Alexandra Pecci

Drink, Eat, Stay: Portsmouth, New Hampshire

2012-01-26T12:22:00.000-08:00

Draft Magazine, January/February 2012

DRINK: Sidle up to the snooker table and grab a pint at the Coat of Arms (174 Fleet Street, coatofarmspub.com), a British pub where the cask ales and specialty imports pair up great with the bangers and mash and tartan décor. Beers like Belhaven Stout and Twisted Thistle IPA are on draft, and the always-changing selection of cask ales include ones like the English-born, Shipyard-brewed Old Thumper ESB.

EAT: Dinner at Black Trumpet Bistro (29 Ceres Street, blacktrumpetbistro.com) is a culinary adventure where even simple ingredients get the superstar treatment. Chef Evan Mallett, a 2011 James Beard semi-finalist for Best Chef, Northeast, might elevate the humble cabbage by stuffing it with rye berry and pine nut risotto or pair potato chips with truffle-whipped foie gras. The restaurant uses local—and sometimes even foraged—ingredients for innovative dishes that change every few weeks to reflect seasonality.

STAY: The sleekly retro Ale House Inn (121 Bow Street, alehouseinn.com) has a sophisticated vibe and décor that’s nautical without hitting you over the head with a buoy. Located in a former brewery warehouse, the inn has iPads loaded with local menus in every room; energy-efficient flatscreen TVs; bikes to borrow; and free tickets to the adjacent theater when there’s a show going on. Plus, two complementary Smuttynose beers await thirsty travelers at check-in.

Bewitched in Massachusetts

2011-10-30T18:43:00.000-07:00

Minneapolis Star Tribune
October 30, 2011

A woman in a red bodice moves silently down the crowded street, stealing worried glances from beneath her bonnet, looking as if she'd like nothing better than to shrink into the brick-paved ground.

Suddenly she's spotted. Someone points to her and shouts, and the crowd becomes a mob, swarming her, grabbing her arms, dragging her along Essex Street in Salem, Mass. Calls of "witch" echo in her wake.

"Come, good people," a man cries into the October air. "Come to her examination!"

A crowd of spectators follows the Puritan-clothed throng, past a jaded-looking witch out for a smoke break in front of her magic shop and a zombie waving his skeletal fingers at passersby. A man in a black conical hat rides by on a Segway, his ankle-length, silver-spangled cloak flapping behind him.

Salem in October is a nonstop Halloween party, and nowhere is that more apparent than on Essex Street, where vendors sell their witchy wares and ghosts and ghouls lurk everywhere, luring tourists into different haunted attractions.

I watch as the crowd follows the witch and her accusers into Salem's Old Town Hall. There the excellent theatrical production "Cry Innocent" re-enacts the pretrial hearing of Bridget Bishop, who was accused of witchcraft during the city's infamous witch hysteria of 1692. The audience is the jury during the interactive performance, and they will decide her fate. Although sometimes the audience is benevolent, voting to acquit Bishop, history wasn't so kind: She was the first of 19 people hanged at Gallows Hill for witchcraft in Salem.

As a local, I've seen the "Cry Innocent" street arrest scene before. But this time I'm visiting Salem with my 2-year-old daughter, Chloe. I hope she'll enjoy the haunted-house style, Halloween spookiness as much as I do.

Although Salem's modern-day association with witches is mostly fun, the real history of the witch trials is anything but. Scores of people were wrongly accused; 19 were found guilty and hanged. Others, including a small child, died in prison, and one man was crushed to death when Sheriff George Corwin piled heavy stones on his chest to force a confession. That man, Giles Corey, refused to confess, and instead cried out for "more weight."

That sad history seems far away on the brick-lined Essex Street pedestrian mall. Soccer moms wearing massive, feathered witch hats mix with the likes of Hester Prynne, a scarlet "A" affixed to her bodice. Street vendors sell custom-made fangs and sparkly masks, while the woody smell of incense pours out of witchcraft shops. A bloody severed arm lies casually on a wagon full of T-shirts for sale, and a guy in a skeleton mask and battered black fedora stares menacingly at Chloe and me.

I spot a man dressed like a monster sporting long, yellowish talons and a black cloak; his bald head, down to his neck, is painted blue. He's crouching on the ground, a cigarette squeezed between his lips. The image strikes me as funny, so I approach him.

"Can I take your picture?" I ask. "I love smoking demons."

"Actually, I'm a vampire," he says, without looking up. "And I'm working for tips."

Chloe doesn't like him anyway. In fact, she's not a fan of any of these monsters, so we escape the Halloween whirlwind and head to the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, a somber space shaded by locust trees where the victims' names and the methods and dates of their executions are carved into jagged stone benches. Even though these people died more than 300 years ago, the benches are always strewn with flowers, candles, and other offerings. The memorial is adjacent to the Charter Street Cemetery, a 17th-century burial ground, a reminder of those who watched in silence while innocent people were put to death.

Our next stop is the Witch House, home to witch trial Judge Jonathan Corwin, and the only building still standing in Salem with ties to the witch trials. As a 17th-century, "First Period" house that's furnished much as it would have been in 1692, it is fascinating from a historical and architectural standpoint. Handwritten witch trial documents hang on the walls, offering an intriguing, in-depth glimpse at the proceedings. On October nights, costumed storytellers tell ghostly tales in the darkened house, which I deem too scary for Chloe -- and me.

Aside from the Witch House and a few cemeteries, most witch trial tourist attractions in Salem are re-creations. Condos or offices have long since replaced significant buildings, like the jail, or "gaol," where the accused were imprisoned, as well as the 1692-era courthouse. Today, those sites are marked only by small plaques quietly acknowledging their significance.

Danvers is where it all began

Visitors who do a little digging, though, will discover that some of the best witch trial sites aren't in Salem. Although the actual trials and executions happened there, the frenzy that set off the infamous witch hunt actually happened a few miles away in what is now Danvers. It was in Salem Village, as Danvers was then known, that the "afflicted" girls first cried witchcraft against their neighbors.

Whereas Salem flaunts its witch-trial associations, Danvers shies away from them. October in Danvers is quiet, suburban, ordinary. Yet I've always been drawn to Danvers, and find myself visiting its mostly unvisited witch trial sites year after year. That's why, in a quiet clearing invisible from the road, at the end of an inconspicuous path between two houses, I've stood completely alone in the excavated remains of the Salem Village Parsonage, in the exact spot where the witch hysteria started.

The Rev. Samuel Parris lived in the parsonage with his wife, Elizabeth; his daughter, Betty; his niece, Abigail, and their slave, Tituba. All that remains today is a small sunken foundation surrounded by a post and rail fence, a lonely place that somehow feels eerier than any haunted house. In this peaceful little clearing, it's hard to imagine what went on during the cold, dark winter of 1692: Betty and Abigail acting wildly, screaming and writhing in apparent pain, throwing things. The village doctor concluding that the devil must be responsible for their illness. The slave, Tituba, being accused of witchcraft. The panic, the fear, the shrieks, crammed into this tiny space. The entire foundation can't be more than 20 feet across.

The site was excavated in 1970 by a team led by Richard Trask, Danvers' town archivist, who said he fell into his job because he was interested in the history of Danvers. It was an interest that most townspeople didn't share.

"Danvers never wanted to be acknowledged as the place where it had begun," he told me when I met him at the Danvers Archival Center last year. "There was always a shame, even in the '50s and early '60s," when he was growing up.

Monument to a victim

Trask's genial, Boston-accented voice also narrates a slide show about the witch trials at the circa 1678 Rebecca Nurse Homestead. Rebecca Nurse was an elderly and respected member of the Salem Village community before Ann Putnam accused her of being a witch, claiming that Nurse's disembodied figure appeared to her.

According to a guide at the Homestead, tours take place "whenever people show up," although you don't need to pay the house tour admission fee to explore the property outside and burial ground behind the homestead.

Since Nurse and the other victims were excommunicated, hanged and denied a proper burial, no one knows where their remains are. But Nurse's family secretly recovered her body from Gallows Hill, and legend says she's buried somewhere on the grounds of her homestead. In fact, there was an unmarked grave in the Nurse family burial ground, and her family erected a monument to her there in 1885. It declares Nurse a "Christian martyr."

As we drive home from our haunted October afternoon in Salem, I glance in the rearview mirror at Chloe, who's fast asleep, her new green witch hat askew on her head. I can't help thinking about Salem and Danvers, two very different towns whose histories are so intertwined. For sheer fun, nothing can beat Salem in October, with its countless witch museums, ghost-hunting walking tours, haunted houses, and even the spectacularly creepy Count Orlok's Nightmare Gallery that pays homage to classic horror movie monsters. Moreover, Salem is a foodie and shopping hotspot, with inventive restaurants and funky boutiques that are great to visit any time of year.

But sometimes silence can be scary all by itself, and every time I'm in Danvers, standing in that parsonage, or gazing at the mound of an unmarked grave, I get chills up the back of my neck and a very strange feeling that even though no one is around, I'm not quite alone.

Alexandra Pecci, the author of "Salem: A Guide to America's Bewitching City," lives in Boston.

Minneapolis, beyond Mary Tyler Moore

2011-10-11T06:10:00.000-07:00

Excavated canals in Mill Ruins Park, Minneapolis

The Washington Post
October 9, 2011

The big beefy guy didn’t really look like the jewelry-making type, but there he was, surrounded by beautiful baubles, stringing delicate purple beads onto a necklace.

Somewhere else, I might have just walked on by, but the intimate setting and handmade wares at Minneapolis’s Midtown Global Market encourage chatting. So I learned that Brad Herring — “Just like the fish,” he said — gave jewelry-making a shot after two heart attacks made him rethink his high-pressure job.

“I went to a farmer’s market and saw people making their own jewelry,” he told me. “I thought, ‘Hey, I can do that.’”

The last time I visited my sister-in-law in Minnesota, I did the two things that everyone apparently does in Minneapolis. I pretended to toss my hat into the air next to the Mary Tyler Moore statue downtown and shopped until my feet hurt at the Mall of America. This time, traveling with my husband and young daughter, I wanted to see the city a little differently. With only two days to explore, we decided to check out Midtown Global Market, as well as Mill Ruins Park and the Mill City Museum.

The stalls of specialty groceries, international arts and crafts and prepared food seemed to be laid out randomly inside the eclectic market. My husband, Brian, and I spent a little too much time circling around the same few rows trying to find the “wall of cookies” he said he’d spotted earlier in the day.

But getting lost there was more fun than frustrating. Around one corner I found Holy Land, a Middle Eastern grocery and deli, where I asked the general manager for help finding orange blossom water. She thought for a second, then motioned for me to follow her past rows of hookahs and packages of goat kidneys before pulling a bottle of the clear, pungent distillate down from its place next to a huge sack of basmati rice.

Around another corner I bought an $8 cow horn bracelet from Simba Craftware, which sells handmade goods such as statues, masks, banana leaf earrings and beaded sandals from 23 different African countries.

I grabbed a cornhusk-wrapped pork tamale for lunch at La Loma before indulging in a chocolate and caramel cupcake from Salty Tart, a bakery whose chef, Michelle Gayer, was a 2010 James Beard Foundation Awards nominee. My daughter, Chloe, munched a pastry from the Scandinavian food and gift shop Cafe Finspang as we checked out toy dragons at Hmong Handicrafts and homemade soaps at Rituals. Three hours later, we called it a day, although it felt as though there was a lot left to explore — and eat.

The international flavor of Midtown Global Market may represent where Minneapolis is going, but Mill Ruins Park and the nearby Mill City Museum provide an essential look at where it has been. Urban ruins seem natural in places like Rome but come as something of a surprise here in the United States, where historic buildings are so often turned into trendy lofts or office space without hesitation. Even Midtown Global Market is housed in the historic Midtown Exchange building.

Mill Ruins Park, with its half-walls of crumbling brick and rusted twists of metal sticking out of the ground, is the excavated remains of the canal system that harnessed St. Anthony Falls to power Minneapolis’s flour mills in the 1800s and early 1900s. Although Minneapolis was the flour-milling capital of the world for a time, changing technology made waterpower obsolete, and the city’s dominance in the industry declined. By the mid-20th century, the mills were closing, the canals were filled in, and many of the once-powerful mills sat abandoned, providing shelter to the city’s homeless, who are thought to have been responsible for the 1991 fire that nearly destroyed the Washburn A Mill, which had closed in 1965.

Instead of razing that building, which was once the world’s largest flour mill and part of a company that eventually became General Mills, the Minneapolis Community Development Agency stabilized the ruins in the late 1990s. In 2003, the Minnesota Historical Society opened the Mill City Museum in the remainder of the building, which is still crowned with its old Gold Medal Flour sign.

Inside, we hurried past the museum’s baking lab and exhibits about hydroelectric power and General Mills marketing (hello, Betty Crocker) to meet our tour group for an eight-story, multimedia ride up the Flour Tower elevator.

“Most people who are a little claustrophobic are absolutely fine with it,” our apron-wearing guide, Nicki, assured one nervous visitor as the lights dimmed and the heavy industrial elevator doors rumbled shut behind her. We sat on wide steps as the huge elevator traveled up and down the tower, the doors opening at different floors to reveal — with re-created factory scenes, sound effects and voice-overs from former mill workers — what it was like to work inside the mill.

“You respect it,” one worker remembered, “because if you don’t respect it, it will chew you up and spit you out. It will.”

That’s because work in the mills could be dangerous with all that flour dust, which is more explosive than gunpowder under the right conditions. In 1878, those right conditions caused an explosion that not only killed 18 people, but also destroyed the mill and many of the buildings around it. The whole area had to be rebuilt.

The elevator deposited us on the eighth floor, where we checked out some of the mill’s surviving machinery before heading up to the ninth-floor observation deck. Atop the deck, I leaned over the railing to look down into the gutted mill ruins below. Beyond the mill walls, a fantastic panoramic view of the Mississippi River, Stone Arch Bridge and St. Anthony Falls stretched out before us. It gave me a whole new perspective on the city. It was Minneapolis as I’d never seen it before, which was exactly what I’d hoped to find.

Around the World in 80 Girls: Salem, Massachusetts

2011-10-11T04:53:00.000-07:00

October on Essex Street, Salem, MA

Bust Magazine
October/November 2011

Thanks to a few naughty girls in 1692, Salem, MA, will forever be associated with witches. If only those Puritans could see it now. These days, Salem is the Halloween capital of the world, a place where vampires, zombies, and even Hester Prynne haunt the streets, partying for All Hallows’ Eve. You can pose with a statue of TV’s most famous witch, shop for spell ingredients, and even get custom-made fangs. With all that ghoulishness, it might be easy to dismiss Salem as way too touristy, but underneath the near-constant aura of Halloween, Salem is an energetic, come-as-you-are college town that promises a wicked good time. And if you know where to look, you’ll learn that those gals in 1692 didn’t go down without a fight.

Start by hanging out with some modern-day witches at a magick shop like Hex: Old World Witchery (246 Essex St.), where you can stock up on everything from Hoodoo powders to wolf hair. Across town, Artemesia Botanicals (102 Wharf St.) sells hundreds of fairly traded and organic herbs and pre-mixed teas for cooking, spell work, and holistic medicine (grab some of the Hangover Helper tea for tomorrow morning). And don’t miss The Cat, the Crow, and the Crown (63 Wharf St.), owned by the legendary Laurie Cabot, the “Official Witch of Salem.”

If you need any assurance that this town’s always been a little on the freaky side, check out the East India Marine Hall at the Peabody Essex Museum (161 Essex St.), where the walls are lined with buxom ship figureheads and cabinets of curiosities that sailors brought home from around the world, including an abnormally long-necked penguin that was inaccurately stuffed by a taxidermist who’d never seen one before. Grab lunch at 43 Church (43 Church St.), and don’t be surprised if you smell apples there, even if there aren’t any on the menu: Salem legend says that the building sits on the site of an apple orchard owned by Bridget Bishop, the city’s first witchcraft hanging victim. After you’ve eaten with the ghost of the accused, check out Cry Innocent, which re-creates Bishop’s pre-trial hearing. The show starts outside on the Essex Street Pedestrian Mall around the corner from Old Town Hall, where actors dressed as Puritans ask passersby whether they’ve seen Bridget. Once she’s spotted in the crowd, the accused witch is grabbed and dragged away, literally kicking and screaming. Follow them to the Old Town Hall (32 Derby Sq.) to help decide her fate.

Shop away any lingering thoughts of consorting with Satan at Modern Millie (3 Central St.), where you’ll find meticulously selected vintage clothing and accessories, modern-day consignments, and a crazy-well-dressed staff. At Fool’s Mansion (127 Essex St.), the industrial music cranks while you check out the shop’s gothic, Victorian, and fetish-inspired clothing and accessories, plus works from local artists. For even more local art, stroll down Artists’ Row, a brick-lined footpath between Front Street and New Derby Street, where artists and craftspeople set up shop in open stalls, selling their wares and leading workshops and demonstrations. Head to dinner at Finz (76 Wharf St.) a seafood restaurant with a fabulous raw bar and a great spot on Pickering Wharf. Not feelin’ fish? Try 62 Restaurant & Wine Bar (62 Wharf St.) which puts a modern spin on Italian food with small plates, seasonal ingredients, and fresh pasta that’s made on site. After dinner, pull up a seat outside at The Lobster Shanty (25 Front St.) to listen to some live music and sip a Lobstertini, a briny vodka concoction spiked with “lobster essence” and garnished with a claw. Or, grab a barstool at Dodge Street Bar & Grill (7 Dodge St.) to chat up some locals and hear even more live music at Salem’s best dive. If you’re in the mood for some late-night partying, hit up Darq, which turns Bangkok Paradise (90 Washington St.) into a goth/industrial nightclub every other Saturday night.

After a night of witchy dreams, re-charge with breakfast at A&J King Artisan Bakers (48 Central St.), where everything, down to the mayo for their delicious sammies and caramel syrup for their espresso drinks, is made from scratch with locally sourced ingredients. Get a little crafty post-meal at Seed Stitch Fine Yarn (21 Front St.), a sunny shop with fibers of every color from around the world and tables and chairs for impromptu knitting, then head across the street to Boston Bead Company (10 Front St.) for a bit of jewelry-making heaven. Find naughty postcards and quirky home décor at The Beehive (38 Front St.) and Roost (40 Front St.), adjacent sister stores with penchants for the handmade and offbeat. Speaking of handmade, the customized fragrances at AromaSanctum Perfumes (5 Central St.) might provide the ultimate one-of-a-kind Salem souvenir. The owner has a sixth sense for creating perfect, personalized perfumes from essential oils, or choose from among House Blends (samples are only $4) and Olde Salem Scents like Fire of Isis and Scarlett Letter.

Take a lunch break at Gulu-Gulu Café (247 Essex St.) to nosh on a platter of stinky cheeses and smoked meats, sample sweet or savory crepes, and sample a brew from the acclaimed and always-changing beer menu. Then relive the ’80s with beanbag chairs and old-school board games down the street at café/dessert bar Coven (281 Essex St.) and see if you can resist the baked goodies and cereal bar (complete with sippy bowls). Indulge your inner tourist by posing with a broom-riding Samantha Stevens at the Bewitched Statue (Lappin Park, corner of Essex St. and Washington St.) before squeezing through the secret passageway at The House of the Seven Gables (115 Derby St.), the real-life home that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel. Take time for one more fright fest at the monster museum Count Orlok’s Nightmare Gallery (285 Derby St.), a creepy temple of classic horror movies where you’ll come face-to-face with Frankenstein and Freddy Krueger. For your final meal, dig into meat pies and spotted dick at The Old Spot (121 Essex St.), a British pub with yummy food and friendly regulars. Or try the wiener schnitzel and potato pancakes at Café Polonia (118 Washington St.). End the night with a Pop Rock Martini at Rockafellas (231 Essex St.). Or if you’re brave enough, try Rockafellas’ Helltini, which is so Hades-hot, you’ve got to sign a waiver to imbibe. Either way, you’ll be drinking in the taste of fabulous Salem.

Road trip week four: Roadside Americana

2011-10-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

A lollipop headdress at MN's Largest Candy Story

The Eagle Tribune
October 16, 2011

Only in South Dakota would the flashiest billboards on the highway count down the miles to a really big drugstore.

But truly, Wall Drug Store is so much more than that, and not pulling off the highway to visit would have been a big South Dakota sin. With nothing out the car window but corn along highway 90, spotting another kitschy Wall Drug sign, with their illustrations of cowboys and roosters and promises of free ice water and five-cent coffee, became an exciting part of our family road trip across Minnesota and South Dakota.

With endless miles of crops and prairie—there are less than 11 people per square mile in South Dakota, according to the 2010 census—it’s no surprise that the folks who live there have come up with some unusual roadside attractions to drum up business for themselves and their towns, if only for some distraction.

But during the Depression, drumming up visitors to Wall, South Dakota, was a necessity for the poor farmers who called that desolate, drought-stricken, middle-of-nowhere place home. So the town’s drugstore owners posted signs advertising free ice water, and suddenly, people were flocking to Wall. Today, old-timey Wall Drug signs stretch for hundreds of miles on I-90, and renegade tourists have even put up signs counting down the miles to Wall Drug from London and Paris.

Wall Drug is a kind of prairie mall, boasting 76,000 square feet of pure roadside Americana. There’s Native American and Western art, a restaurant that seats more than 500 people, homemade donuts and ice cream, wall-to-wall souvenirs, and a huge backyard complete with a gold mining village and re-created Mt. Rushmore. And the ice water is still free.

The real Mt. Rushmore might have been a favorite stop for my daughter Chloe, 2, and nephew Jack, 3, but I think it only beat Wall Drug by a nose (or four). Maybe that’s because Wall Drug’s backyard looks like it was designed by a nine-year-old on a sugar high. “I know! Let’s put a huge, roaring T-Rex head right here, and a 12-foot jackalope that you can climb over here, and how about water shooting out of the ground right there!” Although you could definitely spend money at Wall Drug, you really don’t have to. You can just wander around all day, playing in their weird backyard, ice water in hand, for free.

A couple of days later, we were on the road home to Minnesota but had another peculiar detour to make along the way. The Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, is the only place in the state where we were happy to see more corn. That’s because its outside walls are lined with more than a quarter of a million ears of corn in different colors, formed into rows and mosaics that decorate the building. The mosaics change every year to reflect a theme. This year the theme is “Celebrating Youth Activities,” so it seemed appropriate that our visit to the Corn Palace was interrupted by two huge flatbed trucks rolling down the street, parade-style, with members of the high school sports teams standing on the back, stopping every few feet to flaunt their painted faces, pump their fists in the air, and holler their Mitchell pride to people on the sidewalk.

After the kids rolled away, we saw a corny homage to sports covering the Corn Palace walls, with murals of baseball and basketball, along with images of a bald eagle, the Liberty Bell, and a ballot box over the words “American Pride.” We snapped a few more pictures and hit the road again.

Our last stop before arriving back at my sister in law’s house outside Minneapolis was Minnesota’s Largest Candy Store, also known by its less ostentatious name, Jim’s Apple Farm. Inside the long, electric-yellow building was every kind of tooth-rotting treat you can imagine, some in flavors you’d never want to imagine, like Bacon Soda. Frenetic polka music played as we checked out an Indian with a lollipop headdress, 56 kinds of licorice, pickled everything, and a wall of root beer. The Plexiglas ceiling was lined with puzzles: the store also boasts “the Upper Midwest’s Best Puzzle Selection.” We left with waxed lips, a gigantic caramel apple, an all-day sucker, and a bottle of a cloudy green beverage called Swamp Juice, and drove the last hour home munching on our treats, marking a sweet end to a great trip.

In Search of Americana Week 3: The many faces of Mt. Rushmore

2011-10-09T06:01:00.000-07:00

The Eagle Tribune
October 9, 2011

The image of Mt. Rushmore is so familiar that seeing it in person is almost a disappointment.

Yet, coming face-to-face with those granite visages is a reminder that Mt. Rushmore is more than just stone carvings of four great presidents. It represents America the Beautiful and America the Complicated. It's both a bold and astonishing feat of engineering and a desecration of the Lakota Sioux's sacred Black Hills. It's a monument to our sea-to-shining-sea democracy and the violent displacement it took to achieve it.

Or maybe, it's the grandest and strangest of America's wacky roadside attractions.

My husband Brian, daughter Chloe, 2, sister-in-law Sara, toddler nephew, Jack, and I had spent the past two days and 600 miles traveling from Sara's house outside Minneapolis to Mt. Rushmore. So when we rolled into the little tourist town of Keystone, S.D., we were stunned to find out we could see Mt. Rushmore's profile from the street.

"Well, there it is," Brian joked. "We can go home now."

Of course, we didn't go home. Instead, we drove less than a mile from our hotel to see the national memorial up close; a surreal experience because it looks somehow smaller — and bigger — than I imagined it to be.

We walked through the Avenue of Flags, where every state's flag waves from rows of granite pillars, to the main Grandview Terrace viewing platform directly in front of the mountain, marveling for a long time and posing for pictures.

Then we spotted people walking around on the mountain itself, directly underneath the heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

We wanted to get a closer look, too, so we opted to follow them down the Presidential Trail, which winds up and around the base of Mt. Rushmore to partially climb the mountain before winding back down again.

We left behind the crowd — most people seemed to stick to the Grandview Terrace — in favor of the easy, boardwalk path that cut up a steep cliff lined with boulders and the Black Hills' characteristic ponderosa pine trees.

Benches and interpretive signs dotted the trail along the way. Chloe and Jack were armed with snacks and water, but they didn't need any distractions; they were both enamored of Mt. Rushmore, relishing it from every angle. I can see why. There is an element of odd cartoonishness to the idea of four huge heads sticking out from the side of a mountain.

As we hiked the trail, we finally saw views of Mt. Rushmore that we hadn't seen countless times, gazing up at it from almost directly underneath.

From this vantage point, we could see that the pupils in the sculptures' eyes are actually cone-shaped, and the eyes are hollow around them. We could also clearly see Washington's collar and tie: The monument's original design included torsos, too. Each president came into view at a different angle as we wound around the mountain, their faces framed by tree branches.

Although the first half of the trail was an easy and smooth ride up the mountain with two strollers, we found out the hard way that there were 421 stairs to get back down. We folded up the strollers, scooped up Chloe and our bag, and started the long, sweaty climb down the hill.

We paused to catch our breath at the Sculptor's Studio, an on-site working space for the mountain's sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. There we saw some of the workers' tools and heard discussions about the construction. And we saw a large model of the mountain's original design with all four presidents sculpted to the waist, which had to be abandoned due to insufficient funding.

Back on the Grandview Terrace, we lingered a bit longer, pausing again for one last look at the iconic monument before heading back to our hotel and starting our long drive back to Minnesota.

In Search of Americana Week 2: Badlands National Park

2011-10-02T04:47:00.000-07:00

The Eagle Tribune
October 2, 2011

After hundreds of miles of endless cornfields and flat, unchanging grassland, the Badlands emerged out of nowhere, like someone dropped ragged sections of the moon onto the American Prairie.

We entered Badlands National Park at night. For a second, it seemed unremarkable. Then we saw it: a wall of towering buttes and spires cast in moonlit shadows like ghosts of another Earth. The beam from the car's headlights seemed pointless, swallowed up by the vastness.

"This is kind of scary," one of us said. I don't remember who. But I do remember suddenly feeling very alone, despite the fact that there were five of us packed into the minivan.

We came around a bend and saw the moon hanging low over a cliff, shining like proof we hadn't really been transported there. When we saw a few people photographing the scene, I felt a small surge of relief that there were others in this strange, lonely place.

Badlands National Park was the first official stop on our family road trip from the suburb of Maple Grove, Minn., through South Dakota to Mt. Rushmore.

What should have been an eight-hour drive was stretched into nearly 12, since my husband Brian, sister-in-law, Sara, and I also had two toddlers, Chloe and Jack, with us. Our drive was punctuated by more-than-frequent bathroom, snack and stretching breaks. When we finally rolled into the park at 8:30 p.m., the kids — and adults — were more than ready to hit the hay.

We chose to stay at Cedar Pass Lodge, the only accommodations inside the 244,000-acre Badlands National Park other than campgrounds. I wanted to be able to step out my front door and see the sun rise over the park.

Indeed, the buttes, spires, and pinnacles of the park rose up all around the little horseshoe of about 21 tiny cabins where we'd be spending the night. The units were built in the early 1900s, before the Badlands was even designated as a national park.

I was prepared for rustic charm — no TV— but not for the little, brown segmented worms scattered all over the floor, or the nightmarishly huge spider lurking in a corner of the 12-foot-wide, wood-paneled room.

"We're in the middle of nowhere, of course bugs will come in," I reasoned, as I huddled on the bed in the otherwise very clean cabin, trying to talk myself down from my phobia. "Pretend you're a homesteader. Pretend you're camping. Pretend you're sleeping in a teepee."

I slept that night, but not well, and getting up to see the sunrise was a relief. Yet spending the night with creepy-crawlies was worth it, I realized, as Brian, Chloe and I watched the sun climb up over the pinnacles and paint the landscape in golden light.

After a hearty buffet breakfast at the Cedar Pass Lodge Restaurant, we happily vacated our cabins and set off to check out the park, opting to explore via a couple of stroller-friendly trails and a drive down the main scenic road. We took heed of signs warning us to beware of rattlesnakes, but didn't see any as we rolled Chloe and Jack through the park.

The Badlands Loop Road wound us through the steep, jagged canyons and towering buttes that rise above the mixed grassland prairie. We learned that 65 million years ago, this land was at the bottom of the sea. The park is also home to some of the richest mammal fossil beds in the world, some of which are on display at the Fossil Exhibit Trail.

For the kids, the real fun came when we turned onto the Sage Creek Rim Road and came face to face with herds of bison, big horn sheep, and furry prairie dogs meandering in the grass on either side of the unpaved road.

We left the park and hit pavement again on a road that eventually deposited us in Wall, S.D., home of the famous Wall Drug. I looked behind us longingly as we left the Badlands in the rearview mirror, knowing that we'd gotten only a tiny taste of this amazing place.

As I said goodbye to the Badlands, I was consoled to remember that we were just a couple hours away from our next iconic stop: Mt. Rushmore.

In search of Americana

2011-09-25T06:06:00.000-07:00

Sage Creek Rim Road, Badlands National Park

The Eagle Tribune
September 25, 2011

In Badlands National Park, we set out in search of prairie dogs, turning off of the main scenic loop road and onto the unpaved Sage Creek Rim Road, leaving the tour buses and sightseers behind us in a cloud of millennia-old dust.

We were rewarded almost immediately, spotting dozens of the little critters peeking over their dirt mounds at our passing minivan. I hopped out of the car to snap a picture, and suddenly, the prairie dogs erupted into a chorus of high-pitched squeaks that resulted in surprised giggles from my 2-year-old daughter and 3-year-old nephew.

Prairie dogs, bison and roadside kitsch were all on the agenda when my husband, Brian, daughter Chloe, sister-in-law Sara and nephew Jack piled into a vehicle and drove from Sara's house outside Minneapolis to Mt. Rushmore and back over the course of five days.

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, we weren't glued to the TV reliving the events of that terrible day. Instead, we were cruising down a dirt road in the absolute heart of the country, literally where the buffalo roam.

Ever since I saw the Brady Bunch pack up their station wagon and drive to the Grand Canyon, I've longed for the classic, cross-country family road trip. In my imagination, it's all wrapped up in a kind of mythic Americana — a desire to drive, to explore, to feel the wide-open freedom of the road and truly marvel at this country of ours.

The last time Brian and I hit the road together, we drove from Los Angeles to Denver on a trip that filled me with wistful American pride and a near-constant mental soundtrack of "This Land Is Your Land."

That was before we became parents, and I've learned that the reality of a family road trip, especially with two toddlers in tow, isn't all marveling out the window and group sing-alongs of "Home on the Range."

Our 1,300-mile round-trip journey was equal parts awe-inspiring and yawn-inspiring, alternating between breathless wonder at the haunting moonscape of the Badlands and slack-jawed monotony at yet another hour of the flat farmland and dull-green grasses of eastern South Dakota.

Crying or restless boredom from the backseat quickly yanked me back to reality whenever I found myself drifting too far into existential reverence over a majestic expanse of prairie or a rainbow-hued butte.

There were other challenges, too. An almost-empty tank of gas and getting lost in the Black Hills' Ghost Canyon whipped the three adults into a semi-panic before we realized we were just a few mountain bends away from our hotel. The strange little worms that shared our rustic cabin in the Badlands almost sent us to sleep in the car. And the sound of Chloe demanding over and over again to "get out and stretch" at the top of her voice will ring in my memory forever.

But those were comparatively small prices to pay for the bigger rewards. We saw things that prior to this trip, I'd only seen in books or on TV. Nothing can prepare you for the otherworldly atmosphere of the Badlands or the surreal experience of standing at the base of Mt. Rushmore and gazing up Abe Lincoln's granite nostril.

I listened to my 2-year-old rattle off the names of the presidents on Mt. Rushmore, got up at 6 a.m. with Brian to watch the sun come up over the Badlands, and caught Chloe and Jack sleepily holding hands at the end of the night.

While I no longer cast the family road trip in a romantic, gauzy light, I'm certainly not deterred from doing it again. Quite the opposite.

In fact, I'd like to publicly warn Chloe and Jack that as long as I have a full tank of gas and an empty road, they have many, many more miles ahead of them.

One-of-a-kind crafts and interesting stories at Boston’s open-air market

2011-09-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

T-token jewlelry from Black Sheep Designs

The Providence Journal
September 4, 2011

Any worries that 10 a.m. is too early to eat chocolate-almond pastry crumble away as I bite into the sweet, flaky Mandelbrot, an eastern European version of biscotti. My daughter, Chloe, seems to agree, as she happily licks bits of chocolate and crumbs from her fingers.

These biscotti are unlike others I’ve eaten, not just because they’re softer and flakier, but because they have a history. The woman who made them is standing next to me, telling me about the recipe’s century-long journey from her great-grandmother’s kitchen in Belarus to this table under a tent in Boston’s South End.

If Boston has an epicenter for all things handmade, local, and vintage, it’s here at the SoWa Open Market, a lovely, outdoor, Sunday market that attracts an always-changing roster of artists and artisans, farmers and food trucks from around New England and beyond.

I’ve come to check it out with my dad, stepmother, and Chloe, and we arrive just as the market is opening at 10. After sampling the goodies at Minnie’s Mandelbrot and buying a couple jars of BBQ sauce from Burnin’ Love Sauces at the farmers’ market, we head over to the artist’s market, where vendors sell their wares beneath rows of white tents. There are also food trucks here, including the Vietnamese-inspired Bon Me, and the MIT-bred Clover.

It’s a little overwhelming at first, but soon something catches my eye. T-tokens from the Boston subway, which have been out of circulation for years, are dangling from earrings and bracelets under one of the tents. There Pamela Laurenzo, owner of Black Sheep Designs, is stringing together a necklace at a little table. She tells me that she crafts her jewelry out of found objects, such as T-tokens and vintage beads. Her husband, a metal smith, makes the wires.

“This is from my junk drawers,” she says, showing me a necklace made from an old trade token from a hotel in St. Paul, Minn.

At the next stall, I see what I think are pastel-colored cupcakes topped with fluffy mounds of frosting. But as I get a little closer, I realize the “cupcakes” are actually handmade, vegan-friendly soaps with awesome names and fragrances, like the coffee-spiked Java Lava. Another variety, Last Call, is a lemon-beer soap that’s made with Narragansett Lager.

“I’m Rhode Island-based, so I had to go with my local beer,” says Kim Gonzaga, owner of Stella Marie Soap Company in Pawtucket. “The hops in the beer are actually really good for your skin, and that particular soap has a really great lather.”

I’m sold, and grab a sample for just two dollars.

I meet my dad and stepmother a few stalls over at Structure, which specializes in custom furniture and home goods, including blown glass.

“We’re big thrifters,” says Katrine Hussey, who owns the business with her husband, Peter. They tell us that most, if not all, of the wood they use to create their products, like cheeseboards and planters, is reclaimed from Peter’s carpentry work. The stuff for sale is beautiful and truly one-of-a-kind, like a lantern crafted from player piano paper. My stepmother buys a glass bowl made from recycled restaurant wine glasses that were melted down and hand-blown. Peter says it’s one of the first pieces that he and Katrine created together.

We head inside, where I run into Stephanie Pernice and John Warren, who manage the sprawling SoWa Vintage Market. Stephanie tells me that they were regulars at the Brooklyn Flea for years, but craved a local option.

“We really thought that Boston needed something like this,” Stephanie says, adding that part of the appeal of the vintage market is that it’s never the same twice. You might find a Harvard pennant this week or a piece of vintage luggage next week.

“We’re the stuff patrol,” she says. “We make sure that the stuff stays fresh.”

All throughout the market, the products are beautiful and fun, but the stories about the people behind them are even better. I meet Jeannie Gavrish, who collects antique and vintage textiles to make the gorgeous pillows for her Maine-based business, Blue, and learn that she’s a former journalist. Ed DeVito, owner of Big Fat Magnet, is a mutual funder by day, but relaxes by making kitschy, offbeat (and sometimes off-color) magnets, pins, and kitchen trivets adorned with his friends’ artwork and images of the Golden Girls. My dad comes back from the Trolley Dogs truck with a gigantic hotdog and a story about how the owner found the truck in a field.

As we head home, we all agree that our favorite part of the day was hearing everyone’s stories. The last time I bought soap and cookies, it wasn’t a very personal experience. This time, it was.

If you go:

What: SoWa Open Market

Where: 460 Harrison Ave., Boston

When: Sundays 10 a.m.-4 p.m. through Oct. 30

Cost: Free

Details: sowaopenmarket.com

The Salem Witch Project

2011-09-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

Northshore Magazine
October/November 2011

Danielle Young dips her fingers in a small bowl of water and sprinkles it in a circle, cleansing the space around her. She raises a delicate wooden wand toward the heavens in four directions, calling on the guardians of the North, South, East, and West, as well as upon the ancestors and Mother Earth.

“Magic is about intent,” she says, clutching a white quartz crystal to her chest. “If you do not believe, it cannot occur.” As she intones during the ritual, Reverend Donald Lewis replies, his eyes closed. “So mote it be,” Young says.

“So mote it be,” Lewis repeats.

Although some of the elements of this Wiccan ritual seem a bit foreign, others are not: the holy water, the prayer, the call and response. The World of Witches Museum in Salem often conducts this type of educational ritual in its small—and public—Temple of Tituba, so visitors can see what they’re like.

“They can see there are no goats,” Lewis says, only half-joking. “They can see that there’s nothing particularly scary about it…They expect it to be really weird and strange, but they find it’s really quite familiar.”

Visitors to Salem often only see the surface of the city’s Wiccan and pagan communities: the tarot readers, the magic shops, the occasional public ritual, and the often outsized personalities of witches who have been well-known public figures for years. But starting this fall, a new web-based docudrama will be lifting the curtain on Halloween. The Young Witches of Salem will follow a group of young people as they learn the ropes not only of their craft, but also of the business of being a witch in Salem.

“It’s not just learning about witchcraft—it’s focused a lot on that—but it’s also focused on learning about how to be marketable in this environment, from dance to simple stage magic to studying with a shamanic practitioner,” says the 24-year-old Young, one of the “young witches” who will be profiled on the show.

“There’s a lot of young people out there who are very interested in the subject, who are very entertained by the subject, but are getting a lot of [Buffy the Vampire Slayer] information, a lot of Charmed information,” says Ed Hubbard, the show’s executive producer. “We want to show what it’s like to be practicing. Everybody is fascinated with Salem as a witch Mecca. We want to show what it’s like to be actually in Salem, for good or for bad, [and] what it’s like behind those lines.”

Whereas Wicca is a religion, witchcraft is a set of skills. As with any discipline, these skills need to be learned and practiced, so audiences will see the young witches learning aspects of the craft from well-respected elders in the community. Even though the show will technically be unscripted, there are certain scheduled activities. For example, they’ll be learning about stage magic from magician Daniel Greenwolf, about shamanic practices from author and shaman Raven Kaldera, and about reading stones from Terry Milton. They’ll also be learning about mediumship, spirit messages, and pendulums, among other topics.

“I am not very experienced in any of the above; that’s why I am coming,” says Lexi Renee, an 18-year-old who left her home in South Carolina in August to come to Salem to participate in the show. “Being with like-minded people, getting away from the South for a while, and experiencing new things is the main goal.”

Producer Hubbard calls Renee the show’s “Dorothy.” “She’s coming to see the wizard,” he says. “And she doesn’t want to just go home; she wants to become part of the Emerald City.” Although some of Renee’s friends in South Carolina are interested in witchcraft, none of them are as passionate about it as she is. “It’s very hard to be a pagan around here. In the South, it hasn’t been as accepted as it has in the North,” she says. “You might get someone calling you a devil worshipper; you just smile and wave and walk away.”

Those involved with the show hope it will help to clear up such misconceptions. “This isn’t scary. This isn’t devil worship,” says Katrina Kessler, one of the show’s producers and the manager at the World of Witches Museum. Although Kessler is not technically one of the show’s “young witches,” the 22-year-old Swampscott resident is, in fact, a young witch herself and will appear on the show frequently.

Along with Kessler, many of the people who will appear on the show work at the World of Witches Museum, which presents information about the history of witchcraft and its modern-day practice. Kessler leads tours through the museum multiple times per day, and each tour ends the same way: “Step in front of this magic mirror and see what you’ll look like as a witch,” Kessler says, waving her arms in a grandiose flourish, and inviting tourists to get a glimpse of what they’d look like if they, too, were witches. People expect it to be a spooky mirror that casts a greenish tinge over their skin, but once they take a look, they erupt into relieved—or maybe embarrassed—laughter; it’s just an ordinary mirror hanging on the exit door.

“It gets every kid every time; and it gets about 50 percent of adults, too,” Kessler says. “We dispel a lot of negative stereotypes here.” But Kessler says the museum also helps kids talk with their parents about Wicca and paganism. “We actually have a lot of young people who have come through this museum and have quietly thanked me afterwards,” she says. They tell her, she says, “I’m pagan, and my mom doesn’t know yet, and this has been a really great eye opener for her. Thank you so much for breaking the ice.”

Over the years, it’s gotten easier for people to “come out” to their families as witches, an experience that’s dubbed “coming out of the broom closet.” But that’s not to say it’s exactly easy, even in places like Salem, where witches are celebrated all the time.

“It is very much a matter, for some people, of coming out of the closet, and often it does lead to a lot of strife” within families, says Lewis, who’s 48 years old and was actually raised as a witch—albeit very secretively—in a branch of the craft called the Correllian Nativist Tradition, founded by one of his ancestors. “I’ve known people in their 50s who were afraid to tell their parents that they’d taken up Wicca.”

Although Danielle Young was born and raised in Salem, she has not always been a witch. “My family likes to pretend that I’m still a good little Jewish girl most of the time, but they occasionally do recognize that I am of a different faith,” she says. “They’re generally neutral; not quite supportive, but not ready to throw me out of the house over it.”

Katrina Kessler still remembers the day she broke the news to her Roman Catholic parents. It was Easter morning, and she was 13 years old when she told them that she could no longer take the Eucharist.

“I felt really bad lying in front of my family and in front of the God that they believed in,” she remembers. Her parents took the news very well, but had one caveat: “They said, ‘That’s fine, we totally respect that, and you can do whatever you want…just don’t tell your grandma.’”

Like Lewis, Lexi Renee’s history with witchcraft goes back several generations; her grandmother was from a pagan family who traveled with the circus.

“In my family, the craft was a love-hate relationship. It was talked down and against in public, but in the closet, it flourished,” she says, adding that her grandmother seemed to be afraid of the craft and spoke against it to her own children. “But of course, they picked it up, and then I picked it up,” Renee says. “So it’s just something that’s been going down the line, but very hush-hush.”

Although the Harry Potter books and movies and TV shows like Charmed aren’t exactly accurate depictions of real-life witchcraft, they are positive portrayals of it and have helped make witchcraft more accepted. But perhaps the most powerful tool for young witches is the Internet, which not only provides information about witchcraft, but helps them to connect with other practitioners.

“You actually see a lot more communities online because we are an online generation,” Kessler says. “We can do rituals together because we have the Internet.”

In fact, The Young Witches of Salem, which will be broadcast online by ClickVision TV, is just the latest online venture between Lewis and Hubbard. Together, the two also operate WitchSchool.com, an online educational network that boasts thousands of students from around the world. WitchSchool.com also produces the YouTube channel Magick TV, which features interviews with prominent pagans and coverage of pagan events. And broadcasting The Young Witches of Salem online will reach a broad audience with a message that witches are just like everyone else.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Harry Potter,” Young says. “And he happens to be your next-door neighbor.”

Best of Taste, 2011

2011-08-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

Taste of the Seacoast
Summer/Fall, 2011

The results are in! Taste of the Seacoast readers voted on their favorite dining options throughout the Portsmouth, NH, region, weighing in on everything from the best bagel to the tastiest tipple. Here are some highlights.

Beer Selection: The Portsmouth Brewery
More than 250,000 pints are served every year at the Portsmouth Brewery, and each one is made by hand. Traditional ales and lagers are on tap, of course, but there are lots of seasonal and unusual beers, too, such as Blueberry, Pumpkin Ale, and Wild Thang, which gets its nutty and cherry flavors from wild rice and sterling hops.
56 MarketStreet, Portsmouth, N.H., 603-431-1115, portsmouthbrewery.com

Chef: Evan Mallett, Black Trumpet

Evan Mallett had just spent the afternoon candying stems of a lovage plant when he learned that he’d won in this category for the second year running. And that pretty much sums up Mallett and his restaurant: working with wild, seasonal, and foraged ingredients; always learning, always pushing boundaries. “I feel honored,” says Mallett. “When it comes from readers it means so much more. Our clientele is people that we serve, and that’s just a really nice way of saying thank you.” He also shares the glory with his staff: “They hold me up every day. I get a lot of credit for what I do but they deserve a lot more for what they do.”
29 Ceres Street, Portsmouth, N.H., 603-431-0887, blacktrumpetbistro.com

Clam Chowder: Billy’s Chowder House

Shucking steamers and making chowder are a daily routine at Billy’s Chowder House. In addition to chopped clams, the chowder at Billy’s includes whole Maine steamers. And the thinner-than-usual base highlights the taste of the clams. “Thickness blands away the true flavor of the clam,” says general manager Chris Varano.
216 Mile Road, Wells, Maine, 207-646-7558, billyschowderhouse.com

Coffee House: Breaking New Grounds

Dealing directly with farmers and roasting the beans onsite allow owner Matt Govoni to ensure that he’s serving the best and freshest coffee possible. This year, a favorite has been the “smooth, approachable” Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. A local dairy provides the shop’s milk and cream.
14 Market Square, Portsmouth, N.H., 603-436-9555

Fried Seafood: Petey’s Summertime Seafood and Bar

Not only is all the seafood fresh and local, but some of the lobsters served at Petey’s come right off owner Peter Aikens’ own lobster boat. Heaping plates of fried seafood served with french fries are a hallmark here, including the very popular Fried Lobster Tails.
1323 Ocean Boulevard, Rye, N.H., 603-433-1937, peteys.com

Winery: Flag Hill Winery

Boasting the largest vineyard in the state, Flag Hill makes all its wines from grapes grown right in New Hampshire. According to Frank Reinhold, president of Flag Hill, the winery is housed in a converted family farm that was first built in 1796, allowing visitors to both sample one of 17 different wines and also get a little bit of history.
297 North River Road (Route 155), Lee, N.H., 603-659-2949, flaghill.com

Read the full list of winners here.

Out to sea with Gloucester lobstermen

2011-07-28T04:45:00.000-07:00

“That’s Kettle Island,” Mark Ring says, pointing to a little green dot on the black radar screen. The island is feet away from Mark’s lobster boat, the Stanley Thomas, but appears ghostly through the early morning fog that envelops Gloucester Harbor.

“What do we call this kind of fog?” Mark calls to his nephew, Matt.

“Dungeon-thick,” Matt replies, with a small smile and a voice that’s quieter than his boisterous uncle’s.

The water is calm, but the fog is heavy, disorienting.

“It’s a nuisance,” Mark says. “There’s only one thing worse: catching nothing.”

Fishing is an iconic profession, especially in Gloucester. There’s something romantic and Odyssean about it, something that captures people’s imaginations. That’s why Northshore Magazine has sent me to here to shadow Mark and Matt as they go about their daily work, which usually starts around 5 am, but which they’ve gamely delayed two hours on the morning that I join them out on the boat.

The fog is indeed dungeon-thick from the moment I leave my house until I arrive at the St. Peter’s Square Docks where Mark is waiting for me, holding a gigantic cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and wearing bright orange oilskins that cut through the early-morning gloom.

“Is that you?” he calls to me as I hurry down the boat ramp.

“Yes, it’s me!” I call back, and I’m glad I opted to wear my beat-up old work boots as I climb aboard the small boat, where buckets of stinky bait and a wet deck await. Thick green rubber bands stamped with the words “USA Massachusetts Wild” are piled up in a small compartment of a battered wooden box, ready to be stretched around the lobsters’ claws.

I like Mark immediately; he’s a talker, like me, and funny. He’s the kind of guy you’d be happy to find yourself sitting next to on a bus or at a bar, and his phones—both his cell and the boat’s radio—ring all day. He’s like the mayor—or maybe the social director—of Gloucester Harbor. Someone calls to tell him that another boat has just hauled some bait off Kettle Island; another guy calls to complain about the fog and fret about the Bruins, who, at that point, were still a couple of weeks away from their Stanley Cup victory; his brother, who crews on another boat, just calls to bust Mark’s chops.

“Do you get seasick?” Mark asks me. No, I say proudly, and proceed to regale him with a story about how I was the only person who didn’t get sick on the Montauk ferry during Tropical Storm Josephine in 1996. Two hours later, I do, in fact, get sick over the deck of the Stanley Thomas as Matt nonchalantly hands me a roll of paper towels and goes back to hauling traps.

I like Matt immediately, too. He’s 32 years old and quiet, and spends the day smoking Marlboro lights and gazing contemplatively out to sea. He seems sweet—can you call a lobsterman sweet?—and I’m tempted to also call him shy, but maybe that’s just compared to Mark, who’s anything but. Before I sit down on the boat’s one dry spot, Matt gets a towel from below deck and folds it up in a little square for me to sit on.

Although I find myself just talking with Mark about things like our upcoming vacations and favorites places to drink, we do eventually get down to the business of why I’m here, which is not for a boat ride and a chat. I learn that Mark has been fishing for decades. And yes, he crewed on the Andrea Gail about 10 years before it was lost.

“We fished from Panama City to Newfoundland that year,” Mark says. “And boy did we have fun.”

But it’s a subject that seems to make him weary; he says anytime he talks to a reporter, the conversation always gets back to The Perfect Storm. And he was inundated with calls when the movie came out.

“If you have any connection to that, it seems like people are interested,” he says. But Mark has logged a lot of hours out at sea on boats other than the one that was lost, and he’s done lots of fishing, including swordfishing in the Caribbean and gillnetting. But that kind of work takes a lot out of you, and you’re away from home for long stretches at a time. Although the hours are still long—Mark and Matt are out on the Stanley Thomas seven days a week during the height of the season—lobstering has its advantages.

“You’re home every day,” Mark says. “Get to sleep in your own bed.”

As for Matt, he practically grew up on the Stanley Thomas; he’s been fishing with his Uncle Mark for 14 years. It seems to be in the blood: Matt’s uncles, great uncles, and great-grandfather were all fishermen, but not Matt’s dad.

“His father was the one brother who listened in school and didn’t go fishing,” Mark says. Matt’s only one of two crew members that Mark’s ever had on the Stanley Thomas; his wife, Cara, was the other.

We move slowly through the fog, which hides everything—the sky, the horizon, other boats—and when we finally arrive at a trawl and start hauling traps, I’m shocked at how few lobsters the guys are allowed to keep.

Mark holds up a female lobster and shows me the clumps of tiny black eggs that cling to the underside of its tail. In order to prevent overfishing, lobstermen who catch egg-bearing females like this one have to cut a small v-shaped notch in their tails and release them back into the water. The notches can take years to grow out, and any lobsters with a notched tail, even ones that aren’t carrying eggs, have to be thrown back. If the lobster’s too short? Throw it back. Too long? Throw it back. Even on good days most lobsters get released, but today, five hours of work yields just eight lobsters.

“Some days you get chicken salad. Other days you get chicken shit,” Mark says. But, he adds, “If all you caught were the good ones, all of a sudden there’d be nothing to catch.”

Mark and Matt haul as many as 400 traps a day during the height of lobster season, and the two men work fast together. After they haul up the traps, Mark flips open the tops and pulls out the lobsters while Matt adds new bait. Then the traps are sent back into the water as the boat heads to the next trawl.

“The rotten bait works best,” Matt says, slicing open the bellies of freshly caught mackerel with a small knife, readying them for the bait bags.

Even though Mark says fog can be very dangerous because it’s so disorienting, it’s hard to imagine this little red boat getting into trouble as we tool around Gloucester Harbor. But in reality, fishing is still the most dangerous job in America, and Mark has had some tight moments, including being on a boat that caught fire and sank 40 miles offshore in 1989.

“Have you ever been scared?” I ask.

“Concerned,” he says with a wry laugh.

Despite the dangers, the Stanley Thomas has been a trusty boat for 15 years; it even had a cameo in The Perfect Storm. The fact that it went a little Hollywood might have charmed the real Stanley Thomas, a lobsterman (“and a character,” Mark adds) who lived across the street from Mark when he was growing up.

“He babysat us when we were little kids,” Mark says. And he’d also take Mark and his brothers out on his boat when their uncles didn’t want to. “He was like a member of the family.”

When a bank wouldn’t give Mark a loan for the boat unless it had a name, a friend suggested “Stanley Thomas.” The name stuck, as did Stashu—Stanley Thomas’s real, Polish first name—as one of Mark’s many nicknames.

It’s the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and the catch isn’t great, so Mark and Matt call it a day a little after noon. There are some stops to make—to get fuel, to drop off the day’s catch at Capt'n Joe's Lobster Co.—and Mark chats with everyone he lays eyes on.

“Alex is always welcome aboard the Stanley Thomas,” Mark announces grandly to no one in particular as we pull up to the dock. I shake his hand and thank him and Matt sincerely. I hope I have the occasion to be welcome aboard the Stanley Thomas again someday.

As I drive home, my clothes ripe and soaking with seawater and fish guts, I promise myself that I will not use the word “salty” to describe Mark and Matt; the image of the Gloucester fisherman is already emblazoned in people’s minds as a caricature—hard-drinking, r-dropping, yellow-slicker wearing guys who are as grizzled as if they were whittled from driftwood. And yet, how can you not romanticize it, at least a little? Even inscription on the Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial is epic, taken from the Bible itself: “They That Go Down To The Sea In Ships.”

So are Mark and Matt just guys who happen to work on water instead of pavement? Or are they men who bear the weight of a centuries-old trade, who dwell half in mist, who are not quite of this world because they live, not on solid dry land, but on the sea? Maybe they’re a little bit of both.

Portions of this story were included as text in a photo essay in Northshore Magazine.

Getting a new perspective on gritty Manchester, N.H.

2011-04-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

Millyard Museum, Manchester, NH

The Washington Post
April 29, 2011

The air changes from climate-controlled and dry to cool and damp as I peer into a large pipe that extends from a 10-foot-wide hole in the brick wall. Although the centuries-old penstock no longer channels water from canals to turbines to power this former cotton mill, there’s still a shallow puddle at the bottom of the pipe.

I’m in the Millyard Museum in Manchester, N.H., and just beginning to learn about this city that I’ve largely missed in my years living in southern New Hampshire. That’s because the state’s largest city has always been more practical than pretty, losing out to Portsmouth and the White Mountains when it comes to classic New Hampshire beauty and charm. Instead of maple sugar and quaint covered bridges, Manchester had mills. The city grew up around the Merrimack River and Amoskeag Falls, which powered an industrial complex that for more than a century produced textiles for the entire world.

The imposing brick mill buildings on the river aren’t the only unusual architecture in town. The only Frank Lloyd Wright house in New England open to the public is in Manchester, and another of the architect’s houses is just a few doors down from it. There’s also a quirky little art deco airport terminal that’s now home to a museum.

The Millyard Museum is in a small section of one of the old mills, most of which have been revamped into apartments, restaurants and offices. A hundred years ago, though, these buildings were part of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Co.’s “walled city,” where thousands of people, including children, lived and worked. In the museum are huge looms with spools of colorful thread feeding a half-finished piece of cloth, and bins of raw white cotton, the leaves and seeds still attached to the bolls. One display houses a torpedo-like shuttle, like the ones that were automated to fly across the looms to weave the cloth. I push a button and the shuttle drones to life, bouncing back and forth with enormous force. The noise is earsplitting.

“Magnify that sound by a hundred times,” a visitor says to his wife, and I imagine the deafening noise engulfing this cavernous brick room and every room on every floor of every building along the river.

Amoskeag Manufacturing closed in 1935, a victim of the Great Depression and changing times. Two years later, the Works Progress Administration built an art deco terminal for the city’s airport. It was used until 1995, then moved to its current location on the south side of the Manchester airport in 2004.

With its square body, round windows and the glass box atop its roof, the terminal, which now houses the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, is a little forlorn-looking, plopped at the edge of a parking lot on the airport perimeter. A man is standing outside, taking pictures of a Southwest flight that’s taking off. I ask him if he works at the museum, and he nods.

“Zero percent wages but 100 percent fun, you know what I mean?” says volunteer docent Dave Desilets.

The museum highlights New Hampshire aviation and space luminaries such as Alan Shepard and Christa McAuliffe and a new $1 million learning center that’s just weeks from its grand opening. But the most fascinating part of the visit is talking to the docents, all retired aviators. Richard Fortin tells me that he was in the “spy business,” stationed in Adana, Turkey, as an Air Force electronics intelligence technician who serviced the planes that flew along the border of the former Soviet Union. “And sometimes overflew the Soviet border,” he says.

I mention that my next stop is the Zimmerman House, the Frank Lloyd Wright landmark now owned and operated by the Currier Museum of Art. “My father helped build the Zimmerman House,” says Richard, who was a teenager during its construction in 1950. “It looks like a restroom to me, with all the windows.”

Museum docent Paul Scarlett worked on the house during its restoration in the late 1980s. He tells me that while installing a new radiant heating system, the workers found an envelope containing the names of the original construction crew. He and his co-workers added their own names and put the envelope back where they’d found it. “Now my name is under that floor,” he says.

When I arrive at the Zimmerman House a couple of hours later with a tour group from the Currier Museum, I have to laugh. Richard’s right: It does kind of look like a rest stop, with the plain brick facade, pitched roof and row of small square windows along the roofline. There’s no attic, no garage, no basement; just a small carport and an attached storage shed. Wright designed the house in his Usonian style, emphasizing simplicity and efficiency. We slip blue hospital-style booties over our shoes and walk in.

All comparisons with a restroom end outdoors. We squeeze through an incredibly narrow front hallway, and suddenly the space opens up to reveal a 13-foot pitched ceiling, a wall of mitered-glass windows and furnishings that have been here for more than 60 years.

“What you see is what the Zimmermans lived with until they died,” says our guide, Judith Ransmeier. Local doctor Isadore Zimmerman and his wife, Lucille, commissioned Wright to design not only their home but also the landscaping, the mailbox, the furniture and even their table linens.

There’s only about 1,700 square feet of living space, and everything in the house does double duty as both functional and decorative. The couch and every shelf are built into the walls. The rooms are tiny. Although it’s hard to imagine living here, it’s fascinating to look around, and the craftsmanship is exquisite. The grains of the cypress-wood walls continue as they turn at 90-degree angles. The poured-concrete floors extend out to the patio, creating the illusion that indoors and outdoors are one.

“This house was built as if it was a piece of fine furniture,” Judith says.

Afterward, I ask her whether she has heard about a piece of paper with the workers’ names beneath the floor. She hasn’t, but the Zimmerman House is surrounded by lore, she says.

I, for one, hope that the story’s true. I like the way Manchester seems at once like a big city and a small town, both industrial and rural. Maybe it’s not nestled beneath a mountain or perched near the ocean, but it has a quirky attraction all its own.

Pecci is a freelance writer in Plaistow, N.H.

North Shore restaurants head back to the farm

2011-04-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

Cider Hill Farm, Amesbury, MA

Northshore Magazine
June/July 2011

The butcher’s diagram of a pig tattooed on Andy King’s forearm is numbered to show which cuts of meat come from which parts of the animal. He rattles them off as he points to different places on his arm: picnic ham, prosciutto, shoulder, belly. Behind him on the wall of A&J King, the Salem bakery he owns with his wife, Jackie, is a chalkboard that lists some of the local farms whose products wind up in their baked goods, like milk from Richardson’s in Middleton and eggs from The Country Hen in Hubbardston.

“It’s the lifestyle we like to lead,” King says, his t-shirt dusted with flour. “It makes a better product and it gives the bakery a soul.”

Across the North Shore and across the country, a growing number of people are sharing this sentiment as consumers and chefs embrace the farm-to-table movement, which emphasizes using ingredients and products from local farms. Farm-to-table restaurants, grocers, and bakeries vary in just how much of their products are locally produced and where they draw the line for deciding how far away is too far away to be considered local. But they all agree that sourcing foods from local producers not only makes a tastier product, but also supports local farmers and helps the environment.

“It’s just a healthier way to eat. It’s sustainable. It’s supporting people that are trying to live and work on farms,” says Amelia O’Reilly, co-owner of The Market Restaurant on Lobster Cove in Annisquam.

O’Reilly is one of many chefs to bring the farm-to-table concept to people’s plates here on the North Shore. O’Reilly, along with Nico Monday, her boyfriend and business partner, opened The Market last year after working as cooks at Chez Panisse, the legendary 40-year-old Berkeley, California, restaurant that pioneered local, sustainable cuisine.

“Knowing your farmer—and also your farmer knowing you—is another important connection,” O’Reilly says.

Chefs like O’Reilly and King are working with farms and food producers to create menus that reflect what’s growing on the North Shore. At The Market, for example, this translates to a menu that changes daily and is dictated not only by basic seasonality—such as serving berries in June—but also by the quirks of the weather and what looks especially fresh that day at markets and farm stands.

As a result, chefs are working with local farms such as Valley View Farm in Topsfield, which raises and hand-milks Nubian goats for cheese, making it the only cheese producer in Essex County. The farm produces between 4,000 and 5,000 pounds of cheese per year, and about 95 percent of it is sold in restaurants, markets, and other venues on the North Shore, says Elizabeth Mulholland, who owns Valley View Farm with her husband, Peter.

“We’re a farmstead cheese maker, meaning we raise the animals, we milk the animals, we produce the cheese, and sell the cheese ourselves, as opposed to buying milk from various and sundry goat farms,” Mulholland says. “It gives us the ability to completely control that milk.” And that’s important to people who want to know where their food comes from, especially since E. coli and salmonella have cropped up in everything from hamburger to spinach to peanut butter.

“People are starting to pay attention to what they’re eating and where their food is sourced from. And there have been so many crazy food scares,” says Erin Saltsman, owner of Amesbury-based Dough Raise Me Baking Company. Saltsman’s decadent cookies, brownies, and bars have not only been featured in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue and The New York Times, but also are made with local, seasonal ingredients when possible. She uses everything from Maine-sourced oats to organic, stone-ground chocolate produced in Somerville, to strawberries and other fruit from farms that are down the street from her house.

“When you’re in contact with the man who grew that strawberry, isn’t it nice to see that he’s happy?” she says. “I like to keep it rotating…the money, the good energy, the fact that you know who is handling and supplying the food. Especially with the produce. You know how those apples are grown; you can go pick those apples yourself.”

But the farm-to-table concept is growing beyond small restaurants where the chefs pick out every head of lettuce themselves. Serenitee Restaurant Group, which runs six North Shore restaurants, sources many products locally, especially at the farm-to-table-style restaurants 15 Walnut and Alchemy. And last year, the Wyndham Boston Andover opened On the Bone, a restaurant that sources from larger—but still local—vendors, like Northeast Family Farms. According to Wyndham Andover General Manager Don Corbosiero, the restaurant has also partnered with the Humane Society and serves only eggs that are cage-free.

Farm-to-table might seem to be a loaded concept, since technically everything we put in our mouths comes, in some form or another, from a farm. But to local food enthusiasts, there’s a difference between small, local farms and conglomerate factory farms that crank out pesticide-laden, perfect-looking produce that’s shipped from around the world. Or even, for that matter, less-than-perfect-looking organic produce that’s shipped from around the world.

“You can get organic produce that’s still being shipped in from Chile,” says Christopher DeStefano, owner of Christopher’s Table in Ipswich.“As a chef, I would go local before I’d go organic. I know it’s fresh, I know it’s not filled with preservatives because it’s traveling half-way across the globe. It’s not burning fossil fuels.”

When consumers know their local farmers, it also gives them a chance to see—and ask about—their growing practices. Becoming a certified organic farm is an onerous and often cost-prohibitive process. But talking with farmers reveals that even ones who aren’t certified still have a lot of organic practices, such as crop rotation and integrated pest management. Valley View Farm, for instance, uses only hormone- and antibiotic-free feed and fertilizes their fields with the goats’ own manure. Mike Marini, owner of Marini Farm in Ipswich, says he’ll accept 50 percent damage from pests before he sprays.

“I like chemicals less than the average person,” agrees Glenn Cook, owner of Cider Hill Farm in Amesbury. “The way we farm, we know exactly what’s going on out there,” by tracking disease cycles, hand-hoeing certain crops, and using pesticides as infrequently as possible.

Kathy Rand, owner of The Natural Grocer in Newburyport, likes to visit the local farms where the food she sells comes from. If a farm is basically organic but lacks official certification, she’ll simply put a sign out letting the customers know. “We talk with them about their practices,” she says. “The point is to always try to look for and support others who are of like mind and who care about keeping the food supply clean.”

They’re not only supporting one another, but also working together, carrying each other’s products and getting to know each other. You can find Dough Raise Me cookies and whoopee pies at Cider Hill’s farm stands and at Milk and Honey, a natural grocer in Salem. Marini Farm not only supplies produce to Christopher’s Table, but the two businesses also organize an annual farm dinner, where the food is grown, prepared, and served outside right on the farm.

“Most people were sitting at the dinner table, and the food that they were eating was literally over their shoulder,” growing in the field, DeStefano says.

Smolak Farms is taking the concept of the farm dinner one step further this summer with Whim, an eight-week restaurant concept during which chefs will use the farm’s produce to prepare multi-course, sit-down meals outside on the farm.

Although the farm-to-table idea is certainly popular, proponents argue that it’s simply a return to the way things have always been.

“This is how we, as a civilization, used to eat originally. There’s really nothing new. This is not a fad. This is not a new foodie revolution,” DeStefano says. “This is how people used to eat. They used to pick it, grow it, hunt it, cook it, and sit down as a community and eat it. That’s just our origin.”

Farm to City
For many people, when you talk about local food and the farm-to-table movement, the elephant in the room is money. Not everyone is able to spend a few hundred dollars to join a summer CSA or spend five dollars for a bunch of organic carrots, especially when that money might have to feed an entire family. However, advocates argue that cheap, easy-to-access food that’s devoid of any nutritional value is not only a symptom of factory farming but is also responsible for the obesity epidemic. To combat this, several organizations on the North Shore are developing urban farming programs and using fresh, local food to feed the hungry. For example, the Village Garden Club of Andover sponsors a Youth Garden Club at Esperanza Academy for Girls in Lawrence; Cider Hill Farm says it donates excess produce to the Amesbury food pantry Our Neighbors’ Table; and First Parish Church in Newbury runs an organic community garden that grows vegetables for local shelters. The Food Project, based in Lincoln, runs farms throughout the Commonwealth, including an urban farm in Lynn, which grows food for North Shore hunger relief organizations and for sale at farmers’ markets.

Reclaiming Lawrence, one door at a time

2011-03-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

St. Patrick Convent, Lawrence, MA

Northshore Magazine April/May, 2011

Sharon Mason leans forward, plants her elbows on her knees, and laces her fingers together to illustrate what she’s about to say.

"I’m so struck by how hard we work to not only build our homes but find ways to keep--this is going to sound really bogus, I’m sorry--to keep the community of mankind together." She speaks with urgency, uttering a statement that might very well sound bogus or grandiose coming from someone else, but from her, it's genuine.

Mason is director of development at Merrimack Valley Habitat for Humanity, which spent the winter building not only affordable housing for families in the community, but also the new ReStore retail venue in Lawrence. ReStore sells reclaimed, surplus, or recycled building materials--all donated--with the proceeds going to fund the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate. As they both occupy space in formerly abandoned mill buildings, ReStore and Habitat for Humanity are not only reclaiming building materials; they’re reclaiming Lawrence.

About six weeks before its grand opening, Lawrence’s ReStore location is alive with activity. Volunteers in paint-splattered sweatshirts hammer, saw, scrape, and paint their way through the building, which is already crowded with donations. There are stacks of cardboard boxes filled with unused cabinet fixtures piled on a shelf, donated by a hardware store that was going out of business. There are full sets of cabinets, energy-efficient windows, mahogany doors, even a kitchen sink. “We’re not even open, and we’ve had four kitchens donated,” says Mason.

Donations come from a variety of sources and are sold at a fraction of the original cost. Brand-new items might come from companies that are going out of business or have excess or discontinued inventory. ReStore is already teaming with companies like Pella Windows and Jackson Lumber for donations. Other donations come from interior designers, contractors, or homeowners who need to rip out and dispose of a kitchen or bathroom before remodeling a space.

In addition to being simply a nice thing to do, donating to ReStore is a free alternative to renting a Dumpster or having to pay to dispose of something, says Susan Howell, who owns Lawrence-based Howell Custom Building with her husband, Steve. Howell, who, along with her husband, is on the board of the Merrimack Valley Habitat for Humanity, has been very involved with building the ReStore space and sees the benefits of being kind for companies like hers.

“As a company, it’s a huge resource for us to have this here, and we hope to support it and be constant contributors to the inventory in the store,” she says. “Many other places charge fees; there wasn’t anything else local that we knew about.”

Moreover, donating items provides a tax deduction to homeowners. But reclaimed items aren’t just ones that have been used already. For instance, when a homebuyer wants to put his own decorative spin on a newly built spec home, Howell’s firm has to replace fixtures that were just installed.

“It doesn’t feel very good to pull out a brand-new, unused kitchen and think that it’s going to go to waste. It feels really good to pull it out and know that somebody’s going to use that kitchen,” says Howell.

The person who does end up using the kitchen might be a do-it-yourselfer, a Habitat for Humanity homeowner, a small contracting firm, an interior designer looking for a deal, or just someone who might have fun scouring the inventory.

“Each ReStore actually has a very unique personality,” Mason says. “It’s driven by the donations, and it’s driven by the area in which the stores open.”

ReStore operates hundreds of locations throughout the United States and Canada, making for a lot of diverse inventory and, as Emerson Dahmen, building director for Merrimack Valley Habitat for Humanity, calls it, “oddball stuff.” Mason says ReStores in Florida have a lot of knick-knack-type items, whereas the ones in Dover, New Hampshire, and Portland, Maine, are geared toward building materials. ReStore accepts donations of anything from microwaves…to lumber and plywood.

“We’re constantly getting more donations and more diversity,” says Dahmen. “For instance, I’ve just been in touch with somebody who has a hardware store that’s going out of business, and they want to donate the residual bolts, screws, plumbing and electrical parts, and home and garden stuff to us.”

Mason says a manager at another ReStore called the place a “toy store for the do-it-yourselfer,” and that label seems to be an accurate one, not to mention fun. People who love to spend their Saturdays hunting for bargains could add ReStore to their list of weekly places to check out just-donated items, some of which might be antiques or one-of-a-kind treasures.

For example, Habitat for Humanity itself is donating a huge, beautiful fireplace mantle from the former St. Patrick Convent at 100 Parker Street in Lawrence, which the organization is converting to affordable housing. Habitat for Humanity bought the building and has been working to convert it into 10 multi-bedroom condo-style housing units, the first few of which they hope will be available by the end of 2011.

In addition to the mantle, workers at 100 Parker Street have reclaimed other items that could be donated, like pretty metal brackets and pieces of the old tin ceiling. The renovation work at St. Patrick Convent, the building of ReStore, and even the Merrimack Valley Habitat offices themselves speak to a larger effort by Habitat for Humanity in becoming part of the revitalization of Lawrence.

“We’re very committed to the city…We recognize that there’s a great need here. Lawrence is such a unique place. There are more not-for-profits in Lawrence than there are in any other city in the Commonwealth,” Mason says. “The percentage of impoverished living conditions—poverty housing—in Lawrence is awful. Every time we build a home, every time a family comes in, we change that statistic.”

Habitat for Humanity is also helping to change the future of the city’s historic buildings. ReStore will be located in the Duck Mill complex on Union Street, which used to house Ippolito’s Furniture but has recently stood empty and abandoned. Since taking over the space, Habitat for Humanity has added refurbishing the ReStore space to its already long list of building projects. According to Dahmen, workers have done things like take out the original bathroom to make it wheelchair accessible; remove two sets of stairs to build an accessible ramp entrance; build a manager’s office; take out partition walls; remove musty rugs and add new carpets; replace a cracked window; replace the back door to make it handicap-accessible with an electric button system and intercom; and scrape, scrub, and repaint everything else.

“What I love about what we’re doing is that it stays true to the nature of the environment in which it already exists,” says Mason. “We’re not razing it and building something that’s architecturally different from what’s around it. We’re reusing these magnificent mills.”

Down the street from ReStore, the St. Patrick Convent was poised to be torn down before Habitat for Humanity stepped in and bought it. Now, Habitat is not only turning the building into affordable-housing units, but also preserving it, doing things such as refurbishing the original woodwork and bringing the original banister up to code. “We are preserving a wonderful old building that is part of Lawrence’s heritage, and we are maintaining that building in substantially its original shape,” Dahmen says.

Even Habitat’s offices are in a reclaimed mill on Island Street in Lawrence’s historic Canal District. “This building is a beautiful example of what revitalization means. A lot of attention was paid to keeping it not only environmentally sound, but a place that was welcoming and accommodating to a workforce.” And the new ReStore will be just across the street.

“It’s been abandoned for a while,” says Mason. “And here you have Cambridge College, New Balance, you have this office building,” she says of the outfits that have made their homes in the South Lawrence mills.

What’s more, the act of reusing old buildings fits in with ReStore’s mission to reclaim items that would otherwise go to waste. “We’re reusing mills to benefit building new homes in a reused building like Parker Street. It’s a full circle,” Howell says. “The offices are in a reused building and the store is in a reused building selling reused materials to revitalize a building to create homes for people who otherwise couldn’t afford homes.”

All of this work creates what Mason calls a “lovely ripple effect of revitalization in action.” When Habitat for Humanity builds something, whether it’s from the ground up or by renovating an existing structure, it starts building a community where there wasn’t one before. She points to a project where Habitat for Humanity built eight homes on an abandoned piece of land in Haverhill that had nothing across the street. A year later, a real estate developer built eight additional homes that looked very similar to the ones Habitat built.

“And you’ve got this neighborhood,” Mason says, with a “presto!” tone of voice. “You’ve got your cul-de-sac, American-dream neighborhood, right there where there was blight, where there was nothing.”

Mason says people’s desire to help Habitat for Humanity is huge, whether they donate their time, money, or items. Although the affiliate’s first priority is building affordable housing, most donated items will go to ReStore because of the organization’s specific building criteria for new homes, says Dahmen. “We’re pretty circumscribed in terms of what can go into a house, so an awful lot of stuff will go into ReStore,” he says. And that’s also a lot of stuff that might have otherwise been thrown away, which represents yet another ReStore perk: helping the environment. “We’re diverting stuff that would otherwise go into the waste stream and we’re repurposing it,” Dahmen says.

According to Mason, one local ReStore estimates that it has kept one million pounds of reclaimed items out of landfills. “A million pounds,” Mason repeats, incredulous. “That’s one store.” With stats like these, it’s clear that one ReStore really can have a huge impact on a community beyond raising money or being “green”: Habitat for Humanity homeowners often volunteer to help build other people’s homes, and with ReStore, even more people will be brought together as they constantly donate and buy items.
That’s why Mason’s opinion that Habitat’s work builds a “community of mankind” doesn’t sound bogus at all when you consider the huge pay-it-forward effect this ReStore could have on the community. Suddenly, all that “community of mankind” talk sounds very, very plausible.

“With ReStore, we have businesses, individuals, and families contributing and buying. We’re constantly bringing together communities that don’t see each other,” Mason says. “And that’s how you keep a community strong.”

If you go:
ReStore
4 Union Street, Lawrence
978-686-3323
merrimackvalleyhabitat.org/ReStore

New tastes on the Seacoast

2011-02-22T13:52:00.000-08:00

Taste of the Seacoast Magazine, Winter/Spring 2011

Eatery options abound in our vibrant Seacoast community. Restaurants are a dynamic business, with openings, changing personnel, and new directions for existing establishments. Here’s a roundup of recent dining-out innovations.

50 Local Restaurant
50 Main Street
Kennebunk, Maine
207-985-0850
localkennebunk.com

Lots of restaurants do their best to source their food from local farms, but 50 Local Restaurant in Kennebunk is going whole hog. Literally. “We do whole animals,” says manager Merrilee Paul, who owns the restaurant with her husband, Chef David Ross. Cooking whole animals means that 50 Local, which opened last June, often has choices like sweetbreads and headcheese on their menus, which change with the products they bring in and are printed daily. “We think food that travels less tastes better,” Paul says. “Everything is homemade, right down to the ketchup.” And for diners curious about exactly how far that food has traveled, there’s an ever-changing list on a chalkboard that shows what’s from where. 50 Local buys from farms all over the Seacoast—including the one at Paul’s grandmother’s house.

Lanzo’s Bistro
56 Lincoln Street
Exeter, N.H.
603-772-3000
lanzosbistro.com

Lanzo’s Bistro specializes in gluten-free Italian food. And no, that’s not a contradiction in terms, at least not according to owner Jody Nichelson. “As a celiac sufferer, I went through a serious grieving process when this pizza and pasta girl could no longer have pizza and pasta,” she says. Her solution is Lanzo’s, which opened last June and makes gluten-free sauces and other Italian food in a nut- and soy-free kitchen. Cooking classes, which started last fall, are Lanzo’s latest project, with classes for kids, teens, and adults. They’re run in collaboration with the Exeter Recreation Department and include lessons in everything from dough making to desserts. Personalized, private classes are also available.

Harvesting Hermit
32½ Depot Square
Hampton, N.H.
603-967-4696
harvestinghermit.com

BLTs and breakfast sandwiches might sound run-of-the-mill, until you stop to consider that at the newly minted Harvesting Hermit, the bacon is home-cured and the breakfast sandwiches are served on homemade English muffins. Harvesting Hermit opened last June with chef and owner Ted McCormack at the helm. Trained at Johnson & Wales and formerly chef at Flag Hill Winery and Three Chimneys Inn, McCormack had been using the kitchen at Chez Boucher Cooking School to make prepared meals for farmers’ markets around the Seacoast. So when the opportunity arose to merge his business with Chez Boucher’s Toot Sweet Pastries next door, he jumped at the chance. “I think it’s probably every chef’s dream to do so,” he says. Harvesting Hermit has an expanded menu and hours, and carries pastries from Chez Boucher.

foobar
21 Congress Street
Portsmouth, N.H.
603-373-8973
foobarportsmouth.com

Fresh ingredients and entertainment are behind foobar, which opened last August where Muddy River Smokehouse used to be. Owner Joseph Hults says that along with the fresh food, foobar is home to the “best burger in town,” a 10-ounce burger that’s steam seared, a method Hults brings with him from his native New York. Hults says foobar’s ultra-creamy cheesecake, topped with a layer of sweetened sour cream, is the best in the state. Also on the menu are homemade arancini and pierogies, hand-cut French fries, braised short ribs, barbecue, and a “Fair Fried Combo” of deep-fried Twinkies, Oreos, and Snickers. Entertainment is another priority, with nights devoted to comedy, trivia, karaoke, and live bands.

Yeastern Homebrew Supply
4 Franklin Plaza
Dover, N.H.
603-343-2956
yeasternhomebrewsupply.com

Seacoast-area home brewers have a new retail outlet in Yeastern Homebrew Supply in Dover, which opened last August. “There was no shop anymore on the Seacoast whatsoever,” says Gabe Rogers, owner, home brewer, and former chef. Yeastern aims to fill the void left when Stout Billy’s closed a few years ago, stocking supplies for brewing beer, wine, and mead at home. The store carries ingredient kits and even oak barrels. Although there are a lot of tools for novices, Rogers also says he wants to cater to advanced home brewers with all-grain equipment because there’s a huge base of these brewers in the Seacoast area. “I want to provide a place for people to get their supplies without having to go over the Internet,” Rogers says.

The Black Duck
The Tannery Marketplace
Newburyport, Mass.
978-462-0323

After the owners of White Hen Pantry on Pond Street in Newburyport lost their space to an expanding drug store, the owners packed up and moved on, opening a new shop named after a different bird. “We used to be a White Hen,” says owner Scott Munroe. “Now we’re a Black Duck.” Loyal customers followed the new market when it opened last August. It’s just a half mile away in The Tannery, selling salads, sandwiches, grilled paninis, soups, and grocery items.

China Bistro
8 Market Place Drive
York, Maine
207-361-4388
chinabistromaine.com

The Maine coast might be famous for its traditional steamed lobsters, but China Bistro in York prepares them the Chinese way, cooked in a scallion and ginger sauce. The new eatery, which opened last August, offers a mix of traditional Chinese, all made to order from fresh ingredients, says manager Emily Liu, wife of co-owner Steve Liu. She says their chef has a lot of experience in Cantonese cooking, specializing in traditional Chinese dishes like chow mein and chow fun, prepared the way people in China would make them. Of course there are the Chinese-American favorites, but even these have a different spin, says Liu. For example, there are cold, fresh spring rolls as well as deep-fried.

Gilley’s PM Lunch
175 Fleet Street
Portsmouth, N.H.
603-431-6343
gilleyspmlunch.com

The days of pleading for a late-night grilled cheese sandwich at Gilley’s PM Lunch are over. “We’re going to be having sandwiches offered all night long now,” says owner Steve Kennedy. This past fall, the iconic Portsmouth diner built a large addition, almost tripling its grill space and quadrupling its frying capacity. The bigger grill ends the establishment’s long-standing rule against selling grilled sandwiches past 10:30 p.m. to make room for the burger and hot dog crowd. “We’ve been offered $50 to do a grilled cheese,” says Kennedy of the late-night customers with a craving. Coming with the expansion are new menu items, like sausage and pepper sandwiches, homemade meatball sandwiches, and breakfast burritos.

Blue Moon Evolution
8 Clifford Street
Exeter, N.H.
603-778-6850
bluemoonevolution.com

After 16 years as a market and lunch café, last fall Blue Moon transformed into Blue Moon Evolution. Owner Kathy Gallant closed the market, and expanded the space into a 60-seat restaurant serving lunch and dinner, with Matt Greco as the dinner chef. “Blue Moon at lunch is busy, fast. You order at the counter, or get the salad bar. At dinner, we slow it down. It’s more a place to gather over conversation,” Gallant says. “The menu is broad, with everything from food for the raw foodist, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, and what we call the conscious carnivore, with local meats. That’s our criteria: local, seasonal, organic.”

Q&A with Elizabeth Gilbert

2011-02-04T07:13:00.000-08:00

Photo by Margaret Talcott

Originally published in NH Let’s Go and Eagle Tribune
January 27, 2011

In the opening pages of her newest book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, Elizabeth Gilbert writes, “in the past, I had always written my books in the belief that very few people would read them.”

A blockbuster memoir and a Julia Roberts movie about your life will change that.

Thanks to her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert has earned “best friend status” among millions of women, says Margaret Talcott, associate producer of “Writers on a New England Stage,” an author event where Gilbert appeared on February 3.

Now out in paperback, Committed picks up where Eat, Pray, Love left off: After falling in love with a Brazilian-born Australian expat in Bali, the couple are “sentenced to wed” when Homeland Security cracks down on her sweetheart’s frequent entries into the United States. The idea of marrying again makes Gilbert skittish—she and her lover each have a failed marriage under their belts—so Gilbert sets out to dissect the institution before diving in again. In doing so, she examines everything from her grandmother’s experiences raising seven children on a Minnesota farm, to the marriage customs of the Hmong in Vietnam, to census statistics, and the views of early Christians.

We caught up with Gilbert via e-mail with a few questions ahead of her appearance in Portsmouth:

Pecci: There’s a certain anonymity that comes with being a journalist and telling other people’s stories. How has becoming a famous memoirist affected that? If it’s somewhat lost, can you get it back in places like Luang Prabang or North Vietnam?

Gilbert: I can get that anonymity back very quickly -- anywhere from Atlantic City to Dallas to London. The reality of Eat, Pray, Love is that the book became famous, but I myself am not famous in any invasive way. I don't get recognized on the street, I haven't fostered a TV presence, I don't blog, I don't tweet and I update my website about once a year. By contemporary American standards, in other words, I am virtually invisible. (If anything, the movie has helped me remain invisible, because now everyone thinks Liz Gilbert looks like Julia Roberts, and I can definitely pass unnoticed behind THAT disguise!)

Pecci: What’s the key takeaway that you got—and that you hope readers get—from Committed?

Gilbert: That marriage is not a sport for children, not a game for the young. If there is one consistent message that shines through every possible study and statistic on marriage, it is: WAIT. For women this is particularly true. The older you are as a bride (and the more educated you are and the more financially independent you are, and the longer you wait to have children) the better your chances become of not only staying married, but staying quite happily married. Marriage requires superhuman maturity, for reasons I'm sure I don't need to explain...and for reasons that I absolutely would not have listened to when I got engaged for the first time at the age of 23.

Pecci: Readers were very affected by your grandmother’s wonderful life story. Why should people ask questions of their own mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts?

Gilbert: When you're trying to figure out your own life, it can enormously helpful to go 3-D with your examinations -- to reach three generations deep, if those people are still available for you to interview. Proximity means everything in the development of family character, and it's unlikely that anyone influenced your own views about marriage and love -- positively or negatively -- as much as your closest relatives. Moreover, when you talk to them as adults, you may discover that your mother and grandmother may shock you, giving candid and wild answers to your questions that may blow your head off in surprise (as happened to me), causing you to once more reexamine all your own certainties and assumptions.

Pecci: What do devoted readers most often want to know from you?

Gilbert: "Did you marry the Brazilian guy?" and "What was the name of that pizzeria in Naples?" The answers are, of course, yes, and Pizzeria da Michele.

Pecci: What are you working on now?

Gilbert: A novel. It's been delightful for me to return to fiction -- my first love -- after ten years of writing true stories.

The Music Hall
28 Chestnut Street
Portsmouth, NH
603-436-2400
themusichall.org

The small university museums of Cambridge rival Boston's big galleries

2010-12-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

Washington Post, December 17, 2010

MIT's Kismet

A three-dimensional dog pops out at me from the wall, so lifelike that I expect it to start barking at any moment. Behind me, my mother is holding my 16-month-old daughter, Chloe, who's staring at a wall and grabbing at the air in front of her. I move over next to them and realize that she is trying to grab a hologram that's zo oming out at her like a streaking red comet. I wonder vaguely whether holograms might be bad for a baby's mind.

I guess that if there's anyone who knows the answer to that question, they'd be here at the MIT Museum, which displays Massachusetts Institute of Technology research in fields such as robotics and holography.

We're on an excursion to check out the university museums of Cambridge, a trip inspired by my grandmother's desire to revisit a museum at Harvard University where she saw glass flowers when she was in high school in the 1950s. Searching for that site online, I discovered that Cambridge has a wealth of museums, and exploring them seemed like a good pastime for a chilly New England weekend.

We start at the MIT Museum, skimming over the "Sampling MIT" exhibit of current research, which is fascinating to some people - including the 7-year-old who's apparently transfixed by a map showing the incidence of malaria around the world - but a bit dry for my taste. I'm more interested in seeing the robotics exhibit upstairs, which showcases the artificial intelligence work at the university.

Some robots look like nothing more than boxes of circuit boards and wires. Others, like the gigantic, many-jointed Minsky Arm from 1968, with tubes and wires extending down the length of it like electronic veins, resemble humans in some way. But the most famous robot in the exhibit is Kismet, which has a face that can show emotions and, according to research, elicits emotions from humans, too. Chloe waves excitedly at Kismet, as if to prove the scientists' point.

We make a brief detour to check out the model ships at MIT's Hart Nautical Gallery before heading to Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Founded in 1866, it's one of the world's oldest anthropological museums and houses thousands of artifacts from indigenous peoples the world over, with galleries devoted to Native America, Latin America and the Pacific Islands.

The extensive Native American gallery displays intricately feathered and beaded Lakota headdresses, towering totem poles from the Pacific Northwest and a collection of delicate kachina dolls. But the most interesting items to me are the ones that aren't there, the ones that hung where now hang signs reading: "Objects in this case have been removed under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act." Although the museum apparently has a good relationship with tribes - one of its current exhibits examines the "Contested West" through the eyes of the Lakota people and was co-curated by Lakota artist Butch Thunderhawk - there's a fascinating and uneasy balancing act between learning from these items and wondering just how they were obtained.

The entire museum gives me a strange and exciting Indiana Jones kind of feeling, especially the Pacific Island gallery. There, the wooden floors squeak, and dim lights illuminate rows of glass cases containing such items as a pig-tusk nose ornament from New Guinea and supernatural-looking shadow puppets from Java. With yellowing display cards next to artifacts from exotic lands, it's easy to imagine turn-of-the century adventurers coming back to Harvard to catalogue their treasures.

The next day, I visit the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which houses the most renowned pieces from Harvard's three art museums. (The other two - the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger - are closed for renovation until 2013.) The objects in the museum are exquisite and include ancient Islamic texts, classical Roman sculptures and works by Gauguin, Renoir, Monet and Van Gogh that hang in a beautiful gallery.

Harvard also has an extensive modern art collection that I'm afraid is lost on me. Staring at a huge Jackson Pollock painting, I'm reminded of Chloe's reaction to the Kismet robot. I guess I, too, need faces or recognizable shapes to appreciate art.

The next morning, Harvard's Museum of Natural History is swarming with kids, who press their faces against cases of meteorites and minerals - more than 5,000 specimens from around the world, sparkling like gigantic rock candy in vivid blue, glistening black, electric yellow and every other color imaginable. There's gallery after gallery of taxidermied animals from around the world, jewel-like beetles and butterflies, and nightmarishly huge crickets. The fossils and skeletons are staggering, especially the famous Harvard Mastodon; the 42-foot-long marine reptile kronosaurus; and a huge whale skeleton, complete with a curtain of black baleen hanging from its jaw.

But the highlight is certainly the glass flowers, and I watch my grandmother's lips form a little "Ooh" as she enters the gallery. "They really are as beautiful as I remember," she breathes. And they're nothing like I imagined. When I first heard the words "glass flowers," I thought they'd be big, vivid and stylized. Instead, they look like real flowers, perfect in each tiny detail. How can these be made of glass?

There are fuzzy little goldenrod blooms, wildflowers with thin clumps of roots, spindly-stemmed Mexican cosmos. The thousands of models were made beginning in 1887 by a father-and-son team of glass artisans who based their work on real specimens from around the world. "Oh, my God, Mom, look at this one," a little boy exclaims, and in row after row in the gallery, kids - and adults - ooh and ahh in disbelief that these blooms are man-made, not plucked from the ground.

The museums of Harvard and MIT are overshadowed by two huge Boston institutions that deliver art and science on a grand scale: the Museum of Fine Arts, which recently opened a new wing, and the Museum of Science. But the smaller university museums I visited are just as fascinating and just as detailed. You could spend a whole weekend here and never set foot in Boston. And believe me, you wouldn't miss a thing.

Danvers, Mass., where the 17th-century witch hunt actually started

2010-10-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

A barn at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead

The Washington Post
October 12, 2010

All that remains of the old Salem Village Parsonage is a small stone foundation, and I'm standing in it. A three-foot-deep pit lined with large stones, it's invisible from the road, at the end of an inconspicuous path between two houses in a suburban neighborhood. A few miles away, throngs of tourists crowd the sidewalks in Salem, Mass., but here I'm all alone, standing in the spot where the Salem witch hysteria started in 1692.

Salem may be known as the witch capital of the United States, and trials and executions indeed happened there, but the frenzy that set off the infamous witch hunt actually began in what is now Danvers. It was in Salem Village, as Danvers was then known, that Betty Parris, Ann Putnam and other "afflicted" girls first cried witchcraft against their neighbors.

I'd been to Danvers countless times, always on the way to somewhere else: work, the nearby malls, a restaurant. Even many locals don't realize the number of witch-trial-related sites that still exist, largely unheralded and unvisited, in their town. So I set off to shine a light on the darkness.

First stop is the parsonage, where the Rev. Samuel Parris lived with his wife, Elizabeth; his daughter, Betty; his niece, Abigail; and their slave, Tituba. It takes my stepmother, Robin, and me a second to notice the stone path that runs between the houses at 65 and 67 Centre St., and the small historic marker that's almost overgrown by bushes. It feels like trespassing as we walk between the houses and their back yards, but soon we see the small sunken foundation surrounded by a post and rail fence.

I step into it and struggle to imagine what went on here during the cold, dark winter of 1692: Betty and Abigail acting wildly, screaming and writhing in apparent pain, throwing things. The village doctor concluding that the devil must be responsible for their illness. The slave, Tituba, being accused of witchcraft. The panic, the fear, the shrieks, crammed into this tiny space. The entire foundation can't be more than 20 feet across. All that remains now is dirt and rock and a peaceful little clearing.

The site was excavated in 1970 by a team led by Richard Trask, who describes himself as "just a townie" when I meet him a few days later at the Peabody Institute Library of Danvers, where he works as the town archivist. A descendant of Mary Esty and John Proctor, who were hanged as witches, Trask says that he fell into his job because he was interested in the history of Danvers. It was an interest that most townspeople didn't share.

"Danvers never wanted to be acknowledged as the place where it had begun," he tells me. "There was always a shame, even in the '50s and early '60s," when he was growing up.

Now, Trask manages the Danvers Archival Center, which contains the most extensive witch-trial-related imprints anywhere as well as a few excavated relics from the period. Genealogical and academic researchers haunt the archives most often, although a few witch-enthused tourists do wind up there once they discover that Danvers is "the place," Trask says.

Trask's genial, Boston-accented voice also narrates a slide show about the witch trials at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, where we arrive late in the afternoon for a tour. According to our guide, tours take place "whenever people show up." Rebecca Nurse was an elderly and respected member of the Salem Village community before Ann Putnam accused her of being a witch.

The guide walks us through the circa 1678 house, which is furnished as it might have been when Nurse lived here, and demonstrates some of the never-ending chores that everyone, children included, were expected to perform.

As we walk through the house, my 13-month-old daughter, Chloe, squirms in Robin's arms, punctuating the quiet tour with yells of pent-up energy. In that moment, it's easy for me to imagine why a bunch of puritanically repressed young girls might have acted as though they were possessed.

"I guess being 'afflicted' got them out of chores," I remark.

"Exactly," says the guide.

Ann Putman claimed that Nurse's disembodied figure appeared to her, and that kind of "spectral evidence" was used throughout the trials to convict people such as Nurse, who was excommunicated, hanged and denied a proper burial. Her family secretly recovered her body from Gallows Hill, and legend says she's buried somewhere on the grounds of her homestead. According to our guide, there's an unmarked grave in the Nurse family burial ground behind the house.

Although the exact location of Nurse's remains is unknown, her family erected a monument to her here in 1885. The beautiful obelisk stands tall and crisp at the center of the burial ground, decorated by American flags, plantings and silk flowers. It declares Nurse a "Christian martyr." Another monument remembers the 40 people who signed a petition in support of Nurse after she was accused.

Our last stop is the cemetery where Thomas Putnam and his wife, also Ann, are buried with the younger Ann. The Putnam cemetery is tucked at the top of a steep, wooded concrete path next to the Massachusetts State Police barracks on Route 62. There's no historical marker, nothing even to indicate that there's a graveyard hidden up the hill. I'd discovered only a couple of sentences about its existence on the Salem Witch Museum Web site.

I stand at the gate and rake my eyes across the cemetery grounds, looking for the large mound in the earth that's the only remaining evidence of the Putnams' unmarked grave. When I see it, my stomach does a little flip. How different this place is from the burial ground where Nurse is exalted. Or from the somber and stirring Salem Village Witchcraft Victims' Memorial, where a faceless Puritan is etched in granite above the victims' names and methods of execution. Among them is the unnamed infant who died in prison before her mother was hanged. Huge chains and shackles lie across the top of the monument, and the victims' words are engraved in the stone, declaring their innocence from across the centuries.

"Well! Burn me or hang me," said George Jacobs Sr., who was hanged on Aug. 19, 1692. "I will stand in the truth of Christ."

Everything about the Putnam cemetery, by contrast, feels empty and lonely. A fence prevents me from going into it, but for some reason, I find it hard to leave, knowing that I may be the last person for a while to stand here and remember this sad, accursed family. I stare at the grass for a time, but finally there's nothing more to do. I take one last look and walk away.

Savannah three ways

2010-09-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

From the river, on a dolphin tour with Dolphin Magic.

From the Spanish moss-lined streets downtown.

From the stomach, at the delicious French cafe Papillote.

Dory Time: A Visit to Lowell's Boat Shop

2010-05-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

Northshore Magazine, May 4, 2010

At the edge of the mighty Merrimack in Amesbury, where a small bend in the river makes the water seem almost like a harbor before rushing out of sight toward Newburyport and the Atlantic Ocean, sits Lowell’s Boat Shop. The river sparkles in the soft spring sunlight, providing a striking blue backdrop against the red shop. A wooden skiff, seemingly plucked from a Winslow Homer painting, bobs in the water.

Any sense of being part of a placid painting is erased the moment you step through the shop’s narrow wooden door. Inside, the place is alive, heaving with the sounds of sanding, hammering, and pounding, exhaling sawdust and the smell of cedar.

“When you come here, this place attacks all of your senses, and that would include your heart, in my case,” says Pamela Bates, executive director of Lowell’s Boat Shop.

Lowell’s has been building wooden boats since Simeon Lowell established the shop in 1793, making it the oldest continually operating boat shop in the country. It is credited with introducing the Surf Dory in the late 1700s and the Banks Dory in the 1800s. Bates says the Banks Dory revolutionized the fishing industry by allowing fishermen to stack multiple boats on the deck of a schooner and launch them all at once, rather than going out one by one in individual boats.

Today, Lowell’s is a National Historic Landmark and a nonprofit working museum. But don’t let those distinctions fool you; Lowell’s might not be cranking out over 2,000 dories like it did in 1911, but it is still an operating shop, building custom dories and skiffs for people around the country. The place is heavy with history, yet the past and present live side by side. The tools have changed over the centuries and the techniques have been refined, yet the end result is still the same: handcrafted wooden boats that are the gold standard in the industry.

“Lowell’s is to wooden boats as Hermes is to handbags,” Bates says. “We make the highest quality wooden boats that you can buy.”

The phrase “living history” tends to conjure up images of men and women churning butter in Colonial garb, so it might be a little misleading to describe Lowell’s Boat Shop that way. But the people at Lowell’s are living the shop’s history in the truest sense, considering themselves stewards of the place, practicing and passing on its traditions rather than simply replicating them.

“It has a uniqueness that can’t be matched. This is not recreated. It is completely authentic,” Bates says.

The Lowell family owned the shop until 1976, when Ralph Lowell sold it to the Odell family, who was responsible for getting the shop onto the National Register of Historic Places and having it declared a National Historic Landmark. Eventually, the Newburyport Maritime Society bought the shop, turning it into a nonprofit working museum.

Bates, who has had boats on the Merrimack River for 30 years, says she used to come to Lowell’s Boat Shop to buy oarlocks. “I just liked to come here,” she says. She even joined the Newburyport Maritime society because it owned the shop. So when the Maritime Society decided to sell Lowell’s, Bates stepped in. “The boat shop needed its own focus and management,” she says. Without it, she feared the shop’s centuries-old traditions—and maybe those of Lowell’s itself—would be lost. “I said, ‘Not on this watch.’”

Bates knew that several groups were interested in buying the shop, but they were having trouble raising the money individually. “I just suggested that they sit down at the same table and see if their like minds could pull something together, and that happened,” she says. They formed the Lowell’s Maritime Foundation, which bought the shop in 2007 with the goal of “preserving and perpetuating the art and craft of building wooden boats.”

“The charge of the Maritime Foundation really is to be good stewards of Lowell’s Boat Shop and its traditions. It was formed specifically to own and operate the boat shop,” Bates says. Although the foundation has expanded its membership and board, it is still very much an organization in its infancy that is run mainly by volunteers, including Bates. A volunteer woodworking crew produces fun products like dory window boxes and planters, model dory kits, and oar-handled cheese knives to raise money for additional programming. The shop’s Dory Rescue League is also made up of volunteers who maintain the boats. Yet Lowell’s does employ one full-time boat builder, Amesbury native Graham McKay, who learned the craft of boat building as a high school student by taking a course at Lowell’s Boat Shop.

“I balanced it between playing high school basketball, and I feigned illness for a few practices, I think, to be here for class,” McKay says. Although he has an economics degree from Harvard, he found himself lured by the boats and worked part time in the shop. “If I had a weekend off, it would be what I’d want to do,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to sit around and figure out a better way to put together a mutual fund.”

So after earning a graduate degree in maritime archeology from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, he joined Lowell’s Boat Shop full time in December 2007. “This is essentially working maritime history. This building and this shop have been here for centuries,” he says. “I’m as interested in producing boats and receiving a paycheck as I am in making sure that this place, rather than disappears, thrives and becomes more of a household name.”

Part of the shop’s efforts to become more recognized lies in its educational programs. Lowell’s operates a year-round museum and classes in boat building, knots, model dory building, and rowing, to name a few. The boat building classes, which are the most popular, are limited to six to eight people and usually run five to eight weeks. The boat that the class builds is often sold by raffle. Whoever wins can buy the boat for a lower price than it would sell for otherwise: as little as $1,000 on a boat that could sell for more than $5,000. On average, Lowell’s boats cost between $6,000 and $12,000, although you could buy an unpainted boat with a simple design for as little as $3,500.

“Our boats are very, very labor intensive. They’re all fastened with copper rivets by hand,” Bates says. They are also made with the finest-quality materials; most of them are planked with cedar and framed with oak. According to Bates, the shop is “fussy” about its wood, favoring clear wood without knotholes. Although the boats are just as sturdy as they were in 1793, today they are more often recreational than industrial, so they are prettier, too, Bates says. The boats are enameled and finished, and most have several coats of varnish on them. They seem to be worth the investment. “Our boats will last for generations, and many families hand them down from generation to generation,” Bates says.

Lowell’s also offers memberships, which provide discounts on classes, invitations to special events, and access to recreational rowing during open waterfront days, a perk that Bates says is not taken advantage of enough by the community. A one-year family membership costs just $60, and you do not have to own your own boat to row there. An individual membership costs $35. “Why go to a gym and use a rowing machine when you can get in a boat in a beautiful place and row in the fresh air?” Bates says.

McKay is also launching an expedition day program this summer, during which middle school kids will row from Lowell’s to the Essex Shipbuilding Museum over the course of a week. Along the way, they will learn about rowing, the history of the area, maritime safety, and marine science and biology, as well as how their lives will be influenced by the wind, tide, and elements while they are out on the water.

Even though Lowell’s Maritime Foundation is still new, the boat shop itself is not. The oldest buildings on the site date to the 1860s. To be sure, there are some things that are wonderful about that, like “Lowell’s Linoleum,” where the floor is layered with inches-thick paint, the product of centuries of boat painting. Yet it can be a challenge to maintain such a place. Bates says that the shop didn’t have any maintenance work for 12 years before receiving a Partners in Preservation Grant from American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation last year.

“The grant was all about infrastructure,” Bates says. “The roof over our paint room would not have lasted this last winter. The repairs we made to this building were of a truly critical nature.” The $86,200 in grant money allowed the shop to repair and restore all of its windows, put new siding on the east end of the building, put a new heating system in the teaching room, and paint the building red, which is likely its historic color. Bates says her future wish list for Lowell’s includes expanding the building and waterfront, as well as getting the community more involved in the shop.

One man for whom involvement in the shop is never an issue is 70-year-old John McGann, who drives 100 miles from his home in Plymouth to, as Bates says, “pat his boat.” McKay is building him a Surf Dory, and McGann comes to the boat shop every two weeks to visit, staying for about four hours and “puttering around doing things,” he says. He loves to watch his boat being made and even has had a hand in building it.

“I have riveted three planks onto that boat. Today, I sanded the mast. What role I’ll be doing the next time, I don’t know,” he says with a laugh. “Graham always has something.” McGann said he searched from Connecticut to Maine for a boat builder and settled on Lowell’s because of its history, tradition, and expertise. “It has just been an adventure for me,” he says, adding that the attraction to the dory goes deeper than an interest in rowing. “My great-grandfather was a dory man on the Grand Banks, fishing from a dory. It’s the connection with my ancestry.”

That kind of deep connection seems to be a common feeling at Lowell’s Boat Shop. “We’ve had very masculine grown men come in and say that they have arrived at Mecca. That this place has an aura about it that makes the hairs on their neck stand up,” Bates says. She herself talks about the place with a kind of reverence and says others feel the same way.

“They really feel that this is a spiritual environment, and they feel the presence of past generations here,” she says. “And without being too soupy about it, you really can’t be around this shop and not feel that there’s a lot going on here, both past and present.” Bates says that the people who work at Lowell’s might not make much—or any—money, but they’re all there for the same reason: they believe in the shop and its mission and want to bring that mission to the wider community, both local and national.

“Lowell’s should be a national entity that’s recognized worldwide. It’s one of one,” she says. “We’re the only oldest boat shop there is in the country.”

If you go:

Lowell's Boat Shop
459 Main Street, Amesbury, MA
lowellsboatshop.com

Views from the Newport Cliff Walk

2010-05-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

There are two portions of the roughly 3.5-mile Cliff Walk in Newport, Rhode Island. The first half is the "official" section that's paved and maintained (and crowded).

The ocean is on one side, and opulent, historic mansions are on the other.

The second half isn't paved and is more of a hike along the rocky shore. This section is unofficial, and the people who live along the "rough" section tolerate--but don't welcome--the people who hike on what's technically their property.

In some spots, high fences and barbed wire prevent hikers from making themselves too at home in their yards.

When you're done, catch a trolley back to the end of the paved part of the walk so you can get back to your car.

Learn more on the walk's website.

Zimmerman House offers visitors bonus time for photographs

2010-04-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

NH Let's Go, April 14, 2010
When die-hard Frank Lloyd Wright fans make pilgrimages to the houses he designed, snapping photos can provide the ultimate souvenirs.

“You can really take almost any perspective of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs and sort of frame them artfully, and that view itself becomes a piece of art that you can take away,” says Jane Seney, educator for tour and docent programs at Manchester's Currier Museum of Art.

The Currier owns the Isadore J. and Lucille Zimmerman House, the only Frank Lloyd Wright house in New England that’s open to the public, and for the next three months, visitors have the opportunity to spend an extended amount of time taking photos of its exterior after touring it.

“You get to spend an additional half hour outside the house, photographing any part of the house that you’re interested in,” Seney says. “This is something that real Frank Lloyd Wright fans love to do.”

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house for Dr. and Mrs. Zimmerman of Manchester in the late 1940s and ‘50s in his Usonian style, creating a building that’s at once utilitarian and artful. There’s no attic, basement or garage, but “the details of the house were what made it really sort of exquisite and wonderful to be in,” Seney says.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed every aspect of the house — from the gardens and the furniture down to the mailbox, which “introduces” visitors to the house because it’s made out of the same materials. The Zimmermans wanted Frank Lloyd Wright’s sensibilities reflected on the inside of their home, too.

“They were really sort of taken with his philosophical approach to architecture and even his approach to interior design and the way that he had decorated his home,” Seney says. They draped animal skins over their furniture like he did and commissioned items they’d seen in his home, like lamps and a quartet music stand for their own.

After spending their lives as patrons of the Currier, the Zimmermans left the property to the museum in 1988. The museum spent two years restoring the home before opening it for tours.

“One of the things that really aided them in the restoration was all the pictures that the Zimmermans had taken of their home through the 36 years that they lived there,” Seney says. She calls the Zimmermans “wonderful and enthusiastic amateur photographers,” who kept boxes and boxes of photos that they took of each other, some staged and posed, others candid family shots. Some of those photos are highlighted over the next few months during the tour of the house’s interior, a nod to the special photographer’s tour.

Seney says the idea for the photographer’s tour actually grew from the Zimmerman House’s docents, who themselves often travel to see the other Frank Lloyd Wright sites and bring back photos. People come to Manchester from all over the world to see the house, so the museum wanted to build the opportunity to photograph it right into the tour.

“More and more on the tours that we run here we get people coming from further and further away,” Seney say. “They always want to have more time at the house to photograph.”

If you go

Zimmerman House, Manchester
Note: Tours begin at the Currier Museum of American Art. A short bus ride brings you to the house, which is only accessible through the guided tour. Make your reservations at least a week in advance. Learn more here.

Tour of Boston's Chinatown brings visitors into shops and eateries

2010-03-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

Washington Post, March 7, 2010

Roasted poultry at Great Barbecue

Warm, sweet-smelling air hits my face as I step out of the swirling snow and into Ho Yuen, a tiny bakery in Boston's Chinatown. The place is packed with locals ordering their morning favorites -- and us, a small knot of tourists venturing into a shop like this for the first time.

Our guide passes around a small pink plastic bag filled with pieces of the bakery's moon cakes, which he said might remind us of "Aunt Martha's fruitcake, if Aunt Martha were Chinese." They're filled with nuts, lotus seed and fruit, and if you're lucky, a duck egg yolk or two. I reach into the bag and pull out an entire duck egg yolk with a small piece of pastry clinging to its side. Lucky me!

My six companions and I are on the Boston Chinatown Market Tour, a look at the neighborhood's culinary specialties and highlights. Our guide, Jim Becker, is an American chef who studied in China in the 1970s (which is why "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie" are part of his Chinese vocabulary).

Exploring Chinatown can be intimidating for the uninitiated, especially when it comes to food, what with all the mystery ingredients and the language barrier involved. It doesn't help that Boston's Chinatown was once considered part of the "Combat Zone," the nickname given to the city's red-light district. Today, the Combat Zone has virtually vanished, and the tours -- the brainchild of Boston chef Michele Topor and given every Thursday and Saturday -- aim to help folks feel comfortable exploring and eating here.

In the interest of not acting like a luck-hoarding glutton at the bakery, I share my duck egg yolk with a guy on the tour. It tastes better than I'd imagined it would, the egg yolk giving the pastry a creamy finish. Next we sample coconut dumplings and dumplings rolled in sesame seeds and filled with sweet red bean paste before moving on to our next stop, the modestly named Great Barbecue. Here, glistening roasted chickens and ducks hang from metal hooks behind a glass case, their heads still attached and their eyes wide open. Colorful paper signs declare the price per pound in Chinese and English.

Jim hands out toothpicks and wet naps before popping into the back of the shop to retrieve a plastic-foam box filled with roast pork strips. I stab one with a toothpick and take a bite. Unlike the pink takeout versions, these strips, seasoned with five-spice powder, are mahogany-colored and fall apart in your mouth. The box passes my way again, and I snag another.

We get a quick lesson in tea and jade at a small, relatively new shop called Chinese Art Collection, where we try a tea flavored with jasmine petals that's dubbed Iron Goddess of Mercy. "Sounds like a Catholic school nightmare," quips Jim.

Then we head to the herbal pharmacy Nam Bac Hong Chinese Herbs.

I'm in the way no matter where I stand in the busy shop. People wend their way between the narrow pharmacy counter and stacks of countless ready-made cures, such as "Men's Vigor Tea" and camphor-scented white flower oil, which Jim rubs into his temples whenever he has a headache. Other customers disappear into the back of the store, where an herbalist assesses their condition and orders a prescription of herbs, bark, seeds, roots and other ingredients stored in wooden drawers that line the shop's back wall from floor to ceiling. We watch pharmacists mix the ingredients on metal hand-held scales, crush them with a mortar and pestle and wrap them in paper. Customers steep their prescriptions in tea or soup.

At Bao Bao Bakery and Cafe, a popular place with mirror-lined walls and Technicolor cakes, Jim once again goes into a back room. This time he returns with mango, peach and litchi-flavored iced tea. The latter, mixed with a scoop of "bubbles" -- fat, black, chewy tapioca pearls -- makes bubble tea. We use extra-wide straws to slurp it up. People are crazy about bubble tea, or so Jim says, but it's a bit too sweet and perfumey for my taste. I take just a few sips before ditching it.

We take a quick peek into Eldo Candy House, a shop that uses the word "candy" loosely: It sells scooped snacks such as wasabi green peas and candied olives. The store is small and a bit overwhelming with its vast tubs of goods, so we duck outside, where Jim brings us each a miniature Chinese takeout container filled with candied ginger, tamarind and other samples from the store. I stash it in my bag to eat at home later.

On to C-Mart, an Asian grocery store. At the fish counter, eels swim in tanks and the shrimp are still twitching. "Shrimp don't get much fresher than this," says Jim. As we stand in an aisle alongside produce that includes dried candied persimmon and ginkgo nuts, I start to notice the shoppers' reactions to us. Some people stop to listen, others look bemused. It makes me wonder what I would do if tourists stood in front of the deli case while I was doing my grocery shopping. "These are cold cuts," their guide might tell them. "American suburbanites eat them between two slices of bread."

The tour ends with a dim sum lunch at a restaurant named Hei La Moon. Jim greets the servers in Cantonese, then expertly chooses steamer baskets filled with delicate taro root dumplings, spareribs and crispy deep fried spring rolls from the carts they wheel around the restaurant. Tea etiquette, he tells us, states that you pour your neighbor's tea and say thank you by rapping two knuckles on the table. I try to remember to do it whenever someone refills my cup. The entire meal -- tea plus 10 dishes, which easily served eight -- cost only $57.

The tour is officially over after lunch, but we all linger around the table a little longer. Jim's heading back to C-Mart to do some shopping of his own, and he invites us along. I'm tempted to go, but I have a baby waiting for me at home. As I walk back to the subway, I find myself already planning a trip back. I snap some pictures of the street scene, wondering whether my husband would like dim sum and imagining exploring the neighborhood with my daughter over the summer.

I've lived outside Boston all my life and had never been to Chinatown before. I don't know why. But I do know that it'll be much harder to eat greasy, Americanized Chinese takeout now that I've had the real, unadulterated thing.

If you go:

Boston Chinatown Market Tour

Owned and created by chef Michele Topor. A 3 1/2 -hour eating and walking tour of Chinatown markets and shops that ends with a dim sum lunch. Purchase tickets online.

North End Market Tour

Three-hour walking tours of the North End, Boston's Little Italy, by the same company that runs the Chinatown tour. Learn more here.

Under Edinburgh, a Hidden World of Plague and Passageways

2009-10-18T09:16:00.000-07:00

Modern-day closes extend like bike spokes off the Royal Mile

The Washington Post
October 18, 2009

My eyes struggled to adjust to the dimming light as we descended below Edinburgh's Royal Mile to walk streets that had been hidden for centuries. The cobbled path sloped unevenly beneath my feet, and suddenly we were facing a long, narrow alleyway that dipped sharply downward and disappeared into darkness.

Being accompanied by 20 or so other tourists didn't detract from the eeriness of the Real Mary King's Close, an underground tour. Although, I admit it: I scare easily. I was the kid in tears begging to leave the haunted house fundraiser put on by the local elementary school. Still, the idea of visiting plague-ravaged subterranean streets appealed to the history lover in me. How many memories still lingered, trapped, down there?

I'd traveled to the United Kingdom with my husband, Brian, to visit our British friends Mike and Chris, who live in Darlington, England. Halfway through our stay, the four of us filled the "boot" of Mike's car with a night's worth of luggage and drove a couple of hours along the North Sea coast to Edinburgh.

Mike and Chris had already trod the city's ancient Royal Mile enough times for the excitement of shops filled with kilt-clad mannequins, canned haggis and tartan scarves to have worn off a bit. On the first day, when Brian and I braved the wet, sleety snow squalls of a raw March afternoon to explore Edinburgh Castle, Mike and Chris opted instead to have a pint in the cozy pub down the street.

Yet even the two of them had never ventured into Edinburgh's "closes," these streets that centuries ago were covered and built over to make room for the City Chambers. Several stories below ground, they're now being excavated. So the next day, we walked up the Royal Mile to the tour headquarters on Warriston's Close.

We met our guide in the tour's brightly lighted gift shop, which bustled with people buying postcards, T-shirts, tiny texts of Robert Burns's poetry and supernaturally themed trinkets, a nod to the supposedly haunted streets below. It was hard to believe that this touristy souvenir shop would give way to anything spooky. The guide was dressed dandily in 17th-century garb. Mike snorted at the sight of his tights and lacy collar.

Our guide warned us about the low light, cramped spaces and uneven floors that awaited us. Mustiness pierced my nose as we descended stairs that gave way to a bumpy path, and I concentrated on not losing my footing. The space was cool and damp and reminded me of the dark, dirt-packed basement in my father's 200-year-old farmhouse in Massachusetts. White sheets hung from clotheslines overhead, floating like ghosts in the light of the street lamps. It was as if the street's long-dead residents had just hung their laundry out to dry.

The gift shop seemed far away. I felt disoriented, winding in and out of the dark, narrow alleyways and cavelike homes. It was impossible to figure out how the twisting passageways connected with one other. Arriving at the tiny house of a poor family, we all crowded into its one room, feeling what it might have been like to live here with several unwashed, plague-ridden relatives. I stood shoulder to shoulder with Brian and a woman who kept a tissue pressed to her face to block the musty smell. A bucket for collecting human waste sat in the corner of the windowless space. It would have been emptied directly onto the street outside, the guide said.

It was that kind of poor hygiene and cramped quarters that helped the plague rip through the closes and the rest of Scotland in the 1640s. We passed a window where a white cloth hung outside from the windowsill: the signal of a plague house. Mannequins of plague victims languished in beds while a doctor, dressed in a Grim Reaper-style black cape and beaked mask, tended to their buboes with a cauterizing iron. In the shadowy, flickering light cast by artificial candles, the scene looked spookily real.

After those bleak re-creations, it was weird to see a heap of stuffed animals, toys and trinkets crammed into a little brick alcove. A filthy Barbie doll in a tartan outfit sat atop the pile. We were in Annie's Room, where a psychic claimed to have felt the unhappy spirit of a plague orphan who'd lost her favorite doll. The psychic comforted the girl with a Barbie doll, and visitors have brought toys for Annie ever since. The sight of all those toys -- the emblems of innocence -- in this dark space somehow made them appear creepy, in the same way that clowns or the tinkling strains of a music box can crawl under your skin. Some people say they've felt the little girl's presence or have even seen or heard her lingering in the close. I paused for a minute and closed my eyes to see if I could feel her, too. But nothing. Part of me was disappointed, but a bigger part was relieved.

Legends and ghost stories are around every corner in the closes, but the tales of plague victims being shut up there and left to die aren't true, we learned. Still, in one of the rooms, the guide warned us not to touch the walls. Excavators have found human cremation ash embedded in them, he said. Although I was nowhere near the walls, I immediately recoiled and looked around. I couldn't help imagining the people whose remains had wound up packed into this dank space. Who were they? Could they ever have imagined what would become of them? Or that hundreds of tourists would pass by here every day?

If only those walls could talk.

If you go:

The Real Mary King's Close is at 2 Warriston's Close, Writers Court, Edinburgh. Admission is about $17; children ages 5-15 about $10; seniors and students about $15. Reservations required. No children younger than 5 are permitted. Photography is not allowed in the closes, but on the way out, groups are asked to pose for a photo, which can be purchased in the gift shop.

For more information: 011-44-08702-430160; realmarykingsclose.com.