Tuesday, June 11, 2024

A Great Gatsby Boat Tour of Manhasset Bay

 


This lovely lady is Eleanor Cox Nihill and we were very fortunate to take her Great Gatsby Boat Tour of Manhasset Bay this past Saturday. As we've posted on Travalanche,  my mate and I have lived in Great Neck, Long Island for the past several years, which happens to be the town where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote most of The Great Gatsby, and where the first theatrical adaptation of the book premiered. The book is based on local settings. Many of the places he wrote about are long gone, and just about all of the fabulous mansions that remain are very inaccessible to the public. By contrast with my home turf of Newport, where just about all of the old mansions are museums near the main drag and available to tour for the price of a ticket, Great Neck's big houses are all in private hands and quite far from the center of town. The only way to see them (unless invited) is from the air or from the bay. So I was overjoyed to finally have this opportunity at the invitation of mutual friend Kevin Fitzpatrick, who also came along and assisted Ellie with the tour's narration. Here's me, my fabulous wife, and K-Fitz prior to launch:


And here's Kev workin' the crowd. 


I confess I was enjoying myself way too much to take a lot of careful notes about which house went with which celebrity. I've ID'd a couple that I remembered below. A full list of the celebrities who lived in Great Neck is in my 2018 post here. And here are some of the shacks we gawked at on Satiddy, photographed from a distance on a crappy phone camera. (Note: plenty of these houses are undoubtedly more recent than the Roaring 20s, as well)

The summer residence, at one point, of FDR when he was Governor of New York.


The one time home of millionaire Edwin S. Marks. The notable feature of this property is the display of one of the old Grand Central Station eagle statues (right)


A mansion that was used in the movie Carlito's Way. 


This was Sid Caesar's place (under renovation at the moment)

Unless I'm mistaken this place was once owned by Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who had many much more fabulous places on Long Island and at Newport. He's a distant relation of mine, descended from Rhode Island war hero Oliver Hazard Perry, who was from my hometown. 






The Yankee in me especially loves the tasteful simplicity of this one and the next one, which are likely from the earlier era when the area first began to attract folks from the city. Hey, I'm not greedy -- I wouldn't ask for much more than this! 



Towards the end, these nuts passed us. I don't think it would take much more than a rogue minnow to swamp this thing. It's never too early to day-drink on a raft that suggests an entirely different island 1,500 miles away! 


Hey, I see another boat just about to take off! It's a future Great Gatsby Boat Tour! There are still a couple of upcoming excursions that haven't sold out. Get yer tickets here. 


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Friday, May 03, 2024

For National Textiles Day: A Voyage Home


 

May 3 is National Textiles Day. 

To say that this topic is outside of my ordinary beat is to put it mildly. But I had a very insightful experience while vacationing with my son last year, kicking around old haunts. Admittedly, it was the farthest thing from an original revelation. It was more like being a fish in an aquarium and suddenly noticing the water for the first time. Or, rather, a fish who emerged from the aquarium and noticed the water he used to live in. 

Like many (I hope) I'd certainly been taught about the importance of the textile industry to New England, America and the World when I was in school. But let's be real: that was really so much educational spinach. If you're Bart Simpson, you want to visit the CHOCOLATE museum on a field trip, not look at loom contraptions. On the other hand, at the stage I'm at now, something else "looms" as well, and that's senior citizenship. This stage of life feels very much like having attained a higher peak so you can a better look down in the valley. And as my son and I visited all of these places connected with my childhood, the truth sank in that most of these towns wouldn't even have existed without the textiles that were manufactured there and kept people employed. Every town had a mill without which there mightn't have been a town. It was one of those moments where you realize that something you thought has nothing to do with you...has EVERYTHING to do with you. 

As it happens we did this little junket (fittingly) last Labor Day Weekend. When I realized that a sort of theme had emerged, I decided to sit on the photos 'til today. Happy National Textiles Day.

We were staying with friends in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, which happens to be the home of Slater Mill, which I first (and last) visited on a school field trip when I was about six years old. Its founder Samuel Slater (1768-1835) is often credited with jump-starting the Industrial Revolution in America by memorizing some plans for a mill he had seen in England, smuggling the information back to the United States. This is more like craftiness...or guile...or theft...than it is like, oh, invention, but Yankees take a weird pride in that kind of sharp practice. It's what P.T. Barnum was all about. Back then mills were built next to rivers and and powered by water wheels. At the instigation of merchant Moses Brown (a distant relative of mine) Slater built his mill on the Blackstone River in 1793. 

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Slater Mill was the site of America's first industrial labor strike -- precisely two centuries ago, in 1824. Most of the workers at that time were females, for they had been the ones who used domestic looms in the home. At any rate...as AI puts the fear of God into us all, I've thought a lot about the early days of the labor movement. Machines have been replacing humans in the workplace on a large scale for over two centuries now. Conceivably it's going to continue and become even worse. We've almost reached the point where there'll be no striking workers...because there will be no work. It's going to be 8 billion people twiddling their thumbs, I guess? Or going insane, maybe? Maybe not. 

Nearby Providence contains enough historic mills to fill a book, though on this particular trip, the only one we spent any time in particularly was just over the border in Cranston. We enjoyed a couple of manly mugs at the Buttonwoods Brewery, located in former headquarters of the United Lace and Braid Company Factory, est. 1912. Same year, one notes, as the "Bread and Roses" strike of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Such strikes are what drove a lot of immigrant workers (Italians, French Canadians) to my hometown. It's a little outside our timeline but does reinforce the industrial narrative!


Due west of Providence is my mom's hometown of Putnam, Connecticut. That's where you will find the Cargill Falls Mill, built 1806. 


Another digression, but a rewarding one. In a 2019 post, I recorded my visit to the grave of my 5th Great Grandfather Jonathan Bugbee in western New York, near Chautauqua. He was originally from the area around Putnam, of course. I am descended from his daughter, who remained in Connecticut. Anyway, on this recent visit, I was delighted to come across this on the main drag:

Howdy, cousin! 

In the 1940s, my mom moved from Putnam to South County, Rhode Island, where her favorite cousins lived, and settled in the twin villages of Peace Dale and Wakefield, which is where I grew up. 

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Yep! That's the son! 

The Peace Dale Mill was built by the town founders the Hazard Family circa 1802, and it kept growing and evolving. For most of the town's existence, everyone who lived there worked in the mill, and in the old noblesse oblige tradition The Hazards built amenities for them, mostly constructed out of granite from local quarries: 



Hazard School (the middle school when I attended, although it was originally the high school)...






...the Neighborhood Guild, which is the town's recreation center. And many others along similar lines. 



I was delighted to discover that Whaler's Beer, which I had enjoyed on recent trips to Newport, is brewed at the Peace Dale Mill complex. 


The Wakefield Mill, a ten minute walk from my childhood home, is much newer than the one in Peace Dale, dating to 1845. Today, Wakefield is the much more vibrant of the two villages, but it is quite a bit younger than Peace Dale. As the sign above the door tells, the mill in Wakefield now houses Hera, a feminist art gallery that's existed in my town for about a half century. Wakefield has a theatre, too! Your correspondent was a very lucky scout to be born where he was. 


Which prompts another brief detour. While it is my mother to whom I owe the lineage that puts me near these towns and their mills, my father's story is just as relevant. He grew up on a cotton farm in Tennessee near the Alabama border. When his dad enlisted in the Navy during World War Two he was stationed in Quonset, Rhode Island, and just decided to settle there with his wife and five children. They lived in the mill village of Shannock, which is on the Pawcatuck River (sic--confusingly, the region has both a Pawcatuck and a Pawtucket). There had been mills in Shannock since the early 19th century but the factory complex where my dad's whole family worked had been built in 1901, and was still owned by the same family, the Clarks. Ironically, my dad's family had left the South, as so many did, for what politicians call "good paying factory jobs" up North...but meanwhile back home, after the war, dad's part of the South became a textile manufacturing center, making use of local cotton. In other words, my family could have just stayed home and gotten very similar work without the displacement. But of course, in that case I never would have been born.


We return you now to the Wakefield walking tour with my son. In this photo he stands in front of what used to be the town's only department store, until national chains like Woolworth's at the local mall drove them out in the 1970s. The Kenyons are one of the area's principal families. Why, there's even a historic Kenyon Mill (though it's a grist mill). I have many Kenyon relatives. Hi, Kenyons! Anway, nowadays this old store houses....wait for it...The Rhode Island Weaving Center. 


We popped in to have a looksee when I was there in the hopes we might run into my new daughter-in-law's grandmother, who runs the joint. Like my wife and my niece, she is a Carolyn, and I always feel you can't have too many Carolyns. Anyway...you see how the textile theme kind of knit (ha! I said "knit!") the whole trip together. It was nothing I intended. It was just...there. 

In Utopia, of course, activities like weaving or a million other options are what the human race will be doing in the post-AI world: peaceful past-times that provide satisfaction and pleasure. Life was kind of like that prior to the Industrial Revolution. Yes, it could be harrowing and even deadly before the coming of the machines. But, so are, oh assembly lines and 16 hour work days and low pay and soul-deadening repetition. Who wouldn't rather be a craftsperson than a cog in a machine? I'm pretty sure that's what people hoped the 21st century would look like. Something to aspire to, anyway. 

I dedicate this post to my family, of course -- including my new in-laws. Okay, that about sews up this post. 

POSTSCRIPT: After posting this, I learned my old schoolfriend and room-mate Rebecca Williams made a documentary about the textile mill in her community, Swannanoah, North Carolina. It's called Blanket Town: The Rise and Fall of an American Mill Town. Learn about it here. 




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Friday, December 08, 2023

The Rocky Coast of Southern Maine

 

I visited son and his wife in Portland, Maine this past weekend and they took me to the beautiful area South of the city, including Higgins Beach, Cape Elizabeth, Two Lights and the Portland Head Light lighthouse, which I can now add to my survey of favorite lighthouses. Many believe that Longfellow, who grew up in Portland and spent a lot of time at these sites, was thinking of it when he wrote his 1849 poem "The Lighthouse". I've included the text of the poem beneath the photos. 
















THE LIGHTHOUSE by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The rocky ledge runs far into the sea,
  And on its outer point, some miles away,
The Lighthouse lifts its massive masonry,
  A pillar of fire by night, of cloud by day. 

Even at this distance I can see the tides,
  Upheaving, break unheard along its base,
A speechless wrath, that rises and subsides
  In the white lip and tremor of the face. 

And as the evening darkens, lo! how bright,
  Through the deep purple of the twilight air,
Beams forth the sudden radiance of its light
  With strange, unearthly splendor in the glare! 

Not one alone; from each projecting cape
  And perilous reef along the ocean's verge,
Starts into life a dim, gigantic shape,
  Holding its lantern o'er the restless surge. 

Like the great giant Christopher it stands
  Upon the brink of the tempestuous wave,
Wading far out among the rocks and sands,
  The night-o'ertaken mariner to save. 

And the great ships sail outward and return,
  Bending and bowing o'er the billowy swells,
And ever joyful, as they see it burn,
  They wave their silent welcomes and farewells. 

They come forth from the darkness, and their sails
  Gleam for a moment only in the blaze,
And eager faces, as the light unveils,
  Gaze at the tower, and vanish while they gaze. 

The mariner remembers when a child,
  On his first voyage, he saw it fade and sink;
And when, returning from adventures wild,
  He saw it rise again o'er ocean's brink. 

Steadfast, serene, immovable, the same
  Year after year, through all the silent night
Burns on forevermore that quenchless flame,
  Shines on that inextinguishable light! 

It sees the ocean to its bosom clasp
  The rocks and sea-sand with the kiss of peace;
It sees the wild winds lift it in their grasp,
  And hold it up, and shake it like a fleece. 

The startled waves leap over it; the storm
  Smites it with all the scourges of the rain,
And steadily against its solid form
  Press the great shoulders of the hurricane. 

The sea-bird wheeling round it, with the din
  Of wings and winds and solitary cries,
Blinded and maddened by the light within,
  Dashes himself against the glare, and dies. 

A new Prometheus, chained upon the rock,
  Still grasping in his hand the fire of Jove,
It does not hear the cry, nor heed the shock,
  But hails the mariner with words of love. 

"Sail on!" it says, "sail on, ye stately ships!
  And with your floating bridge the ocean span;
Be mine to guard this light from all eclipse,
  Be yours to bring man nearer unto man!"