So I went to New York last weekend.
This is not a particularly unusual occurrence. I live only three hours away from the Queen of Cities by car, bus, or train, after all, and it’s easy enough to hop on the Northeast Regional service in Springfield and emerge three hours later at Penn Station. Even better, my friend Bella lives only a few blocks away, in Murray Hill, and her red velveteen couch is far more comfortable (and cheaper) than any hotel bed. All I need to do is make sure that Bella and her partner Ned are amenable, make my Amtrak reservation, and check to see what’s at the Met, and I can visit whenever I wish.
This last weekend was special. It was my birthday on Monday, and since I had plenty of vacation time saved up I made arrangements to take a couple of days off from work to celebrate in style. Bella’s sister Beata, my eternal BFF and fellow witness to the Silence of the Peeps LINK, came along to combine a visit to Manhattan with a pilgrimage out to Long Island to see their parents, so we were all set.
This visit was relaxed, mellow, and lovely in all ways. I didn’t have an epiphany about America the way I did last summer, but there was plenty to do, and see, and enjoy.
Highlights of the trip included:
- Ned, whom I’d never met before, not only turned out to be a charming, kind, generous widower who’s a perfect match for Bella, but a fellow member of the Pittsburgh Diaspora that populates so much of the Northeast. We had a great time laughing over jokes that only we got, mourning the retirement of Mario Lemieux, and swapping stories about the Steel City in its glory days.
- A Sunday visit to the Museum of Modern Art, where I took pictures of the art and Bella took pictures of me and other visitors taking pictures of the art. Some of what was saw was famous (Starry Night, which is dazzling but alas has no TARDIS, and The Persistence of Memory, which is much smaller than I’d thought), some less so (they have a lot of obscure Cubists and Surrealists), and some was plain ridiculous (don’t ask me about the stiffened underpants). We also took time to visit a wall of Campbell’s Soup cans painted by yet another Pittsburgher, Andy Warhol, the pride of Floreffe, Pennsylvania, and uncle of my high school classmate Madeline.
Yes. Really.
- A Monday trip to the Met to see the Charles James exhibit. James, a mid-century couturier who dressed some of the most elegant women of his day, took himself as seriously as any sculptor, and his flawlessly tailored suits, coats, cocktail dresses, and ball gowns had me all but whimpering. The best were probably the legendary Clover Leaf gown and a meticulously pieced ensemble constructed of silk ribbons, but it was all stunning.
- Food, glorious food that ranged from genuine New York bagels to an Indian wedding hall in Queens to a storefront Chinese place near the Chrysler Building. Best of all, Beata brought down a birthday cake for Ned and me (our birthdays were the same weekend), which we enjoyed with fruit and dark chocolate syrup, and be damned to the calories.
- Great weather, excellent subway connections, and an astonishing amount of beautiful wool and bamboo yarn courtesy of Ned, who wanted his late wife’s stash to go to someone who would appreciate it rather than the nearest Goodwill.
If only the above had happened, or only part of the above, it would have been enough, and more than enough, to make this a Trip So Good It’s Great. My needs when traveling are few, my wants are few, and good company, good food, and good museums are all I need.
Fortunately for you, my faithful readers, I also found a Bookstore So Good It’s A Classic.
I’d walked past this particular bookstore several times on my way to and from Bella’s place. I never actually set foot inside until this Tuesday, though, thanks largely to poor scheduling.
Oh. My.
The Complete Traveller is its name, and it’s been a Midtown institution for decades. Most of the stock is devoted to rare and unusual books about travel, famous places, old maps, travel guides, and recent history, and my hand to God I could have easily dropped several months’ work of mortgage and utility payments in about five minutes. There’s a section devoted entirely to New York, several shelves covering foreign countries, and what is allegedly the country’s largest selection of old Baedekers, those indispensable guidebooks that were the mainstay of adventurous travelers from Victorian times through World War II.
Biographies…memoirs…essays…travel fiction…rare letters from the likes of Shaw and Twain…rare maps of America and Europe and Asia…it’s all there, and more, and if the prices are sometimes high enough to make the browser gasp, the stock is of such high quality that it’s worth every carefully saved penny.
And did I mention that there’s an entire wall of state, city, and regional WPA Guides?
That’s right. There’s a whole WALL of those marvelous thick guidebooks that put thousands of writers, artists, and photographers to work doing what they did best during the Great Depression. These are primary source material for writers, historians, and researchers wishing to know more about 1930’s America, from geography to demographics to state history. There are even suggested itineraries for those with the money and leisure to See America First, complete with short write-ups of local attractions and historical events.
If I were rich, or had pawned several items of jewelry for the cash, I would have come away with a dozen, or two dozen, or more, of these treasures. As I am not rich, I contented myself with only one, at least until I can cobble together the money for another (and another, and another, and…). I also bought another book at the Complete Traveller, and after five days in their company, I can definitely say that these two are Books So Good They’re Classics:
New York: A Guide to the Empire State - this was the only WPA Guide I came away with, but I assure you that it will not be the last. This copy belonged to a school in Valley Stream, New York, which accounts for the slightly loose binding, but it’s in surprisingly good condition overall, with no graffiti, water stains, or torn pages. There are several photo inserts (all in black and white, which is regrettable but not a surprise), sections on the history, demographics, religion, geography, industry, and major cities of the Empire State, and several dozen itineraries that cover not only famous sights and persons, but areas that would otherwise never rate a second glance.
Best of all, the text actually mentions sites and events that most pre-1960’s people had either forgotten or never thought worthy of attention. One suggested itinerary, for instance, includes Seneca Falls, home of the first women’s rights convention – scarcely a must-see today, let alone seventy years ago.
This is a book to read, and sample, and savor, for years to come, and a tangible rebuke to anyone who thinks that public works programs should be confined to infrastructure and tree planting. There is no better way to get to know America of eighty years ago than to pick up one (or two, or ten) of these guides and start reading…and oh, if any of you reading this is an actual, genuine politician? Can you tell my birthday buddy Barack that it’s high time these were updated? Or at least acknowledged once in a while?
Ernie’s America: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s 1930’s Travel Dispatches, ed. by David Nichols – Ernie Pyle was an unlikely hero. Nervous, introverted, an alcoholic with a fragile, equally hard-drinking wife, he became a legend for his work as a war correspondent in the 1940’s. His columns from the European Theater, especially his coverage of D-Day and a quiet elegy to a much-loved officer, won him a Pulitzer Prize, while his death on Iejima earned him burial in Arlington National Cemetery alongside the infantrymen he loved.
Few today realize that Pyle honed his pre-war writing skills with nearly a decade’s worth of columns written while he and his wife, Jerry, crisscrossed America to see what they could see. These daily columns, originally intended for the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers, became so popular that Pyle found himself mobbed whenever he tried to eat out, and many a rural American subscribed to a local paper solely to see what (and who) Ernie had written about that day.
This collection, which contains only a fraction of Pyle’s work, is ample testimony to the variety of his subjects and the quality of his writing. From vivid word portraits of his parents, to profiles of retired pilots and retired dance hall girls, to accounts of the changes wrought on once-sleepy Washington by the flood of New Dealers who reshaped our government, Pyle covers the country he loved with some of the finest, most lucid prose any journalist has ever produced. If the WPA Guides tell us what America looked like eighty years ago, Ernie Pyle’s columns tell us what her citizens thought and said. Anyone with a taste for history, or just plain excellent, perceptive writing, should definitely check out either or both.
Let me close tonight with Pyle’s account of the night shift at a steel mill in Pittsburgh. My uncle Lou worked there for most of his adult life, and I wish he were still around so I ask him if he was there the night the quiet little reporter watched them pour the molten steel:
“Now You Know What Hell Is Like”
PITTSBURGH - I’d always wanted to go through a steel mill, and now my wish has certainly been gratified. I spent nearly a whole night in the steel mills here.
We walked for miles, we climbed our heads off, we got dirty, we got tired, and we saw strange scenes that took on an exaggerated weirdness at three o’clock in the morning.
In fact, we saw too much. The whole thing became eerie, and new sights crushed out old sights, and things merged into a sleepy-eyed dream, so that I can’t remember half that I saw or heard.
But there is one outstandingly bright memory of that night. It was when the superintendent of the Jones & Laughlin plant said, “Now I’ll show you something no visitor to a steel mill ever sees.” We got into a huge freight elevator. We went up and up and up. A door rose, and we stepped onto a wooden platform. Several men were up there, wearing pith helmets and thick gloves, and doing nothing at the moment. They spoke to us. The superintendent handed me a pair of dark-blue glasses. “Now come over to the railing and look down,” he said.
I held on and peeked over. And I was looking right down into the seething insides of a Bessemer furnace. “Now you know what hell is like,” the superintendent said.
You would not dare look into that terrific fire without those glasses. But they were so dark they made the eye-shattering glow look mildly purple. You could see every detail.
The molten metal didn’t just boil. It leaped, viciously, against the sides of the furnace, like surf beating on a cliff. The temperature in there was around twenty-nine hundred degrees. I could look no more than two seconds at a time. Although we stood fifteen or twenty feet from the furnace mouth, the scorching heat was unbearable. My face felt blistered. The awfulness of the power in that golden maelstrom made me tense, and I held onto the railing as though I might fall, although there was no danger….
April 17, 1937
%%%%%
Have you ever been to the Complete Traveller? Marveled at a Dali, or a Van Gogh, or a Braque? Laughed at pretentious conceptual art? Read Ernie Pyle? Held a WPA Guide in your hands? Come to the table, fellow travelers, and speak….
%%%%%
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule: