New England, March 2020 – Richard Karty / View

We were in New Haven and rural New England just before Covid hit. Everything was gorgeous. The food was great and there was lots of agrodiversity and local produce and small producers even in the smallest towns, things that you essentially can’t get, by the way, here in Berlin where I live. Hard as it may be to believe, they somehow have only barely started getting the memo on eating local. The pictures may look a little gloomy because this was “mud season”, the time in March after the beautiful snow has melted and before spring has started. The trees are bare, mud is everywhere, and many sights, shops and restaurants are closed or have reduced hours. They even advise tourists to avoid March but we had a wonderful time.

Pictures of the excellent Yiddish Book Center in Amherst are here.

New Haven

Whitlock’s Book Barn, my favorite book store in the world

Girls’ Climate Justice poster at a high school

Eating in New England

I miss prepared to-go foods and sandwiches! They don’t have these in Germany! I’m not kidding! I know these are just pictures of to-go foods and sandwich menus but they’re a big deal for me when I’m in the U.S..

Here and there in Massachusetts and Vermont

Red Lion Inn, Stockbridge MA, built 1773

The reception still sells necessities like hotels used to

For some reason they have a collection of souvenir pencils dating back 50+ years

Townshend VT, town center

This hotel was in business from 1769 to 1972 and then reopened in the 80s.

150 yeard old hardware store, West Stockbridge. MA

Lovely tourist information center in Vermont

100-odd-year old menswear store, Bennington. Closed 2022.

Bennington College

Hancock Shaker Village. The bright colors are the originals used by the Shakers.

Umpachene and Campbell Falls

Covered Bridges

Five of Vermont’s 100-odd covered bridges

Maple syrup production

March and April are maple tree tapping season. I learned the sap as it comes from the tree is thin and watery and the finished syrup is 43 times thicker than the sap, and that the tapping removes only a tiny fraction of each tree’s sap, well under one percent.

They used to boil the sap to thicken it but now they use these filters.

Smith College Art Museum

(For the non-Americans: Many colleges in the U.S. have their own art museums which are usually small but very good.)

Ben Shahn , from an exhibition on the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s

There was a lot about the history of this famous photo by Dorothea Lange

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

I didn’t take pictures of their collection of French Impressionists (magnificent, but you more or less know what they look like). This was a fascinating exhibition on the history of arabesque forms and their origins in Islamic art.

19th c. book on ornament in the Arab world

Music education book with illustrations by Pierre Bonnard, 1893

Lithograph of a famous dancer by Toulouse-Lautrec (1893). The photo isn’t blurry – the cloudy forms are in the original. Her face and hair are the yellow and brown shapes and she’s twirling a big cape.

You don’t absolutely have to see the Eric Carle Museum (Hungry Hungry Caterpillar)

There’s an Eric Carle Museum in Massachusetts – author of Hungry Hungry Caterpillar – but it’s not what you think it is and in fact it’s not an “Eric Carle Museum” at all. It’s actually the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and what they have is changing exhibtions on various in children books. Sometimes they’ll show a single aspect of Carle’s work such as oceans and fish so don’t go expecting a museum about his whole career (that’s covered in a hallway), nor a museum on the history of children’s books. We saw an exhibition on the illustrator Maira Kalman whom I adore but it was only on her children’s books which are not as interesting as her books for adults. On the whole I’d rate it as not a must-see but good as long as you know what you’re getting in to.

More photos of the Kalman exhibit are here.

For years I have unknowningly collected a lot of the very same objects that she has, as seen in this re-creation of her studio wall.

Mural of people you see in the Dining Concourse in New York’s Grand Central Terminal

A person on the street in New York (see text)

Umpachene Falls

Connecticut! Massachusetts! Connecticut! Massachusetts!

At Campbell Falls you can stand with one foot in Massachusetts and the other in Connecticut as seen here. You have to turn up the volume and hear what he’s saying for it to make sense.

and at the northernmost point of Denmark you could stand with one foot in the North Sea and the other in the Baltic Sea with their waves going in opposite directions, if it wasn’t 25 degrees (-4 Celsius). Also here you need to hear the audio for it to make sense.

… and the original…