Gentle readers, our journeys begin again! We have actually been away from home for a while now. Monday morning, June 11, we took a flight from Los Angeles to New York City. We met up with my sister in Penn Station and from there we went to an apartment we had rented in Yorkville on the Upper East Side. I had to be on Long Island to lead a training for church, and it seemed fun to have a little vacation before I started my work. That first night we had dinner, explored the neighborhood, and went to bed.
The next day we went off to the Met to see that Heavenly Bodies show. This is the controversial exhibit that shows the influence of the “Catholic Imagination” on fashion designers. I was somewhat disappointed here. There were a lot of fun pieces by designers who had been raised Catholic, and if you were quite familiar with certain kinds of ecclesiastical garments, particularly those widely used before the Second Vatican Council, you could see how the fashion designers had adapted and often eroticized chasubles and copes. But the larger sense of a “Catholic Imagination,” a sacramental vision of nature infused with and perfect by grace, what underlies the otherwise absurd richness of Catholic ritual and folk practices, was largely missed by the curators.
That afternoon we caught up with Yin, a good friend of Ellen’s whom we had met a couple years ago in Charlottesville. Yin now lives and works in Chinatown. We met for lunch at a Mongolian hot pot restaurant, and afterward Yin took us on a tour of Chinatown. It was interesting to learn about the different groups of Chinese people who live in this area, and some of the tensions between older and new residents, and conflicts between immigrants from different areas of China. That evening Lin took us back to the Museum Mile by Central Park where various museums were open for free for one night. We were deterred by the long lines at the Guggenheim, though John stopped briefly to admire the architecture of the building. I mean, that is why he said he stopped to take this picture….
We took a brief look at the Cooper Hewitt museum. It was interesting enough, but I was still glad that I had not paid for my ticket! As evening turned to night, we stopped by the Reservoir for its iconic view of Manhattan.
John and I went back to our place in Yorkville, while Ellen and Yin talked for a bit longer.
Our final full day in New York was mostly about the theater. We had purchased tickets to Carousel, the Rogers and Hammerstein revival at the Empire Theater. I had never been a big fan of this show before, and I was a little perplexed by why John had decided with all the options available to get attend this particular musical. But after a couple numbers, I found myself completely drawn in by the story and the music in a way I had never been before. Maybe it was being a little older, or maybe it was just Renee Flemming’s beautiful voice, but I cried and cried though much of the play. Afterwards, Ellen treated us to a great meal, probably the only decent food I have ever had within shouting distance of Times Square.
The next morning we had to grab the Long Island Railroad out to Huntington. The training, part of my work with the Education for Ministry program, was at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception, a former Roman Catholic facility for training priests that had now been turned into a retreat and conference center.
The seminary is in the midst of 150 acres on the lush north shore of Long Island. However beautiful, it is close to absolutely nothing, so John quickly decided to rent a car and see what he could. While I taught — and I had six absolutely wonderful mentors for this training — he went off to see what he could. Probably the highlight of his travels was a trip to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt’s home on Oyster Bay.
My training lasted from Thursday to Saturday. It was hard to say goodbye to everybody I had only met about 18 hours earlier! John and I had initially planned to spend a final quiet night at the seminary, but it was just a little too boring and the room was just a little too small. We managed to find just about the last available room on the beach in Montauk. We stayed at the Atlantic Resort, or something close to that name. The place was almost certainly overpriced, but just about everything in that part of the costs a fortune. But at least we had an ocean view from our balcony.
On Sunday, our final day, we slowly made our way towards Kennedy Airport. We stopped a couple places along the way. We had lunch in East Hampton at the Bostwick Chowder House, something of a local institution. The food was not bad, but for the price it should have been better than “not bad.”
Our second stop was a bit more off the beaten path. John and I love gardens, and there are remarkable few public gardens on Long Island. The Bridge Garden in Bridgehampton is one of them. Now a part of the Peconic Land Trust, this five acre garden was the idiosyncratic project of two local men. Largely done in the naturalistic English style, the gardens filled with all those lovely trees and plants that we cannot grow in Southern California
Our final stop was at the Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton. This small museum is a serious collection of modern art, mostly works by painters, sculptors, and photographers who worked at some point in their lives in Suffolk County. After we purchased our ticket, we were asked if we would like to join the tour that was just about to begin.
It turned out that John and I were the only ones on the tour, and we had a wonderful guide, a retired philosophy professor from Columbia who had a particular passion for architecture. Much of the collection consisted of abstract expressionist works, never John’s favorite, but I was rather impressed by a collection of pieces by James Brooks. The building itself is interesting. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss “starchitects”, it is designed to look something like the potato storage barns that once dotted Long Island.
The centerpiece of our summer trip is going to be another bicycle trip, this time down the Rhone River from Avignon to the Camargue, the marshy delta where the Rhone empties into the Mediterranean. We are doing this trip with two other couples, Sherry and Giles and Jill and Ray. Both Sherry and Jill were colleagues of John’s in the arts education department of the Los Angeles school system. Neither Ray or Giles had ever been to northern Italy, so we just decided to start our trip in Venice. John and I have been to Venice several times, but even I am not jaded enough to say, “Venice? Again? Puh-leeze!
Indeed Venice is about the only place in the world where the taxi ride from the airport does not make you think that you have made one of the worst mistakes of your life. The Alilaguna water bus from Marco Polo Airport is an enchanting tour of the Venice Lagoon in its own right with stops at all the major islands that form the city of Venice. We are staying this time on Lido, the largest of the islands and one of the few with what the British called “carriage roads.” We found a huge apartment here for a reasonable price on Airbnb. Our apartment, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room, a large living room, and a huge balcony, occupies most of the first floor of the building below.
And all this for far less than we paid for our somewhat claustrophobic quarters in New York!
After we settled into our apartment, John and I took a walk around the center of the island, the area known to locals as Santa Maria Elisabetta. The largest building in this area is the Tempio Votivo. This is a curious structure. Built in 1925, it was originally conceived as an expression of gratitude that the Almighty had somehow preserved the City of Venice from bombardment by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Perhaps reflecting some better theology, it was later changed into a memorial to those who died in the First World War. Despite its aggressive neo-classicism, it had nothing to do with Mussolini or Fascism.
Alas, it was closed and I have no idea what it looks like inside.
Although Lido itself was settled well before Roman times, it was a mostly a fishing and farming area until the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time, sea bathing, that is swimming in the ocean, became quite fashionable with the upper classes of Europe. Although going to the beach seems like a natural form of recreation for us, for most of the Christian era few people in Europe thought of swimming as a pleasurable pasttime. During the eighteenth century, however, doctors in England began to have their patients visit the seaside to breath the healthful air and to partially immerse themselves in the salt water as a therapy. After railways made traveling to the seaside practical, the beaches of Europe were filled the people seeking to restore or improve their health. The west side of Lido island, with its fine sandy beaches opening up to the warm waters of the Adriatic, became some of the most popular places in Europe for the elderly and the infirm. Huge hotels were build there. The Grand Hotel des Bains — I suppose Italian was not considered a refined enough language to attract the best people in Europe — was one of them. It has been closed for decades now, and the interior must be in a perfectly wonderful state of decline.
The beach in front of the hotel is still very much in use and still has the small beach huts where respectable people could discretely change into their “bathing costumes.”
At the same time, other wealthy people began to establish second homes in this area, so Lido is filled with some of the most charming of late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture. Most of this, like our apartment building, is done in an “Italianate” manner.
But some people preferred other styles that owed nothing to the local architecture.
Tomorrow we will be exploring the historic center of Venice with our friends.
