NEW YORK CITY: GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY (BROOKLYN)

 July 22, 2021

Our son knows I like cemeteries, and I know he likes mushroom hunting, and we figured those two interests could converge. Old cemeteries are known not just for their history and architecture, but also for their old trees, which often harbor companion fungi. We planned an afternoon walk through Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery to satisfy both of our interests.

Green-Wood Cemetery was founded in 1838 when the city cemeteries began to become overcrowded. It predated both Central Park and Prospect Park. Today it comprises 478 acres and contains about 600,000 "permanent residents" and 7,000 trees.  It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

Among the famous people buried here are musician Leonard Bernstain; artists Louis Comfort Tiffany, George Catlin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat; politician Boss Tweed; newspaperman Horace Greeley; the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher; NY Governor DeWitt Clinton, Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives ("Currier and Ives"); Elias Howe (sewing machine inventor); Walter Hunt (safety pin inventor); Frank Morgan (the wizard in the movie The Wizard of  Oz); Morse code inventor Samuel Morse; cabinet maker Duncan Phyfe, Teddy Roosevelt's first wife Alice, his mother Martha, his father Theodore, and his uncle Robert; toy store founder F. A. O. Schwarz; and Henry Steinway and his son William of Steinway piano fame. Fifty victims of the September 11 attacks are also buried here.

The main entrance to the cemetery is a gothic arch perfect for a cemetery. It was built in 1861-65.

Just as the Bronx Zoo's "Zoo Center" reminded me of Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle, so too did this magnificent gate--except the scary movie version. I'd love to visit this spot on Halloween.

Sculpted scenes above the entrances depict Biblical scenes of death and resurrection.

FLORIDA: TAMPA

June 9-18 2017

The only benefit I can see of being grounded from travel because of COVID -19 is that I can catch up on posting about some of my previous travels that I have never gotten around to writing about. This adventure happened three years ago--a trip to Tampa Florida to score AP English Composition exams.

I've posted before about the experience of scoring AP exams for the College Board, so I won't go into that very much this time. My focus will be on Tampa, a city of about 400,000 people on the western/Gulf of Mexico side of Florida.

I shouldn't have been too surprised by all the lakes/ponds, but I was!

The College Board always books nice rooms for us, usually in a Sheraton or Hilton or Marriott.  I can't remember which hotel I was in, but I had a nice view from various hotel windows.

The hotel was within a few blocks of the Tampa Convention Center, where I spent eight hours/day for the next seven days.

NORTH DAKOTA: BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA HERITAGE CENTER AND SICKIES GARAGE

September 16, 2019

On our last morning in North Dakota, we spent some time in the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum, located on the capitol grounds. Called the "Smithsonian on the plains," the original building opened in 1981, and an expansion that added 127,000 of space was finished in 2014.

 They have a large collection of fossilized remains, including this huge mastodon skeleton.

The displays are creatively placed, often showing the animals in conflict.

NORTH DAKOTA: THEODORE ROOSEVELT NATIONAL PARK

September 14-15, 2019

Theodore Roosevelt National Park comprises over 70,000 acres (110 square miles) and gets about 800,000 visitors a year. Roosevelt's experiences here in the 1880s and 1890s influenced his pursuit of conservation policies as President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, so it seems appropriate that it is now a national park.

The Park started out as the Theodore Roosevelt National Wildlife Refuge in 1946. In 1947 and 1948, two parts of it were designated as The Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park, the first (and last) Memorial Park ever established, and in 1978 it received its current name and status.

The park is known for its wildlife, and we were excited to get "up-close and personal" with some if it . . . until we saw these signs:

I like the "rule of thumb" at the bottom of this one:

I spent parts of two days in the park, and Bob, who got up VERY early in the morning on the day we flew home so that he could spend more time in the park while I slept, spent parts of of three days there.

Roosevelt spent much of his time in an area called "the badlands."  "Badlands" is a generic term for a type of terrain characterized by eroded sedimentary rock with steep faces, unusual rock formations, deep ravines, minimal vegetation, and often unusual color displays.

NORTH DAKOTA: MEDORA

September 14-15, 2019

I have a love-hate relationship with Teddy Roosevelt. I love his break-the-mold, swashbucklin' style, his bold approach to life, his can-do attitude. But there is part of me that doesn't care for his certitude, his belief that he was always right.

Teddy was a bit of a chimera, a beast made up of many different body parts. Among those parts are the politician part, the Rough Rider part, the cattle rancher part, the conservationist part, and the husband and father part. I've already included David McCullough's insightful biography of TR, Mornings on Horseback, in my post about Oyster Bay, which covers Teddy's childhood and young adult years. That book (and another book I review in my next post) covers Teddy's loss of his first wife and his mother on a single day--February 14, 1884--and his subsequent flight from New York to North Dakota, where he would work through his grief.  (Apparently he rarely if ever mentioned his first wife again, even to their daughter, one part of him I am not impressed by.)

Teddy had been to North Dakota the previous year to hunt bison (a very TR-esque activity), and during that time he had purchased the Maltese Cross ranch for $14,000, substantially more than his annual salary. When Teddy returned to North Dakota in 1884, he purchased a second property, Elkhorn Ranch, and built a home on it.  He maintained both ranches, which were near the just barely established town of Medora, until 1898. 

Never very large, in 2010 Medora had a population of 112, and yet these days they manage to run a few hotels and several restaurants, and their website claims they are "North Dakota's #1 Vacation Destination."

However, it's not the town people come to see. Rather, it is the national park that is right down the road: Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  

But first, Medora.

When Teddy came through Medora on a presidential tour of the Western United States in 1903 (not surprisingly, he was the first president to visit Medora), he made such a good impression that a local hotel changed its name to the Rough Riders Hotel to honor his role in the Spanish-American War. The hotel was renovated in the early 1960s, and since 1986 it has been operated by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, a non-profit organization. Another remodel in 2008 added 68 guest rooms.

We stopped for dinner at the hotel, the nicest place to eat in town.  It has a beautiful lobby.

There are several pieces of Roosevelt-themed art in the lobby.

OYSTER BAY, NEW YORK: SAGAMORE HILL, HOME OF TEDDY ROOSEVELT

While we were in New York City for our son's graduation, we planned a morning trip to Oyster Bay on Long Island, site of Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt's home from 1885 until his death in 1919. Oyster Bay is about 35 miles northeast of Upper Manhattan. In spite of what the map below says, it took us a good hour and a half to get there from our hotel in Fort Lee, New Jersey:

Long Island is 118 miles long and 23 miles wide at its widest point. The largest island in the contiguous United States, Long Island has a population of almost 8 million people, or about 5,600 people per square mile. Once you get past Brooklyn and Queens, however, it maintains a chic, rural atmosphere. I'd love to go back and explore its small towns, like Hicksville, Hauppauge, and Stony Brook, or even go as far east as possible in Long Island's south fork to visit the famed (and very wealthy) Hamptons, also known as the East End and site of Southhampton, Sag Harbor, and Montauk:

But our trip to Sagamore Hill was more than enough for the morning we had free: