I’ve visited New York City a few times because I have a good friend, Alicia Hansen, who has lived there for many years. She once hosted our whole family for a week in her one-bedroom apartment. Even with our best tip-toeing efforts, we nearly caused her to be kicked out of the building! This time, we visited her in the Berkshire mountains, where the neighbors are not directly underfoot.
While Jane searched in vain for traces of the wilderness mission outpost described in the Jonathan Edwards biography she was reading, we did find evidence of the novelists and artists the Stockbridge area has long attracted. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived, worked, and mutually admired each other for a time here. (They seemed have left a footprint in almost every place we visited in New England.) We also stopped in at the nearby Norman Rockwell studio and museum.
The museum docent told funny stories about various local people who served as models for Rockwell’s work over the years.
Rockwell’s work was often criticized by fans of the modern art movement, which developed during his career, and it might be tempting to dismiss his art as dashed-off magazine illustration. However, a tremendous amount of planning went into each picture. The scenes were staged, photographed, and sketched before any painting took place. And the paintings are much larger than what fits on a Saturday Evening Post cover. Rockwell was a perfectionist, and he worked in his studio for hours and hours almost every day. To me, his great achievement was storytelling. My grandmother had a Norman Rockwell coffee table book that I poured over as a child, and its picture stories deeply shaped my sentiments about America.
Alicia’s boyfriend, Adam Chinitz, is a Mulkey-kid-whisperer.
After a weekend getaway, Alicia and Adam were back to the city and NYC SALT, an after-school photography program for high school students. The last time we visited New York City, we enjoyed hanging out in the photography studio with all the students and volunteer professionals who participate in SALT. Now many of those students are graduating from college! Last year, the Today show interviewed Alicia about the program, and we got to see her on TV!
After traversing miles and miles of green, rolling farmland, we reached the Finger Lakes area of northwestern New York. We passed by quaint town squares on mirror lakes surrounded by brightly colored, 19th-century homes. Every green thing was in bloom.
In Auburn, we visited the Harriet Tubman home place. Tubman bought a farm and retired to Auburn, where she also operated a small hospital and retirement home. Until recently, the museum has been run by an enthusiastic, but underfunded group. Now, President Obama has declared the property a National Historic Park, so we are eager to see what it will look like in the future.
Next, we stopped at Erie Canal Discovery Center in Lockport. The Erie Canal was an engineering marvel that reduced travel between New York City and Buffalo from two weeks to five days and opened trade to the west in the early 1880s. The mostly amateur engineers who designed the canal navigated the sharp elevation change at Lockport by cutting five consecutive locks into the Niagara Escarpment. Outside, we watched the two remaining locks in action.
Brandon loved this part of the trip; he spent an hour chatting with the lock keeper, while we watched this party barge.
Finally, we reached the grandaddy destination of our tour: Niagara Falls. (I confess, we were not wholly in New York for this part of the trip; the Ontario side was too alluring. The kids were disappointed to cross the border with very little difficulty. “We could have been drug mules!” they complained.)
The falls made such a gorgeous racket that they mostly drowned out the tin trumpets of all the cheesy, surrounding tourist traps.
We loved it here!
Even Nan.
On the Road with the Archangel 