Yesterday, the news was too depressing- with the cumulative effect of coverage of the Nice massacre and the Baton Rouge ambush dominating the airwaves, I decided that I needed to get out of the house early, so I headed to the Lighthouse at Sleepy Hollow for one of their annoyingly rare tours. The lighthouse, finished in 1883 and decommissioned in 1965 when the lights of the Tappan Zee Bridge rendered it superfluous, is accessed from the gorgeous Kingsland Point Park, one of the jewels of the county parks department.
The tours are run in a perfunctory fashion- while there is a sign declaring "you must make a donation for the tour", there is nobody to collect the money, merely a box which one would fill on the honor system. Being an honorable guy, I put in a fin. Here's where I note that anybody could have run off with the till, so kudos to the honest people visiting Kingsland Point Park. While I stood around waiting for something to happen, I took in the spartan surroundings of the first floor living quarters, with its antique stove and store of firewood:
In the foreground, on the table, you can see the cashbox- it's a rather nice box, and I suspect that one would be more tempted to steal the box and leave the money than to steal the money.
As I was taking in the surroundings, I met a really nice New Jerseyite who was visiting with his two teenage children. He was a lighthouse aficianado and showed me his "lighthouse passport", stamped with the sigils of various lighthouses he had visited up and down the Eastern Seaboard. After a brief discussion, we decided that I would ascend the stairs in order to find a tour guide. The second floor was even more spartan than the first, merely festooned with posters describing the typical ships of the Hudson River fleet and nautical charts of the vicinity. With its porthole windows, the lighthouse has an appropriately nautical air:
As one climbs higher, the place becomes even more austere:
When one emerges at the top, one is greeted by a gentleman from the local historical society who explains that there is no structured tour, but if one has any questions, one merely need voice them and they would be answered to the best of his ability. The view from the top of the lighthouse was magnificent, with a particularly nice vista of the Hudson Highlands rising to the North and Northwest:
I descended and explained to my new friends from Jersey that the tour was pretty much self-guided, then climbed again to take in the glorious view- here's the new Tappan Zee Bridge rising just north of the old, increasingly dilapidated TZB:
And a view of the metal gangway leading to the island on which the lighthouse stands:
That post-industrial moonscape visible at the top of the photo is the site of the former North Tarrytown General Motors Assembly Plant. Old-timers will tell you that you could tell what color they were painting cars by what color the river was running. There's a reason why one is not supposed to eat Hudson River seafood more than once a month.
After taking in the view, I spied one of my co-workers walking across the gangplank with her two tall, rangy sons. I had a nice chat with them before leaving, noting that the scarcity of tour dates was what led to our meeting, that and a desire to get out of the house on a scorchingly hot summer day. It was a nice bit of good fortune, I hadn't seen her boys in months. After bidding them goodbye, it was time to head over to work. Visiting the lighthouse was a nice way to spend an afternoon, I just wish that it were open more often. I'd recommend a visit to anyone, but they'd have to either plan it out well in advance or be really, really lucky.
This being the season when my weekend workdays give me no opportunity for peaceful "alone" time, I figured I'd schedule a post with some pretty pictures. When I visited Kingsland Point Park in Sleepy Hollow to watch a giant crane "limbo" under the Tappan Zee Bridge, I took a couple of pictures of the Sleepy Hollow Lighthouse, which was built in 1883 and decommissioned in 1961.
Up close, it looks like it could use a touch-up paint job:
The area is such a pretty one, it should be more of a tourist draw. Sadly, the visitation hours of the lighthouse are way too scanty:
2014 Lighthouse Tour Dates: Sundays: April 27, May 11 and 25, June 8 and 22, July 6, 20, August 3, 17, 31.
Time: 1:00 pm–3:00 pm, last tour begins at 2:30 pm.
Local scuttlebutt (I'm not naming names) has it that the guy who runs the site doesn't have the time to run it, but doesn't want to step down from the position. I don't know how much it would take to run the lighthouse on a regular basis, but I sure wish somebody would make a go of it. It's a fascinating building, and its setting is unparalleled. I don't want to create a local controversy- this is a plea, not an accusation.
Just as the title of my "crane" post was cribbed from a tune by TMBG, this one is as well:
Why buck a trend? I'll have to see if any other TMBG songs match up with park features...
When the whole world seems to be going to hell, the best way to seek solace is to find a beautiful natural locale... while they still exist. One of the places which is near and dear to my heart is Kingsland Point Park in Sleepy Hollow, which is one of the most scenic spots in the lower Hudson River Valley. It overlooks the Tappan Zee, the widest section of the mighty river:
While it wasn't a frigid day, the mercury was at 37 Fahrenheit (not quite 3 Celsius), a persistent high wind off of the river made it feel about ten degrees colder. The river itself was decorated with whitecaps:
I didn't stay long, it was just a quick visit before heading to work, but it took my mind off of the current geopolitical climate... I prefer the cold of a winter day to the heat of irresponsible rhetoric.
The big local story on the news was the arrival of a super bigass crane to the Tappan Zee Bridge construction site and its subsequent journey under the bridge, conducted during the low ebb tides caused by the full moon (unless you're Bill O'Reilly).
I headed up to the gorgeous Kingsland Point Park in Sleepy Hollow, NY to take in the scenery and to watch the giant crane being moved:
I can't wait until they erect that sucker. I've always been fascinated by heavy machinery... I'm pretty much an overgrown eight year-old.
Post title yoinked from one of my favorite TMBG tunes:
A friend of mine discovered the "Giants" after their Flood album came out, and remarked how whimsical the band was. I set him straight, TMBG may have had a whimsical facade, but the vast majority of their songs were about heartbreak, ennui, and disillusionment. The audio of the official video for They'll Need a Crane is clearer than the live version. Just listen to the bridge and tell me that these guys were ever in it for the laughs.
It's a week until Christmas, and I had a little free time this afternoon before I had to be at work. Having an aversion to shopping malls at even the least congested times, I decided to visit places far from the shopping crowd. I decided, oddly enough, to visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery on an unseasonably warm, but overcast day. Of course, the premier occupant of the cemetery is beloved local figure Washington Irving- author, diplomat, bon vivant. Irving's grave is perpetually festooned with an American flag, appropriate for the United States' first successful professional author and a public servant of long standing:
The fence surrounding the Irving plot was decorated with a wreath:
Watching over the Irving plot was a regal red tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis):
After bidding goodbye to Mr Irving and his avian overseer, I headed to Kingsland Point Park because I'd heard that the lighthouse was illuminated for the holidays. Sure enough, the beacon lamp was lit, and some small lights, barely visible in the gathering dusk, were strung along the tower:
After spending some time braving the wind off the river, I decided that I would thaw out by heading into downtown Sleepy Hollow in order to buy empanadas from the Los Andes Bakery for an early dinner. Los Andes is the perfect place to enjoy Chilean baked goods and Chilean hospitality. After joking with the counter-help for a while, I settled upon two empanadas and a torta mil hojas and bought a box of alfajores for my co-workers.
Every once in a while, I write about Sleepy Hollow, an interesting little working-class village with an extensive Latino population (about 50%). It's the sort of community that send a xenophobe into a tizzy, but I've always found the residents to be hospitable. It's funny how not being an asshole tends to be rewarded... though to be fair, being an asshole is all-too-often rewarded even more handsomely. Oh, well, it's not like an asshole would get a chuckle and a warm season's greeting from the empanada baker.
This year marks the bicentennial of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, originally published on March 15, 1820 as part of his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Longtime readers of this blog will know that reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is an annual Halloween tradition for me. I have long maintained that the tale (not a legend about a place that wasn't called Sleepy Hollow) is the original 'Scooby Doo' episode- a slightly spooky comedic story about a a creepy presence which may or may not be a ghost. Irving's Ichabod Crane, so different from the real man, is pretty much Shaggy, a tall beanpole with a boundless appetite and a tendency toward credulity.
Sadly, this pandemic year put the kibosh on the Sleepy Hollow Literary Festival, which was supposed to be a celebration of the 'Legend's' bicentennial. The festival was supposed to involve a consortium of Irving scholars presenting panel discussions and lectures on the 'Legend'. I had been hoping to attend some of the festivities before work, but that was not to be.
Irving wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow while living in England, trying to keep his family's import/export business afloat, and not having a very good time of it (the United States was in the midst of a 'buy American' phase, with patriotic Americans bolstering homegrown industry). Disheartened, Irving met with Sir Walter Scott, a fan of his youthful writings, and received encouragement to continue his writing career. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving fused fact, fiction, and fable into a wonderful composite.
The figure of a headless specter is common throughout Northern Europe, with the Dullahan being a particularly vivid type specimen, by which I mean archetype specimen. Apparently, the Dutch Americans also had a tradition of muffling themselves in cloaks and scaring unwanted individuals out of town in the colonial era. In the journal of American revolutionary general William Heath, there is an account of a Hessian mercenary decapitated by a cannon ball: "A shot from the American cannon at this place took off the head of a
Hessian artillery-man. They also left one of the artillery horses dead
on the field. What other loss they sustained was not known."
This compares well with Irving's account of the decapitated Hessian: "It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head
had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during
the Revolutionary War..."
I have long maintained that much of the appeal of the 'Legend' is due to its sparse plot... at its heart, it's the story of a man who goes to a party and gets chased by what he thinks is a headless horseman. There is a lot of scope for adding one's own spin on the tale- good-natured rowdy vs pseudo-intellectual, rural vs urban, Dutch vs English. Even more significantly is Irving's genius at description, with his portrayal of Ichabod Crane being a masterpiece of comedic writing:
In this by-place of nature there abode, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, a native of Connecticut, who "tarried" in Sleepy Hollow for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was tall and exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, and feet that might have served for shovels. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.
It's odd that a lot of modern adaptations insist on making Crane sexy.
For me,a lot of the appeal of the story is that it is local, indeed hyper local. The route of the 'Legend', on Route 9, is one I have driven many times. Again, Irving's genius at description comes into play in his depiction of the Pocantico River valley that he dubbed Sleepy Hollow:
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of Saint Nicholas, there lies a small market town which is generally known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given by the good housewives of the adjacent country from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley among high hills which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook murmurs through it and, with the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever breaks the uniform tranquillity.
It's the attention to detail that most adaptations tend to lose, those little flourishes which conjure up an image that remains to this day, say when you hear a woodpecker earning its keep at Kingsland Point Park.
There are some nice background pieces about the 'Legend', such as this History Channel essay or this CBS news item. Again, the appeal of the 'Legend', a factor in its two centuries of popularity, is that it is endlessly adaptable- it was a brilliant synthesis by Washington Irving that has spawned a myriad of different interpretations in a chain of creation. It's an appropriate genesis for American fiction, both comic and scary.
I'll include one recent adaptation, an animated short by David Hyde Costello and narrated by poet Malik Work, which is a current stand-in for a shadow puppet show present annually in non-plague years at Irving's Sunnyside, which was cancelled this year due to the impossibility of social distancing between the two puppeteers involved in the show:
I figure I'll end this post here... I've got some reading to do.
The Big Bad Bald Bastard is a character played by Monsieur _______ of the City of Y______. The role of the Bastard is a handy one to play on subways, walking the streets, and in dive-bars, when being a nerdy, bookish sort is not to one's advantage.
