10/21 – 10/28/21
I needed to get away again. This time, the pressure was coming from my YouTube channel, which had rapidly evolved from a casual hobby into something like a full-time job. It would be a good thing, I decided, to break my routine, and combine a bit of business (recording video footage, signing a few books) with a rigorous regimen of sightseeing in the big cities of the Northeast. The trip would be short and sweet – one week end to end, Baltimore to Boston. Fly in, fly out, trains between. Bada bing bada boom.
10-21
My plane took off from O’Hare just after sunrise, sliced through a pearly sea of stratus, and headed east. The flight to Baltimore was short but confining, since the man next to me – who must have weighed 350 pounds – took up so much of our shared seat that I was shoved up against the window.
Eventually, an Amtrak train deposited me in Baltimore’s stately but aging Penn Station. The neighborhood around my motel was less salubrious than I would have liked, and I was a bit taken aback by the check-in procedure, which was conducted through a slit in bulletproof glass. The bottom of the bathroom cabinet in my room fell off when I accidentally brushed it with my foot.
Feeling no inclination to linger in the motel, I packed my day bag and set out to explore. It had been five years since my last visit to Baltimore, and the area north of downtown doesn’t seem to have changed for the better since. Litter and broken glass were everywhere, especially in the vicinity of Lexington Market, where a selection of stripped-down cars garnished the curb.
Undeterred, I decided to start my vacation off right with one of the famous “whole lump” crab cakes at Faidley’s. The cake – about the size of a softball – was ambitiously priced, but excellent. I ate it standing at a waist-high table, serenaded by bickering fry cooks.
Having strolled around a few of the architectural highlights of downtown, I made my way to the Walters Art Museum. The collections of this excellent (and free) little museum take in everything from Ancient Egypt to modern Europe. But I had eyes only for the Roman collection, and especially for seven spectacular sarcophagi from an aristocratic tomb outside Rome.
After another short circuit of downtown, I started the walk back to my motel. I arrived just before sunset, but found my room already dark, since the outsides of both windows were covered in layers of graffiti.
10-22
I wasn’t impressed by the changes since my last visit to Washington DC, which included a homeless encampment just outside Union Station. I couldn’t have asked, however, for better weather – sunny, breezy, and warm. As in Baltimore, I blended business with pleasure, pausing now and again to take footage for a future YouTube video. I spent 15 minutes or so in front of the Supreme Court building, trying to evade a class of field-tripping middle schoolers.
I stood even longer in front of the Capitol, panning up and down the rotunda in ways that strategically avoided a large group of Capitol police. Their presence – and the fences still barring the building’s stairways – were unwelcome reminders of the January 6 riot. The only protesters in evidence during my visit, fortunately, were a feisty band of youths demanding action on climate change. I wholeheartedly endorsed their cause, but regretted the route of their march, which kept crossing my path.
Ignoring twinges from my ankle – I sprained it just before my trip – I walked down the National Mall, which looked suitably impressive in the crisp autumn light. At the Washington Monument, I detoured over to the Tidal Pool and the Jefferson Memorial, where I watched two Black Hawk helicopters thunder toward the White House.
Onward, then, past monuments and drives and lawns to the Lincoln Memorial. There was plenty of traffic around the monument, but it felt as serene and dignified as it did during my last visit, when rain kept the crowds away. After recording my video, I sat on the steps and spent a long moment looking down the Mall toward the Capitol.
But soon, as my itinerary demanded, I hauled myself to Dupont Circle, where I passed a pleasant half-hour in an excellent used book store. Then, back down to the White House – even more barricaded than usual – and to the Mall, where I stopped briefly at the Museum of American History (filled, I was irritated to discover, with innumerable junior high students) before shuffling back to Union Station.
Back in Baltimore, two friends from college picked me up at Penn Station for a pleasant dinner in a food hall. Afterward, we strolled along the Inner Harbor, bathed in the poetical glow of the Domino Sugars sign.
10-23
Delaware! There are only a few states I haven’t visited, and Delaware was one of them until this morning. I can’t say that I was bowled over with what I saw from the Amtrak train, but Wilmington seems…OK.
On arriving in Philadelphia’s majestic main train station, I bought the wrong transport ticket, and discovered my mistake when I got jammed in the metro turnstile. But I muddled through, and emerged at length in the heart of Old Philadelphia. My hostel room wouldn’t be ready for another seven hours, so I dropped off my baggage, packed my day bag, and launched myself into the city.
I began with a scenic overlook. My hostel wasn’t far from the eastern approaches of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the majestic century-old span that connects Philadelphia with Camden. The bridge’s pedestrian walkways – 20 feet over the roadway, and more than 150 feet above the surface of the Delaware River – offer superb views of the Philadelphia skyline, and lured me all the way to the New Jersey shore.
Back in Philadelphia, I saw the sights in the old colonial center – Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and the rest. Or rather, I saw the sights as well I could without actually going inside them (I have little patience for lines).
So I continued west through the business district, pausing to admire the spectacular 550-foot tower of the city hall building.
Then a long walk – into a series of neighborhoods, across a windswept industrial area, over the muddy Schuylkill, and finally through the rusty gates of Woodlands Cemetery. I’ve always been a sucker for nineteenth-century cemeteries, and this one didn’t disappoint, with long lines of overgrown monuments receding into a moody sky.
Almost as soon I started the walk back toward downtown, the drizzle that had begun to fall when I was in the cemetery became a driving rain. I waited out the worst of it beneath a portico in the University of Pennsylvania med school. Then I strolled through the heart of campus, boots crunching on a carpet of leaves knocked down by the storm.
10-24
There were two bunk beds in my hostel room last night. I occupied the top bunk on the left. Below me was the Thrasher – a large man who tossed and rolled furiously as he slept. On the bottom bunk opposite was the Snorer, whose salient characteristic you can probably guess. And above him was the Sterilizer, who came in late, prepared for bed with extreme deliberation, and then painstakingly sprayed every square inch of his bunk, pillow, and sheets with a handheld bottle of disinfectant. As the Sterilizer sterilized and the Snorer snored and the Thrasher thrashed, two very drunk men had a very drunken argument on the street outside.
Almost as soon as I managed to fall asleep, I had to get up to begin the next leg of my journey. In a paroxysm of thrift, I had booked a seat on a Peter Pan bus (slightly cheaper than Greyhound) instead of the train. The bus terminal was a long walk down Market Street – in the course of which I had to detour around several homeless men sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk.
My bus left Philadelphia just as the rising sun began to kindle the tops of the skyscrapers. The other end of the trip was equally spectacular: the interstate climbed onto a long bridge, and there, abruptly, was the Manhattan skyline, spindly and surreal against a pale morning sky.
After storing my baggage at the Chelsea International Hostel (where I had splurged and gotten a private room), I embarked upon the long subway ride to Morningside Heights in uptown Manhattan. A leisurely walk through the Columbia campus brought me to Grant’s tomb, the vast classical pile ensconcing the sarcophagus of – yes, you guessed it – President Grant.
Since the weather was pleasant, I strolled along the Hudson in Riverside Park, and then into the northern reaches of Central Park. Along the way, I detoured to buy two enormous cookies at Levain Bakery, which I attempted to absorb, with hot chocolate and limited success, on a park bench.
I ended up walking the whole length of Central Park, drinking in the scenery and bustle. I had never seen the park so busy: rowboats on the lakes, picnickers on lawns, joggers and strollers and excitable dogs on every path.
Another subway ride brought me to the Brooklyn Bridge. There can be few places on Earth more dangerous for a mediocre photographer like myself: the geometries of the towers and interlaced cables, the Manhattan skyline, the distant silhouette of the Statue of Liberty. As during my last visit, I kept stopping to take pictures, and kept failing to do the place justice.
I continued along the Brooklyn Heights promenade, an elevated walkway with sweeping views of downtown Manhattan and the harbor.
When I had seen my fill, I started walking toward the Williamsburg neighborhood, where I was meeting a college friend. I had blithely assumed that my destination was only a mile or so away. It turned out to be almost four miles, and I had to run the last mile and a half, darting past knots of black-hatted Hasidim.
10-25
A working day. I spent the morning and early afternoon in the Met, methodically taking pictures and videos of the wonderful Greco-Roman collection (the best in the western hemisphere). Very productive, but not the stuff of a riveting blog post.
I could have stayed all day – under other circumstances, I might have – but my itinerary pointed me downtown, and downtown I went. After taping some footage on Wall Street (filled, during my visit, by an engaging mix of protesters and South American tourists), I walked a few blocks to check out the Roman columns embedded in the façade of Delmonico’s Restaurant.
Then down to Battery Park, where I watched Staten Island ferries chugging back and forth across the sunset-spangled harbor.
I closed the day with a long walk to Katz’s Delicatessen. Thanks to pandemic restrictions, the lines were longer than usual. But the pastrami was as good as I remembered.
10-26
I woke to rain hammering on the window. After checking the weather, and seeing that a lull was forecasted in a few hours, I hung out in my room until the rain dwindled to a drizzle –whereupon, with a surge of pent-up energy, I exploded onto the street and powerwalked to New York’s largest bookstore (where I was rather curtly informed that my book was “only in the warehouse”). Then a long stroll up sodden Fifth Avenue, pausing (as one does) to eat at a Shake Shack in Madison Square Park.
The clouds had cleared from the top of the Empire State Building by the time I walked beneath it, and Times Square was its usual chaotic self.
For an architecture aficionado like yours truly, there are few visual feasts that can match Grand Central Station and the Art Deco skyscrapers around it. I savored them accordingly (Or tried to – I was ejected from the lobby of the Chrysler Building, which is apparently no longer open to the general public.)
Park Avenue followed – I was faintly disappointed to see that the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel is being turned into luxury apartments – and the ever-graceful Rockefeller Center. I rounded out my walk by venturing again into Central Park. I stopped for a while beside Cleopatra’s Needle, the Egyptian obelisk that stands in splendid and rather bizarre isolation behind the Met.
Two long rides on the subway, made still longer by weather-induced delays, brought me out to Bushwick, Brooklyn, where I was meeting a friend from grad school. Bushwick is on the bleeding edge of gentrification, and felt like it, with boarded-up storefronts and grimy cafes cheek-by-jowl with hip new restaurants and bars. After dinner, a bar, and a brisk walk through a downpour, I returned to the metro, and waited for what felt like a very long time on an elevated train track, the station lights blurred by curtains of rain.
10-27
Wind and drizzle and predawn dark – and Moynihan Train Hall, New York’s Amtrak station. As the train rumbled out through the Bronx, I checked the weather in Boston and discovered that the storm that had drenched New York the night before was currently pummeling eastern Massachusetts. The wind grew steadily stronger as the train traveled north, sending flags whipping and showers of leaves fluttering past the windows. At last, after a delay caused by downed trees on the track, I emerged in Boston, checked into my hostel, and – after being pelted by horizontal rain for a few minutes – ducked into a Legal Sea Foods to wait out the worst of the wind.
A short ride on the T brought me to Cambridge, where I had the satisfaction of seeing my book on display at the Harvard Bookstore.
After signing the display copies, I spent an hour or so wandering around the sodden Harvard campus. It was picturesque, despite the weather; but for some reason, I had expected it to be much larger.
Back in Boston, I walked around the Common, umbrella twisting in the wind, skyscrapers glowing in the distance behind curtains of drizzle.
10-28
Last night’s hostel was, as hostels go, very pleasant, and I was delighted to discover that I had only one roommate – a Brazilian who spoke very little English. I slept correspondingly well. This morning, I allowed myself a leisurely start, getting a bag of donuts and hot chocolate at Dunkin’ (inescapable in downtown Boston) before starting down the Freedom Trail.
I walked the whole trail back in 2001 (when I was 14) and hadn’t seen it since. So it was pleasant – as pleasant, anyway, as the cold and blustery weather allowed it to be – to revisit all the historic sites. I especially enjoyed peering at the seventeenth-century gravestones, with their death’s heads and weeping willows, in the historic cemeteries.
There’s not much more to tell. I walked to the U.S.S. Constitution (“Old Ironsides”), and then back through downtown Boston, coat flapping in the wind. As I ate lunch at a pizza counter overlooking the Common, I reflected on how much I hadn’t had time to see, both in Boston and throughout my trip. I guess I’ll have to come back…