Dream Lake Garden is designed as a replica of a Ming-era (14th-17th centuries) garden in southern China. It was designed by Chinese architect Le Weizhong. It was built in China then disassembled and shipped to Montreal where it was reassembled in 1991.
Some Montreal Botanical Garden flowers:
Having lived in the New York City area for most of my life, I am somewhat less enamored by many of the city’s tourist attractions than the millions of visitors who come to see them. Ellis Island is an exception. Standing in the refurbished great hall, you can feel what America is about. Unless you’re a Native American, we all have ancestors who came from somewhere else. For most, it was not an easy trip.
In my mind Ellis Island should represent the fulfillment of the promise of the Statue of Liberty, the place where we swing open the doors and take in “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Two books that I read recently suggest that the people who came through here thought of it as something completely different.
Ellis Island: A People’s History, by Malgorzata Szejnert, is a history of the island, from 1892 when an Irish girl named Annie Moore stepped ashore until they turned the lights out in 1954. Szejnert is from Poland and the book was originally written in Polish. Using a lot of the registry records, Szejnert offers snapshots of many of the immigrants who came to the island and somewhat more detail on the commissioners and others who worked there.
The Next Ship Home: A Novel of Ellis Island by Heather Webb is a piece of historical fiction, a story of how the paths of two young women crossed there. One is an Italian immigrant fleeing an abusive father in Sicily. The other is a German-American whose abusive stepfather sets her up with a unwanted job on the island.
These two works show the island as something other than a beacon of hope and light. The Polish author Szejnert offers the comment “the rest of the world associates it more with the end of hopes than the beginning.” And in Webb’s novel, Italians christened Ellis Island “L’Isola delle Lacrime (Island of Tears).”
One of the immigration port’s commissioners, Frederick Wallis, is quoted by Szejnert upon his resignation as saying “the suffering we see at the island daily is indescribable and would melt a heart of granite.”
This is a place where desperate people, after a most often arduous journey, are subjected to life altering decisions. Decisions made by overworked staffers who don’t speak their language, may not have the best of intentions and who make those decisions quickly and often arbitrarily. And, assuming Webb’s tale is accurate, that’s not the worst of it. New immigrants may well have found themselves extorted and exploited by the more unscrupulous of agents. One of Webb’s characters, an inspector who extracts sexual favors from female immigrants in order to let them through, is based on a real Ellis Island inspector named John Legerhilder.
Szejnert offers the statistic that of the 16.6 million who disembarked on Ellis Island, only 610,000 were turned away. That’s a pretty small percentage, but it tells you nothing of the heartbreak of the 610,000 or of the families split apart, likely forever.
What is striking in reading these two books is how things are pretty much the same a century later when it comes to immigrants. In The Last Ship Home, Francesca Ricci, a beautiful, hard-working and courageous young woman, is reviled because she is Italian. Reviled by German-Americans, immigrants themselves who arrived a generation or two earlier. Now it’s Mexicans and Haitians and Central Americans who are vilified by people whose ancestors also came here as immigrants for many of the same reasons and whose ancestors may very well have been regarded as “undesirable” at the time.
Nor were the politics of immigration all that different. Under some administrations, officers were appointed who had some empathy for the arrivals and who tried to treat them fairly. But the appointees from other administrations looked at every immigrant with suspicion and thought of their jobs as protecting the country from these people.
Both of these books have their flaws. In reading Szejnert’s book I kept wanting to find out more about the immigrants she would so briefly introduce us to. The emotions are thick in Webb’s history that sometimes feels like something akin to a romance novel.
In the future, I will likely find my way back to Ellis island. I’ll stand in awe in the middle of the great hall. But I’ll remember there’s another side to the story. After all, as I learned from Szejnert, Annie Moore, the cute 15-year old Irish girl celebrated as the first to come through, ended up living a life of poverty, giving birth to 11 children of which only five survived to become adults, and dying at the age of 47.
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For more photos of Ellis Island see A Place to Celebrate Immigrants
There is no food that is consumed more on New Jersey’s oceanfront boardwalks than pizza. Any town that has a commercial boardwalk, has at least one pizza joint on every block. These two are my favorites.
Perhaps the reason I can’t choose one of these pizza joints over the other is that they’re blood relatives. Their common ancestry goes back to Anthony and Lena Macaroni who operated a restaurant in Trenton. On Memorial Day in 1953, Anthony, Lena and their three sons Joseph, Vincent and Duke opened Mack’s Pizza on the boardwalk in Wildwood. A few years later, in 1956, Anthony, Vincent and cousin Vince Manco opened a shop on the Ocean City boardwalk which they named Mack & Manco. Mary Bangle, daughter of Frank Manco, and her husband Charles Bangle purchased the Ocean City operation in 2011 and renamed it Manco & Manco. In 2017-18, Charles Bangle spent 13 months in jail on tax evasion charges. Mary got three years probation. It had no effect on the pizza.
They’ll fry anything on the boardwalk.
Curley’s is a Wildwood landmark.
But the best fries are in the Boss’ old stomping grounds, Asbury Park, just a block away from Madame Marie’s and across the street from the Stone Pony.
No contest. It’s Ocean City Coffee Company. Pay no heed that Starbuck’s opened a block away.
Atlantic City’s primary contribution to the culinary world is salt water taffy. There is a story about a storm in the Atlantic in the 1880’s that washed out a storage bin full of taffy at a candy store in Atlantic City run by David Bradley. Perhaps tongue in cheek, he gave the remaining product the name salt water taffy. That may or may not be true, but we know that Joseph Fralinger was the leader in commercializing the sweet treat (a product that includes no salt water among its ingredients). His first competitor was Enoch James. Today, both brands are owned by James Candy Co. (an outfit that is in Chapter XI) and each still has a branded store on the boardwalk.
In Ocean City, this is the signature sweet:
And in Wildwood, it’s this:
And for some non-traditional boardwalk food, how about a Korean fusion taco, served out of this converted storage container on the Asbury Park boards.
Art in the Atrium is a non-profit Black arts organization in Morristown, N.J. Since its founding in 1991, it has exhibited the works of African-American artists at the Atrium Gallery. The current exhibit, For the Culture, By the Culture: Thirty Years of Black Art, Activism and Achievement, at the Morris Museum, is a retrospective of those 30 years of Art in the Atrium exhibits.
Posters from previous Art in the Atrium exhibits:
For those of you who may be living through a sweltering mid-summer weekend, here’s some cool and refreshing photos from Sunrise Point in Mt. Rainier National Park, Washington. Sunrise Point, at an elevation of 6,400 feet, is the highest point at the park that is accessible by car. These aren’t photos from last winter. I took them July 3.
Mt. Rainier National Park was established in 1899. It was the fourth U.S. national park.
At a much lower elevation, and at the southern end of the park is Longmire. This was once a mineral spring resort operated by James Longmire, an American explorer who found his way here in the 1850’s.
The 2022 Tribeca Film Festival had more than its share of movie about sports. Here are a few I watched:
Mira is a women’s hockey player in Austria. She’s captain of the Dragons. Or at least she was captain until she got wasted one night before a road game, showed up 45 minutes late, then puked in front of the steps entering the bus.
Mira works on the family farm/winery with her dementia-suffering grandpa, her hostile mother and the ghost of her wayward brother. How things got this way is a story that unfolds slowly as the movie moves along. On the ice she literally has a love/hate relationship with a teammate.
This is a really nicely filmed movie. There are pictures both beautiful and artistic. And I enjoyed the sounds of the hockey, the skates, the sticks, the pucks slamming into the end boards. (It’s Austrian women’s hockey so there’s no crowd noise to overwhelm that.)
Much of what transpires is pretty somber. But ahhh…what a difference a goal makes.
A sports documentary? Yes, but more so a movie about social justice. This is a movie about the 2020 NBA season. Already a season like no other because of COVID, then George Floyd gets murdered by the Minneapolis police.
The NBA suspended its season in March after one player tested positive. It was the first professional sports league to do so. The others quickly followed. It was some five months later that NBA teams chose not to play in the wake of the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis. Again, the rest of the sports world followed.
This is a movie about conscience, played out over the decision to play basketball in a world that is making sport seem less and less a priority. The players, through the NBA Players Association, had to make the decision to leave their families for three months to play in a bubble in Orlando. It was a still harder decision to go back on the court after the Blake incident.
We’ve seen the footage of Muhammad Ali before. Of Colin Kaepernick. We’ve seen the Gerorge Floyd protests and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. We’ve seen the response from white supremacists, the reactionaries and the loser of the 2020 election. But we haven’t seen it before through the eyes of NBA players, a unique element in the story of race in America because of their skill, their wealth, and their visibility. As I watched many of these committed and insightful players I had to remind myself that these are really young guys. Odds are they will continue to be the leaders of the sports world when it comes to those issues that are larger than sport.
You may be familiar with John McEnroe the cynical, witty tennis commentator who is at once both entertaining and insightful. Or, you may remember John McEnroe the tennis player, the tantrum-tossing New York brat who was quick to tell anyone who asked that he didn’t give a shit what they thought.
The filmmakers catch a different McEnroe, sitting calmly in a studio, introspective and basically offering up a verbal autobiography. We also hear from his kids, his wife Patty Smith, Billie Jean King, Bjorn Borg, Christie Hynde and even a quick snippet from Keith Richards and a guitar gig with Carlos Santana. One of my favorite lines, when asked about pot smoking: “Today they do performance-enhancing drugs, we did performance-distracting drugs.”
The first half of the documentary is a McEnroe-hosted review of his tennis career. He talks about his early competitors. Jimmy Connors “taught me you have to be a prick out there.” He envied Vitas Gerulaitis’ nightlife and Borg’s calm demeanor. He never apologizes for his volatile on-court episodes but talks about being stupid and “sabotaging myself.”
1984 is a turning point. After reaching the top of the tennis world he backs off a bit, gets married and has kids. It doesn’t work out with his first wife, Tatum O’Neal, and his tennis career never hits the zenith it did in ‘84. But with a second marriage, to Smith, and more kids, priorities and focus changes.
The movie is long for a sports doc. At times the music seemed a bit somber and the filmmakers seemed to try too hard for the artsy shot. But it’s an interesting story about sports as much as a personal biography of McEnroe. Stars with the drive to hit the heights are usually neither happy nor satisfied when they get there. Give him credit for changing his goal to being a good father.
A movie about the WNBA and the New York Liberty franchise in particular. We see the league’s pioneers, Sue Wicks and Rebecca Lobo and Theresa Witherspoon, and we see lots of highlights of the 2021 Liberty season when the team unexpectedly made the playoffs.
A good part of the movie felt like a team highlight reel, but interspersed with some meaningful issues. From the early years those players talked about what it meant to have a professional league to play in. While that has been accomplished, these players have to play year round and make most of their money overseas. Picture Stephen Curry heading to Russia as soon as the playoffs end so he can pick up a bigger paycheck.
No professional athletes anywhere are as socially conscious and as willing to use their platform to speak out as the WNBA players and we see some of that here. No other professional athletes as a group have been as forthcoming about their identities.
Yet this is a league where a team can make the playoffs and not have access to their home arena because it’s been booked. And this a league where a team like the Liberty once moved from Madison Square Garden to a gym in Westchester County with a 2,000-3,000 capacity. That’s the unfinished business. Elite professional athletes who are still not always treated as such.
As a movie, this documentary sometimes seems a little scattered and disorganized. You have to admire the people being filmed. But all in all, I’d have rather spent the time watching a WNBA game.
off the leash 