American Road Trip

A few nights ago, I was on my bike at the corner of Houston and Sullivan waiting for the light to change.  A mangy guy on the sidewalk was gesticulating in my direction, clearly trying to get my attention.  While my normal inclination is to ignore such requests, I was feeling magnanimous: it was a beautiful night and earlier in the evening a friend had been generous with an excellent single malt Irish whiskey.  So I turned to see what the guy on the sidewalk had to say.

“You gotta be crazy to ride a bike in New York City,” he yelled at me.

Clearly, this guy has not been paying attention: New York, as most people know, is in the midst of a bicycle renaissance, with nearly 300 miles of new bike lanes built by Janette Sadik-Kahn’s DOT and a bike-share program scheduled to launch next year.  And while there is a tendency to think that Manhattan and the gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn are the biggest beneficiaries, last weekend’s ride out to JFK to tour the TWA Terminal included a few nice stretches along designated lanes and routes in Queens.

Digression: the bike lane on 157th Avenue took us right past New Park Pizza on Cross Bay Boulevard, which some claim is the best in the borough.  It was a pretty good slice, but looking at modernist landmarks always makes me hungry so my judgement might have been impaired.

There’s even a bike rack at the AirTrain station in Howard Beach. And though I doubt I’ll be towing my carry-on wheelie bag any time soon, the “City,” a British-made trailer/suitcase combo just might convince me to trade in my beat up Tumi.

Of course, I didn’t have time to explain any of this to the mangy guy on the sidewalk in the Village before the light changed, so I laughed instead: “Not so crazy,” I told him, “at least, not any more.”

When I first started riding in New York City in the late 80s, in the glory days of the kamikaze bike messenger, you did have to be kind of crazy.  If the taxis didn’t get you (and they got me twice), the potholes and the broken glass did.  Back then you rode on Park Avenue because there weren’t buses on it.  

Never did I imagine a day would come when there wouldn’t be any cars either, even if only for a few Sundays in August.  

Because of Summer Streets and its bike-friendly ilk, the mean streets of the five boroughs have begun to fade from view and recede in memory.  But those feeling nostalgic for a city less kind and gentle can take heart–there’s a reasonable facsimile a mere 8 miles away as the crow flies, though getting there by bike is a whole lot further.

Riding a bike in Newark in 2011 does feels like riding in New York twenty years ago. I’m not really exaggerating. There’s not as much traffic, but there aren’t any bike lanes (though the first protected bike lane in the entire state is under construction near Branch Brook Park) and motorists seem even more aggressive towards cyclists than they are towards pedestrians–and that’s saying something.  I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been nearly run over while crossing with the light in a clearly marked pedestrian walkway–it happens at least once a week.  But in Newark, whether on two feet or two wheels, it’s not the taxis you need to worry about, it’s the SUVs, literally the Suburbans from the suburbs, whose drivers are doubly distracted–by their phones and by their outsized anxiety about being in Brick City.

Still, like a good citizen of the region–Greater New York when I’m east of the Hudson and Greater New Jersey (as Dennis Gale put it) when I’m west of it–I persevere.  

I leave the Mini in Manhattan, take the subway to Penn Station, switch to NJ Transit and arrive in Newark 17 minutes later (21 minutes if we stop in Secaucus). From the Broad Street station it’s a 10 minute walk to school.

Last year I started riding my bike to Newark on days I don’t teach.  More specifically, I started riding some of the way to Newark: from the Upper West Side, I pedal south on the Hudson River Greenway to the World Trade Center, take the PATH to Newark, and then ride one mile from downtown to University Heights. This saves no time, though it does save money ($11.50 total), but that’s an added bonus.  The point is the seven mile ride on the Greenway.

Though intolerably congested on weekends, during weekday commuting hours (and late at night) the Greenway is a joy.  Some may prefer the stretch that passes through Chelsea and the West Village, where the rebuilt piers have the sheen of the luxury city.

I favor the portion that passes under what remains of the West Side Elevated Highway of the 1930s–and not just because when you are under there you don’t have to look at all those ugly towers Donald Trump built on the old New York Central rail yards.  What I like about riding the Greenway under the Highway is the layering of past and present and the way the bike lanes, and the whole southern extension of Riverside Park, reclaim the spatial detritus of the automobile.  That may sound portentous, but transforming a dismal undercroft into usable public space really does signal a critical change in urban planning strategies over the past few decades.  Think of it as “collage city” besting the “noble diagram.”

And since I’m being grandiloquent, I’ll admit something else.  Since I started riding my bike [some of the way] to Newark, whenever I look west across the Hudson while on two wheels, I think of the Situationists.  Now, this could be simply a bad habit I picked up in graduate school; not unlike the heroine in Cathleen Schine’s Rameau’s Niece (“What was the point of having read so much incomprehensible Derrida if one could not make philistine deconstruction puns.”), it displays my self-satisfaction at erudition goofy enough to conjoin radical French urban theory from the 60s with present day New Jersey.

More seriously, it could be that cycling in as congested and auto-loving a place as New Jersey is kind of like a détournement for the age of sustainability, in a beach-beneath-the-streets sort of way.  Upon consideration, though, I’ve come to realize that the reason I’d been thinking of the Situationists while looking at New Jersey from the other side of the river is that I’ve been harboring a secret desire to turn biking to Brick City into a dérive.

Coming soon: Biking to Brick City, Part II: “Sire, I am from the other country.”

ME State Route 102 is a two-lane highway that stretches like a lazy figure 8 across the western lobe of Mount Desert Island.  It was built in the early 1930s as a continuation of the highway that connected Augusta, the state capital, with down east, via Belfast and Ellsworth along the coast.  In the late 1930s, that route was designated ME 3 and continued onward to Bar Harbor, the island’s biggest town and the social center of the summer rusticators.  102, by contrast, served the more hard scrabble working towns of the island’s quiet side: Southwest Harbor, Tremont, Bass Harbor.

As such, 102 was never overrun by the tourist honky tonk that typified the state’s major coastal highways, like Route 3 and especially U.S. 1, as it runs from the state line in Kittery all the way to Canada.  By the middle of the last century, critics were bemoaning the degraded state of those roadsides.  In Harper’s, Bernard deVoto complained that the coastal routes had degraded into a “neon slum” of tawdry amusements and cheap-jack restaurants, of drive-ins and diners.

E.B. White was somewhat kinder in the New Yorker, calling Maine’s highways “a mixed dish” of “Gulf and Shell, bay and gull, neon and sunset, cold comfort and warm, the fussy facade of a motor court right next door to the pure geometry of an early-nineteenth-century clapboard house with barn attached.”  For White, however unavoidable “the garish roadside stand” might be, the traveler was always conscious of a “triumphant architecture” just beyond it: an extended, unspoiled landscape of pine trees and granite that managed, along with the occasional deer and fox, to “creep within a few feet of the neon and the court.”

There are only a few places left on Route 1 where you can sense White’s creeping pine trees today, and Moody’s in Waldoboro is one of them.  Moody’s opened in 1927 and when White and deVoto were driving the coast, it was the only 24/7 establishment between Portland and Bangor (it closes at 9 pm these days; 10 pm on weekends). But for its iconic neon sign, Moody’s isn’t much to look at: a modest lunch wagon expanded to trailer proportions with two ADA ramps flanking a double-wide entrance.

With living pine trees so close to the building one wonders why it was necessary to decorate the vestibule’s fake shutters with cut-out pine trees.  (One also wonders why those fake shutters were necessary in the first place, but that’s a subject for another day.)  Perhaps those little pine trees are a talisman against destruction.  Widening Route 1 is a persistent threat and for miles up and down the coast big box sprawl has overwhelmed the small-scale roadside stands of an earlier automotive era.  This is one reason places like Moody’s are so revered.  The quality of the diner’s whoopie pies is another.

Whoopie pies are not on the menu of the Seawall Drive-In one hundred miles north on Route 102, but pine trees and granite are very nearby.  And while the place lacks neon, it does have sea-foam green accents on the coping of the modestly canted roof, the bollards separating the parking and picnic areas, and the log fence along the road.  In Miami Beach this would barely register as color, but a New Englander might find it a a touch garish.  I am not a New Englander (indeed, I was born in Miami, which may explain a few things), so the place charms me.

On a bright summer day, few things are better than a freshly painted CMU box, especially when it’s got a plate glass storefront with aluminum flashing outlining the alternating heights of the display and ordering windows, which have both sliders and louvers.

Frederick Kiesler abstraction it ain’t, but that’s a smiling sort of modernism the Seawall is showing to Route 102–one that would be even more obvious from the road if the proprietor hadn’t blocked the view with split-rail planters and plastic armchairs with faux-caning on the seats and backs.

The drive-in takes its name from a natural barrier of smooth granite rocks that separates the pounding ocean from a tranquil pond just down the road in Acadia National Park.  It’s called a natural seawall because humans didn’t actually build the thing, though they had something to do with the asphalt and the yellow lines.

The Drive-In was abandoned for many years but it reopened recently, which I learned while reading maine., purchased at the Whole Foods in Portland before heading up the coast.  The magazine is beautifully produced, if a bit too self-conscious–note the miniscule letters and the punctuation in the title.  And if its design reflects the long shadow of Martha Stewart Living, it’s got a better sense of humor–note the backside of the camper in the tent pictured on the cover.  Plus, you have to appreciate a publication that knows its demographic so clearly (recall where I got my copy): “upscale readers who have a passion for all things Maine.”  As long as those things include only the accoutrements of bourgeois privilege, craft beers and weekend getaways, and not, say, the crushing poverty of the inland counties or the deleterious effects of gentrification on the working harbors of the coast.

At any rate, “engaged and active” reader that I am, I took maine.’s recommendation to check out the under-new-management Seawall Drive-In and drove down the lower loop of Route 102 (officially 102A).

The Seawall still serves the kind of roadside fare you’d expect in these parts (hamburgers, lobster rolls, clam chowder) but with an emphasis on fresh and local and biodegradable plates, forks, and spoons.

I can attest to the quality of the Maine-raised beef.  The burger I had on my first visit was quite good, as was the blueberry lemonade.  And the pleasantness of the setting, whether at midday or on towards evening, undoubtedly enhances one’s enjoyment of the food.

As for the Seawall’s frozen confections, they needed no enhancing whatsoever, though that 7-mile hike to the summits of Norumbega and Parkman Mountains probably didn’t hurt.  The blueberry gelato rivaled any you’d get at Giollitti, and since you’d be unlikely to find wild Maine blueberries anywhere in Rome, this drive-in down east just might have the Eternal City beat.

The first time I watched the 1972 documentary “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” I was too distracted by the “Baede-Kar,” a dash-mounted radio tour guide system with a voice only slightly less creepy than HAL 9000, to pay much attention to frozen confections.  But watching it again this morning (yes, it was research), I was delighted to discover that ice cream makes an appearance late in the film.

Banham is pondering what sort of Los Angeles buildings would best represent the city to tourists.  Lamenting that L.A.’s best architecture is private and that its public buildings are generally bad, he decides to enlist the help of two local experts: Ed Ruscha and Mike Salisbury.

When Banham reveals that he has invited them to a meeting at Tiny Naylor’s Drive-In and that the meeting will take place in a Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible, you get the idea that he’s already decided what kind of building best represents L.A.

Douglas Honnold designed Tiny Naylor’s Drive-In in 1949, after he had spent a few years in the office of John Lautner.  Julius Shulman’s splendid 1952 photograph of the place makes it clear that Honnold had learned a few things about exuberant commercial modernism from the Googie master because that cantilevered canopy is clearly poised for flight.

Tiny Naylor’s stood on Sunset Boulevard at La Brea until it was demolished in the 1980s to make way for a box so banal I won’t even post a photo of it.

But I digress.  As Banham, Ruscha and Salisbury pull in to Tiny Naylor’s they put down the hardtop and have barely come to a stop before the carhop waitress hands them menus.  Banham quickly selects a pineapple sundae and tucks into it with gusto once it is served.

I’m not sure what kind of ice cream I thought  the eminent architectural historian and all-around design guru would be partial to, but I can tell you that this oddity never crossed my mind.  When I was scooping ice cream professionally, nobody ever ordered pineapple sundaes and the syrup sat in its vat slowly congealing.  But that was the east coast in the 80s; perhaps the west coast in the 70s was different.  I will rely on my Angeleno friends to enlighten me on this issue.

Postscript: both Ruscha and Salisbury had BLTs.

While I was on jury duty in July the Times published an article mentioning Wooly’s, a new shaved ice stand on Municipal Plaza, between McKim, Mead & White’s Municipal Building and Cass Gilbert’s U.S. (now Thurgood Marshall) Courthouse.

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In pre-Civic Center days, this was a continuation of Duane Street but it evolved during the Progressive era, first into Ottendorfer Square (named after the late editor of the New Yorker Staats-Zeigtung, whose offices were demolished to make way for the Muni Building) and then into St. Andrew’s Plaza.  Today, it’s a brick-paved, pedestrian-only wedge that extends, sort of, the tangle of traffic islands and open areas that define the larger public space in and around Foley Square.

Heading over there on my lunch break at the beginning of the ignominious heat wave, I ignored the food-court-in-the-80s kiosks that were built there as a food-court-in-the-90s and made straight for Wooly’s bright blue and yellow stand.  I ordered a Wooly (size), original (sweetened condensed milk flavor), finished with leche (syrup) and mangos (topping).  On a hot afternoon, this was utterly refreshing and not as intolerably sweet as it might sound.  Sitting there sweating while the shaved ice melted, faster than I could eat it, my mind wandered towards frozen confections of summers’ past.  This wasn’t really Proustian; let’s call it Mr. Softee sentimentality.

If these reminiscences had been chronological they might have started with chocolate chip ice cream from Graeter’s in Cincinnati.  The store in Hyde Park, where I went as a kid in the early 70s, is one of the oldest outlets of the venerable chain (founded 1870).

You’d never know that from its modernized storefront, which sports a mid-1960s zig-zag canopy that, to quote the critic Russell Lynes in high dudgeon about a very different building, “would not look out of place on a bowling alley in Paramus.”

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But that’s why it looks so good on an aging ice cream parlor in Hyde Park Square, a genteel shopping district built in the 1890s to serve one of Cincinnati’s most exclusive streetcar suburbs.

Another significant frozen confection experience took place in New York just a few years later. 40 Carrots in Bloomingdales opened in 1975 in response to two seemingly unrelated trends.

The first was an expansion in yogurt consumption throughout the metropolitan area sufficient enough to rate a feature article in New York Magazine.  The second was Bloomingdale’s transformation from a dowager department store into an epicenter of urban trendiness.

As supervised by the store’s president, Marvin Traub, this included the identity and graphics program by Massimo and Lella Vignelli that produced the now legendary brown bag series.  It also included an interiors and retail renovation program that replaced stalwart departments with small, ephemeral boutiques, like those overseen by Barbara D’Arcy, the store’s influential design director for much of this period.

Her work certainly influenced my mother’s decision to purchase a Kartell Componibili unit (Anna Castelli Ferrieri, 1969) for her bathroom—a rare concession to contemporary design in the otherwise traditional décor of my parents’ house.  By the mid-70s, Bloomingdale’s restaurants were subjected to the same formula as its boutiques.

Originally, 40 Carrots consisted, soda fountain style, of just 12 stools and a counter, but it was so successful that it expanded three times in as many years.  I don’t recall the space exactly but remember it as evoking a sort of health-food-made-stylish urban chic.

It comes as a surprise, therefore, to read in Mimi Sheraton’s 1976 New York Times review that the décor of 40 Carrots included knotty pine boards and dancing carrot cartoons.  It’s the soft serve frozen yogurt that looms large in my memory and somehow I’d managed to transfer the cool whiteness of the fro-yo to the space itself.  How I managed to suppress the actual Moosewood vibe of the place for so many years remains a mystery, but my aversion to Birkenstocks may now have an obvious root cause.  40 Carrots still exists, by the way, in an enlarged and renovated space it moved into in 2007.  Frozen yogurt is still the best selling item on the menu.  It may be time for another visit.

Readers will be relieved to know that my reminiscences were neither chronological nor complete, skipping over many of the ice cream stores that followed: Herrell’s and Barts in Northampton, Gatsby’s in Montauk, Bob’s Famous in D.C., where I worked after college in a white brick building occupied by the Heritage Foundation.  Sadly, I cannot report on the frozen confection predilections of famous conservatives; in D.C. in the 80s everybody dressed like a Republican.

A selection of more recent frozen confection experiences, in mostly chronological order:

Brad & Dad’s is in Palmyra, New York, the hometown of Joseph Smith and generally regarded as the birthplace of Mormonism, which may be more of an attraction for some people than the ice cream.

Birdsall’s Ice Cream in Mason City Iowa is nothing special, though it has some fine boomerang Formica countertops and is in better shape than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Park Inn Hotel and City National Bank building (1908-10), nearby.

This building, the reason we stopped in Mason City, is now in the midst of a much-needed renovation.

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The “concrete” from Ted Drewes in St. Louis lives up to its legendary thickness.  Despite the heat and humidity of a St. Louis spring, not a drop melted into the parking lot.

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.While it provided some measure of sustenance as we braved the long lines to get to the top of Saarinen’s Arch, we were hungry again by the time we got to the Wainwright Building.

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The Red Rooster Drive-In in Brewster, New York is old-school chocolate dipped soft-serve dispensed from a building with a slightly swoopy, high-pitched roof, candy-striped pediment, and an ice cream shaped cupola–just what’s needed to catch your eye as you drive along N.Y. 22.

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The Bridgehampton Candy Kitchen doesn’t have a cupola, but the Dan Flavin Art Institute nearby does—and the Flavins (which brought me to Bridgehampton to begin with) were a whole lot better than the ice cream.

Central Dairy in Jefferson City, Missouri occupies a fine glazed block box that is immaculate inside and out.  Sadly, the ice cream is unexceptional.

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La Beau’s Drive-In in Garden City, Utah is the reverse.  The building is unlovely, but the shakes, made with locally famous Bear Lake raspberries, are inspired.

Parkside Candies on Main Street in Buffalo occupies a two-story commercial building five miles north of downtown.

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It doesn’t matter that the sundaes are almost insipid, because the setting, designed by G. Morton Wolfe, is worthy of Garnier’s Paris Opera.  Now that’s one place I’ve yet to have a frozen confection, though I read somewhere that they used to serve ice cream in the Salon du Glacier.  I’d like to believe this is true but it’s probably a mis-translation by some hungry, hopeful scholar.    And at any rate, who wants to eat ice cream in the 9th when there’s Berthillon in the 4th?  For the record: I consumed my first dish of Berthillon sorbet in 1982.

When Thoreau wrote those words in his book on Cape Cod (published posthumously in 1865), he didn’t mean it as a compliment.  He had nothing but disdain for the “modern” houses he saw on the Cape, white painted boxes built of “dimension timber, imported from Maine.” (The italics are his.)  Not surprisingly, given the romantic rusticity he displayed in Walden, Thoreau preferred the Cape’s “old fashioned and unpainted houses,” which seemed to him “more comfortable, as well as picturesque.”  But if Henry David had returned to the Cape a century later he might have found modern American houses that were more to his liking.

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I certainly did when I stopped off in Wellfleet in June to participate in a summer program of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust.  In addition to giving a talk on the modern vernacular, I was invited to spend a few days in Charlie Zehnder’s Kugel-Gips House (1970), recently restored by the CCMHT and available to the public as a rental property that provides this small non-profit with vital income to support its programs.  Working with the National Park Service, and under the energetic leadership of Peter McMahon, the CCMHT is rescuing, preserving, and studying modernist architecture on the Cape—a legacy that deserves to be much better known.

It stretches back to the 1940s, when Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Serge Chermayeff, and other recent European émigrés began to make summertime visits to the Outer Cape.  In Wellfleet and Truro, in particular, these modernist luminaries mixed with local, self-taught designer/builders like Jack Hall and Jack Phillips.

Early on, the two Jacks saw parallels between the New England vernacular and the new architecture in Europe, and they started making buildings—cottages and small commercial structures—that fused the two, combining the handcrafted materiality and modesty of a Salt Box with the structural openness and lightness of the Bauhaus.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the cottage that Jack Hall designed and built in 1960 for Ruth and Robert Hatch, a painter and Nation editor, respectively.  From afar, the cottage appears essentially of the place, a perfect embodiment of a seaside landscape, its battered boards and weathered frame as bleached and stained as a fishing pier.  Up close, the cottage displays a modernist sort of formal rigor—well, as much rigor of form as a stick-built dwelling perched on pilings in the dunes can have.  But that’s actually a good thing: the Farnsworth House it ain’t, nor does it pretend to be; it’s too intuitive for that.

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Still, standing on the Hatch decks looking out into the dunes, one can’t help but think of Mies’ project for the Resor House and the way its structure consciously framed the landscape of the Tetons.  And the cottage has other modernist affinities, too, with buildings as diverse as the Gropius house in Lincoln, Mass (especially the screened in porch) and, on the opposite coast, the Eames house in Pacific Palisades (in its potential for flexibility).

Here in Wellfleet, Hall designed a straightforward rectangular grid of wood, seven by five bays, and used it to define the cottage’s structure and its space.  Each cube, or sequence of cubes, serves a particular programmatic need: terrace, living room, kitchen, bath, bedroom, studio, etc.

Open air corridors, also defined by the cubes, provide access to most of these spaces, their entrance doors shielded by the slight cantilever of three hovering roof planes whose presence is especially visible from the top of the surrounding dunes.

A series of moveable panels, operated by a rope-and-pulley system, do double duty as storm shutters and shading devices.  Taken together, the frames, panels, and roofs give the cottage a kind of shaggy modularity.

The Hatch Cottage is the next house the CCMHT will restore, after it completes detailed documentation this summer.  And the reason it needs to be restored is part of the complicated back-story of the Cape Cod National Seashore.

As the art and design circles of the Outer Cape intersected and widened during the mid-century decades, an astonishing number of inventive modern buildings were erected throughout the area, in the woods, on the ponds, above the dunes, and overlooking the bay and the ocean.  This continued even after the National Seashore boundary was fixed in 1959, which meant that those post-1959 houses would eventually become the property of the federal government.  Thus, the 1960 Hatch Cottage became Park Service property after Ruth Hatch died in 2004.  Originally, the National Park Service intended to demolish these houses in order to “restore” the seashore to a more “natural” state (or as natural as a place can be when it’s been occupied by humans for thousands of years).

The history does not record whether anyone noticed that the NPS was proposing to tear down modern buildings on the Outer Cape at the same moment it was erecting modern buildings on the Outer Cape as part of its Mission 66 program.

Designed by Ben Biderman of the NPS Eastern Office of Design and Construction, the Salt Pond Visitor Center of 1964 is more conservative than many of its western contemporaries (those at Capitol Reef and Mesa Verde, for example), with its nearly symmetrical plan and ponderous, hexagonal central pavilion.  The roof is a cross between Richard Burke’s Pizza Hut prototype (also of 1964) and a run-of-the-mill Howard Johnson’s from that same period, and it is tempting to push this parallel further given HoJo’s long history on the Cape, the chain’s second unit having opened in nearby Orleans in 1932.

The Visitor Center’s flanking wings are far more satisfying than the central pavilion: with their asymmetrical rooflines and contrasting shake and brick cladding they are simultaneously of the Cape and the modern era.  Out there, in a place that Thoreau thought was “as wild and solitary as the Western Prairies” genius loci met the zeitgeist. And that’s what the Cape Cod Modern House Trust is working so hard to preserve.