[I'm putting it up as a web page http://www.hudsoncity.net/temporary/manhattanapril2004.html since some AOL people still can't get embedded images in their mail.  Most of the pictures open full size when you double click them]

On Kearny Avenue I picked up some rolls and buns at Brothers Bakery [noting that Van Holton Chocolates is still on Kearny Avenue and my sister said it's still running ]. One of the things I got was a tea roll or tea cake and it struck me that I had been eating scones all my life but under a different name.

My cousins Carol and Henry arrived and with blue skies and temperatures in the 60s we drove down to the river. I had wanted to go for lunch to a restaurant with a river and skyline view; Vue in the Hyatt at Exchange Place meets the bill and is wonderful but since we had been there, I thought we should try something new. The Newport Cafe‚ on the pier at the foot of Pavonia Avenue also met the qualification, and  has easy and free parking; but the base $30 @ person lunch range seemed too high. So we gave up a view and went to Tanya's European American Restaurant, a Polish restaurant on 348 Grove Street, just a little way from the Tube station. [Later I found three possibilities with a view for another time:  City Bistro @14th St) the Madison (on 14th St) and a new restaurant on 340 River St at 4th called 3 Forty Grille 201-217-3406.]

There was no river view and the view from the windows to Grove Street is very depressing, congested and negative. But the inside of the restaurant is a gem. It is cheerful, bright, warm without being cluttered. There are attractive colors and decorations without being overly feminine and cute. It raises your spirits and makes you feel clean and alive. I realized as I started writing this it is like being in a small neighborhood non-tourist Gaststätte or wine bar in Vienna or Salzburg or Graz.

We had a barley mushroom soup, a cabbage soup, 2 full orders of mixed pierogi, a half order of pierogi, a mixed salad platter of tuna fish salad and, I think, chicken and several other salads, a side cucumber salad, 4 sodas and 2 teas. For four people the bill with tax but not tip was $40.

The service was extremely slow and poor, such as not offering to refill the water; but since we were there to talk an had no schedule that worked out fine. LINK FOR Henry's main course

This section of Jersey City is maybe 100 feet from the Grove Street Tube station; the blocks between it and the river appear to be under development for commercial and office space. In fact we were able to get a parking space right around the corner from the restaurant on the side which looks likes it's undergoing commercial development. 

But immediately surrounding the restaurant you have the narrow Jersey City streets [my car always seems to expand from a mid size car in Alexandria to a full size Belchfire V-8 land yacht when I arrive in Jersey City or Hoboken] and since there is litter and signs  hanging out, the area feels extremely messy and congested. You have to go about 2 or three blocks one way to get to relaxed residential neighborhoods or 2 or 3 blocks another way to reach open high-rise commercial and apartment buildings. I suspect this section of Grove will be gentrified and maybe even overly sanitized within the next few years.

Since my sister was having a problem with her leg, it wasn't practical to walk around but we died take a short driving tour southwards past City Hall and to the mouth of the Morris Canal with the view of the Statue of Liberty down Warren Street, through the original Paulus Hook / 5 or 6 block square 1830 lower Jersey City real estate development with the Anglo Saxon names like York Street, Montgomery, Warren, Sussex, Essex, Morris, etc.; to Exchange Place for the view of the Jersey City and Manhattan skylines and the Katyn Massacre Memorial; then up Washington Street past Lorrilard's Tobacco Factory where Carol's mother and mine used to work, and into Hoboken. To the City Hall Bakery in Hoboken opposite the City Hall where we got cake and also took some pictures.

We drove northwards up Washington Street to the end of Hoboken, the 14th Street  Viaduct and past North Street Park through Hudson City. On the residential streets there didn't seem to be much change either up or down over the last 10 - 15 years. 

Another cousin of mine had gotten home from work and her husband had just retired and was home so we stopped off with the cake from the bakery. Their house is a quarter block from reservoir #2 which is drained and the view to the Manhattan skyline is very good ------ but which I managed to cut off in this clickable picture which enlarges. [You can see the skyline a little in this picture Carol and Loretta to the right that also expands when you click it.]

After the visit I drove everyone back to my sister's house in Kearny and then back to Jersey City to check into my hotel the Candlewood between the Pavonia and Exchange Place stations and at a ferry landing. [On the map at the bottom of this page its at the foot of the unnamed street, Second Street, just below Avalon Cove apartments.]

After washing I walked to the Pavonia Avenue PATH Tube station and took the uptown train to Herald Square, walking up to Times Square to the TKTS half price ticket booth. After the fall I had several years ago and the damage it caused, I've purposely walked more slowly. But something happened in Manhattan. In DC, in Old Town, in Hoboken and Jersey City later that weekend, I walk at a moderate pace. As soon as I got out of the Tube station in Manhattan, however, my walking speed was up. Maybe it's the speed of other people around you that revs you up.

At TKTS there was a ticket available to a Broadway show I wanted to see, the revival of Comden/Green/Bernsteins's Wonderful Town. A big reason I don't use the ticket booth too much is that the lines are often long long long and by the time you reach the counter, the shows you had seen listed as available are gone.  But the main reason I avoid TKTS is that they make you pay in money instead of credit card and I dislike carrying cash with me. This time there was no line at all and since it was the first day of the trip I still had cash so I got was alleged to be a mezzanine seat for half the $100 face price.

It was now around six and the curtain wasn't until 8 so I decided to walk up to Columbus Circle and see the new special Time Warner complex shopping center that had just opened up on the site of the Coliseum. It  is part of a twin building complex, I'm guessing about 60 or 70 stories that opened a few weeks ago. It is calm in style  on the inside, looking something like the more expensive of the Tyson's Corner shopping centers here. Perhaps if I were a woman looking for coutier or famous name clothing it would be worthwhile but I found little of interest in it. Even the large Barnes & Nobles isn't that large and their local history section was shockingly skimpy. The mall is, however, very open and airy and there is a really nice view from the mezzanine to Columbus Circle and the park.

On the way back from Columbus Circle I cut through the lower end of Central Park which was very filled with people and joggers and baby carriages. Stopping in at the Essex House to use the men's room, I was walking through the bar and overheard a fragment of a  conversation from one table: "Well, if you can't afford to own your own stable, you shouldn't buy any horses at all." I wondered if the next topic was going to be the cost of buying vs. up keeping yachts.

Walking down Sixth Avenue it struck me how touristy this street is with hordes of both foreign and American tourists everywhere. And it's a shame that they're staying in the hotels there because this part of Sixth Avenue is one of the least attractive parts of Manhattan

I got to the Al Hirschfeld Theater [which had been the Martin Beck Theater until it was re-named a year go after the Broadway cartoonists ----  we're becoming so very fickle French in changing our street and monument names] a few minutes before curtain time and I needn't have hurried. The house looked like 2/3rds sold; my $100 face value "mezzanine" ticket was actually in the first balcony, although in the very middle with good sight lines.

My cousin who is very interested in the theater asked me why my "to-do" list of shows was concentrating on musicals. Washington has very good and very many productions of straight plays. But although things are changing, such as at the Signature Theater, Washington doesn't offer the selection of musicals, and certainly not the selection of  professionally done odd ball musicals that New York does: Musicals Tonight!, City Center Encores, The Broadway Musicals of 19xx series, etc. So I try to take advantage of what New York has to offer that I can't easily get in Washington. get in Washington.

The orchestra is on stage on risers behind the performers and the stage setting is effective but not only fluid looking but also cheap looking and as if they were planning to move the show inexpensively and easily on tour after New York.

The miking was likely satisfactory to 99% of the audience but since I really  dislike any kind of miking, I'm probably overly sensitive to any flaws. This show had a very hard and brittle sound; after the first few minutes it wore in and you could ignore it but everyone once in a while you again became aware of the harsh mechanical sound.

All in all it was a very good production of the show, although since I only know the show from records [I believe this is the first time it was ever revived] I can't make any comparisons with the original staging and am not sure whether or not there was any cutting or jiggling of the plot line. I know you're not supposed to compare a production with another one, but I couldn't help comparing aspects of this very  well-done revival to what I've heard scores of times on the 1953 recording.

Eileen was especially attractive and played her character whom everyone loves on first sight very well; Bob the male lead was very good but my mind's ear kept going back to George Gaynes on the recording and this Bob was much lighter and much less powerful. Ruth was attractive as well as good looking; had great body movements and physical comedy ability; sang well and  incarnated the role well. But Donna Murphy for all her talents isn't Rosalind Russell [in my ear on a 50 year old recording]. You KNEW that Rosalind Russell - who had no great singing range and who I suspect couldn't dance very well - not only couldn't hold on to a man but could see how she drove them off ["Just tell him where his grammar errs / And mark your towels "Hers" and  "Hers"]; Donna Murphy was more in the range of clumsy with men and didn't know how to pull off the man-catching tricks society expected her to do.

There was an especially neat piece of staging in "Interesting People on Christopher Street" where a group of the dancers performed like Martha Graham in the 1930s,  in gowns and purple hoods as in her classical productions. It still can be jarring with Broadway's "color blind casting" when the physical types of the actors grate against reality. But the director did this one well: as the black and white Irish police were serenading Eileen [who tries to tell them "mother's a Swede / and father's a Scot / so it's Irish I'm not / and I never have been"] with an Irish song and dance routine, the director has one of the black dancers get the spotlight with an Irish punch line in an Irish accent that brings the audience in on the silliness of the situation.

Until I saw the play itself I hadn't realized from the record what a thin, no, gossamer, plot there is. It's almost like a comic book or a cartoon. There were some odd things: why do the sisters have different accents from each other? Eileen no accent, Ruth an Oklahoma-Kansas accent -- although they're supposed to be from Ohio. 

Which reminds me  that that song had been a top 40 hit at the time; now there's almost never anything from current Broadway shows that makes it to the radio and popular culture. Click here to see all the show's numbers. Another question: Georgia Tech has apparently changed its nickname [I suppose the Rambling Wrecks Political Correctness Committee brought suit against the university] but why did they make the football player - in 1935 - be a rambling wreck from Trenton Tech? And an apparent anachronism: why do they have a Castro style convertible in 1935?

All in all a very good production of a show that you never see; I hope the smallish audience and the fact that I could get a half price ticket 2 hours before curtain on a Friday night don't portend an early closing.

The show [very long first act, short second act] was out by about 10:30. I walked down to 42nd to use an internet cafe, lost a dollar in the machine and started to leave. A foreign tourist offered me his left over time but it had expired by the time I got to his machine. Since I had been up since 4:45 in the morning and had driven up, I decided not to try to do any more and walked down to Herald Square to take the Tubes back over to Jersey City.

I was lucky that I got into the train just before it started out because there is a 15 or 20  minute headway at night after 11pm; I wasn't lucky since  the combined service , where you go from uptown to Hoboken and then back out to go to Pavonia and Journal Square, had also started at 11 pm because it was the weekend. With my evening teaching schedule it's hard to go to New York on weekdays but it is more efficient and advantageous to be there on weekdays than on weekends. 

So it did take longer to get back to the hotel but there was a reward, a possible celebrity sighting. While waiting in Hoboken for the train to switch direction, a rodent was scurrying around the platform; others might have thought it was a rat but I decided it might be either Chip or Dale, the chipmunks from Walt Disney.

Saturday morning I was out of the hotel by 8:30. A friend of mine from work had had surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital [he had decided it was better for him than the Washington Hospital Center] on the far Upper West Side, so after taking the Tube to 33rd Street I rode the West Side IRT up to 168th Street [actually a station I had always wanted to examine close up; there are high speed elevators [no stairs except emergency ones] because of the depth of the station, I think the deepest in the entire New York system.]

I stayed  about 1½ hours; there was a spectacular view of the river and New Jersey from the visiting room [he was mobile] and he mentioned that there was a full scale white table cloth restaurant on one of the upper floors. He was also very happy with the technology and nursing of the hospital. Looking at the buildings from the outside, however, is very depressing. The hospital located on a high ridge of Manhattan with potential views to both the Hudson and the Harlem Rivers. The original buildings, probably from the 30s or 40s, are all right architecturally but the contemporary buildings where the main hospital is located is brutalistically ugly, menacing and inhumane from the outside.

I walked 10 or 12 blocks up Fort Washington Avenue, passing under the George Washington Bridge. The weather was perfect with blue skies and far visibility and I was tempted to take the #4 bus back for the ride along the river and Riverside Park but I still hadn't gotten my ticket for the play, I had to go to an exhibit on the east side for professional reasons and didn't want to cut things close. So I rode the IND train back down to 86th and thook a bus across the park to 5th Avenue.

The Neue Galerie, the trendy Austrian art museum with the Cafe Sabarsky, was having a small exhibit "Arcadia and Metropolis" with selections from Berlin's National-Galerie on the German Expressionists like Kirchner and Grosz. It was interesting, I did want to see it, but I had to hustle so much because of the other things I also wanted to do, I didn't do it justice. 

To save time I walked back across the park instead of waiting for the bus and took the train down to 34th and 8th and then walked down to 27th.

The theater, Haft Auditorium, is inside the Fashion Institute of Technology, one of the New York state universities, and which occupies one complete Manhattan superblock. I couldn't get into the box office, went in through the main university entrance, kept wandering around and wound up in the theater's wings. When I walked onto the stage I found them completing the sets and also learned that there was no matinee; the opening night was that evening, not that afternoon. [I was also advised to get a seat in the middle even if it was far back.] They also gave me a box office phone number [the box office at the theater wouldn't open until that night]. 

I got out by going through the auditorium and then finding my way to a quiet lobby; after checking with the hotel - which was sold out the previous night - and finding that I could stay one more night, I changed my plans, called the number I had been given for the ticket, bought a ticket for Most Happy Fella that evening [they wouldn't tell me, however, where the seat location was]. Then I had to find a matinee to replace the one I wasn't going to.

Then I called up the Irish Repertory Theater which was presenting Finian's Rainbow in a concert version and which did have a Saturday matinee - they were sold out. I asked if there might be cancellations and was told to come to the box office about 15 minutes before the show, in about 1¾ hours.

For a long while I had had directions for a walking tour of Murray Hill on the east side, so I decided to take the time I had to kill to do that - or at least a small part of it which was all that was possible in the time available. I walked from the west side to the east side for this mostly architectural tour. The route was basically up and down Park Avenue South, Madison Avenue and Lexington Avenue crossing back and forth on the side streets between  East 38th and East 23rd Streets [the theater I was trying to stay near was on West  22nd]. 

Some of the stops on the tour were the Morgan Library which I've visited many times, Sniffen Court, a private street  somewhat like Gramercy Park, gated and blocked off from the public. One I wanted to look at more closely for its interior was Our Savior Catholic Church but they were preparing for a wedding and I didn't want to wander around and disturb anything.

I got to the theater on West 22nd, just a few blocks from the 23rd Street Tube station, at 1:45 and there were no cancellations. So I said I would wait in case something came up. The house opened, the lobby cleared, there were no tickets. Then the man in the box office called over to the bench I was sitting on [there was another man next to me]: "Don't worry, Charlotte will make sure you get in". Charlotte was Charlotte Moore the play's director. It turned out the man next to me was a reviewer or a friend of a reviewer from one of the smaller papers. On his coat tails I suppose, they also got me a house seat and for some reason gave me a $5 discount. I did wind up in the last row but so did the friend of the critic.

Finian's Rainbow [click this link for a brief RealAudio sample of its music and also here ]  is another show that has been seldom revived, I think only once, since it opened in the late 1940s. [There had been a very bad movie version of it with Fred Astaire and Petula Clark some time in the late 1960s]. I had, however, seen the one revival of it in the 1960s.

This version was a concert version: semi-costumes; little or no scenery; few props. The plot of the show was done as a narration by The Narrator and the only dialogue was what was essential to introduce and connect the songs. There was no dancing except for the one role of Susan the Silent who's a mute and who dances instead of speaks. When the characters and chorus finished the numbers they were in, they moved to stools around the periphery of the stage.

The music was by two pianos and it was seldom that you missed a full orchestra because the orchestrations and the playing was so good. No miking, natural voices.

The production was excellent and I'd recommend that anyone who can get to this limited run go -- I just read on their web page that they've extended the run from May 30 to July 11. 

Sharon [Melissa Errico] was so good that she actually overwhelmed characters like Woody who normally would have been stand outs -- and who were very good. She had the majority of the songs that became hits or at least had parts of them: How Are Things in Glocca Morra, Old Debil Moon, click for RealAudio excerpts dialup broadband. She's also put out a CD. Ogg did a very good job on "When I'm Not Near the Girl I love, I love the Girl I'm Near". Finian's credits do list a lot of musicals but he was also a marvelous straight actor, one of the best I've ever seen in any musical, on or off Broadway. The complete list of the show's numbers is here.

I did see the one professional revival of the show in the early 1960s with Howard Morris as the Leprechaun and Jeannie Carson as Sharon. It was a full blown Broadway production, although held first in the City  center where I saw it [I think with Gene]. One thing I remember from the staging was a feather boa that a woman was wearing during "When the Idle Poor Become the idle Rich" that wound up running the entire width of the stage. It did so well it was moved to a normal Broadway theater --- but then a newspaper strike began, it got no reviews, no one bought tickets and it folded after a very short while.

Since I have seen the actual show, even though a long time ago, and don't know it only from the OC album, I was able to note differences in the plot line in this production. And they were rather embarrassing comments on today's intellect. 

The opening narration was an exposition on segregation in the Evil South in the 1940s [and adding in denunciations of immigration policies which I'm pretty sure were not part of the 1960s show] --- as if anyone alive today wouldn't know about it. It was extremely condescending. 

The second change was tobacco. The story takes places in the rural South [Missitucky] with a cast of sharecroppers, African-American and European-American. Whatever the crop was, and it may have been tobacco or it may have been just "crops", there was no special emphasis on it. But this production had three or four wink and nod allusions to cancer, cigarette commercials, coughing, the sophistication of smoking. I suspect this may have been fear that the producers had that they might possibly be denounced to the Cultural Commissar for not commenting negatively enough on tobacco to a dumb audience who wouldn't understand that smoking is unhealthy.

It's a production you definitely should see. Based upon the program, the theater group also offers a lot of other interesting productions. This musical appears to be the only one it's done or done recently.

The show was over about 5pm and I was supposed to be back at FIT before 7:45 for Most Happy Fella. There was enough time to go back to the hotel but except for washing there really wasn't any need to do that. 

So I decided to check my e-mail at an internet cafe. That morning when I had gotten off the Tubes at Herald Square, a concierge had given me the addresses of two places. The first one, on 32nd Street was out of business; by the way, now all of 32nd Street east of 6th is Korean: Korean groceries, Korean restaurants, Korean electronics, and I would up in a Korean internet cafe, Empire Net Cafe 2 West 32nd Street 212-216-9484  on the 2nd or 3rd floor of an office building.

When I finished with the mail there still was time before the evening show so I walked down 6th Avenue  to 14th Street, took the 14th Street bus [I had bought an all day pass before I had started out for the hospital that morning]  over to First Avenue and began walking down it.

Teresa's Polish restaurant looked as if it had gone out of business, there's a new Polish one, Neptune,  which looks interesting, and one that my cousin Carol had mentioned to me Polonia is almost exactly opposite Christine's where I've gone several times. At a Polish deli/butchers on the west side of First in the same block as Christina's is in, I picked up a small loaf of dark Lithuanian rye and a small loaf of light Lithuanian  bread. [I knew they would get stale at the rate I eat bread so when I got home the next day I gave half if each to a friend of mine.] The light Lithuanian bread is very close to normal German Mischbrot which is close to impossible to get where I live.

I stopped to check e-mail and have a bagel at the -------- Cafe‚ with VERY disorganized customers [who didn't know what they wanted] and servers [confused by the customers].

I kept walking down First Avenue, passing by a group of loud 20 year olds [I hope Australian and not Americans with funny accents] looking loudly for a "party", which seems to mean cheap drinks to get drunk fast . Then cut over on  3rd Street, past the Hell's Angels' headquarters [which now is very spiffed up and looks like a dot com millionaire's townhouse] and came up Second Avenue. 

 I then walked back up Second Avenue, passing by the English fish restaurant [I think it's part of a small chain] A Salt and Battery that I keep meaning to try [and which is connected with the strange tearoom, Tea and Sympathy in the west Village].

At St Mark's place there were crowds of party seekers, even as early as 6:30 or 7. When I got to Cooper Union I was able to get a picture of the only [?] kiosk left in NYC and even that is a semi-reconstruction. The crowds on 8th street walking over to 7th were getting too unwieldy, so I cut up 5th past the Little Church Around the Corner [which is also around the corner from the parking space from which my car once got towed and detained] and then over to FIT on West 27th.

The Village Light Opera Guild was putting on The Most Happy Fella [the show that Ricky and Fred took Lucy and Ethel to when they had bought tickets to the matinee and went to the evening performance]. 

I think the show's from 1955 or 1956; there was at least one Broadway revival of the show [which I saw 3 times, recommended it to others and they disliked it], but I don't think it was ever recorded; there also was  a television production, LINK I think based on that revival but I think that's not available commercially. Except for the original version there is only a somewhat unusual recording made with pianos instead of a full orchestra.

A critic made a negative comment made about the show when it first was produced but I take that comment as praise: "there's enough music in this one show for three Broadway musicals". It's mostly musical comedy but here also are sung-through dialogues as in a Mozart opera and also operatic numbers like "Benvenuta" and "My Heart Is So Full of You". It's a show that needs a lot of good, trained voices that have endurance and can last the night but they still have to sound natural and not like elevated opera singers. Click here for a  synopsis of the plot and background on the show.

The VLOG is semi-professional; I think the principals are usually Equity while the chorus isn't. And because of that they can have massed choruses that are rare on Broadway now. There were 23 separate named roles, each played by a different actor, and a chorus of singers and dancers of at least 40. I think 12 or 16 is the most you ever see on Broadway now. They group began as a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe but branched out into operetta and then Broadway. I wish I had known about them in the 1990s when they were presenting a lot of things you never get a chance to hear/see.

Because of the nature of the company there is unevenness in their productions. But the result, as in this show, is overall very good and it's well worthwhile going to. The house, opening night, was not too good, maybe 3/4.

They do full productions with scenery, costumes, props, dancing. Rosabella/Amy had a beautiful voice as well as face and figure; Cleo had a very good voice and style for the comic second role. When she danced with Herman they [deservedly] stopped the show in "Big D" dancing with a subset of the dance chorus. The sister Maria wasn't played and sung histrionically as Medea the way she was in the other version I saw but more naturally; Joe sang very well and was pretty ..... but he's supposed to be a roguishly handsome but not evil tough guy who's been around a lot; this Joe was pretty not handsome and had a very good voice singing his big number "Joey"  but a juvenile's voice not a deep manly one. Tony, the main star, had a similar trait: His voice was very good but not the powerful one you need for the role; it was too light and without gravitas.

As I noted the chorus is large and well trained; the orchestra is also full size, around 40 members. Overall the two together were very good but unfortunately there were several spots where the orchestra and the chorus weren't matching the tempo [?] with each other and the chorus' lines got obscured. But that may have been because it was opening night.

The theater is relatively small and the orchestra and chorus are relatively loud; but surprisingly and unfortunately there was miking. After a while you could ignore it in the solo numbers; in the ensemble numbers the natural sound overcame the amplified sound.

In my mind the show got off to a bad start when they had Cleo sing the opening number about her [waitress] feet and when she got to the big toe she actually sang bitch in "son of a bitch" instead of letting the music drown it out. Unnecessarily vulgar. 

"Standing On the Corner watching All the Girls Go By" was well done by a male quartet. It ends with a cop moving them along for leering at women. Since the setting is Italian [or "Dago" as Joe puts it] it struck me how incomprehensible the scene would be to an Italian audience. "Abbondanza" and "Sposalizio"  as in the other productions I've seen - even one amateur one- were crowd pleasers and well done. [I do wonder where the line "the smell of mozzarella in the air" fits in since mozzarella has almost no smell; maybe parmesan or asiago doesn't scan.] Those trio numbers had many allusions to the Three Tenors and Pavarotti's handkerchief.

"Fresno Beauties" was especially impressive with a large male chorus of the type you seldom hear now. My heart Is So Full of You was done well but nowhere as well as in the Broadway version I saw three times, where the orchestra comes in between the sung lines with all the power of opera but even here the orchestra was lushly romantic in this section. All the songs are listed here.

After the show I walked up to 33rd street so that if there was going to be  a long wait for the train I'd be at the terminal and could sit in the train until it started. The train was full but not packed when we left 33rd but was really jammed by Ninth and Christopher Streets. 

As has happened several times recently  when I've ridden the uptown line on the weekends, the train gets a very large number of lesbians at those two stops heading for New Jersey. They are young and black and very very vulgar and very very loud. 11:30  seemed far too early to be going home on a Saturday night; maybe there are bars in New Jersey that New Yorkers go to.

I got back to the hotel about 11:45pm. 

Sunday I was up, washed and dressed by 8 am and tried to get information from the hotel clerk on Mass at St. Anthony's. He hadn't heard of the church [it's about 8 blocks from the hotel] but did call up; he could only reach an answering machine. 

The reason I wanted to go to St. Anthony's ["The Oldest Polish Roman Catholic Church in New Jersey "] was family history. My parents were married there, my brother, my sister and I were all baptized there. There are , however, some oddities: the full name of the church is St. Anthony of Padua, an Italian not Slavic or Baltic saint. And my sister, and maybe my brother, had also never been in the church after baptism; I thought I might have been there once with my grandfather when I was small. 

I think, but am not certain, that the church when I was growing up was an ethnic not geographic parish and I know my family on my mother's side had no connection with it. It also seemed unlikely that the grandparents on my father's side had anything to do with it, since my grandmother was Greek not Roman Catholic and my grandfather who was western Catholic, lived far from the church and had other Polish parishes closer to where he lived.

The church is behind the Newport Mall Shopping Center about six blocks from the Pavonia Avenue Tube station, straight up Sixth Street [whose first block here is called Gangemi Drive, after our deported - not departed -mayor].

But the first part of the walk is where there had been railroad yards and factories and is filled with a mixture of construction sites and vacant lots so the walk seems long. As you get closer to the church you get into a residential neighborhood of 2-family houses from the late 19th century. Not the brownstones of other parts of lower Jersey City but the simple frame ones.  It is not a slum or a terrible place but it is not the kind of neighborhood people from Manhattan will rush into until the beginning blocks are completed.

The church is very plain and unimpressive from the outside, it could even be Protestant. What is really noteworthy about the exterior is that the church, which is almost on the corner - it misses by about 25 feet - almost abuts or does abut another Catholic Church in full operation on Sixth Street: Holy Rosary, one of the Italian parishes -- I believe the one whose fireworks you could see from the Heights during the Italian festivals. It has a special shrine to Padre Pio. [And less than a block a way from these two churches is  McNair Academy which seems to be a former public school changed into a charter high school or a Catholic high school.]

As soon as I walked into St. Anthony's vestibule I knew that this was the church I had gone to with my grandfather; so I had been there at least once since my baptism. 

The interior of the church is spectacular. I didn't want to use flash, even though Mass hadn't started, so these are only poor images of what's really there.  Your gaze is immediately focussed on the main altar which, unusually, runs almost the full width of the church. Since it was decorated with 7 or 8 rows of Easter lilies it was especially impressive. 

The interior bears little resemblance to the plain exterior: it is basically Gothic but, oddly for a Polish church , a variant of Italian Gothic, with the striated brick work that you see in pictures of the cathedrals in Sienna and Orvieto. But some individual aspects of the church, like the illustrations of the Stations of the Cross, are more Austrian Baroque.

The Gothic arches are like a tree canopy and carved and carved again in different levels of depth; low relief and high relief. The illustrations for the stations of the Cross are both carved and painted, with Baroque touches like part of the image flowing into and even outside the frame [the descriptions on the stations are in both Polish and English].

There are of course the old fashioned American touches like the hat buttons on the backs of the pews [by counting which it looks like the church holds only about 750]. The whole design is a knockout and if the church were in a European city it would have several stars band be the goal of guided tours.

I was at the 8:30 am "English" mass [there's one other English and two Polish masses, 7:30 and 10:30 on Sundays] but the priest's accent was so strong it could have been in any language. [Because it's paschal time there's also a Gorzkie Zale at 10 am on Sundays.]

Before Mass I had spoken awhile with a lector who told me some background about the church; but she saw it - in my opinion - as a purely religious institution with a mere decoration of ethnicity and history. The parish now seems to be geographical, with all the immigrants coming from Poland being concentrated enough to make the church a geographic rather than ethnic parish the way it used to be [or at least as it was in one period.] Looking at the bulletin the church's entire staff, janitor to pastor is Polish. There also was information on the situation of the Church in Central and Eastern Europe which still is not good, even after the end of the Communist dictatorships, and still needs outside support..

The lector with whom I had talked in the vestibule spoke clear standard English but the other lector was Asian and her English was as incomprehensible as that of the priest. [What had struck me this trip was the large number of people with Slavic accents [NOT in the Polish restaurant] throughout Jersey City and Hoboken and the noticeably large proportion of Asian accented English in Manhattan.]

As the Mass was about to start and the priest was in the center of the sanctuary, the entire congregation stopped looking at him and the altar and instead directed their eyes to the left, to a shrine halfway along the left wall. It had appeared to be a shrine to St. Anthony since there was a painting of him. [I had noticed the crippled couple who were positioned there and, perhaps my misinterpretation, praying for a miracle.]

A series of herald trumpets began resounding through the church; bright klieg-lights began rising in intensity, focussing on the side altar and began illuminating the shrine; St. Anthony's image slowly began ascending. The organ and a chorus began singing a Polish hymn. As St. Anthony's image ascended and retracted into the top of the shrine, a Byzantine style madonna and child began to be revealed, Our Lady of Czestechowa. 

The herald trumpets and the organ and the choir were recorded but it was done so well they could have been acoustic/real. During the Mass, which then started, the organ and choir played the leads in the hymns and chants and the congregation responded. If you just read this description without having seen the actual scene, you might think it was garish and tacky; it wasn't. It was aesthetically beautiful and very impressive.

I had noticed the stained glass windows but had been more impressed by the illustrations of the Stations of the Cross and by the church's general architecture. A few days after I got back home I received a mailing from the Jersey City landmarks Commission on stained glass artworks in Jersey City that one of the half dozen events on Jersey City during May is a bus tour of five Jersey City sites with outstanding examples of stained glass; one of them is St. Anthony's.

After the visit I still don't know why the marriage and the baptisms took place in this church;  but I remembered that the one time I was back, with my grandfather, was in the afternoon or early evening so it is unlikely to have been for Mass. The perpetual Novena is now in English and in Polish and it may have been that I went with my grandfather when he was going to the novena; there also are weekly stations of the Cross  [in Polish at one time, in English at another [and perhaps he was attending them.

Also after the visit and finding that I had been back to the church since my baptism, I still can't figure out my nuclear family's connection to the church. Someone who isn't from Jersey City might look at a street map and say, Oh, its less than a mile from Jefferson Avenue to St. Anthony's. That's true but he would not realize that in that mile you had to descend cliffs where there were no streets and cross railroad yards which also had no streets. It would be a very circuitous series of bus rides that involved going through parts of the city that people didn't normally go to. 

I got out a map of Jersey City and double checked the distance: from Jefferson Avenue and Palisade Avenue [the big red X on the map to the left] to St. Anthony's [the big red Y on the map] is just over a half mile. But the cliffs, the railroad yards, the highway, the bus and trolley routes, and people's psychology made that an immense distance [when you double click the image to get the full size map you get a clearer idea].

The museums I had wanted to visit in New York would not be opening until 11 am and since one  of them was in Brooklyn I decided New York for that day would make things too rushed and hectic. So I decided to spend my remaining time walking around Lower Jersey City and Hoboken for sight seeing.

I went over to the Warren / Sussex / Montgomery area and noticed that there was Our Lady  of Czestochowa. 

Henry, Andrew and Laura had visited it about a year ago and were very impressed by it. Because of that I went in [Mass hadn't yet started]. I thought the interior was a very ordinary, in fact rather plain, Catholic church; after seeing St. Anthony's OLC looked like a poor relation ---- BUT OLC will be an "economic" success sooner than St. Anthony's is.

It's located in what had in the past been a wealthier brownstone neighborhood, it's being gentrified with "outsiders" more quickly, it's right between two stops of the new trolley line, it is the operator of the major community resource, Victory Hall. It also has a very trendy and Wasp-ish out reach program with ecological and sensitivity themes. St. Anthony's for the next few years is relatively isolated from the money moving in and it's immediate neighborhood is blue collar.

When I walked to the foot of Warren Street, from where we had seen the Statue of Liberty from the car on Friday, I noticed that there's one more ferry route, a water taxi, that puts in there, running to Wall Street and maybe to Liberty State park. This block of Warren is filled with new expensive high rise apartment buildings, apparently condominium buildings.

I went back to the hotel to wash, arranged for late check out and took the trolley to Hoboken. The Marriott and the Hyatt are each right at a Tube station; the Candlewood, where I was staying has a trolley stop at its rear entrance [and the Double Tree, the 4th hotel of the group] has its own trolley stop at its rear entrance. The trolley even on Sunday morning had surprisingly frequent headways, every 10 minutes.

My plan was to walk around the residential parts of Hoboken I hadn't seen recently and also to find a internet cafe to check the day's e-mail. As I was leaving the Lackawanna Terminal I asked some cops if they knew where the new Wolfgang Puck restaurant [which is supposed to have a river view] was; they gave me conflicting directions, including that it didn't exist, and I never found it. But as I turned around the corner where the Clam Broth House is and saw that the big finger is missing [the small big finger is still on the corner of the building]. There's been a major dispute between the among the owner, the tenant, the city and others and I suspect there is something more serious than structural violations. The restaurant is now closed and the building is shuttered.

I walked first up Washington Street for an internet connection and found that there would be one open, My Wireless -- but three days later. But I kept walking in the direction of the Hoboken Museum which I thought might be open but I was too early. Instead I went into the upscale grocery store, something like Dean & Delucca or Sutton place Gourmet, which is next to it and bought a bagel and soda. The weather was beautiful, the view of the river from Elysian Fields Park was very attractive. Washington Street was lively and bustling with pedestrians but not unpleasantly crowded.

I walked back on Bloomfield Street, the first one inland from Washington. Tree-lined almost its entire length; almost every  house renovated and in middle class condition [many are brick, however, not brownstone]. At least two women washing their stoops which was nice to see.

At 9th Street I saw The Dining Room at Anthony David's Restaurant [953 Bloomfield Street 201-222-8399] which I thought might be a possibility for another visit. It may have good food but it seems to have begun as a catering company that added in a small restaurant, like Bittersweet in Old Town. It wouldn't be too comfortable a place for sitting and talking when there was any size crowd.

I cut back to Washington Street and saw what I thought was an internet cafe at 510. it turned out they did have public terminals for a $1 donation but they were actually Symposia, a used bookstore that ran a bicycle rental service and are somehow connected to a Protestant charity.

Around 1:30 I took the trolley back to the hotel, packed and started home at 2pm. Generally good traffic except at the toll booths [the round trip toll is now $25], several cops giving tickets on the turnpike; I got home around 5:30 pm but the stiffness and back pain from the drive lasted until Tuesday, in spite of using a car back massager that a nephew had given me.

Originally I had had plans to do research for the Tubes web page, mostly at the New York Public Library but also at the ______ Library in New York and the Jersey City public library. I realized it is too difficult to combine research with theater with relatives and to try and do them all justice. I'll have to do a special trip just for library research.