A Day in Beacon

The city blahs had me last week. I felt weighed down from too much asphalt and car exhaust. My blood vessels felt as constricted as the traffic by the Holland Tunnel. I was gasping for air. Sunlight. Green things. And it was my birthday, damn it. So even though I was broke and had a rehearsal to attend on Sunday night, I convinced Z to steal away with me and head upstate to Beacon.

I've been there before, but only to Dia: Beacon and the waterfront park. This time, I wanted to see the town. And I thought it would be nice to climb Mount Beacon. Except I didn't really have the proper shoes for that, but I figured, well the West was won with women wearing low heels, no?

Beacon was originally two small towns: Fishkill Landing, a busy port, and Matteawan, a manufacturing center. The area was "bought" from the Wappinger natives in 1683 by former New York City mayor Francis Rombout, who died shortly after and left the 85,000 acre estate to his four-year old daughter, Catheryna.  She single-handedly developed the area, carving out farmland, building a major grist mill on Fishkill Creek, and creating the first produce cooperative in the Hudson River highlands. Beacon was a stronghold for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and it became a major manufacturing center in the 1800s, with factories producing paper clips, biscuit wrappers, coats, air brakes, and especially hats and bricks. There were purportedly over 500 hat factories in Beacon at one time. Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building were built with bricks from Beacon. The town boomed until after World War II, when the factories began to close and it went into a sharp decline that only changed when Dia: Beacon opened in 2003. Since then, it's become known as an arts destination, but most people, like me, day trip it to the museum and never really get to know the town.

We set off from Grand Central Station and arrive at around 10:00 in the morning. Getting out at the Beacon Station, you cross the overpass, hike up the hill, and cut across the police station to get to Main Street. Beacon shows its history as a factory town. It's not as pretty as the Saugerties or even Cold Spring. I was reminded of the town of Catskill, which is also solidly working class. But there's a nice authenticity about the town. It's definitely not an artificial suburb. And I was surprised how multi-ethnic it is.

Beacon's Main Street with Mount Beacon in the distance. 

Pinoys in the town. 

Apparently there's a Muslim contingent too. 

Wait, I thought I left Chinatown...

Halfway down Main Street, antique stores became ubiquitous. Z and I prowled through most of them, although we couldn't really afford anything. But wow, prices are really fantastic.

Antique shops on Main Street. 

A 1950s bubble bath on Main. 

Gorgeous cupboard in basement of Studio Antiques for $265.

Lovely dresser from the 1800s for $225 at Studio Antiques.

Great display of antique bottles at Dickinson's Antiques.

Hoosier Cabinet at Dickinson's Antiques with tambour door and flour bin for $275. 

Then we made out way to Bob's General Store where the trail for Mount Beacon begins. It was actually called Fishkill Mountain until Beacon was incorporated in 1913. Interestingly, the original name of the town was Melzingah, after a local Indian tribe, but when New York City newspapers mocked the name, the townspeople chose the name Beacon instead, after the beacons that were lit on the mountain to warn the Continental Army of British troop movements during the Revolutionary War.

In 1902, the mountain became a tourist destination when an incline railway opened to take tourists up to a casino and hotel. Built by Otis Elevator, it was the steepest funicular railway in the world, going up 1,540 feet on a 74 percent grade. The railway ran until 1978, when it closed due to a financial difficulties. Then in 1983, a huge fire destroyed the railway from top to bottom. In 1996, a restoration society was founded to bring the railway back, but it still remains a steep climb to a marvelous ruin and a beautiful view.

Along the East side of Main.

Main Street railroad tracks.

The bottom of Mount Beacon - this is the remains of the old Station House where people would get on the funicular. 

After walking a couple hundred yards, a stairway up the mountain appears.

200 steps, then it's a steep climb along a rocky trail.

Nearly at the top!

Ruins of the old power house at the top of the mountain.

Z in front of the ruins of the power house.

The view at the top. Turkey buzzard wheeling in the sky.

The climb back down was harder for me in my utterly wrong shoes. It was pretty darn steep and I picked my way down carefully as Z in his flat sneakers took a few spills. We made it down in 40 minutes and had enough time to check out another antique store and stop for an ice tea before getting to the station to catch the 5:13 back to the city. But just as we arrived at the platform, I realized that I left my phone plugged into the wall at the coffeeshop. With Z's goading, we managed to race up the hill to Main Street and back with just a minute to spare.

We caught our breath as the train slid into the station, and this time, we made sure to sit on the water side of the train. It was gorgeous, especially seeing Bannerman Island gliding past us on our way back. I love islands and exploring an abandoned island with the ruins of a 19th century mansion and arsenal sounds like a great way to spend an afternoon. One day when we have more time and money, it would be great to kayak over there. We could also take a sail on the Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger's sloop. And visit Dia: Beacon again. And have dinner in one of the restaurants. With so much to do, one day in Beacon is just not enough.

One Small Car, One Big Dresser

I was on my way home yesterday when I spotted this lovely thing sitting on the street.

Take me home! 

For the past month, I've been trying to figure out how to afford a dresser. Now that I have a semi-permanent spot in Chinatown, I've been dying for a place to put my socks. I sold all my furniture from my apartment on 11th Street (except for the porcelain top table, which is still buried in storage).

Specifically, I want a 19th-century dresser, since I don't really decorate a place, I basically make a set piece out of my apartment. And there's something about the place that feels like a 19th century farmhouse or maybe a rustic cabin to me. Don't ask me why - maybe the wood panelling? So I'm looking for Victorian shabby, kind of like Christopher Walken's little cottage in Heaven's Gate. Or like this picture from the 1880 Koepsell Farmhouse in Wisconsin.

But I've been too broke to do anything but drool over furniture on Craig's List.  So I stopped dead on my tracks seeing the dresser on the street. There were lots of scuffs and dings, but the drawers all worked well. Nothing weird in them. But how to get it home? I looked in my purse and counted the money I already knew was in there - $4.00. And my bank account had 28 cents. I was expecting money the next day but the dresser would definitely be gone by then. 

I began calling friends who had cars. My friend in Ditmas Park couldn't come, but he suggested two other friends who might be closer. I called one of them. Out of town. The second suggestion was Chip, who said he had to call me back in ten minutes. I put up a note on facebook, "Anyone downtown or on the west side who has a vehicle and will help me get a dresser to my apartment?" Across the street, a Latino guy was getting into his giant SUV and I considered asking him for help but chickened out. A friend out in Sunset Park responded to my facebook post. He considered coming back into the city, but in the meantime, Chip called back and said he could come get me in half an hour. 

It was getting cold. Two other people stopped and checked out the dresser, so I draped myself over it and tried to read my book. I'm on the chapter in Jane Jacob's amazing book The Life and Death of Great American Cities that's about gentrification. Chip finally arrived and it turned out his car was small. Very small. For some reason, neither of us had thought to check whether the dresser would fit into his vehicle. After trying to stick it in the trunk (no...), we put it on the roof. 

Um, yeah, but how will it stay up there?

Then we looked around in the car but there was nothing to secure that dresser with except a ball of twine that happened to be floating around. So we wrapped twine all over it, trying to ignore that it was kind of fraying as we did so.

Good way to Tie Die. 

Yep. REAL secure. It looked like a spider-web inside the car. Well, we only had to get it across town, but man, it was a harrowing and slooooow 20 minute drive. Chip had his hand out the window to make sure the dresser wasn't shifting too much. We gingerly skirted around every pothole. People were laughing at us. One lady said as we drove by, "He's HOLDING it up there!!!" 

But here it is in my bedroom this morning with the old mirror that I bought a thousand years ago at Obscura when it was on 10th Street.  Now I need a hurricane lamp, and a Jenny Lind bed, and a nice paint job in the room... 

I Heart Amsterdam

Mention Amsterdam and the first thing anyone thinks is sex and drugs. I kept getting advice like go to such-and-such place for the best weed or don't take pictures of the prostitutes in the Red Light District. But legalized sex and marijuana overshadow what the place is really about. Which can probably best be expressed by the Dutch term gezellig. It's a word that's considered rather untranslatable in English. Here's a whole page attempting to define it. And here. But basically, I think gezellig is what everyone who was around in the East Village in the 1980s misses - a sense of togetherness, of comraderie, of homespun warmth.

In Amsterdam, I kept feeling like it was the 1980s all over again. Part of this feeling was probably due to me staying with Walter at the Vrankrijk, one of the oldest squats in Amsterdam. He's a friend of my friend Joel who had lived in Amsterdam for two years back in the early 1990s. One night, Walter and I made pizza together and he put on a VHS tape to share some of the performance pieces that he and Joel used to do together. He was surprised that instead, the VHS tape began with half an hour of footage in which he ran around with friends asking people on the street how much money they make - the ultimate forbidden question. I mean, people will answer compromising questions about their sex life before they will admit how much money they make. And of course, I think this is a taboo that really should be confronted. So there I was, enjoying a simple night of making food with a friend, watching a crappy VHS tape of something hilariously radical - I was getting flashbacks that definitely did not derive from any substances legal or illegal. I began wondering if home wasn't necessarily a place or a community, but a time period or perhaps just a quality. Maybe gezellig can just be simply translated as homey.

Joel did appear in the end - in a wacky mystery thriller about foiling a dastardly plot by the Dutch Santa's black helpers. Dutch Santa? Black helpers? Yeah. If you don't know about Sinterklaass and Zwarte Pieten (or even if you do), you should listen to David Sedaris read from his hilarious story 6-8 Black Men.

We also went and saw The Night of the Hunter at De Slang (The Snake), one of about six other squats across the street. The building is pretty iconic - I've seen photos of it before in books, maybe in Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities - it has a painting of a giant spotted snake with fangs. While the squatters in the Vrankrijk managed to buy their building, I learned that De Slang and all the squats on the other side of the street were threatened with eviction. Ah, shades of the East Village. It seems that the corporate powers are beginning an attempt to disembowel communities in Amsterdam, same as they did in New York City. Maybe the squatters in Amsterdam will find a way of foiling them. Unlike in NYC, they seem to have support in the general population, probably since most squats seem to have some kind of artistic venue that is open to the public.

After the film, we ended up at Cafe the Minds, where Walter works, a bar decorated with a dozen hanging pairs of combat boots and a giant oar. Most nights ended at Cafe the Minds, actually. The first night, a very drunk guy sidled and lurched up next to us and asked Walter in Dutch what my name was. After seeing the guy try to hit on every other girl in the bar, Walter was mortified enough to toss him out.  And then there was one night when I sat down next to someone else wearing an IDFA badge and he exclaimed, "Oh, I thought I would avoid all the IDFA people here!" It turned out that he's a pretty well-known Iranian filmmaker.

I would have liked to have spent more time getting to know the city, but I was really there for IDFAcademy, and had a pretty intense four days of workshops that started at 10AM and ended with drinks that lasted until 2AM. I had already been partying since Paris so the entire trip I felt "rough as a boot" as one Dutch filmmaker whom I became friends with put it. Plus I was pretty darn broke. I never did get to tour the canals on a boat. Or see the Rijkmuseum. Or visit the Red Light District. But after these last two years when I've been despairing that NYC is at a dead end, out of gas, end of the line, it was great to remember what it used to feel like. And so very unexpected to find a place that has managed to keep its beautiful collective spirit, the missing ingredient in the new New York that used to make everything so possible.

Pictures of Amsterdam are here.
My IDFA experiences are on the ALMOST HOME: TAIWAN website.

Lost in Paris

 Three days walking around in Paris, meeting some great people and getting lost.

Headless man depicted in Notre Dame.

And I buy yet another beret, in the city of berets. Which I naturally lost in the airport coming home.

Pretty city.

Pilgrimage to Shakespeare & Co.

James at Shakespeare & Co, in spirit if not in person. The place made me miss him even more. And Gotham Book Mart and Tompkins Square Books.

Canal St. Martin by night. I think this was my favorite Paris neighborhood.

Got lost looking for the Canal on Day 2, ended up in Villette, where I found this market.

Sausages.

Paris collage.

Okay, it's pretty. But I'm not enough of a tourist to go and climb the darn thing.

Seems to be a required pic, Eiffel tower in the background.

Houseboats on the Seine.

What is up with the locks in Paris? Anyone know? Saw a bridge that was full of them too.

Golden asses. 

The Musee d'Orsay. Got there at 4:15 to get the reduced fare ticket, which left me only an hour to hike through the place. Gawked at some Van Goghs and was impressed by some impressionists.

Got lost in the Invalides looking for Rue de Vernueil and found the Taiwan consulate.

Cafe L'Empire on Rue de Vernueil. Well worth getting a little rained on and walking in circles to find this street and this great inexpensive restaurant.

Paris still life with duck confit.

Dinner at Jim Hayne's atelier for his birthday.

The birthday boy and blondes.

Jim Haynes and me.

Jim surrounded by women.

Cathy and her husband Yves. Way back in 1978, she was staying at Jim's and liked to cook, so they began having dinner parties on Sunday nights. They are still having parties every Sunday only now it's like 60-80 people.

Glad to have a chance to get to know everyone in a more intimate gathering.

Happy birthday, Jim.

Jim invited me to stay over his place and the next day, after I moved into that lofted area with the beams, I helped him prepare for the Sunday night dinner. About sixty people did show up. 

Jim's philosophy of life.

Last day in Paris. Wandered Montmartre and had lunch at the cemetary.

I'm not enough of a celebrity gawker to really hunt for famous people alive or dead. Took a little look for the Goncourt Brothers and for Francois Truffaut but couldn't find them. Alexandre Dumas (fils) was an easy find but damn is his tomb ever tacky. Well, maybe that suits the writer of La Dame aux Camelias. I much prefer his dad. First novel that made me realize what writing could be was The Count of Monte Cristo.

Lost Unicorn posters are also in Paris!

Went up the hill to get this shot of a Montmarte windmill and got lost. Again. Only this time I had a train to catch to Amsterdam.