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Category Road Trips

Ne’er The Twain Shall Meet

By Brian Filed in Life, Road Trips Tagged with , , , , , September 14th, 2009 @ 2:19 pm

Over the Labor Day weekend, we took a drive down to Hartford, Connecticut to visit Mark Twain’s mansion. I can’t claim credit for the idea; my friend Karan made the suggestion back in the spring. It just took me until the end of the summer to get around to actually doing it.

Hartford is just a bit over 100 miles from our house, which puts it outside the 60-mile circle I had drawn up for my little half-day road trips back in the spring, but still close enough to be an easy drive when you want to get out of the house for an afternoon. Our holiday weekend weather was just gorgeous, which made our ride pleasant and insured that most of the highway traffic would be headed toward the beaches instead of inland. Except for the unavoidable occasional Masshole, it was a splendid ride.

I’m sure Sam Clemens didn’t really intend it to be this way, but his house is very easily reached from the spur of I-95 that goes through Hartford. (Long-time New Englanders will recall the “good old days” when this was the only way through Hartford, but the bypass takes most of the through traffic away from downtown now). When the Clemenses had the house constructed in the early 1870s, the area where it was built was very exclusive and still mostly sylvan, but these days is decidedly urban.

twainhouse

I’ll wager that at least some of you had no idea Samuel Clemens lived in Hartford. You probably thought he must have lived somewhere in Missouri, or perhaps in California. And he did live in those places as a young man, but his literary success as a writer of short stories brought him east to settle near his publisher in upstate New York, and after his father-in-law died and passed on his fortune, Clemens relocated again to be closer to New York City and a different publisher. Eventually he would create his own publishing company. His most famous novels were written in the Hartford mansion and published by his own company.

The house sits on top of a bluff that originally looked out over a small river, but in the 1960s the river was covered over with landfill and became the site of a housing project, a high school, and the parking lot that is now used for the Visitor’s Center. The Clemenses were quite wealthy at the point in their lives when they had this house built; his wife Olivia was the daughter of a wealthy banker who had left her his entire fortune when he died, and Clemens himself was flush with cash from the sales of his first major book, “The Innocents Abroad”. Consequently, the house was designed and built to be as show-offish as possible.

The Visitor’s Center is quite new and surprisingly large, almost too large. We were about a half an hour early for the next guided tour, so we whiled away the time watching the obligatory video, looking at the overpriced gift shop, and checking out the small gallery of Twain artifacts, including the compositing machine that Clemens’ publishing company used to lay out the pages of his books. Our tour guide eventually assembled a small group and headed us for the house.

This summer will go down in our memories for all the historical house tours we did: Mt. Vernon, the Adams houses in Quincy, the Longfellow House in Cambridge, and so on. Now that we are hardened veterans of the genre, I can say that the two elements that are critical to a good house tour are the quality of the tour guide and the success of preserving the house and its original furnishings. Our tour guide was one of the better ones we’ve had all summer. He was knowledgeable and thorough (without being dull), and his interaction with our tour group (which included some mentally handicapped people) was patient and thoughtful. Unfortunately, since the Clemens family moved out of the house after the death of their oldest daughter, almost none of the contents of the house are original to them. Most of the furnishings are period antiques, but not possessions of the Clemenses. (FWIW, on our travels this summer, more often than not the houses we visited did not have many original articles; only the Adams house had the furnishings and personal belongings of its famous owners.)

Even though the house did not feature original articles, they did not allow photography, so I have no interior pictures to share with you beyond the tiny ones featured on the museum website. What struck me most about the house was how dark it was. Every room featured darkly-colored wallpaper, and many of the rooms also had carved paneling that was executed in dark wood. There was little natural light except for in the indoor garden, and the lighting fixtures, which all ran on coal gas, provided only dim illumination.

stowehouse

Though maintained by a separate organization, the home of author Harriet Beecher Stowe is immediately next door to the Clemens house. For all intents and purposes, they are very much a duo act, except that you have to pay admission to both, and the admissions aren’t cheap. Tellingly, inside the Twain Visitor’s Center, they have a question on their evaluation form asking if you’d rather pay a single admission for both houses and have the Visitor’s Center serve both. Well, duh.

Unlike Clemens, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a life-long New Englander, except for a brief period early in her marriage spent on what was then frontier territory in Ohio. Her father and brothers were nationally-known abolitionists and preachers, and she wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” largely at the behest of one of her sisters, who encouraged her to find some way to be active in the family cause. She wrote the book while living in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband taught at Bowdoin College, but the house in Brunswick is not open to the public.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is best known for writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the pro-abolitionist novel that was a genuine world-wide sensation when it was published in 1851. Stowe cashed in on the fame from that one novel to help sell a number of books, though none were ever as popular. She was a prolific writer, cranking out a book a year for 30 years. She and her husband, a professor of languages, retired to Hartford on the money she’d earned from her books. Though their house was so close to the elaborate home of the Clemens family, it is a good deal less grand in every respect. Stowe spent her later years painting, gardening, and engaging in other creative pursuits, while her unmarried twin daughters ran the household. In contrast to the Clemens house, the Stowe house is much airier and brighter, and she preferred to have houseplants in almost every window. The contrast between the two neighbors is marked, and my impression was that most modern visitors would feel far more “at home” in the Stowe residence.

In the end, I felt the Clemens house had very little “feel” of the man himself, except for the one room at the top of the house that was his study and billiard room. It’s easy to imagine him sequestering himself up there for days on end, keeping distance from his wife and children and the irascible butler, George, who ruled the house. A house built to live up to someone else’s ideas of what a famous author should do with his money. The Stowe house, however, seemed to have the character of the “little lady” (she was only 4′ 11″), even though her daughters managed the household; her husband was infirm and bedriddden for the last few years of his life, but her fame had long ago surpassed whatever reputation he might have had, and the house is clearly “hers”.

I think both Clemens and Stowe would be a bit disappointed by the way their exclusive suburb has been swallowed up by Greater Hartford, but it’s great that both homes were saved by the historical preservation movement of the 1960s. If they could work out some power sharing deal to manage the administration of the properties and collapse the redundant visitor intakes, it would make for a better experience overall.

Road Trip #3 – Not Another Shit Hole

By Brian Filed in Road Trips Tagged with , , July 6th, 2009 @ 5:20 pm

piscataqua bridge-sm

I think the majority of New Englanders will recognize the bridge in the photo above immediately. It is the Piscataqua River Bridge that lets Interstate 95 cross from New Hampshire into Maine and has let millions of travelers completely dodge one of the deadliest traffic circles ever built and simultaneously bypass the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire for almost 40 years. I have early childhood memories of traveling to New Hampshire and sitting in monstrous traffic jams as my father slowly inched our car through the traffic circle and then across the old drawbridge, praying that the bridge would not have to go up and delay our trip yet another half-hour. The new bridge opened the same year we moved to Maine and transformed the trip forever.

Since I was obviously not ON the bridge in that photo, you can make the (correct) assumption that I was standing down by the riverfront in Portsmouth, which was the destination for this latest roadtrip. Oh yes, I have not forgotten about the roadtrips. I am simply having a profound lack of motivation to do almost anything these days, including these little adventures. I probably wouldn’t have even done this one had my friend Tony not e-mailed with the suggestion that we meet up and explore together, then cross-post to one another’s blogs. Here, for the record, is Tony’s post, telling about the roadtrip from his perspective.

Because of its location at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, Portsmouth’s fame and fortune throughout its history came from shipbuilding. The rivers made it easy to ship lumber and other materials downstream to build new vessels, and the relative shelter from the tides and rough weather made it possible to bring in ships that needed repairs. The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard went into operation in 1800 and built ships and submarines until 1969, when it was converted into a service yard for the existing U.S. Navy Atlantic submarine fleet. The military extended its presence in the area with the construction of Pease Air Force Base in the 1950s. As a military town for two centuries and as a crossroad for nearly every vehicle traveling almost anywhere in New England, Portsmouth had an economic advantage that many other New England cities and towns did not when the milling and manufacturing industries left the region. The military cutbacks of the last couple of decades have taken their toll, but Portsmouth has done well where other New England towns shrivelled up and died.

Which is to say that, on the balance, Portsmouth is not just another shit hole like most places in New England. And that’s good, because, quite honestly, after visiting Pawtucket I don’t know if I could have borne another one. But, having spent quite a bit of time visiting Portsmouth over the years, I knew what I was in for ahead of time.

market square-sm

The rainy June weather cut us a bit of a break and let the sun shine most of the day. The humidity was still quite high, but a gentle breeze from the waterfront kept things from being too oppressive. I couldn’t find a parking spot in the lot where Tony and I agreed to meet, so I parked in the downtown garage and wandered over to a tchotchke shop I knew to hang out until his arrival. (Tony’s post details his travel difficulties in detail, so I will let you read about all that there) Portsmouth’s downtown is several blocks’ worth of shops, pubs, restaurants and such. Apparently every waterfront town in America was forced to convert their downtowns into these giant tourist traps sometime in the late 1970s because I have been in dozens of identical ones from Camden, Maine to Alexandria, Virginia. In many places, these waterfront tourist zones have become the last bastion of small, independent retail, since the traditional downtowns have all long since been destroyed by malls and Wal-Mart. It is this unique and usually decidedly local character of places like Portsmouth that makes the commonality of the experience worth doing regardless of the town, because it’s about the only way left to buy things that are special to the place from which they came.

So, as I said, I twiddled away in one of those stores that sells all the goofy crap that people decorate their cubicles with — wind-up toys, naughty refrigerator magnets, rubber dog turds, ironic action figures, that sort of stuff — and eventually wandered outside to see if I could snag some free WiFi for my iTouch to check my e-mail. Tony soon arrived and we strolled to see what there was to see.

Portsmouth’s waterfront is still a working waterfront for the most part, so we wandered past tarp-covered piles of materials, assorted construction projects in various states of completion, a bit of road work, and not much else until we managed to find our way all the way down to the river’s edge. One particular attraction of downtown Portsmouth is Strawbery Banke, a museum focusing on the local history of Portsmouth, with an emphasis on the Colonial period. Having just returned from our vacation to Washington DC and Williamsburg, Virginia, I wasn’t really all that keen on investing the several hours needed to do yet another historical village. Instead, we headed back up toward Market Square and the shops.

As we wandered, we came across a sign for the “Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art” in front of a building that otherwise appeared to be office space. Neither of us knew that Portsmouth *had* a fine arts museum, so we investigated, only to discover that it really didn’t have one…yet.

not open-sm

Tucked into the corner of the front of the building, the museum was just a couple of days from its opening. It seemed an odd location, but from what was possible to see through the door, the space wasn’t really much bigger than an art gallery. I was actually a bit disappointed, because some of the promotional material in the lobby hinted that the first exhibition they plan to feature is going to be good. I snagged a quick snapshot of the “go away!” sign, but forgot to turn off my flash, which attracted the interest of a woman inside the space. She came out of the door and seemed like she wasn’t particularly happy to see us there, taking pictures of her sign. We muttered through some sort of an excuse and walked away.

By this point we were both warm, hungry and thirsty, so for lunch we agreed upon a barbecue place I’d walked by earlier. There was no shortage of places to choose from, to be sure, but I usually prefer to try places that seem like they might have a little originality to them, and Tony and I had recently been comparing notes about several barbecue places we like in our respective locales. The place was called Muddy River Smokehouse, and seemed to have all the requisite trappings of a decent barbecue joint — beer signs, posters for live blues music, etc. — so we walked in. It was mostly dark, with the bar up front and a few tables in the back. Things were clean and it didn’t look like any chairs had been busted over anyone’s head, and there was light jazz on the stereo, so it obviously wasn’t a real dive barbecue joint, but it is a tourist town after all.

The waitress had a great sense of humor and we kidded a bit about how much Diet Pepsi she should bring me. I knew she was a good one when she brought out TWO large glasses of DP just for me. I drained one almost instantly. The menu had all the usual offerings for the meat dishes. Tony went with a brisket and sausage combo plate, while I ordered just the brisket. For my money, the brisket is the real test of whether a place makes good barbecue or not. Too many places serve brisket that is too fatty and greasy and has a stringy texture. Good brisket has been adequately defatted and has been smoked all the way, not wet-cooked. Though not the absolute best brisket I’ve ever had, my sandwich was definitely way above average, with enough meat piled on that I didn’t even try to pick it up to eat.

fried pickles-sm

The real highlight of the meal, though, was the fried pickles. Half-sour chips dipped in batter and deep fried and served with a spicy remoulade on the side. Pickles are a typical barbecue side, but most places just serve the 5-gallon-bucket variety. One place I like in my neck of the woods makes their own pickles, which are truly superior. This, however, was the first time I’d ever seen fried pickles on a menu, and the waitress vouched for them, so I ordered them. The batter *almost* overwhlems the pickle chips, but just enough of the pickle flavor comes through to make it work. The spicy dip did indeed kill any pickle flavor, so after trying a few that way, I stuck to eating them plain. You can’t eat many because of the deep fried batter — Tony and I together could not finish the app, though we did eat almost all of the app he ordered (chicken breast pieces wrapped in bacon and fried).

Satisfied with lunch, we wandered a little more, and we began to gripe that there really wasn’t much else besides shopping. As the words were leaving our mouths, though, we spotted a sign next to a large yellow house a couple of blocks down that said “Portsmouth Historical Society”.

jpj plaque-sm

As we came up to the house, we spotted this plaque identifying it as the “John Paul Jones House”. Well, that bore looking into, so we popped in. The woman tending the lobby offered some explanation: the house had not been owned by John Paul Jones, the famous naval captain of the Revolutionary War. Rather, he had roomed in the house for a period of months while his ship U.S.S. Ranger was repaired and then again while waiting for another ship to be built. The second ship was given to France upon completion as part of war debt repayments, so Jones never sailed in it, and shortly thereafter he left the United States and went to serve in the Russian Navy. However, the local historical society had used this somewhat tenuous connection to Jones to have the building designated a landmark and they use it as a small museum.

glass portraits-sm

The first level of the house featured some furniture and artwork of the Revolutionary period such as these matching portraits of the owner of the house and his wife, but the featured exhibit was a collection of cross-stitch samplers sewed by Portsmouth girls. Some samplers dated back to the mid-1700s, while others were as late as the mid-1800s, but all were actual pieces made by girls aged 8-14 as part of their education as future housewives.

russojap-sm

The second level had one very large room dedicated entirely to an exhibit about the “Treaty of Portsmouth” that negotiated peace between Russia and Japan after their brief war in 1904 over disputed territories in Northeast Asia. The treaty negotiations were held in Portsmouth at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt and were hailed at the time as a sign of the emergence of the United States as a major world power. Because the major European powers had been accused of meddling in the war, Roosevelt seized on the opportunity to promote the United States as a neutral party and to enhance his own personal presence on the world stage. So, during the summer of 1904, Russian and Japanese delegations ensconced themselves in Portsmouth, and formal negotiations were held at the naval facility.

Most of us learn about the Russo-Japanese War in passing during our school years, and mostly only because of Roosevelt and the treaty. This exhibit, thusly, increased my own personal knowledge about the specifics of the war and the endless details about the treaty conference on the order of several hundredfold. It was a huge feather in the cap of the mayor of the time, who had persuaded TR that Portsmouth was a perfect location, and was treated by the locals much like a Hollywood movie shoot is treated today, with reports of the comings and going of the delegates like sightings of Brangelina. A bit too much breathless reporting for my taste, but it was interesting to see how little media coverage has actually changed in that regard.

jpj mannequin-sm

Tearing ourselves away from that exhibit, we walked into the next room to be greeted by a “lifelike” mannequin dressed as John Paul Jones himself, and a few objects associated with his stay — the desk he used, the bed he slept in, some decorative panels. In truth, they don’t have much and are just hoping they’ve dazzled you with the other stuff in the museum so that you won’t notice. I’ve been in a lot of museums like that, actually.

We concluded our afternoon with a refreshing beverage at a sidewalk table of a local cafe, watching the other tourists amble around. In recent years, Tony and I don’t see each other very often, and when we do it is usually in the context of some other event or in the company of our families, so it was nice to have the chance to sit and talk for a bit. Just as we were about ready to part company, the sky clouded up and began to sprinkle a little rain, which seemed all too likely a sign that it was time to go.

A Pawtucket Post Script

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Food, Links, Road Trips Tagged with , , , , , May 4th, 2009 @ 10:27 am

You’ll recall that I mentioned trying to find the American Diner Museum on my recent road trip to Pawtucket. Well, after I wrote that post, I decided I would look for their website to see if they had moved; my GPS database is out of date, so it was entirely plausible that they were somewhere else and I could plan to visit another time. After all, diners are a huge American cultural icon, and the “train car diner” in particular is a New England-born legend.

Enter The Google. Sure enough, the American Diner Museum’s own webpage is the very first hit, but the second hit was even more intriguing. “The American Diner Museum And I Are Now Enemies” reads the search header, as does the title of the blog post it takes you to. You can read that for yourself, but the gist of it is that the blogger had seen a video that included the museum, set out to see the place for herself, and, like me, discovered that there was no there there. So she ranted about it on her blog (gee, whodathunkit?) and even got a smarmy comment from a fellow named Daniel Zilka, who is involved with the museum, pointing out that the website “clearly states” that the “museum” does not have a public exhibit space. In other words, there really isn’t a museum, per se, simply an effort to have one someday.

There’s some back-and-forth in the comments, but what eventually emerges is a controversial picture of Mr. Zilka and the board of his museum, along with what seems to be a somewhat checkered history. Ladyandria ended up finding this web page which chronicles a series of blog posts from a fellow named Randy Garbin, who blogs about a variety of nostalgia-restoration topics such as diners, railroad cars, and roadside attractions. Garbin has amassed quite a bit of detail about Zilka and what appears to be a string of failed restorations of train-car diners all over New England, not to mention some questionable business deals involving the sale of some diners, and the never-quite realization of the museum itself. Even if you’re not interested in the topic of diner restoration, Randy Garbin is a pretty decent investigative reporter, and it would be great to see some follow-up and answers to the many questions he raises.

Garbin’s articles were written between 2003 and 2005, but his appearance in the comments from Landyandria’s post (dated June 17, 2008), as well as Zilka’s make it clear that the controversy continues to some degree. Meanwhile, Johnson & Wales University’s Providence campus has added their own diner memorabilia exhibit to their culinary history museum (…and Daniel Zilka even tried to get himself installed as the director of THAT operation at one point). Even though Providence is just beyond the radius of my Road Trip map, I can guarantee that the next time we go to Providence, we’ll check that out and I’ll report on it for you.

Tripped Up

By Brian Filed in Road Trips Tagged with , May 1st, 2009 @ 11:23 am

Well, there was no road trip this week. An unexpected situation came up on Wednesday that basically wasted my entire morning. On the plus side, it did afford me the opportunity to catch up on some overdue laundry, so it wasn’t a total scratch.

I’ve decided that next week’s destination will be Haverhill, MA. Now that I’ve done a couple of trips to the far ends of the circle, a place a little closer to home is due. I’m also trying to decide where to visit “Out West” a couple of weeks down the road.

Road Trip #2 – Quintessential New England

By Brian Filed in Road Trips Tagged with , , , April 28th, 2009 @ 12:51 pm

empty-stores

All photos from this road trip can be seen at flickr.com

Very honestly, I had pretty low expectations for Pawtucket. I thought for sure there would be enough votes to send me to Plymouth, then the poll turned out to be a tie. My Charming Wife even picked Plymouth when I told her she could be the deciding vote, but then she changed her mind because she wants to go with me on one of my road trips and figured she should send me to a shit-hole so she could go someplace nicer. Of course, the surprise will be on her when I take her to someplace REALLY special like Chelsea, but I had already promised I would go wherever she picked, and she settled on Pawtucket.

The saving grace to visiting a place like Pawtucket is that even though most of us recognize it for the dump it is, there are locals who are inordinately proud of their place and politicians always willing to spend a few bucks for local tourist spots just to keep those people happy and voting for them. Even the place where I grew up, Lewiston-Auburn, Maine, which takes shit-hole to a whole new level, has local festivals and community pride events and one or two markers of infinitesimally insignificant historical repute.

Beyond local boosterism, though, the historical significance of Pawtucket is actually almost too enormous for its humble place in the world. Pawtucket, it turns out, is the site of the very first mechanized cotton mill in the United States. It was built in 1793 by an Englishman named Samuel Slater on the banks of the Pawtucket River in an attempt to replicate the cotton mills springing up all over England. Slater’s success transformed hundreds of cities and towns throughout New England into what we now think of as the quintessential New England municipality — the mill town. The entire economy of the region shifted from hardscrabble agriculture to textile manufacturing, and an entirely new way of life emerged for the men, women and children who lived in this part of the country.

The Slater Mill, Slater’s house, and a second mill — the Wilkerson Mill — sit together on the river as you enter downtown, with Pawtucket’s towering City Hall right next door. The sun was shining nicely as I arrived and started wandering around the historical site. A large group of 9th-graders started pouring out of the Slater Mill, followed by a man in period costume. They ignored me, but then along came a young woman also in costume who told me that the site was not open that day and the school group was having a private tour. The site will start being open daily next week; a lot of tourist attractions in New England close up completely during the winter and then have limited hours in the spring until “tourist season” gets underway (in fact, I have been avoiding picking a Maine destination so far expressly for this reason, knowing nothing is open for another month).

The neighboring Wilkinson Mill was the first machine shop in the United States, built specifically as a supplier of machine parts to the cotton mill next door.

As unassuming as the small historical site is, it’s hard to overestimate the significance of the arrival of manufacturing in American history. By the middle of the 19th century, industry had come to dominate the economy of the entire Northeast, while agriculture still dominated in the South. Despite the interdependence between the two regions, when civil war finally erupted between them, the North prevailed in part because of its ability to mass produce arms and transportation. Ironically, the textile industry abandoned the Northeast in the 20th century and moved to the South, where labor was still cheap and unregulated, contributing to the economic decline that turned all those mill towns into abandoned ruins, just like Pawtucket itself.

Thwarted in seeing the interiors of the mills, I crossed the street and went into the Visitor’s Center. There were a few other people inside, but other than the lady at the info desk, they were all homeless people or other derelicts. The info desk lady was quick to ask if she could help me, probably to decide if I were just another derelict. I explained my visit, asked if I could take pictures, and signed the guestbook (which had exactly one other signature in it for the day). She told me that once I’d looked around, she would start a video about the town and its history for me.

The Visitor’s Center had on display a series of painted portraits of Abraham Lincoln made from well-known photographs of him at different times in his life. Here you can see how the Presidency and the war aged him in office: the first picture is from 1860, the second from 1863, and the third taken just before his death in 1865. The paintings were done by a local artist and were part of a presentation being given by the historical society that evening by a retired Rhode Island Supreme Court judge who is a nationally-renowned Lincoln expert.

There was also a display of Timberland hiking boots that had been decorated by local high school students as part of an anti-graffitti/public art project. The project is called the 02863 Project, and is in its third year, sponsored by Timberland and the Art League of Rhode Island.

The promised video was a standard tourist history piece about the founding of the mills and the resultant growth of the Blackstone Valley region, which runs from Worcester, MA to Providence, RI. I found it thoughtfully written — the harshness of factory work, the unfair conditions of living in mill towns, and the over-reliance on child labor well into the 20th century were all acknowledged even as the video aimed to make the place seem worth visiting. The screening room featured antique theater seating rescued from the last movie theater in downtown Pawtucket, as well as some ornamental glass work. (too dim for good pictures, though)

I bade the info desk lady thank you and farewell and headed out onto Main Street. Easily 75% of the storefronts up and down the street are empy and for sale or lease. The few open establishments that remain are ad-hoc businesses catering to the Brazilian immigrant community that is the most prominent group in the city: wire transfers, a hair salon, a bare-bones breakfast place. My circuit of the downtown only took a few minutes, as there was really nothing to see except a lot of empty windows and ignored “for rent” signs. The only people I saw on the street were three elderly people, obviously Brazilian, making their way into a local social aid office of some sort.

The one sign of activity was at a building with a sign that read “The Grant”. Underneath that sign, there was additional lettering to indicate that the building had once been a W.T. Grant department store (most of you who are from New England and are over the age of 30 will probably remember the Grant’s department store chain, as most towns had one). The facade had been recently painted and stood out plainly from the abandoned stores. One display window looked into a cafe called Kafe Lila, which looked like my best (if not my only) chance for lunch.

The signboard out front looked promising, and the door to the cafe was whimsical and arty. Inside, the dining area was overflowing with old arm chairs, sofas, coffee tables, and such, doing with real second-hand furniture and vintage decor what Starbucks et. al. imitate very poorly in their shops. The menu had several good looking lunch items, plus bakery treats, ice cream, and the ubiquitous range of coffee drinks. I decided on a turkey wrap and a large glass of “coffee milk”.

A quick word about Rhode Island cuisine — Rhode Island is unique among the New England states for its fanatical devotion to Autocrat coffee-flavored syrup. People drink milk flavored with coffee syrup the way you or I might drink water, and the preferred form of this drink is the “Coffee Cabinet”: milk, coffee syrup, and vanilla ice cream blended into a shake (or, as we call them in Massachusetts, “frappe”). I was duly informed by several readers not to return unless I had a Coffee Cabinet. Sadly, there was not an option for a cabinet, even though the cafe serves ice cream, and I had to settle for regular coffee milk. Hate me if you will, I intend to make another trip to Rhode Island and make a more concerted effort to find a Coffee Cabinet and eat a box of clam cakes. But I think I will have to go all the way to the seashore to do that.

Finishing my lunch, I wandered back into the central foyer of the Grant building. It’s still being renovated, but inside it has been partitioned off into a number of spaces that seem to be destined for (or are already used as) art studio, design studio, and gallery space. The building, which was constructed in the late 19th century, does not resemble a modern department store in any way; it’s quite possible it was never updated during its tenure as a Grant’s…I can remember some Woolworth stores from my childhood that seemed distinctly ancient. There were a few people working in a couple of spaces, but no other sign of activity. A young woman sat on a sofa in the middle of the space, talking on her cell phone, and an elderly woman who was most likely a homeless person was ambling around.

She eventually stopped to scratch the chin of a small black and white cat who must have belonged to one of the office people. She mumbled something to the cat and wandered away. When the cat saw me, she came right to me and wanted affection. I petted her, but when I tried to take her picture, she suddenly got shy and wouldn’t sit for me.

By this point, it seemed clear that I had pretty much seen what there was to be seen, so I headed back toward my car. I turned on my trusty GPS and had it list out some local attractions to see if I had missed anything of consequence. In the list it gave me, there was a promising listing for an “American Diner Museum”, so I set that as the destination, hoping it would be my find of the day. Instead, I got a thorough driving tour of much of the rest of Pawtucket, including a number of derelict factory and warehouse buildings in various states of ruin, neighborhoods full of run-down triple-deckers, and the occasional block where I was in danger for being a white guy. Just like being back home.

I finally ended up at an industrial park that had been turned into offices, a Curves gym (those places are everywhere) and a few warehouses, but no sign of anything resembling a museum or a diner. By this point, it had also started to rain, and my camera had stopped working again, so I decided to call it a day.

I can’t say I’d recommend visiting Pawtucket, but if you were going there for some reason (like to see the PawSox) and wanted to extend your visit a little, it would be worth visiting the mills and the visitor’s center.

Tomorrow’s road trip destination has yet to be decided, so you’ll just have to stop in on Friday to see where I went.

Road Trip #1, Part 3 – Power Lunch

By Brian Filed in Road Trips Tagged with , , , April 21st, 2009 @ 2:26 pm

Okay, let’s finish this up, shall we?

You never have to worry about finding a good place to eat wherever there are politicians and/or lawyers around. Lunch is part of the job description for both groups, with the lawyers usually picking up the tab. Show me a politician who pays for his own lunch, and I will show you someone out of office. The zone for the various Concord politicos only extends a block or two around the State House before the caliber of dining establishment reverts back to Subway, Chinese take-out, and a burrito place that looked promising enough that I probably would have gone there if nothing else turned up.

Directly across the street from the State House is a place called The Barley House Tavern, a gastro-pub with a menu based on the sort of food my brothers and I ate in the various pubs we visited in Ireland, but kicked up a notch from simple pub grub. They were pandering to the teabaggers that day with a “Tax-Free Burger” special, advertised with a large banner in front, but the prices on the menu were a little steeper than your average crankpot will pay for a burger and fries. When 90% of your clientele are charging lunch to the expense account, it doesn’t matter if the burgers cost $12. Unsurprisingly then, most of the people in the restaurant were wearing suits and similar business attire, yakking on cell phones or poking Blackberries, and the bits of overheard conversation were all insider baseball. While I was eating, one teabagger couple came in and sat in the booth in front of me. They were carrying their homemade signs, which they tried to stuff under the table, and they weren’t too happy that the fish and chips had curry in the batter. Even though I wasn’t carrying a sign, I’m sure they and everyone else in the place assumed I was a teabagger, too, and it made me die a little inside. I whipped out my iTouch and tried to make myself look terribly busy checking e-mail and Twittering in hopes that I could undo the damage.

The “tax-free burger”, which turned out to be a burger topped with thinly sliced prime rib really did not sound all that great to me. I mean, maybe Rush Limbaugh needs to top his red meat with more red meat, but that’s 50% too much beef for normal people. Instead, my eye was drawn to one of their house specialities: macaroni and cheese made with cavatappi pasta and a cheese sauce made with Guinness, topped with buttered breadcrumbs and served with a grilled marinated chicken breast garnished with some salad greens. It was sinfully rich, with just the slightest hint of bitterness from the stout ale. The chicken breast was also tasty, although it got a little charred. I hope I can come up with a reasonable replication of the cheese sauce, because it made for a superior dish of mac-and-cheese.

Well-fed, I waddled back into the main street to find that every last teabagger, public employee, gay-basher, and even the three liberal ladies were gone and downtown had turned into a vast emptiness. There was even ample on-street parking! The State House grounds were restored to their usual stately quietude, without the slightest hint that anyone had been there less than a hour before. Once I got over the astonishment, it occurred to me that this was the more typical scene on North Main Street, not the swirl of hot-blooded political adventurism I’d stumbled into. Were it not for the photographic evidence, I might have believed I’d imagined the whole thing.

Half a block down from the restaurant was a sign pointing down a wide alleyway that indicated I would find the New Hampshire Museum of History. A large stone building sat at the end of the alley in a sort of park that sits along the edge of the Merrimack River. The NH Historical Society converted the building, which was originally a warehouse, into museum space in the 1990s. It is quite modest compared to other local history museums I am familiar with (I am thinking specifically of the Maine State Museum), but the exhibits are about par for what one would expect. You begin with a timeline from the aboriginal Abenakis who occupied Central New England, through the early English colonial period and so on right up to a present-day diorama that features a prototype of the Segway. There is little remarkable about New Hampshire’s history, as it has always existed in the shadow of Boston and the rest of Eastern Massachusetts, but they convey some tidbits of info that don’t get much attention at the museums here in the Big City. I wouldn’t plan a day around going to this museum, but, like with the space museum, it was easy to see making another day trip to Concord with child in tow to visit this venue.

In all, the downtown portion of my adventure nearly coincided EXACTLY with the 2 hours I’d paid for on the parking meter. Four quarters bought me 120 minutes, and when I returned to my car there were 4 minutes left. And that even included taking a moment to duck into a coffee shop for an iced coffee for the road. I’d left home that morning not knowing quite what I’d do, but headed back for home utterly pleased with the little adventure that revealed itself to me.

Tomorrow, it’s Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and I am once again expecting to simply wing it; if it turns out half as well as this inaugural road trip, I will be very pleased indeed.

There Once Was A Man From Pawtucket

By Brian Filed in Road Trips Tagged with , , April 21st, 2009 @ 9:07 am

The poll for choosing this week’s Road Trip destination ended up in a tie: 2 votes for Plymouth, 2 votes for Woonsocket, and 2 votes for Pawtucket. Apparently nobody wants to go to Attleboro. That’s wise.

So, I gave the privilege of casting the tie-breaking vote to My Lovely Wife. She hemmed and hawed a bit, changed her mind a couple of times, but finally decided I should go to Pawtucket. And so it shall be!

Pawtucket is famous for two things: the Pawtucket Red Sox triple-A minor league baseball team and a dirty limerick. It just so happens that tomorrow the PawSox (as they are generally known) are playing the only at-home weekday daytime game of the season. However, I don’t want to spend an entire afternoon sitting around watching a baseball game. So I guess that means I’m going to have to track down that infamous Man From Pawtucket. He shouldn’t be TOO hard to find.

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