My main purpose in taking the trip was to see the exhibit at the Hoboken historical museum on the Hudson Tubes which was going to close on Sunday.

Friday morning I took a later train than usual, 7:05 AM, so I was able to park in the garage of the building I work in and then walked to the train station. As I said, the train was to leave at 7:05; at 7:06 it started to move, at 7:06 AM and 10 seconds it stopped, air-conditioning went off, lights went off, all power was lost. We were told not to. worry it was nothing important -- -- -- a cable had just fallen off the train. After awhile we got started .

The snack bar car was not opened up until almost BWI airport and because I don't drink coffee and don't need it in the morning, it didn't matter to me; but  the caffeine addicts were starting to go into a frenzy. This has happened on almost every morning trip up I've taken and I don't understand why Amtrak can't open the snack bar cars up when the train is operating and filled with passengers. 

I didn't move at all around the train since I didn't go to the snack bar car, so I don't know what the other cars were like. My car was about 2/3 filled until Philadelphia after which it got close to jam packed. The paper antimacassars are long gone from the seatbacks and the cars, although certainly not filthy, seemed tattered and shabby. Because the day was so grim and gray with little light, the poor lighting of the cars was really noticeable and it was difficult to read. But the train did get into New York only a few minutes late.

As we had made the sweep through the meadows and began the long curve into the tunnel, there was a particularly nice view of the steeples and domes of St. John's, St. Anne's, St. Michael's, and St. Michael's Monastery on the Jersey City heights,  in spite of the drizzly weather.

All day long Friday it was non stop rain or drizzle; the temperature wasn't particularly cold, in the high 40s, but whenever you went indoors it was really unpleasant because everything was so hot and sticky.

At Pennsylvania Station I called up the hotel and found out that even though it was still very early, I could check in. When I got down to the hotel, I realized why that was possible. The hotel seemed quiet and maybe even empty. More importantly, the whole area was empty. And the area was Wall Street.

I had bought the $4 transit pass for the day and had taken the west side IRT express to Wall Street climbed out of the station and when I reached the  street, I was about five or six car lengths from the hotel on William Street which was five or six car lengths to Wall Street and then one block to Broad Street with the Federal Reserve and the stock exchange. On a Friday morning, a workday, at 10:45 AM the corner of Wall and Broad Streets was almost deserted; I could count may be a half dozen people. And that was the case all day Friday throughout Manhattan.

The hotel was called "Club Quarters" at 52 William Street at Wall Street; it seems to be a small chain of British executive hotels with suites, although my  room had only a microwave oven and refrigerator. If you were in Manhattan for business the hotel was in the perfect location; even if you're there as a tourist, you're just a few feet from the west side IRT and about ½ blocks from the east side IRT expresses so it's very well located. The size of rooms in the hotels on the New Jersey side of the river are like regular hotels throughout the country, large rooms and a lot of space. This room -- which I got at a large discount - was on the small side, although by European standards it was a big hotel room. The bathroom had no tub, just a shower with a low ridge to keep the water from running out and reminded me of the Danish showers that I had flooded so many times. 

The hotel had been converted from an office building, was about 20 stories tall and I was on the 14th floor. It's the first time in a long time I've been in a hotel room which had normal Anglo-Saxon windows: sash windows you could raise up-and-down. And they weren't locked; you could opened the window and get fresh air in. My view to the north was of the municipal building although the foreground was filled with roofs and elevator shafts and ventilation turbines. Unfortunately. I didn't have any film in my camera at the times it was possible to take pictures.

After washing and getting rid of my satchel, I took the Eastside IRT up to Grand Central and then the Queensboro line to Fifth Avenue. In the long tunnel that runs down from the upper part of Grand Central to the Queensboro line station there was a woman selling frankfurters. This wasn't just unusual because there was a food vendor inside a subway station. It was also because she wasn't selling cooked frankfurters on a roll with mustard and sauerkraut, the way you see the on the street. She was selling raw frankfurters by the dozen in shrink-wrapped packages from a cooler she had with her. And doing a good business.

The rain was still heavy when I got out of the subway but I had to walk only about a quarter of a block the into the main library building. I was going to the exhibit "New York Eats Out" which was held on the third-floor in one of the rooms that used to be the card catalog room for the main reading room. The theme of the exhibit was the role that restaurants had played in New York City history.

The exhibit itself was basically only menus but with notes on specific menus and then commentary on the general periods.  and there was an interesting story on how the library had gotten these menus had been bequeathed by a lady, Miss Frank E. Buttolph,  who had begun collecting menus in the late 19th Century up through the 1920s. She had bequeathed the library her menu collection which was the basis of this exhibit. The exhibit was divided into three periods: the 19th-century, pre prohibition and post prohibition; then each one of those three sections was subdivided into the wealthy and the ordinary people. The only negative in the exhibit was that there was no recalculation of what 50 cents in 1875 or 75¢ cents in 1938 was today. So you had a very misleading picture of what the prices were.

The range of restaurants was from Delmonico's to Father Divine. Among the things I learned that I hadn't been aware of, was how destructive Prohibition had been to the glamorous restaurants. They had made the biggest part of the money on marking up the prices of wine and liquor and at the introduction of Prohibition most of the famous restaurants closed down. I had never eaten at Delmonico's or at Sherry's or at Rector's  but somehow I had had the impression that they were around when I was around. I was wrong. They, like many luxury restaurants, had closed down one or two years after Prohibition started.

I also learned something about Child's that I hadn't known. I had always thought that Child's and  Schrafft's were both the same kind of restaurant chain: above the level of the Automat or Bickford's Cafeterias but otherwise the same as each other. I found out that Child's was special because its theme wasn't good food or cheap food [although they did serve good food and cheap food] but they were pushing sanitation and health. Everything was aimed at cleanliness and the waitress uniforms were specifically designed to look like nurses uniforms.

The exhibit also reminded me of Sweet's Restaurant down on Fulton Street , always described as the oldest restaurant in New York, and which I never got to eat at.

Something I had known but had forgotten was jogged into my mind by the exhibit: namely the revolving platforms on the Horn and Hardart tables holding all the condiments. I had also forgotten that the staff at Horn and Hardart wore uniforms. But what I hadn't ever known was that the Automats hadn't begun in Philadelphia but were invented in Switzerland and developed in Germany.

The exhibit was very very interesting and luckily not too crowded and I spent far more time at it and I had planned to. It was now fairly late, around 2 PM, and I still hadn't had breakfast. The next exhibit I was going to was up at Lincoln Center so I took the bus up instead of the subway and part way up got off at the German restaurant, Hallo Berlin on 10th Avenue [click menu for readable view].

I had their lunch special a bowl of potato soup with chopped up sausage and a small pils, Warsteiner, eine  Königin unter den Bieren. Probably because it was so late for lunch they were very few people in the restaurant; I also noticed for the first time the attractive beer garden they have out back. The waitress was in her middle 20's, slim, attractive and German but the person in the back, presumably the cook, was speaking a Slavic language.

As I said, the beer was a small one and I had food with it; but I began feeling drunk and also getting a headache. It was only later on that I realized that although I usually drink a lot of water and other liquids during a regular day, so far today I hadn't drunk anything until that beer and maybe that's why it affected me so much.

Normally gas in Manhattan is far more expensive than anywhere else in the country. That's why it was really surprising to lookout the window of the restaurant at the gas station across the street, 10th Avenue and 44th Street, just a few blocks from Times Square and see that the price of the gas was a dollar 78, only slightly higher than it had been here last week [it's now about $1.68].

Got back on the 10th Avenue bus and went up to Lincoln Center where the bus stop was two or three car lengths from the entrance to the library. It's the performing arts branch of the New York public library [which I first had gotten mixed up with the Donnell branch of the library on 53rd Street near the Museum of Modern Art where I used to borrow records when I was in high school] and is a scholarly research library for the performing arts.

The exhibit here was on original Broadway cast albums, the history from around 1900 with Edison wax cylinders to today's CDs.

There was a track running in the background playing about a dozen Broadway songs from various productions since World War II as ambient sound. Then there were listening stations, each of which held about a dozen recordings beginning in around 1900. The table cases were filled with albums and scrap book items - somewhat difficult to read.

One item was a letter from Richard Rodgers to Goddard Lieberson on the studio recording of The Boys from Syracuse, one of my favorite records. Although Rodgers complimented Lieberson and Columbia for the great job they had done he was very upset with Portia Nelson's interpretation of "Falling In Love With Love".

You always read that Oklahoma was the first full Broadway cast recording; the exhibit made a point of saying that Britain had been making London cast recording is in the early 1930s and also that there even were a small handful of Broadway musicals recorded before Oklahoma. The comment was right about the London cast recordings but it was a stretch concerning the pre-Oklahoma ones here in the US. The ones they were talking about were several that had been performed with a solo piano instead of an orchestra and which had been written by Marc Blitzstein like No For An Answer  [and which aren't remembered today].

To put things into historical context for a younger audience, the blurbs were pointing out that Broadway musical recordings used to be on the hit parade and that they often were the number one albums sold throughout the country. The people who put it together seemed to believe that people nowadays wouldn't know that. I felt like a Neanderthal when I was reading that.

There were several references to on-line resources such as www.castalbums.org and http://musicals.eur.com/ . Around the edge of the room were about 125 LP album covers from World War II through the 1970s. Just as I was walking into the exhibit a large class group was leaving and after that I had the exhibit to myself. For the NYTimes' opinion of the exhibit click here.

I then also went off my schedule a second time, not only because I had spent more time at the exhibit than I had planned on, but also because I afterwards went to the reference collection of library where they have an immense number of CDs of Broadway musicals.

I checked one of them out, Good News, because I thought it was the version I had seen at the Opera house but which had flopped on Broadway and had never been recorded commercially. It turned out to be the movie version of the musical which was interesting but not what I wanted. By the time I finish that it was still later than I had planned it to be. But I did find out that this branch of the library has a Web presence  that I'm going to have to investigate more to see what they offer. Also had a chance to check my e-mail on the library computer.

The library building is on the ugly-warehouse backside of the Lincoln Center complex and as I walked through the main part of Lincoln Center and passed the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Opera Houses I realized that I hadn't made a rash decision 40 years ago when I thought the buildings were ugly just after they had been built. They were ugly. They are still ugly. They will remain ugly. At least the Plaza in front was filled with a lot of people walking, talking and playing with talks. It's a shame they couldn't be doing it any more attractive and humane setting.

I headed down to midtown by the Broadway bus intending to go to the Drama Bookstore whose address I had at Seventh Avenue and 49^th street. They had moved and the people who were there now only knew the store was somewhere near 9^th or 10^th Avenue. So I just started walking around Broadway and Times Square, stopping into the tourist office in the building that used to be the ____________ theater to pick up some twofers. I also noted that the revival of Gypsy with Bernard Peters [isn't there any other female actress who is allowed to appear in Broadway musicals now?] was in previews. I was thinking of trying to squeeze it in for a matinee the next day but didn't want to take the risk of waiting in line at the tickets booth the next morning and finding that the tickets might not be available. So I went over to the Schubert Theater and tried to get standing room but they weren't selling any.

Walked out of little bit more heading for the Drama Bookstore  [put in link] , which I never reached, but did get to the office of "Broadway Hit Show Club" on Ninth Avenue where I got another twofer but unfortunately not valid for the day I was thinking of going to a show. An aside: there were signs all around the building about security and having to check in. When I walked into the lobby nobody was at the security desk I walked past it, took the elevator, saw that somebody was coming out the locked and buzzed door I was going into, grabbed the closing door and got into the office. Their security wasn't very good but the woman in the office with whom I was dealing was very pleasant.

I also was investigating several music clubs for later that night and semi-decided on Swing 46

It was now around for 4:45 PM and I took the west side IRT express back down to Wall Street. Although it was the rush hour, the height of the rush hour, there still were seats in the car. Very surprising. At the hotel I got washed quickly, brushed my teeth, got rid of the umbrella -- although it had been raining all day, it was too annoying to use -- and quickly checked my e-mail in the office center. 

Since I now realized I was dehydrated from not having drunk much liquid during the day, I went across the street to a drugstore to get a bottle Snapple to refill myself. The store was actually a small supermarket but because it's in the financial district, it closed early, 7 PM and wasn't open on Saturdays and Sundays. By the way it just struck me: when I was down at 5 PM and 5:15 PM at Wall Street, it still was very quiet; not empty but nowhere near the number of people you normally would see there in the rush hour.

I took the west side IRT express to Chambers and transferred to the local to Sheridan Square to go to the restaurant I've been going to for 35 years. I like change very much, as long as I control the change. Otherwise I dislike change. It was little bit unsettling this night, because the waiters who have been there the last 35 years were missing. The lady who runs it was there, she lives in the townhouse upstairs. It was very quiet with very few customers but that isn't surprising because it was only 6:00 or 6:30 PM and most people wouldn't be eating until the 8, 9 or 10 PM. Still I have a feeling that since her husband died a few years ago, the restaurant might begin to be too much for her and it may be closing soon. 

I had the special extra price dinner of veal Milanese with Russian eggs as an appetizer, green salad, broccoli, tea, several glasses of water, and really delicious banana cream pie. Maybe because I was focussed on restaurants from the exhibit earlier that day but the veal came with a ramekin of marinara sauce on the side, reminding me that that's how the Automat and many diners used to serve veal cutlets and it's something I no longer see, or at least don't see it in this area. Unfortunately she doesn't take credit cards, $20 with tax and tip.

But I was getting behind schedule again. I had to get over to the theater on 14th Street at First Avenue by 7:30 PM. I stopped at LiLac Chocolate for a candy bar on the way. I was taking the 10th Street crosstown bus over to the east side but the bus was late; so late that after about 15 minutes I realized that I probably wasn't going to make the curtain so I started to walk up to 14th Street to take the 14th Street Canarsie subway over. Just as I began leaving the bus stop, the bus appeared and I got on and got off on First Avenue, with a 6 block walk up to 14th Street ahead of me, five minutes before curtain. Luckily the curtain was late and I was able to rush in. get to the men's room and then get to my seat.

The show was the musical comedy "The New Yorkers" by Cole Porter from 1930, put on by the off off Broadway "Musicals Tonight" series.  [put in link]In the opening remarks on the show it was noted that the year the show opened James earl Jones and Robert Morse had been born. Although i could believ it of Jones it was a surprise to hear that Morse is so old.   Although the show was called a musical comedy it was really a review with a very thin plot line: a loose society woman gets infatuated with a gangster bootlegger who owns the El Toro night club and she has to break him out of Sing Sing with an airplane. Presuming that what was presented was close to what was done in 1930, the play was more than risqué and the society it describes, amoral socialites and immoral gangsters, could be on HBO today, 70 years later.

The show's never been performed professionally since 1930 [that's the kind of musical that this theater specializes in] and was partly a reconstruction. Some of the songs that became standards are Love For Sale, I Happen to Like New York, Heaven Hop, I'm A Gigolo, Take Me Back to Manhattan and Just One of Those Things.

The cast, about 14 in number and 2/3rds equity, was mostly good to very good; I especially liked the head gangster staying in dialect, or at least dialect intonation,  throughout [except when he sang]. The music was one piano which sounded like an orchestra. Live voices with no miking. There is very little dancing in these productions and the actors often, but not always,  hold their scripts; they're in costume and use props but there's  almost no scenery. It was a sold out audience.

Although Porter wrote the music and the lyrics, Herbert Fields wrote the book "adapted by Mel Miller" who is the producer [and the director and the man I talk to when I buy my tickets over the phone and with whom I had a conversation during the intermission. He was commenting that the shows his group presents are not perfect and couldn't be sustained in full Broadway productions with $100 top tickets; in this setting the shows work and people don't feel they're out a lot of money if the show isn't outstanding.]. So I'm not too sure on how original all the lines were, like: [concerning the night club's floozy singer] "she had been a teacher, but she lost her class"; "she had a wonderful husband but unfortunately he wasn't hers"; another woman is complimented with "You look like a million dollars" and she responds: "and I'm just as hard to make"; and I always thought the "are you happy to see me or is that a gun in your pocket" line was from Mae West but it appeared here in Sing Sing as "are you happy to see me or is that a night stick in your pants". There are some reviews of the show here and also here 

I had wanted to buy a CD of one of the earlier productions I had seen at the theater but it wasn't among the ones they were selling.

After the show I had wanted to do something new which was why I had thought of one of the clubs uptown like Club Swing 46 ; but I began thinking that I wasn't dressed appropriately and decided instead to go to Marie's Crisis Café [put in link] on Grove Street. I took the Canarsie Line over to 8^th and walked down the ½ mile or so to Grove.

It's a small saloon which has an upstairs, apparently used for cabaret acts, although I'm not sure about that. The downstairs is a theater piano bar with a pianist playing Broadway songs, an inner group of regulars close to the piano singing all the lyrics and a bigger outer group joining in from time to time. The diet coke I had was $4 + $1 tip but if I had had a beer or whiskey it would have cost the same.

It was good music well played [not necessarily well sung], I knew most of the lyrics but since I can't sing, I didn't. But I did feel like an extra in a scene from a "Will and Grace" episode.

Although the smoking ban had gone into effect two weeks earlier people were still smoking inside. After about an hour the place was jammed and getting uncomfortably loud and smoky and I left for the hotel around 11:30.

The one computer for e-mail was in use so I didn't get Chance to check my e-mail that night.

On Saturday morning at the rain and drizzle had stopped, the sun came out  and the temperature began rising, rapidly.

I wasn't able to check my e-mail at the hotel in the morning since there was only one terminal available and someone had been on  and looked like he was going to be there quite a while.

As I had said, the door of the hotel is about five car lengths from the west side IRT line. [The door of the hotel is also about three car lengths from our Lady of Victory Church which I thought might have moved from the shrine to Elizabeth Ann Seton House down at the Battery but then realized that one is Our Lady of the Rosary]. I took the express up to 34th street to buy a roll of film at one of the big camera stores on 33rd and 32nd. 

As far as I can tell Willoughby's, which had been open in December, is gone and I wound up going to Olden's where I had bought a camera about 25 years ago. Then it was one of the leading camera stores in the city; today it looked dog eared and empty of business and the film wasn't even refrigerated; so I decided to wait until I got to Hoboken and pick up film at a drugstore there.

The tube to Hoboken, on a Saturday morning, was just as crowded as the IRT expresses had been yesterday, a workday, during the rush hours. As most of you know it's a 15 to 16 block walk from Lackawanna terminal up Washington Street to where the Maxwell House factory and the shipyards had been. The museum is part of a complex, mostly residential, built on the site of the shipyards; one building is named the Independence and the other Constitution after the American Export ocean liners [that Lucy and Ricky and the Mertzes sailed on to Europe]. Because I was trying to do more things later on that day before I took the train back home, I was going to take the Washington Street bus up to save time. But I got distracted. I stopped at the City Hall Bakery where I intended to go back later to buy some St. Joseph zeppolli on the way back. Right then I just bought a buttered role for breakfast to eat as I walked up Washington Street. After passing two bus stops without a bus coming, I decided to just keep walking.

It's not news but it was really obvious today that the number of real estate agencies and Hoboken approaches the astronomical. Hoboken today really fits the old saying "doing a land office business". And just since December several more restaurants have opened on the stretch of Washington Street I was walking along. What I found most interesting was that they're not the student/yuppie bar and grill type places that had predominated after the saloons were driven out. These are mostly full-scale dining restaurants and cafes to sit and talk and use your laptop computer in the outdoor sections on the wide sidewalk.

In my mind the uptown part of Hoboken near the river had always been not too desirable because of the Maxwell House factory and shipyards. Perhaps it was just the trees, but the renovated blocks around that area now actually look better than most parts of spiffed up Hoboken.

I got to the Hoboken Historical Museum and Cultural Center about 10 minutes before it was going to open and was planning on stopping at a café to drink something to kill some time, since I didn't want to look too eager to get in. But the café closest to the museum was crowded, so I decided to go straight to the museum and found that it had opened early.

The main reason for this trip was to go to the exhibit on the Hudson Tubes which the museum was running. Normally I wouldn't have thought of going, since it's a major trip to a small museum;  I was expecting to find a very small and not very informative exhibit. I probably would not have gone except that the museum had asked my permission to use my website on the Tubes as one of their displays.

Instead, the exhibit was fairly large, filling the entire [small] museum and it was very professionally installed and it was very interesting. I learned some facts, especially about fares, that I hadn't known and which I can use on my website. The museum doors had just  opened but in a few minutes the place was crowded [although, as to be expected, mostly by men and children]. I noted a grandfather who had brought his eight or nine-year-old grandson in from Belleville to see the exhibit and who kept reminding him to not just look at the pictures "but to read the words since words are important".

Over the last 8 to 10 years I've gotten very disappointed with many museum exhibits, since museums' philosophy seems to have changed. "Exhibits" now are often  nothing but picture books that are spread out on a wall with pictures and diagrams and a lot of commentary but very few actual artifacts or Exponate [I'm getting ready for the start of my German for Reading course tomorrow which will be filled with art historians]. This is what I experience even at the Smithsonian museums and at the major New York museums; so I expected the same thing here and, in fact, expected that it would be even more extreme, since this was a small and, I had thought, amateur Heimatmuseum.

Instead they exhibit consisted of physical Exponate: tokens, tickets, engineering drawings, signs from the H & M not only illustrations from books. The only type thing that wasn't displayed was very large objects such as a tube car itself or seats from one. [Something which is good in the long run but bad in the short run because it's going to take a lot of time and work on my part is that I found about a dozen citations, mostly to 19th-century editions of Scientific American, that appear to have a lot of information and illustrations on the first construction and then on the successful building of the Tubes. It looks like I will be spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress.]

When I entered I had introduced myself to the man at the counter and said that I wanted to see the exhibit because my website was being used as part of it. He was from Tasmania and was the assistant to the head of the museum who was, I think from his accent, English and married to Holly Metz, the woman with whom I had been dealing over the Internet.

The curator mentioned that a lot of people would walk into the museum and wouldn't look first at the exhibits but instead go straight to the computer and spend their time on the websites; besides mine there also was the official one from the Port Authority and another one from "T. M. K." [ Terrence Michael Kennedy whom I "Internet-know" since I've gotten permission from him to use some of his images on my site]. It turned out that the exhibit was 90, if not 99 percent, from Kennedy's personal collection.

The curator told me that the only exhibit they had had which had drawn a bigger crowd than this exhibit was one on the German and Dutch ocean liners in Hoboken. He said the museum would like to have kept this Tube exhibit running as a permanent one but since it filled the entire museum they had to close it down to make way for another exhibit.

He also made a comment on a topic which he said was puzzling to him but which all of us from Hudson County would have found to be "normal".

He said that one reason why this Tube exhibit had done so well was that it covered Jersey City and Harrison and Newark as well as Hoboken. He said that in the past whenever he would try to publicize his exhibits the only clientele he would usually get was from Hoboken. He said he couldn't understand why people who lived across the street in Weehawken or Jersey City or Union City would not come. He was even more surprised that his counterparts in the Jersey City and Bayonne historical societies and museums also seemed not to have a deep interest in Hoboken.

I guess whether you have grown up in England or Tasmania you don't understand how much local patriotism [or, putting it negatively, parochialism] there was/is where we grew up. There was a headline a long time ago, illustrating  our village-like background, that appeared on page 5 or 6 of the Jersey Journal on some especially important presidential Election Day under the headline "New York also has election". 

So the fact that you wouldn't cross the street to go to a different city museum seemed completely normal to me but I could also understand why he found it unusual. On a happy note, however, he did point out that there is more and more cooperation among the cities now than there was even five or six years ago.

They gave me a T-shirt for having let them use my website and I also decided to support them by buying a lot of books there instead of from Amazon; and then I realized, if I were a museum member, I would get a 20 percent discount on the books so I joined the Hoboken Historical museum organization and wound up putting a really high charge on my credit card. [Gene: I have a special tube car, not a normal model, but one made of something like foam that's yours whenever you get back here or I get to Colorado] .

The gift shop, although small, also was still on a level of what one encounters in very professional museums, although with somewhat lower prices. When I went to the gift shop website I found they display only a tiny percentage of what they have on the premises. It looks like you can call them up and order anything, even if it isn't displayed on the website;  but if you're in Hoboken take a look of what they offer, especially their prints of the city,  prints of the ocean liners, maps, etc. Henry and George: you could buy your Maxwell House and "Heaven Hell or Hoboken" T-shirts here [ ---  for the non-natives: Hoboken was the port of embarkation and return of  most of the soldiers sailing to Europe in WW1;, so their ultimate destination was going to be Heaven, Hell or Hoboken.]

Auralize Woody Allen's voice or rather his intonation in his movies. Now make that voice several decibels above the comfort level. That was one of the visitors who was talking with his friend most of the time I was at the exhibit.

Since I was so far uptown in Hoboken, I had originally thought that if I saw the New York bus, I would go back to Manhattan by the Lincoln Tunnel instead of by the Tubes, since I was going to another exhibit on the far upper East side of Manhattan. But I had spent so much time at the Hoboken Museum exhibit and talking to the people there that I realized I was going to be putting myself under pressure to try to get to the other exhibit [which runs for another few months but which had a lecture I wanted to hear this Saturday]. So I decided to do delete even more items from my schedule, like a matinee of a Broadway show, and do things more relaxedly.

Except for the roll I had picked up at the bakery I hadn't eaten anything yet and it was about 2 PM; so I started walking back down Washington Street and at 11^th [or maybe its 10^th]. I saw Helmer's Café [and then there's a review of it here ] which I haven't been to since I went there with my parents 30+ years ago. The front room, where the bar is, was about half to 60 percent filled and by the time I had finished eating and was leaving, the side dining room was also in use.

It looks, on a very small scale, like Haussner's in Baltimore did, or, now that I think of it, as many many restaurants used to look. A lot of wood with a lot of carving and millions and millions of [in this case, German] knick-knacks, good bright lighting. It also struck me that a lot of the new chain restaurants are trying to look old and established by imitating this look. It really isn't a true German restaurant anymore; it's a restaurant that has an enormous number of German and Belgian beers - very many on tap, a connection to The Brooklyn Brewing Company, and a menu which is perhaps 40 percent German but where that German 40 percent is emphasized.

I had a Holsteiner schnitzel with red cabbage and potato dumpling. I realized that the staff had become really un-German when the waitress asked whether I wanted my Holstein schnitzel with or without an egg. After the experience of semi-drunkeness at Hello Berlin the day before, I was somewhat leery about ordering alcohol with the meal but when I saw Jever Pils on the menu as a tap beer I was going to order a glass -- -- -- until I saw that tap birch beer was available. I like that a lot, you can't get real draught birch beer here and so I ordered it; and a second glass of it; and a third class of it after the meal. The schnitzel itself was  veal, not pork, was thin, was breaded correctly, was light and tasty and served piping hot, as was the good red cabbage. The dumpling, however, was too potato-y and loose for my taste. The bill including three mugs of birch beer was $       .

As I was walking down towards the terminal I stopped off at the public library on 5^th Street to check my e-mail but it had closed an hour earlier. Cutting back to Washington Street through Church Park I noticed every tree had a large yellow ribbon and it reminded me that except for the time of the Islamic Attacks on America, patriotism has been more open and comfortable in New Jersey than down here.  

Washington Street was not shoulder to shoulder but was filled with pedestrians, adults and children, young and old, aborigines and yuppies [one of the books that I had bought at the museum, really a collection of newspaper articles, is Yuppies Invade My House At Dinnertime and details the take over of Lower Jersey City by the Yuppies.]

At the foot of Washington Street where the trolley trestle had begun to rise up to Jersey City Heights there still is, according to the museum exhibit, a car elevator although the it seemed like it was a trolley car elevator not a tube car elevator. Since the city is about to demolish it, I took quite a few pictures of it just in case it was connected with the tubes as opposed to with the trolley.

I stopped off again at the City Hall Bakery; I found out that it wouldn't be practical to bring back the St. Joseph zeppoli with me since they had to be refrigerated because of the cream filling. Instead I bought a small Easter cake and an Italian non-sweet pastry made with ham and salami and various cheeses; the name was something like straticiolli [which I was going to bring back for Sigrid and Dmitri but when I got home I realized they had already left for Europe]. The cake was small and rich but flavorful.

Juggling my suitcase, which I had been carrying all day, the books from the museum, and the cakes from the bakery, I went down to the Tube station and had a choice of either taking the Tube to Newark and having two to three minutes to make a connection to the early train to Washington or to take the Tube to 33rd Street, take the later train from Pennsylvania Station and have 55 minutes to kill. I decided I did not want to rush so I went to 33rd Street. By this time most people would have said the weather was beautiful [probably mid 70s] but I found it hot and sticky I was sweating; my body was like a furnace radiating heat and I didn't want to have to rush to make a close connection in Newark.

Got three or four bottles of water and Snapple at Pennsylvania Station and  was able to use a roundabout way to get onto the train before the crowd was allowed in. I got a seat in the snack bar car at a table where I was able to spread out and read and write. By the time the train left Manhattan my car was about half filled but by the time we left Newark it was almost completely filled.

An actor on his way to Washington had begun dictating loudly into a machine while the train was still in the tunnel to New Jersey. So loudly that he could be heard at the end of the car. Then he began a long and loud conversation with a Greek-born woman returning from a college scouting trip with her daughter. [I now know all about her daughter's school choices, what they're willing to spend on tuition, where her husband works, what she does for a living, how many hours drive it is from Baltimore to their house, etc. etc. Also that she doesn't have to worry about long distance phone bills when her daughter is at college because her husband works for the federal government and so has "free" long distance service !!!!!]  The loud actor played his Greek card by complimenting Melina Mercuri for being a lovely actress [I, on the other hand, identify Mercuri  as a vitriolic politician spewing forth vicious propaganda against the US and against American culture]. The woman commented that she was in hospital work and had to communicate a lot with Spanish speakers  which was so very easy ------------- since Spanish is so close to Greek!

At the table next to mine a woman was reading from a textbook and making hand written notes  into something small and electronic. I started a conversation with her and learned it was a palm pilot, light, and - she said -  good at recognizing handwriting and converting it into a text file. Some day I'd like to experiment with that.

The train got back early enough that I could get my car out of the garage and drive home before it got dark and my eyes started having problems.