Bell, Deli and Pickets

October 5-7

Wednesday, the fifth, was Yom Kippur, Kate’s birthday, and our day to visit the Liberty Bell.

The bell used to sit inside Independence Hall, but some time in the past few decades, it has been moved to its own museum across the street on a block now known as Independence Mall. 

It is a short walk from the hotel. There was still a threat of rain and a chill in the breeze, so we took the umbrella for a walk.

When we got there, we were confronted by another of those local-airport style checks, like Independence Hall. The sign says “no weapons” and that included firearms and pocket knives.

Whoops. I forgot to leave mine home this time. Not firearm. I don’t own one. I’m so absent-minded I’d likely shoot myself in the foot.

So I went up to a uniformed person and showed her my switchblade. Can I check it somewhere and pick it up when I leave?

She took it and said she would check. She came to me when I was with Joanna in line and said she had given it to a colleague, a man in the same kind of blue shirt as hers. When I passed the check point he would give it back to me.

This was almost as much fun as the time I walked into the Vatican Museum with a brand new stiletto in my pocket. The metal detectors weren’t even working there.

This time I passed through and was putting my belt and jacket back on when the guy standing nearby hears me tell Joanna that I have to find the officer with my knife. He discreetly dropped it into my hand.

Maybe they took one look at me—white stubble and pony tail. They may have figured I was the ghost of George Carlin. “Let him do as he damn well pleases.”

Like many famous objects, the Liberty Bell has a lot of iffy history. Much of the stuff that people have assumed or have made up about it has managed to stick. 

There’s no proof, for instance, that the bell rang when the States declared independence. It was in the belfry of the Statehouse, which wasn’t yet called Independence Hall, so it could have been used in the celebration. 

But it’s an assumption. Believing it makes the bell a great symbol.

The bell’s home is the Quaker City, which became a front-line base of the U.S. anti-slavery movement. It was a base of operations for Harriet Tubman. The abolitionists used the bell and its yet-to-be-complete promise of liberty as an icon to pique the consciences of the American people.

It was also a symbol of the Women’s Suffrage movement. In 1915, one exhibit says, a Suffragist had a replica made and said it would ring the first time when Pennsylvania granted women the right to vote.

The original Liberty Bell cracked three times. The first was in 1751 during a test after the bell arrived from London. 

The bell was recast by a local foundry. And that’s when it got the inscription taken from Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.” 

It’s a reference to the Jubilee every 50 years when, ironically enough, activities include the freeing of slaves.

There’s no record of when the second crack developed.

That crack wasn’t repaired so much as treated. According to the National Park Service, the plan was to drill the crack wider. That would return much of the bell’s tone because the rough edges of the original crack wouldn’t rub together. 

This was apparently a standard technique for restoring cracked bells.

There are two stories about when the final crack rendered the bell unringable.

One is that it rang to announce the death of Chief Justice John Marshall, who died in 1835 in Philadelphia, where he had come for medical treatment. That’s the story I heard in grammar school.

The Park Service web site said the crack treatment took place later, in the 1840s. The fatal crack may have occurred during a peal for Washington’s birthday that year.

There were a few films among the exhibits. One contained a short segment about the ringing of the Liberty Bell as a morale builder during a World War II radio broadcast. 

It showed a family listening to the radio and then it cut to a film clip of a man tapping a small sledge hammer against the base of the bell.

It’s only a little more than a half mile from the Liberty Bell to Reading Terminal Market.

We wanted to go there because we had heard about it and have been to markets like it in Europe, Asia, and the States. They are always fun.

We also wanted to follow up on a tip that Scott had passed along at Tuesday night’s dinner. He strongly recommended the sandwiches at Hershel’s, a deli in the food court at the center of the market.

We took our time. We walked through a possible drug market, appropriately on Market Street, a couple of blocks from the Reading Terminal. What I saw was a dozen or so streetwise looking men milling about a bus stop. One man, sitting on a plank with his back to the road, counted a sheaf of currency and then drew something out of a plastic bag at his side.

The market is crowded with stalls selling meats, fish, pizzas, herbs, home furnishings, produce and what all. The aisles are a little wider than those in the market at Chungking Gardens, but still, you can see that space is valuable here.

We found Hershel’s easily enough, but I made a mistake. I didn’t watch closely at what the customer ahead of me got. I ordered two sandwiches—one pastrami and one corned beef, both on rye with mustard. That and a pint of still water.

By the time the countermen had finished slicing up the brisket, it looked like they’d put half a softball made out of red meat on each sandwich. So much fat, salt, and red meat, downright sinful. We knew before we started that we would have to go to bed without supper.

The sandwiches were good, and we eventually got through most of them. I left two or three ounces of filling. Joanna left maybe a quarter of her sandwich.

Even more interesting, though, were the two guys who sat down next to us. They were supposedly talking to each other, but were loud enough that even I could hear them over the background noise of the market.

They could have been in their 50s, maybe even 60s. They started talking about ethnicity. One I gather was Puerto Rican. The other guy told him he didn’t look Puerto Rican, but looked German. “I used to work with Germans,” he said by way of explanation.

Later the German-looking Puerto Rican guy mentioned his ex-wife, who he believes is into Santaria or something like it. In any event, it’s the devil, he said.

He said his ex put a hex on him. 

The man who worked with Germans said he’s familiar with hexes too. One time, he said, he refused to “have relations” with a man who dressed like a girl. He woke up in the middle of the night having weird symptoms of some kind. 

Yeah, that’s how it goes, the other agreed. 

The hexed man finally met a minister who gave him a prayer. They read a psalm together.

Later, I was thinking about all this. There are two old guys. Not as old as I am, maybe, but up there nonetheless. One of them even mentioned that he had gone to college. Maybe both of them had.

Could they really have been serious? If so, why were they so loud? Was it a leg pull? Maybe they’re performance artists.

Joanna and I made the walk back, a mile or so. We were beat, but we made it to the hotel with only a couple of brief stops to rest on the way.

Wednesday the hotel serves wine and cheese in the afternoon. A glass of cab and a handful of grapes were a perfect restorative after a workout like that.

Of course, we went to bed early. Without dinner.

Thursday we set out in a taxi for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

All went according to plan until we tried to get in. There was a picket line protesting the lack of a contract.

A polite woman came up to us. The staff is on strike and is asking people not to go into the museum today.

We settled for an interesting stroll around the building. A sign says it was designed by Julian Abele, the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture.

It sits on a hill like an acropolis. I has colored friezes, bronze griffins, soaring columns, and all those steps that Rocky had to run up.

People at the base of the hill were setting up for the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge, a 5-kilometer run that was due to start at 6 p.m. One of the people in a booth said it would involve a thousand runners.

Maybe because of the event, it was only a little after three and traffic was piling up. Or maybe it’s like that every day.

There’s no way a cab was going to find us in this mess.

We walked maybe half a mile eastward, back toward our hotel, before the heat of the day and the walking of yesterday caught up to us. We found benches at a corner and I phoned 215-Get-A-Cab.

We’ll be easy to find, I said. I was the only guy with a pony tail and she’s the only Chinese lady sitting on a park bench at the corner of 21st Street.

The car showed up less than 10 minutes later.

We tried Glory Beer Bar & Kitchen for dinner. We shared two entrees. One was a lamb shank with spicy collard greens and pureed potatoes. The other was an assortment of three kinds of wurst with spaetzle and sauerkraut. 

It was terrific. The lamb was falling off the bone. The collards were nice and hot, and the potatoes helped control the heat. Sausage is one of my major food groups. The spaetzle was almost like little croutons. Never had it like that before. The sauerkraut added a probiotic to our diet.

The beer list was surprising. I didn’t recognize most of the American drafts, and the imports were entirely unknown to me. What’s a Gueuze, for instance? I looked it up. You mix a year-old lambic with a two- or three-year-old lambic for a special effect.

I had three American craft IPAs. The first was Zombie Dust, hoppy enough, but light on the malt. Joanna liked that one best and finished half of mine while I went on to the other two

One that Chris the bartender called Revision Metal is a mildly sour IPA. The Revision Brewing web site doesn’t mention a brew of that name. It was excellent with the collards.

Hill Farmstead’s Susan, according to the company’s web site, is an American IPA brewed with hops from Yakima Valley and New Zealand. 

All the ales were good. Susan may have been my favorite of the trio.

We were tired from walking in the heat so we took our time Friday morning and left the hotel shortly after noon. We were at Joanna’s house in Montclair before three.

Happy trails to all and to all a good night.

Love.

Harry and Joanna

Trees

When in the Course

Oct. 3-4

Joanna and I are in the Old City of Philadelphia where we are visiting the ghosts of Ben Franklin and other early framers of the republic.

Driving in this part of town reminds me a little bit of Paterson, mainly because the streets are mostly one way, and it usually seems in the wrong direction. 

As narrow as these old Colonial streets are, the city manages to make many of them operate in two lanes. 

It’s a situation full of surprises for the stranger. You can be traveling in a left lane somewhere and, just as you come to a light, find a vague painted message on the pavement warning that you have to turn left. Changing lanes at the last second isn’t practical in heavy traffic and there’s no way to go straight.

That’s how I wound up in Camden. 

What I expected to be Chestnut Street was instead the approach to the Ben Franklin Bridge.

That put us on U.S. 30 east-bound. I took the first exit I could reach on the Jersey side and looked for a way back.

After a couple of failed attempts to find a block that I could go around to circle back, we pulled over and dug out a New Jersey roadmap with a Camden inset. It took only three or four tries to figure out how to reach Haddon Avenue and which way to turn when we got there.

We found the hotel with only a little difficulty. We had stayed here before, but that was 10 years ago.

I had the faulty memory that the place is on Chestnut between Third and Fourth Streets. Not so. It’s on Chestnut, all right, but between Third and Second. Once I went far enough, it was easy.

We checked in and I took the car to the garage around the corner. On the way back I passed a few places that looked promising for dinner. There was Rotten Ralph’s, which had French onion soup, served the only way to do it, with day-old bread and melted gruyere.

We chose instead to go to Amada, which has paella. Their red house wine is a tasty Tempranillo. I expect it isn’t from Spain’s most famous wine region, Rioja, because that would almost certainly be mentioned on the menu.

The paella came decorated with a few standing slices of bread, which put me in mind of ladyfingers in a tiramisu. There were also a half-dozen small dollops of aioli.

We tried those, but concentrated instead on the rest, which was pretty familiar and very good—mussels, shrimp, chicken and chorizo in saffron rice.  There were roasted sweet red peppers, too. 

We polished that off and, full of food and wine, were asleep before 10 p.m.

The hotel is called the Independence Park Hotel. When we stayed here on President’s Day weekend in 2012, it was Best Western Independence Park.

It’s still a Best Western franchise, but now it seems the company is putting the location up front. Makes sense. It’s a great location.

Like other Best Westerns, it has a respectable breakfast selection that is included in the rent. One of the steam trays had sausage gravy, which is unusual this far north.

After all the paella the night before, I stuck with raisin bran and black coffee.

Joanna had oatmeal. I believe she put a few walnuts on it. 

Later, we walked to Independence Hall. There was a bag search when we were here last, but now it’s like a local airport. Everything from our pockets went through an x-ray machine and we stepped through a metal detector. 

Like a good boy, I had left my pocket knife in the room, so I had no trouble getting through the check.

Independence Hall is the birthplace of the three most influential documents in U.S. history: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, which replaced the Articles.

There is a small museum devoted to the documents in one of the annexes to the Hall. Kept under glass in a cabinet with very dim lighting are first-edition printed copies of all three. 

The Declaration was published as a single broadsheet. 

The other two were much longer and only the title pages of those are on display. 

It’s impossible to read more than the headline display type of the originals, so replicas are on the wall in better light for reading. “When in the course of human events …”

You enter Independence Hall in a tour. You only see two rooms.

One is the open courtroom. I couldn’t make out much of what the ranger said because she was wearing a mask.

The courtroom had a feature I don’t remember from the last time we were here. It is a waist-high black iron confinement area that I recognized from English courtroom dramas. It is a dock, where the accused stands to address the court. Apparently it was used there in Colonial times.

The meeting chamber always feels eerie. It is set up to recreate the arrangement during the constitutional convention. The ranger referred to the large chair at the center of the presiding table as “Washington’s chair.”

This is also the room where the Continental Congress debated and then approved the Declaration of Independence. 

There's a clay pipe on one of the tables. It’s as if these guys just ducked out to take a quick breather and they’re coming back in a few minutes.

Before we left, Joanna e-mailed her nephew Scott, who lives in Philadelphia, and asked if he and his fiancee, Jen, would be free to join us for dinner when we were in town.

Scott got back to us that he had made reservations for Tuesday evening at a place on Locust Street called Vedge. And that’s what it is, all veggie dishes, each given an ingenious twist. 

It has been drizzling on and off on the East Coast since the first. It’s the fringe of the Hurricane Ian system. It has also been windy and cold.

So rather than walk the mile to the restaurant, we took a cab. We got there early, but as it turned out, that wasn’t a problem. Much to my delight, found that Vedge is a vegan restaurant with a bar. 

So I killed time by nursing an Italian white (whose name I’ve unfortunately forgotten) with a surprising bite.   

For dinner we ordered the purple potato causa, rutabaga fondue, charred squash, campfire carrot, lion’s mane mushroom, and grilled tofu. They came in two courses of three dishes each. The mix of flavors in each dish was extraordinary. 

The tofu looked like a steak of seared tuna. The carrots were charred by the flame, and, when they were on the plate, I thought they were faux sausages

If you’re curious about the food combinations, you can look at the dinner menu here: https://www.vedgerestaurant.com/dinner.

I had a flavorful Bordeaux, not the smoky flavor that’s really great, but still very good. Something else on the menu was surprising—a Malbec from Spain. Malbec means Argentina to me.  

Scott came to the restaurant from his office. He goes in a few times a week and works from home the rest of the time. Jen is mostly working at home. It seems the cats like that. Often they like it too much.

They like to cuddle up with Jen when she’s at the computer, for instance. 

I think Scott and Jen have two cats, and both cays decided to join Jen on screen one day during a Zoom meeting. She was a bit rattled by that and apologized for the intrusion.

The boss seemed to get a charge out of it. After the meeting, the boss wanted to stay online and hear all about the cats.

We ordered a few desserts. The dessert menu is also on the Vedge website. 

Everything we had was delicate and not overly sweet. The corn ice cream that came with the blackberry buckle was unique. It really tasted of corn. We also enjoyed the peach tart, cheesecake and pistachio budino.

After we cabbed back to the hotel, we finished off the night with a couple of glasses of cheap Cab Sauvignon at Rotten Ralph’s. The barkeep seems to be a UFC fan, so we got to watch two fierce-looking women box, kick, and wrestle.

All very instructive.

Peace and love to everyone.

Good night, all.

Harry and Joanna

An American Place

June 6-9

Joanna had read about Appomattox in a book called “American Places.” The author, William Zinsser, examines a number of sites with significance to American history. He visits dozens of places and includes chapters on Mount Rushmore, the Normandy cemeteries, and Appomattox.

We’ve been stopping at a number of historic sites in our wanderings. When I mentioned Appomattox as a possible stop on this trip, Joanna was eager to go there.

The locals told us there’s little in the town besides what is now called Appomattox Court House National Historic Park, but it’s well worth a day or so.

This is where the Civil War ended. Lee had withdrawn from Richmond after the fall of its main defense in Petersburg, about 25 miles to the south.

According to the story line at the park, Lee started out with about 25,000 men and wanted to link up with another Confederate army to the south. The Union army shadowed him and kept him from breaking through.

Hunger and fatigue severely reduced his ranks on the hundred-mile trek from Richmond.

The final confrontation came at the village of Appomattox Court House. A U.S. cavalry detachment under George Custer blocked Lee’s way. There were Federal troops at this rear and to his south.

Lee tried to break through the cavalry, which was the weakest link in the chain around him, but ran instead into 15,000 infantry who had come up in support.

He knew it was over. By the time of the surrender, he may have led a force of fewer than 10,000.

The surrender terms—which gave the rebels immediate parole and let them take their mules and horses home—were signed in the parlor of a house owned by a prominent local named McLean.

The house changed hands a few times after the war and at one point was bought by a group of investors, who had it dismantled and planned to ship it to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition. Later they planned instead to move it to Washington, D.C., and charge admission fees.

None of that happened, and the dismantled house stayed in place. The house today has been rebuilt on its original site.

The courthouse for which the village was named burned late in the 19th century, and after that the village declined.

Most of the buildings standing today are originals, but heavily restored. Many were about ready to collapse when the Park Service took them over.

There is a Confederate cemetery, dedicated shortly after the war. Surrounded by magnolias, it contains the graves of 18 Confederate soldiers, each marked with a Stars and Bars flag. 

One grave, flying the U.S. Stars and Stripes, contains an unidentified Union soldier, whose remains were found on the battlefield after most of the Union dead had been reburied at a Federal cemetery near Petersburg.

According to the white-washers of the Civil War, the rebels didn’t die to keep slaveholders rich. The official argument is that their “lost cause” was an effort to defend states’ rights.

There is a plaque next to the cemetery that carries the essential flavor of the argument:

“Here on Sunday April 9, 1865, after four years of heroic struggle in defense of principles believed fundamental to the existence of our government, Lee surrendered 9,000 men, the remnant of an army still unconquered in spirit.”

I saw that plaque on my other visit here. It has been edited since then. The attribution line has been removed. There used to be a kind of sign-off in the raised metal letters: United Daughters of the Confederacy.

There aren’t many places in town open for dinner on Monday. That’s why it was doubly delightful that we ended up at Granny Bee’s. When I hear a name like that, it gives me pause, makes me think of that place called Mom’s, where you’re not supposed to eat. (And you know: never play cards with a man named Doc.)

But on the contrary, the food reminded me of a vanishing roadside Virginia, the kind of old-time fare I remember from trips this way 50 years ago. 

I haven’t had turnip greens or corn pudding in years. This was Virginia so I had to have the country ham. 

Joanna had turnip greens too, along with her steak and green beans.

Green vegetables in the South are usually cooked with some kind of fatty meat, often ham hock. They’re cooked to death and take on a compensating richness from the shortening. It’s comfort food.

We decided to head home from Appomattox, but make one more stop on the way, at James Madison’s plantation, Montpelier, near a town called Orange.

We found the gate of Montpelier easily enough, but found it closed. We had arrived a day too soon. It is open from Wednesday through Sunday.

We did get to see the Montpelier rail station. It was built when the DuPonts owned the Montpelier plantation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has two doors, one labeled “white” and the other “colored.”

They lead to segregated waiting rooms. There is also a tiny post office in the building. The mailbox is out of service, but there seems to be mail in some of the P.O. boxes on the wall. 

DuPont had the station built mainly for a weekly commute between Montpelier and his office in Delaware. That train, we read, was the only scheduled stop at the station. Otherwise it was a flag stop for passengers or cargo.

We stayed about 25 miles farther north from the plantation at Holiday Inn Express in Culpeper, Va.

We met a man outside who saw the plate on my car and asked, “What part of New Jersey?”

He said he’d been a policeman in Trenton for 20 years. Now he works for the federal government. He said he is involved in counter-terrorism for the CIA.

I hear colorful stuff like that on the road from time to time. True or false, it’s always fun. This could have been a leg-pull. Or do CIA guys really let it casually drop that they work for the CIA? 

But then he started to talk about some serious stuff that had a ring of truth.

The man is black and said he had been encountering a deal of racial prejudice in the short time he had been in the Culpeper area. He had been working in Washington, where there was no problem, but had been assigned here for a few weeks.

He said prejudice is particularly evident for mixed-race couples like him and his wife, and like yourselves, he said to Joanna and me.

I’ve never encountered any open hostility or even unusual rudeness. Oh, maybe a wrinkled nose here and there. But I get that just for wearing a pony tail.

Joanna is aware of people staring at us from time to time, especially at dinner. But hey, we’re pretty colorful when I come to think about it. We look different, sure, and we’ve been places and are having fun.

So the joke goes, Joanna and Harry walk into a bar. The Grill 309 at 309 Main in Culpeper. Everybody takes good care of us. The people are terrific.

So was my burger, made of Virginia black Angus beef. (Avoid the Caesar salad, though. I think the dressing came from a jar.) As usual with a burger, I had a couple of glasses of cabernet sauvignon. This was from Josh, the California label we discovered this past winter on our trip west.

Joanna took the grilled unicorn fish. The menu said it came blackened, but they were able to hold off the Cajun twist. Joanna loves fish and it came with rice. What could be better?

Rather than barrel home from Virginia to Montclair, we broke the trip in half with a stop at another Holiday Inn Express, west of Harrisburg near a village called Linglestown.

I had never been there before but will gladly go again. The downtown is old and charming. 

You pass through it on the way to the Greystone Public House, where we had some fried Brussels sprouts to start. They were supposed to come with chili, lime, and honey. We asked the kitchen to hold the chili. Apparently it was already mixed with the lime and honey, so they came dry.

Not bad, but not what we expected. But they went well with the entrees. 

Joanna had a “pork tomahawk.” What’s that, we asked. We’ve heard of tomahawk steak, an exercise in wretched excess that can run two or three pounds.

This was more reasonable—a thick-cut pork chop served on the bone, which is always the best way to cook it. Maybe 8 or 10 ounces of meat.

I had a rare steak, which pairs well with sprouts. 

Joanna couldn’t quite polish off her pork chop, so I helped her out.

Everything was superb.

Next day was a straight run on familiar roads. Interstates 81 and 78 make a gentle arc across eastern Pennsylvania. Then we take I-287 north through a green belt of Somerset and Morris Counties. Then I-80 and 280 bring us to Eagle Rock in West Orange. 

Hell, we could walk home from there. It’s all downhill.

So this is Harry and Joanna signing off until the next time we wander.

Love to all.

h&J