Thursday, 26 November 2015
Thanksgiving Day
Charleston, SC

This morning we are both sleeping late and fighting blossoming colds.  The staff at the Hilton Doubletree have been especially nice, cleaning the room at whatever time we ask and providing extra coffee, ice, and tissues.  By noon we are feeling better and ready to meet the gang in the lobby.  We are being joined by my cousin Art, so that makes seven of us for Thanksgiving dinner at Magnolias.

Our reservation is for 12:30pm, because when Judy made reservations back in August, the only times available were 12:30 and 8:30. When we arrive at the restaurant we can see, indeed, that it is very popular and every table, even at this early hour--is occupied.  In spite of last night's dinner and the early hour, we are all ready to enjoy another wonderful meal, starting with excellent Bloody Marys.  The menu offers a wide selection of foods, but Will and I opt for a traditional turkey, dressing, and sweet potato platter.  Others at the table choose less traditional options, including oysters, roast duck, roast pork loin, and crab cakes.

After lunch, Art leads Judy, Les, and me on a walking tour of the historic homes that line the cobbled streets between Broad (the center of banking and law) and the Battery that looks out over the bay to Forts Sumter and Moultrie.  The typical ante-Bellum Charleston house is two or three stories, with long porches lining each story.  The sides of the houses are turned to face the street, so that the porches are open to a more private garden and driveway.  Most of the houses have been restored beautifully; the underlying brick or wood construction covered with smooth stucco painted in a variety of colors.  They are owner-occupied or investment property.  In other parts of the city, this type of house is usually sub-divided into apartments.  My grandparents lived for many years in a second-floor apartment in such a house.

There are a few shops and boutiques in this part of the city, but the real shopping is a few blocks away on King Street.  Two important historical structures are St Philip's Church (with John Calhoun in the graveyard), and the Dock Street Theatre, the oldest continuing playhouse in the States; both are on Church Street.  Zoning regulations have kept restaurants and grocery stores out of the historic area, but there is a very large 24-hour Teeter-Harris not too far away. 

The Battery and White Point Gardens mark the end of the peninsula, and are the site of the grandest homes in the city.  These are mansions rather than homes, with sweeping bay windows, large porches, and round porticos.  Revolutionary and Civil War cannon still line the waterfront.  

Art has been an excellent tour guide; he has many wonderful stories of old Charleston.  When we reach the Battery, I decide to head back to the hotel, but Les and Judy continue their walk with Art.  I take a slightly different route back to the hotel, passing by Rainbow Row (supposedly the setting of Porgy and Bess), and turning up State Street, which runs parallel to Church.

Each of us is doing his/her own dinners tonight. Will and I find Tommy Condon's Irish Pub just a few blocks away offering burgers and sandwiches, along with live music provided by three Irishmen on electric fiddle, bass, and drum. Then it's back to the hotel and the end of a perfect Thanksgiving Day in Charleston.

We are back in Tucson trying to recover from our colds.  The flights home were fine and although we had to get up at 5am on Saturday, we were at home with our kittens, Luke and Jake, by two in the afternoon (with a two-hour time difference).

Wednesday Evening, 25 November 2015
Charleston, SC

The six Thanksgiving Revelers meet again at 6:15 for the very short walk to High Cotton, another one of the recommended restaurants. This place is a little more decarous than the raucous atmosphere at Hank's.  The food is almost stereotypically "southern," with lots of local soups and seafood.  I enjoy a really excellent beef carpaccio, a very tender duck entree, and raspberry sorbet for dessert.  Will has a large shrimp cocktail, local crab cakes, and one of his favorite desserts, "icky sticky pudding."  We are all as stuffed as proverbial turkeys and wonder how we are going to eat Thanksgiving dinner at 12:30 in the afternoon tomorrow.

But I will keep you in suspense until tomorrow, when I resume our culinary adventures at Magnolia for Thanksgiving and Hyman's Famous Seafood on Friday.

It's still Friday and we are relaxing before going out to dinner.  So with these extra minutes, I'll start up the next blog entry and maybe get to publish it before we arrive back home in Tucson tomorrow.

Wednesday, 25 November 2015
Charleston, SC
It's a beautiful bright morning and we are all ready to start some sight-seeing, except poor Will who has decided to nurse his cold in bed, so that he can join us all for dinner tonight.

Our caravan of two cars leaves the hotel and heads north on Route 17--the same road that runs through Fredericksburg, VA--across the modern cable-stayed Ravenal Bridge that crosses the Cooper River at its almost-widest point.  It is a beautiful modern sculpture whose two towers soar over all of the very low-built city.  The original Cooper River bridge was an ungainly steel cantilever structure that rose and dipped like a roller coaster as its two narrow lanes crossed the river.  A second, twin bridge (without as many dips and rises, however), was built to accomodate the increase of road traffice in the 1960s.  But the passages between the posts of the bridge were not wide or deep enough for today's modern tankers, so both bridges were torn down and replaced by the new one.  Charleston's harbor is one of the busiest on the East Coast and it was starting to lose businnes to other ports that could accommodate these large ships.  Ultimately it's quite an aesthetic improvement as well.

Our destination this morning is Boone Hall Plantation, about 25 miles north of Charleston.  Although the main house was built in the 1930s, it was constructed in large part with materials from the earlier wood, stone, and brick houses on the same site.  Bricks were quite plentiful, because as long as there was slave labor brick-making and cotton planting were the primary operations on the plantation.  After a brief tour of the downstairs of the house (the current owner still occupies the upstairs), we enjoy a motorized cart ride through a large portion of the plantation that is currently growing a large variety of crops, from strawberries to peaches to pecans.

Akiko and Steve at Boone Hall Plantation

Boone Hall Plantation House

Boone Hall Plantation:  Entrance Avenue of Live Oaks and Spanish Moss

Boone Hall Plantation Srawberry Crop

The grounds of the plantation are maintained at the highest quality so that although camellias are about the only colorful plants in bloom, the shrubbery and grassses are quite attractive.  From here it's a short ride to the resort community of Mt Pleasant--not very high but directly on the water, for a seafood lunch at Water's Edge restaurant.  The parking lot is overflowing with cars and we think we will have a long wait for lunch, but the restaurant itself has very few diners.  The reason for the anomaly is that Marco Rubio is holding a political rally on the patio outside our window.  He looks younger and more comfortable in person than on television, but his ideas are not any more palatable even when heard inside a restaurant.

Marco Rubio in Mt Pleasant, SC

Akiko, Art and Steve at Charles-Towne Landing

Charles-Towne Landing 

Charles-Towne Landing

Charles-Towne Landing

After lunch we head back over the Cooper River Bridge.  Les and Judy return to the city to do more sightseeing, but Steve, Akiko, and I head to the suburbs to the home of my cousin Art, who is probably my last living relative here in Charleston.  We spend a delightful afternoon with him, visiting Charles-Towne Landing State Park, the site of the first settlement of the colony in the 16th century.  On the way back to town we stop at the cemetery to visit with a host of my relatives who now permanently reside in peace.

More about tonight's dinner at High Cotton, and Thanksgiving Day lunch/dinner at Magnolia in the next entry.

Friday, 27 November 2015

Charleston, SC

We arrived in Charleston late morning on Tuesday; another flight that landed early--this time by 30 minutes! It is nice to be away from the cold weather and to enjoy late fall in the Carolinas.  So back I tread to:

Tuesday, 24 November 2015

Charleston, SC

After checking in at the Hilton Doubletree Suites Hotel in Charleston's historic district, we head for lunch at Gigi's, the first of several of the city's best-known restaurants that we will enjoy over the next several days.  Situated on the coastline at the end of a peninsula between the Cooper and Ashley Rivers, the city is well-known for its seafood. Will has shrimp salad and I have a Bibb lettuce salad with tarragon dressing (reminds me of the salad dressing at the dining room in the Virginia Musuem of Arts in Richmond), followed by crispy-crusted fried shrimp. Back at the hotel we make sure that my cousins from Baltimore and my brother and sister-in-law from Austin have safely arrived and make plans for dinner.

Hotel Lobby

Hotel Courtyard

Hotel Front Entrance

This is a very busy time for tourism in Charleston and the city is throbbing with visitors; there is even a Carival cruise ship docked a few blocks from our hotel.  We had to make dinner reservations well in advance to make sure that we could dine well while we are here and even last April many of the small boutique hotels in historic houses were fully booked.  Fortunately, I know Charleston quite well, having visited many times with my family when I was a child. And from when I was 12 to 16 (and in junior high school) I spent three months of each summer with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom had moved from New York City in the early 1950's.  My father was the only one of five brothers and sisters who stayed in New York, so I had the best of both Northern and Southern comforts while I was growing up.

My grandparents lived right in the center of the Peninsula, just a few blocks north of the historic district (although it was hardly thought of as a tourist attraction back in the late '50's), and then later moved further downtown and closer to the Battery which lines the shore at Charleston Bay.  My aunts and uncles lived in the suburbs, but back then nothing was very far.  Although summers are very hot and humid in Charleston, a teenager partying through the summer isn't about to mind them too much, and all the homes I stayed in were air-conditioned.  One summer I worked in my Uncle Leon's supermarket, but most of the time I just bummed around with my cousins Lois and Jerry.

After resting during the afternoon, I meet Steve and Akiko (my brother and sister-in-law) in the lobby and walk less than two blocks to another one of Charleston's famous sea-food restaurants, Hank's. Judy and Les from Baltimore decide to take the night off after travelling all day and Will, fighting a cold, opts to stay in the room (a very large suite with bedroom, living room, bathroom, and small almost-kitchen).  I bring him a bowl of Charleston's special she-crab soup and half of my fried shrimp dinner (which was indeed enough for two people).  Steve and Akiko are major--and I mean major--seafood eaters, so they were in their element with a platter of fresh oysters, scallops, and salad.

It has been a long day and busy plans for tomorrow. Will and I arose at 5am in New York City this morning, so after dinner it's a good night's sleep.

Tuesday, 24 November 2015
Charleston, SC

Late again.  We are in Charleston, SC, and the blog is still in New York on Sunday!  So before reporting on our day of travel, I will return to

Sunday in New York
We have a chance to sleep in this morning, before we taxi over to Park Avenue and 53rd Street for brunch at Brasserie, a long-time staple of the East Side.  We are hosted by Will's family:  his sister Mary from Syracuse, and his nephew Scott and wife Michelle, who live in Brooklyn and West Hampton, LI.  My own arrival is delayed slightly by my discovery that I had left our matinee theatre tickets back in the hotel.  So while Will waits at the restaurant I hot-foot (by taxi) back to the hotel, up two tiers of elevators, interrupt the maid cleaning our room, find the tickets and taxi back to 53rd Street--magically appearing only five minutes late.

After a lovely brunch with post-meridian bloody Mary's, we walk through Rockefeller Center, where the tree is up but still covered with scaffolding.  A sold-out matinee performance of Fun Home, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, provides an emotionally cathartic afternoon.  Most fortunately, the entire original cast is still performing, with the exception of the youngest character, who outgrew the part.  I have beven a keen admirer of Judy Kuhn, who plays the mother, since I first heard her on the Broadway cast album of Chess and saw her as the adult Cosette in Les Miserables. Will and I were also lucky enough to see her in a John LaChiusa musical about Vincent Van Gogh at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, when we were living in Richmond.

After the performance we head downtown to Union Square for really excellent pizza and salad at my cousin Helen's co-op on 15th Street.  I have described her place in many previous blog entries.  We are joined for dinner by her friend Josephine, and Jo's nephew, Michael, who live across the hall.

Monday in New York
Today the weather is still bright and sunny, but it has turned very cold as we subway downtown to the World Trade Center Memorial and the 9/11 Museum.  We have advance timed-entry tickets, but we still have to wait in the cold for 15 minutes.  The line moves slowly, but once past security (just like the airlines), we are left alone to work our way through the museum.  The building stretches five levels below ground and contains artifacts from the destroyed buildings, as well as parts of the superstructure that survived the blasts of the airplanes, such as the slurry wall that held out the waters of the Hudson River and helped save thousands of lives.

The central part of the museum is a minute-by-minute chronological walk through that horrendous day.  Even after the passage of time and my second visit here, it is still a moving and often difficult experience.  I find the audio recordings from passengers on the jet to their loved ones almost impossible to listen to.  It is disconcerting (intentionally so), to return to the bright sunlight as we exit the darkness--both real and metaphorical--of the museum.  Outside are the two memorial pools with the names of victims inscribed around the sides, the completed Liberty Tower which gleams in the bright light, and the still-unfinished Calatravi-designed transportation center which soars majestically like a giant bird.

We return to the hotel in the afternoon to relax and get ready for our early morning flight to Charleston.

Sunday, 22 November 2015

From our hotel window, watching workers setting up the New Year's Ball that drops at Times Square, I am reminded of how quickly time passes and that another year is almost gone.  And I reflect how fortunate I am to be able to travel with Will as we pass our milestone birthdays and reflect on almost 40 years together.

But enough of Somber Reflection and back to the bright sunshine of a gorgeous--and very busy-- Saturday (yesterday) in New York City. we opt for cinnamon buns and coffee n our room for breakfast and a speedy taxi ride to the Meatpacking District in Lowe Manhattan, location of two of the most-visited recent "sights" in the city:  the High Line and the new Whitney Museum of American Art. We have walked the major portion of the High Line on a previous warm-weather visit, so today we are here for the museum and to meet friends from VT who have come down to the city by train for the day.


The newly-built structure for the Whitney faces the Hudson River to the west and all of Tribeca and lower Manhattan to the East.  The building has eight floor of exhibitions and can display a larger percentage of the permanent collection than was possible in the older building, a Modernist brutal structure on Madison Avenue in Midtown.  The highlight of the exhibits today is a full-floor retrospective of the career of Frank Stella from his early almost-monocolor flat paintings to the wildly colorful recent works that are more like sculputre than painting.  His mission has been to extend the media of painting into three-demensional space without using the techniques of sculpture, and is most interesting to compare to the sculptural works of Picasso that we viewed at MOMA the other day. 

The museum building is itself a work of art with expansive glass windows and metal balonies that face in all directions.  The balconies provide panormanic views of all of the area as well as ways of connecting to various floors.  Today's brilliant sunshine makes for perfect viewing.

After a quick stand-up lunch of (expensive) lobster rolls at the Gansevoort Market near the museum, we taxi uptown to the Barrymore Theatre for a matinee performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. The play, based on a novel Will and I had both read some years ago, has won numerous prizes in London and New York.  The production uses innovative electronic techniques to take the audience into the thinking process of the 15-year old central character, who exhibits serious behaviors on the Autism spectrum.  The text carefully and realistically explores his view of the world as well as providing a realistic perspective of his chances (not guaranteed and left ambiguous at the end of the play), for a achieving a fully-engaged intellectual adulthood.


When we emerge from the theatre, all of Broadway and Times Square are lit up with the incredible glow of LED billboards that have replaced the old neon signs.  The lights are extremely bright and the colors sharp and continually changing.  We take a short walk over to the 9th Avenue Restaurant District, formerly called Hell's Kitchen, but now more politely known as Clinton, for dinner at Amarone. When we arrive shortly after 5pm there is no problem getting a good table without a prior reservation.  But by 5:30, not only is the restaurant full, but there is a long line of patrons waiting to get in.

We start off with martinis and Will enjoys a pear and arugula salad with lemon dressing, and freshly-made lasagna.  I have a very large Caesar salad and Pasta with eggplant and tomato.  For dessert we share a large slice of tiramisu.  All of this food is enough to keep us warm as we walk the relatively short eight blocks back to the hotel.

Saturday, 21 November 2015

Before describing our Friday activities in the city, I want to provide some photos from Thursday: Times Square, Toys-R-Us, and views from our hotel room.

  

We awake on Friday morning to bright sunshine, which the weatherman promises will last for the rest of our time in New York City.  We have an early schedule today so we opt for a quick McDonald's breakfast right next door to the hotel.  We take a quick half-block walk to the Seventh Avenue Subway which whisks us all the way down to the southern tip of Manhattan, South Ferry.  We have an 8:30 reservation for a tour that will take us first to the Statue of Liberty and then to Ellis Island.  Unfortunately, it takes about an hour of standing and waiting to go through security inspection, first on land before boarding the ferry, and then again when we get off the ferry on Liberty Island.  

The tour itself is very interesting and the guide, a retired businessman with a hobby in history, is very good.  He guides us through the base of the statue, itself a monumental construction, and the museum located inside.  The highlight of the morning is the view from the terrace at the top of the base, with 360-degree views of lower Manhattan, New Jersey, and all of New York Harbor.  Fortunately there is an elevator to take us up to the top of the pedestal.

From Liberty Island it is another short ferry ride to Ellis Island and the magnificently restored Reception Hall.  We don't have much time to wander through the museum, and most of the buildings are devoted to historical records, which anyone can access for a small fee. About 8 million immigrants came through Ellis Island from the end of the 19th century to the start of WWI.  My great grandparents arrived slightly earlier and were processed through Castle Gardens, originally built as a fort for the War of 1812 and then later served as a theatre, an opera house, and the New York CIty Aquarium. Today it is restored as Castle Clinton National Monument.

After another ferry ride back to Manhattan we are ready to head back to the Hilton for afternoon rest.  This evening we have reservations at 54 Below, a cabaret-night club, at which many Broadway performers appear between shows and tours.  We celebrate Will's birthday with an elegant dinner and a delightful show by Julia Murney, a Broadway soprano, who replaced Idina Menzel in "Wicked."

I will close with one photo of the Statue of Liberty and then provide more photos in the next blog entry.