Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Happy Holidays
A quick note with best wishes for the holiday season, before I sign off, in all likelihood, for the remainder of 2009. I've dealt with my share of grinches before, and while I'm no fan of the shopping-industrial complex that Christmas has wrought, to say nothing of the travesty that is Christmas "music," I continue to maintain that a winter festival is valuable. It gives us, or should, anyway, an opportunity to pause and reflect on the cyclical nature of, well, nature, and the passing of time. So a happy and prosperous new year to everyone.
Comments tightened up
For those of you who comment, my apologies, but I had to enable word verification -- the spam has found me at last. I hope the few extra keystrokes will not discourage you from continuing to offer your unvarnished opinions.
Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music
Why are so many jazz biographies so bad? There are some excellent ones, of course - Peter Pettinger's How My Heart Sings comes to mind - but in any other subject area, those would be all we would have. A manuscript of anything less would not even get past the desk of a junior editor at any self-respecting publishing house. But when it comes to jazz musicians, it seems that anyone who happens to like the music, regardless of their ability to write or their having had any actual connection to the subject, can write a book and have it published. The latest example to cross my path is John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter (University of Michigan, 1998).
I suppose I should be fair. Porter is a musician, and a professor of music at Rutgers, so he knows something about playing. An enormous amount, actually. But that fails to redeem the book. Porter bills his work as a biography, and starts out with an excruciatingly detailed examination of Coltrane's family roots in North Carolina. He spends three full chapters - 34 pages - doing it, and much of those are not even about Coltrane himself but his cousins, aunts and uncles, twice or more removed. Porter's excuse seems to be the fact that it has never been done before, but so what? Maybe there is a reason it hasn't. His conclusion seems to be only that the fact that Coltrane's father died of cancer when John was very young significantly affected the formation of his personality. I grant that this is valid, but it could have been dealt with in a few paragraphs, or a handful of pages at the most.
At the same time, however, the book offers virtually nothing about Coltrane's personal life and lifestyle at the height of his success. Like most musicians of his generation, he had once been a drug addict but kicked the habit. He was married twice and had several children and step-children, the maternity of at least one of whom remains uncertain. One could argue, as Porter probably would, that dirt has no place in a serious biography, but I believe it is possible to write about these aspects of a subject's life in a way that is not prurient, and it is a pity that Porter barely tries. Where he does, he further undermines himself by claiming, early on, that his is the first biography to be based on objective research and then proceeding to fill the rest of the book with phrases like "it is reasonable to suppose" or "it was likely that..." and so on.
What Porter does focus on is Coltrane's music. His compositions and improvisational style are analyzed in mind-boggling detail with copious transcriptions for illustration, some of entire solos. This will have some use to a narrow audience - musicians who want to study Coltrane's style in depth and have a sufficiently deep understanding of music theory to make something out of Porter's analysis. But again, if this is a biography, this level of technical detail is excessive. If you do want to focus on it, call the book "The Musical Style of John Coltrane" or some such and dispense with biographical information altogether. But Porter can't seem to decide what he wants the book to be, or, rather, he seems to want it to be a technical analysis masquerading as a biography.
Yet for all these complaints, there is some value in what Porter has done. Pretty much everyone agrees that Coltrane was an innovator. I am not aware of charges of outright charlatanism ever leveled against Coltrane the way they were against, say, Ornette Coleman. The disagreement lies in whether the direction in which he took jazz was a good one. What Porter's analysis shows is why Coltrane's music was so innovative. Just looking at some of the lines on the printed page you realize that they look weird. He played stuff that no one had played, or even thought of playing, before, and Porter proves it. He is not afraid to take his analyses to their logical extreme, even if he ends up concluding on occasion that a particular fragment fits no known pattern or harmonic device, not even any of the ones Coltrane himself had used previously. Does that make Coltrane's music meaningless, at least from a formal perspective? Porter doesn't say, but he provides the raw material to let us decide on our own. I suspect, fully acknowledging my severely limited knowledge of music theory, that the answer is yes.
Finally, despite the distractions, Porter does manage to give us a smidgen of insight into why some of Coltrane's music, especially from Giant Steps onwards, sounds so abrasive. Long before he had given up tonal harmony and straight-ahead swing, his solos started to sound jarring, off-putting and unsettling, and not in a good way according to this pair of ears at least. He was the first, and is still the most infamous, exponent of the "where the hell is the melody?" school of jazz. Porter's explanation is that Coltrane was hearing multiple things - melodies, chord sequences, what have you - in his head simultaneously, and was unable to organize and prioritize them in his mind, resulting in his trying to play all of them at the same time:
So approach John Coltrane: His Life and Music with caution. Lots of caution. I emphatically do not recommend it as a biography, but for those wishing to gain technical insight into Coltrane's style, it may be worth the effort.
I suppose I should be fair. Porter is a musician, and a professor of music at Rutgers, so he knows something about playing. An enormous amount, actually. But that fails to redeem the book. Porter bills his work as a biography, and starts out with an excruciatingly detailed examination of Coltrane's family roots in North Carolina. He spends three full chapters - 34 pages - doing it, and much of those are not even about Coltrane himself but his cousins, aunts and uncles, twice or more removed. Porter's excuse seems to be the fact that it has never been done before, but so what? Maybe there is a reason it hasn't. His conclusion seems to be only that the fact that Coltrane's father died of cancer when John was very young significantly affected the formation of his personality. I grant that this is valid, but it could have been dealt with in a few paragraphs, or a handful of pages at the most.
At the same time, however, the book offers virtually nothing about Coltrane's personal life and lifestyle at the height of his success. Like most musicians of his generation, he had once been a drug addict but kicked the habit. He was married twice and had several children and step-children, the maternity of at least one of whom remains uncertain. One could argue, as Porter probably would, that dirt has no place in a serious biography, but I believe it is possible to write about these aspects of a subject's life in a way that is not prurient, and it is a pity that Porter barely tries. Where he does, he further undermines himself by claiming, early on, that his is the first biography to be based on objective research and then proceeding to fill the rest of the book with phrases like "it is reasonable to suppose" or "it was likely that..." and so on.
What Porter does focus on is Coltrane's music. His compositions and improvisational style are analyzed in mind-boggling detail with copious transcriptions for illustration, some of entire solos. This will have some use to a narrow audience - musicians who want to study Coltrane's style in depth and have a sufficiently deep understanding of music theory to make something out of Porter's analysis. But again, if this is a biography, this level of technical detail is excessive. If you do want to focus on it, call the book "The Musical Style of John Coltrane" or some such and dispense with biographical information altogether. But Porter can't seem to decide what he wants the book to be, or, rather, he seems to want it to be a technical analysis masquerading as a biography.
Yet for all these complaints, there is some value in what Porter has done. Pretty much everyone agrees that Coltrane was an innovator. I am not aware of charges of outright charlatanism ever leveled against Coltrane the way they were against, say, Ornette Coleman. The disagreement lies in whether the direction in which he took jazz was a good one. What Porter's analysis shows is why Coltrane's music was so innovative. Just looking at some of the lines on the printed page you realize that they look weird. He played stuff that no one had played, or even thought of playing, before, and Porter proves it. He is not afraid to take his analyses to their logical extreme, even if he ends up concluding on occasion that a particular fragment fits no known pattern or harmonic device, not even any of the ones Coltrane himself had used previously. Does that make Coltrane's music meaningless, at least from a formal perspective? Porter doesn't say, but he provides the raw material to let us decide on our own. I suspect, fully acknowledging my severely limited knowledge of music theory, that the answer is yes.
Finally, despite the distractions, Porter does manage to give us a smidgen of insight into why some of Coltrane's music, especially from Giant Steps onwards, sounds so abrasive. Long before he had given up tonal harmony and straight-ahead swing, his solos started to sound jarring, off-putting and unsettling, and not in a good way according to this pair of ears at least. He was the first, and is still the most infamous, exponent of the "where the hell is the melody?" school of jazz. Porter's explanation is that Coltrane was hearing multiple things - melodies, chord sequences, what have you - in his head simultaneously, and was unable to organize and prioritize them in his mind, resulting in his trying to play all of them at the same time:
...it was difficult to construct a smoothly flowing melodic line that would connect all of the harmonies he was hearing with a minimum of extraneous notes. (p. 158)Porter doesn't suggest why he couldn't, but that's probably expecting too much from anyone. Just putting this phenomenon into words is valuable - it offers us a possibility, admittedly extremely daunting, to try to hear those individual threads of Coltrane's thinking the next time we pop Giant Steps into the CD player.
So approach John Coltrane: His Life and Music with caution. Lots of caution. I emphatically do not recommend it as a biography, but for those wishing to gain technical insight into Coltrane's style, it may be worth the effort.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
New Orleans: Friday Lunch at Galatoire's
Or how I had a martini for breakfast and lived to tell about it.
My most memorable meal in New Orleans has to be the Friday lunch at Galatoire’s in the Quarter. The restaurant is world-famous – it has been open continuously since 1905, and has been written up in numerous food and travel magazines. Friday lunch, however, is a tradition within tradition – a local institution where everyone who is anyone in New Orleans comes out to stand in the hyper-egalitarian line, socialize, gossip, and have a grand time. It so happened that T.S. and I had most of the day open while our better halves were finishing up their conference duties, so of course we had to partake.
As famous as Galatoire’s is, it is a little difficult to get a precise description of exactly how these bacchanalian affairs work. Some people will tell you to show up as early as 8:00 a.m., while others will insist that a half-hour before the 11:00 a.m. opening time is sufficient. I strolled casually by around 9:30, hoping to check out the scene, perhaps grab a beignet and coffee for breakfast before returning, but noticed that a dozen or so people were already lined up, so to be on the safe side, I stayed. T.S. joined me a short while later.
A young gentleman waiting in line in front of me – friendly and gracious true to the reputation of the city’s denizens – finally explained how the process works. At some point during the morning, though you never know exactly when, the maitre d’ comes out with a clipboard and walks the line, taking down names and – a key aspect of the experience –requests for specific servers. Most of the regulars have relationships with their favorite servers going back years. It so happened that a friend of a friend, who spends a lot of time in New Orleans, had recommended his favorite, so we were able to follow the protocol as closely as out-of-towners could hope to.
From there, the m.o. is “follow the crowd.” Sometime a little after 11:00, the doors open and everyone starts filing in and goes immediately upstairs to the bar for pre-lunch cocktails. The bar itself is tiny – maybe eight seats, and the room where it is situated is not much larger, so it fills up immediately with people who jostle, call out drink orders over their friends’ heads, and pass glasses back and forth. The din builds quickly.
T.S. managed to nab a seat at the end of the bar, while I stood nearby, surveying the clientele. At least 80% obviously locals; most, though not all, older than us. A well-dressed crowd. Ladies mostly in dresses, elegant but not contrived, men surprisingly well put-together. Not guys who pulled the default weddings-and-funerals suit out of the closet because they felt obligated, but genuinely well-dressed: properly fitting jackets, well-coordinated ties, pocket squares. I spotted a hat or two while waiting. The restaurant made jackets for men optional some years ago, but clearly the regulars were abiding by the old policy. A handful of patrons, and they all seemed to know one another, were dressed more flamboyantly – silk scarves (on both sexes), stylish glasses, designer shoes -- but they were the perfect seasoning in this dense soup of propriety.
The drinks were old-school. I was surprised, and a bit disappointed, that upon hearing me order a martini, the bartender asked whether I wanted gin or vodka, and whether I wanted it up or on the rocks. If it has vodka and/or served on the rocks, it is not a martini, and he, of all people, would have known that, I thought. But perhaps my age, combined with that certain East-coast dourness that I can’t quite shake, gave me away as an interloper. The martini, when it showed up, was in a tiny 4-oz. glass, and the well gin was nothing to write home about, but the drink was garnished with three enormous and delicious olives.
On the cusp of noon, people started to move downstairs. There was no announcement or even a change of tone in the din of the room – the crowd has acquired its own emergent power of decision-making, honed by years of morning cocktails. There is a second dining room on the same floor as the bar, but eating downstairs is part of the experience – the upstairs, in our contact’s words, is “Siberia. May as well not bother.” The main dining room was smaller than I expected, with mirrors and marble on the walls and ornate brass sconces. The table settings were fairly formal. Most of the tables were large, but there was a handful of two-tops kept for couples or unfortunate souls like T.S. and me who did not have friends and associates with whom to conduct business or merriment.
Our waitress Shannon, a friendly, well-spoken middle-aged blonde, was spectacular. We sent our contact’s regards. She knew him instantly and asked us to take back a message – they weren’t kidding about relationships with your servers – and proceeded to orchestrate our meal for us. Galatoire’s menu has no descriptions, and with most names ending simply in maison, is fairly useless, but we only took a cursory glance anyway. Shannon recommended a cold seafood appetizer – shrimp remoulade, some crabmeat, maybe one or two other things, and advised us to throw in some oysters en brochette – wrapped in bacon and flash-fried. With the monsters from the gulf, you can do that, and they were absolutely delicious – salty, and a perfect combination of soft and crunchy. The rest of the components were delectable as well – just mayonnaisy enough, not too cold, and obviously freshly made. This was not modern, cook-just-enough-to-get-away-with-it cuisine, but it was immensely satisfying.
For our entrees, T.S. and I ended up with the same thing – pompano, another local fish, served with a sauce that seemed to consist of little other than melted butter. It was delicious. Perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned, it was more flavorful than the redfish, and immensely satisfying. The butter sauce certainly didn’t hurt, but did not overpower the fish. Our side dish – a la carte as expected – was Brabant potatoes, recommended by the blogosphere and seconded enthusiastically by Shannon. They were a paragon of simplicity: cubes of potatoes, fried and tossed with butter, parsley and garlic. Once again, a throwback to an earlier era, but proof positive that classic cuisine needs not be complicated and can be ridiculously good even to our modern palates used to the hyper-fresh and the minimally cooked. I can’t quite remember at this point what we drank – again something from Oregon (in the one concession to current taste, the wine list was surprisingly diverse), a Gewurtztraminer maybe, or perhaps another Pinot Gris. It went well with the meal, and I must be honest – by about half way through our entrees I didn’t care nearly as much as I normally would. We skipped dessert, sticking to coffee. The coffee had no chicory in it – according to Shannon, that would have been déclassé when Galatoire’s first opened in the early part of the last century.
We were not the first to leave around a half past two, but a large number of the patrons were still at their tables when we did. Now you know why no one picks up the phone when you call a company in New Orleans on a Friday afternoon.
My most memorable meal in New Orleans has to be the Friday lunch at Galatoire’s in the Quarter. The restaurant is world-famous – it has been open continuously since 1905, and has been written up in numerous food and travel magazines. Friday lunch, however, is a tradition within tradition – a local institution where everyone who is anyone in New Orleans comes out to stand in the hyper-egalitarian line, socialize, gossip, and have a grand time. It so happened that T.S. and I had most of the day open while our better halves were finishing up their conference duties, so of course we had to partake.
As famous as Galatoire’s is, it is a little difficult to get a precise description of exactly how these bacchanalian affairs work. Some people will tell you to show up as early as 8:00 a.m., while others will insist that a half-hour before the 11:00 a.m. opening time is sufficient. I strolled casually by around 9:30, hoping to check out the scene, perhaps grab a beignet and coffee for breakfast before returning, but noticed that a dozen or so people were already lined up, so to be on the safe side, I stayed. T.S. joined me a short while later.
A young gentleman waiting in line in front of me – friendly and gracious true to the reputation of the city’s denizens – finally explained how the process works. At some point during the morning, though you never know exactly when, the maitre d’ comes out with a clipboard and walks the line, taking down names and – a key aspect of the experience –requests for specific servers. Most of the regulars have relationships with their favorite servers going back years. It so happened that a friend of a friend, who spends a lot of time in New Orleans, had recommended his favorite, so we were able to follow the protocol as closely as out-of-towners could hope to.
From there, the m.o. is “follow the crowd.” Sometime a little after 11:00, the doors open and everyone starts filing in and goes immediately upstairs to the bar for pre-lunch cocktails. The bar itself is tiny – maybe eight seats, and the room where it is situated is not much larger, so it fills up immediately with people who jostle, call out drink orders over their friends’ heads, and pass glasses back and forth. The din builds quickly.
T.S. managed to nab a seat at the end of the bar, while I stood nearby, surveying the clientele. At least 80% obviously locals; most, though not all, older than us. A well-dressed crowd. Ladies mostly in dresses, elegant but not contrived, men surprisingly well put-together. Not guys who pulled the default weddings-and-funerals suit out of the closet because they felt obligated, but genuinely well-dressed: properly fitting jackets, well-coordinated ties, pocket squares. I spotted a hat or two while waiting. The restaurant made jackets for men optional some years ago, but clearly the regulars were abiding by the old policy. A handful of patrons, and they all seemed to know one another, were dressed more flamboyantly – silk scarves (on both sexes), stylish glasses, designer shoes -- but they were the perfect seasoning in this dense soup of propriety.
The drinks were old-school. I was surprised, and a bit disappointed, that upon hearing me order a martini, the bartender asked whether I wanted gin or vodka, and whether I wanted it up or on the rocks. If it has vodka and/or served on the rocks, it is not a martini, and he, of all people, would have known that, I thought. But perhaps my age, combined with that certain East-coast dourness that I can’t quite shake, gave me away as an interloper. The martini, when it showed up, was in a tiny 4-oz. glass, and the well gin was nothing to write home about, but the drink was garnished with three enormous and delicious olives.
On the cusp of noon, people started to move downstairs. There was no announcement or even a change of tone in the din of the room – the crowd has acquired its own emergent power of decision-making, honed by years of morning cocktails. There is a second dining room on the same floor as the bar, but eating downstairs is part of the experience – the upstairs, in our contact’s words, is “Siberia. May as well not bother.” The main dining room was smaller than I expected, with mirrors and marble on the walls and ornate brass sconces. The table settings were fairly formal. Most of the tables were large, but there was a handful of two-tops kept for couples or unfortunate souls like T.S. and me who did not have friends and associates with whom to conduct business or merriment.
Our waitress Shannon, a friendly, well-spoken middle-aged blonde, was spectacular. We sent our contact’s regards. She knew him instantly and asked us to take back a message – they weren’t kidding about relationships with your servers – and proceeded to orchestrate our meal for us. Galatoire’s menu has no descriptions, and with most names ending simply in maison, is fairly useless, but we only took a cursory glance anyway. Shannon recommended a cold seafood appetizer – shrimp remoulade, some crabmeat, maybe one or two other things, and advised us to throw in some oysters en brochette – wrapped in bacon and flash-fried. With the monsters from the gulf, you can do that, and they were absolutely delicious – salty, and a perfect combination of soft and crunchy. The rest of the components were delectable as well – just mayonnaisy enough, not too cold, and obviously freshly made. This was not modern, cook-just-enough-to-get-away-with-it cuisine, but it was immensely satisfying.
For our entrees, T.S. and I ended up with the same thing – pompano, another local fish, served with a sauce that seemed to consist of little other than melted butter. It was delicious. Perfectly cooked and perfectly seasoned, it was more flavorful than the redfish, and immensely satisfying. The butter sauce certainly didn’t hurt, but did not overpower the fish. Our side dish – a la carte as expected – was Brabant potatoes, recommended by the blogosphere and seconded enthusiastically by Shannon. They were a paragon of simplicity: cubes of potatoes, fried and tossed with butter, parsley and garlic. Once again, a throwback to an earlier era, but proof positive that classic cuisine needs not be complicated and can be ridiculously good even to our modern palates used to the hyper-fresh and the minimally cooked. I can’t quite remember at this point what we drank – again something from Oregon (in the one concession to current taste, the wine list was surprisingly diverse), a Gewurtztraminer maybe, or perhaps another Pinot Gris. It went well with the meal, and I must be honest – by about half way through our entrees I didn’t care nearly as much as I normally would. We skipped dessert, sticking to coffee. The coffee had no chicory in it – according to Shannon, that would have been déclassé when Galatoire’s first opened in the early part of the last century.
We were not the first to leave around a half past two, but a large number of the patrons were still at their tables when we did. Now you know why no one picks up the phone when you call a company in New Orleans on a Friday afternoon.
Monday, December 7, 2009
New Orleans: Commander's Palace
Although New Orleans has its share of modern cuisine - one of its pioneers, Emeril Lagasse, got his start there, in fact - one of the distinguishing features of its culinary scene is a number of old, storied restaurants. Really, really old. The oldest, Galatoire's, more on which later, has been open continuously since 1905. Antoine's, Brennan's and Arnaud's are some of the other legendary names. On the recommendation of our friends P.&T.S., who were in New Orleans with us for a part of the time and wanted to share a highlight meal with us before heading home, we chose Commander's Palace in the Garden District, open in its current form since 1944. Very formal by today's standards and swarming with staff (we would discover that one attendant's full-time job is escorting patrons to restrooms), it is a throwback to an earlier era.
We arrived almost twenty minutes ahead of our 8:30 reservation (streetcars get you around the city faster than you might guess), but got seated right away, or almost - first we had to navigate a long series of relatively small and very traditionally decorated rooms - white table cloths, overstuffed empire chairs - climb up to the second floor, and then weave our way through some more rooms (the place is absolutely enormous) until we finally arrived at our table, located in a slightly larger and marginally more cheerful, though still very dimly lit, room with a glass wall overlooking the large patio, unused that night due to cool weather. The menus were a surprising dose of casualness - giant (at least 11 by 17, but probably larger) single sheets of cardstock, with the menu proper on one side and a garish abstract design in red and purple adorning the reverse. We listened to the specials, described by our young, cheerful but very professional server, ordered cocktails and settled down to contemplate the choices. My cocktail - a rye manhattan - was the first disappointment of the night - bland and watery, much like Bourbon House's version. T.S. fared better with his choice of one of the house creations, the Vieux Carre (rye, brandy, Benedectine and bitters).
This being Louisiana, I was determined to have something that was deeply local but not a touristy gimmick like alligator, so I opted for turtle soup as my first course. It was excellent - dark brown and relatively thick, it was deeply flavored, salty and had a slight bite of spice. It reminded me of the delicious fish chowder J. and I had in Bermuda. The turtle meat, which was finely diced, reminded me more of seafood - clams, maybe - than anything terrestrial in texture and flavor. Our entrees - J. and I both fell for our server's mouthwatering description of one of the specials, as did T.S. - proved to be far less satisfying, unfortunately. It was redfish - a local Gulf species similar to grouper - topped with crabmeat and wild mushrooms, served in a rich cream sauce. There was nothing objectively wrong with it - the fish was tender and not overcooked - but the dish completely lacked balance. Redfish is mild, a bit bland even, and both the giant pile of mushrooms - intensely woodsy and earthy - and the Olympic-size pool of cream sauce the fish was swimming in completely drowned out what flavor it might have once had. It didn't help that in true old-school style, all side dishes were served a la carte, and I was too distracted to order any. Only P.S. went against the current and ordered duck, which proved to be a wise choice - though slightly more well-done than is the norm in modern restaurants, it was still juicy and its skin was nicely crisp. Unlike the fish, it came served over some potatoes, which did wonders for the balance of the dish.
The wine list is worth a brief mention. Unlike the unexpectedly casual dinner menu, the wine list was a thick leather-bound book of the sort that I thought had become completely extinct years ago. Pages upon pages of wines, organized by region and, for new world wines, further by grape, it featured something I had not seen before - complete vertical selections of top-tier California reds. Every vintage of Stag's Leap Cabernet going back to 1984, for example, and a few others in a similar vein. The most expensive was $1,375 a bottle. I neglected to jot down the winery and vintage. Needless to say, we drank a human-scale wine rather than a god-scale one - a Pinot Gris from Adelsheim in Oregon. It was a quality bottle on its own, but could have used a little more weight to do battle against the sauce.
As I looked around the room throughout dinner, I began to get a sense that Commander's Palace wasn't quite the eminence grise of New Orleans dining it was made out to be. Most patrons were playing at the game of fine dining. On one side of us, a group of college-aged youngsters, spending their parents' money on the one indulgence of the semester, the guys not quite settled into their slim-cut black suits, the satin of the girls' dresses a little too shiny and new. On the other side - a large-ish group out for some kind of special occasion, dressed to the nines, and talking to the waiter in overly solemn tones that some people feel they need to assume at an expensive restaurant. The staff, on the other hand, though I must give them full credit for operating with the precision of a regiment on parade, went out of its way to be causal and friendly, no doubt to offset what some would perceive as stuffiness of the atmosphere. A table across the isle from us ordered bananas foster for dessert (yes, this was the kind of place that actually served them), and the excessively bubbly waitress preparing it tableside did it with the maximum possible flourish and spectacle. A bit later in the evening, she swooped over our table the moment she saw T.S. taking a camera out of his pocket and insisted on taking several photos of us. I feel a bit guilty saying this, especially since on balance, we did have an excellent time with our friends, but whether you're looking for a classic or a modern meal, better dining than Commander's Palace is to be had in New Orleans, especially at the price. Or, if you must experience the Palace, go at lunch, when 25-cent martinis can reportedly be had.
To be continued...
We arrived almost twenty minutes ahead of our 8:30 reservation (streetcars get you around the city faster than you might guess), but got seated right away, or almost - first we had to navigate a long series of relatively small and very traditionally decorated rooms - white table cloths, overstuffed empire chairs - climb up to the second floor, and then weave our way through some more rooms (the place is absolutely enormous) until we finally arrived at our table, located in a slightly larger and marginally more cheerful, though still very dimly lit, room with a glass wall overlooking the large patio, unused that night due to cool weather. The menus were a surprising dose of casualness - giant (at least 11 by 17, but probably larger) single sheets of cardstock, with the menu proper on one side and a garish abstract design in red and purple adorning the reverse. We listened to the specials, described by our young, cheerful but very professional server, ordered cocktails and settled down to contemplate the choices. My cocktail - a rye manhattan - was the first disappointment of the night - bland and watery, much like Bourbon House's version. T.S. fared better with his choice of one of the house creations, the Vieux Carre (rye, brandy, Benedectine and bitters).
This being Louisiana, I was determined to have something that was deeply local but not a touristy gimmick like alligator, so I opted for turtle soup as my first course. It was excellent - dark brown and relatively thick, it was deeply flavored, salty and had a slight bite of spice. It reminded me of the delicious fish chowder J. and I had in Bermuda. The turtle meat, which was finely diced, reminded me more of seafood - clams, maybe - than anything terrestrial in texture and flavor. Our entrees - J. and I both fell for our server's mouthwatering description of one of the specials, as did T.S. - proved to be far less satisfying, unfortunately. It was redfish - a local Gulf species similar to grouper - topped with crabmeat and wild mushrooms, served in a rich cream sauce. There was nothing objectively wrong with it - the fish was tender and not overcooked - but the dish completely lacked balance. Redfish is mild, a bit bland even, and both the giant pile of mushrooms - intensely woodsy and earthy - and the Olympic-size pool of cream sauce the fish was swimming in completely drowned out what flavor it might have once had. It didn't help that in true old-school style, all side dishes were served a la carte, and I was too distracted to order any. Only P.S. went against the current and ordered duck, which proved to be a wise choice - though slightly more well-done than is the norm in modern restaurants, it was still juicy and its skin was nicely crisp. Unlike the fish, it came served over some potatoes, which did wonders for the balance of the dish.
The wine list is worth a brief mention. Unlike the unexpectedly casual dinner menu, the wine list was a thick leather-bound book of the sort that I thought had become completely extinct years ago. Pages upon pages of wines, organized by region and, for new world wines, further by grape, it featured something I had not seen before - complete vertical selections of top-tier California reds. Every vintage of Stag's Leap Cabernet going back to 1984, for example, and a few others in a similar vein. The most expensive was $1,375 a bottle. I neglected to jot down the winery and vintage. Needless to say, we drank a human-scale wine rather than a god-scale one - a Pinot Gris from Adelsheim in Oregon. It was a quality bottle on its own, but could have used a little more weight to do battle against the sauce.
As I looked around the room throughout dinner, I began to get a sense that Commander's Palace wasn't quite the eminence grise of New Orleans dining it was made out to be. Most patrons were playing at the game of fine dining. On one side of us, a group of college-aged youngsters, spending their parents' money on the one indulgence of the semester, the guys not quite settled into their slim-cut black suits, the satin of the girls' dresses a little too shiny and new. On the other side - a large-ish group out for some kind of special occasion, dressed to the nines, and talking to the waiter in overly solemn tones that some people feel they need to assume at an expensive restaurant. The staff, on the other hand, though I must give them full credit for operating with the precision of a regiment on parade, went out of its way to be causal and friendly, no doubt to offset what some would perceive as stuffiness of the atmosphere. A table across the isle from us ordered bananas foster for dessert (yes, this was the kind of place that actually served them), and the excessively bubbly waitress preparing it tableside did it with the maximum possible flourish and spectacle. A bit later in the evening, she swooped over our table the moment she saw T.S. taking a camera out of his pocket and insisted on taking several photos of us. I feel a bit guilty saying this, especially since on balance, we did have an excellent time with our friends, but whether you're looking for a classic or a modern meal, better dining than Commander's Palace is to be had in New Orleans, especially at the price. Or, if you must experience the Palace, go at lunch, when 25-cent martinis can reportedly be had.
To be continued...
New Orleans: Food
New Orleans is justly famous for its cuisine, though like anywhere else, it is easy to eat badly, and pay too much for it. The French Quarter is chock-full of restaurants, most of them tourist-grade "Creole" joints serving cut-rate versions of the same few local specialties - red beans and rice, gumbo, shrimp po-boys -- and charging too much for them. J. and I did end up having a late lunch at one, recommended a couple of days earlier by a cab driver, and while my bowl of red beans and rice was decent - reasonably creamy with nicely greasy andouille sausage -- it was not particularly memorable.
That said, at least a couple of places, though touristy, are worth the trouble. The first, of course, is Café du Monde. Located across Decatur Street across from Jackson Square, it is it open around the clock and is justly famous for its beignets - French-style donuts. A little over $2 gets you three large, hot puffs of fried dough, dusted with what seems like a pound of powdered sugar, and I must admit they are good. Not earth-shatteringly, transformatively good, but tasty. They reminded me of nothing so much as zeppoli - the Italian version of the same concept - that I used to eat at pizza parlors in Queens as a teenager. The thing to drink is Café du Monde's café au lait, which was also excellent. Served in normally sized coffee cups instead of giant mugs, it is a true au lait, made with equal part coffee and hot milk, not simply a couple of Mini-Moos dropped in as an afterthought. The black coffee is good as well. Spiked with ground chicory root - a throwback to the times when coffee was expensive and had to be cut with a cheaper substitute to be affordable, the story goes - it has just a slight bitter bite, but is otherwise balanced and smooth. Always fresh, too - the place goes through so much of it.
The other must, located almost directly across the street from Café du Monde, is Central Grocery. Most visitors think of New Orleans as the most French of American cities, being as it was the center of French Louisiana at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, but Italian cultural legacy is prominent as well, and dates back almost as far. Central Grocery is the oldest Italian store in the city still in existence, and is famous for its muffaletta - a giant sandwich of Italian cold cuts, provolone cheese, and olive salad. A vinegary mixture of coarsely chopped green olives and god knows how many other kinds of marinated vegetables, it is this "salad" (really more of a relish) that elevates the muffaletta into the realm of the sublime. Many restaurants in the Quarter offer them, but Central's is the only real thing. The trick is not to eat it right away (if you can resist - good luck), but to let it marinate a while so the flavors meld and the brine of the salad soaks into the bread just a little. When I first got into town, J. had already arrived, and had bought a muffaletta (half of one, technically - a whole, also available, is made with an entire loaf of bread) for lunch. Half or her half had been sitting, wrapped, in her bag for a couple of hours before we met up and I had a chance to eat it. It was unbelievably good - sharp, vinegary, with a great contrast of textures between chewy olives and soft bread, heavy on the cheese and relatively light on the meat, it was utterly unique and delicious. I immediately wanted to run and get another. We got them again on our last day in town, just before leaving for the airport, and while they were good, they didn't pack the punch they did after they've been sitting for a while. Evaluated objectively as a sandwich, they could stand to be a little more generous with the meat.
On two occasions, after having had late lunches and no specific plans for dinner, we ended up at the Bourbon House, located in the Astor Hotel on the edge of the Quarter. Most appetizers and entrees are overpriced and uneven. J.'s shrimp creole was decent one night, lousy the other, my soup barely qualified as mediocre. But the place is more than redeemed by its oyster bar. I had not had gulf oysters before, and they were a revelation - salty, strong-flavored but not metallic like some other varieties, meaty, and absolutely enormous - each one easily the size of three normal ones. They more than made up for other disappointments.
Bourbon House's other claim to fame is that it is the official bar of the Louisiana Bourbon Society, and as such features a mind-boggling selection of bourbons and ryes. On one of our visits, I had a manhattan made with Wild Turkey Rye, which I had not had before. It was a letdown - watery and bland. I blamed the bartender, not the rye. On the other visit, however, I ordered a pour of Four Roses bourbon, which apparently had just become available outside of Kentucky, for dessert. It was delicious - sweet and intense, and much better priced than most quality dessert libations would run you nowadays.
To be continued...
That said, at least a couple of places, though touristy, are worth the trouble. The first, of course, is Café du Monde. Located across Decatur Street across from Jackson Square, it is it open around the clock and is justly famous for its beignets - French-style donuts. A little over $2 gets you three large, hot puffs of fried dough, dusted with what seems like a pound of powdered sugar, and I must admit they are good. Not earth-shatteringly, transformatively good, but tasty. They reminded me of nothing so much as zeppoli - the Italian version of the same concept - that I used to eat at pizza parlors in Queens as a teenager. The thing to drink is Café du Monde's café au lait, which was also excellent. Served in normally sized coffee cups instead of giant mugs, it is a true au lait, made with equal part coffee and hot milk, not simply a couple of Mini-Moos dropped in as an afterthought. The black coffee is good as well. Spiked with ground chicory root - a throwback to the times when coffee was expensive and had to be cut with a cheaper substitute to be affordable, the story goes - it has just a slight bitter bite, but is otherwise balanced and smooth. Always fresh, too - the place goes through so much of it.
The other must, located almost directly across the street from Café du Monde, is Central Grocery. Most visitors think of New Orleans as the most French of American cities, being as it was the center of French Louisiana at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, but Italian cultural legacy is prominent as well, and dates back almost as far. Central Grocery is the oldest Italian store in the city still in existence, and is famous for its muffaletta - a giant sandwich of Italian cold cuts, provolone cheese, and olive salad. A vinegary mixture of coarsely chopped green olives and god knows how many other kinds of marinated vegetables, it is this "salad" (really more of a relish) that elevates the muffaletta into the realm of the sublime. Many restaurants in the Quarter offer them, but Central's is the only real thing. The trick is not to eat it right away (if you can resist - good luck), but to let it marinate a while so the flavors meld and the brine of the salad soaks into the bread just a little. When I first got into town, J. had already arrived, and had bought a muffaletta (half of one, technically - a whole, also available, is made with an entire loaf of bread) for lunch. Half or her half had been sitting, wrapped, in her bag for a couple of hours before we met up and I had a chance to eat it. It was unbelievably good - sharp, vinegary, with a great contrast of textures between chewy olives and soft bread, heavy on the cheese and relatively light on the meat, it was utterly unique and delicious. I immediately wanted to run and get another. We got them again on our last day in town, just before leaving for the airport, and while they were good, they didn't pack the punch they did after they've been sitting for a while. Evaluated objectively as a sandwich, they could stand to be a little more generous with the meat.
On two occasions, after having had late lunches and no specific plans for dinner, we ended up at the Bourbon House, located in the Astor Hotel on the edge of the Quarter. Most appetizers and entrees are overpriced and uneven. J.'s shrimp creole was decent one night, lousy the other, my soup barely qualified as mediocre. But the place is more than redeemed by its oyster bar. I had not had gulf oysters before, and they were a revelation - salty, strong-flavored but not metallic like some other varieties, meaty, and absolutely enormous - each one easily the size of three normal ones. They more than made up for other disappointments.
Bourbon House's other claim to fame is that it is the official bar of the Louisiana Bourbon Society, and as such features a mind-boggling selection of bourbons and ryes. On one of our visits, I had a manhattan made with Wild Turkey Rye, which I had not had before. It was a letdown - watery and bland. I blamed the bartender, not the rye. On the other visit, however, I ordered a pour of Four Roses bourbon, which apparently had just become available outside of Kentucky, for dessert. It was delicious - sweet and intense, and much better priced than most quality dessert libations would run you nowadays.
To be continued...
Monday, November 30, 2009
New Orleans: The City
Although visitors naturally view the French Quarter as the focal point of New Orleans, for the city as a whole it is the Central Business District, or CBD as the locals call it. It is a fairly conventional high-rise downtown, full of office buildings and multiple representatives of every major hotel chain. The main drag that separates the CBD from the French Quarter is Canal Street, with its requisite stores selling vaguely hip-hop clothing at what they claim to be deep discounts and overpriced electronics shops full of dual-voltage radios and (still!) Pal-SECAM camcorders. With its oceanic width, streetcar tracks running down the middle, and a near-complete lack of any identifiably local businesses, Canal reminded me of nothing so much as San Francisco's Market Street. Go a few blocks up the street away from the river, and the building facades and the sidewalks, none too smooth to begin with, deteriorate further, and the Hiltons give way to Clarions, though a block-long monolith of luxury condos, converted from what looked like a turn of the last century theatre, loudly announces its availability with two-story-high banners, a bit out of place among cut-rate parking lots surrounded by rusting chicken wire.
Crossing Canal from our hotel (Courtyard Marriott at 124 St. Charles Ave., chosen for the pragmatic reason of a conference J. was attending) puts you on the edges of the French Quarter, and another block or two in on any of its main arteries -- Royal, Chartres or, if you make that mistake, Bourbon -- the New Orleans of both tourist brochures and Faulkner's Sketches explodes at you.
I should probably dispense with Bourbon Street quickly. I hated it. It wasn't the nightclubs (Hustler's was the only "brand" name I recognized, but there was plenty in the same vein) - that sort of thing does not bother me. It was the sheer level of noise, day and night. Barkers - a few scantily-clad women, but mostly obnoxious men with large signs - were literally at every door. Drunk crowds spilling into the streets from every bar (and every business that is not a gentlemen's club is a bar) at all hours. Music blaring through open doors and windows, bands frequently attempting, unsuccessfully, to drown one another out, resulting in a headache-inducing cacophony of grandiose proportions. I should mention that taken individually, most bands sounded fantastic. In a few minutes, we caught strains of blues, country and zydeco, all spectacularly performed. The sheer volume, however, combined with overwhelming crowds both indoors and out, scared us off from actually going in and giving them a proper listen.
A typical French Quarter exterior
Turn into any of the side streets, however, and you immediately find yourself in the New Orleans of legend. The architecture and overall feel of the place is completely unique. Despite the name, the style is predominantly Spanish, not French. The wrought-iron railings and posts that make the city famous are just the beginning. Flower-filled wraparound balconies, quaint interior courtyards (some occupied by stores or restaurants and therefore accessible to the passer-by), and cheerful Caribbean-inspired colors add up to create an almost fairy-tale atmosphere. Historic plaques abound. A house that was going to be offered to Napoleon after he was rescued from his exile on St. Helena (he died before the plan could be executed), and a blacksmith shop formerly used as headquarters by the pirate Jean Laffitte (who was going to do the rescuing) are but two that come to mind. Not surprisingly, both have been converted to bars, Napoleon's being the nicer of the two.
Napoleon's House
A fair number of buildings - one in ten, perhaps - is shuttered, either under renovation or simply unused, but there is no indication that all of them were rendered vacant by Katrina. The vast majority of these places date from the 1700s, and no doubt many needed work long before 2005.
At the center of the French Quarter is Jackson Square, with the St. Louis Cathedral and a statue of pre-presidential Andrew Jackson, but while the cathedral is impressive and the park surrounding Jackson is an idyllic place to while away some time on a nice day eating a muffaletta, the charm is definitely in the side streets.
Directly to the East of the French Quarter is the neighborhood of Faubourg-Marigny, almost as old as the Quarter itself and, from what I could gather, the first area into which the city expanded once it breached its original boundaries. The vibe could not be more different,
however. The area is largely residential, and no house is taller than two stories, the predominant styles being the Creole cottage and the famous shotgun. The condition of the houses varies greatly, from hovels barely holding together to impeccably restored and outlandishly painted creampuffs. Some house bed-and-breakfasts with names like the Bohemian Armadillo. Unusual zoning, or, more likely, the ignorance of same (New Orleans' acquaintance with regulation is famously casual), placed a neighborhood bar or two on random corners. My personal favorite, though I did not go in, was an establishment called The John. Ghosts are plentiful here, too - a dilapidated house I stumbled upon, currently for sale, was once the residence of Lizzie Miles.
A house in Faubourg-Marigny
The Warehouse District, located to the South of the Quarter, is home to some museums and galleries and said to have suffered mightily at the hands of Katrina. We didn't take too good a look at it, as the only time we were there was at night in pouring rain, but even so, the luxury condos and lofts were obvious, and the reason we were there - dinner at a hyper-modern restaurant Cochon, more on which later - was telling from more than a culinary perspective. All this was post-Katrina construction. Clearly, neither the private developers (as it should be), nor the city government (as perhaps it should not) want to waste the commercial potential of the place. We certainly would not have found the same in the Lower Ninth.
While on the subject of Katrina, though we did not go on an official Katrina tour (had I known they were still doing them four years after the event, I would have signed up), we ended up getting a bit of an informal one from the van driver who took us to Slidell, LA, one morning to the location of a swamp tour we had booked. Even the outer edges of the CBD had been under a shocking fifteen feet of water, according to him. Aside from trashed sidewalks, the effects aren't immediately obvious to someone who doesn't know what to look for, but as the driver pointed out building after building, we realized that they were abandoned. Not enough time had passed for them to have become ruins, and perhaps the city is doing something to maintain a modicum of outward gentility to these places to prevent blight from snowballing, but once you've been shown one or two of these places, you start seeing them everywhere.
East New Orleans, through which we drove on the way up, was devastated, and is currently in an extremely uneven state of reconstruction. Here, both the abandonment and the renewal are glaring. Some of the houses are literally ruins -- caved-in roofs, gaping windows, eight-foot weeds in the yard. Commercial and office buildings are subtler, but still obvious - parking lots overgrown with grass, no lights or signs, and a strange patina of neglect even on those structures that had withstood the winds. You can tell the newly-built houses by their three-foot-high foundations, required by the useless new building code. Some of the apartment complexes are doing a booming business even though the rents are up by 60%, while others, though perfectly ordinary-looking on the outside, are uninhabitable and are waiting for the wrecking ball. According to our guide, some still have squatters living in them, left in peace by the authorities presumably because they would have nowhere to go if they were evicted. Our driver-guide himself had his house in Slidell completely destroyed; he and his wife spent time living in a FEMA trailer, and are now gradually building a new house. Semi-retired before Katrina, he is now working two jobs to pay for the reconstruction.
The fact that even the evidence of Katrina takes little away from the appeal of the less affected parts of the city is testament to New Orleans power and uniqueness. I found the entire vast Uptown area, located to the Southwest of the CBD and reached easily by the St. Charles Ave. street car, enjoyable. The Garden District, full of historic mansions enormous in scale and luxury, is the famous part, and worth seeing out for a glimpse of antebellum Louisiana (one house is now open for tours, the rest are privately owned but a self-guided walking tour with a good guidebook is still worth the time). But to some extent, the "normal" neighborhoods on either side of St. Charles and especially along Magazine Street, are more interesting because they are less special while still retaining significant local color. After seeing the Garden District, J. and I spent the better part of a day strolling along Magazine, checking out the antique shops, many of them with an unusually high concentration of mid-century modern design. St. Charles Ave. half a mile away, a major thoroughfare that roughly follows the curvature of the river from the CBD to the Tulane Campus, is probably the city's most mixed-use neighborhood, majestic apartment buildings sharing frontage with stores and restaurants, forest-green streetcars (originally build in 1925) completing the picture.
To be continued...
Crossing Canal from our hotel (Courtyard Marriott at 124 St. Charles Ave., chosen for the pragmatic reason of a conference J. was attending) puts you on the edges of the French Quarter, and another block or two in on any of its main arteries -- Royal, Chartres or, if you make that mistake, Bourbon -- the New Orleans of both tourist brochures and Faulkner's Sketches explodes at you.
I should probably dispense with Bourbon Street quickly. I hated it. It wasn't the nightclubs (Hustler's was the only "brand" name I recognized, but there was plenty in the same vein) - that sort of thing does not bother me. It was the sheer level of noise, day and night. Barkers - a few scantily-clad women, but mostly obnoxious men with large signs - were literally at every door. Drunk crowds spilling into the streets from every bar (and every business that is not a gentlemen's club is a bar) at all hours. Music blaring through open doors and windows, bands frequently attempting, unsuccessfully, to drown one another out, resulting in a headache-inducing cacophony of grandiose proportions. I should mention that taken individually, most bands sounded fantastic. In a few minutes, we caught strains of blues, country and zydeco, all spectacularly performed. The sheer volume, however, combined with overwhelming crowds both indoors and out, scared us off from actually going in and giving them a proper listen.
A typical French Quarter exterior Turn into any of the side streets, however, and you immediately find yourself in the New Orleans of legend. The architecture and overall feel of the place is completely unique. Despite the name, the style is predominantly Spanish, not French. The wrought-iron railings and posts that make the city famous are just the beginning. Flower-filled wraparound balconies, quaint interior courtyards (some occupied by stores or restaurants and therefore accessible to the passer-by), and cheerful Caribbean-inspired colors add up to create an almost fairy-tale atmosphere. Historic plaques abound. A house that was going to be offered to Napoleon after he was rescued from his exile on St. Helena (he died before the plan could be executed), and a blacksmith shop formerly used as headquarters by the pirate Jean Laffitte (who was going to do the rescuing) are but two that come to mind. Not surprisingly, both have been converted to bars, Napoleon's being the nicer of the two.
Napoleon's HouseA fair number of buildings - one in ten, perhaps - is shuttered, either under renovation or simply unused, but there is no indication that all of them were rendered vacant by Katrina. The vast majority of these places date from the 1700s, and no doubt many needed work long before 2005.
At the center of the French Quarter is Jackson Square, with the St. Louis Cathedral and a statue of pre-presidential Andrew Jackson, but while the cathedral is impressive and the park surrounding Jackson is an idyllic place to while away some time on a nice day eating a muffaletta, the charm is definitely in the side streets.
Directly to the East of the French Quarter is the neighborhood of Faubourg-Marigny, almost as old as the Quarter itself and, from what I could gather, the first area into which the city expanded once it breached its original boundaries. The vibe could not be more different,
however. The area is largely residential, and no house is taller than two stories, the predominant styles being the Creole cottage and the famous shotgun. The condition of the houses varies greatly, from hovels barely holding together to impeccably restored and outlandishly painted creampuffs. Some house bed-and-breakfasts with names like the Bohemian Armadillo. Unusual zoning, or, more likely, the ignorance of same (New Orleans' acquaintance with regulation is famously casual), placed a neighborhood bar or two on random corners. My personal favorite, though I did not go in, was an establishment called The John. Ghosts are plentiful here, too - a dilapidated house I stumbled upon, currently for sale, was once the residence of Lizzie Miles.
A house in Faubourg-MarignyWhile on the subject of Katrina, though we did not go on an official Katrina tour (had I known they were still doing them four years after the event, I would have signed up), we ended up getting a bit of an informal one from the van driver who took us to Slidell, LA, one morning to the location of a swamp tour we had booked. Even the outer edges of the CBD had been under a shocking fifteen feet of water, according to him. Aside from trashed sidewalks, the effects aren't immediately obvious to someone who doesn't know what to look for, but as the driver pointed out building after building, we realized that they were abandoned. Not enough time had passed for them to have become ruins, and perhaps the city is doing something to maintain a modicum of outward gentility to these places to prevent blight from snowballing, but once you've been shown one or two of these places, you start seeing them everywhere.
East New Orleans, through which we drove on the way up, was devastated, and is currently in an extremely uneven state of reconstruction. Here, both the abandonment and the renewal are glaring. Some of the houses are literally ruins -- caved-in roofs, gaping windows, eight-foot weeds in the yard. Commercial and office buildings are subtler, but still obvious - parking lots overgrown with grass, no lights or signs, and a strange patina of neglect even on those structures that had withstood the winds. You can tell the newly-built houses by their three-foot-high foundations, required by the useless new building code. Some of the apartment complexes are doing a booming business even though the rents are up by 60%, while others, though perfectly ordinary-looking on the outside, are uninhabitable and are waiting for the wrecking ball. According to our guide, some still have squatters living in them, left in peace by the authorities presumably because they would have nowhere to go if they were evicted. Our driver-guide himself had his house in Slidell completely destroyed; he and his wife spent time living in a FEMA trailer, and are now gradually building a new house. Semi-retired before Katrina, he is now working two jobs to pay for the reconstruction.
The fact that even the evidence of Katrina takes little away from the appeal of the less affected parts of the city is testament to New Orleans power and uniqueness. I found the entire vast Uptown area, located to the Southwest of the CBD and reached easily by the St. Charles Ave. street car, enjoyable. The Garden District, full of historic mansions enormous in scale and luxury, is the famous part, and worth seeing out for a glimpse of antebellum Louisiana (one house is now open for tours, the rest are privately owned but a self-guided walking tour with a good guidebook is still worth the time). But to some extent, the "normal" neighborhoods on either side of St. Charles and especially along Magazine Street, are more interesting because they are less special while still retaining significant local color. After seeing the Garden District, J. and I spent the better part of a day strolling along Magazine, checking out the antique shops, many of them with an unusually high concentration of mid-century modern design. St. Charles Ave. half a mile away, a major thoroughfare that roughly follows the curvature of the river from the CBD to the Tulane Campus, is probably the city's most mixed-use neighborhood, majestic apartment buildings sharing frontage with stores and restaurants, forest-green streetcars (originally build in 1925) completing the picture.
To be continued...
Sunday, November 22, 2009
How not to play Beethoven: F.F. Guy at the Embassy of France
Friday night, J. and I joined our friend K.L. at the French Embassy to hear a performance of some Beethoven piano sonatas. The pianist was one François-Fréderic Guy, whom I had not heard of until then. He was actually performing the complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas, in chronological order, over a period of a couple of weeks. When K.L. first told me about it, my initial reaction was to try to hear every one. The complete Beethoven cycle performed live is an extremely rare event, the undertaking being so Promethean. I'm still kicking myself for not having gone to hear Robert Silverman do them a few years ago. The commitment on the part of the listener is equally great, however, so reason prevailed and we settled on last Friday's performance, where Guy was doing Nos. 22 - 26, No. 23 being, of course, the great Appassionata.
Good thing we didn't spend money on tickets for more than one of these. The concert was a huge disappointment. Guy played with no feeling or emotion whatsoever. There was no lyricism or subtlety to speak of. His tempos were way too fast (most fast works are usually played too fast, but that's a whole other discussion), he left no space between the notes, and as a result ended up glossing over every significant detail. Appassionata's gorgeous finale, while certainly fast, lives and dies by the relaxed fluidity of the performer's approach, but Guy hammered through it like an automaton. No. 25's Andante movement can be achingly beautiful in the right hands, but we heard none of that beauty on Friday. Guy seemed to want nothing better than to get to the next fast movement so he could so some more mindless shredding.
This kind of butchering of sublime music breaks my heart, and in the case of Beethoven sonatas - some of the greatest piano music of all time -- makes me angry. J., a lifelong musician and classical music fan, has inexplicably been skeptical about Beethoven's solo piano music, and Friday's concert has done nothing to change her mind. Thank you, Mr. Guy, for scaring off another potential fan.
Good thing we didn't spend money on tickets for more than one of these. The concert was a huge disappointment. Guy played with no feeling or emotion whatsoever. There was no lyricism or subtlety to speak of. His tempos were way too fast (most fast works are usually played too fast, but that's a whole other discussion), he left no space between the notes, and as a result ended up glossing over every significant detail. Appassionata's gorgeous finale, while certainly fast, lives and dies by the relaxed fluidity of the performer's approach, but Guy hammered through it like an automaton. No. 25's Andante movement can be achingly beautiful in the right hands, but we heard none of that beauty on Friday. Guy seemed to want nothing better than to get to the next fast movement so he could so some more mindless shredding.
This kind of butchering of sublime music breaks my heart, and in the case of Beethoven sonatas - some of the greatest piano music of all time -- makes me angry. J., a lifelong musician and classical music fan, has inexplicably been skeptical about Beethoven's solo piano music, and Friday's concert has done nothing to change her mind. Thank you, Mr. Guy, for scaring off another potential fan.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
You know how Google sometimes modifies its logo on their home page to incorporate a graphic related to an anniversary of a historic event? I wonder why this week they chose to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street rather than the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surely it wouldn't have been too difficult to come up with a cartoon of a crumbling graffiti-festooned wall, or, better yet, a disintegrating hammer and sickle.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Alberto Moravia, The Conformist
Warning: Spoilers follow.
Finished Alberto Moravia's The Conformist a few days ago. I picked up the book many years at a local bookstore's sidewalk sale. Until then, I had not even known that Bertolucci's brilliant 1970 film with Jean-Louis Tritignan as Marcello was based on a novel. I don't have too much to say about the book, but on the whole I enjoyed it. The style, or perhaps the translation, was off-putting at first - Marcello's every thought and emotion explained, with nothing left for us to infer or deduce. But it grew on me, and somehow the writing ended up being fairly powerful despite the overly literal style. I kept referring back to my memories of the film, of course, which probably made the novel more vivid for me than it otherwise would have been, but it also reminded me how many details of the film I had forgotten. It's definitely going on the re-watch list. It's probably worth pointing out that Bertolucci stuck to the book very closely until the end, but then diverged sharply - in the book, Marcello isn't even present at the scene of Quadri's murder. And for the life of me, I could not remember the very final scene, where Marcello and his family die when their car gets strafed by an Allied plane, in the film at all. Either Bertolucci chose to omit it - I can't imagine why, though, its absence changes the overall character of the work significantly - or my memory is worse than I realize.
Finished Alberto Moravia's The Conformist a few days ago. I picked up the book many years at a local bookstore's sidewalk sale. Until then, I had not even known that Bertolucci's brilliant 1970 film with Jean-Louis Tritignan as Marcello was based on a novel. I don't have too much to say about the book, but on the whole I enjoyed it. The style, or perhaps the translation, was off-putting at first - Marcello's every thought and emotion explained, with nothing left for us to infer or deduce. But it grew on me, and somehow the writing ended up being fairly powerful despite the overly literal style. I kept referring back to my memories of the film, of course, which probably made the novel more vivid for me than it otherwise would have been, but it also reminded me how many details of the film I had forgotten. It's definitely going on the re-watch list. It's probably worth pointing out that Bertolucci stuck to the book very closely until the end, but then diverged sharply - in the book, Marcello isn't even present at the scene of Quadri's murder. And for the life of me, I could not remember the very final scene, where Marcello and his family die when their car gets strafed by an Allied plane, in the film at all. Either Bertolucci chose to omit it - I can't imagine why, though, its absence changes the overall character of the work significantly - or my memory is worse than I realize.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Virginia Elections
I admit, with a fair amount of guilt, that I did not vote today in Virginia's gubernatorial and state house elections, even though on previous occasions, I have implored others to vote whenever possible. I simply could not bring myself to vote for a candidate who had views that are abhorrent to me in a deepest possible way, and since all candidates held at least one such view, well, there you have it. My equivalent of a vote of disapproval of all.
We realize that mathematically, the idea that each individual's single vote will affect the outcome of an election is absurd. I should concede here that if every voter took the previous sentence to heart, the system would collapse. But still, that is not why we vote, or at least not why I do. As I've said before, I vote because I can, while many millions of people around the world cannot, and because it is an opportunity to make a gesture of approval for a certain set of ideas and principles. The gesture is mostly to myself -- I don't go around shouting the names of the candidates I voted for and why I chose them. Still, I see it as a moral responsibility to make that gesture.
Needless to say, this becomes impossible when the likelihood of finding such a set of ideas and principles embodied in the stated opinions of a single candidate is pretty much nil. Yes, politics is the art of the possible, we've been told a thousand times, and that you pick the least of all evils, that you vote for the candidate whose "bad part" is less objectionable than the others'. And there have been occasions in the past where I have done that. But there is a limit. I believe that it is possible to reach a level of objectionableness beyond which my moral principles do not allow me to go, and I have reached it this year. Let's hope that for our society's sake, that does not become a pattern, though I frequently fear it it might.
We realize that mathematically, the idea that each individual's single vote will affect the outcome of an election is absurd. I should concede here that if every voter took the previous sentence to heart, the system would collapse. But still, that is not why we vote, or at least not why I do. As I've said before, I vote because I can, while many millions of people around the world cannot, and because it is an opportunity to make a gesture of approval for a certain set of ideas and principles. The gesture is mostly to myself -- I don't go around shouting the names of the candidates I voted for and why I chose them. Still, I see it as a moral responsibility to make that gesture.
Needless to say, this becomes impossible when the likelihood of finding such a set of ideas and principles embodied in the stated opinions of a single candidate is pretty much nil. Yes, politics is the art of the possible, we've been told a thousand times, and that you pick the least of all evils, that you vote for the candidate whose "bad part" is less objectionable than the others'. And there have been occasions in the past where I have done that. But there is a limit. I believe that it is possible to reach a level of objectionableness beyond which my moral principles do not allow me to go, and I have reached it this year. Let's hope that for our society's sake, that does not become a pattern, though I frequently fear it it might.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Anne Appelbaum, GULAG: A History
A few of us will some day read Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus of Soviet forced labor camps, Gulag Archipelago. For the rest, there is Anne Appelbaum's GULAG: A History (Doubleday, 2003). The word "Gulag" has come to be synonymous with the camp system itself, and is even frequently misused to mean an individual camp, but is in fact an abbreviation for "Central Administration of Camps," the Soviet bureaucracy that ran the system. Though the KGB, and its predecessors OGPU and NKVD, have frequently vied for control of the camps with the Interior Ministry, the KGB won, as it did in most aspects of Soviet life, and in light of the fact that the KGB's archives were the only ones that were not opened to researchers after 1991, Appelbaum's study is as comprehensive and precise as we can hope to find until that situation changes.
Those who have no meaningful knowledge of Soviet camps will find more than they will have bargained for. It's all here - the unbearable weather of Russia's Arctic regions, appalling sanitation, starvation rations, inhumane working hours, and beyond-cruel punishments for the slightest disciplinary infractions. She does not skimp on details, some of which may come as a surprise even to those who think themselves knowledgeable. Prisoners on the verge of starvation who spend the last days of their lives crawling around garbage dumps in search of scarps. Women gang-raped literally to death on the transport ships plying the waters of the Russian Far East. It goes on.
The value of Appelbaum's research and writing, though, extends far beyond these topics, as valuable as they are. She masterfully analyzes the complex social structure of the camps - the informers, the bribery, the gangs and the rivalries among prisoners. What will no doubt come as a shock to many Western readers is the revelation that the line separating the guards from the guarded could, and frequently did, blur. Prisoners became guards with regularity, often going directly from one status to the other.
In the West, more often than not Soviet camps are mentioned in the same breath as political prisoners, so I am particularly grateful to Appelbaum for the attention she pays to the professional criminals that have always, even in the darkest days of political repression, constituted the majority of the camps' population. The Soviet Union having been a society under which the most minute aspects of an individual's life were controlled by the government, many readers do not realize that the country has always, even under Stalin, had a large class of full-time criminals, complete with its own code of ethics, distinctive style of dress and, famously, a patois that at times barely sounded like mainstream Russian. As a primer on this underworld, one could do a lot worse than Appelbaum's book.
Nor does she skimp on the government's administration of the camps and the dismal failures that usually accompanied it. From its inception in 1926, GULAG was always intended to be a bulwark of Stalin's economic policy, but in fact had not had a single profitable year in all of its existence. That does not surprise us today, of course, but what might is her revelation that also throughout its existence, the system was plagued with intense conflict between the central administrators in Moscow and the local commanders at the individual camps. The local bosses, expected to fulfill completely unreasonable production norms, and occasionally, Appelbaum is careful to note, out of genuine desire to improve their prisoners' lot, constantly harped on the bureaucrats for woefully inadequate supplies, lack of support, and the general fact that the bureaucrats simply did not get it.
Appelbaum's writing style is perfect for the topic. She is direct, clear, and most importantly, completely unsentimental. This is a documentary work based on research, and the lack of fuzzy, emotional language in no way diminishes its power or makes us appreciate the plight of the tens of millions of GULAG's victims any less. And her research is impressive to say the least. Communist apologists will no doubt find fault with it, citing, among other things, her reliance on the writing of Varlam Shalamov, who, while a survivor of the camps, has only published camp-themed fiction. But that's just squeaking of a discontented few. Remove Shalamov completely, and the book will lose no more than a few pages and none of its power.
In the closing chapters, Appelbaum does offer some thoughts on why the history of the camps has not played nearly as prominent a role in Russia's social and political discourse after 1991 as many have expected. More significantly, she takes a few pages to lament the West's relative indifference to what we can reasonably view as the largest case of mass murder, if not genocide, in history. Yes, nothing Appelbaum says in conclusion is different from Santayana's "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," but of countless things we, as a civilization, would never want to repeat, the GULAG is right at the top, and in English at least, it has no better chronicler than Anne Appelbaum.
Those who have no meaningful knowledge of Soviet camps will find more than they will have bargained for. It's all here - the unbearable weather of Russia's Arctic regions, appalling sanitation, starvation rations, inhumane working hours, and beyond-cruel punishments for the slightest disciplinary infractions. She does not skimp on details, some of which may come as a surprise even to those who think themselves knowledgeable. Prisoners on the verge of starvation who spend the last days of their lives crawling around garbage dumps in search of scarps. Women gang-raped literally to death on the transport ships plying the waters of the Russian Far East. It goes on.
The value of Appelbaum's research and writing, though, extends far beyond these topics, as valuable as they are. She masterfully analyzes the complex social structure of the camps - the informers, the bribery, the gangs and the rivalries among prisoners. What will no doubt come as a shock to many Western readers is the revelation that the line separating the guards from the guarded could, and frequently did, blur. Prisoners became guards with regularity, often going directly from one status to the other.
In the West, more often than not Soviet camps are mentioned in the same breath as political prisoners, so I am particularly grateful to Appelbaum for the attention she pays to the professional criminals that have always, even in the darkest days of political repression, constituted the majority of the camps' population. The Soviet Union having been a society under which the most minute aspects of an individual's life were controlled by the government, many readers do not realize that the country has always, even under Stalin, had a large class of full-time criminals, complete with its own code of ethics, distinctive style of dress and, famously, a patois that at times barely sounded like mainstream Russian. As a primer on this underworld, one could do a lot worse than Appelbaum's book.
Nor does she skimp on the government's administration of the camps and the dismal failures that usually accompanied it. From its inception in 1926, GULAG was always intended to be a bulwark of Stalin's economic policy, but in fact had not had a single profitable year in all of its existence. That does not surprise us today, of course, but what might is her revelation that also throughout its existence, the system was plagued with intense conflict between the central administrators in Moscow and the local commanders at the individual camps. The local bosses, expected to fulfill completely unreasonable production norms, and occasionally, Appelbaum is careful to note, out of genuine desire to improve their prisoners' lot, constantly harped on the bureaucrats for woefully inadequate supplies, lack of support, and the general fact that the bureaucrats simply did not get it.
Appelbaum's writing style is perfect for the topic. She is direct, clear, and most importantly, completely unsentimental. This is a documentary work based on research, and the lack of fuzzy, emotional language in no way diminishes its power or makes us appreciate the plight of the tens of millions of GULAG's victims any less. And her research is impressive to say the least. Communist apologists will no doubt find fault with it, citing, among other things, her reliance on the writing of Varlam Shalamov, who, while a survivor of the camps, has only published camp-themed fiction. But that's just squeaking of a discontented few. Remove Shalamov completely, and the book will lose no more than a few pages and none of its power.
In the closing chapters, Appelbaum does offer some thoughts on why the history of the camps has not played nearly as prominent a role in Russia's social and political discourse after 1991 as many have expected. More significantly, she takes a few pages to lament the West's relative indifference to what we can reasonably view as the largest case of mass murder, if not genocide, in history. Yes, nothing Appelbaum says in conclusion is different from Santayana's "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," but of countless things we, as a civilization, would never want to repeat, the GULAG is right at the top, and in English at least, it has no better chronicler than Anne Appelbaum.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day Five, Part II
Our original plan was to come down the Western side of the state of Michigan and stop for a visit at two legendary breweries in the Grand Rapids area - Founders in Grand Rapids proper, and New Holland in Holland, MI, a few miles away. We were now completely off schedule, however. Determined to catch at least one, we headed for Founders. After an uneventful two and a half hours on US-131, we rolled into downtown Grand Rapids.
Founders, located in the warehouse district on the edge of downtown, turned out to be a block-long hangar, with several roll-top gates, all of them open, separating the cavernous interior from an equally capacious raised deck. At nine o'clock on a Tuesday, the place was well peopled with a stylish twenty-something crowd, but we had no trouble finding two seats at the end of the bar opposite the stage. A singer was performing, accompanying himself on guitar, but the place was so vast that we could barely hear him in our corner. Founders has made a reputation in recent years for being a hotbed of extreme beer, and they did not disappoint. They are most famous, or infamous, for a beer called KBS. It used to stand for Kentucky Bourbon Stout, but seeing as they were nowhere near Kentucky, authorities intervened. Thanks to our generous and enthusiastic bartended, we tasted it. A 11.2% ABV monster aged in Bourbon barrels, it was so intense that the ounce or so he poured for us was more than enough. I cannot imagine drinking even a snifter of the stuff, much less a pint. We had to be a bit careful, seeing as we still had a couple of hours of nighttime driving ahead of us, but I did enjoy a snifter of the Hand of Doom, which is founder's double IPA aged, once again, in Bourbon barrels (definitely a signature of the brewery). It was enormous - huge hops, huge fruit, big funk and pronounced alcohol (10.4% ABV). Evidently, it is not bottled, so we were glad we got to experience it at the source. There were many, many other fascinating-sounding beers on the blackboard, so we made a mental note to come back (the annual release of KBS in March is supposed to be worth attending), and 130 miles later, were back in Ann Arbor.
Founders, located in the warehouse district on the edge of downtown, turned out to be a block-long hangar, with several roll-top gates, all of them open, separating the cavernous interior from an equally capacious raised deck. At nine o'clock on a Tuesday, the place was well peopled with a stylish twenty-something crowd, but we had no trouble finding two seats at the end of the bar opposite the stage. A singer was performing, accompanying himself on guitar, but the place was so vast that we could barely hear him in our corner. Founders has made a reputation in recent years for being a hotbed of extreme beer, and they did not disappoint. They are most famous, or infamous, for a beer called KBS. It used to stand for Kentucky Bourbon Stout, but seeing as they were nowhere near Kentucky, authorities intervened. Thanks to our generous and enthusiastic bartended, we tasted it. A 11.2% ABV monster aged in Bourbon barrels, it was so intense that the ounce or so he poured for us was more than enough. I cannot imagine drinking even a snifter of the stuff, much less a pint. We had to be a bit careful, seeing as we still had a couple of hours of nighttime driving ahead of us, but I did enjoy a snifter of the Hand of Doom, which is founder's double IPA aged, once again, in Bourbon barrels (definitely a signature of the brewery). It was enormous - huge hops, huge fruit, big funk and pronounced alcohol (10.4% ABV). Evidently, it is not bottled, so we were glad we got to experience it at the source. There were many, many other fascinating-sounding beers on the blackboard, so we made a mental note to come back (the annual release of KBS in March is supposed to be worth attending), and 130 miles later, were back in Ann Arbor.
Road Trip 2009, Day Five, Part I
Our second day in the wine country blessed us with the sort of pluperfect weather that I had been disproportionately lucky to experience on my previous visits to Northern Michigan - blindingly bright sun, temperatures in the low sixties, no humidity, and the overpowering blue of the sky that I had only seen in the Southwest. Since wineries didn't open until 11:00 at the earliest, and some not until noon, we had time to kill, so we enjoyed a leisurely and hearty breakfast at the Omlette Shoppe in downtown Traverse City (all the better to absorb Leelanau Peninsula's bounty), then walked around along the lake shore a bit, admiring the views of the bay and discussing G.&N.'s recent idea of leaving dry land altogether and living full-time on a sailboat for a while. I must say that to my myopic, risk-averse mind it sounded completely insane, though if I know anyone who would not only be able to pull it off but actually enjoy it, it would be them.
Our first winery of the day was L. Mawby, and I completely shot ourselves in the foot by not bringing along detailed directions. The place proved to be impossible to find. We drove all around the lower half of Leelanau for at least an hour, stopping to ask for directions and at one point passing within 500 feet of the entrance without realizing it, until we finally arrived by a combination of unmarked, barely paved roads and sheer intuition. I'm glad we persevered. Mawby would be a rarity in most wine-growing regions. To find it in Michigan was downright shocking. They make nothing but sparkling wines, the vast majority of them using the traditional mèthode champenoise, where the wine is fermented in bottles, rather than tanks or barrels. The bottles are arranged on racks and turned periodically to ensure even distribution of yeast. It is an expensive and arcane method of winemaking, but it is what makes Champagne Champagne. In addition to the traditional sparklers, Mawby makes a line of tank-fermented wines under the M. Lawrence label.
The tasting room was small and sparse, with a small deck in the back, and although you could not see the bay, the views of gently rolling hills covered with rows of vines still made for an idyllic location. The tasting is normally paid, and geared towards helping the visitor select their favorite wine, of which they would then buy a glass and enjoy it on the deck. G., however, gently brought his industry connection to bear, and we were able to taste through most of the wines free of charge, poured by the very knowledgeable and pleasant but refreshingly unsalesmanlike middle-aged woman whose name I'm kicking myself for not having asked. The wines were delicious and stood up admirably, in my opinion, to anything from the West Coast. We focused on the traditional wines, though our hostess did talk us into trying one of the tank-fermented ones. The two lines seem to serve radically different markets. The traditional wines are carefully labeled with the French designation of their sweetness (Brut, Sec and so on) and are named either after their types, Champagne-style (Blanc de Blancs, Blanc de Noirs), or with some appropriately hoity-toity sounding moniker (e.g. Cremant Classic). The sweetest of the bunch, Jadore, is fairly sweet, but still balanced and would not be out of place on any dinner table that would take an off-dry Riesling. The tank-fermented wines, on the other hand, all have gimmicky names intended to evoke stereotypical sparkling-wine-drinking occasions (Us, Fizz, Wet, etc.) and are one-dimensionally sweet. The one we tried is the perennial favorite that is actually called Sex. It is a rosé, cloying, with an off-putting, unintegrated finish. It sells like crazy, according to our hostess, for a whole bunch of wrong reasons (the fact that no one wants to say "I don't like Sex" out loud is only the beginning). The pun in the name is no doubt lost on the vast majority of buyers.
Raftshol Vnieyards
Our next stop was going to be Forty-Five North, but we arrived to discover that it was closed, so we moved on immediately to Raftshol Vineyards. We arrived to find a large, dilapidated barn with a small concrete tower, and adjacent to it, a prefabricated single-story structure that claimed to be the tasting room. The interior was a single large room, and it was in complete disarray. A high counter, something you might find in a cut-rate reception hall, to be used by itinerant bartenders, ran alongside one wall; this would prove to be the tasting area. Across the room from it, something akin to an office - desk, a computer, some bookshelves, peeked from behind a mountain of empty cardboards boxes. Various other objects were strewn about, dominated by a bottle labeling machine in one corner. During my research, Raftshol caught my eye because they appeared to emphasize red wines. Reds are notoriously more difficult to make than whites, and the room we were now in did not exude the sort of discipline required to make good reds. A few people were milling about by the counter, but left shortly after we arrived, leaving us in the presence of an elderly gentleman in suspenders and a flannel shirt, sporting a Lincolnesque beard. This turned out to be Warren Raftshol, owner, vine grower and winemaker. He was so self-effacing as to appear almost uncaring. His answer to many of our questions was a shrug of the shoulders followed by "I wasn't paying much attention." Never have I met anyone in the wine world who had so little need for the trappings of wine commerce and the image that frequently goes along with it.
I would have loved to report that the wines were spectacular, smashing once and for all the myriad myths associated with winemaking and wine drinking. Sadly, they were not. The Pinot Noir, which we tasted from dusty, mismatched glasses, was exceedingly light in color and flavor, murky (bottled completely unfiltered, if memory serves) and tasted home-made. The Bordeaux blend (to think that a place like this even made one!) was not a wine I would reach for expectantly, but was at least convincing, the unmistakable flavor combination of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc detectable, even if muted. When I asked whether Mr. Raftshol has had much luck with Cabernet Sauvignon, his reply was a non-chalant "Not really." The straight Cab Franc, not surprisingly, aquitted itself the best, and at $9, was a bargain. G. and I bought a few bottles between the two of us, and Mr. Raftshol labeled them for us on the spot, putting the foil over the necks of the bottles and setting it with a hair dryer before handing the bottles to us and asking us to let them sit for a couple of weeks as he had bottled them only a few days before our visit.
Our long search for L. Mawby had thrown us off-schedule, and we were now well into the afternoon. While at Mawby, we learned that one of the grapes they grew was Vignoles, an obscure French blending grape that seemed to do well in the local climate. Furthermore, we found out that another local winery, Leelanau Cellars, made a varietal Vignoles. Their tasting room was in the village of Suttons Bay, which happened to be only a couple of miles away, so we headed there to try it. They turned out to have not one but two Vignole-based wines. We found the basic, dry, table Vignoles to be good, though not really unique - crisp, but with a decent body and good fruit. A solid, everyday white wine. It was well worth stopping in at Leelanau Cellars for other reasons, though - the winery features a large tasting room, strikingly finished with maple planks on the interior, with an enormous panoramic window overlooking the bay. It was a lovely place to spend some time, and the wines we tasted from Leelanau's enormous portfolio were in tune with the quality of the wines we had been tasting. The biggest surprise turned out to be the other Vignoles - a botrytis dessert wine. Botrytis - a fungus which, under the right conditions, can remove enough moisture from grapes to concentrate the sugars without killing the grape altogether, is, of course, what makes Sauternes, probably the world's most famous dessert wine, Sauternes. Making a botrytis wine is an enormous amount of work, but Leelanau Cellars pulled it off. While I could not describe the flavor with any precision, it was delicious and enormously complex. There is a bottle in my fridge, waiting to be revisited.
At this point, the afternoon was starting to bend towards evening. We relaxed for a while on the deck of the restaurant next door to the tasting room, enjoying a glass of wine and mesmerizing views of the bay, then got on the road and headed South, for we had one more place to visit before returning to Ann Arbor.
Our first winery of the day was L. Mawby, and I completely shot ourselves in the foot by not bringing along detailed directions. The place proved to be impossible to find. We drove all around the lower half of Leelanau for at least an hour, stopping to ask for directions and at one point passing within 500 feet of the entrance without realizing it, until we finally arrived by a combination of unmarked, barely paved roads and sheer intuition. I'm glad we persevered. Mawby would be a rarity in most wine-growing regions. To find it in Michigan was downright shocking. They make nothing but sparkling wines, the vast majority of them using the traditional mèthode champenoise, where the wine is fermented in bottles, rather than tanks or barrels. The bottles are arranged on racks and turned periodically to ensure even distribution of yeast. It is an expensive and arcane method of winemaking, but it is what makes Champagne Champagne. In addition to the traditional sparklers, Mawby makes a line of tank-fermented wines under the M. Lawrence label.
The tasting room was small and sparse, with a small deck in the back, and although you could not see the bay, the views of gently rolling hills covered with rows of vines still made for an idyllic location. The tasting is normally paid, and geared towards helping the visitor select their favorite wine, of which they would then buy a glass and enjoy it on the deck. G., however, gently brought his industry connection to bear, and we were able to taste through most of the wines free of charge, poured by the very knowledgeable and pleasant but refreshingly unsalesmanlike middle-aged woman whose name I'm kicking myself for not having asked. The wines were delicious and stood up admirably, in my opinion, to anything from the West Coast. We focused on the traditional wines, though our hostess did talk us into trying one of the tank-fermented ones. The two lines seem to serve radically different markets. The traditional wines are carefully labeled with the French designation of their sweetness (Brut, Sec and so on) and are named either after their types, Champagne-style (Blanc de Blancs, Blanc de Noirs), or with some appropriately hoity-toity sounding moniker (e.g. Cremant Classic). The sweetest of the bunch, Jadore, is fairly sweet, but still balanced and would not be out of place on any dinner table that would take an off-dry Riesling. The tank-fermented wines, on the other hand, all have gimmicky names intended to evoke stereotypical sparkling-wine-drinking occasions (Us, Fizz, Wet, etc.) and are one-dimensionally sweet. The one we tried is the perennial favorite that is actually called Sex. It is a rosé, cloying, with an off-putting, unintegrated finish. It sells like crazy, according to our hostess, for a whole bunch of wrong reasons (the fact that no one wants to say "I don't like Sex" out loud is only the beginning). The pun in the name is no doubt lost on the vast majority of buyers.
Raftshol Vnieyards Our next stop was going to be Forty-Five North, but we arrived to discover that it was closed, so we moved on immediately to Raftshol Vineyards. We arrived to find a large, dilapidated barn with a small concrete tower, and adjacent to it, a prefabricated single-story structure that claimed to be the tasting room. The interior was a single large room, and it was in complete disarray. A high counter, something you might find in a cut-rate reception hall, to be used by itinerant bartenders, ran alongside one wall; this would prove to be the tasting area. Across the room from it, something akin to an office - desk, a computer, some bookshelves, peeked from behind a mountain of empty cardboards boxes. Various other objects were strewn about, dominated by a bottle labeling machine in one corner. During my research, Raftshol caught my eye because they appeared to emphasize red wines. Reds are notoriously more difficult to make than whites, and the room we were now in did not exude the sort of discipline required to make good reds. A few people were milling about by the counter, but left shortly after we arrived, leaving us in the presence of an elderly gentleman in suspenders and a flannel shirt, sporting a Lincolnesque beard. This turned out to be Warren Raftshol, owner, vine grower and winemaker. He was so self-effacing as to appear almost uncaring. His answer to many of our questions was a shrug of the shoulders followed by "I wasn't paying much attention." Never have I met anyone in the wine world who had so little need for the trappings of wine commerce and the image that frequently goes along with it.
I would have loved to report that the wines were spectacular, smashing once and for all the myriad myths associated with winemaking and wine drinking. Sadly, they were not. The Pinot Noir, which we tasted from dusty, mismatched glasses, was exceedingly light in color and flavor, murky (bottled completely unfiltered, if memory serves) and tasted home-made. The Bordeaux blend (to think that a place like this even made one!) was not a wine I would reach for expectantly, but was at least convincing, the unmistakable flavor combination of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc detectable, even if muted. When I asked whether Mr. Raftshol has had much luck with Cabernet Sauvignon, his reply was a non-chalant "Not really." The straight Cab Franc, not surprisingly, aquitted itself the best, and at $9, was a bargain. G. and I bought a few bottles between the two of us, and Mr. Raftshol labeled them for us on the spot, putting the foil over the necks of the bottles and setting it with a hair dryer before handing the bottles to us and asking us to let them sit for a couple of weeks as he had bottled them only a few days before our visit.
Our long search for L. Mawby had thrown us off-schedule, and we were now well into the afternoon. While at Mawby, we learned that one of the grapes they grew was Vignoles, an obscure French blending grape that seemed to do well in the local climate. Furthermore, we found out that another local winery, Leelanau Cellars, made a varietal Vignoles. Their tasting room was in the village of Suttons Bay, which happened to be only a couple of miles away, so we headed there to try it. They turned out to have not one but two Vignole-based wines. We found the basic, dry, table Vignoles to be good, though not really unique - crisp, but with a decent body and good fruit. A solid, everyday white wine. It was well worth stopping in at Leelanau Cellars for other reasons, though - the winery features a large tasting room, strikingly finished with maple planks on the interior, with an enormous panoramic window overlooking the bay. It was a lovely place to spend some time, and the wines we tasted from Leelanau's enormous portfolio were in tune with the quality of the wines we had been tasting. The biggest surprise turned out to be the other Vignoles - a botrytis dessert wine. Botrytis - a fungus which, under the right conditions, can remove enough moisture from grapes to concentrate the sugars without killing the grape altogether, is, of course, what makes Sauternes, probably the world's most famous dessert wine, Sauternes. Making a botrytis wine is an enormous amount of work, but Leelanau Cellars pulled it off. While I could not describe the flavor with any precision, it was delicious and enormously complex. There is a bottle in my fridge, waiting to be revisited.
At this point, the afternoon was starting to bend towards evening. We relaxed for a while on the deck of the restaurant next door to the tasting room, enjoying a glass of wine and mesmerizing views of the bay, then got on the road and headed South, for we had one more place to visit before returning to Ann Arbor.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Days Three and Four
I spent an uneventful but very pleasant Sunday in Ann Arbor, catching up with my friends, walking leisurely around downtown and eating a delicious meal of quesadillas with home-made pico de gallo and guacamole that my friends prepared. At 7:00 a.m. Monday morning, G. and I, leaving N. behind to a much-needed couple of days of peace and quiet, set off for Traverse City. Here, I should give props to G., who would win a gold medal if staying up late and sleeping in was an Olympic sport, for being up and out at the crack of dawn, making the travel tyrant in me very happy.
The four-hour drive under the relentless gray of central Michigan skies passed without incident, and we rolled into downtown Traverse City a little after noon.
We had lunch at a small place on Front St. that featured local organic ingredients (the name escapes me for some reason), where I had a minimalist but delicious sandwich of local Lake Michigan walleye pan-fried in olive oil, then immediately set off for the wineries.
Two peninsulas jut out into Grand Traverse Bay on either side of Traverse City - Leelanau and the much smaller Old Mission to the East. Over two dozen wineries are spread across the two. As a wine-growing an wine-making region, the area is young: the earliest wineries were established in the late 1970s, but most have sprung up in the 80s and early 90s. Besides the microclimate created by the geography of the peninsulas and the bay, the area lies directly on the 45th parallel, said to create ideal conditions for growing grapes because of the angle at which the sun's rays hit the ground. Willamette Valley in Oregon, among others, is located on the 45th parallel. To the extent that the area is known at all, which isn't much, it is known for Riesling and Gewurztraminer - not surprising, given those grapes' predilection for cool climates. We would soon find out that Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris were also common, and that Cabernet Franc has taken off like gangbusters. Similar to other "secondary" wine-growing areas like Virginia and New York's Finger Lakes, Michigan makes a fair number of sweet, fruit-flavored wines (the primary flavoring being locally grown cherries), but "serious" wines are also plentiful and growing stronger.
There was no way we could visit all the wineries in the two days available to us, and although I had done some research, my choices were somewhat random - I looked for places that emphasized "serious" wines and deemphasized cherry-flavored nonsense or grew unusual varieties and made unusual styles, as well as wineries that focused on wines and did not attempt to cram restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts into their properties. Our first stop was Penninsula Cellars, whose tasting room is located in a former one-room schoolhouse build in 1896. Their portfolio is large and does include some fruit-flavored wines, along with a full spectrum of whites and a few reds, some of them off-dry. We focused on the dry wines, poured by a friendly but excessively languid young blonde, and I was immediately struck by the quality. These were delicious, well-made wines with no obvious defects. Trying to take detailed tasting notes would have been overwhelming, but the few I did jot down tell me that the Gewurztraminer was a standout. There is a bottle still in my fridge, so I'll be able to do a proper review soon enough. I also bought a bottle of their dry Riesling and opened it a couple of weeks after getting home. In addition to the typical Riesling flavors of citrus and that elusive petroleum quality on the back palate, the Peninsula had a pronounced flavor of honeydew melon. It was delicious.
From Peninsula, we headed up the road to Chateau Grand Traverse, the largest and most commercial winery we would visit on our entire tour. We took a tour of the wine-making facilities (G., who is a trained sommelier, was impressed by the winery's methodic approach - we would see its opposite the following day), then tasted a few wines from their long list in the giant and excessively touristy tasting room-cum-gift shop. Despite the scale and the commercial focus, the wines were good, and, probably thanks to the volume, more affordable than elsewhere. Much like in Virginia, Michigan wines tend to be on the expensive side - the economics of winemaking and the need to recoup the enormous investment a winery requires, I suppose. We've all heard the joke: Q: How do you make a small fortune in wine-making? A: Start with a large one.
Our next stop was Brys Estate (pronounced "Brice"). Visibly a high-end operation, with a stylish, oak-paneled tasting room, it had no fruit-flavored wines in its portfolio and was the site of our first paid tasting. It was also the only scam and the only real disappointment of the trip. Our wine was poured by a handsome and gregarious young fellow, friendly but ever so slightly slippery, with something of a faux-intellectual air about him. 2007, evidently, was the best vintage in the history of Michigan winemaking, and Brys had made a series of super-premium wines in that vintage. With only 500 bottles of each wine available, they were selling for a shocking $50/bottle, but for $10, we could taste all of them, and even get some food thrown in. What a deal. The food proved to be downright insulting - a soggy Carr's cracker, a small glop of stale goat cheese and a piece of "salami" that I was convinced was actually Slim-Jim, on a paper plate directly out of the refrigerator, where I am sure it had been sitting since before the 2007 vintage was even picked. Out first wine was a Chardonnay, and I immediately got a whiff of nail polish - ethyl acetate (thanks, G., for the chemistry lesson), a classic flaw in a wine. Our trust was permanently undermined, though I must admit that objectively, the reds - a Pinot Noir, a Merlot and a Cab Franc - were good. Just not $50 good.
Our last stop on Old Mission was 2Lads, the Northern-most winery on the Peninsula. Located in a striking modernist building overlooking the vineyards and Grand Traverse Bay beyond, the place is breathtaking for its location and design, but you might conclude that the attention and investment lavished on the appearance would be concomitantly absent from their products. You would be wrong - the wines were delicious; the best we tasted that day and the best reds of the entire trip. The portfolio is small - these guys are super-focused - but they get back in quality what they sacrifice in variety. Both the Pinot Noir and the Cabernet Franc, though pricey at $25, were knockouts: the Pinot smooth and fruity but with excellent depth and structure, the Cab enormous and packed with flavor, drinkable now with a hearty meal but designed, I suspect, for cellaring. The people at the tasting room were very knowledgeable, and we left with a feeling of having found the holy grail of Michigan wine.
It had started to rain by this time, and after having paid a quick visit to the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsula, we drove back to Traverse City, checked into our motel and, somewhat refreshed, set out in search of dinner and, for a change, a non-grape-based beverage. I knew of two brewpubs in town - Mackinaw and North Peak, and we intended to try them both. The server at Mackinaw, however, informed us of a new place - Right Brain Brewing Company - well hidden in a former warehouse on the edge of downtown and accessed through an entrance shared with a hair salon. Intrigued, we abandoned North Peak in its favor. What we found was a relatively quiet, well-lit room with cafeteria-style tables and a bar that looked more like a diner counter. The place felt like a mixture of a coffeehouse and a public library, not a pub. Right Brain's planning and scheduling still needs to be ironed out, apparently - they were out of many of the beers on their list - but we did have a delicious, crisp ESB and an enormously complex, aromatic barley wine. I wish I had taken detailed notes.
It was late by this time, but one of the cafes downtown was still open, so we stopped in for a detoxifying pot of green tea and a bit of ceremonial reading from Kingsley Amis's On Drink before heading back to the motel to sleep off our first day of tasting.
The four-hour drive under the relentless gray of central Michigan skies passed without incident, and we rolled into downtown Traverse City a little after noon.
We had lunch at a small place on Front St. that featured local organic ingredients (the name escapes me for some reason), where I had a minimalist but delicious sandwich of local Lake Michigan walleye pan-fried in olive oil, then immediately set off for the wineries.Two peninsulas jut out into Grand Traverse Bay on either side of Traverse City - Leelanau and the much smaller Old Mission to the East. Over two dozen wineries are spread across the two. As a wine-growing an wine-making region, the area is young: the earliest wineries were established in the late 1970s, but most have sprung up in the 80s and early 90s. Besides the microclimate created by the geography of the peninsulas and the bay, the area lies directly on the 45th parallel, said to create ideal conditions for growing grapes because of the angle at which the sun's rays hit the ground. Willamette Valley in Oregon, among others, is located on the 45th parallel. To the extent that the area is known at all, which isn't much, it is known for Riesling and Gewurztraminer - not surprising, given those grapes' predilection for cool climates. We would soon find out that Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris were also common, and that Cabernet Franc has taken off like gangbusters. Similar to other "secondary" wine-growing areas like Virginia and New York's Finger Lakes, Michigan makes a fair number of sweet, fruit-flavored wines (the primary flavoring being locally grown cherries), but "serious" wines are also plentiful and growing stronger.
There was no way we could visit all the wineries in the two days available to us, and although I had done some research, my choices were somewhat random - I looked for places that emphasized "serious" wines and deemphasized cherry-flavored nonsense or grew unusual varieties and made unusual styles, as well as wineries that focused on wines and did not attempt to cram restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts into their properties. Our first stop was Penninsula Cellars, whose tasting room is located in a former one-room schoolhouse build in 1896. Their portfolio is large and does include some fruit-flavored wines, along with a full spectrum of whites and a few reds, some of them off-dry. We focused on the dry wines, poured by a friendly but excessively languid young blonde, and I was immediately struck by the quality. These were delicious, well-made wines with no obvious defects. Trying to take detailed tasting notes would have been overwhelming, but the few I did jot down tell me that the Gewurztraminer was a standout. There is a bottle still in my fridge, so I'll be able to do a proper review soon enough. I also bought a bottle of their dry Riesling and opened it a couple of weeks after getting home. In addition to the typical Riesling flavors of citrus and that elusive petroleum quality on the back palate, the Peninsula had a pronounced flavor of honeydew melon. It was delicious.
From Peninsula, we headed up the road to Chateau Grand Traverse, the largest and most commercial winery we would visit on our entire tour. We took a tour of the wine-making facilities (G., who is a trained sommelier, was impressed by the winery's methodic approach - we would see its opposite the following day), then tasted a few wines from their long list in the giant and excessively touristy tasting room-cum-gift shop. Despite the scale and the commercial focus, the wines were good, and, probably thanks to the volume, more affordable than elsewhere. Much like in Virginia, Michigan wines tend to be on the expensive side - the economics of winemaking and the need to recoup the enormous investment a winery requires, I suppose. We've all heard the joke: Q: How do you make a small fortune in wine-making? A: Start with a large one.
Our next stop was Brys Estate (pronounced "Brice"). Visibly a high-end operation, with a stylish, oak-paneled tasting room, it had no fruit-flavored wines in its portfolio and was the site of our first paid tasting. It was also the only scam and the only real disappointment of the trip. Our wine was poured by a handsome and gregarious young fellow, friendly but ever so slightly slippery, with something of a faux-intellectual air about him. 2007, evidently, was the best vintage in the history of Michigan winemaking, and Brys had made a series of super-premium wines in that vintage. With only 500 bottles of each wine available, they were selling for a shocking $50/bottle, but for $10, we could taste all of them, and even get some food thrown in. What a deal. The food proved to be downright insulting - a soggy Carr's cracker, a small glop of stale goat cheese and a piece of "salami" that I was convinced was actually Slim-Jim, on a paper plate directly out of the refrigerator, where I am sure it had been sitting since before the 2007 vintage was even picked. Out first wine was a Chardonnay, and I immediately got a whiff of nail polish - ethyl acetate (thanks, G., for the chemistry lesson), a classic flaw in a wine. Our trust was permanently undermined, though I must admit that objectively, the reds - a Pinot Noir, a Merlot and a Cab Franc - were good. Just not $50 good.
Our last stop on Old Mission was 2Lads, the Northern-most winery on the Peninsula. Located in a striking modernist building overlooking the vineyards and Grand Traverse Bay beyond, the place is breathtaking for its location and design, but you might conclude that the attention and investment lavished on the appearance would be concomitantly absent from their products. You would be wrong - the wines were delicious; the best we tasted that day and the best reds of the entire trip. The portfolio is small - these guys are super-focused - but they get back in quality what they sacrifice in variety. Both the Pinot Noir and the Cabernet Franc, though pricey at $25, were knockouts: the Pinot smooth and fruity but with excellent depth and structure, the Cab enormous and packed with flavor, drinkable now with a hearty meal but designed, I suspect, for cellaring. The people at the tasting room were very knowledgeable, and we left with a feeling of having found the holy grail of Michigan wine.
It had started to rain by this time, and after having paid a quick visit to the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsula, we drove back to Traverse City, checked into our motel and, somewhat refreshed, set out in search of dinner and, for a change, a non-grape-based beverage. I knew of two brewpubs in town - Mackinaw and North Peak, and we intended to try them both. The server at Mackinaw, however, informed us of a new place - Right Brain Brewing Company - well hidden in a former warehouse on the edge of downtown and accessed through an entrance shared with a hair salon. Intrigued, we abandoned North Peak in its favor. What we found was a relatively quiet, well-lit room with cafeteria-style tables and a bar that looked more like a diner counter. The place felt like a mixture of a coffeehouse and a public library, not a pub. Right Brain's planning and scheduling still needs to be ironed out, apparently - they were out of many of the beers on their list - but we did have a delicious, crisp ESB and an enormously complex, aromatic barley wine. I wish I had taken detailed notes.It was late by this time, but one of the cafes downtown was still open, so we stopped in for a detoxifying pot of green tea and a bit of ceremonial reading from Kingsley Amis's On Drink before heading back to the motel to sleep off our first day of tasting.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part II
Heading out of Pittsburgh, the road passed through the city's Northwestern suburbs - Avalon, Elmsworth, Sewickley -- generic and somewhat dusty, but not the ghosts of their former selves I was expecting (I would get that soon enough). A pristine brown E-Type, an early, six-cylinder model, passed me, its driver waving back when I gave him a thumbs-up. I crossed the Ohio at Rochester, PA, where the river bends sharply to the West and a few minutes later was driving through Beaver, PA - a gem of a town with a textbook Main Street running through the heart of downtown. This was to be the last bit of prosperity I would see all day.
Continuing downstream along PA-39, I crossed into Ohio a few miles later. The industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley was already in evidence a few miles north of Pittsburgh, but the riverside factories and warehouses there, though I couldn't quite tell what they manufactured, all looked operational. Smoke was billowing from their smokestacks, barges were moored nearby and an occasional eighteen-wheeler would pull out of the gates despite it being Saturday. Once on the Ohio side, however, the level of activity dropped precipitously. The town of East Liverpool, the first I hit in the state, was a dismal place from the first house. Covered with decades' worth of industrial grime, the houses all listed and sagged, many of their windows cracked and hung inside with dirty blankets instead of curtains. Cars - mostly dented Chevies and Pontiacs - sat in driveways or along the curbs, but there were no people on the street, not even sitting idly on the steps of their porches or hanging out aimlessly on street corners. The city was a complete ghost town. As I drove past a block-long single-level warehouse, once blue but now of an indeterminate color, its glassless windows gaping vacantly, a teenage boy rode by in the opposite direction on a BMX bike. Naked from the waist up, his body was completely covered with tattoos. He was my only evidence that the town was not completely abandoned. As we passed each other, he did not even glance in my direction even though mine was the only car on the road.
As I continued South on OH-7, the industry started up again on a vast scale. These were obviously power plants. At least one looked nuclear. The landscape was hilly and not unattractive - I was still in the Western foothills of the Appalachians, after all. I couldn't decide whether the massive smokestacks ruined or enhanced it. I've been in love with industrial landscapes since childhood, but in places where I first experienced them - the no-man's land between Brooklyn and Queens - they were total, stretching as far as the eye could see and consuming not only the entire city but seemingly the whole planet. Here, the iron and concrete coexisted with bucolic green hills and a lazily flowing river. Impressive though the power plants were, the coexistence looked uneasy.
I drove South as far as Steubenville, making a point to cut through downtown (larger, but still dead, with a modicum of car traffic but no more pedestrians than E. Liverpool), then cut West on US-22. Almost immediately, the hills leveled off and I was in the farm country Ohio is known for - flat and monotonous. I turned up the music and settled into a sort of stupor, glancing occasionally to the sides of the road and finding nothing but acres of corn and some other equally plentiful crop I couldn't identify. It was well after 1:00 p.m. when I reached Zanesville, named after Ebenezer Zane, an early settler, and not Zane Grey, the writer of Westerns, although Grey was apparently a descendant of Zane and was born here.
Driving through downtown netted no lunch possibilities - the place was dead. A thrift shop here and there, but otherwise, empty storefronts with equally empty loft spaces above them. If I was looking for the proof that the average Midwestern city was dead, I found it here in spades. I learned later that apparently there is a shopping and restaurant district to the North of downtown, along with an artist colony, but knowing nothing of it at the time (I managed to miss the famous Y-Bridge which Amelia Earhart had used for navigation, too), I stayed on US-22 and stopped at a surprisingly cheerful-looking diner a mile or so outside downtown. It was a retro-fifties job, but small, clean, and well kept-up. There was a number of customers at the tables even though it was well past regular lunch time. Sitting at the counter, I ordered a sandwich from a slim woman somewhere in her forties, friendly, her lively dark eyes and youthfully styled hair hinting at the beauty prematurely extinguished (I wanted to think) by life in a place like this. I asked her what the population of the city was. Not knowing, she called over a co-worked, a much older woman, wiry and stern-looking, who said that it had once been fifty thousand, but was now more like thirty-five. The real figure was about twenty-five, I later learned, but it didn't matter. The question I really wanted to ask was "what do people do here?" and was looking for a polite way to ask it. When I managed something along those lines, she launched into exactly the sort of monologue I would have wanted if I was a journalist writing an article about the decline of the American Steel Belt. "There used to be a lot of work here, but one by one the companies left. The mines were good, too, but they are all gone now. Etc., etc." But thirty-five thousand people, I thought. They must do something. They can't all be on the dole. "So what do people do for work now?" I asked. She never answered, doing some more lamenting about the former employers instead, but perhaps her lack of answer was the answer I was looking for.
US-22 Southwest of Zanesville is designated scenic by the AAA, and indeed it was, to the extent possible in the middle of Ohio. My next stop was Lancaster, the birthplace of General Sherman (of Sherman's March). There was a small monument to him in the middle downtown. Knowing that Lancaster was home to an Ohio University campus, I was hoping to get a cup decent coffee, but to no avail. Downtown Lancaster was every bit as dead as Zanesville despite a small festival going on in a park a couple of blocks from where I parked the car. Strangely, a luxurious boutique hotel shared frontage with vacant stores and a pawn shop.
Having looked up some information on these places after the fact, I discovered that all of them - Zanesville, Lancaster, probably even East Liverpool, have some life - communities, restaurants, festivals, museums, art scenes. But it certainly was not obvious from a casual stroll through these cities' downtowns. To an uninformed traveler, they offer little more than on overpowering sense of having been left behind by time.
From Lancaster, I continued South for a while longer on OH-159, also a designated scenic road, then cut North on US-23, bypassed Columbus to the West on its beltway, and continued Northwest on US-33 to Marysville, OH-31 to Kenton, then US-68 to Findlay where I was briefly forced onto I-75 before taking OH-25 to the Toledo bypass and onto US-23 into Michigan, finally arriving in bustling downtown Ann Arbor a few minutes after 9:30 p.m. I made only one other brief stop, in Mt. Victory, OH, where I spotted a complete vintage Gulf gas station. I hoped it was still operational, but it turned out to be just a façade, the building behind it housing a regular auto repair shop.
Continuing downstream along PA-39, I crossed into Ohio a few miles later. The industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley was already in evidence a few miles north of Pittsburgh, but the riverside factories and warehouses there, though I couldn't quite tell what they manufactured, all looked operational. Smoke was billowing from their smokestacks, barges were moored nearby and an occasional eighteen-wheeler would pull out of the gates despite it being Saturday. Once on the Ohio side, however, the level of activity dropped precipitously. The town of East Liverpool, the first I hit in the state, was a dismal place from the first house. Covered with decades' worth of industrial grime, the houses all listed and sagged, many of their windows cracked and hung inside with dirty blankets instead of curtains. Cars - mostly dented Chevies and Pontiacs - sat in driveways or along the curbs, but there were no people on the street, not even sitting idly on the steps of their porches or hanging out aimlessly on street corners. The city was a complete ghost town. As I drove past a block-long single-level warehouse, once blue but now of an indeterminate color, its glassless windows gaping vacantly, a teenage boy rode by in the opposite direction on a BMX bike. Naked from the waist up, his body was completely covered with tattoos. He was my only evidence that the town was not completely abandoned. As we passed each other, he did not even glance in my direction even though mine was the only car on the road.
As I continued South on OH-7, the industry started up again on a vast scale. These were obviously power plants. At least one looked nuclear. The landscape was hilly and not unattractive - I was still in the Western foothills of the Appalachians, after all. I couldn't decide whether the massive smokestacks ruined or enhanced it. I've been in love with industrial landscapes since childhood, but in places where I first experienced them - the no-man's land between Brooklyn and Queens - they were total, stretching as far as the eye could see and consuming not only the entire city but seemingly the whole planet. Here, the iron and concrete coexisted with bucolic green hills and a lazily flowing river. Impressive though the power plants were, the coexistence looked uneasy.
I drove South as far as Steubenville, making a point to cut through downtown (larger, but still dead, with a modicum of car traffic but no more pedestrians than E. Liverpool), then cut West on US-22. Almost immediately, the hills leveled off and I was in the farm country Ohio is known for - flat and monotonous. I turned up the music and settled into a sort of stupor, glancing occasionally to the sides of the road and finding nothing but acres of corn and some other equally plentiful crop I couldn't identify. It was well after 1:00 p.m. when I reached Zanesville, named after Ebenezer Zane, an early settler, and not Zane Grey, the writer of Westerns, although Grey was apparently a descendant of Zane and was born here.
Driving through downtown netted no lunch possibilities - the place was dead. A thrift shop here and there, but otherwise, empty storefronts with equally empty loft spaces above them. If I was looking for the proof that the average Midwestern city was dead, I found it here in spades. I learned later that apparently there is a shopping and restaurant district to the North of downtown, along with an artist colony, but knowing nothing of it at the time (I managed to miss the famous Y-Bridge which Amelia Earhart had used for navigation, too), I stayed on US-22 and stopped at a surprisingly cheerful-looking diner a mile or so outside downtown. It was a retro-fifties job, but small, clean, and well kept-up. There was a number of customers at the tables even though it was well past regular lunch time. Sitting at the counter, I ordered a sandwich from a slim woman somewhere in her forties, friendly, her lively dark eyes and youthfully styled hair hinting at the beauty prematurely extinguished (I wanted to think) by life in a place like this. I asked her what the population of the city was. Not knowing, she called over a co-worked, a much older woman, wiry and stern-looking, who said that it had once been fifty thousand, but was now more like thirty-five. The real figure was about twenty-five, I later learned, but it didn't matter. The question I really wanted to ask was "what do people do here?" and was looking for a polite way to ask it. When I managed something along those lines, she launched into exactly the sort of monologue I would have wanted if I was a journalist writing an article about the decline of the American Steel Belt. "There used to be a lot of work here, but one by one the companies left. The mines were good, too, but they are all gone now. Etc., etc." But thirty-five thousand people, I thought. They must do something. They can't all be on the dole. "So what do people do for work now?" I asked. She never answered, doing some more lamenting about the former employers instead, but perhaps her lack of answer was the answer I was looking for.
US-22 Southwest of Zanesville is designated scenic by the AAA, and indeed it was, to the extent possible in the middle of Ohio. My next stop was Lancaster, the birthplace of General Sherman (of Sherman's March). There was a small monument to him in the middle downtown. Knowing that Lancaster was home to an Ohio University campus, I was hoping to get a cup decent coffee, but to no avail. Downtown Lancaster was every bit as dead as Zanesville despite a small festival going on in a park a couple of blocks from where I parked the car. Strangely, a luxurious boutique hotel shared frontage with vacant stores and a pawn shop.
Having looked up some information on these places after the fact, I discovered that all of them - Zanesville, Lancaster, probably even East Liverpool, have some life - communities, restaurants, festivals, museums, art scenes. But it certainly was not obvious from a casual stroll through these cities' downtowns. To an uninformed traveler, they offer little more than on overpowering sense of having been left behind by time.
From Lancaster, I continued South for a while longer on OH-159, also a designated scenic road, then cut North on US-23, bypassed Columbus to the West on its beltway, and continued Northwest on US-33 to Marysville, OH-31 to Kenton, then US-68 to Findlay where I was briefly forced onto I-75 before taking OH-25 to the Toledo bypass and onto US-23 into Michigan, finally arriving in bustling downtown Ann Arbor a few minutes after 9:30 p.m. I made only one other brief stop, in Mt. Victory, OH, where I spotted a complete vintage Gulf gas station. I hoped it was still operational, but it turned out to be just a façade, the building behind it housing a regular auto repair shop.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part I
The second day of driving would take me across the Ohio River Valley and across the endless farmlands of Ohio. First, however, there was the question of breakfast. I initially wanted to go to the Steel City Diner, a downtown greasy spoon J. and I enjoyed on our visit three years ago, but I walked the six or so blocks only to find that it had closed. Plan B was Pamela's in the Strip, recommended the previous night by the Church's bartender and corroborated by the woman at my hotel's front desk.
The Strip - essentially the area between Liberty Ave. and the bank of the Allegheny River, stretching from downtown roughly to 31st St. -- is, for my money, Pittsburgh's most distinctive, and also useful, neighborhood, especially on Saturday mornings. Originally, and to a great extent still, it was the city's warehouse district. Many of the warehouses have been converted to stores, restaurants and nightclubs, but they happily share real estate with the old machine shops and wholesale glass cutters. In terms of shopping, the twin focus is on home furnishings and food, and while the inexorable march of gentrification hasn't left the Strip untouched, adding a sprinkling of stores selling designer lamps and colorful throw-pillows made from recycled fibers, many of the businesses hark back to the city's days as a working class burg populated by Italian, Polish and Asian immigrants and their descendants. On Saturday mornings, the entire Strip spills out onto the sidewalks and the whole neighborhood turns into an enormous outdoor marketplace. Food vendors of every stripe, especially Italian pastry shops, display their tantalizing wares, many of them baked mere minutes earlier. Espresso machines hiss and foam everywhere. Piles of cheap plastic toys and 99-cent flip-flops block the sidewalks, Chinatown style. It being Pittsburgh, the entire cauldron is generously seasoned with Steelers and Penguins t-shirts.
Pamela's (60 21st St.) is located in the heart of all this. By the time I got there a little after nine and parked the car, both the smallish dining room and the half-dozen outdoor tables were full, and at least a dozen people were waiting, but the counter - the solo traveler's savior -- was empty, so I plopped myself on one of the old-school vinyl-upholstered stools and ordered a much-needed mug of coffee. The place had a retro décor, but it was more sixties than the faux-fifties more common to postmodern diners. Instead of juke boxes and pictures of Elvis, it was advertisements for 1960s American cars - as far as I could tell original flyers and magazine pages shellacked onto one of the walls, covering it entirely. A shelf in the corner held a bakelite rotary phone, an old radio, a couple of kidney-shaped ash trays. The colors around me were relatively bright, but definitely tended towards the turquoise and pale yellow of the sixties, making the room feel inviting and far less contrived than one might expect.
The menu was fairly standard American Diner, though their specialty - giant thin pancakes, somewhere between a flapjack and a crepe -- were featured prominently. They looked appetizing - I kept seeing platefuls of them being brought out every few minutes -- but I was craving protein, and opted for an artery-clogging treat of fried eggs and respectably greasy and spicy chorizo. In Pittsburgh - who would have thought?
While driving around the neighborhood earlier looking for parking, I had spotted a tiny café in one of the side streets, and after breakfast, although I was already over-caffeinated, I stopped in. The place, called The Leaf and Bean (2200 Penn Ave., entrance around the corner), proved to be well worth checking out, not for its large selection of cigars (the "Leaf"), but for the overwhelming amount of junk that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Interior décor is best when taken to either of the two extremes - sparse and minimalist or so overstuffed that you are constantly finding something new to look at. This was a perfect example of the latter. I ordered an espresso, which turned out to be top-notch, and spent the couple of minutes that it took me to drink it taking in the surroundings. On the counter by the cash register was an old rotary telephone (the theme of the morning, it seemed), the kind with a separate earpiece that hangs on a hook. I asked the barista if it was for sale. It was not.
It was time to hit the road. Now really bouncing from caffeine and sugar and with grease coursing through my veins, I crossed the Allegheny on the 16th Street Bridge and headed West past downtown, then North along the Ohio on PA-65, Gerry Mulligan supplying the soundtrack.
The Strip - essentially the area between Liberty Ave. and the bank of the Allegheny River, stretching from downtown roughly to 31st St. -- is, for my money, Pittsburgh's most distinctive, and also useful, neighborhood, especially on Saturday mornings. Originally, and to a great extent still, it was the city's warehouse district. Many of the warehouses have been converted to stores, restaurants and nightclubs, but they happily share real estate with the old machine shops and wholesale glass cutters. In terms of shopping, the twin focus is on home furnishings and food, and while the inexorable march of gentrification hasn't left the Strip untouched, adding a sprinkling of stores selling designer lamps and colorful throw-pillows made from recycled fibers, many of the businesses hark back to the city's days as a working class burg populated by Italian, Polish and Asian immigrants and their descendants. On Saturday mornings, the entire Strip spills out onto the sidewalks and the whole neighborhood turns into an enormous outdoor marketplace. Food vendors of every stripe, especially Italian pastry shops, display their tantalizing wares, many of them baked mere minutes earlier. Espresso machines hiss and foam everywhere. Piles of cheap plastic toys and 99-cent flip-flops block the sidewalks, Chinatown style. It being Pittsburgh, the entire cauldron is generously seasoned with Steelers and Penguins t-shirts.
Pamela's (60 21st St.) is located in the heart of all this. By the time I got there a little after nine and parked the car, both the smallish dining room and the half-dozen outdoor tables were full, and at least a dozen people were waiting, but the counter - the solo traveler's savior -- was empty, so I plopped myself on one of the old-school vinyl-upholstered stools and ordered a much-needed mug of coffee. The place had a retro décor, but it was more sixties than the faux-fifties more common to postmodern diners. Instead of juke boxes and pictures of Elvis, it was advertisements for 1960s American cars - as far as I could tell original flyers and magazine pages shellacked onto one of the walls, covering it entirely. A shelf in the corner held a bakelite rotary phone, an old radio, a couple of kidney-shaped ash trays. The colors around me were relatively bright, but definitely tended towards the turquoise and pale yellow of the sixties, making the room feel inviting and far less contrived than one might expect.
The menu was fairly standard American Diner, though their specialty - giant thin pancakes, somewhere between a flapjack and a crepe -- were featured prominently. They looked appetizing - I kept seeing platefuls of them being brought out every few minutes -- but I was craving protein, and opted for an artery-clogging treat of fried eggs and respectably greasy and spicy chorizo. In Pittsburgh - who would have thought?
While driving around the neighborhood earlier looking for parking, I had spotted a tiny café in one of the side streets, and after breakfast, although I was already over-caffeinated, I stopped in. The place, called The Leaf and Bean (2200 Penn Ave., entrance around the corner), proved to be well worth checking out, not for its large selection of cigars (the "Leaf"), but for the overwhelming amount of junk that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Interior décor is best when taken to either of the two extremes - sparse and minimalist or so overstuffed that you are constantly finding something new to look at. This was a perfect example of the latter. I ordered an espresso, which turned out to be top-notch, and spent the couple of minutes that it took me to drink it taking in the surroundings. On the counter by the cash register was an old rotary telephone (the theme of the morning, it seemed), the kind with a separate earpiece that hangs on a hook. I asked the barista if it was for sale. It was not.
It was time to hit the road. Now really bouncing from caffeine and sugar and with grease coursing through my veins, I crossed the Allegheny on the 16th Street Bridge and headed West past downtown, then North along the Ohio on PA-65, Gerry Mulligan supplying the soundtrack.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part II
Late afternoon found me heading North-West along a stretch of US-40 I had driven before. I took it as far as Uniontown, PA, stopping along the way at General Braddock's grave. Even though I live within easy reach of Braddock Road in Alexandria, 
I never knew who Braddock was, and had always assumed he was a Civil War hero. Turns out he was a British general during the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s. Washington was a colonel under him. Braddock was fatally wounded in a failed raid on Fort Duquesne 
(modern-day Pittsburgh) in 1755, and died as his troops retreated along the route I was now driving. He was buried in an unmarked grave to prevent local Indians from discovering and desecrating it. In the early 1800s, the grave was discovered, Braddock's remains exhumed and moved fifty or so paces closer to the road, where a monument now stands. During the ten minutes or so I spent at the site reading the plaques and displays, I was the only visitor.
I reached Uniontown, which I had also visited before, and which claims to have been founded on July 4th, 1776, a little before six. Its small downtown looks and feels more prosperous than one might expect, owing no doubt to its proximity to some luxury mountain resorts in the area as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. I was tempted to stop and walk around a bit, but decided to press on to Pittsburgh in the interest of time. Heading directly North on PA-51 through a part of the state rich in auto repair shops and purveyors of lawn equipment, I was within city limits in a little under an hour.
Downtown Pittsburgh is respectably sized and infamously canyon-like, and urban renewal of the 1950s did not do it any favors, surrounding it on all sides with a tightly-woven net of highways and ramps like a giant squid choking a whale, but I managed to find my hotel - the Pittsburgh Doubletree (1 Bigelow Sq.) where Hotwire.com had put me - with fewer than a dozen wrong turns and without crossing either of the city's two rivers unnecessarily. Checked-in and cleaned up, I headed to dinner at a place that J. and I first tried when we were in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, and that has a bit of a legendary status in beer circles - the Church Brew Works (3525 Liberty Ave.) in the Strip district.
Built as the church of St. John the Baptist in 1902, the building was deconsecrated in 1993 and opened as a brewery and restaurant three years later. When a good friend originally recommended the place several years ago, I was mostly intrigued by the concept - it is always gratifying to see religion's most wasteful and self-indulgent aspect turned on its head and used for what's truly important. The fact that the mash tuns and fermentation tanks are located where the altar had once been only added to the appeal. Having been there twice now, however, I must say the excitement has worn thin. It's impossible to make a space of that size and scale feel quaint and intimate -- required attributes of a good pub, and while certainly unlike anything else, the Church did not feel particularly inviting on this visit. The beers were mostly good, but not particularly unique, and in one case downright disappointing.
I started with a Thunder Hop IPA, which was an excellent exponent of its style. More bitter than floral in its hop flavor, it was big and tasted exceptionally fresh. Thanks to the generous dry-hopping, the nose was huge and fragrant. Delicious all around. I moved on to their Breakfast Stout. Brewed with six kinds of malt plus oats and sweetened with milk sugar in a quasi-Belgian twist, it was very rich and relatively sweet, but still well-balanced, probably due to the coffee added to the beer after fermentation. In fact, the flavor was surprisingly subtle for something that has both coffee and oats. I liked it. My dessert - I could sample to my heart's content thanks to Doubletree's city-wide free shuttle - was a goblet of Millenium Trippel. This was the disappointment. Though it looked the part, it was one-dimensionally sweet. The best Belgian (and a small handful of American) triples are sweet to be sure, but something about the yeast strains used to make the good ones balances out the flavor - something that the Church's brewers completely missed. The beer was cloying. To accompany the beers, I ordered a bowl of chile pork stew which was surprisingly respectable, though not nearly spicy enough for something that has the word "chile" in the name.
It was quite late by the time I was done, and, having armed myself with the bartender's recommendation for a breakfast spot, I returned to the hotel and turned in in anticipation of another long day of driving.
I never knew who Braddock was, and had always assumed he was a Civil War hero. Turns out he was a British general during the French and Indian Wars of the 1750s. Washington was a colonel under him. Braddock was fatally wounded in a failed raid on Fort Duquesne 
(modern-day Pittsburgh) in 1755, and died as his troops retreated along the route I was now driving. He was buried in an unmarked grave to prevent local Indians from discovering and desecrating it. In the early 1800s, the grave was discovered, Braddock's remains exhumed and moved fifty or so paces closer to the road, where a monument now stands. During the ten minutes or so I spent at the site reading the plaques and displays, I was the only visitor.I reached Uniontown, which I had also visited before, and which claims to have been founded on July 4th, 1776, a little before six. Its small downtown looks and feels more prosperous than one might expect, owing no doubt to its proximity to some luxury mountain resorts in the area as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. I was tempted to stop and walk around a bit, but decided to press on to Pittsburgh in the interest of time. Heading directly North on PA-51 through a part of the state rich in auto repair shops and purveyors of lawn equipment, I was within city limits in a little under an hour.
Downtown Pittsburgh is respectably sized and infamously canyon-like, and urban renewal of the 1950s did not do it any favors, surrounding it on all sides with a tightly-woven net of highways and ramps like a giant squid choking a whale, but I managed to find my hotel - the Pittsburgh Doubletree (1 Bigelow Sq.) where Hotwire.com had put me - with fewer than a dozen wrong turns and without crossing either of the city's two rivers unnecessarily. Checked-in and cleaned up, I headed to dinner at a place that J. and I first tried when we were in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago, and that has a bit of a legendary status in beer circles - the Church Brew Works (3525 Liberty Ave.) in the Strip district.
Built as the church of St. John the Baptist in 1902, the building was deconsecrated in 1993 and opened as a brewery and restaurant three years later. When a good friend originally recommended the place several years ago, I was mostly intrigued by the concept - it is always gratifying to see religion's most wasteful and self-indulgent aspect turned on its head and used for what's truly important. The fact that the mash tuns and fermentation tanks are located where the altar had once been only added to the appeal. Having been there twice now, however, I must say the excitement has worn thin. It's impossible to make a space of that size and scale feel quaint and intimate -- required attributes of a good pub, and while certainly unlike anything else, the Church did not feel particularly inviting on this visit. The beers were mostly good, but not particularly unique, and in one case downright disappointing.
I started with a Thunder Hop IPA, which was an excellent exponent of its style. More bitter than floral in its hop flavor, it was big and tasted exceptionally fresh. Thanks to the generous dry-hopping, the nose was huge and fragrant. Delicious all around. I moved on to their Breakfast Stout. Brewed with six kinds of malt plus oats and sweetened with milk sugar in a quasi-Belgian twist, it was very rich and relatively sweet, but still well-balanced, probably due to the coffee added to the beer after fermentation. In fact, the flavor was surprisingly subtle for something that has both coffee and oats. I liked it. My dessert - I could sample to my heart's content thanks to Doubletree's city-wide free shuttle - was a goblet of Millenium Trippel. This was the disappointment. Though it looked the part, it was one-dimensionally sweet. The best Belgian (and a small handful of American) triples are sweet to be sure, but something about the yeast strains used to make the good ones balances out the flavor - something that the Church's brewers completely missed. The beer was cloying. To accompany the beers, I ordered a bowl of chile pork stew which was surprisingly respectable, though not nearly spicy enough for something that has the word "chile" in the name.
It was quite late by the time I was done, and, having armed myself with the bartender's recommendation for a breakfast spot, I returned to the hotel and turned in in anticipation of another long day of driving.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Road Trip 2009, Day One, Part I
For the past six years, I have been making a trip to Ann Arbor, MI, to visit my dear friends G.&N. I usually spend three or four days in Ann Arbor, but I felt like I needed more time than that away from home and work this year, and J. was not able to travel with me, so I decided to make the entire trip using back roads, stopping along the way to see random things and places and attempt to capture what little local color might be left over from the pre-interstate age of automobile travel. It would take me two days to get from Alexandria to Ann Arbor, instead of the usual nine hours, and I would spend the night in Pittsburgh.
Leaving home at the tail end of the morning rush hour on a Friday, I headed West on VA-7, intending to stop in Leesburg, VA. Strange as it may sound, in my ten years, give or take, of living in the DC area, I have never been to Leesburg, and never driven on Rt. 7 any further than Tyson's Corner. To my great disappointment, the road proved to be far from the idyllic country drive I had hoped for, though I suspect until ten years or so ago it mostly was. Today, however, it cuts its way through the worst kind of exurbia, punctuated by a traffic light every half mile, all of them, needless to say, red. I didn't arrive in Leesburg until after eleven.
Historic downtown Leesburg, however, was attractive, quaint, and quite lively, sustained by a combination of tourists and day-trippers from DC and the horsey set from the surrounding Virginia countryside.
I parked the car and walked around a bit, taking mental note of places worth visiting if J. and I were to come there together. I had my coffee mug refilled at the Shoe Coffeehouse, evidently a shoe repair shop in its previous life. The coffee was decent, albeit on the weak side. My attempts, admittedly lame, to joke with the barista fell flat.
Leaving Leesburg, I headed North on US-15, crossing the Potomac into Maryland at Point of Rocks. I was now driving through the sort of environment I had been hoping for - the two lane road winding through thick greenery on both sides. The traffic was still fairly heavy. Bypassing Frederick, MD, which I have visited numerous times, entirely, I headed for Hagerstown, MD. My original intention was to take US-40 as far as was practical. US-40 was the first major US highway designed for automobile travel in the 1920s, and had once crossed the US from Atlantic City to San Francisco. Today, however, the segment West of Park City, UT, has disappeared entirely, and the remainder has been subsumed in many parts by interstates, including I-70 in Maryland. So I took what the DOT now calls "Alternate US-40," a genuine back road that apparently hews closer to the path of the old National Road, originally planned in 1806 and approved by Jefferson himself. I was in downtown Hagerstown a little after 1:00 p.m.
To many DC area residents, Hagerstown is known primarily for the large outlet mall on its outskirts, but apparently the city, originally an industrial railroad town that has been hit by the disappearance of railroads, mining and manufacturing like countless others in the Steel Belt, has been making an effort to reinvent itself as a tourist destination, boasting of quaint neighborhoods, bed-and-breakfasts and antique shops. Based on what I saw, it has been partially successful. Downtown Hagerstown was larger than I expected, stretching for many blocks in every direction. The neighborhoods leading up to it looked like the neighborhoods I've seen elsewhere in Maryland, and seemed none too prosperous - narrow pot-holed streets, run-down brick townhouses, a dented Chrysler K-car parked here and there. Downtown proper, however, had a bit more life to it. Most of the storefronts were occupied, there was a fair number of people on the sidewalks, and traffic was congested. While it didn't quite reach bustling level, it was clearly a city that has managed to retain, or regain, at least some vibrancy. The most obvious sign was an abundance of late-model Lexus and Mercedes cars, obviously not owned by locals, parked all along the streets. I parked my own far less impressive vehicle across the street from the large, institutional-looking public library and set out in search of lunch.
Walking around, I realized quickly that in its heyday, the downtown must have been gorgeous. Ornate facades, some preserved or restored to something resembling their original glory, were everywhere, and the building themselves had the impressive heft born of the confidence the community had once had in its position in the world. 
Some, to be sure, were in disrepair and looked sad, but enough remained at least to tickle my imagination, if not quite enable me to experience Hagerstown's golden days first-hand.
A couple of pubs downtown were open, and fairly well peopled with customers, but I opted for Skyline Coffee (2 Washington St.), located on Public Square, the geographic center of Hagerstown. For all the world, Skyline looked and felt like a big-city café, with the menu hand-written on giant chalkboards and the walls painted an inviting brick-red. The woman behind the counter looked like a textbook coffeehouse employee, too - young and attractive, with pale skin, green eyes and straight red hair worn in a disheveled ponytail, dressed in a tank top and hiking pants. My optimism, however, was shot down quickly. The woman, who I later found out was the owner, had the flattest affect of anyone I have ever met. No smile; monosyllabic responses. She clearly had no interest in making her customers feel welcome, much less being engaged in a conversation. In fact, she looked like she had no interest in anything at all. I ordered the grilled ham and cheese, which according to the menu came with green apple chutney.
When I found none on the completed sandwich and asked what happened to the green apples, she replied, her voice never wavering from its original frequency, that they had none. By the time I was done with the mediocre sandwich, she was sitting at one of the outside tables smoking a cigarette, looking straight through me at some non-existent point far in the distance. Really wanting to like the place in spite of my experience thus far, I went back inside to find another employee, a tall and emaciated man of indeterminate age with vaguely exotic features and long black hair worn in an looped pony tail the way an American Indian at one time might have. He turned out to be quite a bit friendlier and, to give credit where it is due, made me an absolutely delicious espresso.
Walking back to the car, I stumbled upon a used bookshop called Barnwood Books (103 S. Potomac St.), and wandered in. The large main room was filled with shelf upon shelf of paperback romance novels and other popular fiction, neatly arranged, while what I tend to think of as "real" books were located, in great disarray, in a much smaller room off to the side. There was only one other customer in the store, browsing the romances. I looked around idly for a couple of minutes until I stumbled upon a hardcover copy of Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: The American Version. When I walked up to the counter to pay for it, I was shocked to hear the clerk, in response to my question, say that business was great, and that the recession has only made it better since people were buying used books instead of new ones. I must say hearing her say that made up for the bad lunch.
I was back on the road some time before three, staying on US-40 which paralleled I-68 just South of the Pennsylvania border. Bypassing Cumberland but going straight through the heart of Frostburg, MD, an appealing-looking college town, I finally crossed into Pennsylvania near Grantsville, MD, and headed due North across Laurel Highlands towards Pittsburgh.
Leaving home at the tail end of the morning rush hour on a Friday, I headed West on VA-7, intending to stop in Leesburg, VA. Strange as it may sound, in my ten years, give or take, of living in the DC area, I have never been to Leesburg, and never driven on Rt. 7 any further than Tyson's Corner. To my great disappointment, the road proved to be far from the idyllic country drive I had hoped for, though I suspect until ten years or so ago it mostly was. Today, however, it cuts its way through the worst kind of exurbia, punctuated by a traffic light every half mile, all of them, needless to say, red. I didn't arrive in Leesburg until after eleven.
Historic downtown Leesburg, however, was attractive, quaint, and quite lively, sustained by a combination of tourists and day-trippers from DC and the horsey set from the surrounding Virginia countryside.
I parked the car and walked around a bit, taking mental note of places worth visiting if J. and I were to come there together. I had my coffee mug refilled at the Shoe Coffeehouse, evidently a shoe repair shop in its previous life. The coffee was decent, albeit on the weak side. My attempts, admittedly lame, to joke with the barista fell flat.Leaving Leesburg, I headed North on US-15, crossing the Potomac into Maryland at Point of Rocks. I was now driving through the sort of environment I had been hoping for - the two lane road winding through thick greenery on both sides. The traffic was still fairly heavy. Bypassing Frederick, MD, which I have visited numerous times, entirely, I headed for Hagerstown, MD. My original intention was to take US-40 as far as was practical. US-40 was the first major US highway designed for automobile travel in the 1920s, and had once crossed the US from Atlantic City to San Francisco. Today, however, the segment West of Park City, UT, has disappeared entirely, and the remainder has been subsumed in many parts by interstates, including I-70 in Maryland. So I took what the DOT now calls "Alternate US-40," a genuine back road that apparently hews closer to the path of the old National Road, originally planned in 1806 and approved by Jefferson himself. I was in downtown Hagerstown a little after 1:00 p.m.
To many DC area residents, Hagerstown is known primarily for the large outlet mall on its outskirts, but apparently the city, originally an industrial railroad town that has been hit by the disappearance of railroads, mining and manufacturing like countless others in the Steel Belt, has been making an effort to reinvent itself as a tourist destination, boasting of quaint neighborhoods, bed-and-breakfasts and antique shops. Based on what I saw, it has been partially successful. Downtown Hagerstown was larger than I expected, stretching for many blocks in every direction. The neighborhoods leading up to it looked like the neighborhoods I've seen elsewhere in Maryland, and seemed none too prosperous - narrow pot-holed streets, run-down brick townhouses, a dented Chrysler K-car parked here and there. Downtown proper, however, had a bit more life to it. Most of the storefronts were occupied, there was a fair number of people on the sidewalks, and traffic was congested. While it didn't quite reach bustling level, it was clearly a city that has managed to retain, or regain, at least some vibrancy. The most obvious sign was an abundance of late-model Lexus and Mercedes cars, obviously not owned by locals, parked all along the streets. I parked my own far less impressive vehicle across the street from the large, institutional-looking public library and set out in search of lunch.
Walking around, I realized quickly that in its heyday, the downtown must have been gorgeous. Ornate facades, some preserved or restored to something resembling their original glory, were everywhere, and the building themselves had the impressive heft born of the confidence the community had once had in its position in the world. 
Some, to be sure, were in disrepair and looked sad, but enough remained at least to tickle my imagination, if not quite enable me to experience Hagerstown's golden days first-hand.A couple of pubs downtown were open, and fairly well peopled with customers, but I opted for Skyline Coffee (2 Washington St.), located on Public Square, the geographic center of Hagerstown. For all the world, Skyline looked and felt like a big-city café, with the menu hand-written on giant chalkboards and the walls painted an inviting brick-red. The woman behind the counter looked like a textbook coffeehouse employee, too - young and attractive, with pale skin, green eyes and straight red hair worn in a disheveled ponytail, dressed in a tank top and hiking pants. My optimism, however, was shot down quickly. The woman, who I later found out was the owner, had the flattest affect of anyone I have ever met. No smile; monosyllabic responses. She clearly had no interest in making her customers feel welcome, much less being engaged in a conversation. In fact, she looked like she had no interest in anything at all. I ordered the grilled ham and cheese, which according to the menu came with green apple chutney.
When I found none on the completed sandwich and asked what happened to the green apples, she replied, her voice never wavering from its original frequency, that they had none. By the time I was done with the mediocre sandwich, she was sitting at one of the outside tables smoking a cigarette, looking straight through me at some non-existent point far in the distance. Really wanting to like the place in spite of my experience thus far, I went back inside to find another employee, a tall and emaciated man of indeterminate age with vaguely exotic features and long black hair worn in an looped pony tail the way an American Indian at one time might have. He turned out to be quite a bit friendlier and, to give credit where it is due, made me an absolutely delicious espresso.Walking back to the car, I stumbled upon a used bookshop called Barnwood Books (103 S. Potomac St.), and wandered in. The large main room was filled with shelf upon shelf of paperback romance novels and other popular fiction, neatly arranged, while what I tend to think of as "real" books were located, in great disarray, in a much smaller room off to the side. There was only one other customer in the store, browsing the romances. I looked around idly for a couple of minutes until I stumbled upon a hardcover copy of Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: The American Version. When I walked up to the counter to pay for it, I was shocked to hear the clerk, in response to my question, say that business was great, and that the recession has only made it better since people were buying used books instead of new ones. I must say hearing her say that made up for the bad lunch.
I was back on the road some time before three, staying on US-40 which paralleled I-68 just South of the Pennsylvania border. Bypassing Cumberland but going straight through the heart of Frostburg, MD, an appealing-looking college town, I finally crossed into Pennsylvania near Grantsville, MD, and headed due North across Laurel Highlands towards Pittsburgh.
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