still smokes his mullet – which he sells whole or mashed up with other secret ingredients in a great smoked mullet dip – and he still listens to and plays good old country music (Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams) while he’s waiting for his customers on the side of the road just up a bit from Sandy’s Produce –

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The relaxed and welcoming spirit of the local residents is epitomized by a conversation I had with Tina, the one hairdresser in town (who gave me a great haircut and pedicure about one month into my stay).  Tina said this:  ”We love you snow-birds.  Not so much because you help us keep our small town going financially, though you do, but more because you have the good sense to love Cedar Key the way it is.”

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