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Columbia, New Jersey
I think we’re alone now, there doesn’t seem to be anyone around
The idea of Weekend Trip slideshows are that they cover ground that other slideshows miss. I often travel to random places that really only merit a few pictures and sentences (if that), and gathering up and packaging them as Weekend Trips makes sense. For example, five years ago I was in Death Valley, St Louis, Longwood Gardens, New Haven, Chicago and the (just reopened) New York Hall of Science. All of those trips were only a day or two (or less), but packaged together with a few other stray pictures, you’re looking at six solid pages of content with over a hundred pictures. Even on years where I travel to less places like Death Valley (or even New Haven), there are enough pictures and content and stories to easily justify another Weekend Trips slideshow.
This brings us to 2020. It started well, with a trip to see Spring Training games in Florida and opening day tickets to the Edge observation deck at Hudson Yards. I also had a trip already booked to Los Angeles and A’20 (if you’re a long time reader of these slideshows you already know what A’20 is, or, more accurately, was), as well as already having several other trips in an early planning stage. When everything shut down in March, all travel was off the table, and even visits to the supermarket or Target became carefully planned, quasi military operations. Throughout the year, I was lucky to be outside, or even in a car, let alone on a plane or train or boat or anything. So while five years ago you might think of somewhere like New Haven as unadventurous, suddenly somewhere like New Haven felt like a magical, unattainable place full of far away dreams.
This of course makes you think if I didn’t actually go anywhere in 2020, why is there even a Weekend Trips slideshow for 2020? Is it because there’s a 2019 Weekend Trips slideshow and a 2021 Weekend Trips slideshow? If that’s the reason it’s not especially compelling. Maybe it’s because there are some amazing pictures that I just had to share because of their amazingness (you can see below and judge that one for yourself). Or maybe I just have a need, a compulsion to share every little thing and reframe it so that it seems more important than it is. That one feels closer, but the real reason just may be that it’s hard to understand everything that was so weird and difficult and stressful and different about that year without trying to write it down and hope it reveals some sort of unexpected truth. All things considered, it’s probably that compulsion one if I had to guess.
So, after three paragraphs and (just about) 400 words of saying almost nothing, we finally come to the point where it’s time to talk about some photos. We’re starting off the 2020 photos with exterior dining, often the worst kind of dining. It’s not that I hate being outside, but eating in hastily planned tents where all of the tables are tilted while cars speed by relentlessly does not necessarily always produce the best of experiences. That said, in 2020 it was suddenly the greatest thing ever. Give me a table on an angle and an uncomfortable chair under a questionable tent by the highway anytime- it was just nice to be outside for once. As for the actual pictures below, they represent a few local New Jersey restaurants. The first two are from Hot Dog Johnny’s in Buttzville, as good of a hot dog place that you can ever find and probably the only reason to ever even think about going to Buttzville. The other photos are from Mahwah and Lake Hopatcong, and are normally nothing special unless you like signs that are misspelled and/or tables that are kind of six feet apart.
About that six feet thing- as an architect, I understand size and distance. I can hold my hands apart and tell you how many inches are between them. I think we all can do it, maybe it’s something they teach you in school or maybe it’s one of the few physical benefits of a generally sedentary profession. So I really understand when things and people are six feet away from me, and throughout 2020 and 2021 I realized that no one else did, or they were all just monsters who thought that four feet or less was good enough.
So that whole last paragraph had pretty much nothing to do with this picture. Or did it…? (It didn’t). This is Tyvan Hill in Morristown, New Jersey, the 2020 Mansion in May, except that it wasn’t even May. More about this in the next paragraph.
The Women’s Association of the Morristown Medical Center have a unique local fundraiser called the Mansion in May. This involves them finding a local, historic mansion, giving each room to a different interior designer to do what they wish with it, then charging guests like $50 a person to walk through it. This happens every other year, or every third year since it’s probably not so easy to keep finding mansions to fix up. The 2020 location chosen was Tyvan Hill, a French Normandy style mansion in Morristown, New Jersey built in 1929, and everything was set to open in May like always, until, well, you know. They ended up (shockingly) still opening it in 2020 but waited until September. They also limited traffic inside to one way, sold only limited tickets, required masks (I wore two) and checked your temperature before entering. Even with these precautions, I still knew people who thought I was crazy to even considering going inside a building anywhere, let alone a mansion filled with strangers, just to see what some interior designers designed in a (at the time) pre-pandemic, pre apocalyptic world where mansions still opened in May.
One of the crazy things about 2020 was that governments discouraged gatherings of any kind, so even some safe sounding places that were outside were unexpectedly off limits. Local walking trails were closed or had one way restrictions, and I was so paranoid that if I was walking and saw someone approaching me on the sidewalk, I would switch sides of the streets to avoid an uncomfortably close encounter and/or avoid dying from the plague. Those sure were fun times in 2020.
So it was already fall by the time I actually ended up outside here at New Jersey’s High Point State Park, where everyone and everything kept their distance, even the other mountains and monuments.
In the film “Interstellar,” the New York Yankees play a baseball game to a mostly empty stadium, a scene meant to stress a broken world where a decimated population still tried to desperately hold on to whatever traditions they could. Here at Clover Stadium in Pomona, New York, even the local team (the Rockland Boulders) thought it was unsafe to play, but that didn’t stop our broken world from still trying to desperately hold on to whatever traditions we could. Instead of watching the Boulders play, it was just a bunch of local guys who probably played ball in high school, all in a stadium with hardly anyone watching or caring. Music played throughout (even during play), attendants washed handrails every other inning and there were repeated announcements to stay at least six feet away from the mascot. Despite all that, it was damn nice to be outside, to think of “Interstellar” and to be safe in the knowledge that no mascots would be sneaking up on you from behind.
