PART TWO
Hall of Fame for Great Americans - Bronx Community College
Astor Place is in the area known as the East Village. You might guess its location (just east of Greenwich Village) from the name. Most of thi area is rather dumpy looking mid-rise (6 – 8 floor) apartment buildings with businesses at street level, and apparently it has some of the lowest rents in Manhattan (which can still be at or above $1000 a month). Because it’s comparatively cheap, it’s had a decades old reputation for attracting young people on the cutting edge of society. While the people were decidedly younger than those I saw elsewhere in the city, on a hot summer day I can’t really say there was anything that stood out about their dress or demeanor. These days it wasn’t even particularly noteworthy that most of them had numerous tattoos and piercings. I’d expect the same thing in any college town, and if anything the people in the East Village looked a bit on the tame side.
I walked down St. Mark’s Place (a.k.a. 8th Street) to my next destination, which was a place I’d heard about on TV and read about in magazines. Called BAMN! (with the exclamation point part of the name), it’s a modern attempt to resurrect the old automat restaurants. The last of the old Horn and Hardart automats closed shortly before that trip my father and I made to New York, and the concept is pretty much obsolete in the fast food age. When I heard about BAMN!, I thought it might be fun to go there. It was easy enough to find (particularly since the entire place is painted bright pink), so I grabbed a quick bite.
If you’ve seen a sandwich vending machine,
that’s like a miniature version of the automat concept. Basically an automat is
an enormous vending machine the size of a store. The whole place is filled with
little glass windows behind which various foods are kept either hot or cold. You
insert coins (things cost a nickel when the original automats were founded;
today pretty much everything at BAMN! is $2) in a slot beside the
BAMN! – the modern automat window where the food you want is housed, lift a
latch, and take out your food. In the old days things were served on china, and
you sat down at tables in the automat to enjoy what you’d bought. Today BAMN!’s
selections come on cardboard trays, and you can either stand at a bar-style
tables or carry your purchase with you.
BAMN! features an eclectic combination of dishes. Several of them (like Spam sushi—seriously) reflect the Hawaiian roots of the place’s owner. I bought two items. The first was a deep-fried macaroni and cheese croquette, an item that is supposedly a delicacy in the Netherlands. The other was a grilled cheese sandwich. I’d recommend neither of those, nor much of anything else at BAMN!. While the concept was interesting, the food just wasn’t very good. The croquette tasted like burnt grease and otherwise was a petrified lump of the same stovetop macaroni and cheese you could get out of any box. Grilled cheese is a hard item to screw up. At BAMN!, though, they placed a steamed tomato slice inside it that gave an off taste and made the bread soggy. It was kind of fun to put quarters in a machine for my lunch, but I can’t say I’ll be rushing back or hoping BAMN! spreads around the country.
Actually, looking around the neighborhood it surprised me a bit that BAMN! has managed to stay in business at all. The East Village is full of interesting ethnic restaurants, offering food from around the world at dirt cheap prices. For not much more than the $4 I spent for my greasy snack I could have gotten a good sit-down lunch at any number of more pleasant places. I gather that BAMN! does a lot of their business in the wee hours, after the bars close down. In that context their offerings might be a bit more palatable.
* * * * *
It was extremely hot this afternoon, so I went down to the subway to get a bit of relief. I took an air-conditioned train south to Whitehall Street—South Ferry, which was just a couple blocks from my next destination, the NYPD Museum. A clerk who was stationed vaguely near the entrance said I was free to put whatever I wanted into the donation box by the turnstile. They suggested $5, but I didn’t have a $5 bill on me. I was cheap and paid exactly $1, and frankly I’m glad I did. The police museum was certainly among my least favorite of the places I visited on this trip. In the past I visited a very nice police museum in Toronto and a decent one in Chicago. New York’s, though, was a minimal collection and not very well organized. I could easily have gone through the place in fifteen minutes; the only reason I stayed half an hour was that it was air conditioned.
I made my way back to the subway, where again I was faced with construction. This time the podcasts’ remarks that “sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards” came into play. They had no uptown trains from this station, so I had to detour into Brooklyn and then catch another train back to Manhattan. I ended up at Park Place station in Manhattan’s financial district. I didn’t even know there was a Park Place in New York (it’s a Monopoly property, so it must be in Atlantic City—right?) I wanted to get to the PATH station at the former World Trade Center site, but I couldn’t see it anywhere nearby. I eventually asked a passing letter carrier where it was, and she gestured straight ahead. Had I thought about it, it made perfect sense that the construction project about two blocks ahead was the World Trade Center. What surprised me was that it was no longer just an empty hole in the ground; they’ve done a lot of construction on the building that will replace the former WTC. That construction means that while the PATH station that used to be several floors underground is still technically open air, it’s no longer by itself in the middle of a big hole. By the end of the year it will almost certainly be an enclosed sub-basement.
PATH, the Port Authority Trans-Hudson tunnels, is a subway system owned and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It provides comprehensive service in Jersey City and also connects Hoboken and Newark with New York City. While MTA subway rides cost $2, PATH only costs $1.50. However PATH trains are older and dirtier, and they run much less frequently than the MTA subway. I waited almost fifteen minutes on the steamy WTC platform before a train finally showed up.
I rode west to Exchange Place, just across the Hudson River on the gentrified riverfront in Jersey City. The station was crawling with security people, which seemed more than a bit excessive on a weekend in this wealthy neighborhood. I went up to the riverfront boardwalk and had a quick gander at the New York skyline (definitely not my favorite urban view—Chicago is a much prettier city). Then I set off west along Columbus Street. Since I hadn’t really had much of a lunch at BAMN!, I made my way to the eastern outpost of a California institution I love—Fatburger. I’ve been to the Hollywood Fatburger twice, and I thoroughly enjoyed eating there. The Jersey City location was far cleaner and provided a much less colorful atmosphere than its West Coast ancestor, but the food was equally good. I had the “Baby Fat” (a smaller version of their signature burger), a chocolate malt, and homemade lemonade. As in California, it was overpriced but excellent, much better than the macaroni croquette and grilled cheese.
After this late lunch I made my way back to Exchange Place. I caught a train to Grove Street and then transferred to another PATH train, which I rode to Hoboken. Hoboken is a small city (almost exactly one square mile) located directly across the river from midtown Manhattan. Founded in the late 1800s, it became seedy when its industry declined in the late 20th Century, but today is enjoying a renaissance as it gentrifies into one into what it bills as “New York’s sixth borough”.
Hoboken’s favorite son is Frank Sinatra, and its riverfront drive is named Frank Sinatra Place. I walked up that street past a gorgeous park tree-filled park along the Hudson. At the north end of the park Sinatra Place turns away from the river. Just north of there the street was blocked off. I kept on walking and encountered the Fiesta Borrinqueña de Hoboken (the Hoboken Puerto Rican Festival) . I didn’t really stop at all, but I had a wonderful time just walking all over the fair. They had all kinds of strange-smelling food for sale, as well as games of chance, carnival rides, and a flea market. Puerto Ricans can be of any race, and the people here appeared to be a mix of black and traditional Hispanic in appearance. While the title of the event was in Spanish, the people mostly hawked their wares in English.
North of the fiesta I came across the remnants of Hoboken’s industrial past. The Lofts at Maxwell Place is a condo development being built in the former headquarters of Maxwell House coffee. There was apparently a big controversy when the condo developer removed an old neon sign with the old “good to the last drop” logo that had been a local landmark for generations. The lofts look pretentious rather than industrial, and I’m sure I couldn’t afford to live there.
The real reason I’d come to Hoboken was just down the street from Maxwell Place. Elysian Park was a bit of a pilgrimage site for the baseball lover in me. While Cooperstown mistakenly gets the credit (more on that later), in fact the first recorded baseball game in history was played at Elysian Park in Hoboken. Back in the 1800s this was a rather grungy riverfront park next to a factory. Today it’s a rather pleasant urban green space where wealthy locals go jogging or bring their spoiled children for play dates.
I walked down a variety of side streets as I made my way back south in Hoboken. As I walked around the city I couldn’t help but be struck by the strange politics of the place. Hoboken is certainly liberal, but it’s very much a liberality based on money. I was handed a flyer urging me to support impeaching Bush and Cheney, but one of the main reasons they gave for impeaching our current executive team was that the stock market is poised to go down on their watch. Similarly signs urged support for gay civil unions (such unions are already legal in New Jersey, but apparently the matter is coming up for review), stressing that gay couples were among Hoboken’s wealthiest and most upstanding citizens. I needed to use the restroom, so I stopped in at a Panera restaurant in downtown Hoboken and ordered some coffee and a scone for the privilege of using their facilities. It’s kind of strange to see Panera in this setting. Every other Panera I’ve been to has been a suburban coffee house attempting to look like it was in an urban setting. Hoboken really is urban, and the faux urban décor was a bit out of place next to the real thing.
I could tell from the restroom this was “real” urban, though. You don’t normally see gang graffiti at Panera, but they had that in the men’s room in Hoboken. The restroom was also filthy, which is typical of public toilets in cities. It served my purposes, though, and I did my business and was on my way.
I made my way back to the Hoboken Terminal PATH station and fairly quickly caught a train headed for New York. The train was very crowded, and I stood for the entire ride. Around 5pm I arrived at 33rd Street and Avenue of the Americas (a.k.a. 6th Avenue), two blocks from Penn Station.
NJ Transit trains leave for Morristown hourly at 11 minutes past the hour. That meant I either had to rush to catch a train that was almost ready to leave or I had to wait around for another hour for the next one. 33rd Street separates Macy’s flagship store from the Manhattan Mall, and its sidewalks are overflowing with people. I literally walked in the street to make my way past them and get to Penn Station in time to catch my train. I made it and found a seat about one minute before departure time.
There was a bit of a delay before we left. We heard the announcement, “Attention, trainman. We can’t see the rear door lights from the engine.” While I don’t know exactly what that meant, I could make a pretty good guess. Like most commuter trains, NJ Transit operates in push/pull mode. Trains headed into New York have the engine at the front of the train pulling the passenger cars behind them—pretty much like you’d expect a train to run. Trains headed back to New Jersey, though, have the engine at the back of the train. A driver in a small compartment in the front passenger car operates the train, much like the driver on a subway. The power still comes from the engine, though, which pushes the rest of the cars. Chances are the lights in question provide a signal from the driver to the engine, and I’d certainly hope they’d be working. We were delayed about five minutes while they got things going but then made our way back to New Jersey.
Across the aisle from me on this trip were two fascinating young couples. There were four people there, but only two of them ever talked. One couple completely dominated the conversation, and the man from that couple far overpowered the woman. The woman in the other couple would occasionally grunt appropriate responses, but the man may have as well been a mute. The topics they went through were also interesting. They spent about half the trip discussing a trip the loud couple had made to some Caribbean island. It appeared to be one of those trips from hell that only gets worse in re-telling. After that they discussed various amusement park rides. These were people in their 20s or 30s, yet amusement park rides were something they found important to talk about.
The foursome planned to have a friend pick them all up at their destination, something I gather is very common for people who take these trains. The loud man predicted that the friend would not want to pick them up at the station they had bought a ticket to, but instead would want them to go to a more distant station that was easier for him to get to. When the quiet man called the friend on his cell phone, that was exactly the case. Fortunately, it really doesn’t matter where you get off on a westbound NJ Transit train. Eastbound they use seat tags like Amtrak uses to keep track of passengers’ destinations. Westbound, though, they just take your ticket and assume you’ll get off at the right stop. If you wanted to save money, you could probably buy a ticket to Newark and then actually ride all the way to the end of the line.
I got back to Morristown around 6:15 and found the car precisely where I’d left it. The prisoners were gone now, which made leaving the parking lot a bit easier. I went back to I-287, drove north a couple miles to I-80, and then headed west for a few miles from there. My ultimate destination was Denville, a rather generic suburb overshadowed by its much better known neighbor Parsippany. I was headed to an office park just off I-80 for one of those hotels that on weekends was cheap but that would have been ridiculously expensive on business days, the Hampton Inn—Parsippany (which is actually in Denville).
I’ve only stayed at Hampton Inns a few times, but when I have they’ve always been extremely nice hotels. The chain is owned by Hilton. The one time I stayed at an actual Hilton, though, it was a very generic hotel (much like a Holiday Inn). Hampton really strikes me as a notch above that. This Hampton Inn was no exception; it was probably the nicest hotel I stayed at on the trip. Check-in took virtually no time, and I soon made my way up to an enormous room that featured a king bed, a full-sized couch, and a huge desk. The room also had a refrigerator and a microwave, though I had no need for either of them. The only real problem was that they had the air conditioning off when I arrived, and given the extreme heat of the day it took forever for the room to cool down.
I called Paul and Margaret on my cell phone to let them know how things had gone so far and set out to explore the neighborhood. Honestly there wasn’t much to explore, though. I’d hoped to find some sort of fast food, but there were exactly two businesses within walking distance: Exxon and Shell. I ended up buying some juice and a bag of chips at the Shell station, which was my dinner for the night.
One of the main reasons it was hard to find a real place to eat was that it was difficult to get outside the immediate neighborhood. My least favorite thing about Denville was that the place had no sidewalks at all. Sometimes there would be a path worn into the grass, but most often I’d have to walk in the busy streets themselves to get anywhere. That surprised me, because in most cases the East is fairly friendly to pedestrians. For some reason, though, suburbs everywhere seem to have an aversion to sidewalks. I don’t know what their problem is, but it makes it difficult to walk.
When I got back to the hotel the lobby was filled with people who were there for a family reunion. The concept of having a reunion at a hotel seemed a bit odd to me, though it would probably work pretty well. Apparently no one in this family actually lived in Denville, but they were all from places not all that far away. The Hampton Inn was a convenient compromise for everyone in attendance.
Back in the hotel room I ironed a few of my clothes that had gotten badly wrinkled in transit. I read the papers I’d accumulated during the day, and then re-packed all my things. Then I watched “America’s Most Wanted” on TV and was pleased that I didn’t recognize the New Jersey suspect they were after. When that show ended, the local news came on. The big story was that most of northern New Jersey (but not Denville) had a boil water order in effect, because a recent storm had knocked out the water treatment plant that supplies the area. The other big story was that the Yankees’ Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez had hit his 500th home run this afternoon. At one point I had thought about going to the Yankees game today, and it was a bit disappointing to think that I’d missed what turned out to be a somewhat historic game. On the other hand I probably saw things better on TV than I would have at Yankee Stadium, and by not going there I was able to see a lot of fascinating stuff I wouldn’t have been able to get to otherwise.
I checked my pedometer at the end of the day today, and I was shocked with what I saw. The read-out said I’d walked 20.4 miles today. I recall reading about the Kennedys going on twenty-mile hikes, but I never really imagined myself doing such a thing. I’m not entirely sure I did, but even if the thing wasn’t working right (though I checked, and it was still on the same settings I’d calibrated it for back home), I obviously walked a lot. The news featured a half marathon that had been run around New York today. While I certainly wouldn’t have had a competitive time, it was fun to think that I probably had covered at least that much distance.
I took a leisurely bath and then went to sleep fairly quickly.
I slept comparatively late this morning, not getting up until after 7am. I took a quick shower, packed up the car, and then made my way down to the breakfast area in the Hampton Inn’s enormous lobby. Hampton Inns always serve a hot breakfast, and when I’ve stayed there before it’s been pretty good. Today’s was only adequate, though. They had a container filled with rubbery fried eggs and another filled with fried sausage. I think the idea was that we were supposed to make breakfast sandwiches using those items. I’ve never been a big sausage fan, though, so I passed on that and had a bit of yogurt and fruit.
The crowd at breakfast was certainly diverse. In addition to some of the family reunion crowd, there were tourists here from all over the world. At the next table was a Hindu family whose women were decked out in elegant silk and metallic dresses. Another family spoke to each other in French. (They didn’t like the eggs either, by the way.) Denville itself came across as a lily white suburb, and it was intriguing to see such a variety of people staying at the hotel.
After breakfast I drove back down to Morristown. The prisoners were back again, and I made my way past them and up to the station. The platform this morning was full of weird and often less than desirable people. Yesterday there had been a large number of Hispanics boarding at Morristown, most of whom were headed to jobs in other suburbs. They were not there on Sunday. Instead there were young black men attempting to sell things and elderly white men who appeared to have some mental problems. While they were annoying, none of these people was dangerous, and I just made my way past them to an empty part of the platform.
Someone had littered the entire Sunday Star—Ledger (the Newark paper, whose masthead says “NJ.com” in big type and “Star—Ledger” in the same size type as the date. I spent most of the trip into New York reading through it. This trip was nicer than yesterday’s because I has no seat companion. Though the train was mostly full after the Oranges, the seat beside me remained empty all the way to New York. Most of the old men who had been waiting on the platform were apparently going to the horse races. There are apparently several ways to get to the track, none of which are all that direct. Different little old men got off at different places, though they all had the same ultimate destination.
After arriving at Penn Station I again made my way to the 7th Avenue subway. This time I bought a day pass, and I caught a 1-train (again on the “wrong” track) uptown to 110th Street. As we made our way north, I became aware that in New York the streets are almost never referred to by ordinal numbers. My stop was actually announced as “a hundred ten”,. Earlier stops had been announced as “fifty-one” and “ninety-six”, and the next stop north would be “one sixteen”. Only the major midtown streets (23rd, 34th and 42nd) ever seem to have the ordinal suffixes attached to them in colloquial usage.
110th Street is officially called Cathedral Parkway, though no one actually seems to use that name. Cathedral Parkway gets its name from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an enormous Episcopal church that has been under construction for a century. Much of the edifice is still covered with scaffolding, and I can’t say it was a terribly beautiful place to walk past. Cathedral Parkway itself is very nice, though. While its location at the south end of Harlem might lead people to think it might be seedy, in fact the area is filled with quite handsome looking apartment buildings. There’s a good chance one of them is Bill Clinton’s current home.
The area north of St. John’s is also very nice. This is the home of Columbia University, New York’s Ivy League school. Before I got my master’s degree, there was a time when I’d seriously thought about taking summer classes at the Columbia Teachers College. I still think that might be a fun thing to do—though there’s no way I could begin to afford it these days. Columbia has a handsome looking (though very crowded) campus, and its collegetown area was surprisingly lively even on Sunday morning.
My destination was just west of Columbia, at 122nd Street and Riverside Drive. If 122nd Street sounds like it’s a long way from 110th, it isn’t. In New York the street blocks are very short. There are twenty streets to a mile, compared with eight in Chicago or twelve in most small Midwestern towns. The avenues are much further apart, but even so my walk from the subway station was less than a mile.
At 122nd and Riverside is Riverside Church, one of the most famous Protestant churches in the world. Riverside is unique in that it has affiliation with two very different denominations, the American Baptist Church (the most progressive of the Baptists, but still Baptist) and the United Church of Christ (my own denomination, which morphed from burning witches in colonial days to one of the most liberal churches there is in modern times). The church was founded by one of the great preachers of the 20th Century, the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, and its stated mission has always been to provide a sound Christian alternative to fundamentalism.
I’ve always had a bit of fondness for Riverside Church, though I can’t say I really knew much about the place until this year. The things I did know, though, I liked. My parents went to Riverside on their honeymoon, and they remembered it very fondly. On that trip in ’83 Daddy wanted to go back there, so we drove much farther north than most tourists ever go in Manhattan We made a quick look around the sanctuary then and also got to tour their bell tower, where a musician showed us how the carillon worked.
The other thing I knew about Riverside was that one of my favorite hymns was written by Dr. Fosdick for the church’s dedication. You may know the rousing hymn, which appears in virtually every hymnal published in the 20th Century:
God of grace and God of glory,
On Thy people pour Thy power.
Crown Thine ancient church’s story,
Bring her bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the facing of this hour,
For the facing of this hour.
Lo! the hosts of evil ’round us,
Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.
Fears and doubts too long have bound us,
Free our hearts to work and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
For the living of these days,
For the living of these days.
Cure Thy children’s warring madness,
Bend our pride to Thy control.
Shame our wanton selfish gladness,
Rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal,
Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.
Set our feet on lofty places,
Gird our lives that they may be,
Armored with all Christ-like graces,
In the fight to set men free.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
That we fail not man nor Thee,
That we fail not man nor Thee.
Save us from weak resignation,
To the evils we deplore.
Let the search for Thy salvation,
Be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
Serving Thee Whom we adore,
Serving Thee Whom we adore.
I like the theology of that hymn, which is essentially my theology. I also love the phrase “grant us wisdom, grant us courage”—things fundamentalist Christians (indeed fundamentalists of all religions) never seem to pray for.
The Riverside Church building is quite impressive. It’s apparently modeled after Chartres Cathedral in France, and it fits in well with its faux Gothic neighbors at Columbia. Riverside also had scaffolding, apparently there as part of a roof repair. The morning service begins at 10:45, and it was not much after 10:15 when I arrived. It was hot out, though, and I made my way inside hoping the place would be air conditioned.
It was, and I was not the first to arrive for services. A black woman at a guard’s desk by the door directed me upstairs to the sanctuary entrance. The sanctuary itself was enormous. I could easily believe the place was modeled on Chartres; it looks like a big Catholic church. The pews are arranged in three sections with two aisles, and the main floor could comfortably accommodate 1500 or so. There are also two balconies, and I have no idea how many those would seat. Apparently for special services (Easter and Christmas Eve) they also seat people in the church hall in the basement. The windows are lovely, but the stone work of the walls struck me as surprisingly dumpy.
The altar area at Riverside is lit with two banks of theatrical lighting, which reminded me of a comment my brother John once made that church should be good theatre. In a rather dim Gothic church, the bright fresnels actually made it possible to see what was going on up front. More churches should consider using that type of lighting.
I took a bulletin from a rack near the entrance, not realizing it was actually last week’s bulletin instead of today’s. Since I had a bulletin in hand, the usher just ignored me and let me seat myself. I sat about halfway forward on the aisle of the middle section. Eventually I was able to stop another usher and grab the correct bulletin from her.
When I arrived choir practice was going on, which made a pleasant diversion while I waited. I also thumbed through their hymnal, a Presbyterian publication (interesting in a Baptist/UCC congregation) that had altered traditional hymns in even more obnoxious ways than the UCC’s New Century Hymnal.
Following choir practice, they had a concert on the carillon, which we could clearly hear in the sanctuary. They also tested microphones during this time, and apparently they were having some problems getting the settings right.
I thought for a long time the crowd would be very thin, but just before 10:45 the place started to fill up. There were probably around a thousand people there in the end. I remember the old minister at my church joking when only a handful were there ten minutes before worship that “the bus hasn’t shown up yet”. Five minutes later fifty people would arrive, and he’d joke “well, the bus just came in”. In New York it’s probably a subway train rather than a bus, but it seemed as if that’s what happened at Riverside.
This was a formal, but not really a stuffy church. Before the trip I had debated quite a bit about what would be appropriate to wear to a service here. I ended up with a sport shirt and tie, which was exactly right. The tie was not essential (though it wasn’t out of place either), but a nice shirt was. Men here also wear pants, rather than the jeans or shorts that are becoming more common in many churches around the country. The women were similarly dressed, nice but not really formal. Before the service people were friendly with those they knew and pleasant with those they didn’t know. There was no “happy minute” nor a place visitors were made to put themselves on display. Instead at an appropriate point they “passed the peace” exactly as the Catholics do.
The church staff also helps create an air of formality. The interim senior pastor is called “Dr. Steier”, and his associates (there are at least six ordained clergy on the staff) all go by either “Rev.” or “Dr.” and their last name. Frankly I far prefer that to the interim minister at my own church who insists that people he’s just met call him “Pastor Gil”. I wonder about clergy who don’t want people to use a title of respect when referring to them.
Both the congregation and the staff were very diverse. I’d estimate a little less than half the congregation was black, which makes sense given the neighborhood where the church is located. This is definitely not a “black church”, though. You won’t find anyone of any race shouting “amen” or “hallelujah” here. The remainder of the congregation was about evenly split among Anglos, Hispanics, and east Asians—with the Asians probably being the second largest group. Something that definitely stood out was that this was very much a church of young adults. There were very few senior citizens, and if they had attempted to do a children’s sermon they’d have gotten no more kids than my tiny church has.
The most noteworthy thing about the actual service was its length. This was by far the longest worship service I’ve ever been to. Including music, prayers, the sermon (by a guest speaker, the former president of the United Church of Christ), and communion, worship lasted an hour and forty-five minutes. I wondered if they weren’t trying to go back to pilgrim days with so long a service.
Both the music and prayers were outstanding. The choir was small, but without question one of the best I’ve heard anywhere. Of course, it almost certainly includes members who sing professionally. They had a mix of all races in the choir, but were definitely whiter than the general congregation. The organ was also wonderful, and they had a white male soloist (who I’d guess to be a Columbia student, likely a music major) who I’d love to hear singing in concert. The prayers were eloquently written and presented well. This is most decidedly not the type of church where the prayers begin with “Lord, we just wanna …”. They did not ask the congregation to share joys and concerns, but obviously someone makes it their job to find out what concerns members have, as many intentions were very specific to the needs of particular people.
Communion was also memorable. They distributed communion much the same as in my home church, passing first bread and then wine (actually juice, I think) through the pews. The liturgy was straight from the UCC Book of Worship, so it was also familiar. What stood out was that instead of little glass or plastic communion cups, “the blood of Christ” was distributed in individual silver chalices. They had hundreds of those little silver chalices, enough so that everyone who wanted communion could take his own. When I say silver, I mean exactly that. These weren’t steel or “base metal”, but real polished silver that had probably been used since the church was built 76 years ago. The devil in me toyed with the idea of taking home a souvenir. I can’t imagine stealing from a church, though, and I’m sure the chalice cost more than what I put in the offering plate. It certainly was something to see, though.
Much less memorable was the sermon. The guest preacher went away from the lectionary (something not at all uncommon in the UCC) and used as his text John 1, a chapter I rarely think of other than at Christmas. You surely know “In the beginning was the Word …” Well after the Word becomes flesh there’s the phrase “we have seen his glory”. The preacher expanded that and reminded us that we were all headed toward gloryland. He could have easily made his point in about a five-minute homily, but he just kept repeating “gloryland” over and over again for nearly half an hour. Had the preacher been African American and had this been a black gospel church, that might have worked. For an old white man preaching to a diverse (and very stiff) congregation, though, it was nothing but repetitive.
The church bulletin had a line at the end that stated the congregation should remain seated until the conclusion of the postlude. Given that the service had already taken an hour and forty-five minutes (and I myself had been there over two hours), I was more than a bit antsy at the benediction. When I saw a couple in front of me get up and leave, I snuck behind them. That opened the floodgates, and by the time I was at the back of the sanctuary pretty much everyone was headed out—while the organ still played in the background.
After church I walked through Riverside Park, a lovely park along the banks of the Hudson across the street (and down a very steep hill) from Riverside Church. I remember years ago seeing one of the TV crime shows portray a series of brutal rapes that happened in this park. From the sidewalk along Riverside Drive I had a birdseye view of the entire park, and today at least there seemed to be nothing remotely resembling violent crime happening here. That’s pretty typical for New York these days. While it still has a bad reputation, New York City is actually one of the safest places in America—and it has been since shortly after that trip Daddy and I made back in the early ‘80s. There are fewer murders in New York than there are in Chicago (a city less than half its size), and the overall crime rate it is lower than in Des Moines. Statistically, I was quite a bit safer walking around America’s largest city today than I would be a couple days later when I was in Binghamton (a college town much like Iowa City where drug-related violence has skyrocketed the crime rate in recent years).
I made my way back to Cathedral Parkway and walked east along there through increasingly seedy (but still not really dangerous) neighborhoods to Central Park West (which, as the name implies, is the avenue that runs along the west side of Central Park). There’s a traffic circle at the northwest corner of Central Park where these two streets intersect. This evening Riverside Church would be holding a “procession of peace” beginning here and ending at the church commemorating the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
There’s a subway station under the traffic circle that serves the A and C trains. Unfortunately there was major construction in the traffic circle, and it was next to impossible to find an entrance to the station. Eventually I did, but that solved only one problem. The next problem was another of those “navigating the subway on the weekends” headaches. I wanted to go north to 207th Street, but there was no uptown service from this or any nearby station. To get north I had to first go south (“go backwards to go forwards”) to 59th Street, which is a long way south of 110th. Then I caught an uptown train which ran express past eight different stations (including 110th) all the way up to 125th (said “one-two-five” in announcements). Beyond 125th it ran local, stopping every few blocks on up to the end of the line at 207th (“two-oh-seven”). It seemed to take forever, but I did eventually make it.
I actually exited the 207th Street station at 211th street and then walked back south. The neighborhood around here, Inwood, is at the extreme north end of Manhattan. Almost no tourists ever come here, and it was interesting to see. I’d read a book that said “People often say don’t journey north of Central Park, because the rest of Manhattan is a wild zone. This is nothing but a fallacy. Inwood is a prime example of a quaint, loiterable northern Manhattan community about as threatening as Big Bird.” There’s a lot of truth in that statement. While Inwood is certainly not Algona (it’s very diverse, with the single largest ethnic group being Caribbean blacks) and like all of New York it’s grimy, it’s a fun and fascinating place to walk around. Compared to most of New York, Inwood seems like a small town. Much of it is very low rise, with one- or two-story businesses, there’s lots of parkland (including the site where Manhattan was first purchased from the Indians), and you can even spot a few single family homes with yards here and there. Most of the community actually lives a few blocks away from 207th and Broadway, primarily in high rises that loom over the area. While it is public housing, the high rises come across as much better maintained than what I normally think of as “projects”., and the neighborhood is definitely not a slum.
While it was interesting to see the area, the main reason I’d come here was to see the oldest building in Manhattan, which happens to be located in Inwood. The Dyckman (DIKE-min) Farmhouse is exactly what its name implies, a small farmhouse (living and dining room downstairs and bedrooms upstairs) that dates to colonial day. The house is located on a hill overlooking Broadway about two blocks south of the subway station. Visiting here reminded me a lot of my visit to Edgar Allen Poe’s home in the Bronx a few years back. Neither place expects to get visitors, and my showing up definitely took people by surprise. The Dyckman house was presided over by a college girl from California who was doing an internship with the NYC Parks and Recreation Department. Being from out west, she wasn’t exactly the best person to have as the interpreter for a historic site specific to New York. She said a couple of things that were just plain wrong. For instance, she said the Dyckman’s farm extended all the way to Columbia University. They had a map in their museum area that showed that the Dyckman estate covered most of Inwood, but the area above 200th Street (which would be a large farm, especially by colonial standards) is a far cry from going a hundred blocks further south (which would be larger than even most of Iowa’s farms today). It bothered me that the girl didn’t really seem to care at all about the place she was interpreting. To me it would seem that the point of that job is to communicate excitement about the place. For her, though, it was just an assigned internship. I had a brief conversation in Spanish with a Guatemalan woman who was gardening out back, and she seemed to be more informed about the place than the interpreter.
I’d been sweating buckets all day, so I wanted to replenish a bit of those fluids. I stopped at a McDonalds on 207th Street. The employees were high school aged Dominican girls. They were bilingual, but English was clearly not their first language. They were definitely surprised to see a white man in the place, too. Except for a couple of Latin Americans, all the other customers were black. Most spoke Spanish, though a few were communicating in black English.
It hadn’t occurred to me when I ordered the iced tea I always order at McDonalds that it would be served by default sweetened. I’m used to two possibilities—the Midwest practice of serving everything plain and letting you sweeten to taste yourself and the Southern practice of having separate “sweet” and “uinsweet” pitchers. New York, though, is a place where you have to specify you want coffee black; “normal” coffee comes with cream and sugar. Apparently the practice for tea is similar. Since I hadn’t specified otherwise, I was served a cardboard cup of brown syrup. I managed to gag a few sips down, but I dumped most of it. I really hate sweetened iced tea.
They had a single unisex restroom at this McDonalds, and theoretically an employee had to come and open it when someone wanted to use it. The employee did open it once while I sat at my nursing my tea, and that started a chain of six different people (including me) who let each other in one after the other. I snuck in after a Hispanic grandmother, and I let an elderly Dominican man in after me.
I walked eastward down 207th Street. Manhattan at this point is only about half a mile wide, far narrower than it is down in Midtown. Just beyond McDonalds countless Dominican vendors had set up a flea market along the sidewalk and spilling out into the street (which was only barely passable and fortunately had virtually no traffic). I felt like I was in the Rastro in Madrid, where virtually everything imaginable is for sale in little stalls. While it was heaviest on food items, they sold a bit of everything here, too. Probably most interesting were T-shirts that mimicked the famous “I ? NY” shirts. These instead said “I ? RD”, with the “RD” referring to “República Dominicana” or the Dominican Republic. It amused me that while “RD” was in the order of the Spanish name, the beginning said “I” rather than “Yo”.
The flea market extended down 207th Street for about two and a half long avenue blocks, from just past Broadway down past the 1-train elevated station at the opposite end of the island. It ended at the parking lot for PathMark. PathMark is the supermarket in New York City, which is honestly kind of unfortunate. That would be like saying a dumpy old Fareway or IGA store was the best place to buy groceries in Iowa—as if there Hy-Vee or Cub Foods or Super Target didn’t exist. I’d been past PathMark stores in Queens, but I’d never been inside one. Since this one was here (and since I was still dying of thirst), I decided to check it out. It was on the inside exactly what it looked like on the outside—an old, run-down supermarket. It was fairly large, but any county seat town in the Midwest would have better places to shop. On the other hand, PathMark looked much more inviting than Inwood’s other grocery choice, C-Town—a place with all the charm of a ratty dollar store.
Many of you know that I’ve collected Pepsi memorabilia for years. PathMark had Pepsi in unusual tiny bottles that were much smaller than what is normally sold in America (though likely similar to what New York’s many immigrants would find at home). I bought an horribly over-priced six pack (more than $4.50 with tax and deposit—New York, like Iowa, is a deposit state). I gulped two of them down quickly and lugged the rest around with me the rest of the day.
After all the press coverage of the bridge collapse in Minnesota, I can’t say I exactly looked forward to what lay ahead of me, the rickety University Heights Bridge that connects 207th Street in Inwood to Fordham Road in the Bronx. It rattled and groaned as each car came along, but both I and the cars made it across without incident. There was a traffic light just across the East River in the Bronx, and traffic backed up all the way across the bridge most of the time. College-aged black men were going from car to car trying to sell bottled water to everyone who was stuck in traffic. Surprisingly they didn’t offer any to me, and I actually might have accepted if they had.
My next destination was quite a ways further that I thought it was. On the map it looked as if I’d go to the first cross street in the Bronx and walk about two blocks south from there. I actually walked about half a mile into the Bronx, up a steep hill, until I reached the first major cross street (actually the third traffic light). I turned off Fordham onto Sedgwick and then walked up an even steeper hill for about the same distance to another cross street. Then I walked uphill again for about a block to my destination.
I’ve walked just about everywhere I’ve gone back home this summer, and I’ve gotten in pretty decent shape logging more than 500 miles over the course of the summer. Even so I was huffing and puffing and sweating profusely after going that far straight uphill with the hot sun beating down on me. It didn’t help that I was carrying a fairly large bag that had only gotten heavier after adding bottles of Pepsi to it. I made it all right, though, and the work of getting there made the destination a bit of a holy grail for me.
That destination was Bronx Community College, a small tree-filled campus on a bluff overlooking the East River. Why would a white guy from Iowa be headed to a community college in the Bronx on a Sunday afternoon in August? That question was apparently also on the mind of the young black guard who looked at me very suspiciously and asked what I was doing at the place. When I gave my response, though, he was pleasant and pointed where I should go.
My ultimate destination was one of the least visited attractions in New York, a place that would make even the Dyckman Farmhouse or Poe’s Cottage seem as if they were heavily touristed. That destination was the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. The Hall of Fame was started in 1901 when this campus was home to New York University, an institution a bit better known than Bronx Community College. NYU constructed a terrace behind their library and decided to line it with bronze busts of the men (and later a handful of women) who had made great contributions to our nation and world. To give you an idea of what this place is like, I’m going to reproduce part of a description I read before I went (from the “Roadside America” website):
We have halls of fame for every activity and occupation nowadays—from RVing to strippers to freshwater fishing. It’s hard to imagine a time when the concept was daring and new. But there had to be a first, and in America the first was the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. It was conceived in an era when fame had not yet morphed into celebrity, when its gates had not yet been thrown open to the masses, to glorify willy-nilly whomever and whatever they wanted.
… When it opened in 1901 it was considered to be an important tourist attraction. Visitors would take day trips to its panoramic spot atop the highest point in New York City … the same heights from which the British drove the Americans out of New York during the Revolutionary War. NYU Chancellor Henry MacCracken thought it was delicious irony to use this spot as a pantheon to honor great Americans.
… The Hall is a breezy neo-classical colonnade with a vaulted ceiling, wrapping around the back of two college halls and a library. Bronze busts of the honorees line the low walls on either side. Beneath them are large bronze tablets, designed by Tiffany Studios, providing the person’s name, years of birth and death, and some noble quote associated with him or her—but no information about who they were, or why they were so great. The well-heeled visitors of the early 20th Century didn’t need to be told that, for example, Elias Howe patented the sewing machine, or that Lewis Agassiz came up with the idea for the Ice Age. But today’s visitors are at a loss, something that the founders of this Hall never foresaw.
… The Hall would induct new worthies every five years. Some of them are people that you’d expect to see: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln. But undeserving clunkers are here as well—people such as James Eads, who designed armored steamboats; William Morton, who fraudulently claimed to have discovered anesthesia; and Phillips Brooks, who wrote the words to “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”. Stonewall Jackson got in thanks to a letter-writing campaign by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (they nearly secured a pedestal for Jefferson Davis, too). Silvanus Thayer, “the Father of West Point”, got in thanks to similar pressure from army societies and veterans groups. Even given the self-limited pool of candidates under consideration, Americans such as Johnny Appleseed and Noah Webster are not here, while people such as Rufus Choate and John Lothrop Motley are.
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans outlived its glory years ago. Its last class of inductees was in 1976, but they never got bronze busts or plaques because by then the campus had gone bankrupt and had been sold to Bronx Community College, which still maintains the site. One wonders what the contemporary students of this school, who are mostly black and Latino, think of their hall of fame. Of the 98 members enshrined in it, only two are black, and there are no Latinos, no Native Americans, Jews, or Catholics. …
I had a wonderful time checking out the Hall of Fame. I think I did better on recognizing people than the write-up implied most people do. (I am familiar with Phillips Brooks, for example, who was a well-known 19th Century clergyman and orator as well as a hymn writer.) On some I didn’t the quotes would give a bit of a clue as to who the people were. Even if I didn’t know all of them, the busts were impressive and interesting to see.
The whole time I was there I was the only person at the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Indeed I think the guard may have been the only other person on the campus. While it’s open every day of the year, there are apparently days when there are no visitors at all. I’d imagine it’s a place students might go for a quiet study area between classes, but given its remote location (it would be a chore to drive here, as well as being hard to get to on foot), it’s not really a surprise that it was empty on Sunday.
I made my way to the far end of the BCC campus, which is at a street signed both as University Avenue and Martin Luther King Parkway. There is a fenced-in middle school across the street from the college, and on the corner at University was the sort of black church I alluded to while describing Riverside. At mid-afternoon gospel music was pouring out its windows and throughout the neighborhood, and it was fun to listen to as I passed by.
I walked down University to Fordham and then had a much quicker walk (since it was downhill this time) along Fordham back to the University Heights bridge. One of the guys selling water saw the Yankees cap I was wearing and yelled out some trash about the Yankees. I smiled and just kept walking. The Yankees were playing this afternoon, and from the gridlocked traffic on I-87 under the bridge, I’d bet the game was starting within an hour.
I made my way back past PathMark to the elevated station on 207th Street. (Actually, this overhead structure is technically called a “subway” station, just like the underground stations in Chicago are called “L” stations.) There are two entrances to this station, on opposite sides of a street that further south is called 10th Avenue. The entrance on the east side is for northbound (“uptown”) trains, while the west side leads to the southbound (“downtown”) tracks. The west entrance is much more important, because there are only a handful of stations north of 207th Street. In fact, the uptown entrance is not staffed. If you want to catch a northbound train, you’re supposed to scan your card in a full-length (floor to ceiling) turnstile, which will unlock and let you enter the platform. I scanned my card, but the read-out said “SCAN AGAIN”. That happens a lot in New York, where the card technology doesn’t seem to be exactly state-of-the-art. I scanned again and again, trying to go at different speeds each time. Each time I just got the “SCAN AGAIN” message. Eventually I crossed the street and spoke with the clerk in a cage by the downtown entrance. She took my card and was able to verify that it was valid and working correctly and told me “it must be the turnstile that’s got the problem”. Well, duh! When I asked her what I should do, she suggested that I just go through the emergency gate “like everyone else”. When I went back to the uptown entrance, a train had just arrived, and indeed pretty much everyone exited by way of an emergency gate that sounded an alarm when opened. The exit was much larger than the official one, and both the passengers and the MTA clerk just ignored the alarm. I held the gate when the last person left and just went straight to the platform without scanning my card again. When the gate slammed shut behind me, the alarm stopped. Having been given permission to enter this way, I didn’t even feel particularly guilty about jumping the turnstile.
Elevated trains make for much more interesting riding than subways, and the 1-line is elevated from around 190th Street all the way to the end of the line. Just north of 207th Street we went through the MTA storage yards, where hundreds of subway cars were laid up for the weekend. We then crossed a bridge onto the mainland. Technically we were still in Manhattan, though. The first stop on the mainland is called Marble Hill, and until about a hundred years ago this area was part of Manhattan Island. To help with navigation they dredged a canal south of Marble Hill and filled in the narrow strait north of it. That’s why today Marble hill is physically part of the Bronx but politically part of Manhattan. The most noteworthy thing in Marble Hill was a multi-level Target store that was right outside the elevated station. Otherwise it looked like a dumpy residential neighborhood.
I continued into the “real” Bronx and went all the way to 242nd Street (“two-four-two”) at the end of the line. 242nd Street is at the south end of Van Cortlandt Park, one of the largest urban parks in America. The park extends about three miles north from here, all the way to City Line Road, where the Bronx ends and suburban Yonkers begins. The north end of the park is mostly forest land, and is apparently where the New York State high school cross-country championship is held each year. The south end, though, is a recreational park, and it is very heavily used. As I left the subway, I saw people getting off the train carrying bags of golf clubs, skateboards, baseball bats, soccer balls, and those inflatable donuts you sit in at swimming pools. The park was entirely packed with people of all ages and races playing games, walking around, or just sitting on the ground sunning themselves.
I paused by the entrance where a south Asian man had parked his ice cream truck. A line of mostly Hispanic people had congregated out front. While they didn’t speak each other’s languages, the vendor and his customers managed to communicate by pointing. I was still overheated and parched, and I chose to buy a pre-packaged snow cone from the vendor. I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but it was right there with all the ice cream novelties. It only cost a dollar, and it did a good job of cooling me down.
There’s another historic home at Van Cortlandt Park. Right in the middle is the Van Cortlandt Mansion, the home of the Dutch family who in colonial days controlled most of what is now New York City. While this is a much more visited tourist attraction, their hours are quite limited. I ended up arriving just as they were closing up for the afternoon. Something that was interesting to see, though, was the costumed “Van Cortlandt family” in their powdered wigs and colonial garb getting into an SUV and driving away from the historic home.
I walked around the park a bit and then made my way back to the subway. I took the train south to 125th Street. This station is interesting. South of 190th Street, the red line is entirely underground, with one exception. The area around 125th and Broadway is extremely hilly, and Broadway takes a severe dip in that area. To keep the line relatively level, it emerges from the subway briefly, and the station is actually elevated over 125th Street.
I got off at 125th Street and walked over to a fairly well-known attraction that is just up the street from Riverside Church, Grant’s Tomb. Technically called General Grant National Memorial, the admission-free National Park Service property is mostly just an extension of Riverside Park. Kids were skateboarding at the entrance, treating the place just like any park. Inside the domed memorial they have a few displays on why President Grant was important (and, by the way, I don’t believe he made it into the Hall of Fame) and an overlook where you can see the caskets of him and his wife. (By the way, the answer to the classic riddle “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” is “Nobody.” General and Mrs. Grant are essentially lying in state above ground for eternity.
I walked southward and then made my way east past some classroom buildings to the Columbia subway station at 116th and Broadway. I boarded a very crowded train and rode it south to Penn Station. I paused briefly to buy some juice and ginger ale from a convenience store in the station and soon boarded an NJ Transit train. I was one of the first to board this train, and I was glad of that. There was a big crowd. In fact, many people were not able to sit down until past South Orange. It emptied rapidly after that, though, and I had an uneventful ride back to Morristown.
I got in my rented G-5 and headed back up I-287. North of I-80, the beltway is a fairly unimportant route. In fact it has just six lanes, which by New Jersey standards is almost nothing. Traffic zipped along easily, and before long I exited onto state highway 23.
NJ 23 was a really bizarre highway. It began as a weird six-lane freeway through a business strip, with exits to the different businesses on the strip. (It’s really weird to think of an exit serving nothing but an Applebee’s, but there is one.) Soon the access became less limited, and it was a four-lane strip similar to what you might find in any suburb anywhere (except that, as in all of New Jersey, left turns are either prohibited or strictly limited). As the terrain became more mountainous (though no less suburban), the road morphed into what amounted to two one-way streets. They’d rather obviously taken the original highway and made it one-way in one direction and then built a new road and made it one-way the other way. There were businesses lining both routes, and they frequently had U-turn opportunities allowing people to go from one side to the other.
After twenty miles or so I saw a sign that said “WELCOME TO SUSSEX COUNTY – WHERE PEOPLE AND NATURE MEET”. Thinking back on Sussex County I can tell you that when people and nature meet, bad things happen. Sussex County is a place that doesn’t want to admit it is suburban, but is. At the county line the road degraded into a bad two-lane, likely the same mountain road that’s always served the area. That road would have been fine back when Sussex County was rural, but when the whole thing is lined with homes and tacky businesses, it was annoying to say the least. This was probably the worst place to drive I hit on the whole trip; only the urban expressways in Buffalo and Allentown would give it a challenge.
The very last part of Sussex County actually is rural, mostly because it’s protected as a state park. In the extreme northwest corner of New Jersey is High Point, which as the name implies is the highest point in the state. It’s hard to believe that in only about fifty miles New Jersey’s land rises from sea level to almost 2,000 feet. The eastern mountains may not be towering, but they definitely are mountains. Just a couple hours ago I was tunneling under the Hudson, but now my ears were popping.
High Point is topped by an enormous obelisk that looks a lot like the Washington Monument. It’s apparently a memorial to the dead of various wars. I considered hiking up to it. It would have been easy enough to do so, but they charge $10 just to park your car in the lot there, which seemed a bit excessive to me. So I just kept driving.
At the west edge of the state park a sign says “WELCOME TO MONTAGUE – THE TOP OF NEW JERSEY”. Montague supposedly has about 2,000 people, though I saw no indication that much of anybody actually lived in the place. It was mostly a tacky strip not unlike what I’d driven through south of the park. I drove through it and was surprised to see a “JCT I-84” sign. I-84 is in New York state. There had been no indication that I’d crossed the state line at all, but I’d left New Jersey behind.
I turned onto Greeneville Turnpike, which is the access road for I-84 and made my way up a steep hill to the one and only business on that road, the Comfort Inn—Port Jervis. An old man was staffing the desk. He was overly friendly, but not terribly competent. I wanted to use scrip cards to pay my bill, and he obviously had no clue how to process them. He ended up just letting me into a room without taking any form of payment at all.
(c) 2008 davidmburrow@yahoo.com
The background music on this page is "CWM Rhondda", the Welsh tune to the hymn "God of Grace and God of Glory" which was written for the dedication of Riverside Church.