Penn's Landing: Exploring Philadelphia's Waterfront

The Moshulu, a floating restaurant at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia.

We dined aboard this Moshulu, a Penn's Landing icon for decades. It was exceptional, but more on that later. First, we took some time to explore Penn's Landing. There is a maritime museum here, but more interesting to us were the two restored ships docked here.

The USS Becuna (left, in black) and the USS Olympia (right, in red, white and tan)

Fred demonstrates the narrowness of the sub.

The USS Becuna glided under the South Pacific in World War II, searching for enemy ships to destroy. This isn't the first submarine I have visited, so it wasn't the first time I was faced with the idea of actually living in these tight quarters. There would be no room for T'ai Chi or yoga on this vessel, but perhaps a sailor could manage to fit some jumping jacks if s/he stood sideways in the hall. One is required to have a strategy when passing through the segments, or compartments, of the submarine because they are connected by these airtight, watertight, oval doorways. (These are not as tight as the circular doorways I navigated in a Soviet submarine in San Diego earlier this year.) My strategy is to stand sideways, stick one leg through the opening, duck and put the head through, stand up and pull the other leg through. Real submariners would grab the overhead handles and throw both legs through at once.

The passage between compartments in the USS Becuna.

The 160 sailors aboard the Becuna were charged with finding enemy vessels and destroying them with its steam-powered torpedoes. This is a pre-nuclear submarine, so consider the energy situation: four huge diesel motors (two of whom were named Huff and Puff) ran the generators that powered the electric motors that ran the submarine when it was on the surface. Those diesel motors also charged giant batteries that powered the vessel when it was submerged. (Thanks to Fred for this explanation!)

One of the Becuna's torpedo tubes.

Puff the magic diesel motor.

The USS Olympia's bell.

The USS Olympia was the latest in US Navy warships when it served in the Spanish-American War, most famously under the command of Commodore George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898. This was the battle that won the Philippines without any loss of American life. Visitors can explore almost the entire ship including the bridge where Commodore Dewey famously shouted "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley!" The Olympia seems luxurious after the tight quarters of the Becuna, especially since visitors see the officers' quarters first. Enlisted men slept in freely-swinging canvas hammocks. (This seems barbaric until one considers that the WWII sailors in the Becuna had to hot-bunk: when they went on duty, someone else was ready to sleep in their bunk.)

The USS Olympia: how would you like to sleep on one of those every night?

We didn't research the living quarters on the Moshulu. We went aboard that ship to enjoy a fine dinner. This beautifully-restored ship is actually the world's oldest four-masted ship still afloat. She was built in 1904 and carried cargo all over the world for the United States, Germany, and then private owners under a variety of names. She was named Moshulu by President Wilson's wife to honor the Native American Seneca tribe--Moshulu means fearless in their language. In 1975 the Moshulu became a restaurant here at Penn's Landing.

Yes, those are two people up there!

 I have been fascinated by this floating restaurant since my college days in the early 1980s, so this first meal there probably would have been a real treat no matter what. As it turned out, our food was delicious and the smoked vanilla bean ice cream I finished with has been on my mind since. The interior of the ship/restaurant was beautiful, and the nighttime river view from our window was dreamy. It looks like I'm sitting in front of a TV, but that is Camden!

Waiting patiently for my dinner on the Moshulu (with the Battleship New Jersey over my shoulder).

The Mystique of Washington Square in Philadelphia

Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping.

Under the humble walls of the little Catholic churchyard,

In the heart of the city, they lie, unknown and unnoticed.

"the little Catholic churchyard"

These lines are from Longfellow's poem "Evangeline", which tells the story of two lovers separated when they were forced onto British ships bound for French Catholic settlements in what is now the United States. The British had just taken control of Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s, and these French Acadians were deported when they refused to pledge loyalty to England. Families were separated and Evangeline and her fiance from this Longfellow poem lost each other until he lay on his deathbed decades later. Most were sent to Louisiana where they became known as Cajuns, but many landed in other regions tolerant of Catholics: Maryland, New England, and Philadelphia. These were my ancestors on my father's side, and I was astonished to find out that this churchyard mentioned in the poem I've known for years is in Philadelphia beside Holy Trinity Catholic Church (1789), and that there are Cajuns buried there. "Unknown and unnoticed" indeed, especially to me!

Washington Square

This area surrounding Washington Square in Philadelphia has a colorful history that I'm willing to bet is "unknown and unnoticed" by the many folks who live near it. I've always noticed a peacefulness about this square, and perhaps I would go as far as to call it somberness, but I never knew why. William Penn included five squares or parks in his original plan for Philadelphia: Northeast (now Franklin Square), Southeast (now Washington Square), Centre Square (where City Hall now stands), Southwest (now Rittenhouse Square), and Northwest (now Logan Circle). Quakers like William Penn would not name places after people (this happened much later), and described these spaces by their relative locations. 

Dogs walking their owner

Washington Square definitely lacks the hubbub of the other squares, and one would never expect to find a Rittenhouse Square-esque art fair or event here. My guess is that anyone aware of Washington Square's history would discourage such activity on this ground which conceals the final resting places of hundreds of souls. You will find the more contemplative set here: old men playing chess, people reading, dogs walking their owners, and people of all walks of life passing through.

It's true: this square was used as a "potter's field" or graveyard for poor folks and strangers to the city for many years until the Revolutionary War when soldiers from both sides were buried here in mass graves. Victims of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 were buried here, too. People who died from deplorable conditions in the Walnut Street Jail were buried here until the 1820s when the jail was replaced by the Eastern State Penitentiary. 

In 1954, the Washington Square Planning Committee set out to beautify the park and include a tribute to Washington and the Revolutionary War dead buried here. They imagined a Memorial Tomb to the "Unknown Soldiers of the Revolution" and brought in archeologists to dig up remains of an actual unknown Revolutionary War soldier to put in the memorial. So they dug and found skeletons wrapped in canvas, a clue that these would be the poor, or prisoners, or yellow fever victims. War dead were at least buried in coffins. At last a probable young American soldier's remains were found and placed in the memorial's tomb in front of the statue of George Washington. The eternal flame in front was added in 1976.

Memorial Tomb to the "Unknown Soldier of the Revolution" (1957)

 

Lippincott Building (1900)

Washington Square's history is not altogether gloomy. From the mid-1800s through the first quarter of the twentieth century, this place was a publishing hotspot. Lippincott, Lea & Febiger, Curtis (publishers of The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal), and the Farm Journal were here, and authors with the still-famous names of Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, and Christopher Morley visited them and lectured nearby in the Musical Fund Hall on Locust Street. 

The Athenaeum of Philadelphia (1845)

The famous Athenaeum of Philadelphia, an exclusive subscription library now a National Historic Landmark, still exists in a brownstone building on the east side of the square. This institution allowed Philadelphia's wealthy residents access to the latest books and periodicals in a club setting. Tours are available of this treasure on weekdays, and it provides some fascinating online tours which can be found here. The Athenaeum bookstore specializes in Philadelphia, architecture, and Philadelphia architecture.

For more detailed information and a comprehensive walking tour of Washington Square, please consult this virtual tour provided by the Independence Hall Association in Philadelphia. For more information about the Memorial Tomb to the "Unknown Soldiers of the Revolution", consult this page provided by the same organization.

The FACES Project

Every year, early in January, I pick some kind of project to focus on in that year. In years past, I've focused on photography, French, Latin, non-fiction writing, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Some years I go all out buying or borrowing books and videos, taking classes, and journaling about my endeavors. Some years are just the opposite, and I lose interest right away.

Last year's good intentions for reading Dickens evaporated quickly once I was busy with other stuff. The good news for Charles Dickens is that 2012 is the 200th anniversary of his birth, and the Free Library of Philadelphia (a reasonable commute for me) is hosting bunches of Dickens-related events: http://libwww.freelibrary.org/dickens/. This might jump start last year's project.

Dickens aside, what I really want to dive into this year is photography. I take a lot of photos of places, things, and animals, but I really don't do much with portraits. I am captivated by the photography of Steve McCurry who shoots gorgeous, exotic portraits for National Geographic and other high-profile publications. I went to New York to hear him speak a few years ago, and I was mesmerized by the projected images accompanying his talk. You have seen his work, too: stevemccurry.com. I have decided this year I'll concentrate on portraits. Faces. There's plenty of information for me to get started in the photography books and magazines I already own. I went searching through the photographs I already have and put together a small collection of faces.

While doing this, it occurred to me that animals have to be included in my collection because their faces are so expressive. I included three very different portraits of Gladys the Sheltie that look completely different to me.

The next challenge for me is asking people to let me photograph them. I am very shy about asking people for things, so this will be difficult for me. (I do have a few volunteers lined up already.) These will be realistic photos (not be glamour shots!) with experiments in lighting and backgrounds. If any readers are interested in scoring some free head-shots or profile photos please comment here or shoot me an email. I have no lofty plans for this collection, but if I do decide to publish online or in print, I will make sure to have permission on file. Stay tuned for updates on this, and wish me luck with the asking!

Broad Street Euphoria: the 2012 Mummers String Bands

I shot 339 photos today at the 2012 Philadelphia Mummers Parade, with my long lens over strangers' shoulders, between bobbing heads, around poking elbows, and while perched atop a barricade. I endured the heinous stench of cigars and the stomach-turning aroma of beer. I was almost caught in the middle of a dispute over a twelve-inch-square piece of sidewalk and just missed a train home (meaning a 55-minute wait for the next one).

I stayed for about half of the String Bands which meant I got to see the second-place winners, Quaker City ("A Toys Night Out"), and the first-place captain from Fralinger, Thomas D'Amore. Woodland took the top band prize, but they performed last today with the theme "It's a Jungle Out There." I was long gone by then. The rest of the results are here if you are interested: http://www.myphl17.com/community/mummers/wphl-2012-mummers-parade-results,0,7882020.story

It was all worth it when I got home and loaded up the photos, though. As I expected, they were vibrant and dazzling. The euphoric faces of the musicians, dancers, and captains reminded me of that top-secret bucket list entry of mine. I would LOVE to march up Broad Street on New Year's Day with a really good string band. I have some credentials: I play the tenor saxophone, I participated in seven years of marching band (four of them competitive), I can handle choreographed dance moves, and I would ROCK a sequined costume with crazy hat.

Credentials aside, I understand the huge commitment required for these groups and I know I don't have the time. They practice their music and dancing all year, and those costumes! Those costumes take a lot of work in design and construction, and have to be durable to withstand any weather. This year's weather was the best ever--the strut up Broad Street would have been like a walk in the park (but with lots of preparation!).


When I lived in Center City, I would watch the parade on TV until the string bands stepped-off in South Philadelphia. That was my cue to bundle-up and head out to the corner of Broad and Locust and make my way slowly through the crowd up to the crowd barricade to get a clear shot with my 35mm camera. I would be in position by the time the String Bands arrived at that performance spot. (I enjoy the Comics and the Fancies, but the String Bands are my favorites.) I took some nice shots and after an hour or two I'd head home with my frozen toes and fingers. Then, like now, it was worth it for the entertainment, the joy, and the photos! Check out some more of this year's best and behold those joyful faces:

At The Beach after a Windy Winter Storm

I suspect most people are familiar with the concept of a pleasant walk on the beach on a lovely sunshiny day. If you ask me, though, the most memorable beach explorations happen as a storm approaches, or after a windy winter storm...like today. For two days here, one rainy and one sunny, the wind has been incredibly strong, blowing the patio furniture around and probably too strong for kite flying. Do you know about the Beaufort Scale? I would estimate the past two days as Force 7 or 8, based on the blowing sea foam and resistance when walking into the wind business.

Interesting stuff washes up after a storm. Some stuff you would expect to see like shells, stones, driftwood (above), crab carcasses, and piles of reeds. I saw all this stuff today, and was amazed at the large piles of reeds--as if some reed farmer harvested it and left it in piles at the high-tide mark. (See one of these piles below, with a softball bonus.) Today we saw plastic building blocks, that softball, a tube of sunscreen, and lots of processed wood.

This morning, while breathing in the delicious sea air, I noticed this HUGE black thing on the beach up ahead. It was a bird of prey, a raptor of some kind, and it took flight as we approached. This flying thing was so big that if Gladys had still been a puppy I'd have scooped her up and hid her inside my jacket. (But Gladys is a canine of gravitas and this was not necessary.) The big black flying thing flew in circles above us, getting smaller, then larger, then smaller again as it disappeared over the neighborhood houses. We kept walking, watching for big bird footprints where the thing had been, and sure enough, right by a big, dead, white bird, there were rather large bird prints. Here they are next to one of my own size 7 sneaker prints. Those are big bird feet. I don't know what the white bird's story was. I'm pretty sure it was not an ordinary gull, and I'm pretty sure the big black raptor intended it to be lunch. It looked like yet another thing washed-up in the storm. (I don't go near dead things, but I did take its picture for the record from two angles, neither of which includes a face.)

There are many things in this life that I can say I'm reasonably good at, but bird watching is not one of them. I try to learn about birds because they are so important to Cape May birders. Remember this summer I wrote this for NJ.com about the Raptor Watch: http://www.nj.com/shore/blogs/index.ssf/2011/09/looking_for_raptors_in_cape_ma.html While this bird talk didn't help me distinguish one hawk from another without reference tools, it did give me pointers on what to look for, like the fingery feathers at the ends of wings.

The best I can do is take as many photos as possible, blow them up on my computer, and then compare them to drawings or other photographs in my collection. This prevents me from enjoying the experience on-sight as much as I would if I knew what the heck I was looking at, but usually I can come up with a probable ID after the fact. So here s/he is, my new friend, Fingers, waiting for an ID. I think those very fingers are sending me to the Hawk pages of my bird ID books...but what kind of hawk?? Well, my bird ID books are about 100 miles from where I sit, so this is going to have to wait! Any guesses?

Update: After consulting my notes and books, I have to conclude that Gladys and I saw an eagle on the bay this week! It had the wrong head to be a vulture, wrong color to be any kind of hawk seen in NJ, and its size ruled-out those guys anyway. I've boiled it down to an immature Bald Eagle (uncommon in Cape May in winter) or a Golden Eagle (rare in Cape May in winter). That. is. thrilling.

I Made a Marbled Silk Scarf!

I made this great scarf at the Bethlehem (PA) Christkindlmarkt this month. There, among the stalls filled with handcrafted holiday gifts, was a large work area with three long, rectangular vats filled with what looked like water with paint floating on top (see left). The area was mobbed with people watching and people doing, and soon I went from a watcher to a doer! This was the perfect Christmas gift from Fred (who also shot these photos)--crafting in a new medium I had never worked with and ending up with a beautiful silk scarf (and I wear scarves).

First, I was invited to choose colors. When in doubt or on the spot, I choose colors of the sea: blues, deep greens, rich purples. My scarf coach, who was very helpful, suggested some bright greens and yellows, and I agreed they would contrast well. The paints were all in plastic squeeze bottles like you might find ketchup in at a casual hamburger joint with red-and-white checked tablecloths. Some of the paints were really thin, and others were thick. My scarf coach knew them all by number and advised me which would spread a lot and which would just sit on the liquid in the vat. (That liquid turned out to be sizing and helps the paint stay on the silk.)

I squirted my paint colors onto the liquid. The resulting blob design (see right) was interesting and I could have stopped there. My scarf coach pointed out the samples on the wall: the French swirl design, the feathered design, and the plain blobs. That feathered design was tempting, and the scarf creator before me made a very cool feathered scarf that turned into a peacock design. Keeping my ocean inspiration in mind, I chose the French swirls. I was to poke a metal stylus into the floating blobs and draw a circle. This dragged the paint into the swirl design. I worked my way down the paint blobs in the vat making swirls and watching what the paint did. That's what I'm doing in the photo to the left.

My scarf coach then suggested adding a flower on either end, and we chose a nice pepto-pink for that. We put a big pink blob at either end of the vat, and a small white blob in the center of each flower. To make the flower I was to take the stylus and draw four lines from the outside of the flower to the center. Then the small white blob in the center got swirled. You can see me making a flower in the last picture.

Okay, so now the paint design is sitting in the vat, ready. My scarf coach pulled a long white silk scarf from a box of many. We each held the corners of a short end of the scarf and placed it on top of the paint for a few seconds. We removed it, and the scarf coach brought us over to a bucket of water. She dunked my creation in there for a rinse, and and then we stretched it out for a look. It was beautiful! That paint stayed on the silk just like it had been in the vat.

My scarf got stuffed in a plastic zipper bag with instructions on what to do when I got home: rinse, gently squeeze out excess water, hang to dry, and iron. It's one good-looking scarf. I've worn it twice so far and gotten lots of compliments and inquiries on the process.

If you're interested you can actually make your own scarf! Look here: http://www.ebrurichsilkdesigns.com/

The Charming Churches of Cape May Point

We wandered around Cape May Point yesterday, a bright, sunny, dry and windy day. I called it a perfect kite-flying day, but the clerk at the hardware store called it a perfect exterior painting day. Both of of us turned out to be correct according to to evidence presented by the citizens of Cape May Point. They were flying kites and painting fences, riding bikes and raking leaves. We carried Joe Jordan's book, Cape May Point: Three Walking Tours of Historic Cottages, but only for reference. We agreed to go in search of Cape May Point's churches, picking and choosing parts of the three tours in the book.


Saint Agnes's Catholic Church was our first, just across from the Cape May Point General Store. This Carpenter-Gothic style church was built around 1885. It was expecting an early afternoon wedding luckily for us, so we were able to peek inside at the gorgeous stained glass.


The Beadle Memorial Presbyterian Church is just across from St. Agnes on Cape Avenue. Its namesake, Rev. Beadle, was John Wanamaker's pastor back home in Philadelphia at the First Presbyterian Church there (21st and Walnut Streets). Yes, that is the same John Wanamaker from department store fame--he was an early resident of Cape May Point! Beadle Memorial was built around 1882 in the Stick style popular then. It was moved twice (in 1920 and 1966) before landing in its present location, because the of the encroaching pre-duned ocean. Many of the buildings in Cape May Point used to be at different locations but many others were lost to storms and flooding. The Joe Jordan book has some vintage photos of some of these lost Victorian beauties.

Another Stick-style church, St. Peter's-by-the-Sea, is probably the most-photographed building in Cape May Point. This church was purchased from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, disassembled, moved to Cape May Point, assembled at another location, and finally moved to this triangular, picket-fenced site. Fred chatted-up the guy painting the picket fence supports yesterday (it was a perfect day for that kind of thing).


St. Peter's Beach is just across from the church, and is one of the hot birding spots in Cape May Point which is in itself a really hot birding spot, globally speaking. I had to veer off the church tour to peak at the ocean.
Union Chapel was the last church we visited. This is not the original non-denominational Union Chapel, but was built around 1900. I'm not sure what "soaking" is, but signs were attempting to entice us to one. We resisted.

Lastly, the iconic St. Mary's-by-the-Sea, purchased for $9,000 for the Sisters of St. Joseph around the turn of last century. Originally, this was the swank Shoreham Hotel. When the nuns took over, the Shoreham's ballroom was changed into a chapel and the building's name was changed to St. Mary's-by-the-Sea. This was to honor the priest from St. Mary's in Philadelphia who facilitated the purchase.

When our walking was finished, we stopped to rest at Lake Lily, the centerpiece of Cape May Point, and yet another hot birding spot.