Page 3 of 5
East Rutherford, New Jersey
I tried to live one thousand years from here
If this weekend trips slideshow is really a local trips slideshow (and it is), then it’s hard to get more local than this third page of the slideshow. Here we are staying in state, or more specifically, staying in the state of New Jersey where this year I went out of my way to push myself to get out more. This starts here at American Dream (that mall in the Meadowlands) where its ice skating rink hosted the United States Curling Championships. This was a ticketed event (even though you could kind of see parts of it from the mall with no tickets) and really quite fun to watch. I can’t say that I understand everything about curling, but I can understand enough to know what’s happening most of the time, and honestly, understanding what’s happening most of the time is good enough for me.
On a sunny day this spring, I took a day off from working at home and instead boarded a train to Hoboken just so I could walk to Jersey City. From the former DLWRR Terminal in Hoboken, I headed south along the river all the way to the abandoned CNJRR Terminal in Liberty State Park, a walk that wasn’t all that long (just about five miles) but one that still kind of dragged a little near the end (if you’ve ever considered this walk, you probably know exactly which part I’m referring to).
I had previously walked most sections of that terminal to terminal walk before (no one but me calls it that by the way), but I had never done it all at once, or walked through every coastal section along the way. One new(er) area that I previously missed was this one, the section between Hoboken and Newport, which is also the section that contains this great big hard to miss sculpture on the waterfront. Water’s Soul is by Jaume Plensa and it is fairly similar to his other giant white flattened heads I saw earlier this year in Cincinnati and Buffalo. It is highly visible, especially from nearby(ish) Hoboken Terminal, but up close it has this strange otherworldly presence that still somehow still manages to feel just about right.
There are a lot of places that I went to this year that I had not been to for years and years and years, like right here at Clinton. It’s not all that far from me, but for whatever reason I had never been there on my own and had only been there once before a grade school field trip. All this time the picturesque town, its picturesque bridge, its picturesque waterfall and its picturesque red mill (and its picturesque street mural of its picturesque waterfall and picturesque red mill) waited patiently for me to return.
It may be hard to believe, but I’m actually leaving a lot of things out of this slideshow. You’re missing pictures from Atlantic City from when I went to a conference (there were some nice sunrise pictures from the hotel), a reading of the Declaration of Independence in Morristown (an excuse to include “Huzzah” and “Down with the King” in a description), the Zombie Crawl in Asbury Park (possibly the first time I ever wished there were more zombies) and the Lumon Corporate Headquarters Building by Eero Saarinen (a lost opportunity for even more stretched out Severance references). But I am including this, the Van Vleck House and Gardens in Montclair, which was home base for the annual Montclair Garden Tour, where a ticket buys you a chance to visit generally lovely private gardens throughout Montclair and Glen Ridge, and then an even better chance to talk about their design choices as soon as you get back to the car.
Keeping with the theme of visiting private properties, this year was the 30th Annual Mount Tabor House Tour and the first time I ever actually participated in it. Mount Tabor is a small, interesting community that was originally set up as a religious summer camp. Eventually these small tent sites were replaced by houses on small tent sized lots leaving the historic center with a wonderful walkable scale, with colorful houses close together and interesting paths and public spaces throughout. Participants open up their houses to strangers, and some even offered damn tasty apple cider and snacks. Even in a cold, miserable rain, walking around to walk into people’s homes was a great experience and one I probably shouldn’t have waited all those 30 years to try.
After a tour of people’s private gardens, and then a tour of people’s private houses, we’re combining both by visiting Luna Parc, a private residence surrounded by its own private sculpture garden. Luna Parc is the home of Ricky Boscarino, an artist who bought a home and started changing it piece by piece. Today he opens it on certain days for tours, which consist of a short presentation and then a free for all for guests to explore every part of the garden and every room of the house, including the most photographed bathroom in New Jersey. That might be a hard thing to legally prove, although honestly it’s hard to think of what the second most photographed bathroom in New Jersey could possibly be, so maybe Ricky has a solid case after all.
While not as quite as physically close to me as Mount Tabor, The Stickley Museum at Crafstman Farms is a physically close second to me and somewhere I often forget exists. It’s a real shame because the house (where Gustav Stickley lived before things went downhill) has now been fully restored and looks damn beautiful, far better than the last time I visited. The house was also decorated for the holidays with authentic period decorations, which included a bucket of sand to throw on the christmas tree’s electrical lights which were (at the time) considered to be just as dangerous as lit candles all over your dry dead tree.
We’re staying in a holiday mood as we head north up to Skylands Manor at Ringwood State Park, a mansion designed by John Russell Pope that was also decorated for the holidays, although unlike the Stickley House, there was no thought or attempt to decorate in a historically accurate way for a house that was built less than ten years later. Inside the rooms were well decorated, and even the proud eagles by the driveway, eagles that once stood guard on the facade of McKim, Mead and White’s original Pennsylvania Station in New York, found themselves wearing top hats.
