There was also a lot of information stands on local plans issues connected especially with the Meadows, such  as Pontoon Boat Tours of The Meadows $15 through September 201-460-4640 , the  Meadowlands Environment Center as well as  ecological ones, like the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance  or local history like the Harsimus Stem Embankment.

There were a half dozen tours each day [click here  and here ] but they overlapped with each other so the best you could do was take a grand total of three and even that was difficult.

I had a hard time deciding which tour to take because they all looked interesting but I settled on the one of Paulus Hook. We  gathered at the front of the city hall and [for some odd reason, maybe connected with insurance liability??? ] took a bus three blocks over to Paulus Hock park on Washington Street where the tour started.

The tour leader,                , a newly elected Jersey City councilman and  also a Revolutionary war re-enactor, was dressed as a Jersey Volunteer, a New Jersey loyalist, fighting for the Crown.  His breakdown of public sentiment during the Revolutionary War [ 1/3 Loyalist, 1/3 Patriot and 1/3 who went which with which ever side was occupying New Jersey that month] was the same that you always read.

He did point out some new [to me] things that the British death ships in the East River were not just for captured soldiers and sailors, as I had thought, but for any civilian who was denounced by a Loyalist; also that the atrocities of both sides were terrible but the British Loyalists were even more extreme than the Patriots. It's easy to see why so many of them were expelled to or fled to Canada after the war was over. The Battle of Paulus Hook, was a defeat for the Americans but a psychological victory, since it could have gone even worse for them.

At the park he handed out scripts and maps of the tour for us to follow along instead of having to write down names and dates that he was saying. I've held on to them to use also as self guided tour of Paulus Hook and Van Vorst park for use the next time by myself.

He pointed out that Paulus Hook formed the bay where  Henry Hudson first landed [although a half mile up the river at Pavonia Avenue at the Tube station there's a marker that Hudson landed at that bay] and was the site of the first ferry to Manhattan, which ultimately became the PRR Exchange Place ferry.

He noted that Saint Peter's  Prep had expanded far beyond the one or two square blocks of the school; it's hard to notice because much if its land consists of houses and vacant lots. I had known that Saint Peter's College had first been here in Lower Jersey City but didn't know that St. Aloysius' Academy originally had been here at St. Peter's Prep. 

I commented to the guide that there were very few places to do shopping  on foot for groceries and daily life items, no supermarkets, for example, and asked him if any were planned. His answer surprised me: In his opinion there were enough stores [meaning a few delis] for people to buy food and the new locals didn't want Paulus Hook to 'become like Hoboken'. I found that interesting because, except for the bad parking, I'd think you'd want Paulus Hook and most places to develop into Hoboken where you can shop and do everything on foot and not need a car.

Also joining us at the park was the guide's wife who came from Boston and who was active on the historical district group. She was Ukrainian and I asked her about SS Peter and Paul's opposite Saint Peter's Prep being formerly Eastern Catholic; she said she was a pretty sure it was originally Protestant, First Reformed Church of Jersey City,  and then Orthodox and that the Greek Catholic church - maybe the one my grandmother attended - was on over on Jersey Avenue at __________ Street.

The group stopped in at the main post office on Washington Street which I haven't been in for decades. It's same beaux arts style and physical layout as the main post offices in DC  and NY but on a smaller scale. 

As we  continued walking through the area, we passed by buildings or sites of buildings where [lower] Jersey City's early industry had been: sugar, ceramic ware, porcelain, glass works. Also passed the original Colgate's and Robert Fulton's house near where his factory for building the ferry parts was and the old race track.

At the Morris Canal's Big and Little Basins I got involved in a conversation with one of the participants who was a lobbyist for the canal group that had helped preserve parts of the canal. I've never been able to figure out why there isn't a bridge, or at least a foot bridge, at the foot of Warren Street over to the Jersey Central Terminal and Liberty State Park.

When the railroad yards were being used you could understand why there was no way of walking three blocks across them to avoid having to walk 2 or 2 and half miles but I can't understand why it's still that way. It still isn't clear to me but it's something like: by having gotten preservation status for the Canal it's now illegal to build even a small discreet foot bridge over the canal because that would impinge on its historicity.

That was from the canal lobbyist. The other people on the tour were very varied with very little in the way of a common denominator: two college students [you now wear ear rings in the big part of your inside ear, not the lobe and not the big flap], one of whom grew up in lower Jersey City; local old time Jersey  City residents; new/NY Jersey City residents; ecologists from  the Greenway conference; bicycle riders . I just realized, however, there was a common denominator in the group. Except for the old  time Jersey City people everyone, whether young or old, was noticeably athletic and healthy looking. 

As we were coming back and passing Exchange Place and the Tube station, we stopped at the first headquarters of the  Commercial Trust Company Building which, since Colgate's and the Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal have been demolished, is the only 19th Century commercial building left on Exchange Place [and which we know as the Trust Company of New Jersey]. The guide also pointed out the plaque on the base of the Katyn Memorial of the mourning virgin, which I hadn't paid attention to before.

The second tour was a trolley tour of Hoboken and Jersey City using the Hudson Bergen Light Rail and led by Leon Yost [the photographer for the Jersey  City Calendar]. Because of time constraints we were limited to the northern section, from Exchange Place to Lincoln Harbor, the first station in  Weehawken at the Hoboken line. But from John Gomez - who now has a weekly Wednesday column for The Jersey Journal on local history [ the way Owen Grundy used to do and whose articles my  mother mailed me the days before the internet] - we did get copies of the tour map that also includes not only the northern but also the southern section to Greenville and Bayonne. That's also something I intend to do on my own when I visit another time.

I picked my sister up in Kearny and we met the tour group in the lobby of the Hyatt at Exchange Place and went over over to the trolley stop on Washington Street where we took the trolley northwards past Pavonia to Hoboken.  At Hoboken we switched trains, since there aren't through trains running yet.

On the return trip we got off at  the Ninth / Congress Street Station [which he didn't point out is technically in Jersey City not in Hoboken even though its at the bottom of the Palisades] Ninth Street elevator [the picture is from my cousin Pat]. We rode the elevator up to Paterson Plank Road and Congress Street

I had known about the movie studio on Congress Street at the Palisades but no that there had been another one a few blocks further up by North Street Park. Other movie studios

He also pointed out that Ogden Avenue, because of the Manhattan view and the proximity to the 9th/Congress trolley stop is now a very desirable and expensive neighborhood. I did note that there were at least two real estate agents on the tour.

Comments that he made on the Helix [which I rode on almost every day going to high school] were that it was a perfect 360 degree circle and one of the technical engineering marvels of the worlds when it was built and still today. I had ridden it almost every day going to high school but to me it looks like an ellipse not a circle.

The guide pointed out the site of the trolley trestle to Hoboken at Franklin Street and Palisades Avenue that we all knew about and which had begun as a cable railroad [Click the small picture to see what it looked like as a cable railway.]

I only knew it as a trolley trestle running from Journal Square up Central Avenue and then down the Palisades to Hoboken, the way it's in the big picture. I had ridden it only once or twice because I was a child when it was ripped down and also - I found out later - because my mother was afraid to ride it. At a recent Christmas party one of my older cousins pointed out that the trestle shook and swayed a great deal when you rode  up and down it.

But the guide also pointed out two sites of inclined railways and elevators which other trolley lines and wagons had used in the past. I remember when I was small one of my friends telling me that his father had told him about one of them. I'm still fuzzy on whether the guide said there was or there wasn't an elevator approximately where the 14th Street Viaduct is now. 

The guide  also noted the Hudson Tube car elevator building at Hoboken at the west end of Hudson Place; I've never found verification that the building which I had thought was the elevator building was actually it..

He also made a point that is completely logical and obvious after you hear it but which I had never thought about. When the Public Service trolley trestle was torn down, it was the last of several links taking people from Jersey City Heights/Hudson City and Union City down in a direct line to the river and New York. We grew up less than a mile from the river but always had to make a circuitous way to get to the river and to go to Manhattan.

His view was that after the trestles and elevators on the Palisades were demolished, we were cut off from our normal development with Manhattan; then, especially after the Tubes opened, Hoboken and Lower Jersey City developed towards Manhattan. Now that at least one pedestrian route has been restored on the Palisades, Hudson City is psychologically much closer to Manhattan -- and real estate values in Hudson City are correspondingly rising.

The people on the trolley tour were generally the same mix as on the walking tour the day before, except that there were two who identified themselves as real estate agents for Hudson City.

The second theme of this trip was plays.

The first play was at the Papermill Playhouse. It's a professional Broadway theater but off Broadway, 22 miles off Broadway, in Milburn New Jersey. I could have taken the commuter train from Hoboken, the theater is across the street from the Milburn train station, but I was concerned about having to wait an hour or so at the station for a train to get back after the show and decided to drive. 

A very bad decision. I wound up on I-287, a highway that goes from nowhere [Mahwah] to nowhere [Somerville] and should have no traffic; but I spent almost an hour going 15 minutes on it in rain and dark.  Then they charged me $8 to park at the theater, even though I was out in the suburbs; the round trip train fare from Hoboken is $7.50. The next time, take the train.

The theater is an equity house and is the same size and proportions as most Broadway theaters. The show was She Loves Me, one that I've seen put on by community theaters but never by professionals. [I think there may have been a Broadway revival about 10 years ago.] The same source material was also used for the movie The Little Shop Around the Corner, which kept the story in Europe,  and I think also later for the movie In the Good  Old Summertime which moved the plot to America: two lonely hearts correspondents who fall in love with the letter writer but dislike the actual person they work with.

The songs aren't too well known [ click here for a list of them] because the dialogue flows into them as introductions and the lyrics of the songs carry on the plot of the show.  The most famous ones are  She Loves Me, and Ice Cream [partly because of Barbara Cook hitting a high A over C  or a low X over W at the end of the song].

I knew that the play was very good and this production turned out to be equally good. I didn't recognize any of the names  of the cast members but all were fine; Miss Balash, the comic female, very good, and Amalie, the female lead extremely good. As always, I was making unfair comparisons with the original cast recording that I've heard many times. Kodaly, the roué, was good but not  as good as Jack  Cassidy is  on the record.

There was almost no dancing [but I don't think there's anywhere in the show that dancing would fit] but a lot of good chorus singing. There was a normal 15? 18? piece Broadway orchestra that played well but was so over amplified - as were the actors - that it was false and brittle and seemed like listening to a record.

I've never figured out why the name of a parfumerie in  Budapest  is called Maraczek's,  a Czech name,  and not a Magyar one, except maybe for vague KuK reasons. And having since the play several times I still find a jar when, after the botched rendezvous, George keeps deceiving Amalie about who he has and that this deception doesn't bother her when she finds out the truth.

The performance looked about 90% sold out with a generally responsive audience; the only big difference I noticed from a "normal" Broadway audience was that this one was slightly younger and there were very few obviously foreign tourists.

By chance the second show was by the same authors, Harnick and Bock, who had written She Loves Me.  It was Fiorello! at the St. Bart's Players. The show had won the Pulitzer Prize when it opened, ran several years and was a major hit. But not only has Fiorello  never been revived professionally but it's unlikely to be seen very often. It's far too New York parochial to hold much interest in the rest of the country -- or at least that's what producer think and so they don't do the show.

The theater is attached to the Episcopalian Saint Bartholomew's,  a wealthy persons' church, on Park Avenue opposite the Waldorf Astoria.  As I approached the church building, it was brightly illuminated, police barricades, people 20 deep at the steps, people yelling, camera lights flashing. Luckily the entrance to the theater is away from the main church entrance [if you click the little picture, you'll see it by the sign CAFE]. I asked one of the cops what was going on and they told me someone called Star was getting married. I  said who. And they said it was a woman who runs a woman's talk show in the mornings.

The whole production was on a small off-off-Broadway scale. The musical accompaniment  was only three pieces. But there was no amplification [or there was  some but very well done] so you actually heard the voices and the instruments and not just their amplification.

Using different standards than I would for a Broadway show, I think the cast and their production were professional and good.

Overture

Since I've heard the show only from the original cast recording I knew the plot only in its broadest outline. There's a big night club number, Gentleman Jimmy, sung by  Eileen Rodgers which apparently had stopped the show in 1956 and been one of the highlights of Broadway history.  I couldn't figure out how it could possibly fit into the plot. 

When I saw the show, I learned it didn't fit into the plot: there was  a night club meeting and the song was sung. I know you shouldn't expect reproductions of what was done 50 years ago, but on the recording  Eileen Rodgers sang the song loud, and brassy but classy. Her role was taken over by 4 or 5 singers who were using comedy-low class gangster moll voices. Tom Bosley was Fiorello in the original production and won a Tony for it; but he became famous in television as the father In Happy Days and as far as I know, never did another Broadway show.

The songs are very melodic [like 'Til Tomorrow], and some have very funny lyrics [like  Politics and Poker  or I Love A Cop]  and some have witty lyrics like [ The Little Tin Box ], alluding to the Seabury Commission on corruption ] but because they're woven so tightly into the plot few if any of them became stand alone hits.

What I got new from seeing the show rather than just hearing the songs was not particularly positive: every real person, and especially a politician, is a mixture of good and bad. But the show, although very favorable to LaGuardia, couldn't cover up the fact into that as much as he was honest and effectively caring in aiding the disenfranchised, he was also a vain megalomaniac who got so powerful he could make his own pet peeves [elevateds, burlesque, push carts] enemies of the people.  

And hearing LaGuardia's first wife [the actress playing her was physically different than all the other players: willowy, European-beautiful and I don't know if her being a dress model was in the original show or just a change to fit the striking appearance of the actress] rave about the "brutal Austrian oppressors" of Trieste, the city that had to be "returned"  to Italy, Italia Irridenta,  was an unpleasant reminder of the European ultra-nationalism and hate that brought about the First World War and the dominance of Communism and Nazism ..... but a good off off Broadway production of a good show.

The theater was sold out and the audience was a responsive one, somewhat on the old side. During the intermission I got into a conversation with two couples about the Equity Library Theater which had put on productions with equity actors using the roles as a form of tryout or showcase [it's also the theater where, while I was waiting in line minding my own business, one of the staff came over and asked me if I wanted to usher that performances -- maybe I had Kennedy Center stamp on me.]

Equity's predictions were extremely numerous, varied and good and I never knew why they had stopped. According to the gossip I heard at Fiorello!, it was either over expansion whose expenses couldn't be met or someone absconding with the treasury. Neither sounded very likely to me.

The third show I intended to see was going to be either Pacific Overtures, one of only two later Sondheim shows that I like as opposed to admire, or Five by Tenn, a collection of 5 one act plays by Tennessee Williams, at the City Center. But just as I got to the head of the line at the TKTS Booth they ran out of Pacific Overture tickets and they hadn't had any for the Tennessee Williams.

The plays were good but the meals were disappointing. One was at a restaurant I've eaten at since college and which I try to go to every  time I'm in Manhattan. The food isn't particularly good [but it was never bad] and I go more for tradition or connectivity than for the cuisine. The last few times the food had gone down in quality. This time it either had gone down further or my stomach was overly  sensitive, [I still hadn't fully recovered from a very bad cold] and I left a big part of the turkey dinner.

On Sunday after the trolley tour my sister and I weren't able to get in time to Rockefeller Center where my sister in law was having lunch and we ate at the Vue in the Jersey City Hyatt Regency where we've eaten several times. It's always been good food, slick service, spectacular views. This time the service and food were not as good as they usually are.

The third disappointing meal was at Pfiff!, on 35 Grand Street near Thompson, listed as a trendy Berlin restaurant, "a nouveau German restaurant", in SoHo. It was very nouveau German. So nouveau that there was nothing German on the menu just Spanish tortillas, steamed mussels, fried calamari  and risotto, the house specialty.

I figured there must be daily German specialties but learned from the waitress, the one with many pierced body parts, that this wasn't the case. I began talking to the owner and learned that she was Argentinean, not German; her ex-lover with whom she had opened the restaurant wasn't Germane either but he had been trained in Austria. But she said there were two interrelated  problems in serving German food in Manhattan: it didn't  move quickly enough and it required unusually expensive ingredients, or at least ingredients that were expensive in the US.  So it was economically unrealistic for them to offer German food and maintain their high standards.

The food I had, a Pfiffburger and mashed potatoes, particularly the mashed potatoes, was fine but wasn't what I had come for and the decor / ambience was SoHo black, trendy grey, dark which doesn't appeal to me.

There was, however, an outstanding meal. Included with the walking tour of Paulus Hook was lunch at the Light Horse Tavern on Washington Street, catty cornered from the main post office. I had seen and read about the place but had never been there.

It had formerly been a Jersey City bar and grill with a family room. The decor is in that style but it's been completely done over and is so elegant and well done I doubt that the original was anything like this. A very warm sunny open and attractive space. As a special group, we were seated in the balcony overlooking the main restaurant and bar. 

The meal began with a delicious cream of winter squash soup; then a double entree of steamed shrimp with home made sea food sauce and scungilli on a bed of curried vegetable chutney; then another double appetizer; then a choice of three desserts. A very good meal in a very good setting that I'll go back to independently.

While I was walking around Manhattan at various times I went to several stores that had been rated in a survey of the best chocolate candy in New York. Some were "too too" and were making things like chocolate covered wasabi at $75 per pound. But there were other "normal" and reasonable [$35 per pound] ones like Varsanos Chocolates  212-352-1171 179 W4th between 6th and 7th and  The Chocolate Barn   48 8th Avenue 212-366-1541.  It's probably a matter of taste and habit but I still find Li-Lac, where I've been getting candy since I was in high school, the best chocolate [--- while good chocolate but the best cookies are from Jersey City at Lee Sims on Bergen Avenue].