Hudson River and the Rockefellers

Today we took a trip up the Hudson River. This is so easy to do. You just get on a train at Grand Central station and in an hour or so, you're in this bucolic country setting. We took the train to Tarrytown, and from there we took a taxi to the visitor center for Phillips house and Kykuit, the home of the Rockefeller family, starting with John D.Rockefeller. For all his success later in life, he started out as a door-to-door snake oil salesman, who wore a card on his lapel saying he was deaf and dumb. His future wife, Eliza Jane Spellman (after whom Spellman College was named and founded) said that if he weren't deaf and dumb, she would marry him. I missed the part about what changed, but she did. She was a devout Baptist, so the riches and the devotion kind of had to go hand in hand and it wasn't always a perfect fit.
It's a beautiful place. The guide made a big point of saying it wasn't opulent, because Eliza Jane Spellman Rockefeller, being religious, would not have been happy having anything opulent. But everything was top drawer, of the finest materials, and classy (as well as classical). Almost everything was "balanced," almost symmetrical. For instance, outside the house, on one side of the porch, outside the ladies' sitting room, there is a female sculpture with one foot forward. On the opposite side, outside John D.'s office there is a similarly sized sculpture, which seems more masculine, in that it has quite square lines, and also has one foot forward. There are similar balanced things thoughout the house. There are also things which don't make sense.

For instance, there is a wonderful fireplace with carvings of Bacchus, wine, and dancing girls -- all of which would have been forbidden to Baptists during this period, but which seem to have been accepted because they were classical. Another room has a television set hidden in what looks to be a bookcase. I rather wondered if it had been a hidden liquor cabinet before it was a hidden television space. Our guide was unsure from whom the television set was being hidden. But it seems to be from the Nelson Rockefeller era.

The basement contains a collection of modern art. All the art that Nelson Rockefeller chose was Asian, but his (first) wife, Abby, liked modern art and, if I am remembering this correctly, she was a founder of MOMA. They had a really cool art collection in the basement, including about 6 tapestries that are copies of Picasso's. Here's an example I stole off the web. They had an absolutely NO PICTURES policy.

They wouldn't let us take pictures in the house, but we did get a few of the garden. They had some lovely sculpture, and some very Craftsman-looking structures, though the house was very classical.



Though we had taken a taxi from the train to the visitor center, we realized that it was almost no distance at all, so after the tour we walked back to the train. I thought it might take us about a half hour, but I vastly overestimated the distance. It took us about ten minutes. We asked our guide just before we left, and she said, "I'd tell you you could walk it, but it's so hot."

It's not hot here. It hasn't been hot since we've been here. In fact, every day has been wonderful. As I sit here typing this right now, I'm a bit hot, and that has nothing to do with the fact that Martha had a party tonight and I had about three glasses of wine, and I'm sitting here with my computer on my lap (which is hot.) Nothing at all.

When we got back to Grand Central Station, it was pouring rain, so we took the subway shuttle over to Times Square instead of walking -- which is, in fact, much nicer. We got off "our" subway, the 1 line, at Columbus Circle and bought a salad at Whole Foods to take to Martha's party, and by the time we got there, (Columbus Circle) you could tell that it had rained, but there was no water coming from the sky. Dumb luck strikes again.

Martha had her recorder group over tonight and they occasionally have a little potluck after the rehearsal. Typical New Yorkers, they mostly bring take-out from their favorite places, but one of their standout members actually knows how to cook real food. She brought a rhubarb pie with fresh rhubarb from a friend's garden. She also made pesto with fresh basil from the same friend's garden. Martha bought some cherries which purported to be California cherries, and were only $2 a pound, even though two weeks ago they had the last cherries at the farmer's market in Sacramento and they were closer to $4 a pound. They didn't taste like our fresh cherries, though, but that could be because they'd been refrigerated since May. However, that's the only produce I've seen here that is less expensive than in CA. And don't even talk about how expensive cheap wine is here. If they had any two-buck chuck (which they don't) I think it would be about $8, becuase NY state wants to be sure they protect their citizens from drunkenness by controlling the sale of alcohol. You can buy beer in the grocery store, however.

On the other hand, I saw a sign for gasoline today and it was only $2.68 a gallon which seemed like a steal. And our tickets to go round trip to Tarrytown (a 50 minute trip) were only $11 each. (That was the senior, off-peak rate.) If you did this commute every day on the Metro North, it would cost you $17 each way. I suppose that would be a good deal since it costs more than that to park a car in Manhattan.