Syracuse China

Magazine advertisement for Syracuse China, 1919.

Happy 400th Birthday, Hudson River

CHRONICLES OF THE HUDSON: Three Centuries of Travelers' Accounts edited by Roland Van Zandt New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press: 1971 917.473 VAN

From the first visit by a European, Florentine explorer Verrazano in 1524, the 'River of Steep Hills' has awed visitors. Henry Hudson's navigator, Robert Juet, described sailing up its uncharted waters in 1607 as "pleasant with Grasses and Flowers, and Goodly trees." In the 18th century, naturalist Peter Kalm came to stay with Benjamin Franklin for two years, on a mission to collect herbs and tree specimens for the Swedish Royal Academy.After the Revolution, the river became a flowing highway to the west with the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton and the opening of the Erie Canal, connecting the river to the Great Lakes. Making a triumphal return visit from France 1824, war hero General de Lafayette sailed up the river for five glorious days. At West Point the cadets lined up on the shore, as if by magic, to greet him. At Troy the young ladies of the Emma Willard School recited an ode composed for the occasion. In between these events, the general stopped at the country seats of the valley's landed gentry.The new century brought British visitors everywhere in the valley, perhaps drawn by the stinging rejection administered to their amour propre by their former colony. Fanny Kemble's stage career began by accident in 1832 when the stagecoach she was riding in overturned, leaving her stranded with an injured aunt to care for. Kemble earned money by giving readings from Shakespeare as she traveled and writing a wildly successful book about her exploits, Journal of a Residence in America. Social commentator Harriet Martineau got a book out of her trip - Society in America - and the enmity of some of her hosts for her early and outspoken support for the abolition of slavery.A continuing thread in narratives of the river is the search for its source. In 1836, Governor William L. Marcy ordered a geological survey of the state. Surveyor William Redfield recorded his explorations, in the process climbing and naming the highest Adirondack peak as Mount Marcy and discovering the head of the Hudson at Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, a lake in the shape of a teardrop. It was left to a dedicated outdoors man, Charles Fordham, to canoe from that point down the rapids to Glens Falls in 1880.There are dissenters in any crowd. When the French composer Jacques Offenbach toured the valley in 1876 he barely noticed the river, so wrapped up in his own petty travails that he made no mention of the splendors spread before him. The acerbic Henry James, revisiting his home after decades abroad, penned these sour words in The American Scene (1907), in response to the breathtaking train ride up the east side of the Hudson from New York to Albany, "It has taken our ugly era to thrust in the railroad at the foot of the slope."Editor Roland van Zandt has assembled an intriguing anthology, with many period illustrations.

HUDSON RIVER LANDINGSby Charles Wilstach Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill: 1933 974.7W Paul Wilstach (1870-1952) was an avid traveler and researcher, and an exemplary writer, marrying history and geography seamlessly. For many years Wilstach lived as close to the Library of Congress as he could get. An early contributor to National Geographic Magazine, Wilstach also published several books, including an edition of the letters of Thomas Jefferson, as well as several plays that were produced on Broadway. He brought his trademark curiosity to the writing of Hudson River Landings.Human and natural history interweave throughout the story. River tides led the early European explorers to believe they had found a passage to the Orient, thus luring even more boatloads to head west in search of the east. At West Point the revolutionaries blocked British passage up the Hudson, stretching chains across the river that were forged from locally mined iron. The river's restless kinetic energy inspired innovations in transportation and energy that opened up a continent.Wilstach introduces us to the Livingstons. one of the greatest, and most numerous, of the valley's manorial families. The first (of four) Robert Livingstons was granted a patent by England's King George II to 160,000 acres extending from the Massachusetts state line west to the Hudson River in what is now Dutchess County. The year was 1686, the same year that the British settled at Fort Orange (Albany). A refugee from England's 'Glorious Revolution', Livingston had the good fortune to speak Dutch, the language of the upper Hudson's first settlers. This gave him a leg up on the competition that Livingston put to good use, marrying into the wealthy Schuyler family and adding their vast acreage to his own. The next Robert Livingston, a pro-British sympathizer but a prudent patroon, signed the Declaration of Independence. The British responded by sailing an extra forty miles of the Hudson to burn down his home at Clermont, after they finished sacking the city of Kingston.The fingerprints of the Dutch system of land patents and patroonship that Wilstach describes are still evident today. From Van Cortlandt Manor in the lower Hudson, to that of the van Rensselaers in the capital district, their names and the names they gave to things remind us that the valley was Dutch before it was English.

PHANTOMS OF THE HUDSON VALLEY by Monica Randall Woodstock, NY, Overlok Press: 1995 779.474 RAN

Ninety miles north of Manhattan, near the town of Rhinecliff, stands the ruin of a remarkable house. Wyndcliff, the probable inspiration for the catchphrase "keeping up with the Joneses", was built in 1852 for the wealthy Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones. Her niece, Edith Wharton, decsribed it in her autobiography A Backward Glance this way: "I was obscurely conscious of a queer resemblance between the granite exterior of Aunt Elizabeth and her grimly comfortable home."Most people first encounter the Hudson Valley in the pages of Washington Irving's The Headless Horseman Of Sleepy Hollow. Painters and psychics have long been drawn to its otherworldly atmosphere. The rich built homes that evoked the country seats of European royalty, a castle on the Rhine or a chateau on the Loire. In an endless loop of imitation the Vanderbilts at Hyde Park and the Livingstons at Barrytown created new world versions of Versailles that, in turn, became the models for Hollywood producers of costume pictures like Marie Antoinette. Each home has its own personal history and some even have resident ghosts.Villa Lewaro in Dobbs Ferry was built for the first black millionaire in America. Sarah Breedlove was born in Louisiana, the child of former slaves. Married at fourteen, she was widowed at twenty when her first husband was lynched by a white mob. Breedlove became Madame C. J. Walker, marketing her hugely successful line of hair products designed for black women. It was unprecedented for a black person to buy property in Westchester County in 1916 when Walker moved there. While her new home was under construction, Walker took her petition to President Wilson in Washington demanding the end of lynching.On a narrow island by the east shore near Fishkill, a replica of a medieval castle perches, complete with a moat and a drawbridge. Francis Bannerman was a Scottish immigrant; his wife was a psychic who believed she had been Queen Elizabeth I in a previous life. Together, they bought Pollopel Island in 1900 for $1500 and built 'Bannermans' Castle'. Although he collected munitions as a hobby, the quixotic, wealthy Bannerman worked tirelessly for world peace. In 1920 there was a fire and explosion at the castle and it has stood abandoned for decades. Purchased by the New York State Department of Parks & Recreation in 1964, it awaits an uncertain future, a memorable sight if you take the Amtrack Hudson River Line train from Albany to New York.If the romance of the past lives anywhere, it lives here among the crouching gargoyles, crumbling turrets, moldering leather bound books, abandoned gardens and weed-cracked swimming pools. Photographer Monica Randall's sepia-toned pictures capture the lonely decline of its once splendid residences.Visit http://www.hudsonvalleyruins.org/for more information.

Images:

1. James Bard - The Hudson Valley Steamboat Rip Van Winkle, 1854, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

2. Unidentified photographer - Wyndcliffe in Better Days, reproduced in Phantoms of the Hudson Valley.

Frederick Edwin Church: Olana in Winter

2009 is the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage up the river that now bears his name. Many commemorative events are planned. To find out more, visit http://www.ny400.org/.

Frederick Edwin Church View from Olana in the Snow, c. 1871, Colby College Art Museum, Maine.

Miss Don't Touch Me

If you think graphic novels are poor cousins to the real thing or intended for adolescents, you will be surprised by this first English translation of Hubert (author) and Kerascoet (illustrator). Originally published as two separate works, The Virgin In The Bordello and Blood on Their Hands, this tale of Paris in the 1930s is full of mystery, charm and sophistication.
A faceless murderer, "The Killer of the Dances" is on the loose, preying on the newly minted working girls of the postwar era who frequent dance halls and pleasure palaces with their new found freedom and pocket money. Among them are Blanche, a timid, hardworking orphan and her fun loving friend Agathe, who share a tiny flat as they eke out their living as maids. It is the iconoclastic Agathe who remarks that the Church must be happy to have a killer illustrating their sermons for them.

When Agathe is killed by a stray gunshot from the next flat, a distraught Blanche cannot convince the police or her employer that a crime has been committed. They dismiss it as a suicide and Blanche is fired from her job.

Desperate to find work, Blanche is hired at the Pompadour Hotel, actually a house of prostitution, where she wears the black and white uniform of a maid but is forced to fend off the advances of the customers, including the Chief of Police - hence the nickname Miss 'Don't Touch Me.'
The delicious plot unfolds with realistic touches; the girls are taken in a paddy wagon for mandatory medical tests and the great chanteuse Josephine Baker makes an appearance, helping Blanche on the trail of the killers. At one point, upon discovering a tunnel that leads to an old convent cellar where the killers hide, Josephine touches a drop of blood on the stone floor, commenting, "I'd be surprised if this were the blood of Christ."
The illustrations are witty and knowing about traditions in French art, too. Street scenes evoke the works of Manet and Caillebotte, dramatic moments borrow the palette of the Fauves, and the characters are tart, saucy, and soo familiar looking. Madelene Mommepuy and Sebastien Cosset work together as the illustration team known as Kerascoet. They adopted as their signature the name of Mommepuy's home town in Brittany.

MISS DON’T TOUCH ME by Hubert & Kerascoet, translated from the French by Joe Johnson (originally published in French as La Vierge du Bordel and Du Sang sur les Mains). Paris, Dargaud: 2007 745.1 HUB